This much is fact. In the early hours of Sunday, October 30, 1955, Ann Woodward killed her husband with a shotgun she kept by the side of her bed in their grand mansion on the North Shore of Long Island. The previous evening the couple had been at a party in honor of the Duchess of Windsor, and the talk had been peppered with stories about a recent clutch of break-ins in Oyster Bay Cove.
This much is gossip. Both Ann and her husband, Billy, drank too much and had affairs, and talk of divorce was very much in the air. Ann had been a showgirl who had caught the eye of the heir to a banking fortune, and very much enjoyed the monied life. She insisted she thought the man she heard in the dark hallway was an intruder (Ann and Billy slept in separate bedrooms), and a grand jury declined to indict her. Off to Europe she went, at her mother-in-law’s insistence, and the couple’s two young boys departed for Le Rosey boarding school, in Switzerland, all to evade the harsh glare of publicity.
