Quicklime and Communists

In a spacious Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Manhattan's Central Park lives Jesse S. Harte. president of prosperous little Intermediate Factors Corp., with his wife and daughter. Son Sheldon went to Duke University, took up with Communism without the knowledge of his family, and on graduating refused a job in his father's office. In March he set off for a "vacation in Mexico." Secretly, before leaving Manhattan, Sheldon Harte had visited Leon Trotsky's lawyer, Albert Goldman, who hired the youth to work in Mexico City as a secretary-bodyguard to the Great Exile. Last month Sheldon was kidnapped by a terrorist group who riddled the Trotsky home with bullets, tossed an incendiary bomb into the courtyard, killed nobody in the house (TIME, June 3). Next day Jesse S. Harte (until then unaware of his son's job with Trotsky) enplaned in Manhattan, streaked to Mexico City, offered 10,000 pesos ($2,035) reward for Sheldon.

Last week Mexican sleuths took up some loose boards from the kitchen floor of a farmhouse a few miles from where Mr. and Mrs. Trotsky live in the suburbs of Mexico City. Digging down about two feet, they came to quicklime and a partly decomposed corpse. This was identified by other Trotsky guards now on duty as Sheldon Harte. Promptly the Great Exile wired condolences to Father Harte, who had been obliged to return to Manhattan.

According to the Mexican detectives next day, the condition of the body showed that Sheldon Harte was beaten and otherwise tortured by his kidnappers before they killed him. Mexico City Police Chief Jose Manuel Nunez said his operatives have evidence that the principal assailants were paid 250 pesos each from the funds of the Mexican Communist Party for the shooting & kidnapping. The plot was organized, according to Mexico City police, by four members of the Mexican Communist Party, veterans who fought in Spain against Franco.

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