Queen of the Con , livre ebook

Q UEEN OF THE C ON
TRUE CRIME HISTORY
Twilight of Innocence: The Disappearance of Beverly Potts · James Jessen Badal
Tracks to Murder · Jonathan Goodman
Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome · Albert Borowitz
Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon · Robin Odell
The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America’s First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair · Diana Britt Franklin
Murder on Several Occasions · Jonathan Goodman
The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories · Elizabeth A. De Wolfe
Lethal Witness: Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Honorary Pathologist · Andrew Rose
Murder of a Journalist: The True Story of the Death of Donald Ring Mellett · Thomas Crowl
Musical Mysteries: From Mozart to John Lennon · Albert Borowitz
The Adventuress: Murder, Blackmail, and Confidence Games in the Gilded Age · Virginia A. McConnell
Queen Victoria’s Stalker: The Strange Case of the Boy Jones · Jan Bondeson
Born to Lose: Stanley B. Hoss and the Crime Spree That Gripped a Nation · James G. Hollock
Murder and Martial Justice: Spying and Retribution in World War II America · Meredith Lentz Adams
The Christmas Murders: Classic Stories of True Crime · Jonathan Goodman
The Supernatural Murders: Classic Stories of True Crime · Jonathan Goodman
Guilty by Popular Demand: A True Story of Small-Town Injustice · Bill Osinski
Nameless Indignities: Unraveling the Mystery of One of Illinois’s Most Infamous Crimes · Susan Elmore
Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping · Richard T. Cahill Jr.
The Lincoln Assassination Riddle: Revisiting the Crime of the Nineteenth Century · Edited by Frank J. Williams and Michael Burkhimer
Death of an Assassin: The True Story of the German Murderer Who Died Defending Robert E. Lee · Ann Marie Ackermann
The Insanity Defense and the Mad Murderess of Shaker Heights: Examining the Trial of Mariann Colby · William L. Tabac
The Belle of Bedford Avenue: The Sensational Brooks-Burns Murder in Turn-of-the-Century New York · Virginia A. McConnell
Six Capsules: The Gilded Age Murder of Helen Potts · George R. Dekle Sr.
A Woman Condemned: The Tragic Case of Anna Antonio · James M. Greiner
Bigamy and Bloodshed: The Scandal of Emma Molloy and the Murder of Sarah Graham · Larry E. Wood
The Beauty Defense: Femmes Fatales on Trial · Laura James
The Potato Masher Murder: Death at the Hands of a Jealous Husband · Gary Sosniecki
I Have Struck Mrs. Cochran with a Stake: Sleepwalking, Insanity, and the Trial of Abraham Prescott · Leslie Lambert Rounds
The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875 · Gordon H. Shufelt
Cold War Secrets: A Vanished Professor, a Suspected Killer, and Hoover’s FBI · Eileen Welsome
The East River Ripper: The Mysterious 1891 Murder of Old Shakespeare · George R. Dekle Sr.
Queen of the Con: From a Spiritualist to the Carnegie Imposter · Thomas Crowl
Q UEEN OF THE C ON   
From a Spiritualist to  the Carnegie Imposter
T HOMAS C ROWL
  The Kent State University Press KENT, OHIO
© 2021 by The Kent State University Press
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-60635-429-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
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C ONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
  1 Miss Bigley, Heiress to $15,000
  2 Madame Devere, European Clairvoyant
  3 Family Troubles
  4 A Clear Forgery
  5 An Unprincipled Adventuress
  6 A Most Novel and Unique Defense
  7 Guilty as Charged
  8 A Sort of a Business Arrangement
  9 The Greatest Bull Market in History
10 Splendid Business
11 H. Clark Ford and the Oberlin College Loans
12 The Carnegie Notes
13 Frenzied Finance
14 Absurd!
15 A Most Unpleasant Duty
16 Simply a Sucker
17 Chadwicked
18 A Noble Thing
19 A Most Dangerous Criminal
20 No Artistic Taste and No Culture
21 Enchantress in Her Last Home
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to acknowledge the following individuals and organizations without whose invaluable assistance this book could not have been completed: Kent State University Press, especially Susan Wadsworth-Booth, Mary Young, Christine Brooks, and Kat Saunders; Brian Meggitt, photo collection librarian, and the Cleveland Public Library; Mazie Adams and the Cleveland Police Historical Society; Ann Sindelar and the Cleveland History Center of the Western Reserve Historical Society Library and Archives; Valerie Ahwee, copy editor; Anne Salsich and the Oberlin College Libraries; the Oxford (Ontario, Canada) Historical Society; the Ohio History Connection Library and Archives; the Library of Congress; the Scott County (Kentucky) Public Library; and the New Castle (Pennsylvania) Public Library.
