Joseph Bowne Elwell (February 24, 1873 – June 11, 1920), also known as J. B. Elwell, was an American bridge player, tutor, and writer during the 1900s and 1910s, prior to and during development of the auction bridge version of the card game. He is better known as the victim of an unsolved murder.
Life
Joseph Bowne Elwell, the son of Joseph E. Elwell, was a student at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and worked as an insurance agent as a teenager. Elwell learned the new card game "bridge"—now called bridge whist or straight bridge to distinguish it from later versions—in the course of establishing a young men's club in church, where its play was a popular activity. His fascination with the card game took over his life.
Elwell married Helen Derby, who also liked the game. She was socially well-connected, as her cousin Richard Derby was the husband of Ethel Roosevelt. Elwell's other social connections included his auction bridge partner Harold Stirling Vanderbilt. Such connections provided him with affluent students and with gambling opportunities; he became wealthy enough ultimately to own property in Palm Beach, Florida, twenty horses, five cars, and a yacht. Elwell also took a fancy to some of his female students and acquaintances, and developed a reputation as a womanizer. By 1916 Elwell's wife took their son Richard and filed for separation; by 1920 she was negotiating a divorce.
Murder
In the early morning hours of June 11, 1920, Elwell was murdered with a gunshot to the head from a.45 automatic in his locked house in New York City. The murder has never been solved. A 1921 confession was determined to be the false utterance of a mentally ill man. The crime generated considerable publicity: The New York Times covered it almost daily until the end of July, the Chicago Tribune published eighteen articles, and the Los Angeles Times published twelve. This classic "locked room murder" was the inspiration for S.S. Van Dine's mystery novel The Benson Murder Case (1926), which introduced his famous fictional detective Philo Vance.
