Broken Connection

The phone rang peremptorily in the modest Hollywood home of Mrs. Elsie Thomas. Over 2,450 miles, her daughter's voice spoke raggedly in her ear: "Emory is going to kill us. He has a gun. Talk him out of this awful thing." Emory was on the phone. As she heard her daughter's sobs in the background, Mrs. Thomas begged him, with paralyzed inadequacy: "Please--be a good boy." Her son-in-law's tense voice came back: "It's too late, Mama, it's too late."

Emory Holt, an engineer officer in the merchant marine, had met and married pretty, dark-haired Norma Bew six years before. Emory liked chess and classical music; Norma liked men and gaiety. In the Manhattan camera company where she worked, she had met young and handsome David Whittaker. When Emory got back from one of his voyages, he found Norma changed. With a seagoing officer's methodical care, he noted her behavior in his "log"--when she came home nights (0230); her condition (drunk, smeared lipstick). He hired a private detective, whose reports confirmed his fears. He noted that he had pleaded with Norma, and she had retorted "Nuts."

Alone in his dirty, untended Brooklyn apartment, Emory wrote his own mother in North Carolina: "I expect to be dead within a few hours ... All my love." Then he left to meet Norma and have it out with her and her lover at Whittaker's apartment. He took along a pistol.

The phone call to her mother in Hollywood was Norma's last desperate hope. But Emory was unmoved. Into the telephone, he said: "I'm sorry, Mother, for what I'm about to do. Please forgive me." Over the wire leading into the Manhattan apartment she had never seen, Mrs. Thomas heard her daughter scream, and the scream broken by the sharp sound of shouts and shots. In Hollywood, Mrs. Thomas fainted. When she came to, she hurriedly telephoned for help from the New York police.

A few minutes later, they found Emory Holt's body sprawled over a chair, a 9-mm. Luger automatic still gripped in his hand. His wife's body was stretched out on the sofa. Beside her sat the body of the man who had been her lover. The only sound came from the telephone. Still off its hook, it buzzed angrily and insistently.

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