Muriel produced airline stubs, their marriage certificate, and a statement by Rev. Charles Nabers, who married them in the South China Sea. Their official witnesses were Hans and Ilsa Lindemann.
Muriel’s lawyers also revealed that Annemarie had refused a subpoena that was delivered to her on May 26, 1961, and had continued to evade their requests to take her deposition. This didn’t look good. Dick’s attorneys took action.
Finally, the court would hear from the mystery woman. Annemarie never did appear in court, but she delivered a stipulation. The lengthy explanation stated that she and Dick met in the fall of 1960, spent time in Paris, and traveled to Tucson where they registered at a hotel under the false name “A. B. Carling.” She said Dick paid for everything and gave her $200,000 in jewels, furs, and gifts. In November 1960, she went to Sapelo, stayed in Florida for a week, quit her job in Europe, and took a trip on the Rotterdam with Dick, where they got married in March. She lived on Sapelo afterward and then moved with Dick to Locarno, where they stayed from June till November 1961. While on Sapelo, the sheriff served her and Dick with the subpoena but Dick told her she didn’t have to obey it.
She then went to Nassau on November 30, 1961, while Dick went to Georgia to testify, and he joined her in Nassau in December. Dick paid for a two-year lease at the La Palma Hotel in Locarno in Annemarie’s name.
She admitted influencing Dick to transfer more than $1 million to European investments and persuaded him to make more investments in Germany and other European spots in the future. Annemarie said that Dick gave her additional gifts in excess of $400,000 since November 1960, which included a Mercedes-Benz, a Porsche, stock in her former company, diamonds, and furs.
Muriel’s lawyers asked the jurors to take note of the amount of money Dick gave Annemarie in this short amount of time, proving how much Dick could spend on a woman who wasn’t even his legal wife. Muriel knew all too well how much Dick spoiled his mistresses.
Closing Arguments
Muriel’s attorneys laid out the facts for a case that should have been easy for them to win.
Dick’s marriage was proof of bigamy and adultery and Dick’s divorce trial against Muriel should have been terminated. Dick’s bigamy automatically should have prevented him, the now guilty party, from further action against Muriel, who, because of the appeal, was still considered innocent of the charges Dick brought against her.
While they were on the Rotterdam cruise, Dick had been cabled by his lawyers that Muriel’s motion for a new trial had been denied, so he felt free to marry Annemarie. He moved too quickly after the appeal denial for the marriage to be in “good faith,” and his lawyers had informed them that Muriel would likely appeal again.
Dick claimed that since he learned of the divorce decree, he had stopped living with Annemarie as his wife and had been unable to consummate the marriage due to his illness. Everyone in the courtroom believed this was a lie.
Gambrell repeated an example of Dick’s deposition during the first trial, when he was asked about “the usual incidents of man and wife” and, becoming belligerent, he said, “Put it in blunt words, she had her bedroom and I have mine, and if you’re trying to ask if we have intercourse or not… is that what you’re trying to ask? I refuse to answer.” Gambrell pressed him and Dick said, “Remember, I am a very ill man.” Then he said, “I’m not saying I never went to bed with her.”
“How many times?” Gambrell asked.
“I have been to bed with her,” Dick said.
“Pardon?” Gambrell asked.
“Of course I have been to bed with her, but I didn’t say it was done immediately, though.” Dick argued that he was embarrassed and was just trying to get rid of him—he didn’t realize what he was saying. Rollings tried to help by testifying that Dick’s sexual capacity was limited.
Gambrell asked why they wouldn’t release Muriel’s diaries to her. Kravitch said they were open for them to read in the clerk of court’s office. Gambrell said, “It was like trying to read and memorize Gone with the Wind in the office hours of the clerk in Darien.” Gambrell went on to say the real reason they wouldn’t enter the diaries into evidence was because they would prove that “Dick is not the Prince of Sapelo as the newspaper article said he was. He would be the common drunk of Sapelo community which Muriel’s been living with for seven years, because it’s in there.”
