The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Myrtle’s unwanted celebrity as a femme fatale kept her name in the news for about a year after her acquittal. Alexander Woollcott, a devoted bridge player who spent some of his boyhood in Kansas City, rose from the Algonquin Round Table in November 1931 to write in The New Yorker about Myrtle and what he called the “four shots heard round the world.” At the time of the 1929 shooting, Woollcott wrote, “There was probably not a literate household in Europe or the three Americas [in] which the emotional seismograph had not recorded its tremors.” He noted the theatrics of Senator Reed in his “more than adequate performance” in trial, and poked fun at Mayme Hofman on the witness stand as a dainty and pitiable emblem of the “now devitalized society of a once rugged community.” (In his 1934 book, While Rome Burns, Woollcott republished his Bennett column and, as an addendum, suggested that Myrtle later played with a bridge partner who, unfamiliar with her history, put down his hand as dummy and told her, “I’m afraid you’ll want to shoot me for this,” at which point Myrtle fainted. This story, repeated so often as to become part of the Myrtle Bennett legend, carries the certain aroma of apocrypha.)

  Months after the criminal trial, Myrtle settled out of court with Jack’s family to avoid a civil trial. She had received about $30,000 from Jack’s life insurance policies, plus about $15,000 more from his estate. The attorney for Jack’s dozen heirs said Myrtle paid his clients $10,000, a sizable amount in 1931.

  The trial participants soon faded. Latshaw became ill several months after the trial. When he died in May 1932, Jim Reed was among his eulogists. Jim Page would achieve his goal in becoming judge of the circuit court in Jackson County early in 1933; he died late the following year. Though his failure to convict Myrtle Bennett was a stain upon his record, during his five years as county prosecutor, 7 men were hanged and 3,088 were sentenced to the penitentiary, largely as a result of Page’s efforts.

  Stories, such as Woollcott’s, took root in the years after the trial. One had the defense attorney O’Sullivan reporting that Jack “ran around on his wife for years.” Jim Reed was said to have told Myrtle that he regarded Jack’s death as an alcohol-driven accident. “There can be no more terrible accidents in your life,” the senator warned Myrtle, “because the second time something like this happens no one will be able to defend you.” In Carmi, Illinois, Jack Bennett’s sister, Annie Rice, refused till her dying day to believe that her brother ever slapped Myrtle. “He was such a gentleman,” Rice insisted. She despised Myrtle, and told her granddaughter, “Can you imagine someone who would commit murder because of bridge?” In her home, Rice kept a cartoon showing a wife leaning over a bridge table, a smoking gun in hand, and her husband across the table, slumped over, dead in his chair. Rice told everyone she thought Myrtle should have been imprisoned forever.

  Then, undoubtedly by her own design, Myrtle Bennett vanished, with not a word about her in Kansas City’s newspapers. She lived on, though, in myth and legend. Down through the decades her name has cropped up at bridge games, even today, usually as a laugh line or as a wife’s stern warning to her husband/partner to straighten up, or else “I’ll pull a Myrtle Bennett on you!” On the Internet, I found several dozen references to Myrtle, most filled with embellishments and inaccuracies, and some depicting the fictitious Fatal Hand.

  I told myself that somewhere, beyond the myths, embellishments, and inaccuracies, the real Myrtle Bennett was there to found.

  I searched online for “Myrtle A. Bennett” in the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), and found three women by that name: one born in 1918, the others in 1895, the year of my Myrtle’s birth. I located Myrtle in the 1930 Census, still living with Alice Adkins in Kansas City, and followed her back to the 1920 (South Dakota), 1910 (Tennessee), and 1900 (Arkansas) censuses. Each census provided different personal information—some facts (age, birthplace, parents’ names) were strengthened by repetition, others were called into question by contradictions. The Myrtle A. Bennett born in March 1895 had obtained her Social Security card in Missouri and died in 1992. I could not find a published obituary for her in microfilm or electronic databases.

