The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF STARR FAITHFULL by Morris Markey

Starr Faithfull was found dead on a deserted beach in June 1931. She was the well-to-do daughter of a Manhattan society couple, but her story is a rackety one of murder, cover-up and political intrigue. Her life and unexplained death still fascinates. Police sources were quoted as saying Faithfull-“an aspiring writer” who apparently never wrote anything-had been kidnapped from her home in Manhattan and brought to Long Beach, where she was killed and her body tossed into the surf. The papers also noted-in a way that suggested it meant something to the case-that Faithfull’s close neighbour in New York was the mayor, James J. Walker. Investigators implied that she was a drunken nymphomaniac who frequented “underworld haunts” and “revelled in the company of known killers and desperate criminals”. Police also found her diary that centred on “men, men, men-all sorts of men in all walks of life”. One source said she met her killers at a party aboard a cruise ship, the Franconia. Here, journalist Morris Markey only hints at the back story (he ignores most of Faithfull’s wild shipboard partying and Manhattan society affairs) but his treatment of the case is interesting because he is anxious to suggest a possible solution to the mystery. Puzzled by the strange manner of Starr Faithfull’s death, Markey called on the dead woman’s family and became intrigued by their reactions. His solution seems highly plausible, although no one seems to have thought of it at the time. Markey was the original Reporter At Large for the New Yorker, and many of his articles for that magazine have become classics in journalism schools.

The heat wave was subsiding. All over the country the committee of American mayors who had been visiting in France were returning to their respective constituents, and these, except in a few churlish instances, greeted them with flags and whistles and even listened to their speeches. Mr Hoover’s offices in Washington were pleasantly devoid of news. And Mr Daniel Moriarty, up with the dawn to meet the tide, was strolling the sands of Long Beach-some twenty miles out from New York-searching for drift that he might turn to a profit. The flotsam that he came upon, finally, was of a fabulous nature indeed. It was the body of a young woman, really a beautiful young woman, clothed in a silk dress and nothing else, and quite dead. Within half a dozen hours the front pages of the country’s newspapers, on that eighth day of June, 1931, had a new name to fit into their headlines. It was a singularly poetic name. Starr Faithfull.

It lies within the very nature of a mystery story that it must be told backward. The only possible beginning is the corpse. And then things are learned and told about the corpse and the creature that existed before it became a corpse, until at last we do not have a corpse at all, but a living and very human being to remember, with friends and enemies, with hopes and defeats, with sins, and passions, and now and again a few nobilities.

Now be it observed that the District Attorney of Nassau County, the county in which Long Beach is situated, was a man named Elvin N. Edwards. Mr Edwards was just dusting his hands after sending a prominent thug named “Two-Gun” Crowley to the electric chair when this new sensation, this mystery with the wonderful name, came within his jurisdiction. He had discovered already that publicity was no dainty drink but wine with delight in every bubble. We are indebted to his muscular management of the events that ensued, almost as much as we are indebted to the newspapers, for the strange and fascinating story that was unfolded in the weeks to follow-weeks when nothing much was happening except heat, and an occasional thunderstorm, and President Hoover speaking peevishly to the Emperor of Japan about certain dull happenings in a place called Manchuria.

Starr was not born Faithfull. She was the daughter of Frank W. Wyman, occupation unknown, and of a Boston woman who possessed what once were called good social connections. Ten years before our story opens, the mother had divorced Wyman and married Stanley E. Faithfull, a retired manufacturing chemist and occasional inventor of devices that never seemed to work. The Faithful ménage, in the spring of 1931, consisted of the mother and the stepfather-whose name had been eagerly adopted by all hands-of Starr, who was now twenty-five, and her sister Tucker, younger by two or three years.

The first, hurried reports characterized the dead girl as an heiress, “the brown-haired, brown-eyed product of a Boston finishing school, who preferred to be alone, reading volumes on philosophy and kindred subjects.”

But that impression did not survive the first twenty-four hours of journalistic labor. As always in such circumstances, there were friends eager to talk, and they told the tale of an elusive and difficult young woman, devoted to the proprieties and yet capable of the most bizarre escapades, racing at full throttle to escape from the role into which existence had cast her, and from herself.

