The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller

by Carol Baxter

  It was hard to concentrate. Part of her was listening to the voices in the nearby room. She heard Haden go to the bathroom, then she heard laughter from the two of them on his return. Her tension eased. As the voices died away, she fell asleep.

  She had just left alone two men—rivals for her affections—who had each professed such a passionate love for her that they were willing to kill themselves.

  She hadn’t considered the other possibility. Who would have?

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Latin American Airways attorney Ernest Huston was woken from a deep sleep by the ominous trilling of the telephone. A groggy look at the clock indicated that it was nearing 3 am on Thursday morning, 21 April.

  Chubbie was on the line. She sounded hysterical. ‘Haden Clarke has shot himself!’ She begged him to call a doctor and to come to the house immediately.

  Huston phoned the central telephone operator and requested that an ambulance and doctor be dispatched to Mrs Miller’s house. He dressed and drove there, through streets that were almost empty in these darkest hours before the dawn.

  The ambulance was waiting outside when he arrived, but there was no sign of the doctor’s car. As he walked along the moonlit front path, he could hear an eerie moaning from inside the house, a noise that raised the hairs on the back of his neck and triggered a visceral urge to flee. Chubbie opened the door, looking white-faced and distraught. ‘Thank God you are here!’ She pounded up the stairs, expecting him to follow.

  On the landing, they met an equally shocked-looking Bill. He exclaimed, ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it.’ Then he turned and led him to the sleeping porch, while Chubbie returned downstairs to wait for the doctor.

  The meaty odour of fresh blood hit him as he stepped into the room. The same spine-chilling moans, louder now, drew him towards a bed set against the far wall. The noises suggested that Haden was in excruciating pain but, from close up, it was clear that he was unconscious.

  Blood was everywhere, matting his dark hair, running down his once good-looking face, washing over his neck and onto his pillow. A gun lay on the bed near his waist, partly concealed by his restless body.

  Bill said, ‘Haden left these’ and handed him two notes that had been sitting on the table. One was addressed to Chubbie and signed Haden. It said:

  Chubbie, The economic situation is such I can’t go through with it. Comfort mother in her sorrow. You have Bill, he is the whitest man I know.

  The other, signed H, was addressed to Bill and said:

  Bill, I can’t make the grade. Tell Chubbie of our talk. My advise is never leave her again.

  Huston read the notes then passed them back to Bill. They stayed for a moment looking down at the gravely wounded lad and then headed downstairs to speak to Chubbie.

  Still no sign of the doctor. Huston called the operator and asked if she had contacted a physician. The woman said that he was on his way.

  They waited silently, trying to come to grips with the enormity of what had happened. Chubbie asked what they should do about the notes. She was concerned about a scandal if they became public. Bill suggested tearing them up. Huston dismissed the idea. Donning his attorney’s hat, he said that the notes must be kept. They might be important.

  Charles P. Ditsler, the ambulance driver for W.L. Philbrick’s Funeral Home, was waiting impatiently. When he had arrived at the house and discovered that Clarke was still alive, he had told Clarke’s housemates that the fellow must be taken to the hospital immediately. Mrs Miller—Chubbie, as they called her—objected, saying that a doctor was on the way. Ditsler agreed to wait. If a doctor was coming, it would be best to have his authorisation before moving the critically injured man.

  When the doctor didn’t appear, Chubbie phoned Clarke’s physician and said, ‘Doctor, Haden has shot himself. He’s bleeding terribly. Can you come right away?’

  Another five minutes passed. Ten. When there was still no sign of either doctor, Ditsler requested permission to use the telephone. He wanted his superior, O.C. Yeargin, to come to the house and authorise Clarke’s removal to the hospital. As he dialled the number, Chubbie asked if he was calling the police. ‘It is not my duty,’ he told her and returned to his call.