  A search for her death certificate, though, brought a remarkable finding: a will for “Myrtle A. Bennett” in a Miami-Dade County, Florida, clerk’s office database. A stroke of researcher’s luck, here was the first gold nugget in my sifting pan. Though wills typically are public records, it is unusual for the complete text of a will to be scanned, page by page, in a database free to the public. When the death certificate from Florida showed up in the mail weeks later, it confirmed that I had found my Myrtle. More gold came in the date of her death.

  Born in Tillar, Arkansas, to Alice B. (McReynolds) and Henry F. Adkins, she had died on January 21, 1992, in North Miami Beach. Myrtle had walked from the Jackson County courtroom and lived another sixty-one years. At age ninety-six, she had lived from the nineteenth century to the cusp of the twenty-first.

  How had she come to live and die in Florida? What was her life like after Jack? Did she ever play bridge again? Her will listed beneficiaries, and I hoped to find them—if they were still alive—and fill in the blanks of her life.

  I followed the public-record trail to Miami.

  Myrtle’s death certificate from 1992 carried the embossed gold seal of the state of Florida. It showed she had died at her apartment at 5:27 A.M., no cause listed. It offered a few clues to her life: name (“Myrtle A. Bennett”), marital status (“Widowed”), and occupation (“Administrator—Hotels”). Apparently, never marrying again, she had been resourceful enough to build a managerial career.

  Her will offered more details. Filed in the Probate Division of Dade County Circuit Court in Florida, it reported that Myrtle’s estate would distribute an estimated $850,000, mostly in bonds and securities. According to my cross-checking in the SSDI, all beneficiaries had died except for three people with the last name of Armshaw, and a cousin named Carolyn Scruggs, living in Little Rock. The estate was administrated by a William Armshaw, a name listed in a South Florida phone book.

  I contacted Bill Armshaw. He told me he was Myrtle’s stockbroker. The mere mention of Myrtle’s name made him laugh. He said she insisted on thanking him for his friendship by leaving money to his three children, though she’d never met them. Armshaw first saw Myrtle in the middle 1970s, when she came to his office in Surfside, Florida. “She was a fascinating woman, very bright,” Armshaw told me. About her personality: “Myrtle was a bit acerbic. Basically she was very suspicious, but she was also capable of real warmth.”

  Only near the end of her life did Armshaw learn (from Myrtle’s extended family in Oklahoma) about the killing of Jack. But that Myrtle had it in her to shoot a gun did not surprise Armshaw. He called her tough, fiercely independent, and quick to anger. He said she bickered with maids, firing them for petty infractions, cashiering one for dusting incorrectly. That was Myrtle Bennett, Armshaw said with a laugh. Well dressed, he said, carrying her personal dignity impressively—but always domineering, “one of the most domineering women I ever met.”

  On the off chance Armshaw might have known the Hofmans—the Bennetts’ bridge companions from the Roaring Twenties—I mentioned that Charles and Mayme Hofman had left their country club life in Chicago in 1960 for Fort Lauderdale. Both Hofmans died in 1970, but Armshaw said Myrtle had never mentioned them. In fact, she told him little about herself other than that she had worked in New York hotels, for years at The Carlyle.

  She invested her money conservatively, Armshaw said, mostly in public utilities. Jack had always handled their money in marriage, but during her decades alone, Myrtle proved her own good business sense. Her investment portfolio grew handsomely. In the early 1980s, she handed Armshaw a check for $72,000. “Did someone die?” he asked. No, Myrtle said, but with gold and silver prices skyrocketing, she had sold her jewelry. “I’m too old to be wearing these, anyway,” said Myrtle, then in her late eighties. She added, “They’re pretty and nice, but they don’t pay a month
ly check.”

  I contacted Miami-area bridge clubs to ask about Myrtle, dead fifteen years by this time. No one remembered meeting her, though one woman asked me, “Myrtle Bennett? Isn’t that the woman who shot her husband in Kansas City?”

  For a journalist, nothing can replace putting boots on the ground of his subject, to walk in his subject’s footsteps, and to imagine breathing his subject’s air. This, I would do.

  I would begin with Myrtle’s gun.

