“I don’t know. He fell over in his chair and then he got up and came toward me and he said, ‘Give me that gun, give me that gun.’ I said, ‘No, I’m going to finish myself now. Let go of me because my hand is on the trigger!’” Her teeth were clenched. “He struggled with me, and his glasses got knocked off, but he got the gun from my hand and he went out in the hall with it. I followed him, but then I turned and went back in his office. I was going to jump out of the window, but I heard him scream in the hall and I ran to him. The gun was lying beside him and I reached for it, but he reached and got it first. I went back in the office.”
“Why?”
“To jump out the window, I told you. But I just couldn’t leave him. I started to go back out and when I opened the door some people were around. You were one of them, Mr. Heller.”
“Where did you get that gun, Mildred?”
“At a pawn shop in Hammond, Indiana.”
“To kill Joe?”
“To kill myself.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t. I had plenty of time to do it at home, but I wanted to do it in his office. I wanted to embarrass him.”
“He was shot in the back, Mildred. Twice.”
“I don’t know about that. Maybe his body turned when I was firing. I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“You know that the prosecution will not buy your suicide claims.”
“They are not claims!”
“I know they aren’t. But they won’t buy them. They’ll tell the judge and the jury that all your talk of suicide is just a clever excuse to get around planning Joe’s murder. In other words, that you premeditated the killing and supplied yourself with a gun-and a reason for having a gun.”
“I don’t know about those things.”
“Would you like to walk away from this?”
“Well, of course. I’m not crazy.”
Right.
“You can, I think. But it’s going to be hard on you. They’re going to paint you as a shrew. As a brutal woman who battered her husband. They’ll suggest that Bolton was too much of a gentleman for his own good, that he should have struck back at you, physically.”
She giggled. “He wasn’t such a gentleman.”
“Really?”
“He wasn’t what you think at all. Not at all.”
“What do you mean, Mildred?”
“We were married for fourteen years before he tried to get rid of me. That’s a long time.”
“It sure is. What is it about your husband that we’re getting wrong?”
“I haven’t said.”
“I know that. Tell me.”
“I won’t tell you. I’ve never told a living soul. I never will.”
“I think you should. I think you need to.”
“I won’t. I won’t now. I won’t ever.”
“There were no other women, were there, Mildred?”
“There were countless women, countless!”
“Like Marie Winston.”
“She was the worst!”
“What about her son?”
“That little…” She stopped herself.
“That little degenerate? That’s what you seem to always call him.”
She nodded, pursing her thin wide lips.
“Joe was living in a fleabag hotel,” I said. “A guy with his money. Why?”
“It was close to his work.”
“Relatively. I think it had to do with who he was living with. A young man.”
“A lot of men room together.”
“There were no other women, were there, Mildred? Your husband used you to hide behind, didn’t he, for many years.”
She was crying now. The marble woman was crying now. “I loved him. I loved him.”
“I know you did. And I don’t know when you discovered it. Maybe you never did, really. Maybe you just suspected, and couldn’t bring yourself to admit it. Then, after he left you, after he moved out of the house, you finally decided to find out, really find out. You hired me, springing for a hundred precious bucks you’d scrimped and saved, knowing I might find things out you’d want kept quiet. Knowing I might confirm the suspicions that drove you bughouse for years.”
“Stop it…please stop it…”
“Your refined husband who liked to be near a college campus. You knew there were affairs. And there were. But not with women.”
She stood, squeezing my hanky in one fist. “I don’t have to listen to this!”
“You do if you want to be a free woman. The unwritten law doesn’t seem to apply to women as equally as it does to men. But if you tell the truth about your husband-about just who it was he was seeing behind your back-I guarantee you no jury will convict you.”
Her mouth was trembling.
I stood. “It’s up to you, Mildred.”
“Are you going to tell Mr. Backus?”
“No. You’re my client. I’ll respect your wishes.”
“I wish you would just go. Just go, Mr. Heller.”
I went.
I told Backus nothing except that I would suggest he introduce expert testimony from an alienist. He didn’t. His client wouldn’t hear of it.
The papers continued to have a great time with Marble Mildred. She got to know the boys of the press, became bosom buddies with the sob sisters, warned cameramen not to take a profile pic or she’d break their lens, shouted greetings and wisecracks to one and all. She laughed and talked; being on trial for murder was a lark to her.
Of course, as the trial wore on, she grew less boisterous, even became sullen at times. On the stand she told her story more or less straight, but minus any hint her husband was bent. The prosecution, as I had told her they would, ridiculed her statement that she’d bought the .32 to do herself in. The prosecutor extolled “motherhood and wifehood,” but expressed “the utmost comtempt for Mildred Bolton.” She was described as “dirt,” “filth,” “vicious,” and more. She was sentenced to die in the electric chair.
She didn’t want an appeal, a new trial.
“As far as I am concerned,” she told the stunned judge, “I a perfectly satisfied with things as they now stand.”
But Cook County was squeamish about electrocuting a woman; just half an hour before the execution was to take place, hair shaved above one ear, wearing special females-only electrocution shorts, Mildred was spared by Governor Horner.
Mildred, who’d been strangely blissful in contemplation of her electrocution, was less pleased with her new sentence of 199 years. Nonetheless she was a model prisoner, until August 29, 1943, when she was found slumped in her cell, wrists slashed. She had managed to smuggle some scissors in. It took her hours to die. Sitting in the darkness, waiting for the blood to empty out of her.
She left a note, stuck to one walclass="underline"
To whom it may concern. In the event of my death do not notify anybody or try to get in touch with family or friends. I wish to die as I have lived, completely alone.
What she said was true, but I wondered if I was the only person alive who knew that it hadn’t been by choice.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I wish to acknowledge the true-crime article “Joseph Bolton, the Almost Indestructible Husband” by Nellise Child. Also helpful was the Mildred Bolton entry in Find the Woman by Jay Robert Nash. Most names in the preceding fact-based story have been changed or at least altered (exceptions include the Boltons and Captain Stege); fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed therein.
THE STRAWBERRY TEARDROP
In a garbage dump on East Ninth Street near Shore Drive, in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 17, 1938, a woman’s body was discovered by a cop walking his morning beat.
I got there before anything much had been moved. Not that I was a plainclothes dick-I used to be, but not in Cleveland; I was just along for the ride. I’d been sitting in the office of Cleveland’s Public Safety Director, having coffee, when the call came through. The Safety Director was in charge of both the police and fire department, and one would think that a routine murder wouldn’t rate a call to such a high muckey-muck.
One would be wrong.