The Disinherited

At the rough & rowdy Washington Times-Herald, the fluttery, fastidious little man seemed as out of place as the publisher's high-strung poodles. Apple-cheeked Charles Bell Porter was no newsman but an esthete, a collector of rare stamps and Chinese porcelains, a Ph.D. in criminology from the university at Edinburgh, his native city. He liked to shut himself up in his office with a basket of fruit and play symphony records. But he also had a good head for figures, and that made him immensely valuable to Eleanor Medill Patterson. He was her treasurer and confidant, and for 15 well-paid years his polished head and briefcase bulged with her undivulged secrets.

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, Aug. 9).

Checking Out. A fortnight ago Charles Porter, 52, locked his prettily furnished Washington apartment, and went to Clarksburg, W.Va., where he took a hotel room. He hardly stepped out of the room for four days, even to eat.

One 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.

His 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 papers might contain vital evidence in the case. He had reportedly made a record of all his conversations with Cissie Patterson. So the Times-Herald quickly got an order from the executrix, chartered a plane and flew two men to Clarksburg to get Porter's luggage.

While the police hesitated, Columnist Drew Pearson, ex-husband of the countess, phoned from Washington to urge them to hang on to Porter's things. The Times-Herald won out. Officers sealed the bags and one of the newsmen took them back to Washington.

"He Knew Too Much." The coroner called Porter's death suicide, but next day Columnist Pearson hinted that it might have been murder. The circumstances, he said darkly, "are strange indeed, including the fact that Porter jumped--or was pushed--through a window screen. This is not an ordinary act of suicide." Pearson said Porter had told him that certain people had been trying to force him to return to Scotland (he was a British subject), because "apparently some people believed he knew too much." Porter had told some friends of attempts to blackmail him, and he was sure he was being shadowed. Other friends of Porter said he had booked passage on the liner Media, but had canceled it on sailing day, Aug. 6. They said he would have been a star witness in Countess Gizycka's suit to break the will.

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.

At week's end, West Virginia state police reopened the Porter case, at the countess' request, and the courts were asked to seize Porter's records. 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 for some time to come.

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