Robert "Robin" Hemingray - Carlotta Campiglio

HEMINGRAY, SOCIETY IDOL, SPORT

AND SCION OF WEALTHY FAMILY

SAYS DEAD WOMAN

WAS NOT HIS

WIFE.

Calls in Representatives of the

Press to Proclaim That She

Who Passed as Mrs. Hemingray

Was Not Married.

ROBERT HEMINGRAY'S sorrow occasioned by the suicide of the woman who passed as his wife appears to be mostly for himself. He called in representatives of the press yesterday and told them Carlotta Campiglio was not his wife and then he raised a piteous wail about the social ostracism which he sees likely to follow from these recent passages in his life. He is all broken up, he says - on the verge of collapse.

Robert Hemingray, son of a wealthy manufacturer in Indiana, grew up a society idol and a sport. His father is dead. His mother and uncle sought to reform him and put him to work in the factory. He ran away to follow the races. His mother is prostrated by the shock of the news from San Francisco.

Mrs. P. F. Campiglio, mother of Mrs. Robert Hemingray, refuses to believe that her daughter committed suicide. She insists that some other person fired the shot. Like the mother of the young man, Mrs. Campiglio is suffering from nervous collapse.

Robert Hemingray, the horseman whose alleged wife committed suicide last Saturday evening at the Hotel Knickerbocker, will be ruled off the tracks of the California Jockey Club today.

This action was ordered by the club management last night, and presumably was provoked by Hemingray's heartless conduct in connection with the suicide.

Tells Story of Two Lives.

The sketch shows Robert Hemingray

revealing the secret of his life with

Carlotta Campiglio, a portrait of whom

appears above this.

"That young woman was not my wife,"

Robert Hemingray addressed himself to half a dozen newspaper men whom he summoned to his room in the Palace Hotel yesterday to hear his version of the suicide of pretty Carlotta Campiglio. Robert Hemingray had previously declared that he had married the beautiful girl - that he had married her in Chicago but could not remember the name of the minister who had performed the ceremony or the number of the house in which the ceremony took place.

"She was not my wife," he repeated, making an effort to speak calmly and evidently repressing emotions that threatened to turn his narrative awry. "I was willing to acknowledge her as my wife," he continued, "as long as such acknowledgement would shield the girl's good name, but when her own mother proclaims to the world that Carlotta was less than a wife, I do not see why I should injure myself by the perjury I was willing to commit for the sake of the poor girl who is now dead."

The friend of Carlotta Campiglio referred to a dispatch from Cincinnati stating that Mrs. Campiglio had said that her daughter was not married.

"I met her first in Indianapolis," Hemingray went on. "A friend of mine in that city induced me to meet her. I was in Chicago at the time and I had heard a great deal about the girl's extraordinary beauty. My friend telegraphed to her asking her to come to Chicago, but she wired back that she could not come, so I went to Indianapolis. That was about five or six weeks ago. I met her and we went riding together. Fifteen minutes after we had become acquainted I asked her if she would go to San Francisco with me. 'You don't mean it,' she answered and laughed incredulously. 'I do mean it,' I said, 'and here's a hundred dollar bill; if you owe anything, pay it and we will start at once.' She paid a debt of twenty dollars, I think, out of that bill and we left for Chicago that night."

A LOVELESS UNION

They stayed in Chicago two weeks until Hemingray had shipped his horses to San Francisco. They arrived in this city three weeks ago and lived two or three days at the Palace Hotel. Then they went to the Knickerbocker Apartment House on Pine street, where the girl killed herself.

"How old was this young woman?" The questioner had lifted the cloth from the face of the beautiful dead woman at the morgue, and had guessed a maturity that this man's answer denied.

"She was not yet eighteen," he said. "There were times, though," he added, "when she might have been twenty-four - she looked it and her actions were those of a woman of that age. At other times she was like a child of thirteen."

"Did she love you?" he was asked.

"I don't think she did," was the answer with a straight forward glance convincingly candid. "I do not think she loved any man - I do not believe she ever really loved."

"Had you quarreled?"

