Greensboro, Jan. 16—“Hush, you dishearten me, you make me think I haven’t done my duty,” said Beatie Smith, a young woman, when policemen, trying to comfort her after she shot her former husband, Phil Kidd, told her that he was not seriously wounded.
She admitted that she said that, when placed on trial in Guilford Superior court today. She plead guilty to a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Judge Stack reserved sentence until Saturday.
The woman said that she desired and intended to hurt him, but not to kill, when she got her pistol last Wednesday night, met him on the street here, and shot him three times in the legs. He had given her a loathsome disease, she said, and divorced her while she lay ill in a hospital from it. Then marrying again, he and his wife went to the Pomona mill, where she was working, and he said things reflecting on her character, she said. Then it was that she decided to shoot him.
She married at 16 without the consent of her parents.
The case was moved, Judge Stack to declare that a law should be passed that would make buying a pistol from mail order houses impossible. Further, he said, “Instead of making divorce more difficult, marriage ought to be so, by posting intention of marriage at church doors for not less than 30 days before the marriage.”
The young woman was taken back to jail after the trial and ordered held separate from other female prisoners because of her disease, communicable and difficult to cure.
From the front page of The Monroe Journal, Jan. 16, 1923
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