The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (3 page)

“… Sweet, please stay with me for I am lower than I will ever be anymore in my life. … I need your help, as I always have. I hope and pray for you to come back every day that passes. I hope you will write me and tell me you will marry me again, if I will build myself up and make some money. Will you, Darling,
please
.

“Write me by return mail, Darling. I love you and need you every hour. Always and forever. TGW.”

According to the newspapers, Dallas had never seen a trial to compare with the one that began on Monday, Dec. 4, 1933, in Criminal District Court No. 2, Judge Noland G. Williams presiding.

From the moment District Attorney Bob Hurt rose to read the indictment, through 10 days of testimony by 113 witnesses and almost five hours of final arguments, the city would be transfixed by the sad and sordid drama unfolding in the courthouse.

“The courtroom, by the time a session opens, is so packed that the spectators cannot move a hand,” a
Dallas Morning News
reporter wrote. “The doors into the corridor were opened…but the crowd in the hall became so boisterous that Judge Williams ordered the doors closed and the hall cleared. Instead of leaving, the overflow crowd went into the courtroom across the hall and sat chatting about the trial…. Some of the spectators who arrived before 8 o'clock in the morning did not leave their seats until the night session closed…. Persons who were forced to leave the courtroom because they had to go and prepare dinner for hubby or go feed the baby, sold their seats. Two front row seats were reported to have sold for $1 each.”

They brought lunches in brown bags and threw their bread crusts and fruit rinds on the floor. They paid tips to people who brought them water and soft drinks. Souvenir hunters stole buttons off the coats of the court bailiffs.

Five women fainted. Several were hurt in the press of the crowd against doors, windows and walls. Dr. Horace Duncan, the county health officer, was called upon twice to give medical aid to persons overcome. A man who suffered a heart attack groaned so loudly as he was being carried from the courtroom that Judge Williams sent the jury upstairs until the commotion had ended.

Through it all, the papers said, “Woolley sat as if he had no great concern with the case, remaining calm throughout the day while attorneys repeatedly referred to the tragic death only a month ago of his young wife. He wore a navy blue suit, light blue shirt and darker blue tie. His shoes were freshly polished, and his blond hair parted in the middle. At one time in the proceedings… Woolley smiled, and his eyes sparkled with good humor.”

Aligned behind the defendant, in the front row of the audience, were three of Toy's brothers, the Godfreys, and Gatewood Lafayette Woolley, the 59-year-old patriarch. “Woolley's father…a heavy man in comparison with his slender son, sat stolidly throughout the day,” a reporter wrote. “He wore dark trousers, upheld by suspenders, a blue shirt with white stripes, a collar open and no tie. In his shirt pocket was a cigar case.”

Also among the spectators was Otto Schubert, manager of the Adolphus Hotel, and his lawyer, Martin Winfrey, who told reporters: “Mr. Schubert is thinking about staging an affair like this in the junior ballroom of the Adolphus. Ought to go over big at a two-bits gate, shouldn't it?”

Indeed, the case provided all that an entertainment-hungry public could desire: a bloody killing; a young, beautiful victim; a young, passionate slayer; a
femme fatale;
sex; money; a touch of bigamy; a prosecutor demanding the electric chair. And almost as fascinating as the case itself and the tangled life of its defendant were the lawyers who were arguing it.

On the side of the state were arrayed District Attorney Hurt, his assistant, Dean Gauldin, and Ted Monroe, a special prosecutor. He had been hired by Esta and Ralph Joynes, who now were convinced that Toy had murdered Dorothy. Mr. Monroe had made a reputation for himself as a defender of persons charged with murder. His presence at the side of the D.A. was “an incongruous but colorful factor in the prosecution,” the papers said.

Sitting alone beside his client at the defense table was Currie McCutcheon, a former county prosecutor who also was recognized as one of the best lawyers in the state. However, he had been in semi-retirement because of ill health, and hadn't appeared in a criminal trial in 10 years. “He wore the inevitable white carnation in his buttonhole, questioned jurors in his slightly nasal, but not unpleasant voice, and fingered an automatic pencil,” a reporter wrote. Mr. McCutcheon characterized his client as “indiscreet, but not guilty of murder.”

