The Devil's Tickets

by Gary M. Pomerantz

  Nell loved and admired Reed. As a man of strength and honor, she thought James A. Reed loomed over Paul Donnelly like the Lincoln Memorial loomed over the Reflecting Pool. She thrilled to Reed’s 1928 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, during which he gave speeches in thirteen states and pounded away at the corruption of the Coolidge administration, borrowing his slogan from Andrew Jackson (“Throw the rascals out!”). One day, Nell appeared at the Reed-for-President campaign office in Washington and startled staffers by making a $1,000 contribution—more than anyone except William Randolph Hearst. She was with Reed at the Democratic National Convention in Houston when New York governor Al Smith, and the Tammany machine, crushed him on the first ballot: Smith got 849⅔ votes, Reed 52. Even so, Nell thought her senator one of the greatest men who ever lived.

  There is a photograph of the senator and Lura aboard an ocean liner on their Atlantic crossing in late autumn 1930. They are seated in deck chairs, Lura in a cloche hat, a fur boa draped around her shoulders, the senator sitting stiffly at her side, his expression quizzical. He looks uncomfortable and unhappy, as if he would rather be anywhere else.

  By December, back in his law office, Reed returned to his preferred habits. Nell’s handsome Lincoln convertible sedan would pull in front of the Telephone Building. As her chauffeur, George Blair, waited dutifully, Nell would enter the senator’s office high above Kansas City.

  A fine and spacious office, it had a view—and a divan.

  During such visits, the senator’s standing order to his secretary was that he and Nell were not to be interrupted for any reason.

  Their visits usually lasted an hour and more.

  At Myrtle’s 1931 murder trial, this diagram of the Bennett apartment was used as an exhibit. The dotted lines show the movements of Myrtle and Charles Hofman on the night Jack was killed. The “A” denotes where Hofman, in testimony at the preliminary hearing, said he saw Jack standing near a dresser-this spot would have put Jack in plain view of Myrtle approaching from the den at “D.” But at Myrtle’s murder trial, Hofman placed Jack in a different spot, across the bedroom at “B.” Hofman at “C” moved through the bathroom to meet Myrtle at “D.” The “X” in the living room shows where Jack Bennett fell.

  Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, MO

  NINE

  Myrtle’s Murder Trial, Part 1

  February, 1931: Fifty Communists marched to Kansas City’s city hall from their spare third-floor office on Eighth Street, placards in hand, demonstrating against unemployment. A young woman, nimble, angry, smart—an effective Communist—led with the rallying cry: “Comrades, don’t starve—FIGHT!” She made her appeal in the name of forty thousand unemployed workers in Kansas City, each as hopeless as Hoover. As she demanded an emergency relief fund for destitute families, her voice echoed between tall buildings… The motion pictures rolled: At the Uptown, Edward G. Robinson starred in a gangster picture, Widow from Chicago, while the Warwick featured Walter Huston’s latest, The Criminal Code (“He defied the criminal code… and paid… She defied the moral code… and suffered.”).… The Wickersham Committee in the United States Senate portrayed Kansas City as the center of far-reaching operations in the sale of bootlegged liquor. One report described enforcement of state liquor laws in the city as “a joke or a farce”… The Kansas City Star’s religion editor visited H. L. Mencken at his home in Baltimore and, during an interview, watched him smoke three large cigars and a corncob pipe. The Star’s man asked Mencken: “You’re a’gin everything—the Bible, religion, the church, the clergy, pedagogy, oratory, prohibition, preachments of all kinds, uplift, and the cherished ideals of most of us. Is there anything good you’re in favor of?” The Sage of Baltimore gave the question considerable thought. Then he replied, “Yes, I’m in favor of Anheuser-Busch”… The Depression deepened, and the funnyman Eddie Cantor joked, “The situation is so terrible that when a man goes into a smart hotel these nights and asks for a room on the 17th floor, the clerk says, ‘For sleeping or jumping?’ ”

  Outside the old brick Criminal Courts Building in Kansas City, in the shadow of the turreted Jackson County Courthouse, a few blocks from the Missouri River, dozens of fine automobiles crowded the streets: Buick Roadsters, Austin Coupes, Ford Phaetons. The Myrtle Bennett murder trial opened on February 23 and brought out a high-hat crowd, society women in their furs and pumps. These women arrived early and shivered in the winter cold outside the padlocked front gate, knowing the courtroom’s ninety-nine seats would be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.

