Five Easy Pieces - Part II
The Mystery Plane Rider in the Donna Frislie Murder Case was Dr. George Hill Hodel
In my last post I argued that the nod to The Most Dangerous Game in the Z408 cipher was George Hodel dropping a hint at his responsibility for the 1949 kidnap-murder of Bel-Air socialite Mimi Boomhower. In effect, he was saying to the investigators who failed to catch him back then, “Here, this should ring a bell!” In this installment, I will argue my theory that the recent decryption of Zodiac’s much more challenging Z340 cipher hints at the solution to another high-profile LA cold case — the 1962 kidnap-murder of Donna Marie Frislie, a 14-year-old babysitter, in Lancaster, CA.
As in the Mimi Boomhower case, Donna Frislie’s disappearance provoked a firestorm of press coverage, dominating the front page of the Los Angeles Times on at least four occasions. Within a few years, though, this murder mystery was almost forgotten, the trail having gone completely cold despite promising early clues. The lead detective on the case eventually acknowledged that, as the crime was likely the work of a stranger “passing through,” it could prove impossible to solve. And that is how it turned out.
Looking at the timeline, I think the murder of Donna Frislie might have been where George Hodel fell off the wagon and returned to his old serial killer ways — which would culminate in the Zodiac-branded terror spree a few years later. If so, it was likely by far the highest profile crime he committed stateside as a visiting exile up until the late 1960s. By contrast, the most widely credited “proto-Zodiac” murders — of Ray Davis in Oceanside, CA, in 1962 and Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside, CA, in 1966 — were sleepers that barely made the big city papers.
Given the Zodiac’s self-acknowledged “game” of teasing his identity — which is to say, the crimes he had gotten away with — it would not be surprising to find veiled allusions to Frislie’s murder in his taunting missives. As I will show below, there are several plausible candidates, including wording in the solution to the Zodiac’s most complex puzzle — the Z340 cipher.
The Prima Facie Case That Frislie Was a Victim of the Zodiac
I first learned of the Donna Frislie murder through a discussion thread at Tom Voigt’s website. This case starts with the midnight abduction of the 14-year-old victim during a babysitting job at a house in Lancaster, CA, about an hour’s drive to the northeast of LA. A massive search ensued. It ended a week later when the girl’s body was found in a shallow grave by two gold prospectors. A big lead emerged on Valentine’s Day, 1962, the day after the abduction, relating to a mysterious well-dressed man seen flying out of LAX. Despite a manhunt he seems never to have been traced. Every local person of interest pulled in by the police was exonerated and the crime is unsolved to this day.
The Frislie murder seems to lack the signature feature of Zodiac’s otherwise quite heterogeneous crimes, i.e., taunting letters or phone calls to the police and/or the press. Even so, there are four aspects to the crime which, taken together, suggest it could have been the work of the Zodiac before he styled himself as the Zodiac:
The Frislie crime occurred just two months before the murder of cab driver Ray Davis in Oceanside, CA. The latter is a long-forgotten cold case which has lately been widely acknowledged as a likely proto-Zodiac crime owing to its similarity to the last Zodiac murder in 1969, and to taunting calls to the police by the killer.
The Frislie murder bears some resemblance to the 1966 Cheri Jo Bates murder in Riverside, CA, which was deemed a likely proto-Zodiac crime by Inspector David Toschi and the DOJ in the original Zodiac investigation. It meshes perfectly with the manifesto in the “Confession” letter sent to the police and press in that case.
The prime suspect in the the Frislie case, an unidentified airline passenger flying out of LAX the day after the murder, left behind a copy of the Los Angeles Times in which he had annotated a story on Frislie’s abduction. The obsessive, dreamy, self-analytical notes seem broadly consistent with Zodiac’s distinctive psychology.
The newspaper “scribblings” were well publicized back in February 1962. One particular notation — variously reported as “I am not afraid to die” or “I am not afraid of dying” — dovetails neatly with a statement revealed through the 2020 decryption of Zodiac’s Z340 cipher: “I am not afraid [of death] because…”
The Description of the Mystery Flyer in the Frislie Case
Reading the original news coverage I was immediately struck by similarities between the likely murderer of Donna Frislie — a mysterious airline passenger who captured the attention of TWA stewardess Georgia Shaw during a transcontinental flight out of LAX — and Dr. George Hill Hodel. Certainly, if this was the Zodiac, Georgia Shaw got a better look at him than any eyewitness to his Bay Area crimes. Shaw’s description of the man’s age, physiognomy, dress, and affect fit the exiled Dahlia killer rather well:
Shaw estimated that the man was about 50 years old. Hodel was 54 at the time.
Two artist’s sketches were made with Shaw’s input, each showing a middle-aged white male with dark hair tightly combed back from the forehead. Both resemble George Hodel (sans mustache) — particularly the leaner, longer-faced variant.
Shaw said she could best describe the white male’s appearance by comparing him to the actor Edward G. Robinson (Double Indemnity, Key Largo) but, in tension with that observation, recalled that he had a “square cut face.” This perhaps suggests a shared, hard-to-pinpoint ethnic look. Ethnically, both EGR and Hodel were East European Jews, with roots in Romania and neighboring Ukraine, respectively.
