Ann Woodward

Woodward was born Angeline Lucille Crowell on December 12, 1915 in Pittsburg, Kansas, to Colonel M. Jesse Crowell, a streetcar conductor and retired military officer from Detroit, Michigan, and his wife Ethel Smiley Crowell, a schoolteacher and one of the earliest women in Kansas to receive a master’s degree from the University of Kansas in 1921. She had a role in Noël Coward's Set to Music. The marriage was a controversial one, and she initially was shunned by New York high society. Her mother-in-law, Elizabeth "Elsie" Ogden Cryder Woodward, one of the famous Cryder Triplets and dowager of New York society, initially objected to the marriage. Woodward eventually was welcomed into prominent social circles and became a leading figure in society. She had two sons, William Woodward III and James Woodward, with her husband. Her husband asked for a divorce in 1947, but Woodward refused. Some of her collection of paintings, Chinese antiquities, and couture clothing are housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. == Shooting, aftermath, and suicide ==

In late 1955, there was a string of burglaries in the Woodwards' neighborhood in Oyster Bay. Upon arriving at the home, police found Ann holding her husband's body and sobbing. She immediately told the police that she had shot her husband because she thought he was a burglar. A Nassau County grand jury declined to indict her, after deliberating for 30 minutes - ultimately concluding that the shooting was an accident. Police later arrested a man named Paul Wirths, who admitted that he had attempted to break into the Woodwards' house on the night of the shooting. Wirths claimed that he had been scared by the sound of gunshots and then left. Wirths subsequently pleaded guilty to having entered the Woodward house in an attempt to rob it. Although she was exonerated, Woodward was shunned by New York high society for the rest of her life. Elsie, her mother-in-law, said "I know Ann loved Billy very much and the shooting could be nothing but an accident". In 1975, Truman Capote published excerpts of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers (eventually published as Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel in 1986) in Esquire, which scandalized high society. The novel's characters were based on Capote's real-life acquaintances who were prominent socialites of the time. Despite having only met Woodward once, briefly, in the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, Capote took an immediate dislike to her, and became obsessed with her. In one of the excerpts from Answered Prayers published in Esquire magazine, "La Côte Basque 1965", Capote writes about a character named Ann Hopkins, a bigamist and gold digger who shoots her husband, based on Woodward's killing of her husband, implying that it was murder. The released excerpts caused a wave of gossip. Woodward killed herself by taking cyanide; according to her friends, she was already suffering from severe depression. and William in 1999. == References ==