Mystery Killing

Writer Louis Adamic (The Native's Return, Dinner at the White House), had known hard times in his 38 years in the U.S. He had been a Yugoslav immigrant boy at 14, a newspaper loader, a soldier, a textile worker, a longshoreman. When he moved in 1936 to a century-old farmhouse and 40 acres of land in New Jersey's stony, wooded Hunterdon County hills, he took to the placid rural life with something akin to jubilance. "Louis," nearby residents took to saying, "is a good neighbor--none better."

But as time wore on, they saw him less & less. A devout party-liner with a fierce feeling for the country of his birth, he was a wartime supporter of Tito, and when Tito broke with the Kremlin, Adamic broke too. He campaigned briefly for Henry Wallace in the 1948 campaign, then plunged back into his writing with the single-minded purposefulness of a dedicated man. Finally, he became a virtual recluse: his neighbors rarely saw him. Last year, the neighbors discovered that Adamic and his wife had simply vanished--their house was standing with locked doors and drawn shades amid a rising jungle of grass and plants.

Glare In the Hills. At 3:50 one morning last week, a paper-mill technician on his way to work spotted a glare in the hills and drove up a twisting road to the Adamic place. It was burning. By the time volunteer firemen arrived from Riegelsville, two miles away, the author's garage and studio had burned to its foundations. The charred wreck of a new Nash sedan sat amid the embers. The back of the old farmhouse, 100 feet away, was flaming too. The firemen drove on, ran hose to a nearby pond and put the fire out.

Then they pushed into the house, saw instantly that someone had set the fire. The unswept, cobwebbed rooms stank from a litter of oily rags; the inner walls of Adamic's barn, which did not burn, had also been doused with oil, apparently taken from the farmhouse fuel tank. A moment later, they found the owner of the sedan. Adamic was lying on his back on a couch in an upstairs bedroom. He was wearing dungarees and a windbreaker, with a pillow at his back, a .22 Mossberg rifle across his lap--and a bullet wound just above his right ear. He was dead.

The Visitors. Adamic had been working for almost three years on a new book, The Eagle and the Roots, in which he pictured Yugoslavia as a democratic nation and a rock sturdily withstanding the tide of Russian Communism. In San Francisco, Yugoslav Correspondent Anton Smole, an old friend of the author, said he was certain that Adamic had been murdered for taking this stand. He also explained why Adamic had slipped away from New Jersey--and why he had quietly gone back.

Adamic, he said, had told him of receiving repeated threats because of the book. In 1949, he was twice visited by a man he knew as an "associate of Cominform agents," and twice warned against praising Tito. In 1950, four men in an automobile with Michigan license plates came to the farmhouse while Adamic was alone and demanded to see the manuscript. A laundry truck providentially drove up and they departed. Adamic kept the incident a secret from his wife, said Smole, but immediately packed up and moved surreptitiously to Manhattan Beach, Calif.

This year, Smole said, the author told him of new trouble. One night, two thugs stopped Adamic on the street in California and demanded to see the book. When he refused, they beat him into unconsciousness. Alarmed, he moved back to New Jersey six weeks ago--alone and so secretly that the neighbors had no inkling of his arrival. How did Smole know the stories were true? When he had seen Adamic in New York, the author still bore an unhealed wound from the encounter.

Who? Why? But this left a host of puzzling questions. So did inspection of the rifle, and of an ax used to break open containers of oil. Fingerprints on both were hopelessly smudged. If Adamic had committed suicide, why had he felt it necessary to go to the trouble of burning his house and garage and preparing to burn his barn? Why had he left no note? And how could he have shot himself, then returned the rifle to his lap? But if he had been murdered by someone who set the fires to destroy evidence, why hadn't he resisted while the rifle was held so close to his head that it left a powder burn?

At week's end, none of the questions had yet been answered. A Hunterdon County medical examiner returned a tentative verdict of suicide, and the New Jersey police went on looking for evidence that might indicate murder.

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