Law School Trial Draws Near End

A Suffolk County jury will resume deliberations this morning in a case, tried in a Harvard courtroom, that pits a Boston socialite against the insurance company she charges with targeting her husband for murder.

The panel of four men and 12 women, including a stewardess, an accountant, and two Boston College students, deliberated for more than four hours yesterday and an hour on Monday without reaching a verdict in the lawsuit brought by Adelaide (Smoki) Bacon against the Federal Kemper Life Assurance Co.

The two-week-long trial was conducted in the Law School's Ames courtroom for the benefit or law students and community members under an unusual arrangement between Dean of the Law School James Vorenberg '49 and Suffolk Superior Court Chief Justice Thomas R. Morse Jr. '48.

Mrs. Bacon claims that the company contributed to the 1974 cyanide-induced death of her husband, Edward C. Bacon '51. She says Kemper carelessly processesed a forged form changing the beneficiary of his $50,000 life insurance policy from his wife to his business partner just days before he died.

Mrs. bacon is seeking millions of dollars in damages.

"That insurance policy acted as a murder contract on my husband's life," Mrs. Bacon said yesterday as she awaited a verdict.

According to lawyers for Mrs. Bacon, the partner, James F. Blaikie Jr., forged Bacon's signature on the form signed as a witness, and killed the Boston businessman by poisoning his coffee.

Mrs. Bacon claims the company should have red-flagged the phony form because it was fake and witnessed by an interested party. The company, she charges, could have forseen murder as a consequence.

Lawyers for the insurance company argued that Blaikie may not have killed the businessman and suggested that Bacon's poor finances at the time of his death gave him a motive for suicide.

Blaike, who was indicted on a count of forgery and three related charges in connection with Bacon's insurance policy, is serving a life sentence in state prison on charges that he fatally shot another man.

Mrs. Bacon's charge that Blaikie killed her husband was never brought to criminal court.

The deliberations yesterday were held in the Suffolk County courthouse in Boston so presiding Superior Court Justice William O. Young '62 could send to other court business.

The jury yesterday interrupted its deliberations twice--once to ask the judge to clarify legal definition, among them negligence, and once more to ask for transcripts of testimony. Young told the jurors that transcripts were unavailable.

The jury is set to return to the courthouse at 9 a.m. today.