Bess Truman by Margaret Truman Read Free Book Online Page A

Swope dinner table for a pleasant meal, Cousin Moss Hunton proposed a toast. As he raised his glass, he toppled to the floor. Tom Swope was so upset, he took to his bed. Both men were put under the care of Dr. Hyde, who gave them medicine in capsule form. In three days, both were dead.
    Next, on the pretext that he was performing some experiments on animals, Dr. Hyde obtained from a medical friend a number of cultures for typhoid fever. Soon, four of the younger members of the family were violently ill. Dr. Hyde diagnosed typhoid fever and told his wife, Frances, to stop drinking water from the house cistern. Henceforth, they drank only bottled water. The sick younger Swopes were all put under Dr. Hyde’s care. He gave Chrisman a medicinal capsule, and within an hour, he died in awful convulsions.
    Lest the Swopes seem to have been naive beyond belief, it should be noted that the night after Chrisman died, Dr. Hyde was elected president of the Jackson County Medical Association. He was a highly respected physician. A few days later, Bess’ friend Margaret Swope swallowed one of Dr. Hyde’s medicinal capsules and had a seizure not unlike Chrisman’s, but she did not die.
    At this point in this bizarre tale, the nurses became very upset. They went to Dr. Elmer Twyman, father of Mary Paxton’s beau, and told him what they suspected. Meanwhile, Dr. Hyde had decamped to New York, where he met Lucie Lee Swope, who had rushed back from Europe on hearing of the outbreak of disease and death in her family. On the train to Missouri, Lucie Lee became violently ill. Apparently Dr. Hyde had poisoned her, too. But his career as a mass murderer came to an abrupt end when they reached Independence. John Paxton, Mary Paxton’s father and the Swope family lawyer, had ordered the bodies of Moss Hunton and Tom Swope exhumed. They discovered cyanide in both corpses, as well as strychnine in Tom’s.
    On March 5, 1910, Dr. Hyde went on trial for multiple murder. It was the most sensational event to take place in Independence since Jesse James stopped robbing trains. After a month of wrangling over the evidence, the case went to the jury, which returned a verdict of guilty. But the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the verdict and ordered a new trial. To this day, no one knows why the Supreme Court reversed; under Missouri law, such decisions can be made without stating a reason.
    Two more trials, which dragged on through 1912, resulted in hung juries. Mrs. Swope, who had spent more than $250,000 hiring lawyers to prosecute her son-in-law, gave up. The Swopes’ reign as the social leaders of Independence had long since collapsed. The family scattered, most of them moving to California.
    For two years, Bess Wallace had watched people whom she considered her friends writhing in the grip of publicity. Day after day, she saw the Swopes and their personal habits and wealth discussed by prying, vulgar strangers. She herself had experienced the anguish that public knowledge of private sorrows can cause. Her mother, the self-sentenced prisoner of shame at 219 North Delaware Street, was living proof of the damage, the pain. Then there was her friend Mary Paxton, once so brilliant, so promising and full of self-confidence, now a wan wraith in Mississippi.
    What else could these experiences do but give Bess added reasons to regard the world with wariness and doubt, to wonder again if any man could be trusted, to ask herself if marriage to a husband who piled up money was a promise of happiness any more than marriage to a man who failed? She frequently was tempted to imitate her mother, to choose retirement from this raw, brutal, threatening American world, a retreat to a life of a quiet, dignified mourning.
    One night in the summer of 1910, while the gossip and grisly jokes about the Swopes still were reverberating through Independence, the doorbell rang at 219 North Delaware Street. Bess opened it, and there stood someone whom she had not seen or heard