South Kent and Gaylordsville have none but kindly memories of her. There were rumors, at times, of course, as there must be about any lonely little old lady who lives a secluded life, rumors that someone had left her a vast fortune; that a lawyer in a limousine with a liveried chauffeur appeared at regular intervals to bring her checks. But these were rumors without malice and, unhappily, without foundation in fact, for she died penniless save for an old-age pension finally wooed out of the government.
South Kent and Gaylordsville remember her as the little scurrying woman with the walnut face, the gunny sack and one loyal and indestructible brown straw hat. To them, she was eccentric, yes. It was eccentric in her that she would let no one enter her house; that, at night, there was always a single light twinkling from her window till morning — to exorcise what demons? — and that with age she had let slip in her squalid little home the niceties of hygiene. But to her neighbors, Mrs. Chandler’s eccentricities bore no sinister stamp. It was cute rather than grotesque when, fighting against the loss of one of her few remaining teeth, she tied it to its nearest partner with a piece of string. She did no harm, except perhaps to leave a little too many scraps in the wrong places for the campus cats. The South Kent boys liked her.
And they knew, until the day she died, that the woman they were liking was that most magnificently unliked of women — Mrs. Florence Maybrick.
Which leads to the only really comforting feature of this long and uncomfortable life. There in the little villages of South Kent and Gaylordsville, Mrs. Florence Maybrick found good luck at last — good luck of so sensational a nature that in a way perhaps it neutralized all the tough breaks she had endured earlier.
Mrs. Maybrick was able to spend the last twenty years of her life unpersecuted. And yet, had things gone other than the way they did, this lengthy stretch of tranquility might never have been granted her.
Shortly after her arrival, a neighbor, a Mrs. Austin, was kind to Mrs. Maybrick and, to show her gratitude, Mrs. Maybrick gave her a dress which was trimmed with really good lace. It was undoubtedly the dress in the famous “wedding” photograph and to the cynical will perhaps give further proof that there is a real affinity between old lace and arsenic.
When Mrs. Austin shook the padding which stuffed the shoulders of this dress, there dropped out a cleaner’s card reading: Mrs. Florence Maybrick, Highland Park, Ill. The name struck a chord in Mrs. Austin’s memory. She consulted a sister who in turn consulted a female probation officer in the district. Before long these three women and the two married ladies’ husbands knew all the unhappy tale of Mrs. Florence Maybrick. A family council was called; the evidence was weighed; and it was decided that she had suffered more than enough already. The Austins and their in-laws thereupon made a vow never to show by word or hint that they knew the real identity of the new arrival.
And so, from the start, “Mrs. Chandler’s” future was in the hands of this small group of people. Miraculously, those people kept their vows for twenty years. Never once, at church socials, at whist drives or quilting parties or at the grocery store, did one of those three ladies succumb to the almost irresistible temptation of launching the juiciest piece of gossip in ten counties.
This was the astounding piece of good luck which came at last and enabled Mrs. Maybrick to reach the grave, unwept, perhaps, unhonored, but at least — unstoned.
On Sunday, October 25, 1941, “Mrs. Chandler” was soberly buried on the South Kent Campus. It had been her own request. Five of the students, boys of “good stock” — shades of Florence’s own beginnings! — were her pallbearers. These boys, whom a local newspaper with misprinted enthusiasm termed “Socialists from the swank South Kent School,” carried her to her last resting place. And there, as if a final hand from the grave beckoned her back to respectability, her coffin lies next to that of Miss Doylan, an old friend and beloved South Kent Housemother.
R.I.P. Mrs. Florence Chandler Maybrick.
And good luck to you — wherever you are!
Craig Rice
For Craig Rice, humor and homicide always went hand in hand. The first woman to write hard-boiled crime fiction, her books read like documents from the edge where one has to “laugh, scream, or go crazy.” All her novels, but especially those featuring her finest creation, John J. Malone, a cigar-chomping, hard-drinking, bet-making, womanizing attorney, are marked by wild, over-the-top improbabilities of plot and morbid slapstick humor — or as her one-time collaborator Stuart Palmer put it, “gimmicks, gadgets and slants.” They were farces, and it is for this reason some critics have dismissed them as “hollow.” What they’ve failed to realize is that mockery of the tough-guy clichés she inherited from Hammett and Co. may have been precisely her aim all along. A versatile writer (Rice worked as newspaper sob sister and radio and movie writer before turning to mystery fiction), Rice also published numerous true crime writings, the bulk of which are collected in her 1952 paperback, 45 Murders. This story, however, a look back at Rice’s days as a radio mystery writer, is about the peculiar goings-on in a gloomy old mansion, and it appeared in a collection of stories about great Chicago murders.
Murder in Chicago
“The long arm of coincidence bends a lot of elbows—”
It was November, 1933. I was working for a radio station, and among my many and various chores was the writing of a thrice-weekly, half-hour mystery drama. Late on Monday night, November 20th, I had been sitting at the typewriter beating my brains out for an idea. Towards morning, I came up with one — having a beautiful young woman found murdered on an operating table.
Tuesday morning I turned the script over to the stenographic department, and promptly forgot all about it.
Wednesday morning the producer called me into his office. He handed me the morning paper and said, “Are you psychic, or do little birds tell you these things?”
I looked at the paper. The body of beautiful, red-haired Rheta Wynekoop had been found on an operating table in the basement surgery of her mother-in-law’s home.
The newspapers, of course, didn’t put it quite so bluntly. Adjectives described the victim: “Talented young violinist” — the mother-in-law: “Dr. Alice Wynekoop, prominent Chicago physician and clubwoman” — and the house: “a gloomy old mansion on West Monroe Street...”
The story of Rheta Wynekoop’s murder was a sensational one from the beginning. Elderly Dr. Alice Wynekoop was a prominent Chicago physician, clubwoman and social service worker. Rheta was a young, beautiful, red-haired and talented violinist. Her husband — Dr. Alice’s son — was a handsome young Lothario who had never been able to earn enough to support his wife. Dr. Alice’s daughter, Dr. Catherine Wynekoop, was a highly respected member of the staff at Cook County Hospital.
Those circumstances alone would have been enough to make the story an exciting one. But there were plenty of other details to make it dramatic from its very beginning. Rheta Wynekoop had been found face down on an operating table in Dr. Wynekoop’s basement surgery, wrapped in a heavy blanket, shot through the breast. On the table, near her head, lay a revolver covered with a cloth. There were chloroform burns on Rheta’s face. On the floor, at the foot of the operating table, lay Rheta’s clothing.
Even before the really dramatic and fantastic details were known, it was obvious that the newspapers had hit the jackpot. Then, through the weeks that followed, while the story and speculation ran wild, little by little the history of the gloomy old mansion on Monroe Street became known. Gloomy old mansion! Let’s go back, just a bit—