The Los Angeles Mirror-News, Dec. 23, 1949.
Today is the anniversary of a jury of eight women and four men finding Dr. George Hodel not guilty on two counts of molesting his daughter Tamar. I’ll have more to say about this in the days to come, but I wanted to mark the day.
Steve Hodel is fond of quoting an incomplete transcript of defense attorney Robert A. Neeb Jr. interrogating Tamar.
On the jump, the entire exchange, which tells a different story.
An updated version of the Nativity in Warner Bros. Star in the Night.
Note: This is an encore post from 2021.
Made as a twenty-minute film to complete a program slate for movie theaters, the 1945 Warner Bros. two-reel short Star in the Night provides an understated, moving example of an offbeat contemporary take on the traditional Christmas nativity story. Featuring a much larger budget and more experienced cast than normal for shorts, the powerful featurette proved popular with audiences making it a perennial hit.
While the norm at the dawn of cinema, one- and two-reel shorts came to be seen as just an entertaining morsel or appetizer for the more respected feature film by the 1920s. Providing a training ground for rising talent or work for fading stars, these short films covered the gamut – newsreels, documentaries, travelogues, musical numbers, slapstick comedy, and playlets – offered entertaining product at low prices for local theater owners.
For Monday, we have a mysterious couple. Continue reading
In the December Ask Me Anything on the Black Dahlia case, I gave an update on my work in progress, Heaven Is Here!
I also discussed: Continue reading
Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood, by William J. Mann, Simon & Schuster, 464 pages, January 27, 2026, $31.
Like a game of Clue with an actual cold case to solve, a well-worn list of suspects in the 1947 Black Dahlia killing released 22 years ago continues to provide the “true” crime community and the multimillion-dollar industry that feeds it with endless possibilities for speculation and, occasionally, another book.
Was it the murderous Dr. George Hodel at the Sowden House in a gruesome attempt at surrealist art? Mob nightclub owner Mark Hansen at the Florentine Gardens hiring morgue-trained assassin Leslie Dillon to take care of a troublesome dame? Army butcher Carl Balsiger in a fit of violence?
All of them are fakery and fraud by writers Steve Hodel (the ongoing Black Dahlia Avenger franchise launched in 2003), Piu Eatwell (Black Dahlia, Red Rose, 2017) and Eli Frankel (Sisters in Death, forthcoming in October 2025) who, if they read all of their source material, knew their suspect wasn’t the killer and proceeded anyway. Truth is the first victim for a “true” crime author with hopes of making The New York Times bestseller list and everything that goes with it. Continue reading
Sisters in Death: The Black Dahlia, the Prairie Heiress, and Their Hunter, by Eli Frankel, Citadel Press, 400 pages, October 28, 2025. $29.
Yet another book that treats the murder of Elizabeth Short as a game of Clue in which an author thumbs through a list of suspects and produces a half-baked “solution” using torturous leaps of logic and fraudulent claims as necessary. A zealous but amateurish project that attempts to link two murders separated by five years and 1,600 miles that have nothing in common, implicating a man who committed neither murder. Only for “true” crime fanatics who are unconcerned with reality.
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Sisters in Death is evidence of the dismal state of the “true” crime genre (truly there is no bottom to this market) and further proof, if any were necessary, that unsolved murders exert a powerful magnetism on one another in the public imagination. Cold cases separated by years, hundreds of miles and completely different methods miraculously become “just like” one another, the work of a shrewd serial killer who is always one step ahead of the hopelessly incompetent police. At least for the purposes of a devious author who isn’t shy of fabricating facts – and there is something about the Black Dahlia case that fosters lying among writers.
The accused “murderer” in question is Herman Carl Balsiger, who has been linked through crackpot internet theories to the March 9, 1941, killing of Leila Adele Welsh in Kansas City and the January 15, 1947, murder in Los Angeles of Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia. Continue reading
Saturday May 5, 1990
By RICHARD E. MEYER
TIMES STAFF WRITER
They beat Pete Bucher with gun butts. They kicked him with their boots. They threw him into walls.
“Sonabitchi criminal!” they yelled. “Goddamned liar! Spydog!”
