NEW YORK: Shot in the Dark

It was Saturday night on Long Island, and Mrs. George Fisher Baker was entertaining. The Duchess of Windsor was the guest of honor, and Mrs. Baker had invited 58 guests—the clabbered creme of New York society—to dine with the duchess and join in the quickening whirl of a new social season. Among Mrs. Baker’s glittering guests none were more striking than young William Woodward Jr., 35, the millionaire sportsman, and his wife Ann, 32.

Although he was a director of the Hanover Bank (the third generation of his family to be connected with the bank) and of half a dozen big corporations, Woodward was, in his own words, “not seriously interested” in business, and since his father’s death two years ago he had been able to devote himself almost exclusively to his real interests: circulating through international society, racing his string of thoroughbred horses, and hunting big game in Africa and India. When he was not traveling abroad. Woodward divided his time between a Manhattan town house on East 73rd Street, his 2,500-acre Belair Stud Farm* near Bowie, Md. and a 60-acre estate at Oyster Bay on Long Island’s North Shore.

Ann Eden Crowell Woodward, a farmer’s daughter and onetime model from Pittsburg (pop. 20,000), Kans. enthusiastically shared her husband’s interest in the turf and society. Several years ago, after watching Bill Woodward shoot a tiger and a leopard in India, she decided to take up big-game hunting herself. Last winter, in the jungles of Assam, she bagged two tigers (including one tenfooter, an unofficial record for women) and two leopards.

At 1 a.m., the Woodwards left Mrs. Baker’s party, went home. About an hour later the Oyster Bay telephone operator answered a call from the estate. All she heard over the telephone was repeated screaming, so she prudently dispatched the police. When they arrived, they found Ann Woodward babbling hysterically in her bedroom. Sprawled face down in the foyer of his bedroom, across a ten-ft. hall, was the nude body of William Woodward Jr., his face mangled by a blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun. Another charge of shot had smashed into the woodwork. The shotgun lay on the floor near his body.

After a doctor calmed her down with a sedative, Ann Woodward gave her account of what had happened. When the Woodwards, with their two young sons, William III, 11, and Jimmy, 7, arrived at the estate early last week they had discovered evidence of a prowler. A window in the living room had been smashed, and a cabana beside the swimming pool had been broken open. On the day of Mrs. Baker’s party the Woodwards decided to arm themselves against future prowlers, and went to the game room to choose their weapons. From Woodward’s gun collection Ann selected a shotgun, Bill a pistol (which was found in his room).

That night, after returning from the party and retiring, said Ann Woodward, she was aroused by a noise. Taking up the shotgun at her bedside, she crept into the hallway that separated her bedroom from her husband’s. In the gloom, she told the cops, she saw a “shadow” across the hall. She fired twice, heard a body fall. Then she switched on the lights, with the dawning realization that it might be her husband and not a prowler. It was.

* Belair Stud was established by Woodward’s great-uncle and developed by his father, a famed breeder of horses. It has produced three Kentucky Derby winners (Gallant Fox, Omaha and Johnstown), as well as Nashua, this year’s champion three-year-old and top money-winner ($752,550).