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"Bobby" Edwards, son of devout Congregationalist parents, was a clerk with ambitions to be a minister. He became intimate with his next-door neighbor, a telephone operator named Freda McKechnie, whose father worked in the same coal company as Edwards' father. Both families attended the Bethesda Church. Three years ago Bobby Edwards went off to school at East Aurora, N. Y., fell in love with a plain-looking teacher named Margaret Grain. Their unusual romance was revealed to the jury of anthracite miners in terms of 172 letters written by Edwards to Miss Grain after he returned to Edwardsville. Mostly too hot for even sexational newspapers to handle, the letters described a physical attachment so feverish and inordinate that Edwards' father felt obliged to leave the courtroom while the assistant district attorney was sonorously reading them. As for Edwards, he offered to plead guilty and throw himself on the court's mercy if the letter-reading ordeal could be stopped.
But it all went into the record, and helped make the jury believe that Edwards must have been determined to escape his obligation to pregnant Freda McKechnie. On the night of July 30 he drove with her to Harvey's Lake. Although it was raining, they slipped into their bathing suits in the automobile and went for a swim. Freda did not return home. Edwards told police a half-dozen stories of accidental death and incriminating circumstances. The last version, which he gave firmly from the witness stand last week, was that Freda had slipped while stepping from the dock into a rowboat, had cracked her head on the boat. Fearing she was dead, he hit her with his blackjack, he said, because "it occurred to me that if there were only some mark on Freda's body it would look like an accident and leave me out of it."
In reporting the Gillette case as An American Tragedy (the second volume is almost a stenographic record of the trial) Author Dreiser made Society the villain for having endowed Clyde Griffiths with a sordid background and for tormenting him with emotional stresses with which he was not equipped to deal. (The film version, starring Phillips Holmes and Sylvia Sidney, angered Dreiser to the point of trying to keep it off the screen because, he complained, it slighted the Dreiser sociology.)
Dreiser's report of the Wilkes-Barre trial last week likewise was an indictment of the "system." And, like the novel, his accounts were turgid, myopic, verbose, sorely needing the astringent blue pencil of a copy desk. He seemed to be arguing that had the boy had more money, he would not have got himself or his girl into trouble. Clearest point: "I am inclined to agree with the French that crimes which concern love and passion and the ambition of youth are nothing which the law, in its cold, calculating and in the main commercial mood, should have anything to do with. . . ."
The judge was moved to warn Author Dreiser to cease making faces at the jury.
The jury convicted Robert Edwards of first degree murder, sentenced him to death in the electric chair.
*A Tower Magazine, sold in Woolworth stores. Tower's gumchewers' magazines are headed by able Publisher Catherine McNelis, who also publishes the intellectualist American Spectator, of which Dreiser was a onetime editor.