Cruising in the West Indies in December 1934, Vera Stretz met Dr. Fritz
Gebhardt. Miss Stretz, 30, had no occupation, enjoyed a small
independent income. Dr. Gebhardt, 42, was vaguely connected with the
German Nazi movement for the sake of his importing business. Each lived
in Manhattan, where the cruise acquaintanceship was continued. By April, they were quoting Oscar Wilde. By mid-May, in a hotel at Lake George, N. Y., Miss Stretz had become Dr.
Gebhardt's mistress. By June, Miss Stretz had shown Gebhardt a small revolver, which she said
was to scare off burglars. By July, he had sailed for Germany, presumably to divorce his non-Aryan
wife, return to marry Miss Stretz. By November, Dr. Gebhardt was back in Manhattan, but no marriage with
Miss Stretz had been arranged. By the early morning of Nov. 12, 1935, Dr. Gebhardt was dead, with four
bullets from Miss Stretz's small revolver in his body. By last week, Vera Stretz was on trial for her life, and the New York
Press had made her case the juiciest sex & shooting sensation of the
season. Vera Stretz had a bang-up trial. She was represented by stubby,
truculent Lawyer Samuel Leibowitz, famed for his defense of the
Scottsboro boys . She had an audience of some 300
murder fans, including slinky Actress Tallulah Bankhead. A corps of
some of the best talent the U. S. Press could muster looked searchingly
into Miss Stretz's Germanic countenance, was not in complete accord as
to what it saw. “An educated, cultured girl in an awful jam. . . . Neatly dressed and
actually beautiful, like someone you'd meet at the Savoy-Plaza about
cocktail time,” pronounced the Hearstian Evening Journal. “A prim and rather housewifely woman,” observed the Scripps-Howard
World-Telegram, “a dead-white woman inclining to stoutness, a
school-teacher type with a double chin.” The United Press regarded Miss Stretz simply as an “emotional blonde
beauty.” “A woman stretched on a rack of suffering . . . enduring the torture of
the damned,” sobbed Hearstwriter Marguerite Mooers Marshall. The popular press resoundingly agreed on the purity of Vera Stretz's
motive for plugging Dr. Gebhardt even before the defendant took the
stand. “The defense . . . will prove Gebhardt was a cruel, browbeating type of
man,” declared the Daily News, “and that he was killed as the girl
sought to repulse his brutish advances.” “Blue-eyed Vera,” responded the equally blatant Journal, “emerged . . .
as an enslaved girl who killed her paramour in revolt against his
sadistic love practices.” “She had tried to think out her life in terms of mental and spiritual
progress,” agreed the proletarian Post. “The effort, it seems, betrayed
her.”
