Hank Nuwer, adjunct professor of journalism
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
3191 Chinook Drive, Fairbanks, AK 99507
907 799-4448; Hjnuwer@Alaska.edu
“To say he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
Was Edith Vonnegut’s Death Really a Suicide?
By Hank Nuwer
I
The details of Kurt Vonnegut’s mother’s last evening on earth remain elusive. What’s certain is that on Mother’s Day morning in 1944, as other mothers pinned on corsages and primped for church, Edith lay dead in the tidy, middle-class Vonnegut home in a fashionable Indianapolis community.
Before her marriage, Edith had been the beautiful, flame-haired daughter and granddaughter of prosperous brewery scions. Eager gentleman callers had sent enough floral arrangements to fill a greenhouse.
Now, on the morning of May 14, her last gentleman visitor was at her home with a medical bag. Edith’s grieving family, not she, answered the door. At some point early that morning, she took her last breath. Decades later, Edith’s son Kurt would claim she also had swallowed her last prescription pills.
The previous evening, Edith had spoken her final words before retiring to her separate bedroom. She left no note suggesting any willful act in the typewriter on which she composed cover letters to editors and short stories that never earned her a living–or even the modest literary reputation she had enjoyed as a young woman traveling in Europe. While still in her late teens she displayed a light touch and easy wit while writing occasional travel dispatches from Dusseldorf, Germany, for the Indianapolis News.
Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. was at home to greet Marion County coroner Roy B. Storms, M.D., as were two of his three adult children.
The couple’s married daughter, Alice Vonnegut Adams, had come here to her parents’ home instead of staying alone in Baltimore while her husband, Lieutenant James C. Adams, was away in the service.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., still known to family and friends as Kay, had wangled leave from Camp Atterbury so he could spend Mother’s Day at home. Years later, he claimed his mother had developed a habit of mixing alcohol and barbiturates in the evening. The combination, he claimed, loosened her tongue, and she directed her anger and frustration at his father in attacks, “as corrosive as hydrochloric acid.”
One can only speculate about Kay’s final evening with his mother. Perhaps he spent part of the evening with old friends over drinks or a club listening to hot jazz before returning to a darkened house. Unaware that this would be his last night under the same roof with his mother, he may have gone to sleep expecting to celebrate her special day in the morning.
It was Alice, the tall and athletic daughter, who wondered why her mother’s bedroom remained silent. At last, she nudged open the door and found Edith lying cold in the bed. She summoned Kay. What he saw must have taken away all his composure. He and Alice had to steel their resolve and inform their father that he was now a widower at age 59. The news, despite his life of turmoil with his wife, would turn him into a recluse, his son Kay later would write.
On May 16, 1944, Edith’s wake at Flanner & Buchanan Mortuary was open to friends. The ancient pastor-emeritus Rev. Dr. F. S. C. Wicks officiated at Edith’s funeral service at All Souls Unitarian church in Indianapolis. Fifteen months earlier, the Rev. Dr. Wicks, presided over the marriage of Alice Vonnegut to Adams at her parents’ home beneath a makeshift altar overflowing with bouquets. Three decades before that, Wicks had presided over Edith and Kurt’s lavish wedding ceremony in the first ever marriage held at All Souls.
Edith’s grieving family buried Edith’s body remains in Crown Hill cemetery. Her tombstone was small, inscribed rock with her name.
Kurt wrote to his on-again, off-again girlfriend Jane Cox on May 30, 1944, to confess how he had cried and cried over his great loss. Even in his grief, Kay congratulated Jane’s accomplishments and her imminent graduation from Swarthmore College. This letter was one of a treasure trove of correspondence published by daughter Edie Vonnegut in the 2020 collection “Love, Kurt: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941-1945.”
