’TIL DEATH DO US PART
(1922)
We are convinced that in Mrs. Ford the prosecution has a dangerous, cold-blooded death plotter,” Chief Assistant Prosecutor Robert Toms said of May Ford. “We feel that our community is safer with her behind the bars. We are sure we have the goods on her.”
She came to Detroit to marry a man she believed was related to automobile scion Henry Ford. She believed the nuptials would make her one of the richest women in the world. When she discovered that she had been tricked, she concocted a plot that led to one of the most bizarre court cases in the history of Detroit. Roaring Twenties headlines may have been dominated by Purple Gangsters, rumrunners and bootleggers, but December 1922 belonged to May Ford.
Drops of freezing rain struck the windows of the apartment with the sound of a thousand glass beads. The year had grown old, the weather had turned cold and a wintry mixture of rain and sleet had begun its assault on the city.
“Kansas City Ed,” a contract killer, arranged for the meeting to take place in a small apartment on Park Avenue by Charlotte Street. The quiet, nondescript spot would make an ideal setting to discuss the contract on Ney Ford.
Three figures sat around the dining room table. The sole light in the room—a lamp dangling over the table—cast their shadows against the walls, giving the eerie appearance that the room itself had come alive.
May Ford, thirty-five-year-old wife of wealthy Dearborn farmer Ney Ford, knew Thomas Burton from their days together in Toledo, but she only knew the third figure as a shady ex-cop Burton introduced as “a tough guy from Kansas City.”
Burton first met May when he roomed in a boardinghouse she managed. Years later, when May decided she wanted to bump off her husband, Ney Ford, she contacted Burton. “I want the old bird knocked off,” she told him, “and if you will do the job, I will make you independently wealthy.”
But Burton worked as a policeman with the Toledo Terminal Railroad, so he decided to pass on the job. “No, May,” he told her, “I am too well known to pull that stunt myself. But if you like I can get you a man who will do it for you. Just say the word.” At May’s request, Burton arranged a meeting with a well-known assassin from Kansas City.
“Ed” would take care of May’s “problem,” her overbearing husband, for a fee of $20,000. And her husband’s estate, worth an estimated $350,000, would take care of his grieving widow.
Kansas City Ed drummed his fingers on the table and nodded as he listened to the woman’s proposition. The brim of his fedora, which he wore low over his forehead, shielded his eyes from the light. His three-day beard gave him a grizzled appearance, and the revolver he kept in a shoulder holster caused his coat to bulge.
May unfolded a hand-drawn map showing Ford’s farm on Town Line Road near Plymouth Road and placed it on the table. She pointed to a corner of the barn where Ney kept the milking machine. The sound of the machine would drown out the assassin’s footsteps. Kansas City Ed would slug the unsuspecting farmer over the head, drag him to a waiting automobile and transport the body to a barn about thirty miles away. After removing several gold fillings that could be used to identify Ney Ford’s remains, Ed would torch the barn, and the flames would obliterate all evidence of foul play.
May slid a photograph across the table. Ed could use the picture to identify Ney Ford.
Ed eyed the picture. May, in her wedding dress, sat in an armchair while Ney stood behind her. The couple sent the picture to friends and relatives following their December 20, 1921, ceremony. Now, just short of a year later, the smiling bride was hiring a hit man to preempt the divorce proceedings.
Hand-signed wedding announcement that May Ford handed to “Kansas City Ed” when they discussed the plot murder her husband, Ney Ford. Newspapers across the nation reprinted this wedding photograph in coverage of the case. 1922 Underwood and Underwood news photograph in the author’s collection.
May had clearly thought through the plan, going so far as to arrange for an alibi; she would fake a psychotic breakdown and wind up in a mental hospital. She had been practicing her “snap,” she said with a hint of pride in her voice, and could “throw a fit” on cue. “I’ll have more alibi than I need.” May grinned.
“Very well,” Ed said, “but you’ll agree that I must have some money to pull me through right now. I must go over the farm myself before I do the job, and what about an automobile?”
“I haven’t a cent to my name, Eddie, but if you know some John that’s got $40 or $50 on him let’s know about him and I’ll roll him.”
May wasn’t kidding.
But Ed wouldn’t agree to the deal without expense money, so May said she would try to find money and agreed to meet Ed at the intersection of Woodward and Temple the following morning, where he would receive additional instructions.
