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Death's Deception

Nothing stranger, probably, ever went down in police annals than the seemingly fantastic facts surrounding

the violent death on Friday, November 16th, 1939, a 30-year-old Mrs. Loretta

Martinot in her home at 217 Cypress Avenue, Bogota, New Jersey.

When at 20 minutes past 8 o'clock that tragic morning, the dead woman's terrified

nine-year-old son spread the alarm. A neighbor rushed in and found Mrs. Martineau lying motionless

and bloody on a bedroom floor. He lost no time in calling the police. Bergen County Chief of

Detective's Henry Lockwood found Mrs. Martineauead from a bullet wound in her right temple,

and to prove or disprove suicide he looked about for the firearm.

No firearm could be found.

Lockwood, however, did find the lethal bullet.

It had passed through the victim's head, angled upward, struck the ceiling,

split in two, and fallen to the floor. Weighing the facts which, in the absence of a death

weapon, strongly hinted at murder, Lockwood questioned the dead woman's son closely. The distraught boy

was positive that only he and his mother had been at the house

from the moment the shot was fired. He had run immediately from one part of the house to ask his mother

what had happened, only to find her, still in nightclothes, collapsed on the bedroom floor. The dead

woman's husband was summoned from his office. He revealed that he kept a

45 caliber revolver in a bedroom desk drawer, which he pointed out to the detective. The drawer

was closed. Lockwood pulled it out. There within lay the revolver, quiet as it had been,

but that was not all. There was blood

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