SUICIDE PACT ALLEGED.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18554, 29 April 1930, Page 9

SUICIDE PACT ALLEGED.

American Stage Sensation.

MURDER THEORY CHALLENGED. (United Press Association—By Blectrl# Telegraph—Copyright ) (Received April 28 : 7.30 p.m.) NEW YORK, April 27. A message from Laguna Beach says that the late Mrs Post’s attorney (Mr Moresby White), stated that he had found a letter dated the day before the shooting, bearing Mrs Post’s personal seal, in which she indicated she and the late Mrs Palmer had planned a suicide agreement. Mr White said there was nothing in the late Mrs Palmer’s papers to indicate such an agreement.

(Mrs Guy Bates Post, the divorced wife of the actor, and a woman friend with whom she had been driving, were found shot dead at the latter’s bungalow. The police reconstructed the tragedy as murder and suicide resulting from a quarrel over a luncheon invitation. The authorities expressed the view that Mrs Post (who was 53 years of age and known on the stage in her youth as Adele Ritchie), shot her friend, Mrs Doris Murray Palmer, in the back when the latter started to go to the garage to drive off to a luncheon engagement 15 minutes after another friend had arrived with the invitation, which did hot include Mrs Pest. After brooding over the act for two hours—according to the police theory—Mrs Post went to the business section of the town on a shopping tour, striving to regain her calm, but returned to the bungalow some time later and placed the muzzle of the same revolver in her mouth and pulled the trigger. The tragedy, which is one of the most sensational in the history of the theatrical cinema colony here, was discovered when two neighbours went to the bungalow to return a pet dog which had strayed.)