Word: patterson
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Four months ago, after a squabble with his imperious boss, he had left the paper, but had stayed on as her personal fiscal adviser until shortly before her death. Then, six weeks ago, he had learned that a codicil to Cissie Patterson's will had cut him out of a million-dollar share in the Times-Herald when she left it to seven other company officials (TIME...
...afternoon last week, Porter neatly packed his three bags. In one he put his will, written in the hotel room four days before and naming Mrs. Patterson's housekeeper his executrix. He laid his hat, watch and glasses on the dresser. Shortly afterwards, his body crashed through the screen of an open window of his room and landed on the sidewalk, six floors below...
...death set off a chain reaction, and a furious tug of war between claimants to the $16,500,000 Patterson estate. When the news reached Washington over the A.P., Times-Herald executives moved fast. The seven who had inherited the paper already faced a fight for it; Countess Felicia Gizycka, Mrs. Patterson's daughter, was contesting the will, charging that it had been obtained by "fraud and deceit" as Cissie Patterson was not of "sound mind" when she drafted it. (There was also talk that the seven heirs were already fighting among themselves, too.) And Porter's personal...
Manhattan papers chose to ignore most of the story. But the New York Star added its bit of mystery. It told about a memo written by Cissie Patterson after a squabble with her cousin, the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Bertie McCormick, over management of the family's New York Daily News. Shortly before Cissie's death, said the Star, she wrote Bertie a memo that she was going to change her will...
...Meanwhile Washington had another death to gossip about. Elizabeth Kenney Hynes, 50-year-old society editor of the Times-Herald, was found dead in her Georgetown home. Detectives found a bottle of sleeping tablets nearby, and her brother told the Washington Post that she had been despondent because Cissie Patterson had not kept a promise to "clear the mortgage" on her house. A preliminary autopsy report showed, however, that she died of a heart attack. A final report on Betty Hynes's death was due this week. But the mystery of Charles Porter bade fair to be a mystery...