The Case Runs Out of Steam

After the grand jury indicted Libby Holman and Ab Walker on Aug. 4, 1932 for the murder of Z. Smith Reynolds, the case quickly came to a standstill.

Some of the big-city reporters went home. Other papers sent in replacements.

The only thing still moving was Dick Reynolds, Reynolds' older brother.

At a time when travel was still considered exciting and novel, Reynolds' trip home from the coast of Africa had been breathlessly chronicled in the press, even in The New York Times. He had been cruising in his yacht when he received news of his brother's death. It took him 48 days and 12,000 miles by air and sea to get back to Winston-Salem.

Reynolds wasted no time in trying to take control of the case.

He sat for a series of interviews, in which The Associated Press described him as "the ruddy-faced 220-pound heir to the Reynolds tobacco millions." He wore a narrow mourning band across his left sleeve.

"Smith was a very level-headed boy," Dick said.

"I knew him better, perhaps, than anyone else. When I received a brief cable telling of his death, I felt sure he had not taken his own life. I thought probably it had been an accident."

Not everyone agreed that things were that clear.

At midnight on Aug. 23, Reynolds' first day back, the Forsyth County coroner and four doctors exhumed his brother's body in Salem Cemetery and performed a secret autopsy.

They wanted to determine where the bullet entered the head, and whether the weapon was fired against Reynolds' head, which would indicate suicide, or from a distance, which would point to someone else's having shot him.

The doctors who did the autopsy backed off earlier conclusions that the gun had been held against the head. They could say only that Reynolds was shot "at close range" on the sleeping porch at his Reynolda estate.

Reynolds later claimed to have no part in the autopsy, but he changed his statements to the press.

He said he believed that his brother had been murdered.

No trial date had been set, but the court of public opinion was already in session.

Friends and family of Walker, Holman and Reynolds all attempted to use the press for their own ends.

Holman spoke publicly for the first time in September in a Journal interview, in which the reporter noted she was wearing a dark blue dress and knitting pink baby garments.

"I didn't shoot Smith," she said. "God in heaven knows that. The Reynolds family know it in their hearts. I loved Smith as I never loved anyone before or ever will again. The fullest and richest hours of my life were spent with that dear boy."

But Holman did not attempt to hide what she saw as problems in the marriage and said that her husband was utterly dependent on her.

"Smith was morbid and because of his morbidity and because of his strange delusions, I often sat up with him until 6 o'clock in the morning arguing and pleading.... He'd often disappear for hours at night and come back weeping with joy because I had not fled."

She described the hours after Reynolds' death as the darkest of her life but said she found new hope when she knew for sure that she was pregnant.

"I had something to live for, something to fight for," she said. "And now I want to go through with the trial. I want no strings left, no doubts left in people's minds as to my innocence. I don't only want acquittal; I want a complete apology."

Dick Reynolds followed with his own interview. He said that other than Holman and Walker, no one had ever heard his brother speak of suicide.

"Smith had everything to live for. He was healthy in body and he had a good mind. It's true that he was a bit reserved, but I never thought he was given to moods.

"He was intensely interested in aviation. I used to do some flying myself. I remember that when my brother was only 15 he flew a plane from New York to Winston-Salem. He didn't even have a license to go up because he couldn't get one until he was 16.

The interviewer permitted himself some editorial license after Reynolds' comments.

"Now this is a different picture of Smith Reynolds than the one you have, perhaps. You think he was a hard drinker, a rounder, a frequenter of night clubs, a wastrel - that Smith is a total stranger to Dick, his sisters and his Uncle Will."

Walker gave his own interview to a New York news service, in which he said that he was passing his time going frog-gigging in the Yadkin River. The reporter did not seem impressed with Walker's cavalier attitude.

"He has appeared at the movie theaters - laughed at a comedy on the evening of his release on bail; he has drifted in and out of his club, playing pool with his fellows."

A stalemate set in.

Sheriff Transou Scott and his team had only circumstantial evidence, such as the nurse's account of Walker and Holman grappling on the floor of the hospital in a compromising position the morning Reynolds died. There was no physical evidence linking Walker or Holman to the shooting.

Holman held fast to her testimony that she remembered nothing, but she was worried enough about the case that she and her father had talked with Jimmy Walker, the former mayor of New York, about defending her.

"The proposal has not been approved by Mr. Holman," A.C. Blumenthal, a friend of Walker's, was quoted as saying in a Journal editorial.

"The rumor started when I was discussing the case with a lawyer for Miss Holman and at the time mentioned that I hoped no outside lawyers would be called in because they might prejudice the jury against her. The lawyer, whose name I don't even remember, agreed and said that the former Mayor was the only one he knew who would not be offensive to a small-town jury."

The comment stung Winston-Salem in the same way that F. Ross Johnson's label of the community as "bucolic" would hit home more than 50 years later when he was the head of RJR Nabisco.

