In the Best of Families: A Justifiable Domestic Homicide
Situation: You go, armed, to a relative’s home to protect her from her abusive husband … and you end up charged with murder.
Lesson: Avoid confrontations if you can. If you can’t, have good witnesses. Be the complainant and create a paper trail if being stalked or abused.
Honestly, it could have been a scene in a bad novel or a grade-B noir crime movie.
Our scene opens in a lavish, upscale American home. Four well-dressed people face one another. The Fair Lady wrings her hands as two Gallant Gentlemen bravely confront her husband, the Cad.
“You, sir, aren’t worthy of our beloved Elsie,” says one of the Gentlemen, “and you shan’t be with her any longer, nor will we pay you blackmail money to leave her alone!”
“We’ll see about that,” snarls the Cad as he rushes past them to the library (we told you it was a lavish, upscale home!), where he keeps his gun. The Fair Lady and the Gallant Gentlemen naturally follow.
They enter the room to find him brandishing the revolver. The Gallant Gentlemen cry, “Put it down!”
Instead, the Cad swings the gun around and points it toward them.
And, suddenly, the proverbial shot rings out …
Background
Here is how the New York Times reported the actual incident: “Judge Binds Them Over On Second-Degree Charge. Salt Lake City, May 12: City Judge Noell Pratt, at the conclusion of a preliminary hearing today, ordered Mariner (sic) and John Browning Jr. bound over to the district court for trial for murder in the second degree as a result of the shooting here last April 9 of Benjamin F. Ballantyne.”
The very existence of that clipping under that masthead begs the question, why would a New York City newspaper, seen as a national journal of record, bother with a routine homicide in Utah? The answer is in the names. The Fair Lady was the daughter, the Gallant Gentlemen the son and nephew, and the Cad the son-in-law of the wealthy and famous gun designer John Moses Browning.
When we ordinary poor folks get into situations like this, the news rarely goes farther than the local newspaper. When it involves the rich and famous, however, it becomes a scandal and national news.
I first learned of this side event in JMB’s life in Nathan Gorenstein’s absolutely wonderful book The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World, published by Scribner in 2021. In addition to lots of good gearhead gunny stuff, the book delves deeply into JMB’s personal life and values. Browning was very much a devout family man, growing up with several moms though unlike his dad, JMB himself was not polygamous.
However, he loved family above all else. Note that early on in his career, his business was titled “Browning Brothers.” He ran it along with brother Matthew, who remained a part of the family empire thereafter. Matt Browning was the father of Marriner Browning, who fired the fatal shot in this case. John M. “Jack” Browning, Jr. was the man his brother-in-law was pointing the revolver at when a single shot from his cousin entered the matter.
The man who was killed was JMB’s son-in-law, who had captured the heart of JMB’s daughter Elsie and married her a decade before. They’d had three children, the oldest being nine years of age and the youngest still an infant at the time of the shooting. His name was Benjamin Ballantyne.
Biographer Gorenstein, formerly a reporter and editor for the Philadelphia Enquirer, brings us to the conclusion Ballantyne was an alcoholic, self-centered fortune hunter, and understanding that is a key to understanding the events that made April 9, 1923, the last day of Ballantyne’s life.
We’ll get into Ballantyne’s downward spiral as a person and his upward spiral as an abuser shortly. For now, it’s time to discuss the actual shooting, and no one can explain it better than Nathan Gorenstein.
The Actual Shooting
Gorenstein tells us, “Ballantyne’s behavior had become so intolerable that, with her family’s agreement, Elsie began divorce proceedings. Ballantyne said he wanted a cash payment ‘to go away’ so on a Sunday afternoon in April 1923, John Browning, his wife Rachel, son Jack, brother Matt, and a family attorney William H. Reeder met to develop a plan to bring Elsie home to Salt Lake City. The next day Jack and Marriner Browning, Matt’s son to whom Elsie was particularly close, climbed into a car with the family attorney and made the 36-mile drive south. They arrived to find Ballantyne drunk and initially regretful. He conceded he was acting badly and asked the visitor to empty a bottle of liquor down the sink. He acquiesced to Elsie’s departure with the children, but once she was in the car, he suddenly ran out, pulled open the automobile door, and ordered her back inside the house. She obeyed. He followed her up the walk, pushed her to move faster, pushed Jack out of the way, and unsuccessfully insisted the two Browning men remain outside.”
