Synchronicities of a Detective: Black Dahlia, Hollywood, and My Origins

August 24, 2025
Birch Bay, Washington

Synchronicities: A Life Intertwined with Hollywood and History

As a homicide detective, I’ve been trained to separate fact from fiction, evidence from coincidence. Yet over the past six decades of investigation, I’ve found that life has a way of weaving both together.
In exploring my father’s crimes and the Black Dahlia murder, I’ve uncovered not only patterns of method and motive, but also synchronicities — odd, sometimes chilling overlaps between Hollywood, history, and my own origins. These are not evidence in the courtroom sense, but they are signposts that remind me how deeply intertwined the personal and the historical can be.

Over the years of investigating my father and his world, I’ve encountered a number of remarkable synchronicities. These intersections of time, people, and place seem to suggest a strange pattern that wove itself around my life from the very beginning. Here are several of the most striking examples:

1. Body and Soul (1947)

The classic boxing film *Body and Soul* (1947) was released on November 6, 1947—my sixth birthday. Released the same year my father committed the horrific torture/murder of Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short. Wardrobe for the film was handled by Marion Herwood Keyes, who, just a few years earlier, had been my father’s secretary at his First Street Clinic in Los Angeles before transitioning into Hollywood costume design. Thus, the film connects directly to both my personal life and my father’s world.

2. Director Tay Garnett and The Valley of Decision

Film director Tay Garnett produced *The Valley of Decision* (1945), which was showing on Hollywood Boulevard on VJ Day (August 15, 1945) when someone’s home video footage captured what many believe, including myself, to be Elizabeth Short riding in a car with other young women. Nearly two decades later, I married actress, Amilda Kiyoko Tachibana, “Kiyo”, and we bought a home in Laurel Canyon that had originally been built by Tay Garnett himself—8451 Utica Drive. The circle closed in an unexpected way.

3. Marion Herwood Keyes in Valley of Decision

Adding another layer, Marion Herwood Keyes also worked as an associate wardrobe designer on *The Valley of Decision* alongside the legendary Irene. This ties her not only to my father but also to the very film whose theater marquee was captured in the VJ Day footage connected to Elizabeth Short.

4. Director Rowland Brown

In the early 1940s, my mother, Dorothy Huston Hodel, was having an ongoing affair with the film director Rowland Brown. For years, many believed he could have been my biological father until I obtained  DNA testing that confirmed George Hodel was my biological father. Still, the synchronicity is striking: Rowland Brown’s birthdate was November 6th—the same as mine.

5. James Joyce and Naming

My mother named me after her favorite literary hero, Stephen Dedalus, from James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “Ulysses”. Joyce died in January 1941, the year of my birth, and she chose the spelling ‘Steven’ (with a V) as she found it to be more masculine. Had I been born a girl, she told me she would have named me Stephanie, in Joyce’s honor. The choice reflects her sense of destiny in naming me a seeker of truth.

6. Twin Brother

I was born a twin. My older brother, John Dion Hodel, named after John Huston (a close friend of both my parents and my mother’s former husband), lived only three weeks. We were both born prematurely at three pounds each. Though John only survived three weeks, his presence—and his name—has remained another link tying together the themes of art, literature, and destiny that surrounded my birth.

These intersections—dates, names, films, people—form a strange constellation around my life and investigations. To some, they may appear as mere coincidences. To me, they represent the way biography, crime, and art have been braided together from the beginning, pointing always toward the pursuit of hidden truths.

VJ DAY VIDEO FOOTAGE HOLLYWOOD BLVD.

Marion Herwood Keyes, secretary to both Dr. George
Hodel at his First Street Clinic and to film director, Vincente Minnelli in the 1940s.

Film Director Tay Garnett built home with 100 steps to main house (top) with guest house below at street level. Steve and Kiyo bought the property in 1963.

Film Director, Rowland Brown  (my mother’s lover in the 1930s and 40s) with actor Spencer Tracy.

John Garfield and Lilli Palmer in Body and Soul (1947)

  Silver casket containing the ashes of my twin brother, John Dion, gifted to me by my father on a visit with me in the 1980s. Father commissioned a famous Hollywood silversmith, Alan Adler (who later created works for JFK and Winston Churchill), to make the casket in 1941.