If you haven’t read the first installment of this series, go to The Mad Love of Mrs. Mort, Part 1

Part 2: Three Gunshots  

Florence Fizzele was relieved to hear an auto pull up in front of the house around 11:30 a.m. She let Dr. Tozer in and told him Mrs. Mort was still in bed. After showing him into Dorothy’s bedroom, Miss Fizzele discreetly went to another area of the house but stayed within earshot. The doctor’s visits were sometimes quite lengthy. Other times he would stay only a little while.

“About 14 minutes later I heard what sounded like a revolver shot,” Miss Fizzele said later. She ran to Mrs. Mort’s room and found the door ajar. “Mrs. Mort was not there. I went to the drawing room door, which I found locked.”

She knocked frantically. “Mrs. Mort!” she called. “Are you all right?”

To her relief, Mrs. Mort’s faint voice responded. Everything was all right, she said.

“Can I come in?” Miss Fizzele asked.

“No,” came the reply. “Please bring me a glass of icy cold water.”

“Please let me in,” the companion pleaded. But Mrs. Mort answered her request with a decided negative.

Frightened, Miss Fizzele hurried to the back of the house and placed a call to Mr. Mort’s office. Harold was not there but she left a message for him to come home as soon as he could. A moment after she hung up the receiver, two more shots were fired. “The second and third shots were almost together. Roughly, it was 10 minutes or so after the first shot.”

Miss Fizzele fainted. When she came to, the situation had not changed. Mrs. Mort was still in the locked drawing room. Unsure what to do, Miss Fizzele did nothing.

Harold Mort did not come home. Around 3 p.m., Dorothy’s 8-year-old daughter Virginia, nicknamed Poppy, and her 6-year-old son Maurice, returned home from school but Mrs. Mort did not come out to greet them. Poppy asked her mother to open the door but Dorothy told her no.

Mrs. Mort again requested ice water, and Miss Fizzele brought it and placed it outside the locked door. She noticed that Dr. Tozer’s car was still outside the house.  She took the children outside to play. The whole time she was outdoors, she wondered what was happening inside the locked drawing room.

While her children and her companion played outside, Mrs. Mort silently opened the door to the drawing room, exited, and carefully locked the door behind her. She went into her own bedroom across the hall and locked herself in.

At 7 p.m., Miss Fizzele put the children to bed. She brought Mrs. Mort another glass of ice water. Dorothy told her to leave it at the door to her bedroom. Miss Fizzele had no intention of doing so. Instead she stepped back and waited silently. After a few minutes, she heard Mrs. Mort fumbling with the lock for some time, as if she was having trouble opening it. When the door finally cracked open. Miss Fizzele sprang forward and forced her way inside.

She stared at her employer, speechless with horror. Dorothy was covered in blood, apparently from a gunshot wound to her chest, and was unable to be still. “When I got into her bedroom she was walking up and down like a wild woman,” Miss Fizzele recalled. “She was talking wildly and she struggled with me when I tried to put her to bed, saying that if I covered her up, no one would see her. Mrs. Mort had a skirt on over her nightdress. I tried to do something for her but she would not let me.”

When she recalled her employer’s extreme distress and irrationality, Miss Fizzele added, “She was trying to drink from a candlestick. Eventually I assisted Mrs. Mort with hot water and got her to bed. She was right out of her mind at the time.”

As soon as Dorothy was settled in bed, Miss Fizzele flew from the room. She placed a phone call to the family physician, Dr. Murray, who promised to come at once.

When the doctor arrived, he found Mrs. Mort in bed, gravely wounded. He discovered a gunshot wound caused by the entry of a bullet in the left breast, and an exit wound at the back of the left shoulder blade. “She looked pale and was breathing very heavily,” the doctor recounted. “Her tongue was brown and dry, and her pupils were contracted. In the region of the left breast there was a small wound, about the size of a three-penny hit. There was dry blood on the lower part of the body in front, and also on the lower limbs.” He suspected Mrs. Mort had taken a strong narcotic, like morphia.

“Physically Mrs. Mort was weakened. Mentally she appeared deranged,” Dr. Murray said later. “Knowing her family history, I should say she was deranged for some considerable time. I heard enough of her family history to make me sure there was probably some inherited brain trouble. She was a woman of neurotic temperament.” In an effort to clarify, the doctor added, “If her father was a homicidal and suicidal man it would be in keeping with what I saw. Any external sudden excitement to a mind of such a person would be liable to make her become unhinged.”

Just what had the unhinged mind of Dorothy Mort caused her to do?

Go to Part 3: “I don’t know why God made these neurotic women.”

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