Showing results by author "Steve Hodel" in All Categories

For 56 years, the Black Dahlia murder case remained one of the most notorious and high-profile unsolved crimes of the 20th century. Now, Steve Hodel, a 24-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, believes he has finally solved the case. On January 15, 1947, 22-year-old Elizabeth Short - "The Black Dahlia" - was found dead in a vacant lot in Los Angeles, her body horribly mutilated, bisected at the waist, and posed in a bizarre manner.

Most Evil II is Steve Hodel's follow-up investigation (2009-2015) into his father's potential murders and introduces new evidence and additional linkage obtained by him over the past six years. Included in that evidence is the solving of the Zodiac's 45-year-cryptic cipher, which gives us the answer to the question asked in Most Evil: Were Black Dahlia Avenger and Zodiac the same serial killer?

Twenty years before shocking the world in Los Angeles in 1947 as “The Black Dahlia Avenger”, did George Hodel terrorize California by committing some of its most infamous crimes and serial murders?

When veteran LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel discovered that his own late father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, was the killer in the infamous Black Dahlia murder case, he wrote the best seller Black Dahlia Avenger, a book that convinced even the L.A. County Deputy District Attorney that George Hodel was responsible for Elizabeth Short's gruesome death.

In writing The Early Years, my original intent was to present all my father’s suspected crimes from the 1920s and 1930s in one edition. I have found this is simply not possible, as it would require a book that would dwarf Dostoevsky’s nearly 700-page opus, Crime and Punishment. Therefore, I will present The Early Years in two parts, two editions. This edition is Part II, and it presents my investigations of his suspected crimes in the 1930s.

New York Times best-selling author Steve Hodel has taken the known facts revealed in BDA, BDA II, BDA III and his subsequent investigations of the Elizabeth Short and LA lone woman murders and sews those facts together with the interstitial tissue of what could have been to create a thrilling courtroom drama in this historical fiction.