The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  On Wednesday, Toy met with Mrs. Joynes again. This time he offered to relinquish his interest in two pieces of real estate and give Mrs. Joynes $2,000 if she would give up any claim to the rest of Dorothy’s estate.

  “I told him I would accept the settlement,” Mrs. Joynes said. “The next day, he kissed me and told me he had decided to give me $2,500 in cash instead of $2,000.”

  But at 1 p.m. that day, when Toy was walking on South Akard Street, a pair of Dallas police detectives approached him, flashed their badges and arrested him. They took him to a room in the Jefferson Hotel, where they and investigators from the district attorney’s office questioned him for six hours.

  At 7 p.m., they took him to the Dallas County Jail, and at 9 p.m., they charged him with deliberately planning the murder of his wife. District Attorney Bob Hurt wouldn’t agree to bond. Toy was locked up.

  Two nights earlier, J.J. Cantrell, described in the newspapers as “a wealthy landowner from Comanche County,” had telephoned the Dallas police. He said the shooting of Dorothy Marie Woolley “might have some unpleasant angles” that they should investigate. The police asked him to come to Dallas.

  Mr. Cantrell and his daughter, Mae, had arrived Wednesday by bus. He handed over to the police a packet of letters that Toy had written to Mae.

  “I don’t want to talk to anybody,” Toy told the reporters at the jail. “There are lots of things that have got to be straightened out.”

  Mae Cantrell was born on a farm three miles from the farm where Toy was born, near the tiny community of Lamkin in Comanche County. She was two years younger than Toy. As they grew up, they knew each other well. Indeed, they were first cousins once removed. Toy’s grandfather was Mae’s uncle.

  “Were you sweethearts as boy and girl together?” the prosecutor would ask her.

  “No,” she would reply.

  In 1926, when he was 21, Toy moved to Dallas. He studied accounting at a business college, then got a job as an auditor with Trinity Universal Insurance Co. During his first three years in Dallas, he lived with James and Georgia Godfrey, his brother-in-law and his half-sister, on Madera Street. Then he rented a place of his own.

  In 1924, when she was 17, Mae finished high school and enrolled at what was then John Tarleton State College in Stephenville, where she was very popular. When she finished Tarleton—it was a junior college then—she enrolled at Texas Tech and earned a degree in psychology. In the fall of 1930, she moved to Dallas, too. She took a teaching job at Winnetka School in Oak Cliff for $40 a month and registered for graduate work at Southern Methodist University.

  She hadn’t seen Toy for eight years. But when she was settled, she wrote a note inviting him to call on her. He did.

  Sometime that fall, Toy brought Mae to the Godfrey home and introduced her to James and Georgia, and they would get together from time to time to play bridge. About a year later, the Godfreys learned that Toy and Mae were living together, and that Toy’s teen-age sister, Mina, was living with them.

  Both James and Georgia would testify that they assumed Toy and Mae were married. But they apparently never asked when or where the wedding took place or why they hadn’t been invited to attend. Then one day, during a conversation with Georgia, Mae revealed that she and Toy were living together out of wedlock.

  Georgia was upset. She knew that if Gatewood Lafayette Woolley, the patriarch of the large Woolley clan—he had sired 10 children by two wives—were to find out that young Mina had been living in such an unrespectable domestic environment, there would be hell to pay. She urged Mae to marry Toy before that happened.

  Mae wasn’t interested. It was a policy of the Dallas school board at that time that female teachers must be single. If she were to marry Toy, she would lose her job. Besides, she said, Toy wasn’t the first man with whom she had had an affair. And, she said, he might not be the last. She wasn’t ready to marry.

  Georgia enlisted her husband in a campaign to apply pressure to both Mae and Toy.

  If Mae would marry Toy, the Godfreys told her, she could file for a divorce immediately. They just wanted the couple to appear to have been married during the time that Mina lived with them.

  Finally, Mae acquiesced. On March 11, 1933, she and Toy drove to Hugo, Okla., and got married. It was a “courtesy affair,” Mae would testify, meant only “to save his name with his family.” She said Toy had promised to divorce her immediately.

