The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (2 page)

Shotguns, especially. When I was very young, he used to come to our farm in Comanche County to hunt with my father. This was about 10 years after he killed Dorothy. I remember him in the yellowish canvas jacket that hunters wore in those days, with loops across the front to hold shotgun shells. And the shotgun, huge and dark, cradled in his arms.

I also remember a Christmas. World War II was on, and all the metal and rubber was being used in the fight, so our toys under the tree were crude things, made of wood. Santa Claus had brought my brother a wooden tommy gun with a ratchet thing in it, like one of those Halloween noisemakers. You turned a crank, and it made a tommy-gun noise. I remember Uncle Toy picking up that gun, pointing it at me and turning the crank. Then he laughed.

That's all I remember about Uncle Toy. I never heard about him and Dorothy and what happened on Ellsworth Avenue on that Sunday morning before I was born. I don't remember ever meeting Aunt Mina. And I never heard of the “other woman,” Mae Cantrell. It wasn't something that the family discussed very often, probably—and never around the children.

Then one day several years ago, I was walking through the news-room of the
Dallas Times Herald
, and another reporter, Gary Shultz, called my name. “Do you have a relative named Toy Woolley?” he asked.

“I used to. He was my uncle. He's dead now.”

“You might be interested in this,” Gary said. He handed me a yellowing clip file that he had found deep in a box in a comer of a storeroom. It was the story of the death of Dorothy Marie Woolley, and what happened before and after she died.

Mina ran to the home of William Hidell, a neighbor. “My brother was cleaning his gun,” she said. “I think he has killed his wife.” Mr. Hidell and his wife returned with her. They found Dorothy lying in her blood on the bed. Toy was holding her head.

“Let's take her to a doctor,” Toy said. He laid Dorothy down and went to get his car out of the garage. When he returned, Mr. Hidell met him at the door.

“Dorothy is dead,” he said.

Toy collapsed. Mr. Hidell carried him into the house.

“Did his grief seem real to you?” the defense lawyer later would ask him.

“Yes, it was real. He couldn't have been that good an actor.”

“Did they get along well with each other?”

“Like a newly married couple. They showed the utmost consideration for each other.”

Mina telephoned Dorothy's mother, Esta Joynes, and broke the news. When Mrs. Joynes arrived at the house, Mina and the neighbors begged her not to go into the room where Dorothy lay. But she insisted.

“She was alone there…dead…lying on the bed,” Mrs. Joynes would testify. “It looked to me like she had been shot while she was asleep. Her eyes were closed, and there was a faint smile on her lips. Toy was in the front room. He was raving, but he never shed a tear. He told me it was an accident.”

Mrs. Joynes went back to the living room and sat down. Toy knelt in front of her and put his head in her lap. “What am I going to do without Dorothy?” he asked. Mrs. Joynes stroked his hair.

The police had arrived. Toy told them he had been duck hunting in East Texas the day before, and didn't know he had left a shell in the gun. Dr. D.P. Laugenour pronounced Dorothy dead and shot a quarter grain of morphine into Toy's arm to calm him. Justice of the Peace John Baldwin returned a verdict of accidental homicide. An ambulance carried Dorothy away.

Monday morning, Toy went to the funeral home with Mrs. Joynes and her son, Ralph. They chose a casket, and Mrs. Joynes and Ralph signed the note for the funeral bill of $1,037.50. Toy didn't. “He just sat there,” the funeral director would testify.

Later that morning, two of Toy's brothers, Lynn and Ray, and James Godfrey, their brother-in-law, accompanied Toy to a florist shop to buy flowers for the funeral, which was to be at 2 p.m. in the living room of the honeymoon cottage. James would say later that he and the brothers took turns watching over the distraught widower all day Monday. “We were afraid he might try to commit suicide because of the accident,” he said.

The clerk at the florist shop remembered that one of the brothers had to support Toy while he was in her store, that he was too grief-stricken to choose the flowers he wanted. He left the choice to her.

The men returned to the cottage on Ellsworth Avenue, and Toy's brothers put him to bed. When the hearse brought Dorothy's corpse to the house, about 1:30, Toy got up to look at her.

“He collapsed twice,” James said. “We put him back to bed.”

