The Girl in Murder Flat

Gold Medal Classic Trials #10

by Mel Heimer

Somewhere in the elegance of Beekman Place, the stone refuge of the very rich, she lay naked and sprawled across an heirloom of a bed in the grotesque position of sudden and violent death.

She was beautiful Patsy Burton Lonergan, 22-year-old wife, mother--and sole heiress to seven million dollars.

She had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy brass candlestick handsomely inlaid with green glass. The room was a shambles.

The following dawn Toronto police took into custody Patsy Lonergan's husband, Wayne, a Royal Canadian Air Force cadet. He had two gashes on his chin.

Thus burst over the nation one of the most sensational and sordid cases in the annals of modern crime. The trial of Wayne Lonergran for the murder of his wife revealed a bizarre design for living that shocked even the most jaded -- a trial that erupted into a Roman circus when the morals of a generation of wealth were exposed to a world avid for the details.

Genres: True Crime

141 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Girl in Murder Flat was # 458 in the Gold Medal paperback original series, also #10 in the Gold Medal Classic True Crime series. It was a shocking murder thriller hat stunned a nation with a naked wealthy heiress bludgeoned to death with candlesticks and strangled by her estranged ex-husband whose defense was that he was sharing a hotel room at the time with a sailor he picked up in a bar. When you think about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, you think about their jets and their yachts, but the true story is a nightclubbing heiress who liked to laze around all day and cared little for her young child and a husband she picked up along the way and who had nothing else going.

The story after the initial discovery of the body is told in sequences about the trial from lawyer’s arguments to jury selection to the coroner’s sworn testimony.