I have just finished reading Steve Hodel’s new two volume set on his father’s early years and potential Hodel crimes of the 1920s and 1930s. There’s a lot to process in there. I think many people will again have the reaction, “Hodel’s jumped the shark with this one,” and I suspect that we will again figure out eventually that he hasn’t.
Here I just want to address the Aimee McPherson question. In mid-2019 I was led to the McPherson kidnap story through the process of trying to puzzle out the obscure allusions in the 1974 “Hearst Family” letters unearthed in the FBI Vault by Zodiac researcher Richard Grinell. That led me to the “prolix missive” — the ransom letter which was central to the whole affair. The “Avengers” pseudonym and the “voice” of the ransom letter screamed “pay dirt.” I posted a comment to Steve Hodel’s blog and he sent me an email entitled “You’re too good a detective,” explaining that he was already on the case but would like to keep it under wraps. Steve asked permission to remove my posting, which I gave, and requested that I at least not publicly mention that he was already researching a connection between his father and Sister Aimee.
We have compared notes from time to time on the ASM story — for example, on its eerie “foreshadowing” of the 1938 Frome murders near El Paso — and I have from time to time addressed the matter on Twitter and, more recently, Substack. I’m not sure I would have gone into the story so deeply without that initial feedback from Steve Hodel. Now at last Steve has gone public with his own findings on the Aimee McPherson kidnap affair, which is something of a relief. As he demonstrates in a remarkable “Coda” to the new books, he was onto a link even before the original publication of Black Dahlia Avenger. However, his new books do not address the “Hearst Letters” angle that I identified, which to my mind not only powerfully corroborates the theory of an Hodel link, but also connects the story to the Zodiac case and offers remarkable insight into George Hodel’s criminal psychology.
The Early Years does address my suggestion that the 1990 Celebrity Cypher postcard, a putative and increasingly “credited” late Zodiac missive, also teases the UNSUB’s connection to the 1926 kidnap hoax. I’ll offer one gloss on Steve Hodel’s treatment. Steve writes that the postcard’s beach scene is “reminiscent” of Carmel Beach, but is not definitively Carmel Beach. I would amend that to say, based on reviewing the discussions on the Zodiac forums, there is now a pretty strong consensus that the photograph depicts Carmel Beach. In my opinion it was probably taken no more than a few hundred yards north of Aimee McPherson’s notorious “love cottage by the sea” — the one that was right by Hodel muse Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House.