AUTHOR CLAIMS HIS FATHER WAS 'BLACK DAHLIA' KILLER.

Byline: Fred Shuster Staff Writer

It's a story that's fascinated crime buffs for decades. There have been almost as many potential murderers put forward as fictionalized versions of the long-unsolved case. Now, a onetime Van Nuys cop has penned a book that names the latest suspect in 1947's grisly ``Black Dahlia'' mutilation slaying - his own father.

Author Steve Hodel claims his physician father, the late George Hodel, was a serial killer who probably killed 20 women, including Elizabeth Short, the 22-year-old Hollywood hopeful whose mutilated and horribly posed body was found in a vacant lot near Leimert Park on Jan. 15, 1947. Dubbed ``the Black Dahlia'' because of her black clothing and the flower she often wore in her hair, Short's slaying prompted the largest manhunt in Los Angeles police history and remained on the front pages for weeks.

``I'm asking the press and the detectives to now take up that responsibility and reopen the murder books and continue the investigations so that all of us may know the truth,'' Hodel said Friday.

Now a private investigator, Hodel pins about 20 other killings of women in the 1940s and 1950s on his father, who died in 1991 at age 91 and was never arrested in any of the crimes.

A musical prodigy and onetime crime reporter, the late Hodel was a doctor specializing in venereal disease control for the county health department and opened VD clinics that treated well-connected Los Angeles residents. The author claims his father, the doctor, kept dossiers on clients.

In the just-published ``Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story,'' Hodel says his father had become a primary suspect in the Dahlia slaying and was about to be arrested when the case was suddenly dropped because authorities feared Hodel had friends in high places and would leak the medical files of well-known patients, including police officials.

``At that point, the whole thing was shut down and my father left the country for 40 years and everything sunk below the surface,'' said Hodel, who spent nearly two dozen years with the Los Angeles Police Department, including on Van Nuys patrol in the 1960s before working his way up to homicide detective in Hollywood.

Hodel's story of slaying, mystery and corruption suggests a true-crime ``Mommie Dearest'' as well as Geraldo Rivera's televised Al Capone vault fiasco. He admits there is not one person alive who can corroborate his allegations, including claims that a corrupt 1949 grand jury was ordered to stop hearing evidence because of fears the LAPD's reputation would become tarnished if the VD files became public.

In the book, Hodel says his father killed Short and sliced her body in half with a surgeon's skill during a fit of jealousy. Weeks later, the nude, beaten corpse of 45-year-old Jeanne French was found. Dubbed ``the Red Lipstick Murder'' because the initials B.D. (suggesting a connection to the Black Dahlia) were scrawled on the body in red lipstick, Hodel claims that killing, too, was his father's work.

Stephen Kay, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who helped prosecute the Manson clan in the 1970s, said in a statement he wouldn't have hesitated to file murder counts against the elder Hodel in connection with the two slayings. He said he had ``no doubt'' George Hodel ``not only murdered Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia) but also murdered Jeanne French.''

Ultimately, Hodel's ``Black Dahlia Avenger'' offers merely the latest theory in a crime that continues to capture the imagination. Books - including crime writer James Ellroy's fictionalized ``The Black Dahlia'' as well as the 1981 film ``True Confessions'' - borrowed details of the case. And in a 1995 paperback, writer Janice Knowlton claimed her father was the Black Dahlia slayer.

The 61-year-old Hodel, who lives in Lake Arrowhead where he runs a private detective agency, told reporters he began investigating his father - who abandoned the family when he was 9 years old - after finding photographs among his late father's possessions of a woman he believes is Short. But a detective who oversees files of the case, said it was impossible to determine whether the photos were actually of Short.

Hodel also saw similarities in notes the killer supposedly sent to newspapers and his father's handwriting.

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(1 -- 2) Writer and private eye Steve Hodel claims in his new book that his father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, left, shown in 1952, was the slayer of Elizabeth Short, right, dubbed ``the Black Dahlia'' in 1947.