A bridge game too far
A wrong hand, and then hub is dead
Death was in the cards for traveling perfume salesman Jack Bennett, on Sunday, Sept. 29, 1929.
That evening, he sat down with two friends and his wife to play a game of bridge.
It would cost Bennett his life.
Bennett, 36, and his wife of 11 years, Myrtle, 34, spent the day with their neighbors, the Hofmans, Charles, 38, and Mayme, 28. Starting early in the morning, there was golf and then drinks, dinner and chat in Bennett’s stylish apartment in the Country Club District of Kansas City, Mo.
Around 9:30 p.m., Jack opened a folding card table, and the couples sat down for a game of contract bridge — Myrtle and Jack against Charles and Mayme. The stakes were a tenth of a penny per point. It started pleasantly enough, with the Bennetts, both fiercely competitive, establishing an early lead.
Around midnight, Jack played a wrong hand. He lost by two tricks.
Myrtle called him a “bum bridge player.” Jack responded by lunging across the table and slapping her face. She called him a “cur.” The party went downhill from there.
Jack was scheduled to start
p y. He originally planned to leave in the morning, but after the row, he packed his bags and announced that he was leaving town that night. It’s unknown whether he had any intention of coming back.
As he was packing, Myrtle fetched a gun from a dresser in another room and started walking toward him. According to Charles Hofman, Jack was near the bathroom when he turned to see his wife approaching with his .32 Colt automatic in hand. She fired four shots. Two bullets went wild. A third got Jack in the chest and a fourth in the back.
“Spade Bid Digs His Grave; Slain By Wife at Bridge,” was the Oct. 1 headline of the New York Daily News.
No one knew for sure what cards caused the argument. The exact nature of the “fatal hand” would fuel decades of speculation among bridge aficionados, wrote Gary M. Pomerantz in his book on the case, “The Devil’s Tickets.”
Myrtle shrieked through the night in her jail cell and wailed when she saw her husband’s lifeless form in the morgue.
She had first set eyes on him in a photo in a friend’s
g . “That’s the man I’m going to marry,” she declared, even though she knew nothing about the handsome soldier. Chance later threw them together on a train, and Myrtle’s prediction became a reality on Armistice Day in 1918.
She lived a life of luxury, supported by her ambitious, dapper husband, who brought in an annual income of $18,000 (about a quarter of a million dollars today).
The downside was that Jack’s work kept him away from home and vulnerable to temptation. The marriage became strained when Myrtle found love letters from another woman.
She fought loneliness with bridge, a game known to inflame passions. It was perhaps not the best choice for a woman seething over a cheating husband.
Bridge swept the globe; everyone from housewives to Hollywood stars and heads of state was obsessed. Its intensity seemed to have powers to drive people crazy, especially married couples. “If husbands and wives didn’t play partners in bridge, there’d be fewer matrimonial failures,” a Chicago judge who handled several bridge divorces told The News’ Ruth Reynolds.
The Bennett case, Reynolds pointed out in an article called “Bridge Fiends Sometimes Don’t Stop Short of Murder,” was not an isolated incident. She wrote of another murder and suicides by poisoning, shooting and a death leap from a window provoked by the game.
It took 17 months to bring Myrtle to trial, with much of the delay caused by the defendant’s mental breakdowns. In February 1931, when she finally did face a jury, she had a superstar attorney by her side, Jim Reed, a U.S. senator, onetime mayor of Kansas City and friend of Clarence Darrow.
Reed’s strategy was to paint Myrtle as an abused woman living in fear of her cruel husband. The shooting itself, Reed said, was “an unfortunate accident.”
Myrtle wept freely when telling her story. At times her attorney also appeared overwhelmed, shedding tears along with his client.
Myrtle said that Jack asked her to get the gun from a dresser in another room, to help him pack. As she was bringing it to him, she saw him rushing toward her. “When he got to me he grabbed hold of me,” she said. “He caught my arm and twisted it. Somehow in the scuffle the gun was discharged.”
Asked if she intentionally fired the weapon, she replied, in tears. “No, indeed I did not. I’d rather have been dead myself.”
After eight hours of deliberation, the jury found her not guilty.
The “bridge widow” collected about $45,000 from her husband’s insurance and estate and then vanished.
Many years later, Pomerantz traced her life after acquittal. She landed in New York, where she worked as executive head of housekeeping at the Carlyle Hotel until the 1950s.
When she died in Miami in 1992 at 96, she left about 80% of her estate, valued at more than a million dollars, to her husband’s relatives.
Myrtle gave up on marriage, but never deserted bridge. In 1934, essayist Alexander Woollcott wrote that she “has not allowed her bridge to grow rusty, even though she occasionally encounters an explicable difficulty in finding a partner.”