First Emily Bonne, who worked at the desk next to Benny and was one of her closest friends, telephoned her apartment and got no answer. Then Irene Elliott tried and finally Evelyn Hersey, and still no reply to the call. It wasn’t like Benny to go away without letting her office and her friends know of her plans.
Someone thought of calling the college. Someone called and learned that Edgar A. Werner, Benny’s 31-year-old husband, had not attended his classes during the day. This offered a possible solution: the two had decided on a sudden holiday and had driven somewhere for just a brief rest. The girl friends, however, were not satisfied. It simply wasn’t like Benny to leave her office in the lurch.
Work done for the day, Emily, Irene and Evelyn went to Benny’s apartment on College Avenue. They found a note tacked to the door. It said, “Darlings, whoever you are, I’ve gone to visit Lee and Lorna. Won’t be at the office, so don’t bother them there.”
The girls knew Lorna and Lee to be friends Benny had met through the WAC’s. Benny had not mentioned visiting them, or expecting to see them, but the note was calm and normal enough and the girls were satisfied... for the moment.
Even the fact that the signature had been typewritten, as was the remainder of the note, didn’t upset them.
It also was quite likely that Benny and Ted, her husband, had gone to visit Lorna and Lee together. It wasn’t unlikely that they should drive to Auburn, near Sacramento, for the visit and certainly they wouldn’t be expected to make the two hundred mile trip and return in a day.
In the office the following day, Benny’s friends explained her absence and all was well... that is, temporarily. A few minutes after eleven o’clock, C. S. Wooton, Mrs. Werner’s direct chief, appeared at Emily Boone’s desk to show her a telegram. It had come from Los Angeles and it said:
“Dear Chief. Sorry to let you down on job. Must settle problems for Ted. Plan to be back next Monday.”
The telegram was signed “Hazel Werner.”
“But that can’t be,” Miss Boone protested. “The note on her door said she was going to Auburn and that’s 600 miles from Los Angeles.”
“Well, the telegram’s from Los Angeles,” Wooten said. “Maybe she didn’t want to tell you everything.”
“But,” interposed Irene Elliott, “I just remembered something. Benny doesn’t have a typewriter in her apartment. That note was written somewhere else.”
“That’s right, she doesn’t,” Miss Boone said. “It is strange, isn’t it?”
The two girls looked at each other. It was Emily Boone who said slowly, “I’ve got a terrible premonition. This whole thing just isn’t like Benny. She simply wouldn’t tell some people one thing and someone else another. I’m going over to her apartment as soon as I get off here.”
The day wore slowly on. Promptly at five o’clock, the Misses Boone, Elliott and Hersey hurried from the office and drove to Benny’s College Avenue apartment. They tried the door and got no answer. They tried the windows, found them locked, with the shades tightly drawn... also unlike Benny.
They drove to the telephone office and put a call in to Auburn for Lorna. When she answered, they asked about Benny. Lorna seemed surprised. She hadn’t heard from Benny for more than two weeks. No of course she hadn’t been to Auburn, she knew nothing about the note saying Benny would visit her.
The three ordinarily circumspect girls with no more than the normal young woman’s interest in mysteries and crime suddenly became Pinkertons in petticoats. They sped off to the Western Union office, persuaded the manager there to contact Los Angeles and learn, if he could, whether the wire sent to Wooton on that morning had been filed by a man or woman.
The reply came back in an hour. The wire had been sent by a man, but the clerk remembered little of his appearance. Could the original message be sent, air mail, special delivery, to the Fresno office of the Western Union? No reason why it couldn’t be, said the manager, and the girls asked that it be done.
Fast as air mail might be, it would not arrive in Fresno until the following morning, so the three left the telegraph office and returned to the building in which Benny had her apartment.
En route, they began to ponder the state of Benny’s affairs. The notation in the telegram about settling problems for her husband seemed ambiguous. The girls knew that the pair, once so happy and seemingly ideally mated, had not been seeing eye-to-eye in all things recently. In fact, Ted had taken a room of his own, near the college, so that he could have quiet for his studies. He was making a desperate effort to finish his schooling and land his degree within the year and, since Benny often had friends in, he had sought solitude.
They were together much of the time, nonetheless. He took most of his meals with her and their weekends they spent together. But what affairs Ted could have, especially in Los Angeles, that would require help from Benny, puzzled the three friends. They pondered it apprehensively as they drove back to the apartment house and rang the bell at the landlady’s flat.
The landlady responded. The girls asked her if she’d had any word from Mrs. Werner. The landlady hadn’t, had not seen Benny leave the flat. Miss Boone then suggested that she open the door to Benny’s flat. The landlady demurred, but when the girls told her they had reason to believe Benny might be ill in her quarters, she finally opened the door.
Emily Boone was the first to step inside. She found a scene of violent confusion. Rugs had been kicked out of place, a chair was overturned, a drape had been pulled down from one of the windows. The bedclothes were disheveled and a pillow lay on the floor.
Beyond the bed, huddled in a pool of blood, her head a mass of gashes and contusions, lay the body of Benny Werner. Loose now about her neck, but showing signs of having been closely knotted there was a brown shoe lace and near her, the handle broken away from the bloodsmeared head was a carpenter’s type of claw hammer.
A few minutes after the landlady had called Fresno headquarters, Lieutenant S. G. Vind and Chief of Detectives Dan Lung arrived.
They found the room covered with the unmistakable dark brown spots left by drying blood. The dead girl’s skull had been fractured in at least four places. Yet her staring eyes and the purplish gray pallor of her face indicated, to the trained officers, that the blows, obviously from the broken hammer, had not been the real cause of death. Instead, they concluded, she had been strangled to death, presumably by the shoe lace.
Immediately Lung inquired about Benny’s marital status. He learned that, although she had been temporarily estranged from her strapping, six foot, two hundred pound student husband, they had been reconciled only recently and appeared to be on the best of terms. At Fresno State College, he discovered that Werner had made plans to be away from school for at least two, possibly three weeks, hence his absence had aroused little interest.
Learning that he still lived, part of the time, at the quarters he had taken when he and Benny had separated, they went there. There was no sign of him. Two of his bags were missing and some of his clothing. So, too, was his small automobile, purchased on a GI loan plan. His landlady said that he had told her he expected to be away for two weeks, explaining that he had been ill and needed a rest from his studies.
They found a series of fingerprints, including Benny Werner’s and those of two other persons, obviously, from the broad impressions, male. All three series seemed to be of approximately equal age, as if three persons had been in the apartment within the last forty-eight hours, two of them male.
The officers took the fingerprints to headquarters for study and classification. A few hours later a check with the records of GI students at Fresno state college revealed that one of the two male series belonged to Ted Werner. The other, however, remained unexplained.