Los Angeles in 1948 was selling dreams by the square foot. The war was over. Veterans were home. Hillsides were being carved into subdivisions. Real estate advertisements offered sunshine and citrus trees. Buy a house and you could look out toward tomorrow. If you had a decent job and a little bit of moxie, you could own a piece of the future. Gladys Eugenia Kern believed in the future.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Gladys was born on September 2, 1905, in Ottawa, Kansas, the daughter of Charles O’Neal of Springfield, Missouri and Grace Phipps of Stockton, Missouri. By the age of forty-six she had spent twenty-six years in California. The Kern family traveled West in the early 1920s during that long migration of Midwesterners chasing sunshine and promise.
By 1948, Gladys was forty-two years old, married to John E. Kern, a toolmaker. They lived at 6200 Roy Street in Los Angeles. She was the mother of two grown children and was working as a broker in the city’s roaring postwar property market. It was honest work in a city obsessed with property lines. On Saturday, February 14, 1948 — Valentine’s Day — Gladys Kern kept an appointment.
Earlier that morning, her husband left for work at 5:30 a.m., the last time he saw her alive. In the early afternoon she obtained a key from a fellow agent and drove to show a vacant hillside house at 4217 Cromwell Avenue. The Los Angeles Times would later describe it as a “$25,000 hillside home… in the swank Los Feliz district.” It was the kind of house people aspired to own — stucco walls, view of the canyon, quiet street. The kind of house that meant you had arrived. She took a prospective buyer inside. She never returned.
When she failed to come home that evening, her husband waited. There was a wedding they were expected to attend. She had left him a note reminding him to dress for it. He fell asleep waiting and was awakened by their children. By Sunday morning, they notified police that she was missing.
On Monday, February 16, the silence inside the Cromwell Avenue house was broken. Fred Lyon, a salesman from a Hillhurst Avenue real estate office who also held a key to the property, entered to show it. Inside the kitchen he found Gladys Kern on the floor. The next morning, the headline was blunt: “Real Estate Broker Stabbed While Showing House.”
The Times reported: “Mrs. Gladys Kern, 42, real estate saleswoman of 6200 Roy St., was found stabbed to death with a hunting knife yesterday on the kitchen floor…”
There was no suggestion of prolonged struggle. Police later verified she had been stabbed in the back. The weapon — a hunting knife — was recovered at the scene, “well-scrubbed in the sink.” That detail lingered. Someone had taken the time to wash it. Police believed robbery was the motive. “She was killed and robbed, police believe.” Her wristwatch was missing. Her wallet lay beside her body, empty except for six cents. Six cents. In a city where fortunes were being made in hillside lots and oil leases, that was the final inventory of what had been left behind.
Los Angeles homicide detectives moved quickly. They canvassed the neighborhood. They retraced her steps. They examined the key trail and the appointment.
From left: Gladys Kern's daughter, Peggy Ann Phillips, 22; husband John Kern, 38; and son Jack Kern, 23.
They considered the possibility that the “prospective buyer” had never intended to purchase anything at all. Then the case shifted. According to the Times, “their major clue was a mysterious tip-off note apparently mailed at Fifth and Olive Sts. only a short time after the slaying Saturday afternoon.” An anonymous letter. The Citizens News ran with it under a headline that read like a pulp magazine: “Big Man Sought as Note Writer in Kern Killing.”
The writer claimed to have witnessed the crime. He described the suspect as a “heavy, big man,” about fifty, with black, curly hair — “patently a boxer in appearance.” He said he had ridden to the house with the broker and the accused man. Inside the kitchen, the suspect allegedly stabbed her in the back.
Det. Lts. Herman Zander, at left, and Stewart Jones with the hunting knife, used in the slaying of Gladys Kern.
The letter described how the killer bent over the body, cleaned the knife in the sink, and fled. The writer claimed he had been restrained, later freeing himself. He insisted that finding the suspect was essential, because without him, “I feel equally guilty.” Police homicide detectives refused to release the text of the letter word-for-word. That refusal spoke volumes.
The letter contained details consistent with the crime scene: the kitchen location, the scrubbed knife, the single, controlled assault. But whether it was written by a terrified witness, an accomplice hedging his bets, or the killer himself playing games was never publicly established. Los Angeles had reason to be uneasy.
Just a year earlier, the body of Elizabeth Short — the Black Dahlia — had been found in Leimert Park, severed and posed in a vacant lot. That case had brought national attention and a flood of false confessions and anonymous communications. The city learned quickly that notoriety breeds letters.
Kern’s murder did not carry the grotesque theatricality of the Dahlia case. There were no staged photographs, no tabloid frenzy of the same scale. But it struck at something more intimate and more unsettling. She was not walking alone at night. She was not frequenting a nightclub. She was doing her job in broad daylight. To sell a house, you must open a door. You must step inside first.
The Citizens News added another layer of anxiety: Redondo Beach police reportedly described a similar incident involving a woman real estate agent threatened with a long knife while showing a vacant house. Whether a coincidence or connection, it fed a growing narrative — that vacant houses were becoming traps.
According to the coroner, an autopsy determined the cause of death was a hemorrhage due to stab wound. Five days after she was found, she was laid to rest in the manicured quiet of Forest Lawn, the cemetery of movie moguls and middle managers alike — where Los Angeles packages even death in carefully tended symmetry.
The Cromwell Avenue house returned to the market. The city kept building. Buyers kept signing papers. Real estate kept booming. The anonymous letter faded into the file. No arrest was announced. No suspect was tried. The man described as a “boxer in appearance” slipped back into the anonymity of a growing metropolis — if he had ever been there at all.
Gladys Eugenia Kern’s life, as the records show, was steady and ordinary. Her death was swift, contained within the walls of a house meant to symbolize security.
The hillside house at 4217 Cromwell Avenue, Loz Feliz area, where the body of Gladys Kern was found stabbed to death, as it appeared in 1948. (This is a private residence. Please Do Not disturb the occupants).
It did not alter the skyline. It did not halt construction. It barely lingered in the headlines beyond a few days. The city went on. And the file stayed open.
Postwar Los Angeles liked to think it had outgrown its sins. The war was won, the subdivisions were rising, and escrow offices replaced soup kitchens as the city’s busiest counters. Babylon had traded gin joints for tract homes and told itself that respectability was the same as redemption. But the illusion was thin. The anonymity that had let him become someone else in the California sun now cloaked his disappearance. February 14, 1948, a woman with a key entered an empty house and never left. The knife was cleaned, the door shut, and the city grew upward — as Los Angeles does best: lay foundations on its unrest and name its development. But under every hillside vow rests the original certainty Babylon will never outgrow: paradise and danger share a street number.
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The grave of Gladys Kern at Forest Lawn-Glendale, Resurrection Slope, Lot 98-2 (Photo Credit: Findagrave.com / HiD)
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Excellent reporting, Allan. I had not heard this story before, or if I did, I can't recall. Thanks for sharing!