They forced him to his knees. One put a pistol to his ear and cocked it. “Two minutes to sign, sonabitchi!” Quietly, he said: “I love you, Rose.” He said it again. “I love you, Rose . . . ” The pistol clicked.
A ploy, Pete Bucher realized, and he regained some composure. So they beat, kicked and hit him again with their gun butts, in his stomach, head, neck, groin and kidneys. He retched, urinated blood. Continue reading
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
The young mother asked the waitress at the cafe in the Subway Terminal Building to hold her baby for just a moment—and then she was gone.
Four-month-old Nancy Joyce Morris, with light blue eyes and blond hair, was wrapped in a purple quilt and a pink blanket to which her young mother had pinned a Christmas card: To Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lane, 1711 N. Alexandria, with a return address of C.H. Wagoner, 4256 Troost Ave., in North Hollywood. It was signed Bonnie.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 23, 1907
St. Louis, via Direct Wire to The Times
Dr. Henry S. Atkins, superintendent of St. Louis’ insane asylum, has found that Christmas is a perfect time to test his theory that shopping cures insanity.
Atkins and two attendants took 60 women from the asylum “into the world of department stores and the activities which all women enjoy,” The Times said.
Note: This is an encore post from 2008.
Testimony in the murder trial was so graphic that spectators became ill
and fled the courtroom, The Times said. Continue reading
Note: This is an encore post from 2006. Homelessness is a more than century-old problem in Los Angeles — there are no easy or quick fixes. And yes, homeless people were put on the chain gang in 1907.
December 22, 1907
Los Angeles
As Police Capt. Flammer approached Yuma, Ariz., to take custody of George White, he noticed the smoke of hundreds of campfires made by hobos burning old railroad ties.
The hobos, Flammer learned, were avoiding Yuma because the marshal meted out hard justice to vagrants, as he warned in posters all over town. But Flammer also learned all those homeless men were heading for Los Angeles.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project..
Bonus factoid: The Jewish “defense army” Haganah was reported to have made a major attack—the largest since the U.N. partition decision—against Arabs in Lydda and Bet Nabala, where troops of the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion are camped.
Listen to Victor Jory read “Tubby the Tuba”
Listen to “Uncle Don’s Playland”
Listen to “The Great Gildersleeve”
Links to mp3 files of 78 rpm children’s records
While you’re it, listen to “Grumpy Shark”
Quote of the day: “For a redhead who worked her way through law school as a floorwalker in a department store and by washing dishes, that’s not bad!”
The Times, on Municipal Judge Mildred L. Lillie, whose 1971 nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by Richard Nixon predated Justice Sandra Day O’Connor by 10 years. When a 12-member bar panel rated Lillie, who had 24 years on the bench, “unqualified” because the men feared a woman would be “too emotional” for the Supreme Court, Nixon withdrew her name in favor of William Rehnquist.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 21, 1907
Los Angeles
Lillian Poelk was new to Los Angeles, with no friends and little more than a job as a waitress that didn’t quite cover the rent of her room at 831 S. Hope.
“While other girls were getting pretty things and preparing for a pleasant Christmas, she was shut up in a cheerless room,” The Times said.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project..
And at the age of 55, after dozens of novels and countless short stories, he died. Not that you’ve heard of him or any of his books—unless you collect potboiler novels of the 1930s.
The list of his works is impressive in bulk if nothing else, with titles that tell the entire plot in two or three words: “Dancing Feet,” “In Love With a T-Man,” “Love or Money,” “Modern Marriage” and my favorite: “Short Skirts: A Story of Modern Youth.”
This is the Ask Me Anything on George Hodel and Steve Hodel for December 2025. In this session, I announced the Black Dahlia Book Club, coming in January 2026. The Black Dahlia Book Club will expand the focus of what has been the Ask Me Anything on George Hodel and Steve Hodel to all the magazine articles and books that have been written about the case.
More details to come….
I also discussed:
–What is Steve Hodel’s “proof” that George Hodel
knew Elizabeth Short?
–How has Steve Hodel misrepresented Los Angeles history?
–How many places did Steve Hodel live up to the age of 16 or 18?