Kansas City Ed watched as May, alongside Thomas Burton, sidled out of the flat. Still a looker in her mid-thirties, May Ford would no doubt try to reestablish herself in the world of romance on the affluent farmer’s dime.
As soon as the door closed, Kansas City Ed—a.k.a. Detective Lieutenant Edward Kunath—scampered into the kitchen. Through three holes bored into the wall, Sergeant Detective Ovid Straith heard the entire conversation. Thomas Burton, May’s acquaintance from Toledo, had turned Judas when she asked him to help her find an assassin. He contacted federal authorities in Toledo, who in turn contacted Detroit chief of detectives Edward Fox, who put two of his best men on the trap.
Kunath had located an apartment for the sting, bored three holes in the partition separating the kitchen from the dining room, covered the holes with newspaper, and stationed a team on the other side to witness the wicked wife incriminate herself.
The next morning—Thursday, December 7, 1922—Chief Assistant Prosecutor Robert Toms had little trouble convincing Judge Harry Keidan to sign an arrest warrant charging May Ford with conspiracy to commit murder. Detective Ovid Straith arrested her at the prearranged rendezvous point on Woodward Avenue. She arrived at the county jail wearing a sable coat and a “sheik” hat.
The ordeal had unhinged May Ford, leaving her close to a real, not feigned, mental breakdown. She regained her composure in the prosecutor’s office, where she confronted “Kansas City Ed”—Detective Edward Kunath.
“You know me, don’t you, May?” Kunath asked. His question was rhetorical.
“No,” May stammered and said, “I don’t know you.” Her denial hit Kunath like an uppercut.
She turned to Prosecutor Voorhies and took on the guise of a wounded victim:
What are you gentlemen trying to do with me, anyway? If you insist that I say I met Kunath in a Park Boulevard apartment, where you say I offered to pay $20,000 for the murder of my husband, then I can say I have met him. But it will be a lie. Do you think I couldn’t have done away with Ford long before if I had intended to do that? That’s all I have to say until I can consult my attorney.
By Friday, December 8, May Ford had become front-page news. Throughout the next few months, the tangled affair dominated headlines. As criminal charges loomed over May and divorce proceedings slowly snaked through the system, reporters filled up columns airing the couple’s dirty laundry. The stories almost always included the wedding photograph that May gave to “Kansas City Ed”—the memento of a joyous occasion now became a smoking-gun piece of evidence.
Despite being caught red-handed, May claimed the conversation inside the Park Avenue apartment took place only in the mind of her husband, Ney Ford. She explained her theory to an incredulous Free Press reporter during a jailhouse interview on Friday, December 8:
This tale about my conspiring with a gunman to have Ford killed is a frame-up by my husband. He has often threatened to have me locked up in jail. In his cross-bill which he filed shortly after I sued him for divorce in July, he charged that I once ran out onto the porch and aimed a revolver at him. Well he has carried out his threat, and here I am.
May went on to attack the logic underlying her “murder plot”:
Do they really think that I would have talked about killing my husband with a stranger? Never had I seen this man Kunath until they confronted me with him in the prosecutor’s office this morning. I told him then, and to his eyes, that the thing was a frame-up. Ford’s money has done it.
They should give me credit for a little more horse-sense than talking such stuff to a man whom I had never met. There are plenty of crooks in Detroit’s underworld houses who would have knocked off Ford for me, and the price would not have been $20,000 either. Anyone of these crooks would have done it for $20.
Then May offered what Chief Assistant Prosecutor Toms believed to be a preview of her inevitable defense strategy: she claimed not to remember anything about the conversation that allegedly took place just two days earlier:
After all, though, if I have actually met Kunath and another man in an apartment in Park boulevard and have devised with him a plan whereby my husband should be killed and burned in a hay barn for $20,000, then I don’t remember anything about it. I do forget things I have done. There were other instances during the past few months that I did things and then forgot completely about them. Once, for example, I dressed up, got into an interurban, came to Detroit and returned to my home in Dearborn, all without knowing anything of what I was doing.
May explained that she suffered from “acute nervousness” and insisted the meeting at the Park Avenue apartment never took place. The subsequent rendezvous with the hit man also was a fiction. She just happened to be walking along Woodward near Temple, minding her own business, when Detective Straith clamped a pair of handcuffs over her wrists.
