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The Socialite New York Never Forgave for a Crime That May Not Have Happened

Ann Woodward shot her husband in 1955 and was cleared by a coroner's jury. Decades later, Truman Capote's gossip made sure New York never forgave her anyway.

Ann Woodward killed her husband, William Woodward Jr., in cold blood. Didn’t she? If you recognize her name at all, you know her as the woman who shot her banking heir husband in the middle of the night and got away with the (purported) crime by claiming she thought he was a burglar. Truman Capote called her “Bang Bang” and referred to her as a “jazzy little carrot top killer” who had been “brought up in some country slum way.” Truman Capote remains positively unmatched for bitchiness but, like many others, may have somewhat overstated the horrors of her origin.

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Born Angeline Lucille Crowell in 1915, she came from a farm in Kansas. Her mother, Ethel, was a schoolteacher, and her father, Jesse, would later leave farming to become a streetcar conductor. The couple divorced during Ann’s childhood, after which Ann had little to do with her father. She was remembered as being a “sweet, quiet little girl” who spent an inordinate amount of time eating ice cream sodas in her cousin’s drug store. 

Fortified by this diet, she grew into a willowy fashion model. She moved to New York City in 1937 to work for the John Robert Powers agency and was soon gracing magazine covers. She then turned to radio acting, playing roles in CBS soap operas like “Joyce Jordan, Girl Intern” and “Lincoln Highway.” She was called “the most beautiful girl in radio.” Ann also took on some small roles in the theater, appearing in a Noel Coward play, Set to Music, where she was reviewed as “one of the ten most beautiful girls in New York.” And she danced at the Copacabana nightclub, where uncharitable people would often describe her not as “beautiful” but as a “showgirl” or, just as often, “a hooker.”

During these years, she was remembered as being extremely ambitious. She studied French, copied the mannerisms of the English actors in Coward’s plays, and, according to her........

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