This urge to escape inevitably guided her toward the sea. She had made two trips to England. But in this, her last spring, she had no money for another voyage. So she haunted the liners at their berths, reveling with the tourists as they prepared to sail and then, with such painful reluctance as we may imagine, stepping back ashore at the last minute.

On 29 May, ten days before her dead body was found, she had been overcome at the last moment by that reluctance. She went aboard the Cunard liner Franconia to see the ship’s surgeon, Dr George Jameson-Carr. She was madly in love with him. Her emotion was not reciprocated, and for several months Dr Jameson-Carr had been embarrassed by her eager attentions, her incessant confessions of devotion. On this day, she was pretty drunk when she went aboard the ship. Drinking was not her vice, ordinarily. Those were, of course, the bootleg days, and because he was terrified of speakeasy gin her stepfather, Faithfull, often mixed a flask of Martinis for Starr to take with her. As often as not she came home altogether sober, the flask still full. But on this day of waning May she was tight-volubly and almost boisterously tight.

Dr Jameson-Carr sent her away from his sitting room some time before the ship’s sailing hour. But she did not go ashore. She mingled with the passengers, and the Franconia was well down the bay before her presence became known to the ship’s officers. The vessel was stopped, and she was put ashore by a tugboat after a scene in which the doctor’s embarrassment was made public property. The ship, with Jameson-Carr still aboard, of course, sailed on for England.

The next day, 30 May, she wrote a letter to him.

On 2 June, she wrote another one.

On 4 June, she wrote still a third.

These letters will appear somewhat later on in our narrative.

June 4, a Thursday, was the day she disappeared from home. She had been, apparently, in normal spirits-which is to say, irritated by her incessant febrile depression, and trying to compensate that emotion with little bursts of gaiety and generosity. The family was low in funds Only three dollars could be spared for her purse. Nobody in the house asked where she was going or when she would be back, and she did not volunteer the information.

This is the time for our first glimpse at the Faithfull home. (We shall, before the end, visit it again.) Nobody ever was able to find out, not even the strong-minded District Attorney, Mr Edwards, the source of the Faithfull family’s income. There were theories, beginning with blackmail and ending with an international drug ring, but they were mere flights in the tabloids, and nobody ever took them seriously. There is a fairly sound assumption that we are able to make about the family finances, but that, again, belongs somewhat further on.

However-

The family lived in a second-floor walk-up apartment at No. 12 St Luke’s Place, in Greenwich Village, three doors away from the home of Mayor Jimmy Walker. The building itself was almost identical with the Walker home, an early New York façade with a high front stoop, not without its attraction to the passer-by. The flat cost eighty-five dollars a month to rent, and it was distinctly not roomy enough for four people. But in it there was more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of very beautiful antique furniture-Empire and Chippendale chests, a buffet by Sheraton. Such things.

There were, to be sure, manifestations of eccentricity in great abundance in this family. But Stanley Faithfull, according to his lights, was a devoted father even to a bewildering girl who was not his own daughter. When Starr did not come home on the night of 4 June, he was worried. And by nine-thirty the next morning he was at Police Headquarters. There he gave a confidential report to the Missing Persons Bureau-which meant that his wish to avoid publicity would be respected. He also telephoned numerous friends and acquaintances, asking if they had seen Starr, and even wrote notes to certain of the girl’s acquaintances whom he had not met.

The Police Department put in motion its routine confidential search. It got nowhere. The next news of Starr Faithfull was telephoned by an excited Mr Daniel Moriarty to the Long Beach police station.

Late in the afternoon an assistant medical examiner reported upon the findings of the first autopsy (there were to be two more). Starr Faithfull had died by drowning, he reported, and her body had been in the water at least forty-eight hours. There were no traces of alcohol, but she had taken from one to two grains of veronal-possibly enough to cause unconsciousness but certainly not enough to cause death. She had also eaten a large meal. There was much sand in the lungs, suggesting that she had still been breathing as she lay in the shallow water at the edge of the beach. There were many bruises, resembling finger marks, on her upper arms. And she had been criminally assaulted. The last phrase was the euphemism of the day for rape.

Within a very short time, however, the diagnosis of rape began to lose its validity, as other doctors insisted they could find no evidence at all to support it.

District Attorney Edwards issued the first of his many hundreds of interviews: there was no question whatever but that the girl had been murdered, and he was hot on the trail of the villain who did it.

