Denver Colorado Author/Journalist Zack Kopp Reviews "Most Evil II"

Author and subject of a life replete with synchronicity, former LAPD detective Steve Hodel may well have been the intended discoverer of his eccentric father George Hill Hodel’s secret of decades of surrealist serial murdering after following a series of influences deliberately planted by the father which would inevitably lead his son to unmask him. This theory has it that the author’s father, imitative artist George Hodel’s aim was to perpetrate a series of murders which would confound the public just as had the Surrealists’ art, believing fully that murder can be an art, and in this way do something no other had yet done with the Surrealist impulse. As author Steve Hodel has made clear in previous efforts, “The Black Dahlia Avenger” I and II and “MOST EVIL,” his father’s signature as a murderer lay in the deliberate inclusion of nods to writers, painters and thinkers of that genre, in particular Man Ray, a close friend, in details of his various killings. Not to say that Man Ray was complicit in the killer’s corruptions, but surrealism explicitly endorsed the violation of revered tropes, semantic, moral, and ethical, so he could hardly disapprove. A strong surrealist aspect links the Black Dahlia slaying to the Lipstick Killings in 1945 Chicago and the California Zodiac slayings in 1969. The killer also included phrasing and motifs from popular films of the time, such as “Sniper,” or “The Most Dangerous Game,” in the letters he sent to police.

Hodel’s identification of this and other “thoughtprints” linking his father to all of these and still further brutally artful slayings, such as the “Jigsaw Killings” in Manila, where his father kept an office for 15 years, has gained the support of notable personalities, including retired Los Angeles DA Stephen Kay of Manson Trial fame, and Oscar, Grammy, and Golden Globe Award-winning singer/songwriter T-Bone Burnett of “Zombieland” fame, who says, “From this distance, there is no doubt that George Hodel committed/performed theatrical murders in several cities over several decades. That a mad doctor’s son grew up to be a detective and solved a master criminal’s surrealist crimes—and it was his father—is mind-blowing. But, there it is. My deepest and sincerest respect for [Steve’s] fearless and brilliant investigation into a profound darkness that [he has] brought into a penetrating light.” This reporter is also humbled by the bittersweet magnitude of the younger Hodel’s life mission and legacy, involving not only unmasking his father but redeeming the formerly benighted victims, devoting himself to transmuting that unsavory history.