He remained there while Dr. L.N.D. Wells, pastor of East Dallas Christian Church, said the last words over Dorothy in the living room, and while the hearse carried her to her grave in Restland Memorial Park.

Mrs. Joynes would testify that on Tuesday, two days after the shooting, Toy was “anxious” about a $1,000 life insurance policy that he recently had taken out on Dorothy.

On Wednesday, during a meeting with Mrs. Joynes and Ralph and his own lawyer, Toy declared that he wouldn't waive any of his legal rights to Dorothy's estate. “He claimed all her cash and estate and an interest in my property,” Mrs. Joynes said.

Later that day, she met with her own lawyer and learned to her dismay that since Dorothy had left no will, Toy was entitled to her entire estate, possibly including an interest in Mrs. Joynes' own home.

For a 20-year-old woman in the midst of the Great Depression, Dorothy had been well-fixed. A year before her own death, her father had committed suicide, leaving a note addressed only to her. He also left her a $14,000 life insurance policy and several pieces of real estate, including an interest in the family home. He left his widow less than $3,000. Ralph inherited nothing.

Dorothy had put her money in a trust fund with the insurance company. A week after she and Toy married, they bought their new house on Ellsworth Avenue for $5,650. They paid $3,150 in cash, and signed a note, payable in 30 days, for $2,500. Both the cash and the note were paid from Dorothy's trust fund.

Dorothy also had paid for the car that Toy drove, most of the food they ate, and the shotgun with which Toy killed her. When she died, about $6,000 remained in her trust fund. Her checking account had a balance of about $300.

On Wednesday, Toy met with Mrs. Joynes again. This time he offered to relinquish his interest in two pieces of real estate and give Mrs. Joynes $2,000 if she would give up any claim to the rest of Dorothy's estate.

“I told him I would accept the settlement,” Mrs. Joynes said. “The next day, he kissed me and told me he had decided to give me $2,500 in cash instead of $2,000.”

But at 1 p.m. that day, when Toy was walking on South Akard Street, a pair of Dallas police detectives approached him, flashed their badges and arrested him. They took him to a room in the Jefferson Hotel, where they and investigators from the district attorney's office questioned him for six hours.

At 7 p.m., they took him to the Dallas County Jail, and at 9 p.m., they charged him with deliberately planning the murder of his wife. District Attorney Bob Hurt wouldn't agree to bond. Toy was locked up.

Two nights earlier, J.J. Cantrell, described in the newspapers as “a wealthy landowner from Comanche County,” had telephoned the Dallas police. He said the shooting of Dorothy Marie Woolley “might have some unpleasant angles” that they should investigate. The police asked him to come to Dallas.

Mr. Cantrell and his daughter, Mae, had arrived Wednesday by bus. He handed over to the police a packet of letters that Toy had written to Mae.

“I don't want to talk to anybody,” Toy told the reporters at the jail. “There are lots of things that have got to be straightened out.”

Mae Cantrell was born on a farm three miles from the farm where Toy was born, near the tiny community of Lamkin in Comanche County. She was two years younger than Toy. As they grew up, they knew each other well. Indeed, they were first cousins once removed. Toy's grandfather was Mae's uncle.

“Were you sweethearts as boy and girl together?” the prosecutor would ask her.

“No,” she would reply.

In 1926, when he was 21, Toy moved to Dallas. He studied accounting at a business college, then got a job as an auditor with Trinity Universal Insurance Co. During his first three years in Dallas, he lived with James and Georgia Godfrey, his brother-in-law and his half-sister, on Madera Street. Then he rented a place of his own.

In 1924, when she was 17, Mae finished high school and enrolled at what was then John Tarleton State College in Stephenville, where she was very popular. When she finished Tarleton—it was a junior college then—she enrolled at Texas Tech and earned a degree in psychology. In the fall of 1930, she moved to Dallas, too. She took a teaching job at Winnetka School in Oak Cliff for $40 a month and registered for graduate work at Southern Methodist University.

She hadn't seen Toy for eight years. But when she was settled, she wrote a note inviting him to call on her. He did.

Sometime that fall, Toy brought Mae to the Godfrey home and introduced her to James and Georgia, and they would get together from time to time to play bridge. About a year later, the Godfreys learned that Toy and Mae were living together, and that Toy's teen-age sister, Mina, was living with them.