Gambrell also said the court didn’t make much of Dick being quoted as saying, “Sapelo is a wonderful place to shuck a wife” and also didn’t seem to be concerned with Dick’s constant travel. During the first trial, Dick took trips to Knoxville, Lookout Mountain, and the graduation exercises at Wake Forest School of Medicine within three weeks of the first trial’s conclusion. Muriel’s lawyers found out that Dick had paid $45,000 to charter the Natalie six weeks before the first trial even started. Then on June 7, 1960, Dick took a BOAC flight from Idlewild Airport in New York for a flight to England, stayed at the International Hotel, and then went to Gosport to take his cruise. The cruise took him to the Baltic Sea, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Muriel’s lawyers said, “He’s laughing up his sleeve. So is Dr. Rollings and everybody. He goes to Rotterdam, Miami, Hamburg, Bremen, Heidelberg… all of these places somehow suddenly become good places for emphysema patients. To try to sell you on the idea that all he’s done has been aimed at his health is hogwash,” they said.
Robert Richardson, another of Muriel’s lawyers, stated, “Annemarie Schmitt may be a fine person—we’ve never seen her. She didn’t come here to testify.” He noted that Dick asked her to marry him after five days’ acquaintance, and had kept her hidden since then—in Europe, on Sapelo, and in the Bahamas.
They brought up the dozens of times Dick had lied to the court. He claimed that he “almost died” during his fall deposition in the second trial, which Muriel’s attorneys said he staged to escape his deposition and run off for a prearranged tryst with Annemarie in Nassau. Dick repeatedly committed perjury and whined that the cross-examination was “grueling” and “merciless.” But Dick had his way throughout the trial and managed to evade the toughest questions.
The court heard again the letter Dick wrote to get Muriel off the island in 1959. Dick wrote, “You have been here on Sapelo, for long periods, isolated with a sick man who is cross and irritable over the least trifle. You have stood it like a Roman soldier but it’s getting you down. I urge you to leave and come back and find your old Buck strong and more reasonable. With all my love, Dick (Cross Buck).”
Muriel’s lawyers said, “It was a loving letter he slyly used as he was planning a perfidious scheme to traduce and cast her off like a worn out garment. He was acting the solicitous husband, keeping in touch with her on the trans-Atlantic telephone, so as to direct activities to his French detectives.” He was “framing his middle-aged wife, who was no longer appealing to him,” and he was trying to “steal a march” on the court by marrying Annemarie the day Muriel’s appeal was denied, and before the court had an opportunity to say whether the decree he obtained was or was not final.
Robert Richardson continued, “Did anyone at Fancy Gap say Muriel was not attentive, religious in her efforts while Dick was in the mountains recuperating? Karl Weiss says it, she babied him and cooked for him—she did not make him sick. Maybe a man withdrawing from cigarettes and alcohol is what’s making him an irritable man, so says his doctors. The minute she left she was under surveillance, Dick admits she wasn’t following his plan. He went to the trouble of getting an adjoining apartment to keep an eye on her. Dick said ‘Of course I was tricking her.’… Dick was flitting all over the place in private airlines, paying for laymen, doctors, medical students, the Lindemanns, whoever they are, all flitting around somewhere.”
Richardson said Dick wanted more than justice and was willing to pay to get it. He “organized an armada of strategically located legal talent” and “purposely filed appeals on the alimony and cross appeals to keep Muriel’s money draining.” Richardson finished by sayin
g the jury had better not forgive him for his “open and notorious adultery” with Annemarie.
One of Dick’s attorneys, Mr. White, concluded his closing arguments with a simple message that Muriel was nothing more than a money-hungry beast. He said: “If ever there was a henpecked, devil-driven, hag-ridden poor specimen of humanity it was Mr. Richard Reynolds on Sapelo island” during his life with Muriel. “You saw how she twisted and turned, wiggled and squirmed and slithered round there on that stand like an eel on a slick rock. This wife as a result of her unholy lust for money has destroyed within herself, within her own breast every symbolance of womanly virtue that she may have had.”
That was all the town of Darien needed to hear. After Muriel spent $500,000 in legal fees and Dick spent $1 million, and the court had documented a record eight thousand pages of testimony—the jury ruled, again, in Dick’s favor after only six hours of deliberation. This time they denied Muriel any alimony whatsoever and revoked the roughly $12,500 per year she was supposed to receive before. The prenuptial agreement would prevail.
