The recent killin’ of the unfortunate actress by the fatal pistol shot of poor Frank Frayne, recalls a similar horror which occurred several years ago, the victim bein’, as in this case, a Brooklyn girl.
There was a variety troupe performin’ with considerable success at the Mozart Gardens, in Brooklyn. Connected with the troupe as its managers and principal members, were Mr. and Mrs. Franklin. The names off the stage of this very worthy couple were Mr. and Mrs. Fowler, and they were expert variety performers in general and very expert at pistol shootin’ in especial. Mrs. Franklin herself (who was at one time “a female pedestrian”) was a very nice woman, and much respected off the stage and liked on it. Among the other members of the variety company was a Nettie Malley, whose stage name was Mlle. Volante. Nettie was a rather pretty, impulsive and lively Irish girl, very fond of excitement; a good-natured girl, though pure in her life and devoutly religious, but fond of fun.
She had always been “crazy for the stage,” and finally became a professional trapeze performer, bein’ very agile and active and havin’ a fine figure, which she was not averse to displayin’ in tights and tinsel, though she was free from vulgarity; in fact, the girl was a very rare and curious mixture of “dash” and “propriety,” a combination which made her a decided favorite. She had a sister, a Mrs. Jeannie Lafferty, who had vainly endeavored to dissuade her from her trapeze performance, havin’ a presentiment that sooner or later her sister would come to a violent death, as she did, though not from the trapeze. She also had a lover, a young man named Bissell, in New Haven, to whom she was shortly to be married. Bissell wished her to retire from the stage.
After performin’ with tolerable success at the Mozart Gardens, the variety company “took the road” and traveled on the New England circuit, in the course of their tour appearin’ at the Opera House in Pawtucket, R. I.
On a Friday night in April the Opera House was filled and the performance was progressin’ finely before a large and enthusiastic audience. Among the feats announced on the programme for that night, and the most sensational and therefore attractive feat, was the shootin’ of an apple on the head of a woman, aim bein’ taken not at the apple direct, but at the reflection thereof on a mirror, precisely as in the Frank Frayne case. Mr. Franklin had been called that mornin’ away to New York to see a sick child, and rather than disappoint the audience and spoil the programme, the ever kind-hearted and obligin’ Volante volunteered to stand and support the apple herself in place of the absent Mr. Franklin. She volunteered in a moment of good nature just to oblige Mrs. Franklin, who was to be her room-mate during Mr. Franklin’s absence, and to whom she was sincerely attached. She didn’t for a moment suppose there was any risk, havin’ every confidence in the marksmanship of Mrs. Franklin.
The performance went on pleasantly and Mlle. Volante went through her perilous trapeze acts successfully and safely and to the large delight of the audience. And now it was the time for the display of extra fine shootin’, and poor Volante in her tights prepared to hold the fatal apple on her head.
Mrs. Franklin gave her some very practical advice just before she went on the stage for this act, which advice, if closely followed, would in all probability have prevented the horror that was to come. She advised her young friend to keep profoundly still and to concentrate her whole attention on what she was doin’ while holdin’ the apple. One would have thought that such advice would not have been needed, but poor Nettie Malley was so impulsive, giddy and careless that she needed all the advice she received on this all-important point, and even then she did not follow it.
Just before Volante or Nettie Malley went on the stage with Mrs. Franklin, a boy called Tom, the general drudge and utility boy of the company, who did all the hundred and one chores that have to be done, though no one ever thinks about ‘em when they have been done, and who was very fond of Nettie Malley, came up to her and told her he had a dream about her last night–a dream that prophesied trouble–and begged her not to go on the stage with Mrs. Franklin, and begged Mrs. Franklin not to do the shootin’ at the apple from the mirror trick that night. But Volante kindly and laughingly pooh-poohed Tom, and Mrs. Franklin sternly reproved Tom; and so Tom subsided, and Mrs. Franklin and Volante went on the stage together, and Mrs. Franklin did her fancy shootin’ to the huge delight of the audience.
It was a very clever exhibition, and after shootin’ and hittin’ any number of targets and inanimate objects, the crownin’ bit of sensation was due, and Volante stepped forward in her showy tights and Mrs. Franklin placed the apple on her pretty head, right over her luxuriant and real hair. “Now keep still as death,” said Mrs. Franklin to Volante, and she left her standing with the apple on her head. It was an ill-omened word, that “death;” but Mrs. Franklin thought nothin’ of it as she took her place at the end of the twenty-foot stage and adjusted her mirror, and Volante thought nothin’ of it as she stood at the other end of the stage and supported the apple with a pleasant smile, directed at a few bald-headed men who were conspicuous in the front rows of seats in the auditorium.
Had she heeded her friend’s warnin’–had she but kept “still as death;” but alas, she turned her pretty head very slightly, and alas, the bullet from Mrs. Franklin’s weapon, which otherwise would have hit the apple, hit her–hit her in the head.
She toppled over on the stage, and, her long hair flowin’ over the footlights, as it were, caught fire.
For a moment the wildest confusion prevailed. The audience rose–some yelled, some groaned, some fainted, some called out fire, while over all other sounds was heard the terrified, agonized shriek that issued from the lips of the involuntary life-taker, Mrs. Franklin.
And with this shriek mingled the despairin’ cry of poor Tom, who, to his terror, saw his forebodin’ fulfilled.
At last somethin’ was done. Poor Volante’s body was dragged behind the scenes, and her scorched hair saturated with water. The curtain was run down and the distracted Mrs. Franklin was arrested by the rural police.
