 The Manhattan Projector
This is an invaluable tool for those interested in the postwar period censorship. Even though the entire world knew, only too well, of the devistating atomic bombs we had dropped on Japan by then which we had got a full four years ahead of the Soviet Union through a massive military industrial effort involving billions of taxpayer dollars and tens of thousands of people in complete secrecy, called the Manhattan Project.
Following World War II, the security apparatus that we had built up around the horrible thing remained, and largely remains, entirely in force. In an historically vain and stupid attempt to keep it to ourselves, we have trashed our own history. To this end, many, many bizarre and useless things happen in the historical record of that period that you have to be on the lookout for, because some or any tinkerbell could have had a total national security clearance. Making the non-existant. Any odd references to New York may be suspect from this angle.
Not that that was even the true extent of the paranoia which had siezed the country and held us all malliable in the presence of it's overweaning horror. The cold war then set in and everybody took a long lazy nap on the the dock of the bay, and the time just rolled away down the river, the monstrous big river of time and the always new, but nothing ever changed on the plantation. National security was to be our mantra, and secrecy was your sour dharma. Some meditation then brought about the Freedom of Information Act of 1974. A light at the end of a long, dark, gaping, unknown, black hole in the record.
Edwin F. Burns was drafted into the army and probably had some reason to be rather angry about it. At thiry-thee years old basic training was going to be a hump. Even for someone as fit as Ed. But it was his business that would suffer most. Ed was a very highly skilled tradesman technician. L.A. for a camera repairman with his reputation, was becoming a wartime boom town, and the pickings were lush and getting lusher. He had just got married, ending his long batchelorhood. The wolf had laid down with the lamb. But not for long. Greetings from FDR ended his idyll and he was inducted on December, 15th. 1942. She was already pregnant with his child, a girl.
Limitless were the personnel permutuations for Ed in the Army. He didn't have to be in the MP. This was the most photographed and filmed event in all history. From tiny easily concealable spy cameras to highspeed high altitude camera used in the bombing surveys towards the end of the war, to newsreel cameras and the classified machines, the need for camera repairmen would be service acute. They would have kept him busy for the duration, with a minium of leave for visits home, but all alone with a baby, Mrs. Edwin F. Burns was having understandable problems at home.
According to the FBI teletype confrence dated January 23, 1947. She drowned the then two year old child and killed herself, probably sometime in early 1945. Ed is predictably undone by this awful tragedy and is sent to the Army mental heath facility in St. Louis (Now Ft. Leanord Wood) tor treatment lasting about eight months. He is then given terminal medical leave and is released from the hospital on August 9, 1945. The day of our second successful use of a fission weapon to bomb the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Ed returns to L.A. and is soon given a Section 8 disability discharge from the Army and quickly sets about the task of building a house and removing his mother from the picture.
Next, we see Ed getting married again about Easter of '46 to Vera from California, in New York City and they set up housekeeping in Las Vegas, Nevada soon after. Money doesn't seem to be a problem for them, Ed is able to keep contacts in Los Angeles that bring him there often. But Ed had returned to his wolfish ways even though he took care to lie to new wife Vera about what he was really doing out there, as she is clueless in the FBI file until Ed goes to ground for the last time in late January or early Febuary.
By midsummer the fatal meeting with Elizabeth Short, someone who had suffered a loss nearly as tragic as his own, would occur. She was someone who knew his pain from her own. But it was too late for both of them, she knew it. He didn't. She tried to play him, she was sharp, but no match for Ed given time, and when she finally told him the truth that they would never be, he refused to acceed her reality and murdered her in the most savage and pre-meditated manner imaginable and got clean away with it.
Ed is listed as a suspect in FBI communications then, and NY office has been included in the manhunt. Then we read of the conviently staged farce with local Vegas cop and the documented store purchase of the morning of Jan.14 back in Las Vegas. An alibi which wouldn't have fooled a child appears to be working. By the twenty-fifth he sends his paper cache to The Examiner through the mail, where it is duly published and then something happened. Somebody pulled the plug.
LAPD then bullied the Johnsons back into silence and doped every other hole they could find. SOP in those days. Even if Ed just knew the wrong government secret, he could find himself in a spot on the lense of the Manhattan projector, about to be wiped away on the breeze.
In July of 2007 I discovered Edwin F. Burns Army enlistment record in a newly released exhibit of the National Archives. Listing his birthplace as New York City in 1909.
 Nagasaki, Madonna and Child
12:36:44 PM 
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