Muriel was devastated. Her lawyers were convinced the county was the single most biased, prejudicial jurisdiction they had ever served.
In early January 1963, Muriel filed another appeal with the state Supreme Court in Atlanta and won a new hearing. Her divorce from Dick, now going into its fourth year, was setting precedents in Georgia law.
In May of 1963, Muriel abruptly dropped her second appeal. Dick had finally moved to settle the bitter case. Muriel flew down to Atlanta for the settlement. Surprisingly, Dick agreed to pay $2,142,624 in alimony, the largest recorded in Georgia history, including $500,000 for Muriel’s legal fees and a written guarantee to not disturb the old Canadian trust, which would bring Muriel and her mother, Eleanor, $32,000 a year for life. Muriel would get an immediate cash payment of $681,250 and $60,000 per year for the next twenty years. She had already received $94,072 and $177,301 under court orders. Muriel’s mother was pleased. Muriel was exhausted.
One of Dick’s attorneys, William H. Schroder Jr. of Atlanta, issued a statement saying that Dick’s “physical well being requires that a halt be brought to litigation.” Schroder also stated that Dick had been vindicated by two juries but they had to do this because “Mrs. Reynolds also is dismissing two lawsuits she instituted against Reynolds in the New York Supreme Court. In one she sought to recover $1,800,000 from Reynolds because of an alleged misunderstanding about some bonds she claims he gave her. In the other case she sought to have herself declared the owner of insurance policies on Reynolds’ life with a face value of $325,000.” Schroder explained the details with disgust. At this point, Muriel and her lawyers, Gambrell and the others, didn’t care what they said. Dick had gone to the trouble to publicly humiliate her and she figured he deserved the fight he got.
Dick was ordered to return Muriel’s controversial diaries and her personal belongings from Sapelo as well. There was one more part of their settlement agreement: Upon their deaths, neither of them would be entitled to interest in the other’s estate.
After the exhausting trials with Muriel, Dick prepared to leave America. He wanted little to do with her or his boys—whom he perceived as freeloaders—for a while, until they had “straightened out.” Before Dick left Sapelo for Switzerland to live with his new wife, he called his four older sons together to tell them his plans. They were now age twenty-nine, twenty-six, twenty-four, and twenty-two. He asked them to bring his Orville Wright pilot’s license and the ancestral Joshua Coin, which had been with Blitz all these years. He remembered the Reynolds family superstition that the piece would confer good luck upon the male heirs of the coin. Dick, whose health was getting worse, was in need of good luck again.
Blitz had passed away from cancer the year before, in 1961, and the boys had been very lonely. They were eager to see their father, who remained elusive except for the occasional vacations in Europe, hunting trips on Sapelo Island, and reunions in Winston-Salem. Since meeting Annemarie, he had gone back to ignoring them completely. Dick told the boys he was moving to Europe, which didn’t surprise them. Dick always went where his wives wanted him, and Annemarie probably wanted to live there. As they stood on the beach, Dick examined the coin and when he saw that Blitz had a diamond placed in it, he became enraged and threw the diamond, and possibly the coin, into the ocean.
Dick had severely neglected his boys their whole lives and he had little to say to them, except to scold them for living off of his money instead of getting jobs. It seemed an odd way to say goodbye.
Dick remained a master at constructing grand schemes, even as he suffered from emphysema. No one could figure out what drove him to orchestrate the whole mess—the abrupt divorce from Muriel, the marriage to the young, foreign Annemarie, the continued abandonment of his sons. Perhaps he had been suffering too much from his illness, and it really had affected his mind. All anyone knew for certain was that Dick seemed content with his new German friends: Annemarie, the Lindemanns, Christian Nissen, and the secretary, Guenther Lehman.
Before Dick left for Europe, he had a few last items of business to take care of. He gave more land to the Sapelo Island Research Foundation and sold most of his American assets. He also rounded up his servants and dug up several bags of gold that he had previously hidden in the woods when he thought the world markets would collapse. They never knew exactly what he did with those bags.