Now in order to understand the theory which leaped at once to the minds of detectives and newspapermen, you must be familiar with the geography of the scene. The 130-mile-long, narrow strip of sand called Long Island lies almost due east and west, immediately off the coast of New York and Connecticut. Steamships sailing from New York pass along the length of it as they set their easterly course, and often are in plain sight from the beaches.

An immediate investigation showed that two big liners, the Mauretania and the lle de France, had sailed for Europe in the late afternoon or early evening of 5 June (and presently we shall examine evidence tending to show rather clearly that this was the day on which Starr Faithfull died). During the late afternoon, she certainly went aboard the Mauretania. And, just as certainly, she left it well before sailing time. There were numerous witnesses to both of these facts. Certain other evidence, not nearly so convincing, indicated that she also went aboard the Ile de France, lying at her pier a short distance from the Mauretania. This could never be definitely proved. But, supposing that she did go aboard the Ile de France, there is no evidence whatever that she left it before sailing time-10 p.m.

An immediate assumption was almost unanimously agreed upon: the girl had remained aboard one of the ships, secretly, and while the vessel was passing Long Island she had jumped or fallen overboard. The most emphatic dissent from this opinion was delivered in a muted bellow by Mr Edwards. Starr Faithfull had been murdered. No doubt about it. He was promptly joined in this position by Stanley Faithfull. It was an outrage upon the memory of his daughter, he said, to suggest that she had done away with herself. Somebody had killed her. Her death must be avenged.

Well, naturally, the newspapers were eager to throw away their own theories and subscribe to the theory of murder-the more foul and revolting, the better. A suicide is perishable news indeed. A murder mystery is durable goods, front-page stuff for weeks.

But even as they cast a solid vote for murder, the newspapers clung to the romance of the ocean liners. Somebody had thrown her overboard. Had Starr Faithfull ever been to Long Beach before in her life? Did she know anybody there? The answer was a reasonably accurate no.

Meantime the past of the unhappy girl began to emerge. The first item was simple scandal. Just a year before her death she had been in trouble with the police. People heard screams coming from a room in an uptown hotel, and called a patrolman. When he entered the room he found Starr lying naked on the bed, and a vigorous-looking young man in an undershirt regarding her with angry eyes. There was a half-empty bottle of gin on a table.

The man said he was Joseph Collins, and showed his army discharge papers to prove it. He either did not know or would not tell Starr Faithfull’s name.

The police officer seemed more than usually dense. Despite the fact that Starr was rather seriously beaten up by fists, he told Collins to get out-make himself scarce-which he did, permanently, never being heard of again. Starr was revived and taken to Bellevue, where she spent the night. The hospital record was brief and to the point:

“Brought to hospital by Flower Hospital ambulance. Noisy and unsteady. Acute alcoholism. Contusions face, jaw, and upper lip. Given medication. Went to sleep. Next a.m. noisy, crying. People came. Discharged.”

Her own statement to the hospital people reads: “I was drinking gin as far as I know. This is the first time I have had anything to drink for six months. I don’t know how many I had. I don’t remember. I suppose somebody knocked me around a bit.”

But the first hint of something darker and more appalling than mere scandal came now with a series of rumors and half hints. It was learned that Starr had been under the care of one or more psychoanalysts. It was also learned that there was something unusual in her approach to the problems of sex. Could it be that Mr Joseph Collins had been deliberately employed to take her to the hotel, not to beat her up, to be sure, but to give her, if possible, a normal sexual experience? And had her reluctance so infuriated him that he completely lost his temper? No proof of that, at any time. Because nobody ever heard of Mr Collins again.

Now her diary, which she called her “Mem Book,” was picked up by a policeman prowling among the hundreds of books in the little flat (good books they were, too-solid and thoughtful works for the most part). It was written in a sort of shorthand-no names of anybody, only initials-but even its fragmentary nature told clearly enough of a bitter, and frustrated, and indeed a ruined life. Its most interesting feature, to the tabloids, was that it contained passages of eroticism which even they did not feel disposed to print. But a set of initials cropped up persistently: AJP. Sometimes she hated AJP and sometimes she was affectionate in her references, but always she was frightened sick of him. “Spent night AJP Providence. Oh, Horror, Horror, Horror!!!”

