Later, there was considerable dispute on the subject of this parting. Waters left London for France, on October 13, 1944. According to Bridget he asked for the transfer himself, and told her he never wanted to see her again and didn’t care if he ever saw the baby. He added, that he left her after she refused to agree to an illegal operation.

  According to the prosecution, at the trial, he was under orders to go to France and had to leave. And during the course of the trial the prosecution introduced a letter from Frank Waters to his mother which gave an entirely different picture, showing his attempts to make a success of the marriage, describing Bridget as a flighty, bad-tempered vixen and claiming that it was she who insisted on the illegal operation and forced him to consent to it even though he felt that a child would have a steadying effect on their married life.

  It was pointed out to me that there are several peculiar circumstances regarding this letter—dramatically described during the trial as “The slain man’s only testimony.” The letter tells how he felt on the way to Paris. There was a line or two to the effect that he was afraid of Bridget and that he was never so relieved in his life as when he got on that plane for Paris.

  Yet the letter itself was dated October 6th, 1944, and the uncontradicted testimony was that Waters flew from London to Paris on October 13—in other words he was apparently describing his emotions on that plane ride seven days before it actually took place. And no envelope was ever introduced to corroborate the supposed time of the mailing.

  Furthermore, there were references in the letter to the bombing of London, as well as a description of the trip to France. Under any kind of censorship, how could any of that information have gotten by? If that letter had been sent in October 1944, it would have had to go through censorship, but there was no sign whatever that it had been censored.

  Due to legal technicalities Bridget’s lawyer was unable to raise those questions during the trial.

  To get back to the months preceding the tragedy. Frank Waters returned to the United States late in 1945. In December he went to Las Vegas to try to get a divorce. The moment she learned of it the young Irish bride—now the mother of Frank Jr.—crossed an ocean and a continent to fight the action, bringing the baby with her. Bridget was very much opposed to a divorce and emphasized how few divorces there had ever been in her part of Ireland.

  Although Waters was opposed to her coming and was insistent on a divorce, he did rent a bungalow in an auto-court for her and the baby before her arrival on April 15th. Certainly the least he could do under the circumstances. But an interesting fact about that bungalow turned up at Bridget’s trial when the fourteen-year-old son of its manager told the jury that Frank Waters and an unnamed woman had occupied it the night of April 14th. The boy added a few details including the fact that Waters had asked him to “Clean up the room again” before Bridget’s arrival. Also that he had inadvertently revealed the incident to Bridget when she arrived.

  The Irish bride opposed the divorce action with a suit for separate maintenance, and the case was tried before a jury. Waters testified before that jury, in somewhat greater detail, much of what was in the letter introduced at the murder trial. Both he and Bridget had alleged extreme cruelty, yet in spite of this testimony, which paralleled the letter, the jury found for Bridget. The jurors not only found that Waters had been guilty of cruelty but also of desertion and non-support—failure to provide mother and child with the common necessaries of life. She was granted a decree of separate maintenance and $100 per month—$60 for herself and $40 for the child.

  In spite of everything that had happened Bridget remained in Las Vegas with her baby, living with a family for whom she acted as a governess. Time went by and Bridget made a series of futile attempts at reconciliation. During her trial one witness testified: “Bridget cried a great deal and said she would forget the past and forgive him if he would return to her. She said that she would reconcile if it were not for outside influences but that he had gone so far seeking a divorce that he wouldn’t back out. Bridget said her one hope was that he would come to love the baby enough to reconsider his decision and resume married life with her.”

  But all Bridget’s attempts were unsuccessful and later Bridget said that Frank Waters told her that her presence in Las Vegas embarrassed him. She declared that he had offered her four thousand dollars to consent to a divorce and give him the baby. “I accused him of seeking to buy the baby and ordered him out of the house.” But, she said, she did agree to consent to a divorce if first he would set up a home for herself and the baby and try their marriage again for six months. He refused.

