Yes hello 2,547 day old thrad. I have something to say to you. Trigger warning first, though. This is an ugly story about child rape and the injustice system.
I
recently blogged about the upcoming sale of one the Maltese Falcons used in the classic movie of that name. It's a lead prop made from a plaster cast by artist Fred Sexton who was kind of a big deal in the LA art scene at that time and who also happened to be a friend of
Maltese Falcon director John Huston from his high school days.
What I didn't mention in the blog entry is that Fred Sexton was also a good friend of one Dr. George Hill Hodel, Jr., a society doctor specializing in STD treatment who was one of the main suspects in the Black Dahlia case. His home at the time,
Frank Lloyd Wright's Snowden House, was bugged by the DA and he said some incredibly incriminating shit on that wire tap. He was never arrested, though.
The doctor's son Steve Hodel, a former LAPD homicide detective and private investigator, would decades later research the case assiduously and make a pretty damn persuasive argument that Daddy Dearest
really did murder Elizabeth Short. Dr. Hodel was also notorious for another crime he was acquitted of but everyone knows he really did: he molested his daughter Tamar starting when she was 11 years old. He made her pose nude for his buddy Man Ray, and passed her around his friends. John Huston was one of the predators in question (according to Tamar, Huston was on top of her when her stepmother, who happened to be John Huston's ex-wife, pulled him off of her).
When she was 14, Hodel raped Tamar in front of multiple witnesses. She got pregnant and her father arranged for her to have an abortion. A month later, she ran away from home. When the police found her, she told them about the rapes so they wouldn't force her to go home. They promptly put Tamar in juvenile detention for a year while they built a case, because apparently Los Angeles in 1949 was just a thumbscrew short of handling rape cases the way Artemisia Gentileschi's case was handled in 1612 Rome.
Two women initially claimed to have seen the rape. One of them, Barbara Sherman, who had admitted to police to having watched and participated in the abuse, recanted at trial. The other, Corrine Tarin, stuck with her story but was discredited by the defense because Hodel had hypnotized at some point so like maybe it was all some crazy hypnosis dream. The third witness was Fred Sexton. He admitted under oath to having been in the room during the rape, to having removed her blouse and to having attempted but failed to penetrate Tamar. This was an important distinction when adjudicating the gang rape of minors, you see, because if there was no p in v, there was no statutory rape. Tamar testified that Sexton had indeed penetrated her. Tarin also testified that she had seen Sexton have penetrative sex with Tamar.
Sexton would years later admit to having raped his daughter starting when she was 8 years old. He also his raped his stepdaughter and God knows how many other girls. You can see why he and Hodel were besties.
Of course the defense painted Tamar as a crazy slut who was only fantasizing about being forced to suck her father's cock when she was 11 and raped by him and his sick pals in front of a viewing audience when she was 14. Her own mother testified against her, saying she was a known liar especially about sex issues. So did her grandmother and half-brother. Defense attorney Robert Neeb argued in his closing that not only was Tamar a "psychopathic liar," but she was also co-conspirator in her own rape and that therefore her uncorroborated testimony could not be considered as a point of law. The other witnesses were also co-conspirators, and therefore their testimony should not be considered either.
The jury bought it. Hodel was acquitted. Gentileschi's rapist was convicted, so criminal justice in 1949 L.A. was actually worse than that of Church-run Rome in the early 17th century.
Steve Hodel thinks that Sexton did more than rape children and make the Maltese Falcon: he also helped George Hodel kill multiple women, including the Black Dahlila.
Re: The Black Dahlia Murder
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