Sorry/Not Sorry
Below is the ransom letter sent in the 1921 Father Heslin kidnap-murder case. We know that this communication was from the real kidnapper(s) because it was mailed before the abduction of the priest became public. Nonetheless, it is largely a work of the imagination. It is thought that Heslin was murdered minutes after he was lured from the Colma rectory rather than being imprisoned. No Rube Goldberg-style booby-traps were contrived to defeat efforts to release him. It is doubtful the author had the support of a gang of criminal underlings (reminiscent of Fantômas’s “apaches”). No effort was made to follow up on collecting a ransom. The long-winded letter’s tone is imperious and its language is sophisticated (“I had charge of a machine gun in the Argonne, and poured thousands of bullets into struggling men…”). Still, the overall effect is breathless, melodramatic, and childish.
Below is the fake followup ransom letter in the case written by the celebrated Los Angeles detective Nick Harris, who collaborated with the San Francisco Bulletin, the SFPD, and Archbishop Hanna on a ruse to smoke out Heslin’s kidnapper(s). As the authorities approvingly noted upon this letter’s publication, the kidnapper’s arrogant tone is gone, replaced by a humble, apologetic voice — “Fate has made me do this. Sickness x mizery has compelled my action … Please forgive this act if you can.”
Examination of the timeline lends credence to the Bulletin’s claim that the Harris note pushed William Hightower into coming forward, leading to the unearthing of Father Heslin’s grave just hours after its publication. If so, this bit of gamesmanship may well have created unexpected problems for the small, dark, foreign-seeming motorist who abducted Father Heslin — Hightower’s mooted secret “pal” — since the priest’s fate might otherwise have remained a mystery for weeks or months.
Fast forward five years to 1926. Celebrity radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears while taking the sun on Ocean Park Beach in Venice, CA. She is feared lost to the sea. Following a massive search operation her mother and business manager, Mrs. Minnie Kennedy, proclaims Aimee drowned and holds a service/fundraiser in her memory. Only, other rumors begin to fly — “Sister Aimee” has had a blow-up with “Ma” Kennedy over an affair with her married radio wizard, Ken Ormiston, and has run off with her new squeeze or — alternatively — she has been kidnapped.
In fact, Sister Aimee really had motored off up the coast with “radio Apollo” Ken Ormiston and was secretly enjoying a hideaway vacation with him in a cozy cottage on Carmel Beach, out by poet (and Hodel favorite) Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House.
Nevertheless, a ransom letter addressed to Mrs. Minnie Kennedy and signed “THE AVENGERS” was sent to the Echo Park nerve center of Aimee’s ministry. That letter, reproduced below, describes in detail a fictional kidnapping scenario similar to the one which played out in real life in the Father Heslin case. As in the Heslin ransom letter, it is implied the kidnappers control a gang of operatives, in this case placed as “inside workers” at the Angelus Temple. Also, as in the Heslin case, the ransom letter expresses anti-religious sentiments in a caustic but markedly restrained fashion.
The contents of this “prolix missive” would become the basis for Aimee’s cover story when she staged a dramatic “escape” from a non-existent makeshift prison south of the Arizona-Mexico border a few days later. Sister Aimee would return in triumph to Los Angeles, only to face a long-running, high-profile fraud prosecution which would ultimately be derailed pursuant to a dirty backroom deal between the district attorney and media mogul William Randolph Hearst.
The AVENGERS ransom letter reads as if the author of the original Father Heslin ransom letter had grown up and gone to college during the intervening five years. Despite half a year of saturation press coverage, copious court testimony, several books on the imbroglio as well as TV movie and feature film treatments, the question of who wrote the letter remains a mystery — as is the relationship of that person to the gruesome and suspicious death of a key witness in the case.
During the course of her “martyrdom” at the hands of District Attorney Asa Keyes Aimee released to the press the text of a simpering, apologetic note she purportedly received from the fictional kidnap gang’s nurse, “Rose:”
To confound matters further, Aimee hired celebrity detective Nick Harris to lead her own investigation into her imaginary kidnappers — the very same Nick Harris who concocted the bogus, apologetic kidnapper’s note as a ruse in the Father Heslin case.1
Fast forward another 48 years to February 4, 1974. Heiress Patty Hearst is kidnapped from her Berkeley home by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).