  That was the state of affairs that fatal Labor Day in 1946. Frank Waters went to Bridget’s home to pick up Frank Jr., for a visit. His mother, Mrs. Martha Waters, waited outside the house. Just exactly what was said in that room, no one knows, only that a shot was fired killing Frank Waters and slightly wounding the baby boy, and that a moment later a police sergeant heard the Irish bride sobbing hysterically into a phone, “Get a doctor.”

  Las Vegas, Nevada, a pleasant little desert city was already noted, not to say notorious, from coast to coast. Its tourist attractions range from a variety of interesting gambling establishments to quick and easy divorces. Even the slot machines in the airport waiting room have received their share of fame. But the beautiful red-haired Irish war bride kept the town on nationwide front pages from Labor Day till November 7th when she was given her sentence and kissed her baby goodbye. In the weeks before the trial it looked as though everyone wanted to get into the act, including a famous Los Angeles attorney and the British Consul General’s office in San Francisco. And the mother of the slain man hired a press agent, to assist her “in demanding justice.”

  With that build-up it is not surprising that the trial of Bridget Waters played to a packed courtroom. By October 25th the jury had been selected and the show was on. The prosecution started out by describing the red-haired defendant as a “vindictive, revengeful, vicious woman, and quite an actress besides.” In his opening remarks the deputy prosecutor described the slain man as helpless and kind, and accused Bridget of shooting him so that no other woman could have him. He accused her of having planned the slaying from the time she borrowed the gun from a neighbor. She had been a nurse, he pointed out, and thus would have sufficient knowledge of anatomy to kill Frank Waters with a single shot from the tiny .22 caliber gun.

  The defense attorney stated that Bridget had borrowed the gun for protection when her employer was out of town, since there were rumors of prowlers in the neighborhood. It was Bridget who described the shooting, after telling of Frank’s renewed demands for a. divorce. The look on his face terrified her, she said. She went on in detail. “ ‘I am taking the baby where you won’t see him again,’ I said, and he grabbed my hand and the gun went off. I didn’t intend to kill him; I knew the child was in danger, and I wanted to get him out of the house.”

  The prosecution claimed that the gun would not have gone off that easily. It was a .22 caliber pistol about four inches long, looking more like a cap pistol or a water pistol than anything else. Over objection the prosecution succeeded in having each juror pull the trigger of the gun. It was difficult. The spring was so strong and tight that the jurors had quite a struggle pulling the trigger back to the firing point. But as an expert on guns pointed out (not in the courtroom) it had been in the hands of the prosecution for six weeks, had been sent to Los Angeles for a ballistics test and might accidentally have been adjusted for hard or easy firing.

  But the great question in the trial in its mass of conflicting and confusing evidence and its dramatic punctuations of outbursts from both Bridget Waters and the mother of the slain man was: Did the red-haired beauty shoot her husband in cold blood so that no other woman could have him, or was she trying to protect her baby and herself?

  And at last the final bit of evidence and testimony was presented to the jury and then in an oration colored by dramatic gestures and impassioned oratory the deputy prosecutor called Bridget’s defense “a shameless and brazen lie” and described her as “a murderess who had slain her husband for no reason at all after this court and this country had given her everything she wanted.”

  He demanded a conviction of first degree murder and remarked that, if the jury set Bridget free, “She may get a Hollywood contract or do a personal appearance tour. Perhaps the gun manufacturer will even seek her endorsement for his product.”

  The defense attorney in his address to the jury could not resist a sly remark to the effect that the deputy prosecutor “used to be in the movies and had acted with Mae West. He is still an actor and thinks that everybody else is.” He pointed out that during the divorce trial in that very court a jury had heard Frank Waters testify and had returned a verdict finding that he and not Bridget was guilty of extreme cruelty.

  And inevitably he concluded with a dramatic plea. “All she has is her baby, don’t take this mother away from her baby.”