Shaw described the man as well-dressed, in a plaid check sport jacket with dark trousers. Hodel was a snappy dresser and that outfit fits his style.
Shaw noted the man’s “very unusual eyes” and oddly distant manner — “he looked right through you” — which recalls Ted Le Berthon’s profile of “George Morel” (actually his junior ex-colleague at the Los Angeles Record, George Hodel): “George drowned himself at times in an ocean of deep dreams. Only part of him seemed present. He would muse standing before one … oblivious to one’s presence.”
In fairness, I note that there are a couple of aspects to the description developed from Shaw’s testimony which do not fit George Hodel. The circulated description puts the man’s height at 5’8” while Hodel was 6’. I have come across no quotes from Shaw that go to the man’s height or build, or to indicate she ever saw him standing, and it seems quite possible that she had no specific recollection and that the height estimate given is simply filler. Also, the circulated description describes the man’s hair color as “dark brown.” Hodel’s natural hair color was black — like Edward G. Robinson’s.
A Comment on the Mystery Man’s Handwriting
The mystery flyer’s “scribblings” were in cursive, and merit comment as there is no obvious connection of the handwriting to either Zodiac or Hodel. Zodiac habitually used print lettering in his communications, possibly because it is easier to disguise. He artfully stylized that printing on at least two occasions. The print writing used to address the envelope of a letter to celebrity attorney Melvin Belli mimics the Art Deco font of the street number signage on his San Francisco home, presumably to hint that Zodiac had been by the place. The writing on a letter to SF Chronicle columnist Count Marco — but not that on the envelope — changes up the Zodiac’s usual printing to incorporate artistic or “aristocratic” flourishes. A Christmas Card sent from the Bay Area to Donna Lass’s sister in South Dakota — “non-canonical” but widely suspected to be the work of the Zodiac — features an artistic-looking cursive script which mimics that of the card’s pre-printed message.
Oddly, given his high level of education, George Hodel almost completely eschewed cursive writing in his personal and professional life, though there are a few cases were he seems to “slip up,” and some versions of his signature are in cursive. I can think of a couple of instances where highly stylized cursive was used in his suspected crimes: the “Revengers” ransom letter in the Aimee McPherson kidnap imbroglio, and the address on a package containing a human ear filched from a medical lab which was sent to Suzanne Degnan’s mother in the Chicago Lipstick Murders case.
Possible Zodiac Allusions to the Frislie Murder
I have already cited one obvious instance where Zodiac might have dropped a hint about the Frislie murder. That is the bit in the Z340 purporting to explain why Zodiac is not afraid of death (to wit, his victims will serve him in paradise). If that is indeed a hint, its ambiguity is characteristically well-calibrated so as to almost give the game away without actually giving the game away. Assuming that Zodiac was the man on the TWA flight, it would have been quite dangerous for him if anybody had actually cottoned on, given the Frislie murder probe was far from ancient history.
On a deep dive into the original press coverage of the Frislie case a number of other items struck me as potentially the subject of veiled hints within the corpus of Zodiac correspondence. I summarize these below, deliberately casting a wide net to include even the more marginal cases. My approach is, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld: “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” Then, weigh how it all stacks up in the light of the “overall” — the prima facie signs of a Zodiac link outlined above, plus that interesting description of the likely perp from Georgia Shaw. Is there a signal in there or not? I tend to think that there is. Let’s review…
“There Are a Hell of a Lot More Down There”
In November 1970 the San Francisco Chronicle’s investigative reporter Paul Avery broke the news that official investigators had endorsed a private citizen’s theory linking the Bay Area serial killer to an unsolved murder in the Los Angeles area dating from 1966 — the stabbing of 18-yo Cheri Jo Bates by the library of Riverside City College. Zodiac was silent for four months after this revelation. However, on March 13, 1971 he wrote directly to the Los Angeles Times — for the first and only time — acknowledging this “Riverside activity.” He added authorities were “only finding the easy ones, there are a hell of a lot more down there.” Thus, we have it from the horse’s admittedly unreliable mouth that he was responsible for more unsolved murders in Southern California.
Today we would probably flesh out Zodiac’s hint with the 1962 murder of cabbie Ray Davis in Oceanside (near San Diego), and maybe add the Domingos-Edwards murders in Lompoc (near Santa Barbara) in 1963 and/or the murders of newlyweds Johnny and Joyce Swindle in Ocean Beach (San Diego) in 1964. Of course, if George Hodel is the Zodiac, that could bring in a slew of older LA area murders, dating back to before his exile across the Pacific. In any event, the murder of Donna Frislie in north LA county in 1962, two months before the killing of Ray Davis, would certainly fit the bill.
“They Don’t Bury Me on the Back Pages”
The Zodiac’s March 13, 1971 Los Angeles Times letter concluded: “The reason that I’m writing to The Times is this, they don’t bury me on the back pages like some of the others.” Indeed, the Times had given the Riverside link top billing four months earlier. Was there more significance to Zodiac’s remark? Was he hinting he had been on the Times’ front page before that — e.g., in relation to his claimed murders “down there?”
