On NBC Radio at 1:30 A.M.,Ely Culbertson stood with his favorite partner and announced his genius confirmed.
He said the Bridge Battle of the Century had proved nothing he did not anticipate or predict, including the superiority of the Culbertson System. Exultant, he said his system was about two hundred points per rubber better than any other system.
He praised Sidney Lenz and his partners for their sportsmanship and “their almost angelic patience with me.”
He said he was convinced that, Depression or not, people naturally will work harder for their pleasures than for their necessities.
“It has been stated several times that I am one of the greatest showmen living today and even the elder statesmen of the ‘Official System’ announced that I appeared to be an illegitimate child of Bar-num, who, incidentally, I greatly admire for his unquestioned genius.
“People who talk a great deal about publicity and ballyhoo, as some do, seem to miss the most important point in the art of mass psychology,” Ely said. “Nothing can be ballyhooed which is not worthwhile. Bridge, an intellectual game, has become a powerful social factor for good, mainly because there is a great need and a great desire on the part of millions to forget, to relax, to quiet down the emotional waves aroused by everyday fears and worries.”
Returning to a central theme, Ely told listeners, “To women the most satisfying feature of this match is, and should be, to see a member of their sex exchange the most subtle inferences and out-maneuver, in the strategy of an intellectual struggle, the greatest of men experts.” Ely and Jo had played as partners for 85 rubbers and in aggregate won by a razor’s edge, 365 points, only 4 points per rubber.
But the ballyhoo artist understood his craft. Ely knew the margin of victory didn’t matter. Americans would remember only this: that Ely Culbertson had played with his wife, his favorite partner, they had used the Culbertson system, and they had won.
“What’s that, Sweetka?” Ely said on air. “Excuse me, please, my wife, who is standing by my side, is whispering something to me.” Five seconds of dead airtime passed. “No, darling, please don’t worry, I won’t say anything dreadful? What?” More silence.
“She says I am overbidding. I sign off.”
Hidden, even from Ely, was the truth that Jo could no longer tolerate her husband’s insensitivities and self-delusions. The Bridge Battle of the Century was over. Ely’s unraveling was about to begin.
THIRTEEN
Myrtle’s Murder Trial, Part 3
They were liars, Mayme Hofman and Alice Adkins. That’s what Jim Page wanted to tell the jury. He wanted to scream it not only to jurors and Latshaw, but also to the holy heavens: “THEY LIE!” Loyalty to a friend or daughter was one thing, but these lies were protecting a murderer.
When Latshaw, at long last, ruled that he would permit the prosecutor to impeach his own witnesses, Page stood before jurors on rebuttal and said, “I want to read to the jury a part of the statement made by Mrs. Hofman early in the morning following the tragedy. ‘The next thing I saw was Mrs. Bennett rushing into the front room. Before I knew what happened the shots were fired. I jumped out of the door and ran upstairs.’ “
Standing before the jury box now, Page said, “Mrs. Hofman testified at this trial that she saw no shots fired and that she did not see Mrs. Bennett rush across the room with the pistol in her hand. She testified that she left the apartment before the shooting began.”
Then Page said, “I want to read from the statement signed by Mrs. Adkins on the morning after the tragedy: ‘.… and I said to her, “There’s no need of your getting it [Jack’s pistol] tonight. He is not going away tonight”’.… Now I want to read from Mrs. Adkins’s testimony given at the preliminary trial. This question was asked by Mr. O’Sullivan. ‘Question: And you ran into the living room and Mrs. Bennett still had the gun in her hand? Answer: “Yes.”’” Page said, “And in another place is this answer: ‘And [Myrtle] said, “He hit me, he was fighting me and twisting my arm.”’” However, in this murder trial, Page reminded jurors, Alice Adkins had testified differently. Adkins said she did not remember whether her daughter had the pistol in her hand when she first saw her in the living room, nor did she remember what Myrtle said to her at that moment.
There, Page thought. Even though Latshaw had ruled earlier that testimony could be used only to impeach witnesses, and not to prove the guilt or innocence of Myrtle Bennett, Page felt better. At least jurors knew the truth.
