The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Impose any penalty whatever upon her, place the brand of the unlawful killing of her husband upon her and you destroy her. She is not the type of woman that is graduated from penitentiaries. If you are going to give her one ounce of penalty, give her the limit.

  She will be sent into the world, after a sentence of any kind, with bowed head and crushed heart, to her old mother, and do the best she can in the few days left her in this world, and then she will go to her grave, rest and be destroyed.

  You can do that. Or you can say to this woman: “You are simply the victim of misfortune that took your husband and your support, and left you a widow to take care of yourself in this world. That is misfortune enough.” And send her back to her sad tired mother, who cared for her from babyhood and who she in turn has cared for.

  As a cold winter rain fell on Kansas City, and pelted noisily against the courtroom windows, the senator was nearly sobbing, his voice breaking, as he said, “All I can say, gentlemen, is read the instructions and find, if you can, where there was intent to kill in this case. Find the evidence to sustain it. You will not find it. It isn’t there. And, now, gentlemen of the jury, I thank you.”

  In the hushed silence of an old courtroom, with all eyes upon him, Reed walked to the counsel table. He reclaimed his unlit cigar, bit off the tip. He strode off into an anteroom, head high.

  In his closing argument, his last chance, Jim Page’s emotions ran hot. Emotion pent up over nine days erupted from within, like lava from a volcano. “If this had been an accident,” Page said, “why didn’t she explain it immediately after the accident?”

  Reed objected.

  “But isn’t it the most natural thing on the face of the earth if you had killed somebody by accident to say so immediately after it happened?” Page asked, rhetorically.

  Latshaw waved off Reed’s objection, saying, “The jury heard the evidence.”

  “Did she say it was an accident?” Page continued. “No, this is what she said to Mrs. Trowbridge. [Reading] ‘I shot him. He slapped me. I went into my mother’s bedroom and got the gun. I went out of the bedroom and into the den. He was packing his grip. And he said he was going to leave me. I shot him. I followed him into the bathroom and out into the living room.’” Page then cited Myrtle’s conversation with Jack’s sister, Annie Jane Rice. “Does she say it is an accident? And this is undisputed even though it was given by a good old deaf lady who sat up on that stand—and the senator stood back there and bellowed at that old woman like you wouldn’t holler at a common dog.” Page looked at Reed with accusing eyes, and said, “Why were you so disrespectful to [her]… just because she was telling the truth and it showed that this wasn’t an accident?”

  He read Annie Rice’s testimony, and recalled Myrtle’s reply: “Only me and my God know why I killed him.”

  Page asked jurors, “Is there an accident in that woman’s testimony? Nobody knew it but her and her God, but after she had talks with her mother and these two distinguished members of the bar, she concluded it was an accident.”

  Page scolded and mocked Mayme Hofman. “She ought to be called ‘Mayme I Don’t Remember,’ ”Page said, his brows arched.

  “Now, men, those are the facts of the case. There aren’t any of the senator’s tears in those facts. But they are the facts without his tears just the same. And he is seeking, in my judgment, to cry in the presence of you men and overcome the facts by tears.”

  Page pointed across the table at O’Sullivan. “He said he knew what the man she shot in the back would want him to do if he was here. Now, Great God! I wonder how long he has been receiving messages from the dead and using them as testimony to keep this woman from being punished. He said that this case has news value. Why? He says because these people were rich and were somebody.

  “It has news value because this man was making $18,000 a year and was a bum bridge player.”

  The prosecutor defended Jack’s bridge game: “He was a bum bridge player because he had to work and couldn’t learn to play bridge!”

  Now it was Page’s turn to finger the killing weapon. He playacted the motion of firing four shots, pulling the trigger each time and using his free hand each time to illustrate how the .32 Colt automatic ejected cartridges. In his pantomime, Page falsely made it seem as if two hands were required to shoot the automatic pistol. “She went through the bathroom, just as she told Mrs. Trowbridge she did. This man was fleeing from her, fleeing for his life. Then she fired two more shots. Her finger was on the trigger. The pistol had to be pointed at this man. She pulled the trigger and the shot struck him either under his arm or in the back.”

  There was blood on the outside of the front door, Page said. Then Jack Bennett came back inside his home to die. His wife stood six or eight feet from him. With mock incredulity, Page asked, “Where is the intent to kill?”