Of the 1960s SoCal murders mentioned herein— Bates, Davis, Domingos-Edwards, the Swindles, and Frislie — I believe that only the Frislie case got front-page banner headlines from LA’s top newspaper. Even the Black Dahlia murder and Boomhower disappearance got more subdued coverage — if only because in the 1940s (as now) the Los Angeles Times hewed to a more conservative broadsheet style.
Finally, in this connection, I wonder if there could be a veiled hint in the phrasing of “they don’t bury me on the back pages.” The scribblings of the mysterious flyer in the Frislie case appeared above the fold on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. On the last occasion the Times gave Donna Frislie front page banner headlines, it was above a photo of investigators poring over her grave in the Mojave Desert.
The Road to Lake Tahoe
The setting for the Donna Frislie murder was Antelope Valley, at the western end of the Mojave Desert. Its major population centers are the twin cities of Lancaster and Palmdale, which lie within north LA county. Donna Frislie was abducted from a house in Lancaster and it appears that her killer then drove to Palmdale, ten miles south on the Sierra Highway, before striking out eastward on Palmdale Boulevard, going deep into the desert. Her grave was found off the main road near an abandoned gold mine.
Palmdale is known as the “Aerospace Capital of America,” and has long hosted major aircraft companies. Recreationally, Antelope Valley attracts game hunters — although the antelopes are long gone, there are still deer and quail. In regards the Zodiac, what seems most interesting, though, is that the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale lie on the Sierra Highway. This venerable roadway extends from Los Angeles all the way north to Lake Tahoe, traversing the snowy Sierra Nevada mountain range which flanks the eastern edge of California. It constitutes a back road up north from LA, or down south if you are starting from the Bay Area. That should make alert ears perk up, I think…
The Zodiac’s letter to the Los Angeles Times — the one claiming “a hell of a lot more” SoCal victims and chiding police for “only finding the easy ones” — was followed up a week later by a second missive that would be dubbed the “Pines Card.” The card was mailed to the attention of Paul Avery at the San Francisco Chronicle but, unusually, was co-addressed to the Los Angeles Times. The card is generally interpreted as a pictorial puzzle. There seems to be something about a buried body, and about a pass near Lake Tahoe or passing Lake Tahoe, something about going “around in the snow,” and about the Sierra Club or the Sierra Nevada (the raison d’être for the Sierra Club).
Back in 1971 it was immediately surmised that the Pines Card was Zodiac’s attempt to claim authorship of the abduction and presumed murder of Donna Lass, a nurse at the Sahara Tahoe casino who had vanished in September 1970. However, this was never explicitly stated or affirmed by the Zodiac. The disappearance had been covered in the Bay Area press in 1970, notably including a Chronicle article headlining the case as “A Tahoe Mystery” — which might have tickled Zodiac’s fancy. So, another possibility is that the Donna Lass reporting inspired the Zodiac to concoct the Pines Card as a sort of fantasia for his own purposes, and he had nothing to do with her disappearance.
In December of last year there was a major development in the half-century-old cold case of Donna Lass. Placer County police announced that a skull found in 1986 near the I-80 corridor west of Tahoe had recently been linked to Lass by DNA. While there remains no definitive answer, by exploding several interpretations of the Pines Card advanced over the years this breakthrough seems to favor the fantasia theory — i.e., the idea that the Pines Card was inspired by the Donna Lass case but someone else did the crime. But a fantasia about what? That merits its own, separate installment.
A Lass Named Donna
The San Francisco Chronicle’s story on the “Tahoe Mystery” of Donna Lass came out on September 26, 1970. At that juncture the Zodiac had been silent for two months. He mailed the Chronicle two communications in October — the “13-Hole Postcard” and the “Halloween Card” — before going dark again for another five months, after which he broke cover with the LA Times letter/Pines Card salvo discussed above. Given the timing, we can reasonably assume that the Donna Lass affair was already on his mind when he authored the October communications — even if that preoccupation would only be evident to his audience the following year upon the arrival of the Pines Card.
The successive October 1970 communications featured running scores or “victim counts” of 13 and 14. In my opinion, these scores are taken over-literally, like Zodiac’s absurd claims about a Rube Goldberg-style “bus bomb.” They strike me as just more of his malign, manipulative whimsy. The scores usually went up incrementally from letter to letter, but sometimes veered widely off track, as if Zodiac was flaunting their fantastic quality to mock his readers’ gullibility.
The “victim counts” have long tempted people to link Zodiac to apparently unrelated contemporaneous murders, but there is little to justify this. There seems to be no sign of a potentially Zodiac-linked crime during the three-week interval between the two October 1970 letters. In fact, it seems quite likely that Zodiac stopped killing in 1969, after the murder of cab driver Paul Stine in San Francisco. I suspect that these scores at times did double duty as “clews” in Zodiac’s long-running “game,” and that he free-associated from or to the fictive running count when constructing puzzles hinting at his identity. This impression informs my reading of the two October communications.