In a few matter-of-fact sentences, he explained to his future wife that Edith had died in her sleep, curled beneath the covers, and emphasized that there had been nothing strange or unnatural about the position in which she was found. He also told his “Woofy” that he regretted never telling his mother more of what was in his heart. Rather than attributing her emotional outbursts to drugs or alcohol, he blamed a particularly severe menopause. He memorialized her limitless devotion to her children and her unwavering sense of morality and justice. On simple sheets of lined paper, he lamented the loss of her limitless devotion and again told Jane how he cried. Oh, how he cried.
The presumed cause of Edith Vonnegut’s death would remain unchanged for about a quarter century. Dr. Storms finished his inquest and concluded that the cause of death—based upon his observations, the evidence, and an interview with Kurt, Sr.—was a “coronary occlusion,” an obstruction of blood flow in an artery. Simply put, Storms ruled that Edith Sophia Lieber Vonnegut died of heart failure. What was not known in 1944 was later findings by Dr. Masahiko Setoguchi of Tokyo Medical and Dental University that found habitual users of sleeping pills had eight times the risk factor of dying from heart failure.
Edith Vonnegut’s obituary ran in the Indianapolis Star on May 15, 1944, under the headline: “Suffers fatal heart attack.” Another obituary with that cause of death ran that day in the Indianapolis News.
This tendency to develop heart disease most definitely was a common event in Edith’s family.
–Edith’s grandmother, Sophia Barus, died of pneumonia and an unspecified heart issue at age 85 on July 13, 1920.
–Edith’s unmarried aunt, Jennie Barus, an Indianapolis piano teacher, died of pneumonia with myocarditis as a contributory factor on January 17, 1938. Jennie’s death certificate was signed by informant Kurt Vonnegut, Sr.
–Albert Lieber, Edith’s father, died of atherosclerosis and chronic myocarditis.
–The son of Albert Lieber’’s sister Caroline, Kurt George Francke, would die of a myocardial infarction at 65 in 1955.
Vonnegut family historian John Rauch wrote in his account that Edith died from a sleeping pill overdose. He softened his words by allowing that taking too many pills might have been a mistake. Kurt quoted this explanation of Uncle John’s verbatim in an autobiographical chapter in Palm Sunday. Rauch’s history, incidentally, has many factual errors that Kurt reprinted uncorrected. For example, the history erroneously listed Edith’s age at death as 56, but it was actually 55. She was born August 26, 1888.
What matters much more than Uncle John’s errors, however, is that a suicide by overdose certainly is not the cause of Edith’s death that coroner Storms reached for the historical record.
While it is clear from Kurt’s recollections that he and Uncle John believed Edith abused sleeping pills, there is simply no document or anything stronger than a family historian’s hearsay to support Kurt’s accusation that his mother died a suicide.
Storms ordered no autopsy, but even an autopsy might not have provided an absolute medical conclusion given Edith’s long-term use of sleeping pills and alcohol dependence. Many autopsies in similar death events end up “inconclusive” for a cause of death.
Moreover, if Edith was depressed as Kurt believed, such acute depression can influence behavior certainly, but the circumstances known to the coroner cast doubt that her death qualifies as a deliberate fatal overdose.
Edith in 1944 was hardly a recluse behind closed curtains. About ten days before her death, she and her husband sponsored a social event for the Portfolio Club of Indianapolis.
Family events in Indianapolis and Lake Maxinkuckee mattered always to Edith. The previous Christmas of 1943 she accompanied her husband to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the marriage of son Bernard, a scientist of note, to Lois Bowler. And with daughter Alice visibly pregnant, and days from delivery without a husband present, it is hard to imagine Edith deliberately missing the joyous birth of her first grandchild, James Carmalt Adams, who would be born at an Indianapolis hospital on June 1, 1944.
II
Many questions arise that neither Uncle John nor Kurt Vonnegut ever addressed. Who was the coroner? What was his background? Most important, did the coroner get the verdict wrong or worse, cover up the death?