CHAPTER 18
North Carolina’s Prince of Wales: The Mystery
1964–1966
On December 14, 1964, R. J. Reynolds Jr., who had been living with his new wife in seclusion in the tiny mountain village of Emmetten, Switzerland, was rushed to the hospital as he lost consciousness. By the time he arrived at the hospital, he was dead. Muriel heard the news while traveling with her mother.
Annemarie immediately ordered Dick’s body to be cremated, against his previously stated wishes. When Dick’s six sons found out about it, they sent a telegram to Switzerland to have the cremation stopped. Only two of Dick’s older sons made it to Europe in time for the quickly assembled funeral and when they arrived, the coffin was closed. They never saw their father’s body.
The boys were also shocked to find that Annemarie couldn’t attend the ceremony because she was about to deliver a baby. No one knew she had been pregnant. Thirty-six hours after Dick died, she delivered a baby girl, Irene Sabina, in the maternity ward of the same hospital where Dick died.
It had only been a year and a half since Dick had settled with Muriel and remarried Annemarie on July 10, 1963, in Muralto, Switzerland, at the La Palma Hotel. The wedding was conducted in their small suite of rooms without any witnesses or guests—Muralto was situated in a canton in Switzerland where unwitnessed marriages were permitted. Dick was feeling ill that day, so the registrar who married the couple didn’t actually see his face. Dick’s back was to the registrar as he signed the necessary marriage certificates. There was no public announcement of the marriage.
After Muriel heard this, she wished she would have never settled or freed up the love of her life to marry this woman—even after she got all that money. What she really wanted was Dick back in her life.
Muriel had continued to feel emotionally bankrupt after her divorce from Dick. It left a hole in her heart that wouldn’t seem to mend. She went through the details of the case in her mind daily and couldn’t believe it had all happened. She hated this new wife and blamed her for stealing Dick from her. She became convinced that Dick was having an affair with Annemarie when she left during the summer of 1959, and she was the reason Dick divorced Muriel.
Annemarie and Dick carried out their quiet life together, building a large villa in Emmetten in the remote Swiss countryside, where they planned to settle down. Dick, still only fifty-eight years old, was in even worse health than before. In spite of this, he told reporters in North Carolina, “Contrary to what you may have heard in Winston-Salem, I plan to go on living for quite a while.”
Now Dick was gone.
At first Swiss authorities and hospital officials didn’t reveal the details. Dick had collapsed suddenly, and they weren’t sure what happened. Nancy Reynolds told reporters that she thought he had a heart attack.
Hugo Frey, Dick and Annemarie’s attorney, acted as the family’s press spokesman and funneled reports to the American media. He said Dick had been using a pressure breathing apparatus for years with a face mask and motor that pumped oxygen into his lungs, and that he was dying of emphysema, but that they thought the immediate cause of death might have been a heart seizure brought on by the strain of the disease. As soon as Dick began having trouble that Sunday, they had called Dr. Rosier of the University of Zurich, a leading medical specialist in Europe, but Dick succumbed in the presence of Rosier and two other doctors. Dr. Heinrich Holtz, the physician who treated Dick at the clinic, said an autopsy would be performed prior to the memorial service. Frey reported that Dick had used the oxygen tank only briefly before living in Switzerland and had moved to Europe when his condition became worse. He had recently been using the oxygen pump every three minutes. Until the spring of 1964, he and Annemarie had been living in Locarno on the sunny side of the Swiss Alps. Now they were living in Emmetten near Mount Bürgenstock, Switzerland’s “magic mountain” (made famous by Thomas Mann’s 1924 book), where they built a home that was completed during the spring.
A few days later, the attending physician at St. Anna Clinic reported that Dick entered the hospital Sunday afternoon and that he’d been suffering a long time from emphysema. The immediate cause of death appeared to be “too much oxygen to the brain.”
Too much oxygen?
The physician went on to say that Dick had been “in an oxygen tent” but wouldn’t give any further details. Dick had spent a lot of time with oxygen tanks in recent years and was never without his oxygen tank administrator, Sergio Amati. Reporters recalled how he was excused from court during his first trial with Muriel because of his ill health. Even at that time, Dr. Henry Valk had told the Darien judge that Dick’s life expectancy was only five to seven years, although few took his claims seriously.
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