STATES & CITIES: At Reynolda

On the evening of July 5 Zachary Smith Reynolds, eccentric 20-year-old son & heir of the Camel cigaret fortune, gave a small birthday party for a friend at "Reynolda," the family's 600-acre estate at Winston-Salem, N. C. Hostess to a dozen guests was his bride of seven months, 26-year-old Elsbeth ("Libby") Holman Reynolds, shapely, olive-skinned "torch singer" of Broadway musical shows. Also on hand was Albert ("Ab") Walker, 19, athletic son of a local realtor. Smith Reynolds' friend and "secretary."

A barbecue supper was served near the lake. Much corn whiskey produced a general fog of intoxication. Mrs. Reynolds, demonstrating that she could "drink just like a man," got drunk. Her husband grew moody as the evening progressed. He seemed at odds with his wife. About midnight Mrs. Reynolds threw her arms around young Walker, exclaiming: "Smith doesn't love me any more." When her husband heard about it, he gloomily remarked: "Ab, I don't blame you. I blame Libby. She's that kind of a girl. . . . I'm going to end it all. Here, you can have that." And Smith Reynolds tossed his pocketbook to Walker, went upstairs.

A few minutes later a shot rang out from the floor above. Walker, according to his story, dashed up to a sleeping porch. There he found his friend unconscious, blood streaming from a bullet hole in his head. Over him bent his wife, throatily sobbing: "Smith's shot himself!" They rushed him to a hospital. While he was on the operating table, his wife was given a spare room. Nurses later reported that they found Mrs. Reynolds and Walker tussling drunkenly on the floor, heard her say she was pregnant. At dawn Smith Reynolds was dead.

Though the local coroner was ready to give a verdict of suicide, other officials demanded more investigation. A coroner's jury uncovered evidence of sex maladjustment. Mrs. Reynolds, almost hysterical, declared her mind was a total blank for July 5. "The only picture I have," she moaned, "is Smith standing over me on the sleeping porch. First he called my name. Then there was a flash and then that crash of the universe — just like every thing falling around me. And that feeling of his head in my arms and the warm blood." The jury concluded that Smith Reynolds had come to his death at the hands of a "person or persons unknown" (TIME, July 18). Mrs. Reynolds was taken back to her family home in Cincinnati by her father, Alfred Holman, a spare, grey-thatched attorney. The case died off the front page.