Patty was the daughter of Randolph Hearst, then editor of the San Francisco Examiner — the newspaper historically responsible for putting William Hightower behind bars and letting the small, dark man who kidnapped Father Heslin off the hook. She was also the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, the “yellow press” baron who allegedly engineered the corrupt deal through which Aimee McPherson escaped any responsibility for her kidnap hoax and the multiple deaths which flowed from it.
The kidnapping was first linked to the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) on February 7th, based on a communiqué issued by the shadowy terrorist group:
For reasons known only to himself, the by this time mostly quiescent Zodiac Killer chose to advertise his interest in this dramatic turn of events.2 Ten days after the kidnapping of Patty Hearst a handwritten note mailed in Los Angeles and officially attributed to the Zodiac arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle. In a one-liner, the Zodiac name-checked the Symbionese Liberation Army while characteristically melding this shout-out with a bit of arcane trivia:
A few years back British Zodiac researcher Richard Grinell called out a possible link between the Zodiac’s “SLA Letter” and a pair of strange, typewritten letters sent to Randolph Hearst’s home days after his daughter was kidnapped. The two letters can be found in the voluminous files on the kidnapping the FBI has released through its public FOIA document library, The Vault. (See HEARNAP Part 05 at p. 807 et seq. and p. 823 et seq.) I believe Grinell’s find could be of great, almost Rosetta Stone-level significance, but I have a very different interpretation of its import than he does.3
The first letter was mailed at or by San Francisco Airport (SFO) on February 10, 1974:
The letter purports to be from an uncharacteristically humble, apologetic, religious-minded member of the Patty Hearst kidnap gang. It is peppered with an unrealistic number of misspellings, as were many of Zodiac’s letters. It uses language which recalls the Bates “Confession” in the Zodiac case (“She is brave and beautiful and innocent” v. “SHE WAS YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL”). There is some sly humor going on: “Dont let her marry that Weed man … He got his idea from Miss Angla Davis, who gives orders and idees to our brass.” Prior to the kidnapping the heiress’s fiancé, math teacher Steven Weed, was looked on disapprovingly as a fortune hunter by some in the Hearst family. In fact, Steven Weed played no role in Patty’s abduction and was badly beaten during the home invasion. While Angela Davis was involved with violent black militants in the early 1970s she had no link to the SLA or Patty Hearst’s kidnapping.
The second Hearst Family letter was mailed in Palo Alto a day later. It is clearly from the same person, but is otherwise so different in character that it dissolves any doubts as to whether the “God bless you” letter was anything but a clever put-on.
This second letter is written in an imperious, educated, and intellectually self-assured voice. There is a bit of understated anti-religious sentiment, and a great deal of oddly anachronistic rhetoric about William Randolph Hearst “starting yellow journalism and instigating the Spanish-American War” as well as his “later, cheap liaison with the trollop Marian [Marion] Davies.”
The Hearst Family letters take on a special interest in the light of William Randolph Hearst’s important but hidden role in the 1926 Aimee McPherson kidnap affair:
The first letter recalls the pious and obsequiously apologetic “Rose” letter which Aimee brandished to reporters to show that her kidnappers were “in the wind.”
“God bless you” was a catchphrase endlessly repeated by Aimee McPherson and her followers at the Angelus Temple.
Legend has it that Aimee got Hearst to bribe DA Asa Keyes into abandoning his prosecution by threatening to publicize Hollywood scuttlebutt which claimed that Hearst shot and killed film producer Thomas Ince on his yacht after catching him in flagrante with his mistress, (“the trollop”) Marion Davies.4
The key witness in the Aimee hoax case who died under suspicious circumstances was lawyer R. A. McKinely. McKinely was of a “proud family” — he was a second cousin to President William McKinely, who started the Spanish-American War.
R. A. McKinely was brought low after being blinded in an explosion during the Spanish-American War, and eked out a living representing petty criminals and bootleggers from a one-man office in Long Beach, CA.
McKinely died along with two friends after drowning in mud in a car that went off the road in an unwitnessed single car accident during the Aimee prosecution.
McKinely’s widow presumably did receive a Spanish-American War veteran’s widow’s pension. Congress hiked the pension for Spanish-American War widows substantially to $20-$50 just around the time McKinley was killed.
