STATES & CITIES: At Reynolda

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Last week it flared up more sensationally than ever when a grand jury at Winston-Salem indicted Libby Reynolds and Ab Walker for murder. Largely re sponsible for the indictment was Sheriff Transou Scott who had amassed secret evidence against the suicide theory. Questions put to the grand jury: How did left-handed Smith Reynolds happen to shoot himself in the right "temple? If he was standing, as his wife said, how did the bullet which traveled downward through his head manage to cut a hole through the porch screen six feet above the floor? Why did detectives fail to find the .32 calibre Mauser, until Walker returned hours later from the hospital? What was the meaning of bloody fingerprints on the door jamb, of a bloody towel in the bathroom, of Mrs. Reynolds' slippers and sweater in Walker's room, of their behavior at the hospital?

When the murder indictment was announced. Ab Walker was promptly jailed. Two days later he was released on $25.000 bail, after the prosecutor had indicated in court that he lacked sufficient evidence to press a first-degree charge, punishable by death, against the defendant.

Mr. Holman, fulminating about a "dastardly frame-up ... a piece of savagery" sped to Winston-Salem to fight for his daughter's freedom. But Mrs. Reynolds did not immediately appear to answer the charge. She was. her father said, in seclusion recovering from shock. Four days after her indictment she gave herself up at tiny Wentworth, N. C., 40 mi. from Winston-Salem. On hand to greet her were her attorneys and the State solicitor. She wore a heavy black veil, was accompanied by a nurse. Taken into court, Mrs. Reynolds was released on $25.000 bail with the consent of the prosecutor.

North Carolinians were shocked and startled at the dramatic turn of events in their State's rich family, famed for frivolity, now caught in tragedy. At first Winston-Salemites had been ready to accept the suicide theory. Young Reynolds was known to have talked of suicide often. Then gossipy newshawks began to arrive from New York and spread stories about Libby Holman, darling of Broadway. It was learned that she was a Jewess, that her father had changed his name from Holzman. She had married a queer backward youth six years her junior out of pity, she said, more than love. Was she after his $15,000,000 share of the Reynolds estate? Manhattan tabloids playing up her stage life and loves got back to Winston-Salem, stirred old Southern prejudices. In this atmosphere of moral distrust and sectional suspicion Sheriff Scott procured his murder indictments while Libby Holman's friends talked bitterly of a "legal lynching."