Con Heir

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In 1879 Thérèse Humbert was traveling by railway through France when she met an ailing American millionaire named Robert Crawford. She sought medical care for him, and he showed his gratitude with a handsome bequest, which she kept in a sealed safe.

Or so she said. Humbert and her husband lived luxuriously in Paris for two decades, borrowing money against Crawford’s unseen gift. When suspicious creditors finally sued her, they discovered that Crawford didn’t exist and the safe contained a handful of worthless papers. She was sentenced to five years in prison.

In 1897 Ohio con artist Cassie Chadwick “confessed” to a Cleveland lawyer that she was the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie and stood to inherit $10 million on his death. She parlayed his sympathy into a series of bank loans and lived lavishly until 1904, when she was unable to repay a Massachusetts banker. Carnegie, who denied her story, attended the trial and saw her sentenced to 10 years in prison. She died two years later in the Ohio State Penitentiary.

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Malice Aforethought

On May 31, 1964, Cyril Church beat Sylvia Nott into unconsciousness. Thinking he’d killed her, he dumped her body in a river, where she drowned.

Is this murder? The deliberate act wasn’t fatal, and the fatal act wasn’t deliberate. “His case is that he genuinely and honestly believed that she was dead,” Justice Glyn Jones told the jury. “I direct you that, if that was his genuine and honest belief, then when he threw what he believed to be a dead body into the river, he obviously was not actuated by any intention to cause death or grievous bodily harm; you cannot cause death or serious bodily harm to a corpse.”

They convicted Church of manslaughter.

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A Guilty Face

One morning in 1727, York pubkeeper Hannah Williams found that her writing desk had been opened and a sum of money stolen. As waiter Thomas Geddely disappeared at the same time, there was little doubt as to the robber.

Twelve months later, a man calling himself James Crow arrived in York and took a job as a porter. The townspeople immediately accosted him as Geddely, but he insisted that he didn’t know them, that his name was James Crow, and that he was new to York.

Williams was called for, instantly identified him as Geddely, and accused him of robbing her. The man protested his innocence before a justice of the peace but had no alibi and admitted to a history as a vagabond and a petty rogue. At the trial a servant testified that she had seen him at the robbery scene with a poker in his hand. He swore again that his name was James Crow but was convicted and executed.

Some time later Thomas Geddely was arrested in Dublin on a robbery charge. While in custody he confessed to the robbery at York. A York resident who was visiting Ireland at the time declared that the resemblance between the two men was so great “that it was next to impossible for the nicest eye to have distinguished their persons asunder.”

See Mistaken Identity.

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Frontier Justice

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In 1881 a federal trial judge in the Territory of New Mexico, presiding at Taos in an adobe stable used as a temporary courtroom, passed sentence on murderer José Gonzales. We don’t know the details of Gonzales’ crime, but it must have been extraordinary — here’s the sentence:

José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, in a few short weeks it will be spring. The snows of winter will flee away, the ice will vanish, and the air will become soft and balmy. In short, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, the annual miracle of the years will awaken and come to pass, but you won’t be here.

The rivulet will run its purring course to the sea, the timid desert flowers will put forth their tender shoots, the glorious valleys of this imperial domain will blossom as the rose. Still, you won’t be here to see.

From every tree top some wild woods songster will carol his mating song, butterflies will sport in the sunshine, the busy bee will hum happy as it pursues its accustomed vocation, the gentle breeze will tease the tassels of the wild grasses, and all nature, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, will be glad but you. You won’t be here to enjoy it because I command the sheriff or some other officer of the country to lead you out to some remote spot, swing you by the neck from a nodding bough of some sturdy oak, and let you hang until you are dead.

And then, José Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, I further command that such officer or officers retire quickly from your dangling corpse, that vultures may descend from the heavens upon your filthy body until nothing shall remain but bare, bleached bones of a cold-blooded, copper-colored, blood-thirsty, throat-cutting, chili-eating, sheep-herding, murdering son of a bitch.

Cleopatra Mathis discovered the transcript in the records of the U.S. District Court, New Mexico Territory Sessions. She published it in Antaeus in autumn 1976.

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Bad Country

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Yellowstone National Park doesn’t quite fit in Wyoming — small portions extend into Montana and Idaho. But Congress has placed the legal jurisdiction for the entire park in the District of Wyoming. At the same time, the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that a jury be “of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

Suppose you lure me into the 50 square miles of Yellowstone that lie within Idaho, and suppose you kill me there. The Sixth Amendment requires that the jury be drawn from the state (Idaho) and the district (Wyoming) in which the crime occurred. But the only way to fulfill both those requirements is to draw the jury from the tiny part of Yellowstone that lies in Idaho — and its census population is zero. Without a jury, you can’t be tried. “Assuming that you do not feel like consenting to trial in Cheyenne,” writes Michigan State law professor Brian Kalt, “you should go free.”