  By the time Yeargin arrived, Ditsler had been waiting for nearly forty minutes, unable to do anything while he listened to the ghastly moans. Neither of the two doctors had appeared, despite further calls. After Yeargin provided the necessary authorisation, Ditsler and his offsider picked Clarke up, one clutching him under the arms, the other holding him by the legs. They bundled him down the stairs and out to the ambulance, then drove him to Jackson Memorial Hospital, ten miles away in north-west Miami.

  Haden’s physician, Dr Carlton Deederer hadn’t been able to find the house among the myriad streets and terraces with similar names. Around 3.30 am, he returned home and phoned the physicians’ exchange, asking for directions. He finally reached the place just after the ambulance had sped off. Collecting the two aviators, he took them to the hospital, leaving Attorney Huston sitting in his own car outside the house in case the police showed up.

  When he entered the hospital, the pungent odour of disinfectant greeted him. The nursing staff took him to see Haden. He found the lad still unconscious, still moaning. He removed Haden’s blood-saturated bandages and inspected his injuries. The right side of his head was bleeding and his hair was matted with congealed blood. He separated the hair and located the entrance wound. Continuing his search, he found the bullet’s exit wound on the left side of Haden’s head.

  From the bullet’s trajectory through Haden’s brain, it was clear that he wouldn’t survive his devastating injuries. If his family wanted to say their goodbyes, they would need to do so immediately.

  Police emergency officer, Earl S. Hudson, had received a call from the hospital advising him of the gunshot victim’s admission. Finding the two aviators waiting tensely outside the emergency room, he asked what had happened. They said that Haden Clarke had shot himself. Hudson, who knew Haden personally and had heard him speak of Chubbie and Bill, asked why the fellow had done such a thing. Bill said that Haden had contracted a contagious disease and that it was preying heavily on his mind.

  Hudson had rules to follow for gunshot cases. He told the aviators they were to return to their home with him so he and his colleague could search the property.

  When they arrived back at the house, Attorney Huston stepped from his parked car and joined them. Bill escorted them to the sleeping porch and showed them Haden’s bed. Hudson placed a handkerchief over the gun—a Colt .38—and picked it up. He searched for the bullet in the bedding and around the bed, but couldn’t find it.

  After exploring the cottage, he asked if Haden had left a suicide note. Chubbie gave him the note addressed to Bill. When Hudson said that the ambulance officer had mentioned two notes, she protested that one was addressed to her personally but handed it over anyway.

  After he completed his search and said that he was ready to return them to the hospital, Chubbie begged to be allowed to go to the Everglades Hotel so she could talk to Haden’s mother. When they reached the hotel and asked for Mrs Clarke, they were told she had received a call from the hospital and would be downstairs in a moment.

  Dr Deederer had also arrived at the hotel by the time Haden’s mother entered the lobby. He was Mrs Clarke’s doctor as well as her son’s and he started telling her about Haden’s condition, detail by gruesome detail.

  She interrupted him, saying ‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Then she asked bleakly, ‘Is there any chance?’ Gravely Dr Deederer reported that there was no chance of him surviving, that his injuries were too severe. She said that if her son wasn’t going to live, she saw no need to go to the hospital to see him.

  Before she returned to her quarters, Officer Hudson showed her the typewritten note addressed to Chubbie, the one with the full signature. Mrs Clarke inspected it. She said that she wasn’t sure if the signature was her son’s; however, she knew he wa
s worried about money. He had told her so the previous day. In view of their conversation and the notes, she thought it likely that he had taken his own life.

  Hudson took the aviators back to the hospital. But before they could see Haden, two investigators from the state attorney’s office approached them. They were to be taken to the courthouse for questioning.

  Haden Clarke died at 11.20 that morning, alone, without his mother or fiancée to kiss him goodbye.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  State Attorney N. Vernon Hawthorne had no intention of assigning such a high-profile case to an underling. His tenure was in the hands of the voting public so he would leave nothing to chance in a case that would surely generate international publicity.

  He and his team recognised that there were three possible causes of Haden Clarke’s death: accident, suicide or homicide. They soon eliminated ‘accident’ as a possibility. It wasn’t as if Clarke was drunk or was hunting in the Everglades.

