A number of Dime Mystery covers feature one or more women looking on as some other woman is put through some probably fatal ordeal, an ordeal which they to might soon expect to undergo. The cover of the April 1936 presents this as a simple case of crimen interruptum.

By January we have two beauties helplessly waiting their turn while a third puts up what again looks like ineffectual resistance to a fourth being put to the torch, itself a repeat Dime Mystery trope. The editors liked this idea so much that they commissioned the cover as an oil painting, executed in loving detail.

The cover.

And apparently the readership liked the theme so much that the editors again put it on the very next month’s cover.

We again see eyes directed heavenward.