In the “13-Hole Postcard” the number 13 — presumptively the latest “victim count,” although the presentation is atypical — is referenced three times for emphasis. There is the number 13 itself, the thirteen holes punched in the postcard, and the paste-up text, “THE PACE ISN’T ANY SLOWER! IN FACT IT’S JUST ONE BIG thirteenth.” We also have a clipped headline, “Some of Them Fought It Was Horrible,” a crucifix, and a paste-up paragraph claiming that, even though “city police” are reportedly “closing in” on him, they will never catch the Zodiac because he is “crackproof.”
If this postcard is a clue about a specific crime, the Donna Frislie case fits better than most. Frislie was abducted and probably also murdered on the thirteenth of February, 1962. Reportedly, the autopsy suggested she put up a fierce fight, possibly injuring her killer. More tenuously, the cross could be seen as an allusion to a grave. Finally, 1962 news bulletins reported police in Las Vegas were gradually tracking down the flyers, believed to include the mystery man, who de-planed there from Georgia Shaw’s New York-bound TWA flight — which sounds like “city police” closing in on the killer.
By contrast, none of the victims in the canonical Zodiac murders had a chance to fight with their attacker, to my knowledge there is no “13” or “13th” connection to any of the crimes, no victim was buried nor was there ever any evident religious angle to the murders, and there was no sign city police or any other law enforcement ever believed that they were “closing in” on Zodiac. Besides, a puzzle about a crime already linked to Zodiac would seem redundant. It is true that Cheri Jo Bates, the victim in the soon-to-be-recognized likely proto-Zodiac Riverside case, did fight with her attacker — but there does not seem to be any 13 or thirteenth connection there. I have to concede we cannot exclude that Donna Lass was Zodiac’s thirteenth victim and that they fought, but my guess is that idea will find few takers after recent developments in the case.1
The Zodiac’s second October 1970 communication, the “Halloween Card,” might be the pièce de résistance of Zodiac missives. Mysterious, allusive yet opaque, the heavily-modified commercial Halloween greeting card is uniquely explicit in laying out what Zodiac calls his “game” with the police and press — saying, in effect, “Here is a puzzle containing a bunch of clues to my identity — I bet you can’t figure it out!”
Even if people did not in fact figure it out, the publicity attending the Halloween Card led to the realization that Zodiac was likely operating around Los Angeles long before his branded campaign in the San Francisco Bay Area. A private individual had been prodding Riverside police to look into a possible connection between the Zodiac and the October 30, 1966 murder of Cheri Jo Bates, to no avail. His suspicions renewed by (at minimum) the Halloween connection, he reached out to Paul Avery. This soon led to official confirmation of a probable link — by everyone except the Riverside cops.
Decades of head-scratching has yielded several credible and by no means mutually exclusive ideas about the meaning of and inspiration for the tableau Zodiac assembled in the gate-fold of the Halloween Card — including some I have added to the mix in recent years. I note that several of these theories suggest a thematic link to the Donna Lass story.2 Fascinating as this topic is, I will not digress on it here. As already noted, it is obvious from the timing alone that Donna Lass’s disappearance was likely at the forefront of Zodiac’s mind during the creation of the Halloween Card.
Is there anything concrete in the Halloween Card which could represent a deliberate allusion to the Donna Frislie case? I see a couple of things:
Just as in the preceding 13-Hole Postcard, the presumptive running score is again presented atypically and emphasized by restatement — the number 14 is drawn in the hand of the skeleton on the front of the card, and the number is repeated in the suggestive form “4-TEEN” within the gate-fold. Donna Frislie’s age was 14, a fact blazoned all over the headlines back in 1962. None of Zodiac’s known victims or his usually mooted proto-Zodiac victims was 14 years old.
Then there is the hand-drawn text around the knot of the tree:3 “PEEK-A-BOO! YOU ARE DOOMED!” That echoes something from the original Donna Frislie news coverage. Reportedly, Frislie had cracked open the front door to the house at which she was babysitting to monitor the driveway. This was presumably how her kidnapper gained entrance to the home. So, the text seems apposite.4
“Swamped Out” and Cooling His Jets
There were freak rains and snowfalls over Greater Los Angeles during February 1962, and they extended into the Mojave Desert. Contemporary news reports attributed the early discovery of Donna Frislie’s remains to the fact that the downpours washed out her desert grave, revealing the body. Had Frislie’s body taken a long time to surface, it seems likely the probe into the identity of the mystery traveler would have been even less diligent than the one actually conducted. Also, it appears that significant forensic evidence was developed from the grave (discussed below). It therefore seems possible that the early discovery of Frislie’s body was an unexpected close call which chastened her killer and postponed the onset of his publicity-seeking Zodiac terror campaign.