  FIFTEEN

  Kansas City

  I

  It took me months to locate a Colt .32 automatic pistol. Gun dealers and gun shop owners told me that Colt had stopped production of this gun more than a half century ago. But now, finally, I held one in my hand. Small and lightweight, it fit snugly in my palm, as it must have in Myrtle’s. With a gun shop owner, I had come to an indoor shooting range in San Rafael, California. I needed to know the sensations that Myrtle must have felt on that long-ago night. We put on hearing protection—the reports from a .32 were loud, he warned me—and then he fired at a target twenty paces away. These were smokeless bullets, but there was a discernible smell, the chemicals superheated by the gun’s firing. Now it was my turn. I explained that Myrtle fired at Jack while on the move, from about six or eight paces. The paper target, showing a man’s torso and head, was mechanically moved closer, to about ten paces. Just then, I took a deep breath, bolted two steps forward, raising the gun to chest level, and fired. I was a novice—I had never fired a handgun before—but my first shot hit the X on the target, beneath the paper man’s solar plexus, a bull’ s-eye. This was pure luck, but it proved how easy it was for Myrtle, a first-time shooter, to hit the mark from close range, twice. Now, I pulled off my hearing protection. “Don’t do that,” the gun shop owner warned. But I needed to hear the gun blast, no matter how loud, to know what it must have sounded like inside the Bennett apartment. I fired twice more in rapid succession, and in an enclosed area the reports sounded like cannons. For several minutes, I could not hear anything but the cannons.

  No wonder Charles Hofman said he never heard the third and fourth shots.

  During my research I consulted with Bill Worley, a Kansas City historian. A delightful conversationalist in love with local history and lore, Worley has portrayed Boss Pendergast and Harry Truman in local one-man stage performances. He informed me that the Park Manor cooperative apartment building where the Bennetts lived still stands at the intersection of Ward and Roanoke Parkways.

  Thrilled at the prospects of visiting the most infamous living room in the history of contract bridge, I flew to Kansas City.

  With the current owner’s permission, a Park Manor neighbor escorted me, Worley, and a local historic preservationist, Susan Jezak Ford, inside Myrtle and Jack’s apartment. I brought a photocopy of the diagram used as a trial exhibit. Jim Reed was correct: the Bennett apartment was not big and sprawling. In fact, the current owner was merging it with the adjacent apartment. A few wall beams were exposed as a carpenter explained to us the structural changes already made. The long hallway Myrtle traversed, past the dining room, to her mother’s bedroom, was no more. But the high style of the cooperative building, and of the Bennett’s first-floor apartment, remained, including the decorative molding and the wrought-iron railing in the front foyer. I had stared at the diagram of the apartment so intently and for so long—a copy of it was taped to my office desk—that being in Myrtle and Jack’s place riveted and haunted me. It brought chills.

  Now, walking through the apartment, I see and feel and know that Byrd Rice’s story about the explosive moment is the way it must have happened:

  Go get my gun, Jack ordered. He stood by the living room closet, inflamed, his words and emotions fired by alcohol and contempt for his wife. Myrtle had embarrassed him in front of the Hofmans. No woman would excoriate him like that.

  Myrtle did not think to defy him, not yet. She sobbed as she walked the forty-five feet down the hallway toward her mother’s bedroom. In her wifely obedience, she grew smaller with each step. That Jack had asked for his gun was one more slap of humiliation. With robberies in the neighborhood recently, it was as if he were saying, You and your mother can fend for yourselves. Myrtle turned on the light in Alice Adkins’s bedroom, rummaged through the chest of drawers, and reached beneath the linens until she felt the four-inch gun barrel, smooth against her fingertips. She took the weapon in her hand. Her mother, groggy from sleep, heard Myrtle sobbing, and asked, “What are you after?” Myrtle replied, “Jack wants his gun. He’s going to St. Joe.”

  It was well past midnight, and Adkins said, half-statement and half-question, “He’s not going away tonight.”

  In response Adkins heard nothing, only her daughter sobbing and slamming the bedroom door.