Oddly, both Hearst Family letters invoke the idiom “to hold one’s head up.” This was another of Aimee’s pet phrases, as DA Asa Keyes emphasized in court when presenting his decryption of one of the celebrity evangelist’s cipher mash notes to her Carmel Beach playmate, Ken Ormiston.
Curiouser and curiouser. I think there is a strong possibility that the cryptic, one-line message in the canonical Zodiac “SLA Letter” is a hint that the Zodiac wrote the two phony SLA letters to Randolph Hearst. If you took the hint, you might start thinking about what all that apparent nonsense really means — and that could tell you a lot about the Zodiac’s identity. It’s “the game” again: “I’m telling you who I am, but I’m betting you are not smart enough to figure it out.”
I am slightly surprised that Richard Grinell latched onto those unpublicized Hearst Family letters as potentially related to the Zodiac “SLA Letter.” There is an awful lot of nut mail in the HEARNAP files, and the most obvious link — the use of “a friend” as a sign-off — is pretty generic. True, there is also a less tangible, de-localized signal which could trigger a bit of pattern recognition — the juxtaposition of feigned naivete and an imperious, judgmental voice, the use of irony and absurdist humor, the arcane references, and the quirky language reminiscent of the Bates Confession letter.
What is clear is that, as soon as one plugs in George Hodel as the Zodiac, the contents of the letters makes a whole lot more sense. That would be true even if we consider only the easily verified aspects of George Hodel’s biography, without getting into any theories about his playing an active part in the Father Heslin kidnapping or the Sister Aimee kidnapping hoax. For example:
George Hodel worked as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Record in 1924, a paper which played a key role in surfacing doubts about Aimee McPherson’s 1926 disappearance and alleged death.
George Hodel was the subject of a hit piece written by the prominent Catholic journalist Ted LeBerthon in the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Evening Herald in 1925.
George Hodel was plugged into Hollywood in the 1920s through his friendship with future film director John Huston, the art student son of actor Walter Huston.
George Hodel worked as a cab driver in downtown Los Angeles around the time Aimee McPherson was trysting with Ken Ormiston at downtown hotels.
George Hodel had strong connections to Pasadena, the location of Aimee’s #2 ministry and another of McPherson and Ormiston’s trysting places.
George Hodel moonlighted as a radio announcer at the same time as Ormiston was a jobbing engineer and announcer in LA’s burgeoning new radio industry.
George Hodel was likely immersed in the intellectual controversies of the 1920s which raged around figures like William Randolph Hearst and Aimee McPherson, both of whom were excoriated and lampooned by the celebrated muckraking journalist, novelist, atheist, socialist, and Pasadena resident Upton Sinclair.
You won’t find another Zodiac suspect who would be a better fit for the author of the Hearst Family letters. Indeed, there probably weren’t many people around in 1974 who gave two hoots about the 1926 Aimee McPherson kidnap imbroglio or who could even remember obscure nuances of that long-forgotten case.
But is there more to it than that? Is there a single thread which would link the Father Heslin kidnap-murder, the Aimee McPherson kidnap hoax, and Zodiac-authored hoax letters to the Hearst family in the wake of Patty Hearst’s kidnap by the SLA? A thread which extends over more than fifty years? I tend to think so.
FURTHER READING
Bruce, John. “The Flapjack Murder” in San Francisco Murders. New York: Bantam Books, 1948.
Cox, Raymond L. The Verdict Is In. Los Angeles: Research Publishers, 1983.
Dawson, Kate Winkler. American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI. New York: Putnam, 2020.
Harris, Nick. Famous Crimes. Los Angeles: Arthur Vernon Agency, 1931.
Hodel, Steve. The Early Years - Part I. Los Angeles: Thoughtprint Press, 2021.
Mavity, Nancy Bar. Sister Aimee. New York: Doubleday, 1931.
Sutton, Matthew Avery. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Thomas, Lately. Storming Heaven: The Lives and Turmoils of Minnie Kennedy and Aimee Semple McPherson. New York: William Morrow, 1970.
Thomas, Lately. The Vanishing Evangelist: The Aimee Semple McPherson Kidnaping Affair. New York: Viking Press, 1959.
Wagner, Rob Leicester. Red Ink White Lies: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles Newspapers 1920-1962. Upland, CA: Dragonflyer Press, 2000.
