Word: pattersoned
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...kind of story that Eleanor Medill Patterson, who liked her news on the dramatic side, would have enjoyed telling-on someone else. Her death had plunged her Washington Times-Herald and the seven employees to whom she left it, into a confusing legal tangle, with overtones of violence...
Last week the plot thickened in the mysterious suicide of Charles B. Porter, Cissy Patterson's onetime treasurer (TIME, Sept. 27). In Manhattan, Roland de Corneille, 21-year-old divinity student, and protégé of Porter, told an eye-popping tale. Porter had been offered a $50,000 bribe, said De Corneille, if he would support a phony $500,000 claim against Cissy's estate. He refused, but had told De Corneille that the bribers were trying to make him change his mind and had "threatened...
...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...