This matter of the torrential rains of 1962 calls to mind remarks in the Zodiac’s April 20, 1970 “My Name Is” letter, in which he claims that he would have killed a lot more people only “I was swamped out by the rain we had a while back.” It will be objected that the Zodiac was referring to his vaunted “bus bomb” being swamped out by rain — not a buried body — so taking this as a hint about Frislie is a stretch. Perhaps so, but my belief is that we need to think laterally rather than literally when tackling the clues proffered in Zodiac’s long-running “game.” Consider:
The “bus bomb” talk was an extended leg-pull by the Zodiac, spanning several communications from November 1969 to July 1970. There was no bomb. Zodiac would simply drop this gag and segue into teasing a buried body in 1971.
The line about being swamped out follows remarks about killing a kid (“cid”), and the letter has a postscript which seems quite unrelated to the bus bomb — “PS I hope you have fun trying to figure out who I killed.”
The “My Name Is” letter came after months of silence, and turned out to be the first part of a one-two punch, being followed just a week later by a greeting card whose artwork evokes the discovery of Frislie’s body. See the next item…
The Two Gold Prospectors
Zodiac’s followup to the “My Name Is” letter was his “Dragon Card”of April 28, 1970. Another two months would pass before he wrote again. The artwork on the front of the annotated commercial greeting card depicts two gold prospectors in a sort of Don Quixote/Sancho Panza configuration. There is a grizzled old man riding a dragon and a younger man riding an ass. The jokey pre-printed greeting, “Sorry to hear your ass is a dragon,” fits the Zodiac’s perennial theme of the incompetence of the authorities. Zodiac wrote on the front and inside of the card, again riffing on the bus bomb while fatuously calling for terrorized San Franciscans to sport “Zodiac” lapel buttons.
Was there something about the art showing the two gold prospectors which attracted Zodiac to this particular greeting card? I have never seen a convincing theory about that but it might be significant — in light of his letter of a week earlier — that it was two gold prospectors, one in his seventies and one in his twenties, who discovered Donna Frislie’s body in the desert after heavy rains washed out her shallow grave.
As if to drive home the point, on April 27, 1970 — the day before the Dragon Card was mailed — the San Francisco Examiner reported on the discovery of the body of Judith Hakari in a partially uncovered grave near an abandoned goldmine by two hikers. Her fate would be recalled months later in the Chronicle’s “Tahoe Mystery” story on Donna Lass. So, that raises the possibility Zodiac murdered both Hakari and Lass, and that the Dragon Card is about Hakari and the Pines Card is about Lass — or, that Zodiac co-opted both these news stories to his own epistolary hints. I believe it was the latter.
“The Bleeding Knife of Zodiac”
After the discovery of Donna Frislie’s grave the press at first reported that detectives believed she had not been sexually assaulted because her clothes, including her Capri pants, appeared to be undisturbed. However, several days later the coroner’s autopsy contradicted this, finding that the girl had been sexually molested in an unspecified manner. It was reported that his findings suggested Frislie might have put up a fight, spurring the frenzied blows and stabbings of the attacker which took her life.
But it seems the coroner found something more specific, because his analysis was followed up by an urgent appeal to doctors and hospitals for information on anyone seeking treatment for a groin injury after February 13. The most obvious scenario to explain these facts is that the coroner detected foreign blood and/or tissue on Frislie’s body, probably on examining her teeth. It would seem the details were undisclosed, perhaps to spare public sensibilities or to create an evidentiary holdback.
It is hard to imagine how the autopsy finding motivating the appeal to hospitals could have been ambiguous, though we cannot of course know the severity of the inferred “groin injury.” I here note a couple of items from the Zodiac’s correspondence which conceivably might reference this aspect of the Frislie case.
I have already mentioned that the Zodiac’s Z340 cipher, decoded in 2020, offers what could be read as a hidden callback to the “I am not afraid to die” notation the mystery flyer scribbled on a Los Angeles Times article about Frislie’s abduction. The Z340 was mailed with the “Dripping Pen Card” of November 8, 1969. This communication was based on a commercial greeting card whose artwork depicts a fountain pen which seems to be dripping blood. The card features the following pre-printed message:
“Sorry I haven’t written, but I just washed my pen… and I can’t do a thing with it!”
That seems slightly suggestive.
Then there is the drawing of “The Bleeding Knife of Zodiac” in the second “Fairfield Letter” of December 16, 1969. The two “Fairfield Letters” are “non-canonical” and have often been dismissed as the work of a hoaxer, but they seem to get more respect these days. The “bleeding knife” drawing suggests an association with the Dripping Pen Card, as does the same letter’s Z38, a short, unsolved cryptogram in the cipher alphabet of the Z340. Is the drawing simply a bit of cheap bravado, a tip of the hat to Jack the Ripper, a reference to the groin injury story — or a double entendre?
Maybe that’s too tenuous — I am not sure. As it seems possibly relevant, here is an example of George Hodel’s idiosyncratic mental processes, from Steve Hodel’s Most Evil, showing how he annotated a shoe in green ink to memorialize a minor injury:
Is the Frislie Case a Missing Link in George Hodel’s Criminal Career?