A few years later it came out that this arrangement was a result of Nick Harris and Aimee McPherson sharing a friendship with a Superior Court judge, Carlos Hardy. That does not speak well for Harris, inasmuch as Judge Hardy emerges as a particularly toxic figure even amidst the rogue’s gallery of miscreants involved in the fake kidnap story. The judge had close ties to Sister Aimee before the case. It was revealed that he took a substantial bribe from her after she staged her resurrection in Arizona and that he quarterbacked efforts to suppress incriminating testimony and procure false testimony from assorted petty crooks to undermine the factual Carmel Beach sexcapade narrative and bolster Aimee’s false kidnap narrative. These revelations ultimately led to Hardy’s being ejected from the American Bar Association, his impeachment by the California Senate in 1929, and a decisive rejection by ordinary voters following his acquittal on a split vote in the Senate.
For context, the canonical, self-branded Zodiac attacks occurred in 1968-1969, but the killer continued sending several letters a year through 1971. He then went quiet for three years, reemerging to send four officially Zodiac-attributed communications over the course of 1974. Besides the Valentine’s Day “SLA” letter, the other 1974 letters ostensibly address William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist,” Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” and the Chronicle’s anti-feminist sex columnist, Count Marco.
Richard Grinell has focused on the fact that, although the Zodiac “SLA Letter” arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle on Valentine’s Day (February 14th), the postmark date on the envelope looks like February 3, 1974, a day before the SLA grabbed Patty Hearst. He points out that the FBI’s typed description of the letter restates that February 3 date. Grinell reasons from there to conclude that the SLA Letter is not a genuine Zodiac correspondence at all, but rather issued from a Los Angeles-based SLA member with knowledge of what was about to go down in Berkeley — one who for some reason chose to send a threatening note imitating the Zodiac. On that assumption, he has argued that the Hearst Family letters are from SLA members, too, and that some or all of the other three “return of the Zodiac” letters mailed in 1974 are actually also from SLA-ers mimicking the Zodiac.
By contrast, I believe that when you look at the amount of drop-out in the postmarks on other Zodiac correspondence and consider the improbability of it taking 11 days for a letter mailed in Los Angeles to reach San Francisco, it is more intuitive to infer that the “SLA Letter” was sent by the Zodiac as previously assumed, that it was picked up in LA on the 13th, and that it was motivated by the firestorm of publicity which followed Patty Hearst’s kidnapping. That doesn’t go to the question of whether the SFO and Palo Alto Hearst Family letters of the 10th and 11th also came from the Zodiac. I think we can only weigh the likelihood of that based on textual analysis and the explanatory power of the hypothesis.
Matthew Avery Sutton’s scholarly biography of Aimee McPherson rates the rumor about Aimee blackmailing Hearst into paying off DA Asa Keyes over the Davies/Ince story as probably true (see Chapter 5, “Unraveling the Mystery”). McPherson certainly had the means to broadcast that insider gossip far and wide. Eventually the story would reach a broader audience. The scurrilous tale was retold in 1959 in the original, unexpurgated Paris publication of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Later, Orson Welles related it to Peter Bogdanovich, who dramatized the alleged events in his 2001 film, The Cat’s Meow.
My impression is that Hearst’s affair with Marion Davies (derisively fictionalized by Welles in Citizen Kane) was otherwise pretty uncontroversial. Hearst stayed on good terms with his legal wife after they separated, and Davies was admired for her movie work and well-liked for her society activities as the hostess of Hearst Castle. That seems all the more reason to see the reference to Hearst’s “cheap liaison with the trollop Marian Davies” as an allusion to the Ince story and therefore, taken in context, to the Aimee kidnap hoax.
In passing, I note that Hearst fathered a daughter by Marion Davies named Patricia who was passed off as Davies’ niece. The paternity relationship was the subject of gossip during the 1920s, and Patricia confirmed it shortly before her death in 1993. Reading the last line of the second Hearst Family letter, perhaps we can detect a barbed double entendre (“… we will release Patricia, whose only sin is that she carries the genes of William Randolph Hearst.”) In matters concerning George Hodel, the words of his friend Man Ray are always apposite: “Concentration is the desired end, as in an anagram whose density is the measure of its destiny.” Alphabet for Adults, Beverly Hills [Calif.]: Copley Galleries, 1948.