TEXAS: Terrific

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Texas is the only State that was ever big enough to elect a woman Governor. But Texas women are terrific. From Miriam Amanda ("Ma") Ferguson to long-legged Mary (My Heart Belongs to Daddy) Martin, the women of the Lone Star State have been justly famed for their beauty, their temper, their incorruptibility.

Last week a Dallas County grand jury in Ma Ferguson's and Mary Martin's

Texas considered the exploit of 26-year-old Corinne Maddox.

Dressed in black, with a Cossack hat perched on her blonde head, Corinne had stationed herself in a doorway on Main Street at the hour when Dallas goes to work. There she waited until Brooks Coffman sauntered by, busily talking to a woman companion. Corinne put her hand in her purse, stepped out behind him.

The street, a canyon between high office buildings, was suddenly filled with a flat sound like someone beating a rug. Piercing the racket was Coffman's shriek: "Corinne, don't kill me!" Corinne blazed away until the gun in her hand was empty, yanked another gun from under her coat, emptied that into the twitching, still screaming Coffman. When the racket stopped, Coffman lay still. Calmly, Corinne surrendered.

At police headquarters, she sat down, lighted a cigaret, told her story: Last spring she had tried to end a romance with Coffman, who was 39, a well-known attorney, married and the father of three children. When she spurned him, refused to elope with him to California, he stabbed her with an ice pick, choked her, threw her in a mudhole beside a gravel pit and left her there for dead.

Picked up and taken to the hospital, she spent six weeks there, six more weeks at home recovering from wounds which had punctured both lungs. She was going to appear against Coffman as soon as she was well enough. He began hounding her. "He bothered me—called me—even followed me. I would have left Dallas but I had no money. He had even cost me my job." He constantly intercepted her on the street, slapped her. "He called me . . . and told me he would kill me if I appeared against him."

Terrified, brooding, she resolved to free herself of him. The first time she aimed her old .38 revolver at him as he walked along the street, the gun wouldn't work. She took it to a gunsmith, had it fixed, waited for Coffman in a cafeteria. But the place was crowded. She was afraid someone else might get hit. Her third attempt was more successful. Even while she was talking, Coffman died in the hospital.

Said Corinne's mother: "That man simply pestered her to death." The Dallas County grand jury, having pondered all these things, declined to return an indictment. No one in Texas was surprised. Corinne took it well.

"Fine!" she shouted. "That's a sure cure for the rainy-day blues."