Hammer Heroine

"This is just as good as Clara Phillips, isn't it?" Mrs. Mabel Frances Willys, 38, anxiously inquired of a group of Los Angeles newshawks one day last week. "You're gonna have my pictures on all the front pages?"

"Yes, indeed!" chorused the newshawks.

Mrs. Willys, an ex-convict's wife, proceeded to smear make-up over her fat face, show photographers how she had swung a hammer found buried that day in the skull of her 62-year-old dentist lover, Dr. William F. Hammond.

Since Clara Phillips beat out Alberta Meadows' brains near Los Angeles 13 years ago, a hammer seemed to California editors the most glamorous of all murder weapons. Last week a Los Angeles citizen interested enough to buy copies of all his local newspapers could have pieced together the following picturesque account of Mrs. Willys' feat:

Officers learned of the tragedy when Mrs. Willys called Central Police Station and delivered this laconic message: "You'd better come out to 2737 Clearwater Street. I think there's a dead one here." When the police arrived Mrs. Willys greeted them thus: "Come in, boys. You'll find the body in the bedroom."

To an Illustrated Daily News reporter she remarked: "I was the happiest woman in the world when the hammer sank in that old ----'s head."

"Why didn't you call us before?" asked a policeman.

"I wanted to clean up a bit," a Herald & Express newshawk heard Mrs. Willys answer. "I'm not a bit sorry. I was thinking of Clara Phillips as I swung on him. Now give me a drink."

"Did you love Dr. Hammond?" one interviewer asked.

"Love him?" she sniffed. "I was a mother to him. I was his nurse--even his--his woman. . . . But he wouldn' never let me go to his office because he had his young floozies down there."

The Herald & Express asked greedily for more details, got them: "I hit him four or five times. He kicked me. And I'm black and blue all over from his beatings."

"I wish I could show you my bruises," Mrs. Willys told the Daily Newsman.

"Did he say anything?"

"Yes, he asked me, 'What is the matter with you, have you gone nuts?' "

"Which blow knocked him unconscious?"

"The last one. He was talking to me all the time I was hitting him."

"Have you quarreled often?"

"Always. He was so hard to live with."

"I killed him because he was about through," remarked Mrs. Willys philosophically. "At 62 he was pretty much through."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.