  Uneasy with the prosecutor’s theatrics, Reed interrupted. He asked Page why the state had opted not to place Mayme Hofman on the witness stand.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Page said, spitting out each word. “You gentlemen heard her sit there and to everything I could ask her, her only answer was—she would look up at the judge and smile, and say, ‘I don’t remember.’ That is the reason why I didn’t put ‘Mayme I Don’t Remember’ on the stand.”

  “The court didn’t see those smiles, Mr. Page,” Latshaw said.

  “Well, the jury saw them,” Page replied.

  “I didn’t see them,” Latshaw reasserted.

  “Well, you were not fortunate,” the prosecutor answered. “They were pleasant smiles.”

  Page was on the prowl now.

  Decide the case on the evidence as it came from the lips of witnesses and the judge’s instructions, Page told jurors, and not from O’Sullivan’s fictions or the senator’s crocodile tears.

  At long last, with the dinner hour past, Page was done. The jury left to begin its deliberations. Newspapermen raced to their typewriters to tap out a beatification of Reed, the old master of the legal drama. “He came to sing his swan song in the old courtroom where the triumphs of his young manhood sent him hurdling to fame,” wrote the Kansas City Times. The Kansas City Star recalled the young Reed from the Hyde trial: “He found pathways in the clouds never before trodden by orators in criminal cases… That golden voice could be as plaintive as a lute or as bold as thunders, ringing from mountain peaks.” All around Kansas City, small wagers were made that Myrtle would be freed. According to one columnist, “Much more censure was heard about town for Mrs. Bennett’s counsel and for the court than for Mrs. Bennett herself.”

  The jury deliberated for more than three hours that night without reaching a verdict. Jurors reentered the courtroom and lined up in a single row behind Myrtle’s chair at the counsel table. Uniformly, and one by one, they answered Latshaw’s question about the possibility of reaching a verdict: Not tonight, they said. Latshaw sent them back to the Gladstone Hotel, and to bed.

  For Reed, the jury’s failure to reach a quick acquittal was a personal affront. The senator and his client had walked to his law office for a quick dinner. Myrtle was tense and picked at her food. Then they returned to their favored spot in the back of the now-vacant courtroom.

  By 11:20 P.M., only newspapermen and a few stragglers remained. Reed put on his overcoat and talked in hushed tones with Myrtle and O’Sullivan. Just then, Reed heard a shutter click and saw a quick flash of light. He turned, thrust out his finger, and demanded, “I want to see you.” George Cauthen, photographer for The Kansas City Journal-Post, folded up his tripod, snapped shut his camera case. Reed hastened across the hallway and gave Cauthen a verbal whipping. He used brawny language, the Journal-Post later reported, “liberally sprinkled with hells, damns and stronger terms.” Cauthen explained to the senator he was only doing his job. “I want you to understand that if this picture is published I’ll knock your ____ head off!” Reed said.

  As Cauthen turned away,
Reed suddenly reached back and slapped him in the face. Cauthen did not retaliate. O’Sullivan stepped forward and pulled Reed from the photographer. As he did, Reed’s voice reverberated in the courtroom hallway: “Now, listen, if you don’t like that, by God, I’ll hit you with my knuckles and knock you out.”

  Fightin’ Jim was still Fightin’ Jim. He was sixty-nine, Cauthen only thirty. An irony was not lost on observers of the Bennett trial: Reed had struck Cauthen in the face with a hard slap, Jack Bennett-like. The next day, Cauthen playfully claimed to be the most distinguished newspaper photographer in the nation, reasoning, “I’m the only one who has ever been attacked by a one-time candidate for president of the United States.” In a front-page editorial, the Journal-Post was less playful, saying that if the senator were a younger man, it would have upbraided Cauthen “for not breaking his camera over his assailant’s head.

  “Irascibility, which not infrequently comes with age, may be indicative of many things—inflated ego, waning powers, a sense of frustration, loss of a sense of proportion or whatnot,” the newspaper editorialized. “We do not know what it is symptomatic of in James A. Reed, former United States senator. But whatever the trouble in his case, it is deep-seated.”

  The Journal-Post published Cauthen’s photo the next day, Jim Reed be damned.