Even prima facie, when you look into George Hodel and then look into the Zodiac case, you have to wonder if Hodel is the Zodiac. Hodel is, at the least, a very strong suspect for the Black Dahlia killer, whose MO almost uniquely anticipated Zodiac’s crime signature of trolling the police and press by phone and mail in an audacious, theatrical game of cat-and-mouse. That alone renders him one-in-a-million in terms of his “pre-fit” to the Zodiac. To that, we can add the following considerations:
Hodel had strong links to both Los Angeles and San Francisco, and his general pattern of movements in the 1960s is compatible with a roving killer operating out of San Francisco and sometimes LA during extended business trips.
In contrast to Zodiac’s more diversified crimes, Hodel’s suspected LA crimes of the 1940s were all “lone woman” murders, but the 1966 Riverside murder and the linked “Confession” imply wildly misogynistic impulses also moved the Zodiac.
It is strongly suggested that the Zodiac was an intelligent and cultured polymath, well-versed in the works of W. S. Gilbert, Edgar Allan Poe, Guillaume Apollinaire and the Marquis de Sade. That narrows the field greatly — and fits George Hodel.
Only one Zodiac eyewitness, Officer Fouke, got a well-lit and unobstructed closeup view of the Zodiac — albeit, a night-time drive-by view lasting a few seconds under circumstances where he assumed he was looking at an innocent bystander. Fouke’s retrospective estimate of Zodiac’s age was quite a bit younger than Hodel’s age (35-45, versus 62), but the police sketch developed with his input does resemble Hodel.
It is notable that Officer Fouke thought he saw some gray hair on the man he later understood to be the Zodiac, and that numerous textual clues suggest that the Zodiac was an older individual. We might also recall that the original description circulated of the Unabomber, derived from two witnesses who had watched him plant a bomb in Salt Lake City, put his age at 25-30. Ted Kaczynski (1942-2023) was in fact 44 years old at the time (1987). Eyewitnesses fill in the blanks with what they expect to see.
But if the Lancaster-Palmdale murder of Donna Frislie was a proto-Zodiac crime, like the Riverside murder of Cheri Jo Bates, it would completely negate the most frequent objection to the Hodel theory — that he is “excluded” because he was too old to be the man seen by Fouke. Then we are really off to the races.
Born in Los Angeles in 1907, the only child of a Russian businessman and a Russo-French lady dentist, George Hodel was hailed as a musical and intellectual prodigy and pampered like a prince. At five years old, he was shipped off to Paris to stay with the internationally-renowned sculptor Prince Paulo Troubetzkoy. For his fifteenth birthday he was gifted with his own house, designed by a famous Russian architect, Alexander Zelenko. The boy was inducted into Stanford Professor Lewis Terman’s famous longitudinal study of genius and gained early admittance to the newly-minted California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. It was an auspicious start in life.
For reasons unclear, Hodel left Caltech after his freshman year, and then spent a few years working as a taxi driver, crime reporter, antiquarian book seller, KFI classical music announcer, and advertising copy writer. He edited and printed his own poetry magazine, mounted a one-man photography show, and did some stage acting during this period. Hodel returned to the academic track in 1928 as a premed at UC Berkeley, and earned his MD at UC San Francisco in 1936. After graduation he doctored for the Civilian Conservation Corps (the “CCC,” aka “Roosevelt’s Tree Army”) at a logging camp in Arizona and did a stint in public health in New Mexico, including extensive work on the state’s Pueblo Indian reservations. Hodel returned to LA in 1938 and rose to become VD control czar in Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health.
Hodel was very well-connected socially, particularly in the arts. He was close to future famed film director John Huston in his youth and surrealist artist Man Ray in middle age. He advised the police, the FBI, and the US Army. In 1946 he was dispatched from Washington, DC to China, given the honorary rank of general, to oversee the United Nations medical relief mission in Hankow (a city now subsumed into Wuhan).
In October 1949 the high-flying Dr. Hodel was arrested and charged with committing incest and perversion with his daughter, Tamar Nais Hodel. He would beat the rap at a highly publicized trial with the aid of Hollywood super-lawyer Jerry Giesler — only to find himself in even deeper trouble when this scandal subsided.
By early 1950 Hodel had become a prime suspect in the Los Angeles district attorney’s reopened probe into the 1947 murder of Beth Short, aka the “Black Dahlia” — still the city’s most iconic cold case. Hodel’s home — the Mayan temple-like, Lloyd Wright-designed Sowden House at 5121 Franklin Avenue in Hollywood — was bugged and he was subjected to 40 days of round-the-clock electronic surveillance.
The secret Sowden House bugging transcripts were unearthed as a result of the 2003 publication of retired LAPD Homicide detective Steve Hodel’s book about his father, Black Dahlia Avenger. They make interesting reading. George Hodel comes across as remarkably cocksure in these transcripts, but it is clear his world is coming apart and he is looking for an exit. Highly incriminating statements appear in the transcripts.
