Echoes in Elysian Park—Cast in Stone: A Tale of Two Hodels and the LAPD Police Academy
August 1, 2025
Birch Bay, Washington
The Academy: Born from Reform, Cast in Stone
The LAPD Police Academy was dedicated in 1936, built with assistance from the federal WPA under Chief James E. Davis, to clean up a force once riddled with scandal. Nestled in the canyons of Elysian Park, it served both as a training ground and a symbol of a new era — of discipline, professionalism, and public trust.
The Mediterranean-style main building, with its red-tile roof and open-air courtyard, quickly became an LAPD landmark. Over the years, it became a site of public ceremonies, Hollywood cameos, and personal transformation for thousands of recruits — myself included.
Officer Steve Hodel, a few years after LAPD Academy graduation- mid-1960s
July 29, 1942: Dr. George Hodel Takes the Stage
On July 29, 1942, Dr. George Hill Hodel — then a prominent physician and head of L.A. County’s Social Hygiene Department — delivered a formal lecture to LAPD vice detectives and police recruits. The topic: the newly enacted federal “May Act,” which made prostitution and venereal disease a wartime national security issue.
A photo discovered by me in 2002 shows him standing confidently behind the podium, addressing uniformed officers seated in precise rows. The setting is unmistakable: the main lecture hall of the Elysian Park Police Academy. An LAPD brass-led invitation. A federal medical expert. A moment meant to reinforce moral authority in a time of war.
Yet not once, in all my years on the force — or in the decades that followed — did my father ever mention that he had once lectured officers at the very academy where I would later train.
The Date That Haunts: A Hidden Intersection
It wasn’t until I looked more closely at the photograph that I noticed something impossible to ignore. The date of the lecture: July 29, 1942.
That was the 18th birthday of Elizabeth Short, born July 29, 1924.
A woman whose life and death would become entwined with my father’s name. A woman whose mutilated body would be found in Leimert Park in January 1947, launching one of the most infamous unsolved murders in American history — until I connected the dots in Black Dahlia Avenger.
On the very day she reached adulthood, the man who would later be accused of killing her stood before a sea of LAPD officers, lecturing on sexual disease and moral conduct.
Ironically, Elizabeth and George were just a year away from their fateful meeting, which I believe occurred initially as doctor/patient (she was treated for an infected Bartholin Gland), likely at his First Street Clinic in downtown Los Angeles in the summer of 1943.
Full Circle: From Silence to Stone
In 1963, I entered that same LAPD academy. I trained in those same rooms. I sat in those same steel chairs, not knowing that two decades earlier, my father had stood in front of recruits like me — possibly in the very same room.
In 1989, a brick was placed in the center courtyard. No one at the time — not me, not the academy staff — knew the full irony of what it represented.
WE KNOW IT NOW.
Steve from slick-sleeved rookie to Detective III
A blog post that summarizes the entire story of father and son in one photo. Thanks for your work.