Warning: SPOILERS ahead for I Am the Night.
I Am the Night's ending concluded with Fauna Hodel (India Eisley) learning the truth about her family: that her father was really George Hodel (Jefferson Mays), who is also revealed as the Black Dahlia killer. Even though I Am the Night is based primarily on a true story, the Patty Jenkins-produced TNT miniseries played out a bit differently and changed several real-life aspects.
After Fauna and disgraced reporter Jay Singletary teamed up, they traveled to Hawaii to find Fauna's mother, Tamar (Jamie Anne Allman), in I Am the Night episode 5, "Aloha". There, Fauna learned that Tamar lied about Fauna being mixed-race on her birth certificate, confirming what her grandmother Corinna Huntington (Connie Nielsen) told her in episode 2, "Phenomenon of Interference". Tamar also dropped the bombshell that George was Fauna's father, who raped Tamar when she was a teenager. Horrified but not believing Tamar, Fauna returned to LA with Jay, only for the journalist to get arrested by the LAPD at the behest of George, who the department was protecting. Meanwhile, George traveled to Sparks, NV, and attacked Fauna's adoptive mother, Jimmie Lee (Golden Brooks), leaving her for dead.
Related: I Am the Night Cast And Character Guide
When Fauna learned Jimmie Lee was in the hospital, she turned to Corinna for help but Corinna drugged her so that George could kidnap her and hold her prisoner at Sowden House, his posh LA home, where the devious physician kept a secret, illegal abortion clinic in his basement, which doubles as the location where he murders his victims. However, Fauna turns the tables and injures George before he can kill her; Jay managed to escape the LAPD and went to Sowden House to kill George but he finds Fauna safe. Meanwhile, George escaped and left the country for Asia. Finally, Fauna returned to Jimmie Lee in Nevada as Jay also fled LA. Now that the mystery is resolved, here are the deeper meanings of I Am the Night and how it changed from Fauna Hodel's true story:
- This Page: Truth About George Hodel, His Relationship To Fauna, & The Black Dahlia
- Page 2: What I Am The Night Changed About Fauna Hodel's True Story
George Hodel Is The Black Dahlia Killer In I Am the Night
At the end of I Am the Night episode 3, "Matador", Jay Singletary realized Janice Brewster's killer was the same person as the Black Dahlia murderer, and he suspected that murderer was George Hodel. In episode 5, "Aloha", Jay meets Fauna's real mother, Tamar, who shows him paintings George sent her of his victims, two of which the reporter recognized as Janice Brewster and Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia. (George even signed the backs of his works.) In I Am the Night's final episode, "Queen's Gambit, Accepted", when George kidnaps and tries to paint Fauna's portrait before he planned to rape and murder her, I Am the Night makes it clear George Hodel is the Black Dahlia killer. Unfortunately, George flees the country and escapes justice.
In real life, George Hodel was a Black Dahlia murder suspect who was alleged to be the killer by his own children. Tamar accused her father of murdering the Black Dahlia during their morals trial in 1949 but George had her discredited as a liar who was mentally unstable. Years later, George's son, Steve Hodel (Fauna's uncle), a former LAPD homicide detective, investigated his father and concluded that George was the Black Dahlia killer. Steve published books about George and he also alleged that his father killed as a form of creating art, something I Am the Night equates with the series' George being a deranged artist.
George Hodel Is Both Fauna's Father And Grandfather In I Am the Night
It's understandable why Jimmie Lee was so against Fauna's quest to find her real parents and the truth about her family; in I Am the Night, Fauna learns she is the product of incest. Tamar tells Fauna that she lied on her birth certificate and that Fauna isn't mixed race. The truth was George raped Tamar and he is Fauna's true father, which makes George both Fauna's father and grandfather. George confirms this in I Am the Night's final episode, "Queen's Gambit, Accepted", when he has Fauna in his grasp and says, "You're just another one of my daughters that no one will believe".
Fauna is forced to accept the truth but rejects George and the sordid history of her family when she asserts, "I'm Jimmie Lee's daughter." Fauna also doesn't kill George, which proved that despite her DNA, she isn't a cold-blooded killer like he is.
