Edna McClure

Edna McClure was an American actress born in California around 1888 to Henry McClure, a building site contractor of Scottish immigrant descent originally from Vermont, and Amy Hodges, a native Californian whose family came from the Carolinas. McClure was their only child.

Her Broadway career began in 1904 with two musical productions. She appeared as Elsie Habbicombe in the musical comedy The Medal and the Maid and, later that same year, as Monty in The Baroness Fiddlesticks. In January 1905 she took a role in the short-lived comedy The Money Makers, and two months after that she appeared as the wife of General Butin in a burlesque staging of C. M. S. McLellan's melodrama Leah Kleschna. Following these engagements, McClure returned to San Francisco to attend Caldwell College of Oratory and Acting. She came back to Broadway in August 1906 to play Eleanor in a successful run of the comedy The Tourists, and her final Broadway appearances came in September 1911 at the Bijou Theatre in the Harrison Rhodes play Modern Marriage. Thirteen years later she performed again on Broadway, billed as Edna M. Chamberlain, playing Buria in The Warrior's Husband, a comedy by Julia F. Thompson that closed after a single performance at the Belasco Theatre.

During her time in New York, McClure became acquainted with people in the circle surrounding the model and actress Evelyn Nesbit and Nesbit's millionaire husband, Harry Kendall Thaw. On the night of June 25, 1906, Thaw shot and killed the architect Stanford White at the rooftop restaurant atop Madison Square Garden during a performance of the Edgar Allan Woolf musical comedy Mam'zelle Champagne. McClure told police investigators that over the two years preceding the shooting she had repeatedly witnessed Thaw become enraged at any mention of his wife's former lover, and that Nesbit appeared to encourage these outbursts by urging him to act. When the prosecution chose not to call McClure to testify at Thaw's trial, the press dubbed her the "will 'o wisp witness." Thaw was ultimately committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane but was released in 1913 after five years of confinement.

On December 1, 1906, McClure married John G. Richardson, an entrepreneur then involved in a mining venture in Tonopah, Nevada. The two had known each other only a few weeks before the wedding and separated in 1909, with the marriage ending in divorce in December 1910. In the months following the White murder, McClure joined the Frank Bacon stock company at the Theatre Jose in San Jose, California, performing in a dramatization of Archibald Clavering Gunter's novel Mr. Barnes of New York. During this period she attempted suicide twice: once with laudanum at the Bristol Hotel in San Jose, and again in September 1907 by ingesting a cocaine solution at her parents' home in San Francisco. The press at the time speculated that family pressure to leave the stage was a contributing factor in her depression, though McClure herself offered no public explanation.

At some point McClure married Gordon S. Chamberlin, a contractor and business associate of her father. The couple had a daughter and two sons. Chamberlin died in June 1931 from injuries sustained while inspecting a San Francisco construction site. In 1934 a dispute arose between McClure and her twenty-four-year-old daughter Amy over an uncle's estate valued at $40,000. During a confrontation, McClure shot her daughter multiple times with a handgun, wounding her in the mouth, neck, and shoulder. Amy survived, and McClure was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, a charge reduced from attempted murder, and received one year of probation on the condition that she and her daughter have no further contact. The presiding judge chastised the daughter for bringing charges, stating that a man would not have done so. McClure largely disappears from the public record after this point.