  The verdict came the following afternoon, a Friday. After more than eight hours of deliberations, the jurors formed in a semicircle in front of Latshaw’s bench. Standing beside the defendant’s chair, wearing the same black wool outfit for the tenth day, Myrtle held a handkerchief in one hand and J. Francis O’Sullivan’s hand in the other. O’Sullivan placed an arm about her shoulders. She leaned into him as the clerk read aloud from a yellow sheet of paper: “We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty.” Myrtle fell into O’Sullivan, trembling, and through the handkerchief said to jurors, “I thank you, gentlemen.” Those in the crowded courtroom received the verdict, per Latshaw’s orders, in silence.

  Jim Reed beamed. The verdict was no surprise to him, except this, Why had it taken so long? News of the acquittal hit the radio airwaves within minutes: “Mrs. Bennett freed!” In an anteroom moments later, Myrtle’s friends embraced her and sobbed with her. “I want to tell mother,” Myrtle said repeatedly. O’Sullivan dialed the Woods residence where Alice Adkins was confined to bed. “Please tell Mrs. Adkins, it’s not guilty,” O’Sullivan said. Jim Page, not in the courtroom for the verdict, told reporters later that it had not been a fair trial. His assistant, John Hill, said, “It looks like an open season on husbands.”

  Jurors explained their decision. “It was not that the defense proved her innocent of murder,” the jury foreman, Leslie Choate, explained. “It was that the state did not prove her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Jurors took eight ballots, the first seven with the same result: three for conviction, nine for acquittal. The three holdouts for conviction found especially persuasive the testimony of policewoman Frances Trowbridge, who said Myrtle had told her on the night of the killing that Jack slapped her and she had gotten his gun and followed him through the bathroom, and then shot him. But the other nine jurors, with Jim Reed’s story still in their ears, countered that Myrtle had been given a hypodermic injection and ought not be responsible for what she said that evening. As pressure came to bear on the three holdouts, they conferred in a corner of the jury room. Later they conferred in a washroom. Finally, after lunch on Friday, the three announced they were convinced: the eighth ballot brought unanimity.

  According to Choate, the nine jurors who were for acquittal believed that the first two shots had been fired accidentally. They remained uncertain whether the next two shots were fired accidentally or by a hysterical woman struggling with her husband for the pistol. Either way, those nine said, the state had failed to show premeditation.

  In short, the jury believed Jim Reed.

  “We agreed early that the lawyers’ speeches should be thrown aside,” Choate said. “What they said was not considered.”

  But their speeches were considered. Jurors accepted Reed’s version of events that night: that the pistol discharged twice only because Myrtle stumbled in the den, and that Myrtle could not have seen Jack through the offset bathroom doors. In fact, from studying the locations of the bullet marks in the bathroom door and molding, jurors believed that the far door had been closed, disregarding completely Page’s contention that Jack had slammed the door shut as he fled. They believed Jack was shot to death during a scuffle for possession of the gun.

  From the courthouse, O’Sullivan rushed Myrtle out a side door and into a waiting car. A small crowd saw her and fell back. Reed emerged through the front door moments later, the crowd slapping him on the back, shouting huzzahs. The once and still legal champion climbed into the backseat of his car, his trusted chauffeur, George Dugan, as happy as he. At a brief press conference in Reed’s office at the Telephone Building, Myrtle pulled off her wool beret, loosing chestnut curls upon her neck. She opened her black coat, which had been tightly fastened throughout the trial, threw it back to reveal a frock of black crêpe. “Plans? Well, I—I haven’t any,” she said. Reed said, “I’ll tell you what she’s going to do. She’s going to take care of that old mother of hers, that’s what.”

  Hearing the verdict, Tom Bennett remained stoic. “I think the prosecutor did all he could,” Jack Bennett’s brother said. “If I had not been here to see and hear the trial I expect I would have blamed him, but he isn’t to blame. It was a case in which he had fourteen men to fight: the judge, the jury and Senator Reed.” He headed for the train station. “There’s nothing for us to do now, but take the medicine they gave us.”

  Jim Reed’s wife missed the dramatic moment. Lura was in Washington, staying at the home of former congressman William Rodenberg of Illinois and his wife. Reed dashed off a Western Union telegram to her: VERDICT IN BENNETT CASE, NOT GUILTY (STOP) LOVE. JAMES A. REED. How the buoyant senator shared the great good news with Nell was not recorded in writing.

