SUICIDE PACT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 156, 3 July 1937, Page 4 (Supplement)

SUICIDE PACT.

TWO WOMEIC DIE.

WASHIXGTOX TRAGEDY.

Two beautiful girls, one of them a distant relation of the Earl of Devon, found dead together in a gas-filled room in their Washington lodgings,, left instructions for their remains to b® cremated and their ashes scattered over the ocean. But their dying wish is not to be carried out. Parents of twenty-eight-year-old Dorothy Lawrence, brilliant Government worker, have buried their daughter's ashes in the family vault in Washir.°ton cemetery. The ashes of twenty-seven - year-old Adrienna Courtenay, granddaughter of a former well-known Tunbridge Wells divine, rest in an urn some mileaaway awaiting burial in America's Mid-West—two days' journey from Washington. The two girls .visited England together on holiday last May. The last letter they left said:— , "It is a deed, the decision of which is in anticipation of great happenings for both of us. For reasons known only to ourselves, there was a serious possibility of separation." Charles Edward Russell, eminent American historian, and professor to u awrcnce > said:—"Miss Lawrence had been my pupil for five years. She was a talented actress, but her type of acting is not in the fashion now, and she failed on the stage. Drug Overdose. "She told me a long time ago that Miss Courtenay had attempted suicide by taking an overdose of drugs, and had tried to persuade her to do the same. When they came back from England last year Miss Courtenay again asked Miss Lawrence to join her in a suicide pact. Miss Lawrence talked her out of it. Ten days ago Miss Lawrence told me it was the anniversary of Miss Courtenay s first attempt at suicide. She was very insistent that they should both die. I talked to Miss Lawrence for hours, and I thought I had talked her out of it, but I was wrong."