Writing the Last Word on a Mystery?

"You know," James Ellroy said over the phone, "I'm the son of a murder victim."

So I heard. If you know anything about Ellroy, you know that's who he is.

Ellroy's mother was killed in El Monte on June 22, 1958. The unsolved case drove the lad inward, and some would say Ellroy -- the brilliant author and chronicler of death -- has never crawled free of the darkest corners of his soul. Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia," among his other explorations of human weakness, reveled in their own inspired depravity.

But I hadn't called Ellroy to ask about his own books. I had called to ask how he ended up writing the foreword to the newly released paperback version of another book on Elizabeth Short. Nicknamed the Black Dahlia, her nude, bisected body was found posed in a Leimert Park lot in 1947.

The way I heard it, Ellroy, a careful student of the case, didn't buy the theory laid out in Steve Hodel's "Black Dahlia Avenger," first published a year ago. Hodel, a former LAPD homicide cop, had dropped a bombshell of an accusation in that book:

His very own father, he claimed, was the killer.

Hodel also claimed that in 1958, Fred Sexton, his father's occasional partner in crime, might have killed a woman named Geneva Ellroy, the mother of a 10-year-old boy named James.

"I don't think Sexton had anything to do with it," Ellroy told me of his mother's murder. "I think that was a date rape that went bad."

Ellroy, who met Steve Hodel at a police gathering last year and "connected in a shared world of Oedipus Rex," told me I was correct about his initial skepticism on the claim that Dr. George Hodel killed the Black Dahlia. Ellroy liked his new friend Steve Hodel's book as a work of art, but he didn't think detective Hodel cracked the case.

So what happened to make the hard-boiled psychic son of Raymond Chandler change his mind?

I'll get to that later.

By Steve Hodel's account, Dr. George Hodel, politically connected and incurably avaricious, was a Jekyll-and-Hyde character. His pals included John Huston and Man Ray, who joined him for wild orgies at the Hodel home on Franklin near Normandie.

If you'll recall from my columns of a year ago, I enjoyed the "Avenger" as a journey to the intersection of "Chinatown" and "Hollywood Babylon," but I remained skeptical about Hodel's theory on his father. Dr. Hodel might well have killed the Black Dahlia, but I didn't think his detective son had ever put the two of them together, let alone prove a murder.