Yvette and I are sisters.
We are not twins.
We have different fathers,
but we were raised by the most amazing human on the planet.
(camera clicking)
Fauna Hodel, my mom worked her entire life
to tell her life story and brought my sister and I along
on this journey.
For years, we knew that mom had a ton of stuff
and this storage container was her whole life.
Every single clue, tons of audio of her and Tamar.
I met my mother's mom, Tamar,
when I was about seven years old.
We only went through it a few months after mom died.
So, she came back to life for us.
The biggest surprise I got from the tapes
was listening to Tamar and our mom, Fauna,
talk about the very first sexual experience Tamar had
with her father, George Hodel.
It's like you just can't wrap your brain around it.
I've never not known about the Hodel family
or the Black Dahlia or our family's connection to it,
especially because the only grandmother I've ever known
is Tamar Hodel and that came with a lot of stories
about our family.
She would say my father, George Hodel,
was this wealthy rich, charismatic man,
and by the way, he also was the Black Dahlia murderer.
I'd be like, "Well, what do you mean
"he killed the Black Dahlia?"
Or, "What do you mean you slept with your father?"
Or, "What do you mean he killed other people?"
There were no family secrets in the Hodel family.
However, there are.
I mean, we still truly don't know who
our mother's biological father is.
We only knew the tip of the iceberg.
We didn't know everything.
George Hodel did a lot of things left out in plain sight
to make it clear that he killed Elizabeth Short.
One of them, he named his granddaughter Debra Elizabeth
after Elizabeth Short.
So, when we found out that our podcast was
called Root of Evil, we were a little taken aback
'cause we're like, "We're not the root of evil."
We're like oh, but George Hodel was the root of all evil
and yes, we might descend from that root of evil--
But that will never define who we are.
Well, thank y'all for being here.
Thank you.
So, your mother passed when?
17 months ago.
OK, I'm very sorry for your loss, by the way.
So, you started, of course, going through her things,
as we do when we lose our parents
and you came upon some of these tapes.
My mother had had a storage unit for many, many years
and she saved everything.
She was the Nancy Drew in her own story,
ya know, in finding her truth.
The things that we uncovered were just like--
It was a lot.
It was a lot, yeah, it was a lot.
And she refers to one lie.
What is the one lie.
Tamar lied on our mom's birth certificate
and said that our mom's father was, at the time,
she said negro because it was 1951 that our mom was born.
So our mom thought she was biracial.
Then, she discovered she was adopted
and realized not only was she not biracial,
but she found out why Tamar lied.
In Tamar's mind, she thought,
"Well, I'm white and my family was awful to me,"
but she was close to people who were African American.
That's the story that we had heard for many years
is Tamar had always said that she was close to the maids
and the servants and the black people were always,
ya know, embracing her and she wanted her child to be
in a loving environment.
Do you know who was your mother's father?
We don't know.
I know what she told me.
She said he was Italian-American in San Francisco,
ya know, that had raped her.
Now ya gotta understand she'd been totally sexualized at 14
by my father.
