Rhinoceros Running

I don’t know why, but there is something interesting to me about this murder case. Actually, I’m hardly the only one. I don’t know what sparked my original interest, but last year I trolled the internet for information, and actually happened upon the crime scene pictures, completely unretouched. Pretty gruesome.

In high school, I took a drivers ed course that showed up a very graphic film about high-speed car wrecks. I actually saw some horrific things there, people still alive who’d been mangled by their cars, by someone’s bad decision(s). THAT was far more memorable to me, personally. While the graphic pictures of this truly unfortunately woman known as the Black Dahlia are terrible, at least they are not pictures of someone experiencing pain. Death extinguished her pain, which can only be a blessing, because her murderer went to great lengths to torture her and maximize her pain.

The author of this book, Stephen Hodel, was an LAPD homicide detective, and he makes his case here that it was his father who killed the Black Dahlia, as well as a large number of other women. So the book is a very compelling piece of policework, but also this horrific portrait of the worst kind of family dysfunction, as well as the systematic corruption that allowed the killer to remain free.

It is hard not to feel that misogyny guided some of these decisions. Societally, we seem to accept a certain level of violence against women as acceptable. Rape and sexual harassment continue unabated. The victim continues to bear the brunt of the blame. I ask myself, what would have been the response if men were being systematically murdered, their bodies unceremoniously dumped, abused, raped?  

The book is both terrifying–I can’t help but think that there are variations of this man out there today, right now–but also a strange comfort because it seems violence isn’t so random after all?