CRIME: Bomb Plot II

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Ever since a bomb exploded in the big Meier & Frank department store (TIME, April 25), Portland, Ore. has been keyed to a high pitch—somewhere between a laugh and a scream—by fake bomb threats. Last week another bomb exploded in Portland, this time with fatal results. The victim: Oliver Kermit Smith, 35, a prominent lawyer who lived in the highly respectable Alameda district with his wife, Marjorie, 34. After an evening of gin rummy at the Columbia-Edgewater Country Club, he called his wife to say he would be home in 10 minutes; he went out to his car, switched on the ignition and was blown to bits by a dynamite bomb.

Portland police decided that the wiring of Smith's car had been an expert job. Two hours later they arrested a suspect: husky, greying Victor Lawrence Wolf, 45, an electrician who lived in an apartment house owned by Mrs. Marjorie Smith. After ten hours of questioning, police charged Wolf and Mrs. Smith with plotting her husband's murder for the sake of his $21,000 life insurance policy. According to Wolf's confession, they were lovers and planned to start life anew in Alaska with the money. He said that Mrs. Smith, who divorced her husband last June, remarried him in February solely to become his beneficiary. Pretty Marjorie Smith denied the story, called Wolf a "repulsive old man," and sobbed: "I've never heard such twisted, terrible things in all my life."

Wolf stuck to his story. Last month, he said, Mrs. Smith bought him a revolver to shoot her husband, but his nerve failed. Instead, while she locked up the family dog, he ambushed Smith in the garage and tried to beat him to death with a bottle. When Smith recovered, Wolf decided to use dynamite. Last week he went to the Smith home, supposedly to fix up a backyard swing and playground as a birthday present for Susan Smith, who was turning three. Wolf brought ten sticks of blasting dynamite and put them under the front seat of Smith's Buick, with wires hidden under the floor mat but not attached to the ignition, so there was no danger. Two nights later, while Smith was in his club, Wolf connected the wires on the Buick parked outside. Soon afterward, Smith, homeward-bound, turned the key.