Gorenstein continues, “Ballantyne, Elsie, Jack and Marriner all entered the house. Testimony was that Ballantyne rushed into the library, where a revolver lay on a bookcase. Ballantyne picked it up, and Jack and Marriner yelled at him to put it down, but Ballantyne swung the barrel toward Jack. ‘The next instant, Marriner fired a shot,’ according to Reeder, the attorney. Ballantyne fell. The bullet perforated his windpipe and nicked the left jugular vein. He was rushed to a hospital, where he lingered into the evening, long enough for police to arrive with a stenographer and take down his version of events, which was that while he’d been drinking since morning, he never picked up a gun. He didn’t know which of the two Brownings shot him. Among his last words were: ‘They tried to break up my home.’’’
Marriner and Jack were both charged with second-degree murder. The prosecutor’s office subsequently elevated the charge to murder in the first degree, with the stated reason for the upcharge being the dying Ballantyne’s statement that he didn’t have a gun.
The Brownings were released on a $25,000 bond. Adjusted for inflation, $25,000 in 1923 dollars would be equivalent to $453,766 today. Fortunately, his firearms innovations had made JMB fabulously rich. There was money to put up for the bond … and for the good lawyers who were now desperately needed.
The Trial & “Fat Salary”
It would be essential to show that the Brownings hadn’t come with guns to kill a man who had displeased a woman they loved but to protect her. The defense needed to establish reasons for the jury to believe that Ballantyne, who worked as a bank teller, would pull a gun and try to kill his relatives by marriage.
This is where that downward spiral of Ballantyne’s self-control and behavior comes into the picture. At a family Thanksgiving a couple of years before, Ballantyne had thrown a self-pitying tantrum of rage and flung his plate of food to the floor screaming that he had nothing to give thanks for.
It turned out that “fat salary” was one of his favorite terms. He constantly berated his wife and demanded that she ask her father to give him “a job with a fat salary” commensurate with what the man who married his daughter should expect.
Ballantyne’s widow, Elsie, testified for the defense. Gorenstein quotes from the transcript of her testimony, “All the rest of the day he (Ben Ballantyne) kept on drinking and continuously talking in a loud voice, calling me a coward and sometimes abusing my family, my father and brother … He abused Daddy, saying he hadn’t treated him fair and never given him a chance … he said a young man had never been known to get anywhere without a pull. I contended that any man with brains could get along without pull, but he didn’t agree with that. He said my duty as the daughter of a wealthy man was to see that he was put in a good position at a good fat salary.”
She also testified to one fight in which he had ripped her garments, and to at least one occasion when she was so afraid of her husband that she hid from him in the cellar.
Elsie told the jury that in the moments before the shooting, her husband “pushed me through the door and said, ‘I’ll kill the whole bunch.’ I saw him rush into the library, and I put my hands to my head and I said, ‘Oh, he’ll kill us all.’ I must’ve screamed loudly, for Marriner heard and rushed past me. I remember hearing a shot, and I think I said, ‘He has killed Jack.’”
In another incident, deadbeat Ballantyne had refused to pay for furnishing his and Elsie’s home. Rather than allow the furniture to be repossessed, her father, John Browning, wrote his own personal check to the furniture company to cover the bill. Far from being grateful, Ballantyne was furious: He had wanted JMB to give him cash to pay for it himself so Ballantyne could pose as a responsible customer.
Writes Gorenstein, “Over the objections of the prosecutor, the judge allowed her to tell the all-male jury about her history with Ben, so she recounted a litany of unhappy moments, including her husband’s threat to commit suicide if John Browning didn’t pay for the purchase of a horse and buggy when Ben and Elsie already had an automobile. A monthly subsidy of $300 to $400 didn’t prevent Ballantyne from cursing the inventor and his eldest son.” (At that time, $300 to $400 per month is roughly equivalent to $5,400 to $7,200 today.)
After approximately a month of trial the jury took only one hour to find both of the Brownings Not Guilty on all counts.
Guns Of April 9, 1923
This being American Handgunner magazine, after all, our readers are always interested in the firearms used in these incidents. Details are scarce on the three handguns that were present in the room when the single, fatal shot was fired in this case.
Let’s look first to the shooter. Gorenstein tells us, “There was also the question of why both Browning men arrived at the home armed. Marriner explained his practice was to always carry his uncle’s tiny pocket pistol, though for the trip to Salt Lake City, his worried father, Matt, asked him to carry a larger, more powerful, and more accurate .380 caliber Colt.”
Makes sense to me. The .25 caliber Browning-designed Vest Pocket Colt that Marriner used for everyday carry is the sort of thing most of us would have “on a day when we weren’t carrying a gun.” The Colt Pocket Model .380 of 1908, also designed by his uncle, was indeed a much better choice.