His rebuttal had only begun. Page introduced seven character witnesses so that jurors would not believe, as Reed hoped, that Jack Bennett came home every night and struck his wife. Jack’s aunt Nellie Scyster, his brother Tom, a colleague at Hudnut, and several friends in Kansas City testified to his work ethic, civility, and honorable nature.
At last came the moment, according to Jim Page’s script, to drop the bombshell.
There was a sparkle in Byrd Rice’s eyes as he took the witness stand. Reed and O’Sullivan, sensing high drama, pulled their chairs closer to the counsel table. Assistant prosecutor Hill questioned Rice, though he did not get far, only a couple minutes, when he asked this question: “Mr. Rice, did you ever have occasion to talk to Myrtle Bennett since the homicide?”
Reed, rising to his feet: “Wait a minute.”
Latshaw: “Gentlemen of the jury, step to your room a moment.”
The purpose of Rice’s testimony, Hill explained to Latshaw, was to rebut what Myrtle had said on the stand. She had testified that she did not intentionally shoot her husband. Now, Hill told the judge, “I want to show through this witness, through conversation had with the defendant—”
“Ask the question,” Latshaw said, interrupting.
He did and, with jurors out of the room, Rice answered directly. He said on November 10, 1929, six weeks after the killing, he visited his aunt Myrtle at her apartment and they discussed the shooting.
From the counsel table, Page added, “[Myrtle] testified on the witness stand that she didn’t know what happened. We want to show by this witness that she told him exactly how it happened.”
“Then it was a part of your case in chief,” Reed argued.
“It could not be,” Page replied, “until she had testified.”
Reed demanded to know if Byrd Rice had told his story to the prosecutor’s office long ago.
Rice said he had.
He said the day after he spoke with Myrtle, he shared her story with George Charno, then an assistant prosecutor investigating the case. (Charno resigned from the prosecutor’s office seven weeks before the trial started.) “You told him all you know now, didn’t you?” Reed asked.
“I think so,” Rice said.
Latshaw had heard enough. Once more he excoriated Jim Page, this time for failing to place Byrd Rice on his list of witnesses before the trial. “It is one of the safeguards the law has seen fit to throw around a defendant to protect him. This is a part of the case in chief. You put the sister of the deceased [Annie Rice, Byrd’s mother] on the stand to show these same matters, knowing that they were in chief. At that time the question came up as to whether or not the sister had talked to the prosecuting attorney and she had not, and the court very properly permitted you to use her… [But] to allow the state sixteen months after it had knowledge of the witness and had not indorsed the witness’s name on the information, to use that witness, is to use the court as a trap, to take away from the defendant the constitutional right which [she] has.”
The prosecutors insisted they were unaware of Byrd Rice’s conversation with Myrtle until only a few days before, during the trial’s first days. His mother, Annie Rice, told them about it. The prosecutors said George Charno had never mentioned his conversation with Jack’s nephew. Hill phoned Byrd Rice immediately and heard his story. He wired money to Rice and told him to come to Kansas City at once.
That Charno had left the prosecutor’s office before the trial mattered not at
all, Latshaw said. “The knowledge of one prosecuting attorney is the knowledge of all,” he said.
Pointing at Myrtle, Page countered, “I am not bound by this woman’s testimony. If I have a witness who says—”
“I will not argue with you now, Brother Page,” Latshaw fumed. He ruled Byrd Rice could not testify and said, “You knew it sixteen months ago. Objection sustained. I am trying this case according to the law. Bring in the jury.”
Strategically, Page had hidden his most important witness and waited for the optimal moment to call him. This proved to be a grave miscalculation.
Jim Reed could barely contain his glee.
Rice stepped from the witness chair and walked past Myrtle Bennett, who diverted her eyes. As he left the courtroom, spectators buzzed, wondering foremost, “What did Myrtle say to him?”
The prosecution’s bombshell remained in the hands of Jack’s young nephew, unexploded.