It became news, for a day, that when she was nineteen she spent nine days under mental observation in a Boston sanitarium, and the record showed upon her release that she was “much improved.”

And there were some revealing dispatches from London. On one of her recent trips there she had been accompanied by her mother and her sister, Tucker. They had lived in cheap lodgings while Starr cut a swath in the town, wearing beautiful clothes, sharing the champagne and jollities of the giddier fringes of aristocracy. On her second trip, alone, she tried to commit suicide. She swallowed twenty-four grains of allonal, but somebody found her and she was revived.

Even the most cynical of the horde of men and women prying and picking into the brief twenty-five years of her existence knew, by now, that Starr Faithfull was not just another tramp. She was not just another by-blow of the speakeasies, nor a demimondaine like the celebrated Dot King and Louise Lawson who, also, had gone down to violent and early death in those treacherous times. Something about her was pitiful rather than sordid-perhaps even tragic. But what was it?

At this juncture of the affair I went calling one night on the Faithfulls. Thirty-five or forty reporters and photographers were gathered about the stoop, and I asked how one went about getting upstairs to the flat.

The only answer was, “You can walk, can’t you? But it’s hot as hell up there.”

Mr Faithfull was standing thoughtfully in the doorway of his living room, a big pipe in one hand and a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the other.

“Come in,” he said. “I was just trying to determine the normal weight of the human liver. There are some things about that last autopsy report I don’t like, and I’d like to satisfy myself. Do you know how to translate grams into pounds and ounces?”

A very large photograph of Starr stood in a leather frame on a table, with a vase of peonies drooping over it. On the table, too, were several volumes on criminology and one on anatomy, and a pad of yellow foolscap with much writing upon its top sheet.

“The answer to everything lies in that veronal,” said Faithfull. “We’ve got to know exactly how much was given her.”

“You think she did not take it herself?”

“Nonsense!” He wrote more figures on his pad.

Mrs Faithfull came in-a thin woman with what we used to call the touch of good breeding upon her, wearing a nervous smile and offering hospitality in words that tumbled over each other.

“I’m quite relieved it is just you,” she said. “We thought it might be the police to take Tucker away. One of the reporters told us an hour ago that they were coming to arrest her. We thought he was just saying that to see what reaction he would get, but we were a little upset anyway. That man Edwards out there is likely to do anything to keep his name in the papers. So Tucker went back and got into bed. She was going to say she was too ill to move.”

“Would it be possible for me to meet Tucker?”

“Why, certainly.”

(Remember that I had never been in the Faithfull home before, never met one member of the family before.)

She led me back through a dark little passageway to the room the two girls had shared until the week before. Tucker was propped up in bed reading a book-not the newspapers-and she was very steady in the nerves.

“What can I do about these?” she began, and threw a handful of telegrams out upon the pink counterpane. The telegrams were from Broadway, from agents and movie scouts, from nightclub owners and vaudeville people. All of them begged for luncheon appointments, and all of them talked of wonderful contracts that were waiting to be signed. Tucker did not wait for my answer.

“I can’t take any of them,” she said. “It’s terrible I can’t take any of them up, because I’d do almost anything for that much money. I haven’t got a dime.”

Mrs Faithfull laughed gaily. “And we are the family of blackmailers the papers are talking about! They’ve told us in the papers how shabbily we live, how much rent we pay, how many bills are in the mailbox downstairs, and that we can’t even afford a telephone. Not very competent blackmailers, I would say-wouldn’t you?”

With the utmost coolness, Tucker began to talk about the newspapers. “Why is it, really, that they print all of that stuff? One of them said today that we were pals with Legs Diamond. I never heard of the man except in headlines, and neither have any of us. Do they really make up stuff like that? And half the things they print about Starr are perfectly ridiculous.”

I said, “Mr Faithfull talks too much to the newspapers. You ought to have a lawyer who could protect you a little.”

Tucker said, “We couldn’t pay a lawyer.”

Feet tramped on the stairs, and Tucker said wearily, “Well, I guess those police are coming after all.” But it was only a new detachment of reporters, who settled around Faithfull in the living room, and puffed pipes, and discussed his theories with him.

I stayed there in the back room for an hour, chatting with them. And our talk drifted far from the mystery and the dead girl who was the center of it-about books, about Europe and travel in general, finally about the theater. They were very fond of the theater.