Hodel’s life during the 40 days is pretty “happening” by most people’s standards. Poet Ken Rexroth pays a visit and he and George chat in a men-of-the-world fashion about the contraband business in China and (as Steve Hodel put it) “great whores they have known.” There are intellectual parties at which George plays parlor guessing games — perhaps Charades or Botticelli — and takes turns reading “morbid poems” out loud with young women guests, and generally turns on the charm.
In a late night conversation, Hodel and a musician friend discuss their plans to drive a troupe of French girls down to Mexico City to perform light opera — and rake in the dough. George prospectively congratulates himself on his ability to persuade the girls’ parents to sign off on the trip. “I have a way about me,” he says — which seems pretty cocky for a fellow who has just starred in a high-profile criminal trial for allegedly having oral sex with his 14 year-old daughter at an orgy. But then, he beat the rap…
Still, it is apparent that Hodel is having money problems and that he is searching for a position overseas. He prepares overtures to officials in Tibet and Burma, presumably to pitch himself as a public health czar, and mentions that he has an iron in the fire in what was then still Territorial Hawaii. Hodel rents a light plane and takes associates down to Mexico to enjoy some fishing and check out a property that might be turned into a profitable sanitarium which would be, as he terms it, “safe.”
There are a few discussions about a Ruth St. Denis dancer from Santa Barbara, Lillian Lenorak, who supposedly stalked Hodel with a rifle for some reason — likely because he forced her to perjure herself at his trial — and then slashed her wrists at his house (or had her wrists slashed by Hodel after first being sedated).5 Hodel avers Lenorak is a danger to herself and others while he white knights as her psychiatric social worker now she has been dispatched to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital for observation.
It gets worse. In a sinister, unexplained incident, a never-identified woman visitor to Hodel’s house is heard crying and trying to call out on the phone — followed hours later by the sounds of screaming, digging, and a pipe being hit in the basement. The transcripts show Hodel was well aware that he was a suspect in the Black Dahlia case and in the death of his secretary by Seconal overdose. They also reveal Hodel believed his phone was bugged, but evidently did not understand there were listening devices planted in the house. Hodel speaks freely with a nameless, German-accented “Baron” about killing the Black Dahlia and his secretary, about how the DA is out to get him, and how he is confident they will never be able to get enough on him to convict.
After the transcripts were published the German interlocutor was identified as one Ernst Von Harringa, a well-traveled art dealer with offices in the Oviatt Building. A handsome, cultured womanizer, in the 1932 Harringa was arrested for blackmailing a wealthy married woman with whom he had an affair. At the time the press reported that he had threatened to kill this lady if she did not pay up. Found guilty, the “Baron” managed to get his conviction thrown out on a re-trial. Harringa was close to William Talbot Smith, a key figure in the quasi-Satanist Church of Thelema.6 Hodel’s precise relationship with Harringa is a mystery, but clearly they were two of a kind.
In March 1950, summarizing a final conversation with the “Baron,” the Sowden House transcripts note Hodel seems to be planning to leave the country. Hodel tells Harringa that “he wants money and power” and mentions the police have pictures of him with “some girl,” even though he thought he had destroyed them all. The transcription and presumably the surveillance ends abruptly after this, for unknown reasons.
Hodel’s movements during the remainder of 1950 are unclear, but in January 1951 he reemerges as a newly-hired psychiatrist at a mental hospital in Honolulu. He will also serve as a consultant to the Hawaiian prison system. At some point shortly before or after the move Hodel traveled to Mexico and married a Julliard-educated, politically-connected Filipina heiress, Hortensia Laguda (1920-2010). Hortensia joined him in Hawaii in 1952 and they took a place by the ocean in an exclusive neighborhood. The couple left Honolulu for Manila in the mid-1950s — still well before Hawaii attained statehood — and raised four children in the Philippines.
Hodel gradually transitioned out of psychiatry and into opinion research, market research, consulting, and other business enterprises. He traveled extensively, making frequent trips to the United States. After four decades of exile, he moved back to the US in 1990, taking a condo overlooking downtown San Francisco with his Japanese-born fifth wife, June. He died in San Francisco on May 16, 1999 at the age of 91.
George Hodel in February 1962 — Prelude to Murder?
To get an idea of George Hodel’s personal situation at the time of the Donna Frislie murder we need to consult the chapter entitled “Subic Bay” in Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger. Estranged from his father since childhood, the younger Hodel had an opportunity to reconnect when the Navy stationed him at a hospital in the Philippines in 1959. The assignment would end a year or so before the events in Antelope Valley.
Steve Hodel arrived to find George’s marriage to Hortensia had fallen apart and he had moved into his own digs at the Admiral Apartments on Manila Bay — former home to General Douglas MacArthur. Steve found his father aloof and preoccupied and their interactions were mostly perfunctory during the eighteen months of the Subic Bay assignment. Encountering George now as an adult, Steve observed that his father was a “successful, wealthy, politically connected, charming, multi-talented, charismatic womanizer, who was also an overbearing, arrogant, egotistical control freak.” At the same time, beneath the aura of power and authority, he could sense “his sadness, his solitude, his emotional pain, and knew it was dark and ran very deep.”
