Word: buntin
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When he was young, fortune smiled on Thomas Craighead Buntin of Nashville, Tenn., but he was disconsolate. He was a rich man's son; he had a $300-a-month job as the nontoiling, unfirable general manager of his grandfather's insurance business, drew a $200-a-month allowance from his doting mother, had a pretty and loving wife, three children, two cars, social position and all the creature comforts. By the time he was 28, nevertheless, he seemed to be fizzing toward self-destruction like a lighted skyrocket...
...tall, fragile, handsome young man. He had moods of burning exhilaration. They were followed by moods of suicidal depression. He drank wildly. His father had committed suicide; Tom Buntin talked with animation of killing himself. One night his wife awakened, found him holding a pistol at his head and knocked the weapon aside. Buntin got so scandalously drunk one afternoon in September 1931 that he broke into the home of two horrified spinsters and was hauled off to jail. When he disappeared two days later, many of his friends believed he had left town to do away with himself...
Legally Dead. A little later some of them began wondering if they had guessed wrong. Buntin's ex-secretary, a dark, quiet girl named Betty McCuddy, vanished six weeks after his disappearance. Missing-persons bureaus all over the country were asked to watch for Buntin. Chief distinguishing mark: a left ear that stood out almost at a right angle from his head. But neither Buntin nor well-fixed Betty McCuddy-who had left $10,000 behind in a Nashville bank and $27,000 in a trust fund-was heard from again...
...Buntin carried $50,000 in insurance. In due time, his wife went into court to claim it, and in 1942 the Tennessee supreme court ruled that he was dead. Mrs. Buntin married a wealthy Nashville banker. Buntin's sons grew up; two of them married. Twenty-two years passed. Then, last month, an attorney representing the New York Life Insurance Company went into a Nashville court, announced that Buntin was still alive, and began an action to recover the $31,894 residue of his insurance...
...Search for an Ear. Now Nashville burned to know what he had done with his life. Only a shred of information leaked out from the insurance company: Buntin was living in Texas, probably in a citrus-growing area, under an assumed name. The Nashville Tennessean forthwith started one of the oddest chases of all time: it sent a young reporter named John Seigenthaler to the biggest state in the union to look for a thin man with a protruding left...