  Supporting a hypothesis of suicide were Clarke’s two notes along with his housemates’ statements that he had shot himself. Significantly, his housemates’ accounts of the evening were essentially the same—similar enough to be consistent yet different enough to indicate that the pair hadn’t rehearsed them. Additionally, there was Mrs Clarke’s remark that her son had complained of financial difficulties.

  However, Mrs Clarke had also said that she wasn’t sure if the signature on the farewell note was her son’s. They would need to compare the notes with Haden’s correspondence to obtain clarification.

  If it was homicide, there were four possible perpetrators: Captain Lancaster, Mrs Miller, the two of them, or a person or persons unknown. When Hawthorne’s team found no evidence to support a hypothesis of homicide, they told the hovering pressmen that the two notes pointed conclusively to suicide.

  But as the day progressed, his investigators read eye-opening papers taken from Mrs Miller’s house. Love letters between the three residents. Letters detailing Lancaster’s involvement in a smuggling operation.

  Hawthorne told the press later that day, ‘We are positive there was a love triangle behind this thing, but whether it was murder or suicide, we do not yet know.’ When asked about his murder suspicions, he said that he didn’t suspect Mrs Miller because her story rang true. However, he said nothing about Lancaster, except to add that the two aviators were being kept in custody overnight for further questioning.

  By mid afternoon, news of the shooting death had spread across the country. Little was said about the victim, apart from the erroneous description of him as an aviator. What hooked the public’s interest—and later filled the nation’s headlines—was the involvement of Mrs Miller, who had been a household name since her dramatic disappearance in the Bahamas.

  Locked in Miami’s gaol, Chubbie was unaware that her name was being publicly bandied about as a suspect in a possible murder, although it was clear from the investigators’ questions that they were considering the possibility that she or Bill had killed Haden. For hour after hour she was besieged with questions: about the love-triangle, the events of the previous evening, her discovery of her blood-covered fiancé. Over and over she repeated her answers until she was stumbling over her words, traumatised, heartsick, exhausted. They seemed to believe her when she said she didn’t shoot Haden—she loved him!—but did they believe Bill? She hadn’t seen him since they reached the county gaol and courthouse. They had been interrogated and incarcerated separately.

  That evening, she was released to attend Haden’s funeral, escorted by a deputy. As she slipped into the chapel via a side entrance, Haden’s mother looked up and saw her. For a moment, she gazed at the older woman, who looked bereft and bewildered, as if she couldn’t comprehend what had happened. Then she slipped into Mrs Clarke’s embrace and the two of them wept.

  She wasn’t allowed to attend Haden’s burial the next morning. She wouldn’t discover until much later that the state attorney had allowed Haden’s remains to be embalmed and buried without ordering an autopsy.

  Although Hawthorne told the press on Friday that he still remained guided by Mrs Clarke’s belief that her son had committed suicide, it turned out that Mrs Clarke herself was less certain. Dr Deederer had told her that neither he nor the embalmer had found any trace of powder burns or marks on Haden’s head or body, indicating that the shot was not fired at close range. The doctor had also found evidence of a probable basal fracture of the skull, which was unlikely to have been caused by the bullet because the fracture was about three inches from the bullet’s path. Additionally, he had found bruises above Haden’s right ear, while the embalmer had found a bruise on Haden’s shoulder. These were possibly caused by blows from a knuckle or gun butt and raised the possibility that there had been a struggle before the shot was fired.

  Based on this new information, Mrs Clarke told the Miami Daily News that she no longer accepted without reservation that her son had killed himself. Indeed, in the hours since his death, she had remembered that he’d always had an aversion to suicide and was afraid of firearms. Even as a little boy, he had refused to play with toy guns. She told the pressmen, ‘When Captain Lancaster ran out of money during a recent trip to Mexico, he telegraphed back that he was going to pawn his pistol. Haden told me he hoped fervently that Lancaster wouldn’t bring the damn thing back.’ She added that she would accept a verdict of suicide if the authorities so decided but currently found such a theory incomprehensible.

