At "Reynolda"

On the evening of July 5 Zachary Smith Reynolds, eccentric 20-year-old son & heir of the Camel cigaret fortune, gave a small birthday party for a friend at "Reynolda," the family's 600-acre estate at Winston-Salem, N. C. Hostess to a dozen guests was his bride of seven months, 26-year-old Elsbeth ("Libby") Holman Reynolds, shapely, olive-skinned "torch singer" of Broadway musical shows. Also on hand was Albert ("Ab") Walker, 19, athletic son of a local realtor. Smith Reynolds' friend and "secretary."

A barbecue supper was served near the lake. Much corn whiskey produced a general fog of intoxication. Mrs. Reynolds, demonstrating that she could "drink just like a man," got drunk. Her husband grew moody as the evening progressed. He seemed at odds with his wife. About midnight Mrs. Reynolds threw her arms around young Walker, exclaiming: "Smith doesn't love me any more." When her husband heard about it, he gloomily remarked: "Ab, I don't blame you. I blame Libby. She's that kind of a girl. . . . I'm going to end it all. Here, you can have that." And Smith Reynolds tossed his pocketbook to Walker, went upstairs.

A few minutes later a shot rang out from the floor above. Walker, according to his story, dashed up to a sleeping porch. There he found his friend unconscious, blood streaming from a bullet hole in his head. Over him bent his wife, throatily sobbing: "Smith's shot himself!" They rushed him to a hospital. While he was on the operating table, his wife was given a spare room. Nurses later reported that they found Mrs. Reynolds and Walker tussling drunkenly on the floor, heard her say she was pregnant. At dawn Smith Reynolds was dead.

Though the local coroner was ready to give a verdict of suicide, other officials demanded more investigation. A coroner's jury uncovered evidence of sex maladjustment. Mrs. Reynolds, almost hysterical, declared her mind was a total blank for July 5. "The only picture I have," she moaned, "is Smith standing over me on the sleeping porch. First he called my name. Then there was a flash and then that crash of the universe -- just like every thing falling around me. And that feeling of his head in my arms and the warm blood." The jury concluded that Smith Reynolds had come to his death at the hands of a "person or persons unknown" (TIME, July 18). Mrs. Reynolds was taken back to her family home in Cincinnati by her father, Alfred Holman, a spare, grey-thatched attorney. The case died off the front page.

Last week it flared up more sensationally than ever when a grand jury at Winston-Salem indicted Libby Reynolds and Ab Walker for murder. Largely re sponsible for the indictment was Sheriff Transou Scott who had amassed secret evidence against the suicide theory. Questions put to the grand jury: How did left-handed Smith Reynolds happen to shoot himself in the right "temple? If he was standing, as his wife said, how did the bullet which traveled downward through his head manage to cut a hole through the porch screen six feet above the floor? Why did detectives fail to find the .32 calibre Mauser, until Walker returned hours later from the hospital? What was the meaning of bloody fingerprints on the door jamb, of a bloody towel in the bathroom, of Mrs. Reynolds' slippers and sweater in Walker's room, of their behavior at the hospital?

When the murder indictment was announced. Ab Walker was promptly jailed. Two days later he was released on $25.000 bail, after the prosecutor had indicated in court that he lacked sufficient evidence to press a first-degree charge, punishable by death, against the defendant.

Mr. Holman, fulminating about a "dastardly frame-up ... a piece of savagery" sped to Winston-Salem to fight for his daughter's freedom. But Mrs. Reynolds did not immediately appear to answer the charge. She was. her father said, in seclusion recovering from shock. Four days after her indictment she gave herself up at tiny Wentworth, N. C., 40 mi. from Winston-Salem. On hand to greet her were her attorneys and the State solicitor. She wore a heavy black veil, was accompanied by a nurse. Taken into court, Mrs. Reynolds was released on $25.000 bail with the consent of the prosecutor.

North Carolinians were shocked and startled at the dramatic turn of events in their State's rich family, famed for frivolity, now caught in tragedy. At first Winston-Salemites had been ready to accept the suicide theory. Young Reynolds was known to have talked of suicide often. Then gossipy newshawks began to arrive from New York and spread stories about Libby Holman, darling of Broadway. It was learned that she was a Jewess, that her father had changed his name from Holzman. She had married a queer backward youth six years her junior out of pity, she said, more than love. Was she after his $15,000,000 share of the Reynolds estate? Manhattan tabloids playing up her stage life and loves got back to Winston-Salem, stirred old Southern prejudices. In this atmosphere of moral distrust and sectional suspicion Sheriff Scott procured his murder indictments while Libby Holman's friends talked bitterly of a "legal lynching."

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