George Hodel’s solitude and pain are understandable — even leaving aside the issue of whether he was already a serial killer with a longstanding double life. The child prodigy had matured into a high flyer living in an architectural wonder in one of the world’s greatest cities in perhaps its most exciting era. He had counted some of the twentieth century’s leading lights as personal friends. Expelled from Paradise, he had landed on his feet and now enjoyed a life of luxury in Asia. Yet it was a post-scandal life in a relative backwater — like the fate of the eponymous protagonist in the recent movie Tár. Now his marriage had disintegrated. He was in this place because his own daughter had turned on him. That must have rankled, even if he would never admit it.
Steve Hodel has presented evidence tending to implicate his father in LA’s “Lone Woman” murders of the 1940s and the Chicago Lipstick Murders of 1945-46, the late 1960s Zodiac murders, and other murders dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. The 1950s seem to be a blank at the moment. I wonder if it actually was that — if George was chastened by his fall and managed to “kick,” keeping his nose clean and focusing on his marriage — and the pursuit of “money and power” — for a whole decade. By the mid-1960s it looks like he was off the wagon, though, scratching that itch like never before, first in Riverside and then in the Bay Area. This phase seems to wrap up when Hodel, well into his sixties, transitioned into an enduring and psychologically-stabilizing relationship with his long-time personal assistant and later wife, June.
With the recent spotlight on the Oceanside murder of Ray Davis, we have a strong indication that the Zodiac was already warming up in Southern California as early as April 1962, though it would be another seven years before he would go big under that nom de guerre. The timing seems about right for Hodel to have picked up his old ways. By 1962 he was unfettered and unmoored. As the Zodiac states in one of his letters:
“I get awfully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing!!!!!!”
That seems plausible psychologically to me. But in some ways the murder of Donna Frislie two months before Oceanside looks like an even more logical starting point — a potential “missing link.” It hearkens back to Hodel’s 1940s crimes against women. I wonder if the sublimated rage behind this atrocity against a child was directed at his nemesis Tamar. In an interview with Steve Hodel in Black Dahlia Avenger III, Tamar offered this insight into her father’s mindset, which seems pertinent:
Was there a plan to play cat-and-mouse games with police, send a phony ransom note, etc., which was scuttled because of Georgia Shaw’s testimony and the early revelation of Frislie’s body? Were the scribblings on the newspaper notes for a letter campaign, or themselves intended as a planted “clew?” Or does the plane story give us a window onto a dazed, “hypnotized” George Hodel processing his situation after giving in to an irresistible impulse, like the protagonist of that old Hodel favorite, Fantazius Mallare? If I have to hazard a guess, I lean towards the latter.
If my theory about the Frislie case is correct — and it is of course only a theory — I suspect that after the murder George Hodel mentally regrouped and concluded, “No turning back now — this is who I am — in for a penny, in for a pound.” Then, seized by Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” he proceeded to the apparently motiveless killing of cabbie Ray Davis, adding the artifice of taunts and challenges to the police already featured in his earlier exploits — notably the Black Dahlia murder. This “game” would become the signature of his increasingly abstract late-life crimes as the Zodiac.
I suspect the card references both the Frislie murder and George Hodel’s boyhood murder of Father Patrick Heslin in San Francisco in 1921. The latter provides an even better fit to the content of the card than the Frislie case. I think Hodel deliberately mashed up these two crimes, milestones in his criminal development with significant common features, through his continued teasing and trolling of the police and press about a supposed buried body and/or a hidden roadside “death machine” — both prominent elements of the Father Heslin case — after winding up the “action” phase of his Zodiac terror campaign.
To wit, a woman in a casino (the 1952 Tim Holt “Red Mask” comic book, Lady Doom and the Death Wheel, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound), a body in a ski resort (Spellbound), a woman in the snow (Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan), a woman — or a woman’s corpse — in a lake (the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian myth and Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake).
Like the PARADICE SLAVES figure on the back of the card, this figure is a calligram, in the manner of the French avant garde poet, prophet of Surrealism, champion of the Marquis de Sade, and founder of La Societé des Amis de Fantômas, Guillaume Apollinaire. The Sade link is a propos as Zodiac’s “PARADICE SLAVES” idea probably came from reading Philosophy in the Bedroom and/or Juliette. Indeed, George Hodel’s pal Man Ray fueled his Sade obsession by reading the work of Apollinaire during his time in Paris.
I believe there is likely also a poetic allusion here, to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Arthurian poem The Lady of Shalott. I discuss this idea and how it connects to George Hodel here.
In a remarkable coincidence, Lillian Lenorak was recovered from Hodel’s home after the wrist-slashing incident by Policewoman Mary Unkefer, who had booked Elizabeth Short for minor possession at a ritzy nightclub down the street from a Man Ray one-man show at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 1943. The fingerprints Unkefer took at Short’s arrest were used to identify her posed, exsanguinated and surgically-bisected body in January 1947.
On the question of whether George Hodel partook of occult practices, Steve Hodel avers that his father was not a “joiner” and was skeptical of mysticism and religion in general — which is also my impression based on everything I have read by or about him.