That night, away from the courtroom, Byrd Rice told his story to a reporter from the Kansas City Times. Six weeks after the killing of his uncle Jack, Rice said he visited his aunt Myrtle. She told him essentially what she had told his mother, Annie Rice: “After the trial I will tell you why I shot Jack and then you won’t feel so prejudiced against me. Nobody but my God and I know why I killed him.” But then Myrtle went a step further. She walked Byrd Rice through the apartment and narrated the chase as she remembered it. In the den, she pointed to the spot where Charles Hofman had stood, near the bathroom, when she appeared with the pistol. Of Hofman, Myrtle told her nephew, “He could have stopped me.” She demonstrated how she had chased Jack with a pistol in her hand. She told Rice she fired four times, the first two from the den, just as Jack closed the bathroom door as a shield. She said she chased him through their bedroom and into the living room, where she fired twice more, the last bullet striking him in the back as he reached for the front door.
The next morning all of Kansas City knew Byrd Rice’s devastating story—except the jurors.
The suffragists notwithstanding, women always turned out for James A. Reed. His oratorical eloquence and rough-hewn Andrew Jackson-like handsomeness commanded their attention. Now would come Reed’s closing argument in the Bennett case—the senator’s last criminal trial, according to the newspapers. So day nine of the trial became a society event, attracting women from the Junior League and Kansas City’s arts and theater circles. Some of the city’s old legal lions, lawyers and judges who had watched Reed as prosecutor twenty years earlier, wangled choice seats. During a recess, Latshaw waxed on to a newspaperman, comparing the Reed from the 1910 Hyde trial to the Reed defending Myrtle Bennett. “Just a trifle slower than in former years,” the judge said of Reed, though “still a fighter and still a flashing star in a firmament of stars.” His closing argument would be yet one more quintessential Kansas City moment for James A. Reed, reminiscent (on a smaller scale) of the Century Ball, December 31, 1900, when more than ten thousand Kansas Citians, in ball gowns and tuxedos, gathered at Convention Hall and bid adieu to the nineteenth century, while their energetic young reformer mayor wrote a letter (placed in a time capsule) to Kansas City’s first mayor of the twenty-first century. Reed was the thirty-nine-year-old mayor then, and with typical flourish that night, he called his Kansas City “Queen of the West and Southwest.… wielding a scepter of supremacy over a territory vaster than the empire of Germany, richer than the valley of the Nile in the days of the Pharoahs.” In his letter to the future, Reed bowed solicitously to the ladies of his day, and wrote, “In 2001 you may have greater concourse of people at your ball, but the flower of your womanhood will not exceed the congregated loveliness here tonight.” Now, in the cold of winter, at the padlocked front gate outside the Criminal Courts Building, a few such Kansas City flowers, 1931 vintage, vied to get inside, some even offering guards five-dollar bribes. Radio station KMBC announced that as soon as the Bennett verdict was known, it would cut in on programming.
That morning, attorneys met with Latshaw to discuss jury instructions. Despite Page’s arguments, a first-degree murder charge was eliminated. Latshaw ruled that the evidence did not support it. The most severe charge the jury could assess was second-degree murder, which carried a sentence of ten years to life imprisonment. The jury’s other options were manslaughter or not guilty. According to Latshaw’s instructions, jurors could find Myrtle not guilty only if they believed the homicide had resulted from an accident or a mistake committed in the heat of passion and without unlawful intent.
From the four lawyers, the jury would hear four hours of closing arguments. The two assistant counselors outlined the case for their sides. Hill went first and, standing before jurors, lit into Charles Hofman’s credibility. “And this man, Hofman,” the assistant prosecutor said, “Hofman said he was paralyzed, ‘glued to the spot’.… [He] stood ‘glued to that spot,’ while the life of one of [his] friends was destroyed.” O’Sullivan’s turn came next. He said the Bennett case had drawn wide attention because it involved a young, wealthy couple playing the popular game of bridge. Then he said, “You’ve heard it said that I was a friend of the dead man. That is true. I played golf with him on that Sunday of the tragedy. I had visited at his home and at the home of this good woman [Myrtle]. My wife and I associated with them and had them visit us in our home. You’ve heard that I represent this woman because of that friendship, and that is true. I’m here because I know that if John Bennett were alive he would order me to protect this wife.”
