Connecticut Morning

One morning last week Peter Higginson, seven, and his blond brother John, four, awoke as usual at 7 o'clock. After the winter they had spent in boarding school, the comfortable, red-&-white clapboard house in Connecticut's quiet Litchfield Hills was strange, lonely, still. The nearest neighbor lived half a mile away. Behind the house, a dark wood stretched away to a hillside. Beyond the white picket fence in front was a little-used highway.

Barefooted, in white pajamas, Peter and John ran downstairs. Something was wrong. The living-room lights were burning. Their mother, who usually had breakfast ready at this hour, lay unconscious in a pool of blood beneath the piano, her skull fractured, her head battered with 23 wounds.

The Higginson boys' father was away. Francis Lee Higginson Jr. of Groton and Harvard, son of a famed Boston banking family, was serving in Key West, Fla. as a Lieut. Commander in the U.S. Navy. The mother who now lay so still and strange on the floor was the former Harriet Beecher Scoville of Hampton, Va., slim, vivacious, 31, a Back Bay Boston belle, great-granddaughter of Henry Ward Beecher.

Mother was so still that Peter and John supposed she must be dead. They were distressed--and hungry too. They had been warned that the phone was no plaything; it had been placed, just out of Peter's reach, on top of a high bookcase in the living room. The little boys looked at their mother; they wandered around the house, played upstairs and downstairs, wished that someone would come. By 10 o'clock they were hungrier than they had ever been before. They went out through the white picket fence and stood watching the quiet highway. A few cars went by, but no one stopped when they, waved. When the phone rang, Peter stood on tiptoe and managed to lift the receiver. But he could not quite speak into the mouthpiece and he finally let the receiver fall back on the hook.

At 3:15 the phone rang again. The caller was a friend of Peter's mother: Mrs. James Thurber, wife of the humorist-cartoonist. This time Peter was ready. He hauled the piano stool over to the bookcase, mounted the stool and said: "Come quick. Mummy's hurt."

When a doctor and the Hartford police arrived an hour later, they could piece together only part of the mystery. Mrs. Higginson had gone out to dinner the night before, leaving the children in charge of a 16-year-old Negro boy. She returned about 10:30 and dismissed the "sitter." She was found next day in the trench coat in which she entered the house. The police questioned the baby-tender and believed his story. Mrs. Higginson's broken wrist watch indicated that the attack had come, apparently from behind, at 11:15. There had been no attempt at rape, no robbery. Six special investigators went to work; 30 state police beat through the dark woods; and the boys' father flew home, grim-faced, and rushed his wife to Boston for a brain operation.

The full details of how two little boys whiled away nine and a half hours while their mother lay unconscious on the living-room floor remained almost as obscure as the criminal's motive. When Peter opened the door to the police, he said about all he had to say: "Mummy's dead. I'm hungry."

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