Dr. Roy Basil Storms was the son of a farmer who farmed acreage about an hour north of Indianapolis. He graduated from Indiana University Medical School in 1915. He served as a captain in the Army Medical Corps in France during the Great War and commanded an ambulance corps. After mustering out, his reputation and private medical practice were imperiled after he took offense at an insult and was charged with assault and battery. The Journal of the American Medical Association carried a brief note about his 1922 acquittal by an Indianapolis trial judge. At the time of Edith’s death, Roy Basil Storms, was a robust 56-year-old man with a photogenic 30-year-old girlfriend, Mary Frances Gordon. The couple’s wedding was set for July 1, 1944.
Active in the Indianapolis Athletic Club and Columbia Club, the socialite Dr. Storms likely had a nodding familiarity with Kurt, Sr., also a member. That hardly suggests Storms felt obligated to stage a cover to spare the family a social stigma and political fallout, as Kurt claimed during PBS’s NOW program in 2005.
It defies belief that Storms would see any gain for himself politically by helping Kurt’s father, an architect with woefully few post Great Depression commissions. Storms was elected coroner in 1940 and then served for 18 years. “Dr. Storms served so long and so well that his name almost became synonymous with the job,” the Indianapolis News would say in a tribute after his death from a stroke.
The year prior to the death of Edith Vonnegut, Dr. Storms was a key source for news reporters in a mysterious, never-solved death. WAC Corporal Maoma Ridings, 32, was murdered August 28, 1943, at the then-fashionable Claypool Hotel. “He was patient and precise in answering the reporters’ questions and gained the confidence of newsmen,” wrote a columnist for the Indianapolis News. “While some law enforcement officers could not resist the temptation to grandstand, he was interested only in the facts.”
On the other hand, he was pilloried in the press where he found deaths caused by Indianapolis police in shootings to always be “justifiable.” In 1953, he defended the actions of two Indianapolis policemen who beat an uncooperative disabled veteran to death with blows to the head from their night sticks. A prosecutor who took the case to trial. The verdict favored Storms and the police as justifiable.
Nor would Storms have had the slightest qualms about labeling Edith’s death a suicide if that was his conclusion. The coroner rarely minced words if a death was due to suicide by ingestion of pills. After the coroner conducted an autopsy on the corpse of a cheating wife named Mary Juanita Nance Yadon, 41, who was found dead in a hotel room with a petty criminal, he wrote this on her death certificate: “Acute alcohol & barbiturate poisoning self-ingested during drunken orgy. Consumed overdose of alcohol & barbiturates.”
In another of the coroner’s cases, the death of Halene May Wilson Cox on July 8, 1954. a death certificate declared her a suicide due to a “self-digested overdose of barbiturates.”
However, to support Kurt Vonnegut’s claim of political maneuvering, one death certificate signed by Storms suggests he may have clamped the lid on a suicide. Three months prior to Edith’s death, he responded to a shooting “accident” at a tiny, older three-bedroom house on West 29th street in Indianapolis. He found a body with a single .22 bullet lodged in the head. Donald Beeker, 34, and seriously ill for two years, sat on a chair when he shot himself. The rifle was propped under Beeker’s chin.
Dr. Storms’ wrote this on the death certificate: “Gun shot wound under chin and into head. . .while loading .22 calibre rifle[,] which was accidentally discharged.”
What might have prompted this ruling was that one of Beeker’s brothers was Detective Leonard Beeker of the Indianapolis police Department. Another brother was Indianapolis police chief Donald Beeker.
Chief Beeker defended the coroner’s findings, claiming that Donald Beeker died accidentally when he snatched up the weapon to defend his property. The incident inspires comparison with a famous shooting in another time and place: Ketchum, Idaho, 1961. After Ernest Hemingway, depressed over ill health, triggered a loaded shotgun under his chin, wife Mary Hemingway claimed the famous big game hunter died accidentally while cleaning his weapon. A local coroner supported her and refused to check the suicide box on the death certificate. In time, the grief-stricken wife conceded in her autobiography that her husband, son of a physician who killed himself, committed suicide.
