Wife-Killing Attorney Got It Right On Seventh Attempt
It was sometime around Christmas 1928 that an Amarillo attorney made up his mind to murder his wife so he could be with his sweet young thing of a secretary.
It was sometime around Christmas 1928 that an Amarillo attorney made up his mind to murder his wife so he could be with his sweet young thing of a secretary.
Some men stick to the straight and narrow merely because temptation never crosses their path. Arthur D. Payne was such a man, a churchgoing pillar of the community smugly certain of his moral superiority and contemptuous of those weaker creatures sucked into the cesspool of sin.
Then one day in the fall of 1928, fate put the 40-year-old lawyer to the test. A beautiful blonde named Marilyn Miller answered his want ad for a secretary, and he hired her on the spot. The attractive young woman knew her looks had landed her the job and so did her employer, though weeks went by before he faced that fact.
While dictating a letter just after Thanksgiving, Payne blurted out, “I love you!” Marilyn scribbled the astonishing announcement on her notepad, did a dumbfounded double-take and looked up in wide-eyed surprise.
“It slipped out,” stammered the tongue-tied attorney. “But I mean it, Marilyn. I’ve fallen in love with you.”
The object of his infatuation confessed her feelings and burst into tears. “I know your wife. She’ll never give you a divorce.”
“She’ll have to,” Payne said firmly. “A man has a right to live.”
But he knew Marilyn was right. Eva Payne believed in the “until death do us part” portion of the marriage vow and would never consent to a legal breakup.
Contested divorces were hard to come by and ever harder to live down in the 1920s. How many clients would the small-town attorney have left, if he walked out on his faithful mate and their three small children?
It took strait-laced Arthur Payne less than a month to decide that the little woman had to die. He insured Eva’s life for $20,000 — more than enough to set up housekeeping with the new Mrs. Payne — and to begin planning her demise.
Separate bedrooms, tightly shut windows, and a gas jet were the ingredients of the first attempt, which occurred shortly before New Year’s. Payne retired for the night expecting to awake the next morning a merry widower, but Eva survived and blamed herself for absent-mindedly leaving on the gas.
Payne eagerly awaited the next opportunity, which came in February 1929 when Eva stayed in bed with a bad cold. After getting the children off to school, the concerned husband gave his unsuspecting spouse eight morphine tablets dissolved in a glass of orange juice. Eva drank the lethal concoction and quickly fell into a deep sleep.
Payne monitored her vital signs late into the evening. He was encouraged by her slow and erratic pulse, but her heart was still beating when he nodded off at 2 a.m.
Four hours later, Eva suddenly regained consciousness. The pesky cold was gone thanks to her wonderful hubby’s home remedy.
Marilyn, who had no idea what her lover was up to, was growing impatient. Payne begged for more time claiming his wife was on the verge of agreeing to a divorce, while in reality he had not mentioned the matter.
The homicidal husband’s next brainstorm involved a lookout at a nearby lake. He would entice Eva to the site with the promise of rekindling their romance and push the car with her inside over a cliff.
Everything went according to plan, until Payne tried to send his trusting bride plunging to her death. The car would not budge and with good reason. Eva had shifted the transmission, which he had deliberately left in neutral, back into gear.
Ten days later, Payne booby-trapped the broom closet with a shotgun, but Eva escaped with only a flesh wound to her right hand. A fiendish scheme to strand her in front of a speeding train failed because the incompetent killer ran out of gas 500 feet from the railroad crossing. The intended victim unwittingly foiled the sixth attempt on her life by removing an electric heater from a precarious perch over the bathtub.
But even the proverbial cat has only so many lives. Eva Payne’s short drive to downtown Amarillo on June 27, 1929, ended in an ear-splitting explosion that killed her instantly and maimed the couple’s 14-year-old son.
The authorities bought the grieving husband’s elaborate explanation that an unknown assassin had made good on a death threat but murdered his poor wife by mistake. The local newspaper editor, however, smelled a rat and assigned several reporters the task of tracking down the bomb components.
The journalists cracked the case and so did Arthur Payne when he was confronted with the irrefutable evidence. He dictated a 63-page confession but cheated “Old Sparky” by blowing himself to bits with a small bomb someone smuggled into the Potter County jail.
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