Then it was Reed’s turn, the main event. Before Reed began, though, the judge called for a five-minute break to allow spectators to stretch, and smoke. A rocking chair was brought in and set behind Latshaw, and in that chair now sat R. R. Brewster, the Republican lawyer who had lost to Reed in the 1922 Missouri senate race, for decades Reed’s ardent admirer and implacable foe. Alone now, Reed stood in a small room behind the jury box. Gathering his thoughts, he smoked a cigar and stared out a window. More chairs were added in the courtroom, filling the center aisle. The break grew to fifteen minutes, with Reed standing, smoking, thinking. At last he returned to his seat, Latshaw nodded to him, and the senator approached the jury box.
Newspaper photographers stood poised, ready to take his picture. “Get it over,” Reed told them, gritting his teeth. All at once, the flashbulbs exploded, loud and brilliant, as if a meteor had struck the courtroom.
And then: “If your honor, please, and you, gentlemen of the jury …” Reed began his argument by reading from notes, and then removed his glasses. The rest he would do strictly from memory. There was fire yet in Reed, and now he unleashed it. He sneered and threw acid on the prosecution’s case. His chest puffed out, his right arm shot skyward, and twice he clapped his hands together with a bang to emphasize a point. He took Jack’s .32 Colt automatic in his hand, twirled it before jurors, walking in front of the jury box, this way and then that way. He pulled the trigger, and his body recoiled in horror, just as Myrtle’s must have. He was part scold, part friend, a thespian performing his high art. Reed called for O’Sullivan and for the third time in this trial they pantomimed the physical struggle for the weapon between Myrtle and Jack, Reed’s face—or, rather Myrtle’s face—writhing for effect. “Could you say if you were struggling,” the senator said softly to jurors, “that you could not get a bullet here?” He pointed to his upper back. “Nonsense.”
“The state started out to hang this woman,” Reed said. “And then they said they guessed they wouldn’t hang her, they would just send her to the penitentiary for life. That was all they wanted. The court tells you there isn’t a scrap of evidence of murder in the first degree.… There has been something said here about your duty to enforce the law. There are people who think that the law is a sword to be held in the hand of some cruel monster to chop down through bone and sinew and muscle, that that is the business of the law. The law is more shield than sword. And you twelve men are in this box today as much to shield as you are to punish. And you ha
ve no right to punish, no right to penalize, no right to create human suffering in the future, no right to destroy this woman’s life, unless under the evidence she is a guilty woman.”
He turned to portraiture, painting Myrtle with splashes of color and insight, up from poverty, both tragic and heroic: “The story of her school-day life, of the hard toil and labor of this pathetic figure [Alice Adkins], working to take care of her baby girl, brought moisture to the eyes of more than one of you,” Reed told jurors. He had been watching, and hoping, for their tears all along, of course, and he neglected to mention that Alice Adkins—“this pathetic figure” on this reference, “that old woman” on earlier references—was four years younger than he. That was not part of his script. Reed reminded jurors of Myrtle’s marriage to Jack, how she had worked in those early years, “and this old mother moves down her furniture—I expect it was pretty shackling stuff” to live with them. Of Jack, Reed said, “Years run on and he begins to have these fits of anger. Trifles light as air throw him off his balance. Where he got it, I don’t know. Inherited it, perhaps. Then we run along. Men of that kind and of that disposition are liable to tie themselves with hoops of steel to the affection of a woman.” Jack Bennett had slapped Myrtle twice previously, Reed said, “under the evidence. How much oftener I don’t know. But the point of the matter is she showed no hatred or resentment. She showed no disposition to kill or strike back. A crushed woman—the humiliated woman, sobs, ‘I cried.’ ‘I cried.’
“Did he handle her roughly that night?” Reed pulled out Myrtle’s sport suit and handed it to a juror, who studied it, and passed it to the next juror. “Here are the clothes she had on,” Reed said. “They speak to you with voiceless lips with a strength that nothing I can say will supplement.” Those rips in the outfit, Reed said, resulted from a man trying to physically overpower his wife.
Reed veered toward the peroration’s emotional center:
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