Georgette Bauerdorf
Georgette Elise Bauerdorf (May 6, 1924 – October 12, 1944) was an American socialite and oil heiress who was strangled in her home in West Hollywood, California.Jerome M. Brown, an anti-aircraft artillery trainee stationed at Camp Callan, was identified by Fort Bliss authorities as the man Georgette had planned to visit.[9] On the night of October 11, 1944, Georgette left work at the Hollywood Canteen at around 11:15 p.m. She spent the next several hours dancing at a local club called the Palladium, leaving at around 2 a.m. Driving home, Georgette picked up a hitchhiking Army sergeant named Gordon Aadland, who had also gone to the Palladium; she told Aadland also that she was hurrying home to receive a telephone call from her boyfriend in Texas.An examination by Los Angeles County autopsy surgeon Frank R. Webb found abundant bruises and scrapes, and determined that she had been raped.[11] A reconstruction of the murder gave investigators the idea that the culprit perhaps entered Georgette's apartment by passkey and lay in wait downstairs until she got ready for bed.Cosmo Volpe, turned himself in several days after the discovery of Georgette's body, after he read the police were looking for a "husky, dark-haired GI".[13] He was questioned by police, but eliminated as a suspect after he offered proof that he had "checked into his barracks at the Lockheed Air Terminal at 11 p.m."[14] June Ziegler, who had worked with Georgette at the Hollywood Canteen on the night prior to the murder, told the Sheriff's Department that Georgette had dated a 6'4" serviceman less than a month before her murder.At a coroner's inquest October 20, a jury of nine men found that Georgetts's death was a homicide and proposed a thorough investigation to apprehend her killer.During the hearing, Fred Atwood, a janitor of the apartment building, testified that he had heard woman's heels clicking back and forth on the floor, and was awakened by a loud crash at around midnight on October 11.[10] William Randolph Hearst, a close friend of Georgette's father, pressured the LAPD at his behest to close the investigation as quickly as possible; their reasons for this are unclear, but it was done supposedly to avoid embarrassment and to keep Georgette's romantic life private and her reputation intact, as she was sexually active and she documented all of her social and romantic relationships in her diary, which would had become evidence and thus become available to the public had the investigation and a trial followed.Dr. George Hodel was a top suspect for the Short murder, and his son Steve Hodel has suggested George killed both women due to certain similarities such as the fact that Bauerdorf was choked with a medical-grade bandage shoved down her throat and that in both cases the media received notes supposedly from the killer taunting the police and boasting of his skills.[17] However, though Hodel is considered the strongest suspect for the Black Dahlia murder, the critics say links between that case and that of Bauerdorf remains highly speculative.