  On the same day—apparently only a few hours after his wedding—Toy applied to rent a room that Mrs. Joynes had advertised at her home on Elliott Street. He told her he was single. Mae moved into a room of her own on Belmont Street. But when the school term ended in June, Mae and Toy rented an apartment and moved back in together.

  Their marital bliss, if they enjoyed any, didn’t last. Within a week, Mae was demanding a divorce. Toy resisted, but finally said he would grant her one if he could be the one to file for it. Mae agreed, packed her bags and went home to Comanche County. Shortly, Toy drove to the Cantrell farm and begged her to return to Dallas with him. Instead, they took a trip to Galveston to talk over the possibility of making a success of their marriage.

  “I decided we could never be happy,” Mae said. She went back to her parents, and Toy returned to Dallas. On July 12, he filed for divorce. In his petition, he charged that soon after their wedding, Mae had begun “a course of cruel treatment, disagreed with him continuously and that he could not please her at all.”

  “She did not want to live with me,” Toy would tell the reporters at the jail after his arrest. “She preferred the company of other men to mine.”

  Meanwhile, at the house on Elliott Street, Mrs. Joynes had learned that Toy was courting Dorothy. “If I had known he was married at the time, he could not have gone with my daughter except over my dead body,” she would testify.

  Then, on the afternoon of Aug. 26—two days before his divorce was final—Toy, carrying a suitcase, was starting out the door with Dorothy. “Well, Mrs. Joynes,” he said, “Dorothy and I are going to Oklahoma to be married.”

  “I told him I didn’t think that a very honorable thing to do—start off like that without telling me before,” Mrs. Joynes said. “I asked him to put the marriage off for a while. … I suggested they could have a nice home wedding later on. But he walked off with Dorothy. … They returned the next day. They said they had been married. But Dorothy had no wedding ring on her finger.”

  The newlyweds lived with Mrs. Joynes for a week, then bought the cottage on Ellsworth. For the first two days of their marriage, Toy was a bigamist.

  The prosecutor asked Mrs. Joynes: “Did you know that four days after this marriage, while he was living under your roof, accepting your hospitality and living with your daughter, that he had written his first wife and told her he had married again, but did not love the girl he married?”

  “No, sir.”

  “… Or that he told his first wife he soon expected to make enough money to gain her back again?”

  “Oh, no!”

  The prosecutor already had placed into evidence a letter that Mae had received from Toy four days after he married Dorothy. It was one of the letters that J.J. Cantrell had turned over to the police. It told of the divorce being granted, and continued:

  “… I am married again, and am here to say I do not love her and never will. Words will not express my feeling about it, but I intend to take care of you, all the time. You are before anyone in the world to me.

  “… Yes, it was a radical thing to do…. I did it, you know why and I expect to make enough money to gain you back again soon, Darling. Please stay close to me, for I love you above anything else on this earth. I want to marry you again as soon as I can and I expect to have some money, too.

  “… Sweet, please stay with me for I am lower than I will ever be anymore in my life. … I need your help, as I always have. I hope and pray for you to come back every day that passes. I hope you will write me and tell me you will marry me again, if I will build myself
up and make some money. Will you, Darling, please.

  “Write me by return mail, Darling. I love you and need you every hour. Always and forever. TGW.”

  According to the newspapers, Dallas had never seen a trial to compare with the one that began on Monday, Dec. 4, 1933, in Criminal District Court No. 2, Judge Noland G. Williams presiding.

  From the moment District Attorney Bob Hurt rose to read the indictment, through 10 days of testimony by 113 witnesses and almost five hours of final arguments, the city would be transfixed by the sad and sordid drama unfolding in the courthouse.

  “The courtroom, by the time a session opens, is so packed that the spectators cannot move a hand,” a Dallas Morning News reporter wrote. “The doors into the corridor were opened…but the crowd in the hall became so boisterous that Judge Williams ordered the doors closed and the hall cleared. Instead of leaving, the overflow crowd went into the courtroom across the hall and sat chatting about the trial…. Some of the spectators who arrived before 8 o’clock in the morning did not leave their seats until the night session closed…. Persons who were forced to leave the courtroom because they had to go and prepare dinner for hubby or go feed the baby, sold their seats. Two front row seats were reported to have sold for $1 each.”