Gorenstein has JMB Jr. carrying too but doesn’t mention what. He writes, “Jack took the stand and said he was in the hallway at the entrance to the library and saw Ballantyne raise a revolver. He grabbed at his own gun when a shot came from over his right shoulder. Marriner had fired once, and Ballantyne fell to the floor.” I think we can safely assume, however, that the namesake son of John Moses Browning would have been carrying one of his father’s inventions.
The Salt Lake Tribune described the Brownings’ guns in evidence as .38 caliber automatics. It was not uncommon in old times to refer to .380 pistols as .38 autos.
And that leaves us with the late Ben Ballantyne. Every account describes him wielding a revolver. Now, given that to this day we see newspapers describing auto pistols as revolvers, it’s possible that it happened then … but also given the fact that it’s “revolver” every time, I suspect he did in fact have a round gun instead of a square one.
And off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single revolver designed by John Moses Browning.
Think about that. You get thousands of dollars from your father-in-law to extend your salary from your bank teller day job but still want more. You still badmouth the guy, and you don’t even use one of the guns he designed? It’s like marrying Henry Ford’s daughter and driving a Chevrolet to spite him. Ben Ballantyne benefited from JMB’s largesse every month, and when he wanted a handgun for himself, he wouldn’t even have enough loyalty to “ride for the brand.”
I hope JMB got some satisfaction from knowing a gun he designed saved the life of his son and, quite possibly, also the life of his daughter.
Lessons
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Of the estimated 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, data reported by law enforcement agencies indicate 34% were killed by an intimate partner. By comparison, about 6% of the 17,970 males murdered that year were victims of intimate partner homicide. Overall, 76% of female murders and 56% of male murders were perpetrated by someone known to the victim.”
Ben had forced Elsie to come back into the house with him alone, and once he was inside, he immediately went for his gun. Putting it together a little over a century later, it’s entirely possible the actions of the Browning men saved her life that day.
Was Ben just shooting his mouth off? Consider that he said in a state of rage, “I’ll kill the whole bunch.” Only a fool would ignore threats to kill or not take them seriously.
Ballantyne’s earlier threat to kill himself had meaning, too. Suicide is, after all, inner-directed homicide, and that means a person expressing suicidal ideation is, therefore, by definition, homicidal. In the presence of men he hated and envied who had now finally thwarted him, feeling himself kicked off the Browning family gravy train, it’s entirely possible he did, in fact, intend to kill them all, perhaps finishing with suicide.
When marriages or other relationships break up in ugly ways, it is common for relatives and friends to come and help the person who is leaving to move out. In the circumstances we saw above, arming themselves when they did so seems extremely wise. You are entering a highly emotionally charged situation. The dangers are real.
Lesson One: Take these dangers seriously.
Lesson Two: If there are as many red flags as there were in this case, get law enforcement involved. In many jurisdictions, when one party has to be removed from a home or remove their things during a breakup, and trouble is feared, call your local sheriff’s department. If there is a warrant or court order involved, the agency will often simply send a deputy or two. If not, some departments will allow you to hire an officer or deputy as an off-duty job (usually with a minimum number of hours) to stand by for security while you remove your possessions or have the individual escorted out. Can that be expensive? It’s a lot less expensive than a shooting and a subsequent murder trial. If that had been done in this case a century ago, the shooting would very likely have been avoided.
Lesson Three: Understand the value of the “paper trail.” In the case above, all the police knew was someone shot someone else, and the guy who was shot claimed to be an innocent victim before he expired. Dying declarations have always carried weight on the not-always-correct theory that someone who knows he’s about to meet his maker won’t lie. It becomes he said/she said, and the other party is no longer alive to be cross-examined by your lawyer. No one knew of Ballantyne’s escalating potential to be dangerous except for the closest members of Elsie’s family.
It was a time when spousal abuse and even divorce were seen as scandalous, particularly among the wealthier class. We can understand why they didn’t involve the police. But if there had been reports on file of, say, the incident where Ben tore Elsie’s dress, it would have helped cops and prosecutors alike in determining who were the good guys and who was the bad guy. It might also have prevented the great cost and great stress on the families involved. Matthew Browning, the shooter’s father, dropped dead of a heart-related ailment not long after the trial.
Final lesson: Don’t confront the Other Guy on his turf. You know you’re the good guy, and he’s the bad guy, but the rest of the world doesn’t know that. In entering Ballantyne’s home to order him to do something they knew he wouldn’t want to do and carrying guns while doing so, the Brownings created the impression they were the initial aggressors. A wiser attorney would have had them wait until Ben was out to go there and safely extract Elsie and the kids and had Ben served with legal papers later. I’m sure this was a big part of the prosecution’s decision to charge them with murder.
And finally, if you view this article as a long review of Nathan Gorenstein’s excellent book, you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s strongly recommended reading.
