The Battered Wife and Her Five Little Kids All Dressed In White

It was pitch dark outside a stately New Jersey mansion in 1916. Inside, a man's body lay on the floor. Margaret Clair Beutinger gripped a smoking gun. Two little girls crept from their bed and clung to her. She arose with the revolver carefully pointed away from them, and then, in fright, threw it down. She sank back and wept. The six-year-old ran to soak a towel in water from the sink and returned to bathe her mother's face. The servants came.

Was it murder or self-defense? It was up to two dozen men to decide.

And that drunken politician brought up on a charge of touching her when she lay abed in jail. Would he beat the rap?

You follow this story as almost everybody did it at that time - through printed newspaper reports, day after day as the tale unfolded. It is a unique way to look at this gripping narrative of a century ago.

This new edition brings her story up to date. The time she was named correspondent in a divorce suit. Whom she finally married. The astonishing claim that she had been a British agent. Her long (and eventually quiet) life.

And what became of her five little kids all dressed in white.