Strange Shooting Drama

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 892, 8 February 1930, Page 18

Strange Shooting Drama

Poet and Society Bride Die Together in Artist's Studio

KELLY dressed and covered with a 'blanket, Henrs r Grew Crosby—- “ Harry Crosby” poet and writer, well known in London and Paris, and Mrs. Herbert Bigelow, the young bride of a Harvard student, were found dead in a studio apartment at the Hotel des Artists in New York. Crosby had borrowed the apartment earlier in the day from a friend, Stanley Mortimer, a painter. His left arm was round the woman’s neck, while his right hand grasped a revolver. Yet the police are not altogether convinced that the tragedy i 3 the result of a suicide compact. Both the victims are prominent in Boston society. Ci'osby, who was associated with the hank of Morgan, Harjes, and Co., Pai-is, is a nephew of the late J. P. Morgan. Married in June He was part-owner and associateeditor of the Paris magazine “Transition,” which describes itself on the title-page as the “International quarterly for creative experiments.” He had been living since November 28 at a fashionable Plaza hotel with his mother, his wife, and two children by

a former marriage. He was 35 vears old. Mrs. Bigelow, who was 22, was only mari-ied last June. She came to New York recently, and had been staying with a girl friend who was a classmate at college. Mr. and Mrs. Crosby were the proprietors of the Black Sun Press, Rue Cardinale, Paris, where “Transition” was published, and where books by James Joyce and other exponents of the “new school” of literature were produced. In a recent number of his periodical Crosby wrote: “I have a nightmare In the shape of an empty bed in the centre of a tall room. On the bed lies' one of those long pistols, the kind formerly used in duelling. lam kneeling on one side of the bed; my uncle is kneeling on the other. The horror of the dream is, who will first dare to reach for the revolver, the strain being so great, lam exhausted all next day, although this nightmare has repeated itself more than once.” Although he had given as one of his reasons for living abroad as “the rivers of suicide are more inviting than the prairies of prosperity,” he was very well off financially.