–Did a detective tell Jack Webb that the doctor who killed Elizabeth Short lived on Franklin Avenue?
–Were Steve Hodel and his brothers ever a ward of the state?
–How true are Steve Hodel’s stories about decadent parties at the Sowden House?
–Did police question George Hodel when he returned from the Philippines?
–Did Betty Bersinger call the police from the Bayley house to report Elizabeth Short’s body?
–Steve Hodel’s so-called photos of Elizabeth Short.
–Where can someone see the Black Dahlia photos that Steve Hodel bought on EBay?
–What became of the investigation using Buster the Cadaver Dog at the Sowden House?
–Is it true that the files in the Black Dahlia case are “lost?”
–What is Steve Hodel’s motive in making so many claims about his father?
–Did Steve Hodel get rich from his books?
–Steve Hodel’s claim that he was
part of a “new breed” at the LAPD and the recruiter’s alleged comment that with
the name Hodel he would never work as a cop.
The George Hodel transcripts:
The George Hodel files Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 |Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 20,1907
Los Angeles
Mr. C.D. Roberts of 1900 E. Main was feeling a bit unwell. He had bad headaches, an irregular appetite, saw dark spots before his eyes and felt as if something in his stomach was alive.
Not sure what to do, Roberts consulted the European Medical Experts at 745 S. Main St., where he was treated with the secret cure of “The Great Fer-Don.” “He was prevailed upon to try it, with the result that his system was quickly relieved of this monster scores of feet in length,” surely the Loch Ness creature of internal parasites.
December 19, 1941: The suicide of Dr. Rikita Honda, who slashed his wrists while in custody at Terminal Island, revealed that he was the director of a vast spy ring, the FBI says. Honda was head of the Imperial Comradeship Society, which allegedly had 4,800 members in Western states, including California and Arizona.
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
City Hall’s elevator operators have been having a little too much fun on the job. Instead of calling out the numbers of the floors, they have been using nicknames and building superintendent Ralph Hoffman wants them to stop.
The operators say that the passengers were the ones who were using the nicknames:
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 19, 1907
Los Angeles
What you have to understand first about George White is that he isn’t to blame. Oh he’ll take his prison sentence for robbing the Hot Rivet Saloon, 1006 N. Main St., but it’s not his fault; he fell in with the wrong man. He just hopes that when he’s released he won’t be turned over to the Army as a deserter.
Continue reading
Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.
The Jacobowicz brothers—Karl, 16, Joseph, 13, and Rudolph, 10—stood on the metal ramp leading from the gleaming airliner that carried them on the final leg of their journey from Vienna.
The Nazis took their Jewish father away in 1940 but left their mother because she was Catholic. Then on Christmas Eve 1942, the Gestapo made their mother get rid of her children because they were half-Jewish. She died less than a year after turning them over to Catholic nuns.
December 18, 1941: Louis A. Tyler reports to the Navy recruiting office after receiving a telegram informing him of the death of his son, Fireman 3rd Class George L. Tyler, at Pearl Harbor. “My purpose is to take my son’s place and carry on in the capacity for which I am best fitted,” he says. (The Times didn’t follow up on this story to report whether Tyler was accepted).
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences cancels its annual banquet, due to the war. The awards will be given out later in some informal gathering, Edwin Schallert writes.
Jimmie Fidler says: Gracie Allen is already wearing George Burns’ Christmas gift: a full-length stone marten coat, tres expensive. Marlene Dietrich owns the only other local one.
Note: This is an encore post from 2006.
December 18, 1907
Los Angeles
Los Angeles County Coroner Roy S. Lanterman was arrested on charges of being drunk and disorderly at the Navajo, a bordello run by Ida Hastings, 309 Ord St. Hastings called police, who arrested Lanterman.
A Mills Seminary graduate nicknamed “Suicide Ida” because of her attempts to kill herself “every time she has a serious setback in her numerous ‘love’ affairs,” Hastings had contacted police earlier in the evening, asking for protection from Lanterman, saying that he had attacked her. Hastings notified police when Lanterman, who was married, returned to the bordello, went to her bedroom and after a fierce fight, removed several photographs of himself as well as a letter.
ladailymirror.com 