Editing George Hodel (section)

==Biography==
Hodel was born on October 10, 1907, and raised in Los Angeles, California. His parents, George Hodel Sr. and Esther Hodel, were of Russian Jewish ancestry. Their only son, he was well-educated and highly intelligent (scoring 186 on an early IQ test). He was also a musical prodigy, playing solo piano concerts at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium. Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff traveled to his parents' house to hear the boy play. 

Hodel attended South Pasadena High School and graduated at age 15 and entered the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, but was forced to leave the university after one year, due to a sex scandal involving a professor's wife, though this is not the only account. He had impregnated the woman and wanted to raise their child together, but she refused. The affair between Hodel and the woman had caused her marriage to fall apart.

By around 1928, Hodel was in a common-law marriage with a woman named Emilia and had a son by her, Duncan. In the 1930s he was legally married to a model from San Francisco, Dorothy Anthony, and had a daughter by her, Tamar.

Hodel graduated from Berkeley pre-med in June 1932 and immediately afterward enrolled in medical school at the University of California, San Francisco and received his medical degree in June 1936.

After the establishment and success of his medical practice and becoming head of the county's Social Hygiene Bureau, Hodel was moving in affluent Los Angeles society by the 1940s. He was enamored of the darker side of Surrealism and the decadence surrounding that art scene and was friends with such artists as a photographer Man Ray and film director John Huston, and those who associated with them. With Ray and some other Surrealists, he shared an interest in sadomasochism and the darker side of art and philosophy; with the young men of the Hollywood scene, he shared a fondness for partying, drinking, and womanizing.

Hodel's second legal wife, whom he married in 1940, was John Huston's ex-wife, Dorothy Harvey. He called her "Dorero" to avoid confusion with his other wife, Dorothy Anthony, at least within their circle, but is better known to the press as Dorothy Huston-Hodel.

Hodel purchased the Sowden House in 1945 and lived in that Hollywood property from 1945 until 1950. The structure, built-in 1926 by Lloyd Wright (son of the noted American architect Frank Lloyd Wright), has since been registered as a Los Angeles historic landmark. Hodel was effectively a polygamist in this large household: in the late 1940s, during the period of the deaths of Spaulding and Short, Hodel was living with "Dorero" and their three children (including Steven, who would later write books outlining a case to prove George Hodel a murderer); with his first legal wife Dorothy Anthony and their daughter Tamar; and, at times, with his original common-law wife, Emilia, mother of Hodel's eldest child (by that time an adult). He was also prone to taking a series of temporary lovers; multiple witnesses later suggested such a relationship between Hodel and Short.

Hodel left the United States in March 1950 for Hawaii, then a U.S. territory, where he married an upper-class Filipino woman, Hortensia Laguda (after another four children, they divorced in the 1960s; she was later a member of the Philippine Congress as Hortensia Starke). Hodel returned to the United States in 1990, and married (legally) for the fourth time, to a woman named June, in San Francisco, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1999, at the age of 91.