  Snow blanketed Kansas City on verdict day, a happy development for the unemployed that would bring hundreds of jobs to men who needed them. On that day, the Kansas City Country Club announced that at its upcoming mixed contract bridge tournament husbands and wives would not be permitted to play as partners. No explanation was needed.

  A car dropped Myrtle at the Woods residence and she dashed upstairs to her mother’s bedside. They shared tears and a long embrace. Then Myrtle slept fifteen hours. The next afternoon a reporter inquired about her future. Myrtle told him she wanted people to forget her. But she had made herself unforgettable. She would not be forgotten.

  FOURTEEN

  Miami

  Here the author enters the story. Myrtle wanted to disappear. I wanted to find her, or at least find her well-covered tracks, to see what she had made of her freedom. I wondered if she had ever found redemption, and so in searching for her footprints seventy-five years after her acquittal, I would search also for how she tried to make peace with herself and get right with Jack’s memory.

  A woman of Myrtle’s resolute nature would find a way to live. Of that I was certain. But how? Where? Anita Loos’s fictional Lorelei Lee, after shooting her man, created a rich new life of adventuring. I imagined Myrtle had used her second chance to do much the same.

  And if driven by endless curiosity about Myrtle, I had to know about the others, too. The braided stories of Myrtle, the Culbertsons, and Jim Reed ended with Myrtle’s trial and again became three streams, this time diverging. When I left them in 1932, Ely and Jo—and contract bridge—were national sensations. Senator Reed had one more presidential run in him. Myrtle was a young woman, only thirty-six. But now in the early years of the twenty-first century, they were long gone from center stage, enveloped by the shadows of time.

  Myrtle’s fame endures in the dim light of the microfilm readers at the Kansas City Public Library’s central branch. Her acquittal prompted an avalanche of cynical, even ca
ustic, letters to the editors of Kansas City’s newspapers. “Why go to Arkansas and stay ninety days to get a divorce when you can stay in Missouri and get one overnight by getting your husband into a bridge game?” one said. Another took a swipe at Jim Reed and Judge Latshaw: “The senator should have snapped his finger at the judge when the trial was over and brought him out from under the spell. The way it was, the judge congratulated the senator over his victory—adding more disgrace and shame to the occasion. Well balanced judges don’t do those things.” From the pulpit in Jefferson City, Missouri, a Presbyterian minister castigated Latshaw, contending that his court “has deliberately obstructed the introduction of evidence, has belittled itself by arguments with the prosecutor and has generally conducted itself in a manner ill befitting any court of justice.” Latshaw reacted harshly. “Some people are preordained and predestined to be fools,” he said. “This reverend gentleman seems to be one of them.” Later, for the only time in his judicial career, Latshaw dictated a public statement. In it, he cited several critical instances during the trial in which he had sided with the prosecution.

  The Kansas City Times would have none of it. Nearly aghast over the handling of the Bennett trial, the newspaper editorialized, “It was representative of a good many American trials, in which essential facts are kept from the jury through the technicalities of law and procedure, the resourcefulness of counsel for the defense or the blundering of the state’s attorneys. In such cases there are often two verdicts, that of the jury and that of the public. As to the merits of such cases, the public is likely to be much better informed.… If the jury had been permitted, or could in law have been permitted, to have all the essential facts in the case, the verdict might have been different.”

  Deaths at the card table are few and famous. Wild Bill Hickok was shot dead playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876. Legend says Hickok held two pair, aces and eights, the “dead man’s hand,” when a bullet from a Colt .45 crashed through the back of his head. In November 1928, only ten months before the Hofmans sat at the Bennetts’ bridge table, the gambler Arnold Rothstein, a much-feared man, was shot through the stomach with a Colt .38 while playing poker at New York’s Park Central Hotel. A shadowy figure believed by some to have fixed the 1919 World Series, Rothstein stumbled from the hotel room and lived long enough to be able to tell authorities who had shot him. He chose not to, though. He took the name of his killer to his grave. To this short list was added an obscure name from the bridge table: the Kansas City perfume salesman Jack Bennett.