Note: This is an encore post from 2005 and originally appeared on the 1947project.

Echoes of Georgette Bauerdorf….

Paging through the Oct. 15, 1947, edition of The Times offers so many choices: meatless Tuesdays to send food to the starving people of Europe, thereby stemming the march of Communism; the new Buick’s Accurite Cylinder Boring, Fliteweight Pistons and Deepflex Seat Cushions; or Pasadenan Adolf Schleicher, who wants to the city to buy him a new canary after a city trash truck knocked down a birdcage hanging on his porch..

How about two “adults only” features at the Mission theater, 4238 S. Broadway, “Nude Ranch” and “Sins of Passion,” two movies so obscure that they’re not even in imdb.com? As a family paper, The Times refused to run the racy movie ads found in the Examiner.

A Proquest search for “Mission” and “Nude” turns up the gruesome May 23, 1945, killing of Vivian Simon, whose nude body was found under a palm tree at Mission Sanitarium, 4525 San Fernando Road, stabbed and beaten, with her underwear jammed down her throat.

Although the sanitarium was surrounded by a 12-foot-high barbed wire fence, Simon, 31, the wife of Syrian grocer James S. Simon of 1262 W. 25th St., and another patient escaped for drinks at a nearby bar with the help of one of the dishwashers, Candelaria Cabrillo.

Cabrillo and the other patient left, while Simon remained to have several more drinks with James O. Bullack, a 29-year-old ex-GI. Arrested wearing blood-spotted clothes outside his rooming house at 2062 Wollam St. with his suitcase packed, Bullack told police of taking Simon back to the sanitarium and “socking her in the jaw” when she “resisted his advances.”

Bullack, described as a tall, shy blond, was questioned in the 1944 murder of Bauerdorf, who was found in a bathtub with a rolled-up bandage jammed down her throat, but nothing apparently came of it. He was convicted in the Simon killing and sentenced to five years to life in prison. No James Bullack is listed in the
California Death Index or the Social Security Death Index. His whereabouts remains unknown.

Quote of the day: “Reckless attacks on liberals permitted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the past repeatedly have strengthened the hand of Communist agents. They have used such attacks to prove that our democracy is a frail and frightened thing and to proclaim that legitimate exposure of their activities must inevitably degenerate into a ruthless heresy hunt.”

Leon Henderson and Melvyn Douglas of Americans for Democratic Action, on the need to protect the civil rights of Hollywood actors and writers called to testify on Communist influences in the film industry.