Retired LAPD Cold Case Detectives and “Team Connelly” Agree With Steve Hodel Investigation: Black Dahlia and Zodiac Were the Same Killer — But Disagree on Identity

By Steve Hodel/January 15, 2026
Birch Bay, Washington
79th Anniversary of Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Murder

Historic consensus reached on linkage between America’s two most notorious serial-murder cases; dispute now centers solely on identity.

PRESS NOTE — January 15, 2026
(For Readers and Press)

“Team Connelly” refers to popular mystery writer and television producer, Michael Connelly and retired LAPD Cold Case and homicide detectives Rick Jackson and Mitzi Roberts, longtime law-enforcement consultants to Connelly’s television series Bosch and Ballard, the latter inspired by Detective Roberts’s LAPD career.

Over the past twenty-three years, media coverage of my investigations into the Black Dahlia, Los Angeles Lone Woman murders, and Zodiac crimes has routinely referred to my findings as “Detective Steve Hodel’s theories.” Let me be perfectly clear: these are not my theories, nor have they ever been.

I did not invent my father’s confessions. Those confessions exist in the Secret Los Angeles District Attorney Black Dahlia Hodel Files, recorded in 1950 and concealed in the DA vault for decades. I merely uncovered and reproduced the hidden transcripts.

I did not theorize that senior law-enforcement officials solved the Dahlia murder. I located, interviewed, and documented the statements of surviving family members confirming that Chief William H. Parker, Chief of Detectives Thad Brown, Undersheriff James Downey, and Deputy District Attorney Lt. Frank Jemison each separately identified the actual killer and had “solved” the case, based on their original investigation.

Nor did I speculate about the relationship between victim and suspect. District Attorney documents written in 1950 confirm that George Hill Hodel knew both Elizabeth Short and Los Angeles Lone Woman murder victim Louise Springer prior to their murders. That fact was known to law enforcement and establised in June, 1947, when both George Hodel and the police undercover informant were taken in and “grilled” by LAPD, more than six months before the murder of Elizabeth Short.

In Most Evil (Dutton, 2009), I presented a strong circumstantial case as him being “Zodiac” and formally requested that Dr. George Hill Hodel be placed at the top of the suspect list, and that San Francisco and Bay Area Police and or the CA Department of Justice obtained confirmed DNA and compare it to George Hodel’s full DNA profile as published in that volume.

By Most Evil II (Rare Bird Books, 2015), additional behavioral, forensic, and documentary evidence—along with thirty-two unique and highly specific crime-signature matches—allowed me to conclude that the Black Dahlia and Zodiac crimes were the work of the same offender. That conclusion was further reinforced when a Zodiac Ogham cipher was solved by French high-school teacher Yves Person, in which Zodiac actually spelled out his own name–HODEL. 

What follows is a verbatim reprinting of those original thirty-two Black Dahlia Avenger / Zodiac M.O. crime-signature comparisons, first published in 2015.

While a small number of these crime-signature elements, viewed in isolation, could be considered generic, their combined presence is extraordinarily rare.

Black Dahlia Avenger / Zodiac

M.O. Crime-Signature Comparisons (32 Matches)

During my twenty-four years with the LAPD, I investigated more than three hundred homicides. None involved a perpetrator who mailed taunting notes to the press or police, threatened future killings, or contacted victims’ families—with one exception.

Prior to the Zodiac’s 1966 Riverside murder, I am unable to identify a single modern American serial killer who employed this precise and obsessive pattern of press and police taunting through deliberately misspelled letters—again, with one exception: Dr. George Hill Hodel, who in the 1940s called himself the “Black Dahlia Avenger.” Before that, investigators must go back nearly sixty years—to 1888 London and Jack the Ripper.

In previous investigative summaries in Black Dahlia Avenger, Black Dahlia Avenger II, and Most Evil I, I have detailed additional links involving handwriting characteristics, as well as the killer’s consistent use of surrealist references drawn from art, literature, music, and film.

In 2010, a California Department of Justice handwriting expert compared known handwriting samples from George Hodel with verified Zodiac letters. While unable to reach a court-level identification, the examiner concluded: “We are unable to eliminate George Hodel as the writer of the Zodiac letters.” At that time, DOJ requested additional lower-case handwriting samples, which remain unavailable.

As stated in Most Evil:

George Hodel was a prolific serial killer whose signature is visible not in any single method of murder, type of victim, or specific killing ground, but rather as a series of complex arrangements, installations, and obscure references to art, culture, and film which, taken together, reveal a chilling and never-before-documented form of serial murder—murder as a fine art.

One additional crime-signature element—unrecognized until recently—further links the Avenger and Zodiac. In taunting letters mailed decades apart, both signed identical correspondence to newspaper editors as “a friend,” using a distinctive lower-case “a.”

The Zodiac’s February 14, 1974 “a friend” SLA letter was mailed on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Black Dahlia Avenger’s February 14, 1948 murder of Los Angeles victim Gladys Kern. This was not coincidence.

As Michael Connelly’s LAPD Detective III Harry Bosch famously observed:
“There are no coincidences.”

Supplemental visual comparison of George Hill Hodel and Zodiac-era composite imagery. Included for reference only; identity conclusions rest on behavioral and documentary evidence.