“How did you like Wonder Bar?” Mrs Faithfull asked.

I confessed that I had found it dull.

“Well, now!” she exclaimed brightly. “Isn’t that an interesting reaction? It was the last show Starr saw, and we loved it but she thought just as you do. She said it was dull, too.”

Tucker asked, “What’s going to happen to all of us when the excitement dies down? Will they let us alone? Will we take up living again just like we lived before?”

Mrs Faithfull said, “There’s one thing you can say for all the excitement. It keeps you so worked up you don’t have much time to think that Starr is really gone, and isn’t coming back.”

Tucker looked up with a peculiar expression.

“Starr!” she said. And she did not smile.

The apartment was suddenly cleared of all such intruders as myself. A dapper young newspaper reporter arrived, and he was a very special visitor who required privacy within the family circle. He had been engaged to write Mr Faithfull’s own personal narrative for a press association-a literary undertaking in which Faithfull declined to share the profits.

As its chapters began to appear, the confusing character and actions of Starr Faithfull were clearly explained at last. She had been seduced at the age of eleven by a middle-aged Bostonian of wealth and prominence, with whose children she was accustomed to play at the beach and in the parks. Her seduction had been accomplished by the use of ether, and thereafter she had become something of an ether addict. The relationship with this man had persisted for a number of years and it had obviously had a profound effect upon her. She went through periods of “queerness” which her family could not understand at all-periods when she refused to go swimming because she would not expose herself in a bathing suit, indeed insisting upon ankle-length skirts and even upon boys’ clothes-periods when she would not associate with any of her young friends and spent days at a time alone in her room.

At last, after two nights in a New York hotel with this man, when she was still in her teens, she told her mother all about it.

The villain of the piece was identified by Faithful in his story as “Mr X.” But it did not take long for those who had read the girl’s diary to associate this individual with the “AJP” so often referred to in its pages. And, almost as quickly, a man was located whose name fitted the initials. He was Andrew J. Peters, former Congressman, former Mayor of Boston, and a distant relative of Mrs Faithfull’s.

It was certainly true that Starr had played with his children, that the two families had seen a good deal of each other, and that he had been alone with Starr on many occasions. Next it developed that the Faithfull family had been paid a considerable sum of money for signing a formal release to some unnamed individual, quitting him in lengthy terms of all liabilities for damage done to Starr. Faithfull said that the sum was $20,000, and that all of it was spent on medical and psychiatric care for the girl. Other reports indicated that the sum was about $80,000, and that it had been the source of the Faithfull family’s income for years. The firm of Boston lawyers which negotiated the payment and release had only one comment: “If Faithfull wants to say that it was only $20,000, then we’re satisfied to let it rest at that.”

No official representations were ever made to Peters. His only comment was a formal denial, issued to the press, that he had ever in dulged in improper relations with Starr Faithfull.

While these matters were occupying the public attention, the family received permission to cremate the body. Frank Wyman, the girl’s real father, had now appeared on the scene, and with the three Faithfulls he attended the funeral service. The four were kneeling before the candlelit bier in a Long Island mortuary when men from the office of District Attorney Edwards rushed in.

“Stop the funeral!” they cried. “The DA has ordered another postmortem examination. New evidence!”

Volunteers from the gathering of newspapermen lifted the coffin into a wagon and the body was taken off for a new hour or two of scrutiny.

The next day, Edwards made his announcement: “I know the identity of the two men who killed Starr Faithfull. One of them is a prominent New York politician. They took her to Long Beach, drugged her, and held her head under the water until she was drowned. I will arrest both of them within thirty-six hours.”

That was the last of that.

Nobody was paying much attention to Edwards anyway, by now.

On 23 June, Dr Jameson-Carr returned from England. He had been in Belgium on vacation when news of the girl’s death reached him, and he had made his way to New York, voluntarily of course, with all dispatch. He was a pleasant fellow, cast in a difficult and highly embarrassing role. It would have been altogether impossible for him to be involved in the girl’s actual death. But English sense of propriety being what it is, the Cunard Line was annoyed with him for getting his name into the papers at all. Privately (and a little ruefully) he confessed that they had taken him off pay for his trip to New York-a trip which he thought would certainly clear up the whole mystery, for he brought with him the three letters he had received from Starr.