  They brought lunches in brown bags and threw their bread crusts and fruit rinds on the floor. They paid tips to people who brought them water and soft drinks. Souvenir hunters stole buttons off the coats of the court bailiffs.

  Five women fainted. Several were hurt in the press of the crowd against doors, windows and walls. Dr. Horace Duncan, the county health officer, was called upon twice to give medical aid to persons overcome. A man who suffered a heart attack groaned so loudly as he was being carried from the courtroom that Judge Williams sent the jury upstairs until the commotion had ended.

  Through it all, the papers said, “Woolley sat as if he had no great concern with the case, remaining calm throughout the day while attorneys repeatedly referred to the tragic death only a month ago of his young wife. He wore a navy blue suit, light blue shirt and darker blue tie. His shoes were freshly polished, and his blond hair parted in the middle. At one time in the proceedings… Woolley smiled, and his eyes sparkled with good humor.”

  Aligned behind the defendant, in the front row of the audience, were three of Toy’s brothers, the Godfreys, and Gatewood Lafayette Woolley, the 59-year-old patriarch. “Woolley’s father…a heavy man in comparison with his slender son, sat stolidly throughout the day,” a reporter wrote. “He wore dark trousers, upheld by suspenders, a blue shirt with white stripes, a collar open and no tie. In his shirt pocket was a cigar case.”

  Also among the spectators was Otto Schubert, manager of the Adolphus Hotel, and his lawyer, Martin Winfrey, who told reporters: “Mr. Schubert is thinking about staging an affair like this in the junior ballroom of the Adolphus. Ought to go over big at a two-bits gate, shouldn’t it?”

  Indeed, the case provided all that an entertainment-hungry public could desire: a bloody killing; a young, beautiful victim; a young, passionate slayer; a femme fatale; sex; money; a touch of bigamy; a prosecutor demanding the electric chair. And almost as fascinating as the case itself and the tangled life of its defendant were the lawyers who were arguing it.

  On the side of the state were arrayed District Attorney Hurt, his assistant, Dean Gauldin, and Ted Monroe, a special prosecutor. He had been hired by Esta and Ralph Joynes, who now were convinced that Toy had murdered Dorothy. Mr. Monroe had made a reputation for himself as a defender of persons charged with murder. His presence at the side of the D.A. was “an incongruous but colorful factor in the prosecution,” the papers said.

  Sitting alone beside his client at the defense table was Currie McCutcheon, a former county prosecutor who also was recognized as one of the best lawyers in the state. However, he had been in semi-retirement because of ill health, and hadn’t appeared in a criminal trial in 10 years. “He wore the inevitable white carnation in his buttonhole, questioned jurors in his slightly nasal, but not unpleasant voice, and fingered an automatic pencil,” a reporter wrote. Mr. McCutcheon characterized his client as “indiscreet, but not guilty of murder.”

  “The state says that this young man, Toy G. Woolley, willfully, maliciously and voluntarily murdered his little wife, a beautiful young woman,” he told each potential juror. “Toy, here, says it was an accident. Would you require that the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was intentional?”

  From the beginning, Mr. McCutcheon’s plan for Toy’s defense puzzled the prosecutors. Indeed, he didn’t seem to have a plan. He asked for no postponements, tried no delaying tactics. Instead, he demanded that Toy be tried as speedily as possible. During jury selection, the prosecutors freely exercised their right to reject potential jurors they didn’t want, but Mr. McCutcheon rejected no one. He accepted men who admitted they already had formed opinions about the case. He even approved the seating of M.J. Carroll, who said Dorothy had once worked for him.

  In only three hours, the jury had been seated. It was said to be a Dallas County record in a capital case.

  And throughout the trial, Mr. McCutcheon allowed the prosecutors to treat the witnesses however they wished and ask them anything they wanted, rarely rising to offer an objection. At one point, a frustrated Mr. Monroe got upset that Mr. McCutcheon wasn’t objecting enough. He demanded that the judge “make this defendant’s lawyer come out in the open and fight.” He complained that Mr. McCutcheon’s handling of the case “placed the state in an embarrassing position” when prosecutors had to register objections of their own.

