High Seas Murder

One evening last month a young man named Andrew Kirwan, collector of knives, daggers and swords, got into an argument about religion with a man named Gilliam Sessoms in the smoking room of the S. S. President Garfield as the Round-the-World Dollar liner neared New York. Shortly afterwards Gilliam Sessoms was found on the floor stabbed in the shoulder and stomach. Three days after the vessel docked in Jersey City he died. Arrested by Federal agents on the charge of murder on the high seas, Andrew Kirwan refused to identify himself.

Last week it was revealed that Andrew Kirwan was none other than the son. by a prior marriage, of Mme Paul Dubonnet, better known to the public as Jean Nash. "best dressed woman in Europe."

When the wife of France's famed maker of aperitifs heard of her son's plight, she hastily prepared to go to him. Dressmakers, milliners, shoemakers, hairdressers and manicurists stood in line outside her Paris home to outfit her for the trip to the U. S. M. Dubonnet fluttered about the apartment warding off reporters. "Under the present circumstances," he explained, "it seems reasonable to understand that my wife cares to make no statement. I am accompanying her to New York tomorrow. ... I am doing all in my power to spare her. . . ." Once before, when their secret marriage was announced in 1926, M. Dubonnet had spared the best dressed woman in Europe from the blows of a stick in the hands of his irate mother, who objected to her new daughter-in-law's notoriety. At 15 Jean Donaldson, daughter of an Erie Railroad vice president, ran away from a Manhattan school to marry John Stanley Kirwan. son of a real estate operator. The marriage was annulled before the birth of Andrew. Mrs. Kirwan next married and divorced Captain Winneld Sifton, son of a Canadian Cabinet official. Mrs. Sifton's third hus band was Captain John Victor Nash of the British Army. Before her divorce from Captain Nash, she figured in a notorious lawsuit brought by Paris dress makers against her husband in which the Judge declared: "She threw herself be neath the fatal curse of luxury. . . . Dress and dress alone seems to have been her end in life." Mrs. Nash next married Prince Mohammed Sabit Bey of Egypt. Six weeks later she induced him to divorce her. The following year she married M. Dubonnet. Her five unions have produced four children. Awaiting trial and his mother in Manhattan last week, Son Andrew admitted his identity, explained that until he boarded the President Garfield he had never made a trip alone in his life. If tried, convicted and sentenced to death for murder on the high seas, he will be executed by the Federal Government on Federal property--possibly Governors Island, possibly the roof of the Post Office Building.

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