  It took the jury of eight men and four women fifteen hours to make up their minds. They brought in a verdict of involuntary manslaughter. For a little more than a day there was speculation as to whether or not Bridget might still escape a jail or prison sentence. At any rate the highest sentence that could be given was from one to five years in prison. During that day Bridget was free on a five thousand dollar bail and spent the day playing with Frank Jr. It was reported that Mrs. Martha Waters, furious at the verdict, appealed to the Las Vegas police department “for protection” against her daughter-in-law.

  The next day at three o’clock Bridget received her sentence: one to five years. A new complication immediately arose. It appeared that there was a housing shortage in the Nevada State Prison at Carson City and until that little problem could be solved Bridget would have to stay in the county jail in Las Vegas. But wherever she serves her term arrangements will be made for “Butch” to be kept nearby so that he may see his mother as often as possible.

  And so ends the story that began when an attractive young American met a lovely, vivacious, red-haired Irish nurse on a window-shopping tour in North Ireland—a love story that included quarrels, recriminations, and reconciliations—a story whose locale moved from Ireland to London to Paris and at last crossed an ocean and a continent to reach its final tragic chapter in the sun-baked little desert city of Las Vegas.

  Yet the story is not ended for two of its principal characters—Bridget Waters and the chubby smiling baby boy she named Frank Waters Jr. True, baby Frank will always carry a tiny scar where he was grazed by the .22 caliber bullet that killed his father. But scars are only the memories of wounds. And Bridget, too, has her memories. But the time will come when the young mother and her son will be together again—and “Butch” may have a happy ending to his story after all.

  LADIES DON’T RUN ON THEIR HEELS

  This is a story about clues.

  Remember the legend of Ariadne, the Grecian gal who rescued Theseus from the Labyrinth with a ball of thread? All he had to do was follow the thread—

  That was a clue. And that, scholars, is where we get the word “clue.” From the Greek by way of the Latin glomus, or globus, a ball. Don’t ask me how globus got to be clue. For that I recommend to you the most ingenious mystery book of all time, the Dictionary. And the Greatest Detective of All Time, Noah Webster.

  Anyway, this, as I said, is a story about clues—too many clues!

  Maybe you don’t think there could be such a thing as a murder case with too many clues. That’s what I thought, too. And I’ll bet that’s what the police of Seattle, Washington, thought—till they found themselves confronted, one cold December day in 1944, with—well, we may as well call it that—The Case of Too Many Clues.

  It started right off that way, from the very beginning.

  A man stumbles into Columbia precinct station at 6 o’clock in the morning. His face and clothes are covered with blood. He collapses before he can utter a single word, and is taken to the hospital in an ambulance. There the doctors report that he has a fractured skull and cuts and bruises on his face. He hasn’t a chance to live, probably won’t even recover consciousness long enough to give his name.

  Next, a woman calls up. She says she has just come back from a neighbor’s house and there is blood all over the place. The address? 3912 Hudson Street—just one block from the Columbia precinct station.

  What have we here, one murder or two murders? That’s one for the police to answer.

  They hurry over to the house on Hudson Street, and—do they find any clues? I’ll let you be the judge of that.

  The back porch is stained with blood.

  Inside there are blood stains on the walls, around the light switches. You couldn’t ask for more perfect fingerprints. It’s as if the murderer—if there was a murder—was so proud of his handiwork that he stamped his signature on the wall in blood.

  Outside, in the yard near the back porch, is a large pool of blood. Lying near it are:

  A broken beer bottle.

  A set of false teeth.

  A pair of broken glasses.

  A woman’s black glove.

  A powder puff.

  A lipstick.

  A half-filled package of cigarettes.

  Enough clues for two cases. But is it two cases, or only one?

