LED DOUBLE LIFE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 15, 18 January 1930, Page 3 (Supplement)

LED DOUBLE LIFE.

MURDER SEQUEL

BETRAYED WIFE'S PRAISE

How Samuel Howard Dorr made love to his wife and assured her he would be home early just before he left her to spend the night with Mrs. Genevieve O'Brien and kill Mrs. O'Brien's husband, William, was revealed by Mrs. Rose Dorr, the betrayed wife, in the Court at New York. Mrs. Dorr, who is standing by her husband in a desperate effort to save him from the death penalty .which the State will ask, tried to convince her hearers that Dorr ,was "a tender-hearted and gpod father and husband," unconsciously magnifying his betrayal of her faith in him. "Howard and Mrs. Dorr are on their way to the county jail now," she said. "It is she who is guilty. Even if he fired the shots, he can't be guilty. That girl with her tears and her clinging vine pose, who made us both feel sorry for her, is the guilty one. "Do I want her punished? That is up to .the jury, and God. I don't want it on my conscience that. I ever wanted her to have the electric chair." Dorr will plead not guilty, according to his attorney, although he confessed to the police that he fired the shots that killed O'Brien, 25-year-old_ clerk in the country recorder's- office, in the O'Brien flat above Dorr's, at 7328, South Maplewood Avenue. Dorr's Farewell To Wife. Meanwhile Mrs. Dorr, her face set and blank with grief, talked of her husband as if he were a god. ' "It seems like, the last two weeks he's been more tender with me than usual, even more affectionate," she said. "The night before the murder he came into my room and took me in his arms. 'Daddy, come home early to-night,' I said. He said he would. .He said he was going out to make calls. I did not know she went with him on those calls." An hour and a half later Dorr met Genevieve, and after hours spent talking with her in her living room, hours in which the police believe the pair planned the murder of O'Brien in the hope that Mrs. O'Brien might collect his 7000 dollars insurance, take the blame, and be freed, they retired together. They heard O'Brien enter the house at 3 o'clock and went back to sleep. At 7 o'clock they arose and Dorr shot O'Brien. After the shooting he went downstairs, and with his clothing stained from the struggle with O'Brien, dressed his children, Mrs. Dorr said. "How Could She Do It?" "How can Gen love Howard?" she asked in her deep voice. "How could she when she was carrying her child —and she claims it was her husband's—how could she want to take him from his own children? • .f "I heard her tell Mr. O'Brien that she hated him and wanted her child to hate him. And I—l always wanted mine to be just like Howard. For I'm nothing to look at, but I always thought him so handsome and wonderful. So did every one. Why, wherever we'd go people would like him, he was so jolly, always shaking hands with every one." Although Dorr denied to the police that he has been married before, Court records show that Harriette Dorr obtained a divorce from him on April 30, 1917, charging cruelty fnad drunkenness. ,The day. of their separation, March 31, 1910, she was forced to call the police, said the first Mrs. Dorr's suit, and he was subsequently fined £50. She later married.