The newlyweds, Alvin and Gladys, were on a little vacation at the Big Chief Auto Court in Truckee, Calif. — it may have been their honeymoon — when they went out together to the local cinema to see “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

It was September of 1946, so it was the old film-noir version starring Lana Turner. As you’ll surely remember if you’ve seen it (or a more recent remake of it), this is a film in which Turner’s character, Cora Smith, seduces a drifter named Frank and convinces him to murder her husband for her so that the two of them can take over ownership of his restaurant.

After the film, Gladys was in a pensive mood as she turned to Alvin, the eager 23-year-old cowboy she’d married in Reno a day or two before. “It’s too bad something like that can’t happen to the doctor,” she remarked to him, innocuously.

By “the doctor,” she meant Dr. Willis Broadhurst, a prominent Jordan Valley rancher and chiropractor — her other husband.

Or, rather, one of her other husbands. At that particular moment, Gladys, a strikingly pretty and charismatic 40-year-old, was married to three different men, and there were four additional failed marriages in her rear-view mirror. If there was anyone for whom the wedding bells sounded like the alarm clock, it was Gladys.

Or, maybe they sounded like funeral bells. Because less than a month later, Alvin actually did it.... (Jordan Valley, Malheur County; 1940s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2503a.gladys-broadhurst-film-noir-murderess-691.516.html)