Both James and Georgia would testify that they assumed Toy and Mae were married. But they apparently never asked when or where the wedding took place or why they hadn't been invited to attend. Then one day, during a conversation with Georgia, Mae revealed that she and Toy were living together out of wedlock.

Georgia was upset. She knew that if Gatewood Lafayette Woolley, the patriarch of the large Woolley clan—he had sired 10 children by two wives—were to find out that young Mina had been living in such an unrespectable domestic environment, there would be hell to pay. She urged Mae to marry Toy before that happened.

Mae wasn't interested. It was a policy of the Dallas school board at that time that female teachers must be single. If she were to marry Toy, she would lose her job. Besides, she said, Toy wasn't the first man with whom she had had an affair. And, she said, he might not be the last. She wasn't ready to marry.

Georgia enlisted her husband in a campaign to apply pressure to both Mae and Toy.

If Mae would marry Toy, the Godfreys told her, she could file for a divorce immediately. They just wanted the couple to appear to have been married during the time that Mina lived with them.

Finally, Mae acquiesced. On March 11, 1933, she and Toy drove to Hugo, Okla., and got married. It was a “courtesy affair,” Mae would testify, meant only “to save his name with his family.” She said Toy had promised to divorce her immediately.

On the same day—apparently only a few hours after his wedding—Toy applied to rent a room that Mrs. Joynes had advertised at her home on Elliott Street. He told her he was single. Mae moved into a room of her own on Belmont Street. But when the school term ended in June, Mae and Toy rented an apartment and moved back in together.

Their marital bliss, if they enjoyed any, didn't last. Within a week, Mae was demanding a divorce. Toy resisted, but finally said he would grant her one if he could be the one to file for it. Mae agreed, packed her bags and went home to Comanche County. Shortly, Toy drove to the Cantrell farm and begged her to return to Dallas with him. Instead, they took a trip to Galveston to talk over the possibility of making a success of their marriage.

“I decided we could never be happy,” Mae said. She went back to her parents, and Toy returned to Dallas. On July 12, he filed for divorce. In his petition, he charged that soon after their wedding, Mae had begun “a course of cruel treatment, disagreed with him continuously and that he could not please her at all.”

“She did not want to live with me,” Toy would tell the reporters at the jail after his arrest. “She preferred the company of other men to mine.”

Meanwhile, at the house on Elliott Street, Mrs. Joynes had learned that Toy was courting Dorothy. “If I had known he was married at the time, he could not have gone with my daughter except over my dead body,” she would testify.

Then, on the afternoon of Aug. 26—two days before his divorce was final—Toy, carrying a suitcase, was starting out the door with Dorothy. “Well, Mrs. Joynes,” he said, “Dorothy and I are going to Oklahoma to be married.”

“I told him I didn't think that a very honorable thing to do—start off like that without telling me before,” Mrs. Joynes said. “I asked him to put the marriage off for a while. … I suggested they could have a nice home wedding later on. But he walked off with Dorothy. … They returned the next day. They said they had been married. But Dorothy had no wedding ring on her finger.”

The newlyweds lived with Mrs. Joynes for a week, then bought the cottage on Ellsworth. For the first two days of their marriage, Toy was a bigamist.

The prosecutor asked Mrs. Joynes: “Did you know that four days after this marriage, while he was living under your roof, accepting your hospitality and living with your daughter, that he had written his first wife and told her he had married again, but did not love the girl he married?”

“No, sir.”

“… Or that he told his first wife he soon expected to make enough money to gain her back again?”

“Oh, no!”

The prosecutor already had placed into evidence a letter that Mae had received from Toy four days after he married Dorothy. It was one of the letters that J.J. Cantrell had turned over to the police. It told of the divorce being granted, and continued:

“… I am married again, and am here to say I do not love her and never will. Words will not express my feeling about it, but I intend to take care of you, all the time. You are before anyone in the world to me.

“… Yes, it was a radical thing to do…. I did it, you know why and I expect to make enough money to gain you back again soon, Darling. Please stay close to me, for I love you above anything else on this earth. I want to marry you again as soon as I can and I expect to have some money, too.