  When Myrtle Bennett and her lead defense attorney, Senator James A. Reed, mounted the building’s front steps, the crowd parted and stared, chattering in their wake.

  “Do you think the senator can get her off?”

  “Lucky for her she has the money. She’ll get all the breaks.”

  No one could be certain why the senator had taken this case. Jim Reed wasn’t saying. He told Nell that as an attorney he was, in effect, a hired gun. He said no client called him unless something had gone dramatically wrong. It then became his job to represent the client’s interest and to make order out of chaos in that person’s life (as defense attorney, though, Reed typically tried to create chaos to disrupt the order that suggested his client’s guilt). His friends insisted Reed sought only to defend the honor of a woman wronged by her husband and by public opinion. One rumor said Reed was defending the liberty of Mrs. Bennett at no cost. Cynical reporters wondered if Reed had taken this case only to feed his ego. Privately, Nell might have prevailed upon Reed to aid Myrtle Bennett. She surely identified with the sufferings of a childless wife at odds with a philandering husband who was trying to control her. The trial also offered an opportunity for a former senator who had famously opposed woman suffrage to strengthen his bona fides with women voters for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination.

  The newspapers assumed Reed had not taken the case for money. Henry Ford had paid Reed $100,000 when charged with libel and anti-Semitism in a 1927 case in Detroit. Another Reed client, the Universal Oil Company—awarded $25 million in a patent infringement suit against the Standard and Shell Oil companies—reportedly had poured $750,000 into Reed’s pockets recently for more than a decade’s work. What the newspapers did not know was that Reed’s personal investment expert had borrowed heavily and lost nearly everything in the stock market crash. Neither did the newspapers know that Reed was contesting his fee from the Universal Oil Company, demanding more, and that to date he had received nothing. He needed money.

  Reed had gotten a trial continuance to allow him and Lura to make their earlier scheduled crossing to Europe in the fall of 1930. Later, Myrtle underwent an emergency appendectomy, and then peritonitis set in. She went to Memphis to recover, and, once there suffered from influenza. Some in Kansas City wondered if her murder trial might ever happen.

  Locally there were signs of a deepening interest in contract bridge. The Kansas City Star now published regularly on its women’s page a frivolous fictional feature, “After the Bridge Party” (“Mrs. Waterstradt just insisted that I drop by to see her new poodle. Such a cunning little thing … “), as well as a regular column, “Correct Contract Bridge,” by Mrs. Clyde A. Bissett. She kept her eye on the national bridge scene, informing her readers, “Ely Culbertson, now world champion and a leading authority on contract bridge… advocates the use of what he calls ‘honor tricks.’ ”

  The night before the trial, Reed paced in his law offices. Messengers delivered telegraphs from the East and Southwest. A boy showed up with a large photographic chart, diagrams and drawings of the Bennett apartment.

  Prosecutor Jim Page had deep concerns. The stakes for him were enormous. All of Kansas City would be watching. Page aspired to a judgeship, so he needed a conviction in this case, but he worried about the presiding judge, Ralph S. Latshaw. Page had attacked Latshaw and other circuit court judges for their
work on the county’s board of paroles. As a tough-on-crime politician, Page thought judges doled out paroles too freely. He also worried about Latshaw’s long friendship with Reed. All three were Pendergast loyalists, but Jim Reed was, after all, Jim Reed. Twenty years before, Latshaw had been on the bench—in the very same courtroom as this Bennett trial—for the 1910 trial of Dr. B. Clark Hyde, accused in the poisoning death of the eccentric octogenarian philanthropist Col. Thomas Swope. It had been the most sensational murder case in Kansas City history. Reed served as special prosecutor in the case, and his closing argument had launched his senatorial career. In that argument, he described Latshaw as “a man who loves fairness as the sun loves to shed its light,” and then he called out to jurors, “I am asking, gentlemen, that poisoners shall not escape, that great wealth shall not be sufficient to hold back the lash of justice and that because a man is rich and can get shrewd and cunning lawyers to defend him, he shall escape while the poor man’s son is punished.”

