QUEER SUICIDE PACT

Gisborne Times, Volume LXV, Issue 10310, 20 January 1927, Page 5

QUEER SUICIDE PACT

BARONESS’S AWFUL ORDEAL. ROMANCE OF RUSSIAN EXILES. Behind the suicide of the Baroness Sophies Rovce Barrett, who leaped to deatli from the eighteenth storey of the Everglades Hotel Miami, and the attempted suicide of her husband, Baron Boyce Garrett, is one of the strangest “suicide pacts’’ ever known. The couple had seen the Russia they knew tumble to pieces, and with its downfall went all that they possessed. Ruined, practically penniless, they met and loved with the dramatic intensity of the Slavonic nature. Seven years ago they made their compact, when the baroness, who \\as a daughter of an aristocratic and wealthy Russian family, appeared on the stage of the Imperial Opera in Petrograd. She and her father were arrested by the Bolshevists. To save her father’s life the girl pleaded with dramatic passion* and the brutal captors consented to spare them both on the one condition that she should prove her loyalty to the revolution by drinking a cup of aristocrats’ blood. She drained the cup. Then she met the Baron Koyco Garrett, a brave soldier, but desperately wounded man as well. Both, believed in the old superstition that luck runs in periods of seven years, and they agreed to link their lives and carry on as well as they could for exactly seven years. “Success in seven years, or we die together,’’ was their slogan, and they swore to each other to stand true to that vow. . The baron was a maimed and broken man, with nothing but his courage and hts wife’s love to aid him in the fight for success. They watched the abandonment of Russia by her Allies, and were among the last fragments of the retreating White forces in the Crimea, whence they ned to Georgia. . , , At Ba'tum the British representative managed to get them away, and they reached London, where the Baroness took up concert work, and scored a distinct success. Then she went to America. But the baroness’s contract ran out and she could not renew it. Wit» the coming of winter the tourists migrated, and no work came m sight. They owned themselves beaten. They agreed to die together, blit at the last moment/the woman s nerve failed her —not for herself, but for the man she loved . She sent him out from thr\ hotel to his club, telling him she had "some things she wished to do alone—and in his absence sfie made the leap that killed_ her. The first he knew of it was when he road' in the paper that a woman had made the death leap. It was then that he tried to hang himselt and failed. _______