Perhaps it was just another 4th of July party that got out of hand. Over at Reynolda in Winston-Salem, festivities did not go as planned. It’s kind of like any get together. Things are going just fine until the first gunshot goes off.
Smith Reynolds served as host of the whole affair. A noted aviator and heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune, he stood to receive the modern equivalent of half-a-billion dollars on his 28th birthday. But during the summer of 1932, he was just 20 years old.
Smith Reynolds, the deceased
The party included his best friend, Ab Walker, who Smith had recently hired as his personal assistant, his Broadway wife Libby and a few other friends. They drank and frolicked. Libby started a drinking contest. When she gave an impromptu performance from atop a fountain, her husband demonstrated irritation. He had always been the jealous type, given to fits of threatening suicide. Some saw that as a play for control but with the bootleg whiskey flowing, all bets were off that night.
We don’t know exactly what transpired. It would be hard to figure out the chain of events at a party where alcohol was not involved, so let’s just say details were murky. After the partygoers got back to the house, a .28 Mauser appeared in Smith’s hand. He was upset, which took tension to a whole new level.
Libby Holman Reynolds, with their son, Christopher.
Sometime during the midnight hour, the gun went off, piercing Smith’s head from one side of his head to another. Did he pull the trigger? We don’t know. Years later, Libby told a friend she was too drunk to remember what went on. Speculation that Ab Walker was involved escalated during the subsequent investigation when he declared he knew something that he would “take to his grave.” That’s exactly where he took it because no source ever came to light that he confessed to anything. Libby and Ab carried Smith to the hospital where he died a few hours later.
What happened on the east sleeping porch? Since suicide had been threatened before, it cannot be ruled out. Was he murdered? If so, was it premeditated? Did a secret come out that Smith just could not withstand and his angst produced the gun and the whole affair escalated to tragic proportions? Anything and everything was possible.
When the news broke, the family did not know who to blame. They understood Smith was impulsive. Once he and his first wife got into a public argument that resulted in him throwing dishes out of the 9th story window of their apartment in front of guests during a dinner party.
As the police investigation began, no one could find the gun, until it reappeared later in the day. Apparently, someone began to realize they were a suspect and let it be found.
Both Libby and Ab were indicted. After she announced that she was pregnant with Smith’s child, things began to change. She and Ab swore they wanted their day in court to refute the charges, but the local justice system decided to drop the charges due to lack of evidence. According to accepted belief, the family wanted it that way to curb the airing of dirty laundry.
Libby moved to Connecticut, Ab went into obscurity but the story became fodder for several Hollywood movies into the 1950s. Now the story is being told where it happened. Down at Reynolda, the exhibit “Two Rings, Seven Months, One Bullet” gives all us folks interested in that kind of stuff an opportunity to sleuth our way to a conclusion on the mysterious chain of events that night when the party got out of hand.