  Mr. McCutcheon replied that he simply was eager for the jury to hear all the facts, and that his defense would come in due time, when Toy himself would take the stand.

  The state’s star witness, Mae Cantrell, testified on the second day. Wearing a brown wool belted suit with a green knit yoke and collar, a brown felt hat banded with ribbon, kid gloves, and gold-rimmed spectacles, she was a picture of the prim schoolteacher.

  Under Mr. Monroe’s careful guidance, she told of her unconventional relationship with Toy, their marriage and divorce, and his obsessive efforts to win her back. In the letter in which Toy had begged her to marry him again, he also offered to pay her expenses if she would come to Dallas and talk things over with him. On Saturday, Aug. 30, the day after she received the letter and only four days after Toy’s marriage to Dorothy, she arrived by bus and registered at the Jefferson Hotel.

  Toy came to her room. Mae told him she had been fired from her teaching job because of their marriage, even though their divorce was in progress when school officials found her out. She was about to transfer to the University of Texas in Austin, she said. She wanted to know whether Toy would continue helping with her school expenses, as he had done when she was at SMU. Toy told her he would.

  On Sunday, they took a drive around the city, and on Monday Toy drove her home to Comanche County. Toy continued to write and phone her, she said, begging her to come back to him. Late in September, she said, he went to Austin and declared: “If Dorothy won’t give me a divorce, I’ll get rid of her some other way.”

  “Throughout the long period of questioning…the defendant Woolley looked at her intently,” the Morning News reported. “At infrequent intervals, she glanced in his direction, but averted her eyes the greater part of the time. Her answers were given in a soft voice, and frequently she paused before answering a question, frowning as if to make sure of dates, hours or places before making a statement.”

  At 6 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 4—the day he was supposed to be hunting ducks in East Texas—Toy called Mae and said he was on his way to Austin. When he arrived, he picked her up at her rooming house and took her to his room at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel.

  “We stayed from 8:45 until 10:15 a.m.,” she testified. “He refused to let me leave and locked the door and put a chair in front of it. He said there was going to be a showdown, that I was going to promise to marry him again or do
something about the money I owed him.

  “I told him I owed him no money. He apparently wished me to submit to his desires then, and I refused. He said I would not leave the room alive, and that he would not leave alive.

  “I became afraid and insisted I had to be at an 11 o’clock class. He took me to the campus in his car, and when I got out I told him I never was going to see him again. He wanted to know about the money again. I walked off, and when I was halfway across the campus he caught me and forced me to go back to the car. He probably would have forced me to go into the car if some students had not come up, and he then let me go.”

  Mae went into the administration building and phoned her new fiance, E.W. Shuey, described in the newspapers as “a traveling man of Austin.” He picked her up and drove her home.

  “About 4 o’clock that afternoon, Toy called me and implied he was going to kill himself,” Mae testified. “He asked me to attend to his affairs in Dallas. I told him I would.”

  Then about 9:30 that Saturday night, Toy called Mae from Dallas. “He was excited,” she said. “He told me that Dorothy had been in a serious accident and was not expected to live. … He told me that if I would not marry Mr. Shuey, he would give me $1,000 before the end of the week. Mr. Shuey was with me at the time and listened over the telephone. I read of the shooting of Dorothy in the noon papers Monday.”

  Mae said Toy also had threatened suicide about a week before he married Dorothy. He turned on the gas in the room where they were talking, she said. She turned it off. Then he tried unsuccessfully to choke himself.

  Mr. McCutcheon, cross-examining her, asked: “Did you ever love him?”

  “I hardly know how to answer that,” Mae said.

  “Well, did you?”

  Mae looked down at her hands and said: “What is the test of love?”

  On Nov. 6, the day of Dorothy’s funeral, Mae withdrew from the University of Texas. Her registration card, which listed Toy as her “guardian,” said her reason was “lack of finances.”