"So Shall Ye Reap"

Merrily, merrily last Christmastide laughed French friends of that quaint, rich U. S. couple, Mr. & Mrs. Fred G. Nixon-Nirdlinger of Philadelphia and Nice.

Their Christmas card was quite the funniest ever seen in France. It showed jealous old Mr. Nixon-Nirdlinger in the act of shooting his delectable, deep-dimpled young wife, the "Miss St. Louis" of 1923. Below the picture appeared this Christmas greeting:

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

In her Nice apartment one night last week, Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger fired two bullets at her husband. One entered just under his left eye, lodged at the base of his skull. The other bullet plowed through Mr. Nixon-Nirdlinger's left side, tore away much of the lung.

As her husband crumpled up and died on the floor in a pool of blood, Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger stumbled, dropped her pistol and half fell into the pool. Picking herself up she stumbled out into the hall, her arms and pajamas streaked with bright red stains. Running downstairs to the French janitor she cried: "I have killed my husband after another quarrel," then fainted.

In Coronado, Calif, the divorced second wife of Mr. Nixon-Nirdlinger soon greeted with marked skepticism news from Nice that Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger claimed to have shot in self defense.

"My former husband," said the former wife, "was a domestic man, not the type that strikes women. He and I had been married 18 years when he met her."

In Nice, however, the sympathy of police and public was with the killer. Upon her pretty neck the French police surgeon found ugly red marks. They might have been caused, as Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger said they were, by her husband's attempting to strangle her.

In Nice, Italians are most unpopular. Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger said that her husband flew at her throat because he thought she had an Italian lover. She said she had not. Her children's Swedish nurse corro- borated this.

In jail Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger wept for her two small children. French policemen assured her that they were all right, playing safely on the warm sands of Nice with their nurse. French friends testified that the slain man was "insanely jealous," recalled that he once insured Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger 's dimples for $100,000. Preparations were made to bury him in Philadelphia.

French counsel for Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger made light of the fact that after divorcing him in 1926 she remarried him in 1928. This did not prove, they contended, that she knew what kind of a man he was and should not have married him a second time unless she was prepared to take her chances.

"It is a clear case of self defense," said Maitre Louis Gassin, her principal attorney. "The fact that my client bought two months ago the revolver with which she shot and killed her husband does not indi- cate premeditation. . . . She simply purchased the weapon for use in case of ex-treme emergency to defend her life. How prudent this action was."

A second pistol, assumed to have belonged to Mr. Nixon-Nirdlinger, was found in the apartment. Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger charged that he had once threatened her with it.

The U. S. consul at Nice, Robertson Honey, escorted the Swedish nurse when she brought fresh linen to make up Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger's bed in jail. In Paris the lawyer who handled Mr. Nixon-Nirdlinger's last divorce coined an impromptu epitaph: "He always found married life extremely difficult. But he found it impossible to live alone."

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