Rather than live through a new round of hounding, she took a cyanide pill, lay down on her bed, and never got up. Shortly thereafter, she heard that Truman Capote’s legendarily unfinished gossip novel Answered Prayers was to feature an account of the killing, essentially convicting Ann of murder. One of her troubled sons wouldn’t forgive her for killing his father and tried to kill himself (he’d later succeed, as would his brother). She was entangled in a heavy web of gossip. A jury took a half-hour to find her innocent of murder-but her sentence turned out to be much more diabolical than mere prison. The drama delighted their high-society friends, whose pride and insecurity was that all anyone could see in them was dollar signs-of course, a woman like Woodward would stop at nothing, even murder, to get her hands on her husband’s money (in fact, most of it was kept in trust for her sons). The police arrived to find her crying next to her husband’s body. In the middle of the night, she saw a shadowy figure and fired both barrels of her shotgun. In their North Shore neighborhood, there had been reports of a prowler, so husband and wife went to bed half-drunk-in separate bedrooms-with weapons by their sides. It happened after a particularly boozy party at the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s (she and Wallis Simpson, a fellow arriviste, had a deep bond).
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