  The .32 Colt Automatic Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless, designed by John Browning, weighed just twenty-three ounces. It held eight bullets in a magazine inserted in the handle, a ninth bullet in the chamber. On its hard rubber handle was the company insignia, a rampant colt kicking up its forelegs. “Equipped with safety features that absolutely prevent accidental discharge,” the Colt advertisement boasted of the .32. “It is always reliable … It is accurate. For target practice, small game shooting or personal protection and in the defense of Law and Order, Colt accuracy will serve you best.”

  Holding the weapon gave Myrtle a sense of shifting dynamics, a new power. “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men,” the old saying about the gun maker went, “but Sam Colt made them equal.” Now his pistol made a woman equal. Myrtle felt more than equal.

  She turned into the den.

  Charles Hofman stepped from the small master bathroom, a door on each side, and saw Myrtle, sobbing still, moving toward him, and toward Jack, her right elbow slightly bent, and in her hand, held slightly below waist level, a gun, Jack’s pistol, pointed obliquely at the floor. “My God, Myrtle, what are you going to do?” Hofman said.

  He reached out to her, but Myrtle sidestepped him. She saw Jack through the two offset bathroom doors. For one instant, their eyes met. Jack pulled the far door shut just as Myrtle fired twice in rapid succession, flames erupting from the gun barrel, the recoils surging into Myrtle’s forearm, two cartridges ejecting, one bullet embedding in the bathroom door casing, the other splintering through the door itself. Myrtle pursued Jack through the bathroom, into their bedroom.

  From behind, still in the den, Charles Hofman heard those two explosions. In the small room, the sound became a siren deep in his inner ear, a shrill scream. In a few moments, confused, he saw, to his right, Myrtle’s mother, in her nightclothes, stumbling down the hallway, the siren still spiraling in his ear, so loud he did not hear the two explosions that came next. Hofman followed Mrs. Adkins down the hallway and through the archway into the living room.

  Myrtle chased her husband through their bedroom and into the living room, Jack six or eight paces ahead, sprinting for the front door, reaching for it.

  On the run, Myrtle, a few steps from the folded-up bridge table, raised the pistol, fired twice more. One bullet lodged beneath Jack’s left arm, the second ripped through his upper back, slicing past the second vertebra, and exiting through his throat. Blood spurted on the door and floor.

  Jack stopped. He put his hand to the doorjamb and staggered back into the living room.

  Charles Hofman emerged from the hallway, standing beside Myrtle’s mother, blinking into the living room light. Alice Adkins asked, “Myrtle, what on earth are you doing?”

  “He hit me,” Myrtle said. “He was fighting me, and twisting my arm.”

  Jack leaned against a chair in the middle of the room, reached toward his back, and fell to the floor, blood on the chair, blood on his back.

  Myrtle, across the room, her voice a disembodied shriek: “Oh, what will I do?”

  She rushed to Jack and dropped Sam Colt’s equalizer. She knelt beside her husband, cradled his head, called for a pillow, called fo
r him: “Talk to me, Jack! TALK TO ME! ” Her mother joined her, and cradled Myrtle. Jack, on his back, reached for them, one hand to Myrtle, the other to Adkins. He tried to say something, but no words came, only gasps of air through the hole in his bloodied throat. Myrtle screamed, half hysterical, “Call a doctor!”

  Charles Hofman reached for the phone, and dialed. The doctor’s wife answered and Hofman told her that something terrible had happened, and to have the doctor come quickly.

  Mayme Hofman, still in her evening wrap, reappeared at the front door with an upstairs neighbor. In time, the doctor hurried into the room and felt for Jack’s pulse. There was none.

  Myrtle’s wail filled the room.

  Passing through the Bennetts’ handsomely arched front door splattered with Jack’s blood was a policeman from the Country Club station and a reporter from The Kansas City Star, notepad in hand. They were responding to reports of gunshots.

  From the living room floor, Myrtle called out again, this time not for Jack, but for his gun. Her mother held her tight, keeping Myrtle from the Colt .32.

  Alice Adkins demanded, “Somebody get that gun.”