  Mrs Clarke and Dr Deederer were in attendance when Hawthorne held a press conference that Friday evening. He reported that the investigation was ongoing and proceeded to describe Dr Deederer’s discoveries. He then talked about the handwriting analysis, saying that the experts had found nine points of difference between the signature ‘Haden’ on one of the suicide notes and other specimens of Clarke’s handwriting. For confirmation, they were awaiting a letter Clarke had sent his brother the day before his death. They had also found differences in phraseology and spellings. Notably, the word advice had been spelt advise in one of the suicide notes, yet the university-educated writer always spelt the word correctly. And the suicide notes omitted the space usually found at the end of a typewritten sentence, a space always found in Clarke’s typewritten prose. Significantly, when Lancaster was asked to type a series of sentences, he omitted that same space and typed the word advice as advise.

  Lancaster’s pillow was another source of concern. Lancaster had told the investigators he was asleep when Clarke shot himself, yet his pillowslip was smooth in the police photographs. When asked why it wasn’t rumpled, Lancaster had said that either the ambulance man or the physician must have smoothed it. Yet these men had signed statements vowing they hadn’t touched the pillow.

  And a blood-stained pencil had been found on the sleeping porch.

  While Hawthorne didn’t say anything more about the blood-stained pencil, it wasn’t hard for the reporters to work out its significance. If this was the pencil that had signed the suicide notes, how could it be blood-stained? Unless the hand that signed the notes had done so after Clarke had been shot.

  Hawthorne chose not to disclose one more finding. The ballistics expert had been unable to find any usable fingerprints on the gun Lancaster had admitted bringing back to Miami with him, the gun that had shot Haden. It had been wiped clean.

  While Hawthorne continued to hold the aviators in custody, he granted permission for Chubbie to communicate with the press. She issued a statement saying that she had loved Haden with all her heart and soul, and was proud they were to have been married.

  The next day Miami discovered that a local resident had taken issue with Chubbie’s appropriation of Haden’s affections. A young attractive blonde woman entered the state attorney’s office and claimed that she, rather than Mrs Miller, was Haden Clarke’s fiancée. Her name was Peggy Brown and she had come to help them determine whether Haden had killed himself or had been slain.

  When Hawthorne’s team investigated her claims,
they discovered that she had been seen repeatedly in Haden’s company. She was also the sister-in-law of Officer Hudson, the policeman dispatched to Mrs Miller’s house after the shooting. Could this simple ‘suicide’ get any more complicated?

  Hawthorne released Chubbie at 4 pm on Saturday afternoon, two-and-a-half days after the shooting. Mrs Clarke’s solicitor, James H. Lathero, collected her and took her to the Everglades Hotel, where the three of them discussed her future. Mrs Clarke raised the possibility of taking over the ghost-writing task herself. In the short term, though, they decided that Chubbie would stay overnight at the hotel and return to her home the next day.

  Bill joined them at the hotel later that evening. After being released from Hawthorne’s custody, he had been detained by federal authorities for questioning about Latin American Airways. The authorities later told the press that he had helped them in their enquiries and they were convinced he wasn’t a party to the smuggling conspiracy.

  Chubbie took him to see Haden’s mother.

  Bill moved over to her and placed his arm around her shoulders. Looking squarely into her eyes, he said, ‘Mrs Clarke, I want to tell you that I didn’t kill your son.’

  ‘I am glad to hear you say that,’ she answered.

  She would later report the conversation to the press.

  Chubbie and Bill returned to their house the following day. It looked as if a tornado had swept through. All their letters and personal papers were missing and a telegram from Haden’s wife was lying crumpled on the floor. As they cleaned up the mess, they could only hope that the question of murder had been laid to rest and that they were not only picking up the pieces of their shambolic home, but also of their lives.