The first one, written on 30 May (the day after she had been put ashore from his outbound ship), was on hotel stationery. The envelope was marked for the Berengaria, and the letter began without saluation:

I am going (definitely now-I’ve been thinking of it for a long time) to end my worthless, disorderly bore of an existence- before I ruin anyone else’s life as well. I certainly have made a sordid, futureless mess of it all. I am dead, dead sick of it. It is no one’s fault but my own-I hate everything so-life is horrible. Being a sane person you may not understand-I take dope to forget and drink to try and like people, but it is of no use.

I am mad and insane over you. I hold my breath to try to stand it-take allonal in the hope of waking happier, but that homesick feeling never leaves me. I have, strangely enough, more of a feeling of peace or whatever you call it now that I know it will soon be over. The half hour before I die will, I imagine, be quite blissful.

You promised to come to see me. I realize absolutely that it will be the one and only time. There is no earthly reason why you should come. If you do it will be what I call an act of marvelous generosity and kindness. What I did yesterday was very horrible, although I don’t see how you could lose your job, as it must have been clearly seen what a nuisance you thought me.

If I don’t see you again-goodbye. Sorry to so lose all sense of humor, but I am suffering so that all I want is to have it over with. It’s become such a hell as I couldn’t have imagined.

If you come to see me when you are in this time you will be a sport-you are assured by this letter of no more bother from me. My dear-

Starr

The second letter, that of 2 June was simply a formal note of apology, obviously written for the record or for him to show to his employers if the occasion arose. It was addressed stiffly to “Dr George Jameson-Carr, Dear Sir,” and said that she regretted her conduct on the ship, that he had not invited her to come aboard or served her any refreshment-she had brought her own liquor and drunk it too hastily. It gave formal assurance that she would never embarrass him again, and was signed, “Yours very sincerely, Starr Faithfull.”

The third letter was written on 4 June, the day she disappeared from home. It was posted at 4.30 p.m., written on the stationery of a department-store writing room, and addressed to Dr Jameson-Carr, and marked “Via USS Olympic”:

Hello, Bill, Old Thing:

It’s all up with me now. This is something I am going to put through. The only thing that bothers me about it-the only thing I dread-is being outwitted and prevented from doing this, which is the only possible thing for me to do. If one wants to get away with murder one has to jolly well keep one’s wits about one. It’s the same way with suicide. If I don’t watch out I will wake up in a psychopathic ward, but I intend to watch out and accomplish my end this time. No ether, allonal, or window jumping. I don’t want to be maimed. I want oblivion. If there is an after life it would be a dirty trick-but I am sure fifty million priests are wrong. That is one of those things one knows.

Nothing makes any difference now. I love to eat and can have one delicious meal with no worry over gaining. I adore music and am going to hear some good music. I believe I love music more than anything: I am going to drink slowly, keeping aware every second. Also I am going to enjoy my last cigarettes. I won’t worry because men flirt with me in the streets-I shall encourage them-I don’t care who they are. I’m afraid I’ve always been a rotten “sleeper”; it’s the preliminaries that count with me. It doesn’t matter, though.

It’s a great life when one has twenty-four hours to live. I can be rude to people. I can tell them they are too fat or that I don’t like their clothes, and I don’t have to dread being a lonely old woman, or poverty, obscurity, or boredom. I don’t have to dread living on without ever seeing you, or hearing rumors such as “the women all fall for him” and “be entertains charmingly.” Why in hell shouldn’t you! But it’s more than I can cope with-this feeling I have for you. I have tried to pose as clever and intellectual, thereby to attract you, but it was not successful, and I couldn’t go on writing those long, studied letters. I don’t have to worry, because there are no words in which to describe this feeling I have for you. The words love, adore, worship have become meaningless. There is nothing I can do but what I am going to do. I shall never see you again. That is extraordinary. Although I can’t comprehend it any more than I can comprehend the words “always”-or “time.” They produce a very merciful numbness.

Starr

District Attorney Edwards was quietly nonplussed as his murder theory evaporated. Stanley Faithfull promptly cried to the press that the letters were forgeries, trembling with indignation as he talked to the reporters. But half a dozen handwriting experts said there was no doubt at all that the hand which wrote the diary also wrote the letters.

