Trial by Reporters

Cruising in the West Indies in December 1934, Vera Stretz met Dr. Fritz Gebhardt. Miss Stretz, 30, had no occupation, enjoyed a small independent income. Dr. Gebhardt, 42, was vaguely connected with the German Nazi movement for the sake of his importing business. Each lived in Manhattan, where the cruise acquaintanceship was continued.

By April, they were quoting Oscar Wilde.

By mid-May, in a hotel at Lake George, N. Y., Miss Stretz had become Dr. Gebhardt's mistress.

By June, Miss Stretz had shown Gebhardt a small revolver, which she said was to scare off burglars.

By July, he had sailed for Germany, presumably to divorce his non-Aryan wife, return to marry Miss Stretz.

By November, Dr. Gebhardt was back in Manhattan, but no marriage with Miss Stretz had been arranged.

By the early morning of Nov. 12, 1935, Dr. Gebhardt was dead, with four bullets from Miss Stretz's small revolver in his body.

By last week, Vera Stretz was on trial for her life, and the New York Press had made her case the juiciest sex & shooting sensation of the season.

Vera Stretz had a bang-up trial. She was represented by stubby, truculent Lawyer Samuel Leibowitz, famed for his defense of the Scottsboro boys (TIME, April 10, 1933). She had an audience of some 300 murder fans, including slinky Actress Tallulah Bankhead. A corps of some of the best talent the U. S. Press could muster looked searchingly into Miss Stretz's Germanic countenance, was not in complete accord as to what it saw.

"An educated, cultured girl in an awful jam. . . . Neatly dressed and actually beautiful, like someone you'd meet at the Savoy-Plaza about cocktail time," pronounced the Hearstian Evening Journal.

"A prim and rather housewifely woman," observed the Scripps-Howard World-Telegram, "a dead-white woman inclining to stoutness, a school-teacher type with a double chin."

The United Press regarded Miss Stretz simply as an "emotional blonde beauty."

"A woman stretched on a rack of suffering . . . enduring the torture of the damned," sobbed Hearstwriter Marguerite Mooers Marshall.

The popular press resoundingly agreed on the purity of Vera Stretz's motive for plugging Dr. Gebhardt even before the defendant took the stand.

"The defense . . . will prove Gebhardt was a cruel, browbeating type of man," declared the Daily News, "and that he was killed as the girl sought to repulse his brutish advances."

"Blue-eyed Vera," responded the equally blatant Journal, "emerged . . . as an enslaved girl who killed her paramour in revolt against his sadistic love practices."

"She had tried to think out her life in terms of mental and spiritual progress," agreed the proletarian Post. "The effort, it seems, betrayed her."

After a week of journalistic antics, unequaled since the Hauptmann trial last year, the publisher of one of the greatest offenders revolted. In an editorial entitled WHAT IS HAPPENING TO JUSTICE? Captain Joseph Medill Patterson of the News printed examples of the most offensive coverage of the Stretz trial he could find, admitted that "the News did the cleverest and worst," then denounced "the practice ... of trying murder cases beforehand in the newspapers. . . . The real issue is whether Miss Stretz . . . was guilty of murder. . . . But the defense attorney ... is trying also to paint the dead man as some kind of a sadist or other fiend--although he wasn't sadist enough to put four bullets in his lover. . . . The fault lies partly with the newspapers and partly with the lawyers. Both are to blame."

Following this unique self-castigation from the front office, the News blithely continued to print all the Stretz case testimony it could lay hands on, masterminded over the weekend: VERA TO TELL ALL IN BID TO EVADE CHAIR.

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