Jay Singletary Cut A Deal With The LAPD To Kill George Hodel
Jay promised his editor, Peter Sullivan (Leland Orser), that he could get the true story that George was the Black Dahlia killer but Peter was pressured to betray Jay to the LAPD, which was in George's pocket. When Jay and Fauna returned from Hawaii, Jay walked into a trap the LAPD forced Peter to set and the reporter was arrested and beaten at the precinct. However, Jay pleaded with Sgt. Billis' (Yul Vasquez) to "be a cop for once in your life" and investigate George Hodel, which he did. When Billis went to Sowden House and met Fauna, who was held prisoner and asked Billis to take her away from the house, the detective realized Jay was right - but because George is so well-connected by powerful people, Billis feared he'd be killed if he acted against George.
Jay realized his only recourse was to cut a deal with Billis to set him free so Jay could kill George himself in exchange for signing a full confession that Jay was Janice Brewster's murderer. In Jay's words, it "kills two birds with one stone" for Billis; the LAPD gets rid of George Hodel so they no longer have to cover for and protect him and they also get rid of Jay, who goes to prison for as Janice Brewster's murderer. Billis accepts the deal and engineers a scenario where Jay manages to escape police custody. However, when he got to Sowden House, Jay found Fauna had saved herself and George had escaped. Now a fugitive, Jay left LA and fled to Hawaii, where he kept in touch with Fauna, who moved back to Sparks, NV.
Page 2 of 2: What I Am the Night Changed About Fauna Hodel's True Story
I Am the Night Draws Similarities Between Jay Singletary and George Hodel
Since Jay Singletary is not based on a real person, I Am the Night uses Chris Pine's reluctantly heroic reporter to draw some interesting parallels to the villainous George Hodel. Ultimately, both Jay and George are killers. Jay is a former Marine who killed many enemy soldiers during the Korean War; his fellow soldier, Detective Cuddy (Theo Marshall), owes Jay his life. However, Jay suffers from untreated PTSD; he self-medicates with drugs and alcohol and he's prone to sudden bursts of manic violence. Jay is also literally haunted by the people he's killed, which includes Sepp (Dylan Smith), George's henchman who Jay killed to save Fauna's life in episode 4, "Matador".
In "Aloha", when Fauna finds Jay screaming in his sleep, the reporter confessed that "they never tell you how good it feels" to kill someone. This is the deepest shame that troubles Jay, not that he has killed but that he enjoyed doing it. By contrast, George murders people because he considers it as succumbing to his "natural urges". George, a wealthy child prodigy who scored a 186 on an IQ test, considers himself above normal people and not subject to their laws. George's powerful position and connections to Hollywood, the LAPD, and the mob protects him and allows him to pursue his "art" of kidnapping, raping, murdering, and butchering girls, whom he also paints. George also enjoys killing and not only feels zero guilt about his crimes, he feels entitled to commit them, which is the stark difference between the evil physician and Jay, the disgraced newsman who is a thorn in George's side.
How Did I Am the Night Change Fauna Hodel's True Story?
Ultimately, I Am the Night is a fictionalized account of the life of Fauna Hodel and made some significant changes for the sake of drama. In real life, George Hodel is not Fauna's real father. George is Tamar's father who did sexually abuse her; when she was 14, Tamar ran away from home and, after she was found by police, Tamar detailed George's history of incest and sexual assault. Thanks to his lawyers and influence, George was acquitted in the 1949 morals trial. In I Am the Night, Jay Singletary reporting on the trial and getting sued for libel by George is what led to Jay becoming a disgraced reporter.
After the trial, Tamar was sent to her mother's home in San Francisco where she was raped by a neighborhood boy, who was white, and she became pregnant with Fauna. Unlike how I Am the Night has Tamar giving Fauna her name, in real-life, it was George who named Fauna, and he engineered the baby's adoption by Jimmie Lee in 1951. Tamar insisted, however, that Fauna's father be listed as black on her birth certificate "to ensure that the child would never return to [her] emotionally reclusive white family," according to Fauna Hodel's website.
Fauna did eventually meet Tamar in Hawaii, but it happened in the 1970s, not in 1965 as depicted in I Am the Night. George also fled the country in real-life as he did in the series and he lived in Manila, where Steve Hodel claims his father continued his crimes, as well as in San Francisco, where George died in 1999 at age 91. Fauna Hodel died in 2017 at age 66 after a battle with cancer. In the end, I Am the Night is a sordid but powerful story of a young woman seeking her identity - and choosing to define it for herself in the wake of the disturbing truth she finds.