There can certainly be no doubt that Starr Faithfull intended to commit suicide. But there may be more than a fragment of doubt that she succeeded in her purpose. Two or three things pique the curiosity:

She had her last big meal, yes. It was one of the few things about the autopsy that everybody agreed upon.

But the autopsy surgeons agreed upon something else, too: There were no traces of alcohol in her system, though she had written, “I am going to drink slowly, keeping aware every second.”

She had made her secret plans, and specified in her last letter, “no allonal,” yet allonal or veronal-they are both barbiturates and very similar chemically-was found in her body.

More provocative, perhaps, are several other things she dropped into her last letter, written about twenty-four hours before she died. You will observe that she says two things which might very well be taken in conjunction: she will not worry about flirts, indeed will encourage them; and she can be rude to people, tell them exactly what she thinks of them. Furthermore, she confesses that she is a “rotten sleeper.”

Now let us remember back for a moment to her adventure with Mr Joseph Collins. Is it too far-fetched to suggest in connection with that episode: That Mr Collins (however he fell in with her) found himself in a room with a beautiful and naked girl; that her poor qualities as a “sleeper,” her insistence upon those “preliminaries” which counted so greatly with her, made her appear to him as simply a tease; that his anger and frustration drove his emotions out of control, and he gave her the beating which neighbors and the police stopped before it went too far.

Perhaps, then, it is not too fantastic to suggest that on the final day of her life she allowed herself to be picked up by an attractive stranger that she agreed to his suggestion that they go to Long Beach. (Long Beach was by the sea, was it not? You could see the liners sailing out from there, could you not?-all brilliantly lit and crowded with gay people escaping from the humdrum. She had seen Long Beach from the outbound ships, but never the ships from Long Beach.)

They had a good dinner and she decided not to drink after all. Here, at the very end, she could be more certain of enjoying every moment if she remained quite sober. Every moment of what? Of putting a panting male in his place-a male who lay eternally in her mind as the male who had hurt and frightened her and savagely disillusioned her, so long ago in Boston. She would get him excited. That was easy. And then she could ridicule his excitement, laugh unrestrained in her contempt for him.

The veronal comes in here somewhere. I shall not dare to imagine where, but I think she always had it with her. It is to be remembered that drugs, preferably ether but one of the barbiturates if ether was not handy, were essential to her whenever she approached the realm of sex. They were the signal element in that first, haunting experience, the element from which she could never thereafter escape.

I think they did not go to a room, but found a lonely spot on that almost endless stretch of shadowed sand. The Ile de France would make her way past soon. She discarded all her clothing except the thin silk dress-her coat and shoes and underclothing. And then, I think, she teased this unknown man beyond endurance. He mauled her, perhaps into unconsciousness. Then he was frightened because he had mauled her, and decided that she would never tell of it. So he took her down to the water’s edge and held her head under for a while.

And so, reading over all the old documents in the perspective of time, I think that Starr Faithfull was foiled of her final purpose as she had been foiled of everything else in life. She was not even able to accomplish her own end, which she had been so determined to do. That quantity of sand, heavy in her lungs, tells rather plainly that she did not go over the rail of a ship in the open sea. She was a good swimmer, it is true; but what swimmer, even an expert, full of veronal, could dive fifty feet into the swells from the deck of a liner and swim five miles through surf to reach the sand-filled water close inshore, still alive and breathing?

No single item of her clothing ever was found. It may easily be argued that even had she stripped herself down on the Ile de France or any other ship, the owners would not be very eager about producing the clothes she left behind. Public-relations officers are jealous of the good names of their charges. But such matters are rather hard to keep secret. And it is rather more difficult than you might think to go off the deck of a well-ordered ship, rather early in the evening, without being seen.

Again, you may ask, “If this unpremeditated murder were accomplished on Friday night, why was the body not seen by the crowds which swarmed the beach over the hot weekend?” The answer to that is the movement of the tides. It has happened often enough that the bodies of bathers, drowned close inshore, have drifted out and not been cast ashore again for days.

It is even possible that District Attorney Edwards had somewhere in his thoughts an approximation of this theory of mine. At any rate, he had the Coast Guard make an elaborate study of the tides and currents at Long Beach. He never published the result of his findings, however. And at last the sounds of his voice subsided. Within a month of that June weekend, the tale was done. Detectives turned to other misfeasances of the human race. And city editors, looking a little sourly at the suicide notes, decided that the story was about over.