CRIME: Cupid’s Messenger

In 1936 an elderly couple who gave their names as Mr. & Mrs. Will Hebner moved into a farmhouse about seven miles from the dusty little town of Pocahontas, Ark. Most conspicuous feature of the Hebner ménage was a large sign which said NO VISITORS WANTED. Pocahontas townsfolk took the hint until last winter, when both Hebners ceased to be seen and a flock of buzzards was observed wheeling over their establishment. Neighbors then found that the most conspicuous feature of the interior of the Hebner menage was a man’s corpse lying in the storm cellar. The corpse—apparently several months old— was wearing a belt which looked like one that had belonged to Will Hebner. Authorities began to look for his wife, presently found her in Dade County, Fla. living with a man named Grover. Invited to return to Pocahontas to shed some light on the matter, Mrs. Hebner did so. Last week the coroner’s jury to whom she told her tale, scarcely knew whether to be more bewildered by it as a denial of murder, or as a confession of more escapades than they had dreamed existed.

In the first place, said Mrs. Hebner, the corpse in her cellar was not her husband’s. In the second place, she had five husbands, among whom Will Hebner was distinguished chiefly for having married her first—in Clinton, Ill. in 1897, using the name of Samuel Sullivan. Asked where she had acquired her taste for polygamy, Mrs. Hebner readily obliged. Will Hebner had deserted her shortly after their wedding, remained away for some 30 years. On his return, by which time she had been a widow and a wife again, he had told her his real name, revealed that while she had been contracting two marriages he had contracted 19, mostly to correspondents of a matrimonial publication called Cupid’s Messenger. The two joined forces and Cupid’s Messenger, thereafter, became the Hebner handbook. Mrs. Hebner advertised herself in it, left home temporarily to marry a Montana rancher whom she subsequently deserted as “too cranky.” Mrs. Hebner advertised herself again, this time got herself a Putnam, Okla. farmer. Again she returned to Pocahontas and Hebner. She said he went away last year and she went to Florida to see Grover.

At this point the jury remembered to ask Mrs. Hebner whose, if not her husband’s, was the corpse in her cellar. To this Mrs. Hebner had no answer, but she gave the jury interesting ground for speculation by relating how one day, when she had found Will Hebner beating a cow to death with an iron bar, he had explained that it was the same bar he had used to beat the life out of a St. Louis storekeeper named William Hite on Nov. 10, 1935. It seemed that for Will Hebner a murder was of no more moment than a marriage.

Faced with the liveliest mystery in Arkansas criminal records, police were last week looking for Will Hebner, dead or alive, and for his brothers, to see if they could identify the corpse in the Hebner cellar. Informed by the Deputy Prosecutor that her Miami friend, Grover, had hoped to marry her, grey-haired, 55-year-old Mrs. Hebner, indicted last week for Hebner’s murder, betrayed maidenly confusion. Said she: “Well, I didn’t know that. It certainly was nice of him.”