" . We surmise that at least one of Mrs. Reynolds' lawyers does not have a particularly exalted regard for the intelligence of Winston-Salem's 'small-town' citizens," the Journal said.

In mid-October, Will Reynolds, a guardian and uncle to Smith Reynolds, gave an interview in which he said that he never heard his nephew talk about suicide.

He was asked how the family felt about Holman's being "a Jewess."

"Of course the family knew Libby was a Jewess. Smith told me himself. He remarked that maybe it would do the Reynolds blood a lot of good to have Jewish mixture in it. I agreed with him," he said. "Some of the dearest friends I have are Jewish. I have a keen admiration for them. As a race, they don't make any finer people."

He had asked Walker, he said, about the secret the young man said he would take to his grave. Walker told Will Reynolds that the secret was that Holman was drunk the night of the party.

"Hell. There isn't a person in Winston-Salem that doesn't know that," Reynolds said.

He didn't believe that was the secret, he said.

But that was all Walker would say.

On Oct.19, a letter Will Reynolds wrote to Solicitor Carlisle Higgins the day before was made public. In the letter, Reynolds said that the Reynolds family did not think there was enough evidence to convict Walker or Holman and that the charges should be dropped.

Holman told reporters that she was not happy with the Reynolds family's decision.

"I want this cloud over me lifted permanently, not temporarily; my earnest desire is for complete exoneration," she said.

It took almost a month, but on Nov. 15, Higgins moved to drop the charges against Walker and Holman. The judge agreed. So did Sheriff Scott.

Though Holman had initially said she was not pleased with the Reynolds family's move to get the charges dropped, she came around to endorse the decision. Her lawyer issued a statement saying that Holman was pleased that her baby could be born without the mother having to stand trial for the murder of the father.

In an editorial the next day, the Journal had some final thoughts on the case.

"Perhaps the State has followed the right course in connection with the Reynolda tragedy. If it had no more evidence than that which was carried in the newspapers, it is extremely doubtful if a conviction could have been secured had the action gone to the jury," the editorial said.

"But if this is so, it is all the more pity that a nation has been entertained by sensational stories digging deep into the inner lives of every principal in the Reynolda tragedy of July 6. It is all the more pity that officers handling the investigation have been laid open to the charge of persecution, the community of racial prejudice."

The solicitor's decision to drop the charges was front-page news on Nov. 16, but a few days later, when Holman announced that she would return to the stage, the story was relegated to the back pages.

Holman's son, Christopher Reynolds, was born on Jan. 10, 1933. His paternity was never questioned in court and after a lengthy legal battle he was given a share of his father's estate.

He was killed in a climbing accident with a friend while trying to scale Mount Hood in Oregon in 1950.

Holman used the money from her son's inheritance to set up the Christopher Reynolds Foundation in 1952. The foundation supported civil-rights causes in the 1950s and 1960s and has recently worked on projects in the Middle East.

The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation was incorporated in 1936 with its namesake's inheritance from his father. The foundation supports educational and charitable efforts across North Carolina.

Miller Airport was renamed Smith Reynolds Airport in June 1942. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation provided the money for a new terminal.

Walker left Winston-Salem after the acquittal and disappeared from the public eye for 21 years.

He died in Walnut Cove on August 2, 1954, at the age of 44. The Journal's story about his death said that he lived most of his adult life in Corpus Christi, Texas. He had been married but had no children and had died of a long illness after returning to the area the previous year.

Reynolda was shuttered for three years after the shooting. Trustees were preparing to offer the house and farm buildings to an orphanage or college when Reynolds' sister, Mary, and her husband, Charles Babcock, stepped forward and bought it. They lived there until Mary Babcock died in 1953.

In 1964, Babcock began thinking about making his wife's family home an arts center. The following year, the house opened to the public two afternoons a week as an art museum. Later it would become the Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

Holman returned to the stage and made several "comebacks" as a singer and actress, but she never generated the excitement of her torch-singing days.

The Reynolds shooting dogged her throughout her life. Any account of her career always included a mention of Reynolds' death and her part in it.

That chapter of Holman's life provided fodder for two movies - Reckless, with Jean Harlow, and Written on the Wind, with Lauren Bacall - and the story was rehashed in numerous books and articles.

Holman married two more times. Her second husband, Ralph Holmes, an actor, committed suicide. She married Louis Schanker, an artist, in 1960.

She is also alleged to have had several long-term relationships with women. She had lived with a woman before she married Reynolds. During the late 1940s, she had another long-term relationship with writer Jane Bowles.

On June 22, 1971, tragedy and Holman were again entwined on the front page.

She had committed suicide on June 18, 1971, and was found in the front seat of her limousine in the garage of her home in Connecticut.

The headline in the Journal said simply, "Libby Holman, Reynolds' Wife, is Dead".