PLUNGING MANIA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 18, 23 January 1933, Page 7

PLUNGING MANIA.

FATAL LEAPS IN U.S.A. SOME AMAZING INSTANCES. CASE OF FORMER TENNIS STAR (By a Special Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, January 4. During the last few months a startling mania has developed in various cities of the United States of persons plunging from, top storeys of lofty •buildings, especially in New York and Chicago. Most of the cases have been of suicidal intent, although several have been attributed to persons in weakened condition accidentally .overbalancing while near open windows. Naturally, the American depression has had a great deal to do with these violent deaths, which have been almost daily in occurrence. Brokers and general business men have been largely among the death list, the business slump having engulfed many in:high positions. Malcolm Douglass Whitman, former national tennis champion and divorced husband of San Francisco's ten milliondollar heiress, Mrs. Jennie Crocker Henderson, committed suicide in a five- # storey leap from his' penthouse on top of a New York skyscraper building. Whitman's body crashed into the courtyard of an adjoining apartment building, and he was dead when tenants reached the spot. The millionaire and former tennis star had been suffering from a nervous breakdown, according to his business associates. They also said he had been unable to forget the tragic death of his 16-year-old daughter, Mary, a few month? previously. Dogs on Honeymoon Tour. Jennie Crocker, Whitman's second wife, is now Mrs.. Robert B. Henderson,. of Hillsborough, the millionaire colony near San Francisco. - She married Mr. Henderson, president of the Pacific Portland Cement Company, in 1926, at almost the same time as Whitman was being wed to Madame Lucilla de Vescovi, Italian opera singer. The marriage of the then Miss Crocker and the tennis champion was an.event that surprised peninsula society of California. The heiress, widely known as a sportswoman and an authority on pedigreed dogs, had been reported engaged several times. Suddenly Whitman appeared on the scene and a whirlwind courtship followed. At their wedding the gifts alone were insured for 1,000,000 dollars. When they went on their honeymoon Miss Crocker's 65 blooded dogs went along in a private car attached to the special train. Whitman at the time admitted he had pledged himself to love the dogs as much as his wife. In 1925 Mrs. Whitman went to Paris and sued for divorce on grounds of desertion, and a decree was obtained. Whitman was the holder of the United States national singles tennis championship for three years, from 1893 to 1900, and was runner-up for the title in 1902. He wrote a book called the "History of Tennis," one of the most complete books on the game ever written. He was an honorary member of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association and a member of two of its committees.

Other Death Leaps.. In Sacramento,. the. capital city of California, .a. .well.-knp.wn. politician for 40 -years, Supervisor Callahan, in a fit of desperation, jumped, from the second storey of a high building, but, finding himself only slightly injured, scrambled up and crawled up to the fifth storey, from whence he hurled himself out into the street and died from his injuries. His financial affairs were strictly in order,-and it is believed he was suddenly seized-with-mental aberration. In New -York, Mrs. Isabella M. Dudley, aged a piano teach*#, jumped to her death from her sixth floor bedroom window, in West One Hundred and Seventy-eighth Street. Police said they found a note she had-written complaining that a neighbour's "insistent radio" had increased- her- nervousness until life was unbearable. She had suffered a" injury to her hip and spine in a fail about two years previously. Mrs. Clara Joselit, aged 55, jumped to her death in New York--also, fiom a window of her fourth floor apartment in the Bronx district of Manhattcn. oic recently had been a liospHal-patient for observation.