Classroom Casanova

On a clear summer night in Texas the moon hangs like a huge orange Chinese lantern; the stars sit like fat, cool diamonds on a sky of jewelers' plush; the earth is silent with the windless quiet of a thousand miles of sleeping land.

At about 1:20 a. m. on the morning of July 26, 1938, Ray Bonta, a reporter on the Dallas News, drove Mary Jo Miller, Illinois physical education teacher, home from a dance, saw her safely in, drove off. Jaunty, dark-haired Mary Jo was staying with her brother, J. H. Miller, on Dallas' quiet Monte Vista Street. As she undressed in the bathroom, she heard a sudden thud, a crash of glass, from the front bedroom where she slept. It sounded like a floor lamp falling over. Mary Jo ran in, saw a suitcase on the floor, under a broken window. Something was dreadfully wrong. She ran to the rear bedroom to wake her brother. Just as he stepped out of bed, the whole house came apart in a blasting crash. Mary Jo and Mrs. Miller were only slightly bruised; Brother J. H. was hit on the head by a falling timber. Outside, in the Texas summer night, a car drove away.

Soon after, a pale, lanky rural school superintendent, E. Ross Wyatt, 36, was jailed, charged under the involved Texas law with "burglary of a private residence at nighttime with intent to commit a felony; to wit, murder." For 16 months beak-faced Principal Wyatt languished in the Dallas jail; once, on the trial date, pneumonia reprieved him. Last week the "love-bomb" trial began. From Chicago flew 26-year-old Mary Jo.

On the witness stand, Miss Miller, smart in a blue tailored suit, told a sympathetic jury that Ross Wyatt had wooed her and pursued her for seven years; had kissed her the week he hired her as his secretary in 1931; had threatened to kill her brother if he interfered; had sworn to kill "both of you" if he found her going with another man. There were no real intimacies, said she: kisses and hugs, love letters, slaps, hair-pullings, finally escape to Chicago in 1937.

To the stand went a score of witnesses: Mrs. Lela Wyatt, who divorced the classroom Casanova in 1936 after finding him "more times than she could count" with Mary Jo; Thelma Powell, buxom waitress, once the object of his affections; his sisters and his friends. Seven of them gave him a perfect alibi: that he was 250 miles from the explosion scene at the time. But careful detective work placed his car near the Miller house that night; established his purchase of a case of dynamite in March 1938 in Shreveport, La.; proved by dust analysis that dynamite had been carried in one of Wyatt's suitcases found in his car.

Ross Wyatt took the stand, told in detail how Mary Jo had drawn two hearts, arrow-joined, when she applied for a job with him; how he first kissed her, how they became intimate three weeks later, how they took a ten-day trip to Florida at her suggestion, spent weekends in tourist camps and hotels, how she loved him.

Once, he said, they went back to a rendezvous to get some pillows left there on a previous tryst. "When I returned to the car she had stripped off her clothing ... it was a beautiful moonlit night."

This crass betrayal of the Texas moon and Texas womanhood settled Ross Wyatt's hash with the Texas jury. Unanimously, they found him guilty on the first ballot, sentenced him to 50 years in jail.

"I've been vindicated," said Mary Jo Miller.

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