The Law That Killed

One dark and moonless night last July, a 31-year-old Long Island housewife named Mrs. Andrea Gehr found herself engaged in a furtive and embarrassing job of housebreaking. She got quietly out of an automobile which had brought her up a woodsy Putnam County lane and left the car in the shadows. Then, flanked by three private detectives, she climbed a fence and sneaked through the gloom toward an unlighted summer cottage.

Mrs. Gehr was on a humiliating mission; she wanted evidence for a divorce and custody of her two children. Her husband, a 40-year-old photographer and television director named Herbert Gehr, had bitterly refused to grant it. Since New York law lists only one basis for divorce --adultery--Mrs. Gehr had grimly set out to prove that a sloe-eyed charmer named Mrs. Dorothea Matthews was inside the cottage with her husband.

"Bedroom Raid." As the raiding party fumbled with a screen door, a .22 rifle cracked inside the dark house. Mrs. Gehr toppled over, dead, with a bullet hole between her eyes. The rifle cracked again, and the detectives--one of them wounded in the arm--charged off in frantic retreat. Mrs. Matthews jumped out a rear window and ran, too--according to tabloid reports, completely naked.

When Herbert Gehr came to trial in rural Carmel, N.Y. this month, the prosecution did its level best to convict him of second-degree murder (prison for life). It scoffed at his explanation of the shooting --that he believed burglars or prowlers were outside and that he had shouted "Who's there?" before firing.

It lifted an eyebrow at Mrs. Matthews' contention that she had simply been a governess for his children and that she had been appropriately dressed when she leaped through the window. Mrs. Matthews had been engaged in a messy and sensational divorce fight with her own husband at the time of the tragedy, had led a "bedroom raid" of his apartment and had been accused of numerous infidelities in return.

The Criminal. But the jurors (seven of whom were women) listened to the arguments on both sides almost as if they were all beside the point. After only two hours and 21 minutes in deliberation last week, the jurors found Gehr not guilty. The real criminal: New York's divorce laws. Said one indignant juror: "Mrs. Andrea Gehr was a martyr to this antiquated law which places evidence-gathering in the hands of professional snoopers, and in this case led to a dreadful tragedy."

Mrs. Gehr's "martyrdom" was a dramatic instance of U.S. confusion over the divorce question; in California--where every marriage license has an escape clause, in not too fine print--the question was reduced to moral absurdity. Movie Star Betty Hutton last week filed suit for her second divorce in nine months from Chicago Camera Manufacturer Ted Briskin.*"Well," she said cheerfully, "here we go again," and repeated the same testimony which had done the trick for her the last time. She had divorced Briskin in April and was reconciled with him before the decree became final. But he had gone right on being "rude to her guests" and making her "very, very nervous." Her new decree was granted forthwith.

*Other Hollywood divorce cases in a quiet week: Linda Darnell (grounds: mental cruelty), Leslie ("The Saint") Charteris (grounds: cruelty) and a host of minor characters.

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