I NTRODUCTION
In New York City in the spring of 1904, Mrs. Cassie Chadwick, a wealthy resident of Cleveland’s fashionable Euclid Avenue, met a prominent Cleveland attorney—a florid-faced, prosperous man with a professional air and a propensity to gossip—in the lobby of the exclusive Holland House Hotel. Unbe-known to the barrister, he was about to become an unwitting accomplice in one of the most audacious frauds in American history. It was a pleasant carriage ride up Fifth Avenue to the magnificent mansion of Andrew Carnegie, where Mrs. Chadwick had promised her companion an introduction to the famous industrialist. Arriving at the mansion, Cassie tactfully suggested that the attorney wait in the carriage while she asked if Mr. Carnegie was home to visitors. The woman strode unhesitatingly to the front door, was admitted, and, with a jaunty wave to her companion, disappeared inside.
Mrs. Chadwick informed the butler that she wished to speak with the housekeeper about a former employee of the Carnegie household. The employee was unknown to the housekeeper and as the two women talked, Cassie took notes and stalled for time. Twenty minutes later, she reemerged from the mansion chirping pleasantly and waving. Once again seated in the cab, Cassie apologized to her companion, but Mr. Carnegie was not receiving visitors. Then, as if on cue, a package fell from her handbag. After the attorney retrieved it, Mrs. Chadwick said she wished to confide in him. After extracting a pledge of secrecy, Cassie admitted she was Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter. Her mother died, and, according to Cassie, Carnegie had discreetly placed her with foster parents in Canada. The ironmaster was very generous to her, she said, and the package contained US Steel bonds. To seal the deception, Cassie displayed two six-figure promissory notes to her benefit bearing the signature of Andrew Carnegie. As the carriage pulled away from the curb, the attorney could not resist a backward glance at the mansion and later swore he saw a short, gray-bearded man standing in an upstairs window. Such was the power of Cassie Chadwick’s persuasion. 1
This tale has become part of the Chadwick mythology, and there are various versions. The attorney was never identified, and no one stepped forward to collaborate even a portion of the story. Cassie appreciated the importance of perception and appearance and was more than shrewd enough to plan just such an encounter. She was an expert at manipulating men of power and money in an era when swindlers and forgers flourished. This is the true story of the life of a poor Canadian farm girl named Betsy Bigley, who, before her fiftieth birthday, became the clever, persuasive, high-living Cassie Chadwick, a wealthy doctor’s wife with a home on Cleveland’s millionaire’s row. With the suggestion that Andrew Carnegie stood behind her financially, Cassie succeeded in borrowing at least $10 million—$250 million in the twenty-first century—from some of the shrewdest businessmen in America on the flimsiest of collateral. In the press, she became known variously as Cleveland’s Duchess of Diamonds, the Queen of Finance, the Queen of Swindlers, the Heroine of High Finance, and the Carnegie Imposter. After her downfall, any suspicion of association with her could cause banks to fail and powerful men to divert their gaze. Cassie’s victims, and there were many, were said to have been “Chadwicked,” and her methods, “Frenzied Finance.” 2
In the early twentieth century an anonymous pundit observed, “Men can lie, do lie, lie even on a gigantic scale, but the supreme liar is always a woman. Take all the great frauds of history which depend upon sheer invention and the fantastic creation of nonexistent things, they have, in nearly every case been the creation of woman.” The newspapers of the Victorian age were filled with the exploits of feminine swindlers, imposters, and forgers. New York’s Fox sisters—Maggie, Kate, and Leah—practically invented spiritualism in America in the 1840s. Eventually exposed as frauds, the sisters nonetheless launched the careers of thousands of spiritualists, mediums, and fortune-tellers. Ellen Peck, “a smooth-tongued pleasant little lady,” according to one victim, defrauded a wealthy New York soap manufacturer of thousands, numerous Jewish diamond merchants of their wares, and a young physician of his life savings all while occasionally assisting the police in apprehending other swindlers. In the early 1890s two New York con artists, Sophie Lyons and Carrie Morse, opened the New York Women’s Banking and Investment Company with the sole aim of defrauding women of all classes. Before the bank failed, the duo had collected at least $50,000 from unsuspecting victims. “Big Bertha” Heyman, described as “fair, fat and forty,” operated in both the United States and Canada. She once