Retired homicide detective Steve Hodel believes that he may have finally solved the decades-long murder mystery of the Zodiac killer as well as the Black Dahlia murder. He believes someone close to him is the killer.
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Speaking with the U.S. Sun, Hodel claims that his late father George Hodel was behind both murder mysteries as well as committing other murders like the Lipstick murders. Steve wrote a best-selling book Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder linking his father to the crime. But Steve says his father's depravity goes much further than that.
Steve believes he closed out his lifetime of murder by committing the Zodiac killings in California. Georgie Hodel passed away in 1990. He was one of the suspects for the Black Dahlia. Steve became obsessed with the case wanting to clear his father's name. But the evidence soon showed Steve that his father was a murderer.
"So I started out to show he had nothing to do with [Black Dahlia]. I said, 'I can show that in 10 minutes with my background experience.'"
"Doors just kept opening one after the other. Initially, I saw on the front page the Black Dahlia killer sent in a bunch of taunting notes - about a dozen notes over a time period - kind of catch me if you can type stuff, cut and paste that sort of thing," he said. "And one of them was on the front page of a newspaper. I look at it, and it's my father's handwriting. I mean, you know your parents handwriting... and I thought, 'Is he pretending to be him? This can't be..what's going on here?"
Zodiac Killer
Hodel is hoping to prove that his father is also the Zodiac killer. He paid to have a DNA profile of his father done. Now, he's reached out to five police departments hoping they will compare the DNA.
"You've got at least five jurisdictions involved, and each one of them supposedly has some unidentified DNA, such as unidentified fingerprints.I don't think they're sharing their information with each other because to my knowledge, they don't have confirmed Zodiac DNA. In other words, the only way you're gonna get confirmed DNA is if several of the departments match..." he said.
He also added, "I sent my summaries to all of the five agencies, and I said, 'I'll be happy to come up on my dime to make a Powerpoint presentation as to why I believe he's Zodiac' - and it's been silence, crickets from anybody. And that's kind of where we're at, I went as far as to print my dad's DNA profile in the book so they could take a look at it... It's one of the oldest and coldest cases there is. But I think I've put together a case that's beyond reasonable doubt at this point."
