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Drop Dead. Another time she was sent out to cover what the police thought was an accidental killing. A woman had been shot to death in a holdup scuffle. Aggie took the victim's husband, Sam Whittaker, down to confront the burglar for an old-fashioned "I-Accuse" picture. As Whittaker obediently shook his forefinger at the young fellow, Aggie spotted a wink passing between them. She tipped off the police, who got a confession from the "burglar" that the scuffle was staged so that Whittaker could shoot his wife. Confronted with the confession, Whittaker shouted, "If I'm guilty, may God strike me dead." He later dropped dead in prison.
Aggie had a hunch about Laurel Crawford, too. Crawford insisted he had accidentally driven his car over a cliff, killing his wife, three children and a friend. Aggie thought he was overacting the grief-stricken father. When she pointed out that Crawford's shoes were not scuffed enough for him to have climbed up from the cliff's foot, he was charged with murder. The court found that he had pushed the car over the cliff, sentenced him to die.
Louise Peete, a seemingly gentle and gracious lady who shot two victims in the back and drove three husbands to suicide, asked to see Aggie before she was executed recently. Another convicted murderess, Nellie Madison, won a commutation to a life term, after Aggie wrote a sympathetic, exclusive series about her in the Her-Ex. It was Aggie who got the only exclusive interview with Louise Overell, the teenager now on trial for the time-bomb murder of her parents. Aggie was also the first reporter on the scene of the "Black Dahlia" murder; she beat the chief of the homicide squad to the hacked-up corpse. For such feats, Hearst picked Aggie to give some lessons in crime reporting to his granddaughter, Phoebe.
City Editor, Honey. Aggie starts work at 6 a.m. with a breakfast sandwich in hand. At first, on the desk, she had stage fright. Says she: "I'd sit there for ten minutes with a handful of clips before I'd have nerve enough to ask somebody to go to work on them." A gregarious soul who "loves everybody," Aggie still goes easy with her 28 reporters and nine photographers. She runs all nine Her-Ex editions; Co-City Editor Eddie Krauch takes over when she isn't on deck.
In Aggie's view her new job has its drawbacks: "You can't have any fun. You can't kick a policeman's shins and you can't pull any shenanigans. No overtime pay and no expense account." It also has its compensations: "Imagine anyone calling his city editor 'honey' and 'dear.' I get that plenty from my boys." Aggie has only two thoroughly female ambitions: to write a book called Things I Know about Newspapermen Their Wives Don't Know, and "to sit on the desk and have them call me Grandmaw."
*A popular barroom definition of an assistant city editor: a mouse learning how to become a rat.