When the reporter asked May if she went to the intersection at the request of “Kansas City Ed,” she refused to answer the question.
May wanted to make the most of her fifteen minutes of fame, as she explained when primping for her press photograph. “Let’s make it a nice picture,” she nodded to the photographer. “This is my first time in jail, and I want to look nicer in the paper than the other women photographed after they have been locked up.”
Meanwhile, reporters had a field day with May’s background.
May’s December 1921 trip down the aisle with Ney Ford wasn’t her first. It was her third. Her previous two marriages ended in divorce.
Born May Dutton in 1888, she grew up on a farm near Denton, Ohio. At seventeen, May left the farm as the teenage bride of Ray Blenn, a railroad man with a quick temper. They had two children together before divorce ended the marriage after six years. According to May, the precipitating event occurred after a heated argument during which a cauldron of boiling water was knocked over, scalding her and her son.
May moved to Toledo, went to school to become a nurse, learned the real estate business and met Ora Hallett, who operated an automobile garage. They wed in 1918, but the marriage survived just a little after the honeymoon period, ending a year later amid allegations of “another woman.” It was during this second marriage that May worked as a masseuse in a massage parlor, told fortunes as a spiritualist and managed a boardinghouse, where she first met Thomas Burton—the go-between who later introduced her to “Kansas City Ed.”
Through a friend, May learned that Ney Ford, a prosperous farmer from the Detroit area with the right surname, was seeking a wife. Ford had been married to a Dearborn schoolteacher named Blanche Winn, but the relationship didn’t last.
May sent an introductory letter, and Ney traveled to Toledo in July 1921. Smitten, Ney begged May to accept his proposal of marriage, luring her with his fortune, which he said topped half a million. He presented himself as a relation to automobile tycoon Henry Ford and hinted that May would become one of the richest women in the world. Her life in Dearborn would not consist of farm chores, he promised, but of salons and tea parties. First, they would take a lavish honeymoon trip to Florida.
The farm girl from Denton became intoxicated with the possibilities. “At the time we first met and later, Ney tempted me with luring word pictures of the immense wealth that would come our way if I married him,” May later reminisced from her prison cell. “He gave me to understand that he was on intimate terms with Henry Ford. I was a poor woman and the call of gold was too insistent.”
Their marriage took place on December 20, 1921. According to May, Ney reneged on his promise to fete her in Florida. Instead, she spent her honeymoon on Ney’s farm in Dearborn.
Then she realized her fantasies of instant wealth would not materialize. “After we married I found that my husband was a moderately prosperous farmer, but for all the chance there was of nipping Henry’s millions Ney’s surname might have been mud.” May came to the painful realization that she “had been pulled by the leg.”
The palatial farmhouse of Ney Ford, who used his distant relationship with automobile pioneer Henry Ford to dupe May Blenn into matrimony. She hoped that “Kansas City Ed” would help her even the score. Anonymous news photograph in the author’s collection.
Instead of living the life of a plantation wife, May lived like a slave. She cooked meals for Ney and his hired help and delivered them to the fields. When not slaving in the kitchen, she hung wallpaper, painted floors and did various upkeep to the farmhouse.
And Ney, according to May, was a cruel master. “One of the things Ford delighted in doing,” May later recalled, “was to have me shadowed. Strange men prowled around my front yard in Dearborn, and I knew I was shadowed after I came to live in Detroit. At last I went to Toledo and told the chief of police there about my troubles. He told me to beware of assassins.”
Eight months later—on August 8, 1922—May filed for divorce.
The June trial had all of the makings of great reality drama. Both characters arrived in court coated in mud courtesy of the press. May was the gold-digging, three-time loser who financed her lifestyle by acquiring new husbands as often as some women acquired new Sunday dresses. She came to Detroit not for the love of Ney but for the love of his modest estate, and when she realized he had duped her, she concocted a plan to inherit his money. And there was a pretty good indication she was mentally unstable.
Ney didn’t elicit much sympathy, either. He was either a mean-spirited and manipulative puppet master who yanked his wife’s strings or an incredibly naïve country bumpkin who got in over his head with a semiprofessional gold-digger whom he lured to Detroit with tales of grandeur.
The trial opened to a standing-room-only crowd the week of Valentine’s Day—February 16, 1923.
