Polly Pry by Julia Bricklin

Author:Julia Bricklin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493034406
Publisher: TwoDot

Not everyone believed Campbell’s version of what happened that evening. On Tuesday, January 12—two days after the alleged attempt on Polly Pry’s life—the Rocky Mountain News published its assessment of the events equal to the Post’s in length. It was scandalous, for it said that the shots came from the gun of none other than Campbell’s own guest, John E. “Jack” Bell.

Just an hour before the shooting, Bell—head of the Victor, Colorado, Independence Mine and occasional contributor to the Post and other Western newspapers—paid a call to the local police station and retrieved his revolver, which police had taken from him the night before when he was drunk in public. The bullets pulled from the living room of Nell’s house looked suspiciously like the ammunition used in such a revolver.

Moreover, continued the Mountain News article, when Campbell’s friends rushed downstairs into her reception room after the shooting, it was filled with a “blinding smoke” that was still there ten minutes later when neighbor John Corbett was allowed in. And twenty minutes after that, when police sergeant Frank Kratke and detectives R. W. White and W. W. Arnett arrived, the room was still thick with smoke. “Such a condition,” said the Mountain News, “could not have existed, the officers say, had the man who fired the shots stood out on the porch and shot through an opening of eighteen inches as Mrs. Anthony declares.” And, the article continued, there were many pedestrians still out on the street at that early nighttime hour—none of them saw the would-be assassin run away. Almost all of the neighboring homes reported flinging open their windows to see where the shots and screams came from but even with bright street lights saw no one fleeing.7

Taking its analysis even further, the Mountain News printed that Nell and Roy made some contradictory statements to the police and the public. To Sergeant Kratke, Nell said she took the precaution of shielding herself by standing behind the door when she opened it. But she told Detective Arnett that she stood directly in the threshold when she first opened the door, but on second thought, fearing some sort of violence, stepped around behind the door. Both Nell and Roy said that Roy hurried down the stairs, pistol in hand, when he heard the shots and then ran out into the street to pursue the “murderous stranger.” However, the detectives allegedly gleaned from others in the home that Roy never left the house. And the sound itself was suspect, argued the Mountain News, because anything that sounded as loud and crackling as dynamite meant that it had to be something shot from inside the house, not outside of it. And somehow the Mountain News gleaned that Hattie Fox, owner of Nell’s house, never received a threatening letter at all.

Campbell’s demeanor was suspect, too, according to the Post’s rival paper. When the first officers arrived, it said, she was not the least nervous or excited but became more animated and agitated as more and more people interviewed her.

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