Jackie Hendrickson: The Shooting of Dr. Warren Brown

On February 19, 1969, Jackie Sandra Hendrickson, a 28-year-old former Playboy Club bunny working as a medical office assistant, fatally shot her employer, Atlanta plastic surgeon Dr. Warren Franklin Brown, during a struggle over a pistol inside her apartment. The shooting of Dr. Warren Brown by Jackie Hendrickson drew national and international attention for its strange details: an argument over a lipstick smudge, a cache of firearms in the apartment, and a dying surgeon who reportedly called for his own ambulance and then coached Hendrickson on how to keep him alive. She was charged with murder.¹

What Happened on February 19, 1969

The shooting took place around 6 p.m. inside an apartment at a complex Brown owned in Atlanta, Georgia. Hendrickson had been his office assistant for two years, working under her maiden name, Sandra Paul. She told police the confrontation began over a lipstick smudge on Dr. Brown’s forehead.²

By her account, she picked up a pistol from the foot of the bed, intending to move it to the headboard. She and Brown struggled over the weapon. Two shots were fired. One struck Brown in the chest; the other missed. “I swear to you on my life that I did not knowingly pull the trigger of that gun,” Hendrickson told police.¹

When officers searched the apartment, they found roughly half a dozen other firearms. They also found that Hendrickson possessed a special deputy sheriff’s badge from Fulton County. Contemporary reporting did not explain how she had obtained it.³

The Surgeon Who Called His Own Ambulance

After being shot, Brown reportedly telephoned Georgia Baptist Hospital himself to request an ambulance. He then walked Hendrickson through the use of a syringe to draw air and fluid from his chest cavity, trying to buy himself time. The improvised treatment did not save him. He died from the chest wound.²

Who Dr. Warren Brown Was

Brown was 37 and widely regarded as one of the most accomplished plastic surgeons in the American South. A native of Dayton, Tennessee, he had been valedictorian at Baylor School for Boys in Chattanooga, finished college and medical school in five years, and trained for three years at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He was known in Atlanta for performing volunteer surgeries on Vietnam veterans and their dependents who could not afford care. He was married with two children, a ten-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter, and he owned the apartment complex where he was killed.²

Who Jackie Hendrickson Was

Before taking the job in Brown’s medical office, Hendrickson had worked as a bunny at a Playboy Club. She was 28 at the time of the shooting according to contemporary news accounts, and she had been Brown’s assistant for two years. Reporters of the day did not spell out the personal dimensions of their relationship, though the setting of the shooting and the subject of the argument pointed past a purely professional one.¹

One oddity sits in the record. A later obituary for Jackie Hagens Hendrickson gives her birth date as March 12, 1925, in Detroit, Michigan, which would have placed her at 43 in February 1969 rather than 28. The discrepancy is not explained by available sources.⁴

What Happened to Hendrickson After the Charge

The resolution of the murder charge against Hendrickson is not in the available historical record. Whether she was tried, convicted, acquitted, or had the case disposed of some other way is not documented in the sources that survive.

She lived for decades afterward. According to her obituary, she attended Norview High School and had two children, Sharon and Thomas, from her first marriage to Arthur “Skeeter” Bingley. She later married George Hendrickson, a military major, and the couple lived in Cape Coral, Florida, until his death in 1984. She then returned to Virginia Beach, Virginia, settling in the Southall Quarters neighborhood for the next two decades. She belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star, Daughters of the Nile, the Kings Daughters and Sons, and the Virginia Beach General Hospital Auxiliary, where she held a lifetime membership. Jackie Hendrickson died on August 4, 2005, at Virginia Beach General Hospital. Her obituary made no mention of the 1969 shooting or of Dr. Warren Brown.⁴

1
The Royal Gazette. Former Playboy Bunny Charged in Atlanta Surgeon Shooting
2
Griffin Daily News. Former Playboy Bunny Held in Fatal Shooting of Atlanta Surgeon
3
Griffin Daily News. Former Playboy Bunny Held in Fatal Shooting of Atlanta Surgeon
4
Hollomon-Brown Funeral Home. Jackie Hagens Hendrickson Obituary