Of all the witnesses against May Ford during the trial, “Kansas City Ed” provided the most damaging testimony. Detective Kunath detailed the plot that May Ford unfolded during their one-hour conversation. “She suggested I slip up behind Ford who is slightly deaf while the noise of the milking machine would drown other sounds, and hit him over the head or slug him in the jaw with something. Then I could drag him into a waiting automobile and finish him. I was then to drive 30 miles away and burn his body in a barn,” Kunath recalled.
“Mrs. Ford warned me that Ford had several gold fillings in his teeth which might be identified if found among the ashes of the barn and said I might dig them out of the mouth with a knife before I finished him.” Kunath testified that “Ed” suggested using pliers to remove the teeth.
Thomas Burton also testified about May Ford’s intentions, but he admitted that the meeting did not produce a contract between “Kansas City Ed” and May Ford. The expense money brought the negotiations to a halt.
This seemingly minor point killed the prosecution’s case. May Ford’s lawyer Maurice Fitzgerald successfully argued that in this case there was a difference between preparation for an act and the overt act needed to prove a conspiracy charge; in other words, just talking about it did not make May Ford guilty. It made her guilty of nothing more than a hypothetical, he argued. And to make a conspiracy charge stick, the prosecution needed to prove May committed an overt act.
The prosecution’s case also took a hit when Burton admitted on cross-examination that he notified Ney Ford’s attorney about May Ford’s inquiries into a hit man before the meeting took place in the Park Avenue apartment and that Ney Ford paid the lawmen’s expenses during the trap. Ney Ford had financed the scene to expose his wife’s scheming.
During his closing argument, Toms characterized May Ford as an aberration. “She is not a natural woman, but just as a dwarfed, gnarled tree sometimes occurs. Just as a rotten apple appears among the sound ones, so will a woman be found occasionally among the true mothers and wives of earth, possessed of the harsh, cruel and vindictive heart of an animal.”
Fitzgerald argued that the vindictive heart belonged to Ney Ford, who engineered a frame for his wife as a way to worm out of paying her a hefty divorce settlement. The entire conversation at the Park Avenue apartment, he argued, was taken out of context. The outcome depended on whom the jury liked least between two highly unlikable characters. They didn’t like Ney Ford very much.
It took the jury just forty-three minutes to return a verdict of not guilty.
A triumphant May Ford, captured in mid-stride by an anonymous Detroit Times news photographer in December 1922. International Newsreel Photo in the author’s collection.
In the wake of her acquittal, May Ford attempted to drum up support for her cause in the forthcoming divorce proceedings. In a two-page feature article, she provided a narrative of her life with Ney Ford and explained her frame-up theory. According to May, Ney Ford attempted to frame her so he wouldn’t have to pay her a divorce settlement. Burton started the frame by giving her a flask of spiked booze that caused her “to lose all consciousness.” As a result, she didn’t remember a thing about the meeting with “Kansas City Ed.”
“As God is my witness, that is all I remember of that night!” she wrote. “Whether I actually went into the house I do not know. I knew nothing until next morning when I awoke on my bed in the Graham home on Pacific avenue, fully dressed.”
Seven months later, Ney and May faced off in divorce court. The proceedings morphed into the ultimate he-said, she-said affair, with both claiming the other did the active wooing. Ney, May said, couldn’t wait to tie the knot. May, Ney said, proposed to him and seemed intoxicated by the promise of wealth.
Fitzgerald scored points when he showed that Ney’s first wife, Blanche, sued for and obtained a divorce in 1913 on the same grounds as May: cruelty.
Ney’s lawyer Frank Eaman scored points when Louis Smitt, an acquaintance of May’s, testified he accompanied her to several blind pigs, where she proceeded to become half drunk and then half dressed. Smitt even characterized her as a woman of ill repute. Another witness testified to seeing May with a lover.
The various witnesses threw enough dirt during the proceedings to cover Eight Mile. In the end, May received a settlement of $100 a month for three years in addition to $245 to cover her medical expenses and attorneys’ fees.
The ordeal apparently unbalanced May, who was committed to a Fort Wayne, Indiana insane asylum. In 1925, she was judged to be sane and released.
Ney James Ford didn’t shy away from matrimony, marrying for a third time to Grace May. He died in 1958.