She was soon released, however. The thought of escape now was as far from the soul of Mrs. Franklin as had been the idea of guilt or murder. She could not have been torn away from the still form of her victim, round which she hovered wildly in despairin’, fruitless agony.
And now a strange scene took place on the small stage of that rural opera house. Willin’ hands erected in the centre of the stage a rude but comfortable couch, and on it was placed the bleedin’ Volante, who had never stirred or uttered a sound, but only bled since she was shot.
All night long willin’ watchers watched around the poor girl’s bedside, and Tom never closed his eyes, but was ever speeding to and fro on some little errand of love and mercy.
Doctors were sent for, but one and all gave no hope. As fast as one doctor pronounced the wound fatal, Mrs. Franklin would frantically insist upon some other doctor bein’ sent for, till all the doctors in the little town had been consulted. One doctor at first gave some faint hope, but even he, when he found that the artery which supplied the brain had been severed, abandoned the case.
And then Mrs. Franklin raved and acted like a lunatic, as she temporarily was. But at last she kind of calmed herself by resolvin’ that her victim should and would recover finally, somehow, and in this desperate hope she grew comparatively calm and rational.
When the mornin’ of Saturday dawned the still unconscious Volante was removed to an adjoinin’ hotel. There she recovered sufficiently to understand her situation, to kiss Mrs. Franklin, to request a telegram to be sent to her sister in Brooklyn and her lover in New Haven, and to request the ministrations of a priest. All her wishes were religiously attended to, of course; her distracted lover came, and her sister and the priest. They all were at her bedside ere she died–the following’ Sunday night.
If prayers and kindness and sympathy could have saved a human bein’, Mlle. Volante, alias Nettie Malley, would have recovered. But she died about nine o’clock on the Sunday evening’, about forty-eight hours after she had been shot–died with a smile on her lips and her hands clasped in those of the good woman who had killed her.
When she was pronounced dead Mrs. Franklin went into hysterics, and came near dyin’ herself.
It was thought and said at that time that no similar exhibitions on the stage and no similar risk of life would ever be allowed again.
But the last few weeks have proved that the people and the papers were mistaken.
[Editor’s notes: This site’s editor (Jerry Kuntz) wrote about the Mlle. Volante tragedy in my 2010 book, A Pair of Shootists: The Wild West Story of S. F. Cody and Maud Lee. Contemporary news accounts of the aftermath of the shooting paint a slightly different picture. Jennie Fowler (Mrs. Franklin) returned to the stage within three weeks–out of economic necessity, she claimed. She was treated harshly in the press for her supposed indifference. From a New York Sun interview (which I included in my book):
Mrs. Jennie Franklin, advertised as “the daring shot, and principal in the terrible catastrophe and innocent killing of a woman onstage in Pawtucket,” stepped on the stage of Tony Pastor’s theatre, at the matinee yesterday, gun in hand. She is five and a half feet in stature, and lithe and straight as an Indian. A blue velvet cap, knotted to her shoulders with ribbons, hung jauntily down her back, leaving her arms free. Blue short skirts, snow-white tights and blue leggings adorned the rest of her graceful figure. Before she shot Volante, a little more than three weeks ago, her cheeks were rosy and she weighed 157 pounds. Now she weighs 119 pounds and her cheeks are pale.
Mrs. Franklin’s twenty-nine-pound gun was held with the steadiness of a Creedmoor rifleman. Her husband fastened apples on the face of a target, and she split them in two with bullets. She extinguished a lighted candle and broke a clay pipe. The range was the width of the stage. At last turning her back to the target, she pointed the gun over her shoulder, and taking aim over the reflection of the gun in a mirror, at the reflection of the apple—missed. She tried three times without success, and then bringing her gun to an order arms, with an angry pout, bowed and retired, the spectators heartily applauding.
“I could have hit the apple,” she explained in the green-room, “if the audience had kept still. Just as I was raising the gun I could hear people say—‘That’s the shot she killed Volante in.’
“I had to miss then. I can hear what people say if it’s only a whisper in the back of the room. Then some ladies in one of the boxes made some remarks about me. I want people to know one thing–that I never shoot below the mark. If I miss, the bullet always goes above it. I think Volante must have breathed so (drawing a long breath), after getting off the trapeze that night, and that threw her head up. I laughed when she fell, and sat on the floor with her hands on her knees; I thought she was making believe, as she had done before, to scare the audience. Then I said: ‘My God!’ I went over to her and I knew at once the bullet had come out again. I saw a few drops of blood under the hair just over her forehead. The wound in the forehead where the bullet went in didn’t bleed. I wanted then to wash her head and let her go to sleep, but the doctor inserted a probe, which cut the principal vein that carries the blood all through the head. The blood came out in a stream, and it continued to bleed. They wouldn’t believe me when I told them that the bullet had come out, but they had to afterwards. I attended her, and when her right side was paralyzed, she tried to talk to me, but she couldn’t shape her lips to speak the words. She would take my arm in her left hand and draw me to her, and when I stood close beside her, leaning over her bed, she would put up her hand and raise her left eye so that she could see me. “I am paying $5 a week for the board of a woman who used to stand for me [in the act.] She wants to do it again. I have to support my child, and it [the shooting act] is all I can do. I can’t save anything. You look at me here and you don’t know me, but you would know me well if I should tell you the name of my family in Brooklyn. That is a secret I have kept through all my trouble.” ]
