Grace La Rue was an American actress, singer, and Vaudeville headliner
I fancy this is very like the hat worn by the murderess in “The Woman in the Big Hat" (PDF link) by Baroness Orczy.
(Completely incidentally, I rediscovered while searching for that story that Orczy was the author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I tried to read a couple of years ago and quickly gave up on, as it was far too royalist for my tastes. I couldn’t quite get my head around a man saving French aristocrats and being treated as a hero for it. [Not that I think anyone ought to be guillotined … but ….] It makes more sense now that I know that the writer was the daughter of a baron and a countess who “left Hungary in 1868, fearful of the threat of a peasant revolution” [Wikipedia].)
While not a killer, Grace LaRue seems to have had an interesting life herself. She starred on the Broadway stage, in London and in several early films, and was sued for “alienation of affection” by the wife of the man who would become her second husband. Variety described her as having a “Parisian cultivated voice,” but I feel its charm is somewhat diminished at a distance of one hundred years - listen for yourself here.
Compton Mackenzie’s novel The Vanity Girl, available free at archive.org, tells the life story of a woman with similar ambitions - grander, even - in the same period, though it’s set in Britain. She wins in the end, more or less, though the moral questions of the book are odd ones to modern eyes. I’ve also started reading a similar novel, fifty years older, Ought We To Visit Her? Unfortunately I only have one volume of the two, and I can’t even tell which, since the cover has been ripped off! I have a feeling that story ends with the redeeming consumptive death of its heroine. Grace La Rue died in California at the ripe age of 75. Good for her.