In short, despite a few perplexing decisions made during a long career, Dr. Storms was nonetheless a respected coroner in the eyes of Republican voters
Dr. Roy B. Storms died in 1970 after years in the care of his wife as he battled a stroke, pancreatic cancer and anemia. Kurt Vonnegut now had no legal barrier to publicly charge that an Indianapolis coroner—he never referred to Storms by name—covered up his mother’s suicide.
For example, Kay’s 1974 essay titled “Reflections on My Own Death” claimed Edith’s suicide with pills was her way out of a loveless marriage to Kurt, Sr.
By then, Kay’s father also was long dead of cancer and pneumonia and unable to refute any calumnies by family members. Sister Alice was also long dead of cancer. They and Kurt were the only witnesses present when his mother died that long-ago Mother’s Day.
Certainly, former reporter Kurt knew that he no longer had to worry about a libel or slander suit once Dr. Storms died. Had the author accused the coroner of a felonious cover-up of a homicide before 1970, he might well have found himself in court accused of libel. The physician’s widow lived until 1991. If she followed Kurt Jr. and his career at all, she might have been aware of his accusations against her husband.
The old saying that “there is a thin line between certainty and doubt” certainly applies to whether or not Kurt’s mother killed herself. Edith’s younger son took hold of a possible explanation for an event and then he held on to that belief with all his power. Believing that he was the son of a suicide gave him all the reason he needed for the suicidal tendencies he fought all his life, as well as a failed suicide attempt at age 62 in 1984.
And so it goes that the suicide story keeps on being rehashed in biographies and news stories alike as if it were a certifiable truth.
In fact, Kurt wasn’t always certain his mother’s death was a suicide.
As early as April 7, 1965, around the time Kurt engaged in a whirlwind publicity campaign for God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt wrote a letter to confide in his former student from the Hopefields Riverview School that his mother Edith Vonnegut “may or may not” have committed suicide. Kurt added in the letter to Corrigan that “if” Edith’s death had been a suicide, sleeping pills were the death instrument of choice.
The student was William (“Bill”) Corrigan, and he had written Kurt to inform him that his own mother has taken her life. Exactly five years after expressing in this letter a lack of absolute certainty about Edith’s demise, Kurt publicly began claiming that his mother killed herself.
The April 7 letter showed Kurt’s sympathetic, caring side. Kurt warned Bill Corrigan that being the child of a suicide may make it more likely that the youth also might consider ending it all one day. He urged him to ignore the likely impulse in strongly worded language. He said to always remember that a mother’s suicide makes a repetition of the fatal choice attractive to the child of a suicide.
Kurt wrote Bill Corrigan that the coroner attending Edith could care less if she killed herself and took no steps to make a determination either way. The available deaths records do not support that conclusion.
The timing of the letter is crucial. Kurt has just returned from a visit to Indianapolis to see his father who has been diagnosed with cancer. Certainly, it is possible, the father and son revisited the topic of Edith’s demise.
Mark Vonnegut and his sisters Edie and Nanette at times have questioned their father’s certainty that their grandmother killed herself. “His mother had allegedly killed herself,” wrote Mark Vonnegut in a 2010 memoir. “I say allegedly because not everyone thought so and I wanted that doubt to lessen the chances of my father doing the same.”
More significant than Kurt Vonnegut convincing himself that his mother’s death was a suicide, thereby reshaping her reputation a quarter century after the fact, was that hundreds of established journalists, scholars and even Charles J. Shields, author of the biography “And So It Goes,” have written without identifying relevant independent evidence, that Edith Vonnegut took her own life on Mother’s Day.
At the present time, no evidence has turned up to overturn Dr. Storms’ original finding of Edith’s death by heart failure. Kurt Vonnegut’s delayed certainty that his mother had taken her own life was unsupported by the official surviving documents.
Edith’s sudden death haunted her son and became intertwined with his reflections on depression and suicide. That said, only one indisputable certainty remains. Whatever happened in Edith Vonnegut’s bedroom during the night of May 13, 1944, went into the earth with her body.