  And now the wheels of criminal investigation begin to grind. The woman who turned in the report is questioned. Her milkman, she says, called her attention to the blood on the porch, so she went over to have a look. She knows the man who lives in the house. His name is Harry Lyons and he’s a cook. He has a daughter who lives out at Richmond Beach, and another daughter who lives somewhere in the North End.

  One of the daughters is located. She goes to the hospital where the man who stumbled into Columbia station is lying, and she immediately identifies him as her father.

  Now the two cases are definitely one case, but who killed Harry Lyons, and why? The broken beer bottle and the whole general nature of the case points to a man. The glove, lipstick and powder puff point to a woman.

  And now one more clue turns up, footprints. Heel-prints, perfect prints of a woman’s high heel shoes, dug clean through the grass into the wet ground. You can tell from the spacing of the heel prints, from the length of the stride, that their wearer was running.

  Was it a woman, after all? The daughter who identified the victim as her father was inclined to doubt it. Harry Lyons was past sixty. She knew of no women in his life. He lived alone in the house. Only last night he had visited with his daughter, leaving her house at eleven and driving home alone in his red Chevrolet. “He mentioned that he had over fifty dollars in cash in his wallet. He was going to buy a bond with it today.”

  The police recalled that the victim’s pockets were empty when he staggered into the precinct station and fell unconscious on the steps. Also, that he wore no hat or overcoat, in spite of the cold. According to his daughter he was wearing a tweed overcoat and a grey felt hat when he left her house to drive home the night before. Both were hanging up in the closet when the police searched Lyon’s house that morning. The red Chevrolet was gone. Evidently Lyon’s assailant had helped himself—or herself—to the car, too, for a quick get-away.

  At least a motive had been established: robbery.

  Two theories of the case were now possible. Lyons had picked up a woman on the way home. Entering his house with him she had robbed him of his wallet and the keys to the car. On the way out of the house by the back door she had picked up a beer bottle. Pursuing her into the yard Lyons had been struck with the beer bottle, and the woman, in striking the blow, had dropped her purse on the ground, spilling some of its contents. Too scared to stop, she had snatched up the purse and left the glove, powder puff, lipstick and the half-filled package of cigarettes lying there, and made a run for the red Chevrolet. As for the broken glasses and the false teeth, they had been dislodged from Lyons by the impact of the blows.

  It was also possible that there were two assailants, a woman and a man, and it was the man who wielded the beer bottle. Wounds as forceful and as deep as those in Lyons’ skull, the police reasoned, would have been beyond the strength of any woman.

  Very gallant of the police, don’t you think? Or was it—after all those wartime lady riveters, to say nothing of lady wrestlers and weight lifters. Anyway, the police, who are always the first to cry cherchez la femme, were, in this case, inclined to underestimate the well-known “power of a woman.” Her muscle power, at any rate.

  So they fell back on the third possibility, that the robbery may have been the work of a woman, but the beer bottle attack was the work of a male accomplice.

  These were all very well as theories, but murder cases are not solved by theories alone. There is also the patient, slow but sure work of the laboratory and the investigator, and these were beginning to show results. For what had started out as a case of assault had by the following morning become a case of murder, Harry Lyons having died during the night without regaining consciousness.

  From the detectives on the case, who were losing no time in running down some of the many clues, came the information that the package of cigarettes bore the label, “Sea Stores.” Evidently the lady had a friend in the Merchant Marine. The lipstick and powder puff were popular brands, too numerous and too hard to trace. The glove offered better possibilities and an effort would be made to track it down to the place of purchase.

  A telephone call brought the next important piece of information. A dry cleaner reported that on the previous afternoon a woman’s coat and a pair of brown suede shoes which had been brought in for cleaning had blood on them. A prompt police call at the cleaning establishment bore out the proprietor’s report, The coat, front and sleeves, was stained with blood. The shoes had blood on the toes and the heels were caked with mud.

  “A young fellow brought them in,” explained the proprietor. “He gave me the name of Jennie Gritz. Said either he or she would call for the stuff.”

 

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