"I don't think you could call our little differences quarrels," he rejoined. "We had our tiffs as other people have them, but I was never unkind to her and she never complained of my treatment of her. One night soon after we reached this city we had some words - it was a trivial matter - so trivial that even now when I ought to remember every detail of this affair, I cannot recall the exact circumstance. I only know that she jumped up crying out "I'll shoot myself!" and ran to my grip in which I carried my pistol. Before I could stop her she had the pistol in her hand and was turning it on herself. I caught hold of the weapon and wrenched it from her. I removed the cartridges telling her that she couldn't shoot herself. She laughed and said "Do you think I would shoot myself for you, or any other man?" I thought she was trying to frighten me, and when I spoke to her afterwards she convinced me that she had no intention of shooting herself. That was why I took no precautions - that is why she had access to my pistol when she finally carried her threat into execution."

THE SIGNAL OF DEATH.

As further proof of the amicable relations existing between them, Hemingray related how on another occasion he offered to send her back to her mother or to any other place she wished to go - any reasonable amount of money was at her disposal in addition to her fare on the train; but she declined to accept Hemingray's offer.

He reviewed the incidents of the tragedy as he has already narrated them - how he rebuked the girl for gossiping; how he and his brother went out to buy Christmas magazines; how they returned to the Knickerbocker; how his brother laid his hand on the knob of the door behind which, as Hemingray inferred, this young girl was lying in wait for just this signal, her head bound in wet cloth and the muzzle of the pistol at her head.

"I heard the crack of my revolver," Hemingray went on, "and I knew something awful had happened. I heard her moan and I knew that she was dying. I felt as if I were about to collapse on the threshold of the door. I asked my brother to go in, but he refused, saying, 'I can't go in; I can't go in.' I ran back to the room of Locke, the proprietor of the house, and told him that somebody had discharged a pistol in my room, asking him to see what had happened. He went in and almost immediately he came out shouting, 'That's what you get for keeping such things in the house!' Then I knew certainly that Carlotta was dead."

It was a clear vision that came to this child in the hours before she finally resolved to end it all - perhaps she saw then where it would lead if she followed this primrose path, and the horror of it appalled her with the knowledge that she had already gone too far; that she could never retrace her steps; and that death would eventually be the wage of her sin.

"Take this passbook," she said to Rose Hemingray, who ought to have been her sister-in-law; "take this passbook and have it renewed - I'll not need it again." Her book of passes to the racetrack had run out on that fatal Saturday afternoon and she was already deliberating on the immediate manner of her going out from the life that had already begun to taste so bitter.

Then she went home and attired herself for death - Rose Hemingray and her friend, Miss Cora Westphal, say that she put on other clothes after Hemingray left her - and those who found her dead body say that she had bound a cloth about her head to save her wondrous hair from the blood that she knew would flow.

HEMINGRAY'S REGRET.

"I blame her mother for the life that Carlotta was leading when I met her," said the man who had loved her last. "I could name many men high in the public regard who thought this woman very beautiful and very winsome," he continued. "I would have protected her with the perjury that she was my wife, but her mother has cast this shame upon her daughter, and I must now in self-defense tell the whole truth. I will send her body back to her mother tomorrow night, as her mother has ordered. I expect nothing from Mrs. Campiglio - I shall pay all the expenses."

Hemingray told his auditors that this mother was originally married to a man named Steffens in New York. She was divorced and married Campiglio in Cincinnati, where she is now living.

"It has ruined my life," he added. "I will be ostracized in my own country and I shall be pointed at wherever the story of this tragedy may be known."

So, at last, it came — this regret — for the man who set there telling his story to the newspaper men is the scion of a proud family of Kentucky; of the proudest Revolutionary stock; the only family of that name in the United States.

The inquest will be held tomorrow morning and then J. E. Locke, the owner of the Knickerbocker, will tell his story. It has been hinted that this story will lay a suspicion on those most nearly implicated, charging them with accurate knowledge of Carlotta Campiglio's intention and a purpose involving conspiracy to let her die as they knew she had planned.

"This is not true," Hemingray responded indignantly when informed of the rumors afloat. "And if Locke does not tell the exact truth as I know it, I'll teach him what the truth looks like."