“The state says that this young man, Toy G. Woolley, willfully, maliciously and voluntarily murdered his little wife, a beautiful young woman,” he told each potential juror. “Toy, here, says it was an accident. Would you require that the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was intentional?”

From the beginning, Mr. McCutcheon's plan for Toy's defense puzzled the prosecutors. Indeed, he didn't seem to have a plan. He asked for no postponements, tried no delaying tactics. Instead, he demanded that Toy be tried as speedily as possible. During jury selection, the prosecutors freely exercised their right to reject potential jurors they didn't want, but Mr. McCutcheon rejected no one. He accepted men who admitted they already had formed opinions about the case. He even approved the seating of M.J. Carroll, who said Dorothy had once worked for him.

In only three hours, the jury had been seated. It was said to be a Dallas County record in a capital case.

And throughout the trial, Mr. McCutcheon allowed the prosecutors to treat the witnesses however they wished and ask them anything they wanted, rarely rising to offer an objection. At one point, a frustrated Mr. Monroe got upset that Mr. McCutcheon wasn't objecting enough. He demanded that the judge “make this defendant's lawyer come out in the open and fight.” He complained that Mr. McCutcheon's handling of the case “placed the state in an embarrassing position” when prosecutors had to register objections of their own.

Mr. McCutcheon replied that he simply was eager for the jury to hear all the facts, and that his defense would come in due time, when Toy himself would take the stand.

The state's star witness, Mae Cantrell, testified on the second day. Wearing a brown wool belted suit with a green knit yoke and collar, a brown felt hat banded with ribbon, kid gloves, and gold-rimmed spectacles, she was a picture of the prim schoolteacher.

Under Mr. Monroe's careful guidance, she told of her unconventional relationship with Toy, their marriage and divorce, and his obsessive efforts to win her back. In the letter in which Toy had begged her to marry him again, he also offered to pay her expenses if she would come to Dallas and talk things over with him. On Saturday, Aug. 30, the day after she received the letter and only four days after Toy's marriage to Dorothy, she arrived by bus and registered at the Jefferson Hotel.

Toy came to her room. Mae told him she had been fired from her teaching job because of their marriage, even though their divorce was in progress when school officials found her out. She was about to transfer to the University of Texas in Austin, she said. She wanted to know whether Toy would continue helping with her school expenses, as he had done when she was at SMU. Toy told her he would.

On Sunday, they took a drive around the city, and on Monday Toy drove her home to Comanche County. Toy continued to write and phone her, she said, begging her to come back to him. Late in September, she said, he went to Austin and declared: “If Dorothy won't give me a divorce, I'll get rid of her some other way.”

“Throughout the long period of questioning…the defendant Woolley looked at her intently,” the
Morning News
reported. “At infrequent intervals, she glanced in his direction, but averted her eyes the greater part of the time. Her answers were given in a soft voice, and frequently she paused before answering a question, frowning as if to make sure of dates, hours or places before making a statement.”

At 6 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 4—the day he was supposed to be hunting ducks in East Texas—Toy called Mae and said he was on his way to Austin. When he arrived, he picked her up at her rooming house and took her to his room at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel.

“We stayed from 8:45 until 10:15 a.m.,” she testified. “He refused to let me leave and locked the door and put a chair in front of it. He said there was going to be a showdown, that I was going to promise to marry him again or do something about the money I owed him.

“I told him I owed him no money. He apparently wished me to submit to his desires then, and I refused. He said I would not leave the room alive, and that he would not leave alive.

“I became afraid and insisted I had to be at an 11 o'clock class. He took me to the campus in his car, and when I got out I told him I never was going to see him again. He wanted to know about the money again. I walked off, and when I was halfway across the campus he caught me and forced me to go back to the car. He probably would have forced me to go into the car if some students had not come up, and he then let me go.”

Mae went into the administration building and phoned her new fiance, E.W. Shuey, described in the newspapers as “a traveling man of Austin.” He picked her up and drove her home.

