To the Oct. 26, 2021, audience at the Council Bluffs, Iowa, Public Library who attended Duffy Hudson’s performance delivering the words of Steve Hodel: You should know that virtually everything you heard was a lie.

The fault is not necessarily with Hudson, except for his lack of skepticism. He transformed himself into a human tape recorder and delivered what appeared to be a flawless repetition of what Steve Hodel told him. The responsibility is with Steve Hodel and his rather incredible gift for making up new lies and embellishing his old ones.

Hudson spoke for 90 minutes, including a question-and-answer period, and it would be humanly impossible to catalog all of the fiction. But here’s a few tidbits:

Update: Steve Hodel claims George Hodel ran an abortion ring. He did not. George Hodel was opposed to abortion. Who said so? Tamar Hodel. Oops.

Steve Hodel now claims that the Sowden House was his boyhood home. It was not.

Steve and his two brothers, Kelvin and Michael, were in the custody of his mother, the former Dorothy Harvey, when she separated from George Hodel, and they lived at a number of residences when Steve was young.

We know this because she was repeatedly cited for neglecting Steve and his brothers and eventually sentenced to jail. To cite one instance, in December 1944 and February 1945, Steve and his brothers were living with their mother at 4555 Glenalbyn Drive in Mount Washington.  There were times when Dorothy Hodel was couldn’t afford a residence and she and the children lived at the Sowden House. But the arrangement was temporary. She also used the Sowden House as a mail drop when she had no fixed address. When Dorothy Hodel was questioned by investigators in 1950, she was living over a bait shop on Santa Monica Pier. So all of Steve Hodel’s stories about the swanky parties his parents threw at the Sowden House – you guessed it: Lies.

Steve Hodel now claims that Los Angeles County district attorney’s Lt. Frank Jemison was “ordered” to turn over his files on the Black Dahlia case to the LAPD and that he shrewdly left second copies in a vault, safe and secure to be discovered (surprise!) by Steve Hodel.

Not at all. The district attorney’s files are a shambles and I should know because I’ve gone through them. The D.A.’s office now distributes a CD ROM of the files rather than granting access to the originals, so researchers have no way of knowing that Steve Hodel is lying. But in reality, the files are a mess; lots of papers randomly shoveled into boxes with no order whatsoever.

And, of course, Steve Hodel doesn’t mention that the only reason the district attorney has any Black Dahlia files is because the grand jury was looking into in the Leslie Dillon debacle of Dr. J. Paul De River and the gangster squad. 

Steve Hodel has also returned to his claim that his father “probably” killed Geneva Ellroy, mother of author James Ellroy. Steve Hodel earned a robust, throaty “FU” from Ellroy when he originally floated this nonsense, but Ellroy eventually jumped into the Hodel crowd and has now jumped out, refusing to discuss Steve Hodel or the Black Dahlia.

One of Steve Hodel’s more bizarre claims is that when the purported killer of Elizabeth Short called Examiner city editor James Richardson, he identified himself as the “Black Dahlia Avenger.” Of course, that isn’t true. As with so many things, it’s something Steve Hodel would very much like to be true. But it’s not.

Another bizarre claim, and there are so many that it’s hard to keep track, is that Elizabeth Short went from Los Angeles to Chicago to “investigate” the 1946 Suzanne Degnan killing. In reality, Elizabeth Short stopped in Chicago en route from Medford, Mass., to Los Angeles several months after the Suzanne Degnan murder. As for Elizabeth Short being interested in the murder – everybody was. It was a huge case and everyone was following it.

Oh. And the nonsense about George Hodel being a taxi driver and knowing the city of Los Angeles like the back of his hand, including the neighborhood on South Norton Avenue where Elizabeth Short’s body was found. Naturally, Steve Hodel has never actually researched when the neighborhood was developed – or he would know that it didn’t exist when his father was driving a cab. Yet another example of the caliber of research one can expect from former Detective III Hodel.

Did I mention that George Hodel’s purported photos of Elizabeth Short aren’t her? So says her family.

I may add to this as I find more lies – and these are lies. Steve Hodel knows that these things aren’t true. These aren’t mistakes. These are deliberate misrepresentations and lies. But truly: fact-checking Steve Hodel would be a life’s work.

The main thing, of course, is that every bit of Steve Hodel’s investigation is about Steve. Elizabeth Short barely enters the discussion. It is all about Steve Hodel.