Editing George Hodel

{{Villain_Infobox 
|image =George Hodel circa 1950.jpg
|fullname = George Hill Hodel, Jr.
|origin = Los Angeles, California, United States 
|occupation = Physician
|crimes = [[Murder]]<br>[[Rape]]<br>Adultery<br>[[Child Abuse|Child abuse]]<br>Psychological abuse 
|hobby = Drinking<br>Partying<br>Womanizing 
|type of villain = Abusive Murderer
}}'''George Hill Hodel Jr.''' (October 10, 1907 – May 16, 1999) was an American physician. After the 1947 [[murder of Elizabeth Short]], a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, police came to consider Hodel a suspect. He was never formally charged with the crime and came to wider attention as a suspect after his death when he was accused by his son, Los Angeles homicide detective Steve Hodel, of killing Short and committing several additional murders.

Prior to the Dahlia case, he was also a suspect in the death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding, but was not charged. He was also accused of raping his own daughter, Tamar Hodel, but was acquitted for that crime. He fled the country several times, and spent time between 1950 and 1990 in the Philippines.
==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.
==Accusations of rape and serial murder==
===Ruth Spaulding===
Hodel first came under suspicion for murder in 1945, following the death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding, by a drug overdose. He was suspected of having murdered her in order to cover up his financial fraud, such as billing patients for tests that were never performed, and to protect various valuable secrets he had obtained about police and politicians from clients for his illegal abortion services. At about this time, Hodel left briefly for China, where he worked with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. These events first came to public attention in 2004.
===Black Dahlia murder===
On January 15, 1947, the naked body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was discovered in an empty lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Short had suffered gruesome mutilation, notably her body being cut in half at the waist, as well as [[Glasgow Smile|her mouth being cut ear to ear]]. The case earned major publicity and prompted one of the largest investigations in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department. The case was never solved. However, authorities at the time interviewed hundreds of suspects and focused on about 25, one of whom was George Hill Hodel Jr. Various aspects of the case have suggested a strong connection to Surrealism, including the works of Man Ray in particular.

In late 1949, Hodel's teenage daughter Tamar accused him of incestuous sexual abuse and impregnating her (after which she was given a back alley abortion). He was acquitted after a widely publicized trial. There had been three witnesses present during and who participated in the sex acts. Two testified at the trial, and the third recanted her earlier testimony and refused to come forward, the theory being that Hodel had threatened her into silence. The trial had caused Tamar to look like a liar and that she had made up the entire abuse allegation for attention.

Hodel came to police attention as a suspect in the Elizabeth Short murder in 1949 after the sexual abuse trial; known or suspected sex criminals in the area were being investigated first, and it had come out in that trial that Tamar had allegedly claimed that her father was the Dahlia killer. Hodel's medical degree also aroused suspicion, given the hypothesis that whoever bisected Short's body had some degree of surgical skill. At least eight witnesses claimed first-hand knowledge of a 1946 relationship between Short and Hodel, then back in Los Angeles from China. 

The full details of the investigation came to light only in 2003, when a "George Hodel–Black Dahlia File" was discovered in the vault at the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. The file revealed that in 1950, Hodel was the prime suspect of the Dahlia murder. His private Hollywood residence was electronically bugged by an 18-man DA/LAPD task force during the period February 15 to March 27, 1950. The transcripts of conversations revealed Hodel's references to performing illegal abortions, giving payoffs to law enforcement officials, and to his possible involvement in the deaths of his secretary and Short.
===The Green Twig murder===
Hodel was also interviewed as a suspect in the nearby June 1949 murder of Louise Springer, the "Green Twig Murder", though evidence to support this accusation was not publicly available until July 2018.
===Serial murders===
During Steve Hodel's investigation, he learned that his father may have been responsible for more than one murder. Steve Hodel also suspected his father of being the Chicago "Lipstick Killer" of the late 1940s, the Manila "Jigsaw Murderer" of 1967, and even the San Francisco "[[Zodiac Killer]]" of the late 1960s, among other such crimes.
[[Category:Deceased]]
[[Category:Rapists]]
[[Category:Family of Victim]]
[[Category:Doctors and Scientists]]
[[Category:Modern Villains]]
[[Category:Corrupt Officials]]
[[Category:Adulterers]]
[[Category:Misogynists]]
[[Category:Misopedists]]
[[Category:Male]]
[[Category:Murderer]]
[[Category:Karma Houdini]]
[[Category:Perverts]]
[[Category:Sadists]]
[[Category:Psychopath]]
[[Category:Abusers]]
[[Category:Wolves in sheep's clothing]]
[[Category:United States of America]]