“About 4 o'clock that afternoon, Toy called me and implied he was going to kill himself,” Mae testified. “He asked me to attend to his affairs in Dallas. I told him I would.”

Then about 9:30 that Saturday night, Toy called Mae from Dallas. “He was excited,” she said. “He told me that Dorothy had been in a serious accident and was not expected to live. … He told me that if I would not marry Mr. Shuey, he would give me $1,000 before the end of the week. Mr. Shuey was with me at the time and listened over the telephone. I read of the shooting of Dorothy in the noon papers Monday.”

Mae said Toy also had threatened suicide about a week before he married Dorothy. He turned on the gas in the room where they were talking, she said. She turned it off. Then he tried unsuccessfully to choke himself.

Mr. McCutcheon, cross-examining her, asked: “Did you ever love him?”

“I hardly know how to answer that,” Mae said.

“Well, did you?”

Mae looked down at her hands and said: “What is the test of love?”

On Nov. 6, the day of Dorothy's funeral, Mae withdrew from the University of Texas. Her registration card, which listed Toy as her “guardian,” said her reason was “lack of finances.”

After she had finished testifying, Mae granted an interview. “He never did love me,” she told the reporter. “He didn't say the things other men would, nor act as they would.”

The reporter said, “But you must have had a terrible fascination for him, an overpowering charm, if he did what the state claims.”

“I don't know. I don't understand. It all puzzles me.”

Mae said she sensed that many of the people in the courtroom, “the women, particularly,” were bitter toward her. “But I had to do it. I was afraid. It was either tell this story, much as I hated it, or run the risk of being killed myself.”

Many of the hostile people were from Comanche County. Mae said she knew of only two families in Lamkin who hadn't come the 125 miles to Dallas for the trial. “You know how a little town is,” she said. “They're just eating it up, talking and talking, as little towns do….

“And Toy, he stands out in the corridor there during the recesses and stares and stares at me. I guess he hates me. If looks could kill….”

Mr. McCutcheon began his defense by calling 88 character witnesses—from Comanche and Hamilton counties, from Ellsworth Avenue and from Trinity Universal Insurance Co.—to testify that Toy was an honest, truth-telling man and had the respect of the people who knew him. Several of the Lamkin people testified that Mae didn't enjoy such a sterling reputation among her neighbors.

Then on Thursday, Mr. McCutcheon announced to the reporters that Toy would take the stand in his own defense, probably Thursday night or Friday morning.

“What the defendant will say about how his young wife met her untimely death is the principal thing the jury and followers of the trial want to know,” the
Times Herald
reported. “… In fact, the entire defense, while hard to analyze and understand in all details, has been mostly a ‘build-up' for the defendant's own story of the shooting.

“His burden, though, has been made heavy by the state in the criss-cross of circumstances pointing to a murder motive. Woolley, the state claims, may find it easy to tell how Dorothy was killed, but not so easy to explain many of his actions, and the telephone calls and letters he wrote to Miss Cantrell during the time he was married to Dorothy.”

But the week ended without Toy coming to the stand. A bailiff took the jury to a movie at the Majestic Theater Saturday night, services at City Temple Church Sunday morning, and a bus ride around the city Sunday afternoon. Court reporter Jack Tingle said he had taken down 300,000 words of testimony in shorthand, and estimated he would pass the 500,000-word mark before the end of the trial. The
Morning News
said this was about the same length as Victor Hugo's
Les Miserables
.

Monday night, Mr. McCutcheon put Mina on the stand and asked the judge's permission to set up Toy and Dorothy's bedroom furniture in the courtroom.

“The courtroom was packed until there was no breathing space,” the
Times Herald
reported. “Men and women strained to see and hear. An atmosphere of morbid expectancy hung over the room as bailiffs set up the deathbed and brought in the chair and other furniture as Mina said it was the morning of Dorothy's death.”

The newspapers described Mina as “a slender, attractive young girl.” She wore a red-and-black silk dress and a black, tight-fitting hat. She said she had been visiting Toy and Dorothy and had stayed with them Friday and Saturday nights.