  Page worried, too, about Charles and Mayme Hofman. They were his key witnesses, but they had remained devoted friends to the defendant. What if the Hofmans altered their earlier sworn statements from the preliminary hearing? Would Page be permitted to impeach his own witnesses?

  The Jackson County criminal courtroom was ancient, wooden, and rickety, its floor-to-ceiling windows on one side battered by winter rains and sleet. Faded paintings of bearded politicians from Missouri’s lustrous past hung from the walls along with an old clock and a calendar from the Des Moines Life and Annuity Company. Wire netting had been attached to the ceiling to aid the acoustics. A simple wooden witness chair was placed beside a court reporter’s desk illuminated by a small lamp; Latshaw’s bench was a few feet away. The defendant faced Latshaw while sitting at the far end of a thin table shared with attorneys for the prosecution (to Myrtle’s left) and the defense (to her right). The twelve jurors sat in armless swivel chairs in two rows of six. There was a table for newspapermen, a desk for the bailiff, and a wooden railing that separated the public from the trial participants. Windows nearly always remained open in Latshaw’s courtroom. Reed worried that everyone in the crowded room would catch cold. This was, after all, winter.

  As the trial opened, cuspidors were pushed beneath tables, out of sight, so as not to offend the sensibilities of fashionable women. The chief deputy sheriff arrived in a pea-green suit, his trousers stiffly pressed and his shoes, as one newspaperman noted, “polished like apples of the unemployed.” Moments before the bailiff’s “Oyez! Oyez!” prompted those assembled in the courtroom to rise, Charles and Mayme Hofman, warm and snug in their camel’s hair and mink coats, took their seats. So did Alice Adkins, who sat in the gallery beside Arkansas judge Abner McGehee, Jr., for whom she had worked so long ago and who had come as a character witness for Myrtle. Sitting just behind Jim Page were several of Jack’s siblings, newly arrived from St. Louis and rural Illinois.

  Myrtle entered with Reed and co-counsel O’Sullivan. Nearly as tall as the senator, she wore a buttoned long black woolen coat, neatly tailored, over a simple frock of black crêpe unseen by anyone in the courtroom. A matching beret covered her hair. She wore black kid gloves, black pumps of alligator leather, and pewter-gray hose. Without makeup, her face was pallid, with dark circles beneath her eyes. She seemed a picture of haggard, quiet desperation. She had been eating little, and drinking too much coffee. Her life was about to be laid bare. In the courtroom, Reed treated her deferentially.

  Jury selection took three days. It unnerved Myrtle to hear would-be jurors admit that they had discussed her case in a business office, a packinghouse plant, at home, in a small-town corner store. For the jury selection Reed had activated the Pendergast machine, instructing block captains to learn every biographical fact and known prejudice of prospective jurors. (Even as Page complained loudly about the hidden work for the defense by the machine men, O’Sullivan admitted with a wink, “A few boys have been earning some honest dollars.”) Reed studied prospective jurors’ occupations, associations, and living habits. Probing back two generations, he asked one would-be juror, “Are you any relative of the man by the same name who is a banker in Independence?”

  The senator studied a photograph of the forty-seven men impaneled, and penned brief notations by some.

  “Looks like a skinned cat.”

  “This is a weak man.”

  “Easily influenced.”

  “Never had a thought in his life.”

  Myrtle would not be judged by a jury of her peers. Eleven years after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, twenty-six states, including Missouri, still categorically excluded women from juries. Some states insisted that while voting was a right, jury service was a privilege. (Missouri would change its law in 1945.)

  Both the prosecution and defense sought a jury of married men. Of the twelve selected, nine were married, three single, and only one knew how to play bridge. The jury that would determine Myrtle’s fate included a night watchman, railroad conductor, factory foreman, insurance salesman, storekeeper, telegraph operator, and retired railroad agent. During the trial, jurors would be kept under guard at the Gladstone Hotel.

