CRIME: Rough Week

Crime, as reported here & there in the U.S.:

¶ During a night of drinking in Little Falls, N.J., grey-haired Mrs. Geneva Humphrey decided that her middle-aged husband was taking up with another woman. At 3 a.m., lacking any other weapon, she chased him down the street with the family automobile. Husband Hugh Humphrey, a butler by trade, dodged nimbly into a driveway, discovered too late it was a dead end. His wife drove in after him and squashed him to death between the bumper and a cellar door.

¶ In a Chicago apartment, Mrs. Marian Caldwell dug carefully into a grapefruit, then dodged back—a .22 caliber bullet, fired from outside her window, had passed through her nose.

¶ In the Ozark hills, near Vienna, Mo., a carpenter named Henry Westerman was killed by a delayed reaction from a hen’s egg. Nineteen years ago a 12-year-old girl named Edna Adkins wrote her name and address on it with a pencil. The egg was sold, shipped to St. Louis, served hard boiled in a restaurant. Westerman got it, read it, ate it. Charmed, he looked up Edna, courted and married her. They had five children, the oldest of whom was a boy named Gene. Last week, because Edna had decided she liked Neighbor Ben French better than her husband, 15-year-old Gene shot Westerman through the head with a .22 rifle.

¶ In Chicago, police found the naked body of a stenographer named Frances Brown lying in a hotel bathroom with a 12-inch bread knife through her neck. Above her, scrawled in lipstick, was the legend: “For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more. I camnot [cannot] control myself.”