The First Bridge Murder

Mrs Vache Folle read me excerpts from this piece about contract bridge in the New Yorker. The really weird bit:

“’[A] notice appeared in the Los Angeles Times announcing that a Chicago woman was suing her husband for divorce on the inexcusable grounds that he trumped her ace., Four years later, in Kansas City, another aggrieved bridge-playing wife, Myrtle Bennett, shot her husband to death shortly after he failed in his attempt to make a contract of four spades. At her trial, Myrtle was represented by James A. Reed, a former Kansas City mayor and United States senator. Remarkably, she was acquitted, and is said to have collected on her husband’s thirty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. After reconstructing the final deal, the bridge expert Ely Culbertson concluded that Mr. Bennett could have made the fateful four-spade contract after all.”

It turns out that this is quite true and, to a bridge aficianado, the homicide would be considered justifiable.

Now Mrs VF, with whom I am already on shaky ground, seems emboldened to make death threats over the slightest infractions.