“It bears emphasis that the flaw here is really with the District of Wyoming statute, not with the Sixth Amendment,” advises Kalt, whose full paper is here. “The solution is to fix the statute, not eviscerate the Constitution. If we do it quickly enough, no one will get hurt.”

Please don’t actually kill me. (Thanks, Ty.)

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Second-Story Man

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The world’s greatest jewel thief rarely carried a weapon and never indulged in violence, yet in the 1920s he managed to steal between $5 and $10 million from wealthy victims, whom he called “clients.”

Born in Massachusetts in 1896, Arthur Barry committed his first burglary at 15, creeping in through the window of a merchant’s home to plan the job and then returning to steal his receipts. The value of preparation struck him, and after a stint in the Army he went to New York and began his career in earnest. He would scan the society columns for a wedding party on Long Island, crash it wearing formal wear, then enter the house, wander upstairs, memorize the floor plan, and unlock windows. He’d return later to commit the robbery.

Working in this meticulous way he managed to steal half a million dollars a year in the mid-1920s, including $750,000 in jewels in broad daylight from the suite of F.W. Woolworth’s daughter. “Whoever took those pearls really knew what he was doing,” marveled a police captain at the time. “There were five ropes in the drawer, four imitations and the real one. The imitations were good enough to fool an oyster.”

Ironically, by the time Barry was finally caught and sent to prison in 1927, he had discovered that some of his victims were criminals themselves. “On the day after a job I’d read stories which listed all kinds of things I hadn’t stolen at all,” he told Life in 1956. “The clients would hide them and get the money from the insurance company. Sure, I was a thief and I’m sorry now, but you’ll find a lot of people in the Social Register who are also thieves and aren’t one bit sorry.”

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Thorough

LONDON — Mrs. Kathleen Cameron, 19, was amazed at how hard and fast carpenters worked to tear down the pre-fab house next door at 10 Jardin Street.

‘I didn’t become suspicious of the four men until they skipped their tea break to continue working,’ she said.

Sure enough, the carpenters were thieves who stole the five-room house in its entirety. By the time police arrived, they were gone.

— Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, Sept. 12, 1971

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Earwitness

Mike and Tobye Madison of Baytown, Texas, had two odd experiences in January 1984: Their house was burglarized, and Baby, their exotic talking bird, began saying “Come here, Robert. Come here, Ronnie.”

“When the lady told me about it I almost broke up,” Baytown police detective Reggie Harper told the Associated Press. “I almost didn’t write it down.”

Apparently Baby, a female yellow-headed Amazon, was repeating the words of the intruders. This helped police identify two men and a 16-year-old boy and charge them with a series of house burglaries involving the loss of $50,000 in property.

Forty years earlier, the same thing had happened in New York.

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Antique Spam

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In July 1833 the Earl of Stamford and Harrington received a letter signed “Martha Turner.” “It is with shame, indescribable shame, I presume to address your Lordship with these lines,” she wrote, “but from having a knowledge of your Lordship’s person from my infancy, and through the report of your Lordship’s sympathising and benevolent character, I am about entrusting a most unfortunate affair to your Lordship’s honour and secrecy.”

She had left her widowed mother at Christmas, she said, with a man who had promised to marry her but had left her “ruined and undone.” She begged for “a small pecuniary assistance,” pleading with the earl to rescue her “from entire destruction” and “a miserable death.”

Martha Turner didn’t exist. Her appeal was contrived and arranged by Joseph Underwood, one of about 250 letter-writing impostors who plagued England’s wealthy in the 1830s. Underwood had invented and written Martha’s letter in a woman’s hand, and he forged corroborating messages from her supposed seducer and from a clergyman supporting her story.

Underwood earned nearly £1,000 a year at this, which apparently made his frequent incarcerations worthwhile. “If the faculty of creation be one of the principal attributes of genius,” wrote John Grant in 1838, “Underwood was a genius of the first magnitude. The force and felicity of his imaginative facts were remarkable. Had he turned his attention to novel-writing, instead of to the profession of a begging-letter impostor, there is no saying how high his name might at this moment have stood in the current literature of the country.” Underwood chose otherwise — he died in Coldbath Fields Prison in 1838.

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Oops

A Mr. Smith was attacked at night, about a fortnight ago, in the neighbourhood of Hexam, by three men, who dragged him from his horse, and threw him on the ground face downwards. They made no attempt to rob him, nor did they utter a syllable. Mr. Smith also held his tongue until feeling the teeth of a saw enter into the flesh at the back of his neck, he exclaimed — ‘What are you doing with me?’ On hearing his voice, one of the men observed with an oath — ‘It is not him!’ And all three immediately departed. These barbarians had obviously been upon the look-out for some object of revenge, whom they had intended to destroy by means of the instrument we have mentioned.

— The Times, Dec. 19, 1821

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