  Page announced in court he would not seek the death penalty, prompting Myrtle to smile, if weakly, while Jack’s sisters glared. Jim Reed said only, “My client is innocent.”

  Reed would appeal to the jurors’ chivalry. He would demonstrate that Myrtle, a chaste and honorable woman, had periodically suffered violence at the hands of her husband. Jack had struck and humiliated her. Reed would ask jurors, in effect, to protect Myrtle, as they might their own wife, mother, or daughter. He knew how jurors, particularly married ones, thought and felt. He knew about the shifting values, and verdicts, among juries in murder trials of wives who had killed their husbands. An old unwritten law allowed a man to murder a libertine who had had sex with his wife. And American courts early in the twentieth century seemed to approve a wife’s taking lethal action against a physically abusive husband. Of eighty white women who killed their husbands in Chicago between 1875 and 1920, only two were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms of more than a year. (Black women, who committed a disproportionate number of the husband killings in Chicago, were convicted at nearly five times the rate of white husband killers.) Murdering wives in Chicago during this period often came from wealthy families and were thirty-three years old on average—Myrtle’s age, in September 1929, was thirty-four. These women overwhelmingly acted to protect themselves from physical abuse, and typically used a gun. Most of these killings were premeditated, and many wives later expressed not remorse but relief, even joy, over the act. Some knew their legal defense strategies even before killing. One told Chicago police, “I look upon my act as a morally justifiable killing.” Another carried to the shooting a newspaper article that detailed the acquittals of fourteen husband killers. Chicago prosecutors blanched. In 1906, one defended the right of a husband to use physical force against his wife: “If this jury sets the precedent [that] any woman who is attacked or is beaten by her husband can shoot him, there won’t be many husbands left in Chicago six months from now.” In 1917, another prosecutor asked jurors if they planned “to join the great army of boob ex-jurors who have acquitted women of murdering their husbands although they were absolutely guilty.” Immediately after killing her husband in 1919, a Chicago woman said: “I will need no attorney—the new unwritten law will save me. I will tell my whole story to the jury and they will free me.”

  It was instructive to consider the two white husband killers in Chicago convicted of murder. One was an unschooled nineteen-year-old dressmaker from Mississippi, who, the prosecutor said, had accepted the attentions of other men. Therefore, he argued, the husband’s physical beatings of her were appropriate, and the killing could not have been in self-defense. In the other conviction, in 1919, a forty-six-year-old Swedish immigrant had stabbed her husband to death after he had attacked her with a knife. Neighbors te
stified that the wife had been a “husband beater” for years—she was much bigger than he—and that once she poured boiling water on him. A few weeks before the killing, neighbors saw the husband running from home holding a bloody handkerchief to his face, charging, “She tried to kill me.” A jury of married men convicted the wife, and she erupted in the courtroom: “I suppose if I had been young and beautiful, I would have been turned loose just as other women who have been tried for killing their husbands.”

  Reed knew Myrtle’s acquittal was not certain. Evelyn Helms, who shared the holding cell with Myrtle on the night Jack was killed, offered a cautionary tale. Jurors heard that Helms’s husband had starved and belittled her, and a stream of character witnesses testified to her essential decency. Still, in October 1929, with Jim Page prosecuting the case, Helms was convicted of murder and sentenced to ten years in prison.

  Reed would play the card of female virtue. He would show Myrtle as a loving daughter and an obedient wife, caring for her husband’s every need, frying his bacon, packing his traveling bag. Even as jurors and spectators heard Reed defend Myrtle’s honor, they could not know of the lawyer’s own indiscretions with Nell Donnelly. They certainly did not know that Nell was pregnant with Reed’s child.

  As the trial began, Nell, two months into the pregnancy, was not yet showing. Even so, she and the senator had to devise a course of action. Nell believed she and Reed must obtain divorces and marry. She would buy out Paul Donnelly’s half-share of the business. Paul’s threats to kill himself if Nell became pregnant were irrelevant now.