The Suicide's Grave
British Zodiac researcher Richard Grinell has come up with a banger of a find with yesterday’s blog entry, entitled THE EXORCIST AND “THE SUICIDE’S GRAVE.” I will pick up my commentary on the San Francisco Bulletin’s coverage of the Father Heslin murder later, but this item is highly pertinent to the Heslin case and the possibility of a Zodiac connection.
The most striking evidence that the Zodiac made cryptic allusion to the 1921 Heslin murder is to be found in his long-running “death machine” hoax. This extended leg-pull recalls the press feeding frenzy over a similar Rube Goldberg contraption which William Hightower purportedly intended to stage by the side of the road to shower his pursuers with buckshot at a ransom drop. Indeed, a plausible solution to Zodiac’s Mt. Diablo Code / Phillips 66 Map puzzle, which was supposed to give away the location of the death bomb, points us to present-day Pacifica, formerly known as Salada Beach — the general location of Father Heslin’s alleged holding cell, his shallow grave and, presumably, Hightower’s roadside “death bomb.”
Still, once you hypothesize a link, you notice other things in the Zodiac’s missives that seem like a fit. Probably the strongest candidate is the “Exorcist Letter” of January 29, 1974. Out of the blue, Zodiac wrote the San Francisco Chronicle to sing the praises of The Exorcist, adding a brief quotation from W. S. Gilbert’s lyrics for The Mikado (a work he had already parodically misquoted at length in one of the “Death Bomb” letters), and a mysterious, cuneiform-like signature starting with a symbol peculiarly resembling a crude letter ‘K.’ I have previously pointed out that, if a not-quite 14yo George Hodel was the never-apprehended small, dark “foreigner” with a high, refined voice who spirited away Father Heslin and sent him to his doom at the top of the cliffs overlooking Salada Beach, then it’s easy enough to see why The Exorcist would give him a chuckle. “He plunged himself into the billowy wave and an echo arose from the suicide’s grave” is also apropos with respect to the moonlit clifftop death scene.
Richard Grinell asked a good question — is there any special import to the curious juxtaposition of praise for The Exorcist with the “suicide’s grave” excerpt from The Mikado? I have already suggested a potential answer to that, but Grinell’s latest observation adds another possible layer of meaning to the juxtaposition. The phrase “the suicide’s grave” is in W. S. Gilbert’s original lyric, but Grinell points out that The Suicide's Grave is also a literarily significant nineteenth century novel dealing with demonic possession, madness and the divided self, written in first person from the perspective of a self-analyzing, self-justifying murderer. This work by the Scottish poet James Hogg was cited by Robert Louis Stevenson as an influence on his famous novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Originally published in 1824, Hogg’s novel has been hailed as a progenitor of post-modernist literature owing to its multiple “experimental” features. The novel received a 1947 reprinting with a preface by Andre Gide, a Nobel laureate in literature. Gide said of it: “It is long since I can remember being so taken hold of, so voluptuously tormented by any book.”
Despite the high praise of literati, The Suicide’s Grave (also published as The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner) represents a pretty rarefied taste. I found relatively few twentieth century references to the book on searching the vast repository of newspapers.com. One of the first that popped up is in a serialized story, Murder on Tour by Julian Symons, in the London Evening Standard of July 29, 1960:
It turns out the serial killer in this story deals in antiquarian books and leaves them as a calling card at the scene of his crimes. Presumably he chose The Suicide’s Grave for this particular crime because there is a scene where the protagonist wrestles with his alter ego (possibly Satan himself) the brother he has been tasked to murder on the top of a cliff and almost plunges to his doom.
All of which seems very suggestive, if admittedly far from conclusive, of a conscious reference to James Hogg’s novel in the Exorcist Letter. I note here that George Hill Hodel was definitely a litterateur. We know that his favorite writers included Edgar Allan Poe, Poe’s acolyte Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire’s acolytes in the French fin-de-siècle Decadent and Symbolist schools, including Joris-Karl Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont, and screenwriter Ben Hecht’s early homages to the Decadents, Fantazius Mallare and The Kingdom of Evil. He was also a fan of James Joyce’s experimental, high modernist stream-of-consciousness novels. His nod to the Arthurian tradition in entitling a photographic self-portrat “Merlin Gazes at Cracked Mirrors” suggests that he was versed in nineteenth century romantic literature (Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Lord Tennyson, etc.), as might be expected of any highly cultivated, bookish youth born in 1907. Furthermore, George Hodel worked in the antiquarian book trade in the mid 1920s — probably for Dawson’s Book Shop in downtown Los Angeles.
Not for the first time, I would have to say of a Zodiac “lead” generated by someone operating outside the framework of the George Hodel theory: if this lead means anything at all — it means George Hodel is the Zodiac.