Before she shut herself up in her Natchez plantation home 40 years ago, Jane Surget ("Miss Jennie") Merrill, spinster, daughter of a onetime U. S. Minister to Belgium, was widely reputed for good looks and charm. Fortnight ago Miss Merrill emerged from her seclusion—a bullet-ridden corpse. Her murder not only stirred old memories among septuagenarians in Natchez but also gave romantics of the Southern press an opportunity to write floridly about departed social glories. The dead woman's father was Ayres P. Merrill, a friend of President Grant who sent him to Brussels....
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