The Vera Page case was an unsolved murder case from the early 1930s. Vera Page was born in 1921 in Notting Hill, London. On 14 December 1931, Miss Page was reported missing by her parents in London. Two days later, her raped and strangled body was found in the bushes by a house at Addison Road, about a mile from the victim's own house. The police thought she had been murdered somewhere else and then dragged into the growth alongside the road. The remains were examined by Sir Bernard Spilsbury. He discovered coal-dust and candle wax on the girl's body, as well as a piece of ammonia-stained finger bandage. Over a thousand people were questioned about the Vera Page case, and Percy Orlando Rush was the prime suspect. Rush was a forty year-old married man, who had often been seen lurking about the district on evenings. Furthermore, he had recently had a bandage applied to his finger and he worked with ammonia in nearby Whiteley's Laundry. Unremarked upon at the inquest was the fact that he had been previously found guilty of exposing himself to girls. He was never officially charged with murder. No one saw him with Vera on the day of her death, though his movements were never verified. He died in 1961.
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“Life’s like a ball game. You gotta take a swing at whatever comes along before you wake up and find out it’s the ninth inning.”
—Martin Goldsmith, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Vera (Ann Savage)
“A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.”
—John Steinbeck (1902–1968)
“Before I get through with you, you will have a clear case for divorce and so will my wife. Now, the first thing to do is arrange for a settlement. You take the children, your husband takes the house, Junior burns down the house, you take the insurance and I take you!”
—S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Arthur Sheekman, Will Johnstone, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Monkey Business, terms for a divorce settlement proposed while trying to woo Lucille Briggs (Thelma Todd)