So far, a rather pleasant, ordinary family day. Rheta had met Veronica Duncan on the street and been invited to go for a walk, but instead, she wanted to go downtown and purchase a certain piece of music. (There was a court recess during the telling of the story when Dr. Alice became ill, the jury was sent out of the room, Dr. Catherine administered medicine to her mother, and the jury was finally allowed to return.)
Dr. Alice left the house about three o’clock, according to her story. She walked for a bit, window-shopping. “It was an unusually beautiful day, pleasantly warm.” She dropped in at a postal station and bought stamps. She paused at a hardware store. She took a street car to the hospital and examined her patient, who was sleeping. She went home, and entered by the upstairs door.
There was no Rheta. Dr. Alice took off her wraps, went into the kitchen, found groceries on the table, and began preparing dinner.
The rest of Dr. Alice’s story has been told and retold by Miss Enid Hennessey, the police, and Dr. Catherine. She denied, emphatically, every detail of the “confession.” She denied that she was in so serious a financial condition that Rheta’s insurance would be important to her. There were other collapses during her testimony; each time the jury was excluded until she had been revived.
The trial dragged on. Cross-examination, re-examination of Dr. Alice. Other witnesses. Still no one knew exactly what had happened to pretty, melancholy Rheta Wynekoop. But at last the jury returned its verdict, on March 6, 1934. “We find the defendant, Alice L. Wynekoop, guilty of murder, in manner and form as charged in the indictment, and we fix her punishment as imprisonment in the penitentiary for the term of 25 years. We further find from the evidence that the said defendant, Alice L. Wynekoop, is now about the age of 63 years.”
Everything possible was done to get the aging Dr. Alice a new trial. Nothing worked. She was sent to the Woman’s Reformatory at Dwight, Illinois.
That should have ended the matter. But for naturally inquisitive minds, there are still questions. If Dr. Alice did murder red-haired Rheta, was it for rather a smallish amount of insurance money, or so that her adored son could marry again? (He never did.) Or was it for some motive that has never been told? What accounts for Dr. Alice’s very calm behavior at dinner, if she knew that Rheta was lying dead, in the basement surgery? Especially when contrasted with her near collapse at the time of the discovery — if it was a discovery — of the body?
Perhaps, now that so many years have passed, one should not ask questions. Yet there are so many questions that fairly cry out for answers. First, of course, is, did the elderly Dr. Alice Wynekoop murder her lovely, melancholy young daughter-in-law? If so, just how did she commit the crime, and exactly why? Did she — being innocent — make the famous confession because she believed her adored son Earle murdered Rheta — and in that case, what led her to believe him guilty?
The alibi Earle tried to repudiate proved him unquestionably innocent. In that case, if Dr. Alice did not murder Rheta, who did?
Who did — and why? I leave it to you to do the speculating on the basis of the confused and confusing known facts in the case.
One wonders, sometimes, what happens to the people involved in stories as tragic, and as famous, as the Wynekoop Case. The real tragedy, I think, comes afterwards. In this case—
Dr. Alice is still in the Woman’s Reformatory at Dwight, Illinois.
Dr. Catherine is a successful woman physician, associated with the Children’s Clinic of Cook County Hospital.
Walker Wynekoop, the businessman, stayed on in business and brought up his family, despite the shadow on the family name.
The last I heard about Earle, he was working as a garage mechanic. That was several years ago.
Yet one imagines — a stranger, meeting Dr. Catherine: “Oh yes — aren’t you the Dr. Catherine Wynekoop who...?” Or, someone meeting one of Walker Wynekoop’s children: “Wynekoop — are you any relation to the Wynekoops of the murder trial...?”
Perhaps houses suffer, too. The house at 3406 West Monroe Street, built to be a home for a young and happy family, must have suffered in the years when it was pointed out by bus drivers and pedestrians as the scene of the Rheta Wynekoop murder. Perhaps, under such circumstances, the house might even have been glad when a little item appeared on page 26 of a morning paper.
“The gloomy old mansion at 3406 West Monroe Street is being torn down now—”
Jim Thompson
Since his death in 1977, Jim Thompson has been rediscovered by a legion of readers, many of whom never read crime novels before, and by filmmakers who have seen fit to adapt five of his books to the screen: Pop. 1280 (filmed as Coup de Torchon), A Hell of a Woman (filmed as Serie Noire), The Grifters, After Dark My Sweet, and The Kill Off, having previously adapted The Getaway and The Killer Inside Me during Thompson’s lifetime. Perhaps in response to his newfound fame, some mystery critics have tried to dent his armor. They’ve pointed to his plot defects, and quickly dispatched, carelessly written chapters, and his use of the same themes over and over. And while some of these complaints are true, Thompson still commands our attention. Why? For starters, because nowhere else does one find this monstrous vision and laconic wit. Nor does one often come across such a sad bunch of pathetic heroes — a drawling, schizophrenic Texas sheriff, a door-to-door salesman, and a third-rate con man, to name but a few. But it is his formal experiments that truly separate him from the pulp crowd. His novel, The Criminal, shifts points-of-view, Rashomon style, and A Hell of a Woman uses an outlandish split narration. Robert Polito suggests in his introduction to Fireworks: The Lost Writings of Jim Thompson, that as-told-to stories such as the one before you now played a major role in his developing this double-voicing mechanism, for they, too, rely upon it (this particular one was told to him by Chester Stacey, Evidence Officer, La Tumara County, Texas). I agree. But in the often shadowy and contradictory life of Jim Thompson one mystery can be put to rest: he did not publish his first story in True Detective at the age of fourteen, as has often been written, but in 1936, when he was twenty-nine.
Case of the Catalogue Clue
At approximately 6:30 on the morning of August 6th, I was awakened from a deep sleep to find my wife shaking me by the shoulder.
“Get up, Chet. Sheriff Carter just called. He wants you to come out to the Parker-Kern Hotel right away.”
When Sheriff Isaac R. Carter was in a hurry there was good reason for haste. Of the old school of frontier peace officers, he was one of those calm, drawling Westerners who find their own leisurely pace still adequate for a speeding world.
I was flinging on my clothes before the next words were out of my wife’s mouth: “Mr. Trumbull has been killed!”
“What?” I paused in the act of tying a shoelace. “William Lake Trumbull?”
“That’s what Sheriff Ike said.”
“An accident of some kind?”
“No. Sheriff Ike said he’d been murdered.”
I didn’t waste time with any more questions. Jamming on my hat I raced out of the house to my car and headed for the hotel.
William Lake Trumbull was the man most responsible for changing La Tumara, the seat of the county of the same name, from a sleepy, cattle-country village into one of the busiest small cities in Texas. He had first appeared in La Tumara in the late twenties with a rickety drilling-rig and a strong conviction that there was oil in the neighborhood — and very little else. He was not a particularly likable man, but he had the rare trait of inspiring confidence. He was able to persuade several ranchers to finance the drilling of a well on a share basis. Sixty days after operations began, he struck oil.