BOY RUNS AWAY
Chicago Herald
Somewhere between Chicago and Lansing,
Mich., Harvey L. New, a fair-haired
boy of 14, is wandering along the dusty
roads carrying a nightcap, a pocket full of
feed and Sarah Jane, a stub-toed chicken.
In his boyish heart he carries a love for
his chicken, the life of which he felt bound
to save at the cost of his home.
Harvey visits his grandfather’s farm near
Lansing every summer. A year ago his
grandmother presented him with Sarah
Jane, then only three weeks old.
He brought the chicken to his home at
4969 Prairie avenue and built a coop in
the back yard. Every morning he
arose
early and fed and fondled the chicken.
When he returned from school his first
thought was for Sarah Jane.
One night last winter the cold penetrated
the cellar where he kept her and
froze off her toes. He nursed her until she
got well.
As time went on his love for the chicken
grew. The chicken also grew, until one day
Harvey’s parents jokingly remarked that
she was getting large enough for a stew.
Harvey shuddered, but said nothing.
Last Sunday his parents again threatened
to sacrifice his pet.
Early Monday morning, when Harvey’s
father entered the boy’s room, he found
his son gone. In the mud beneath the bedroom
window he saw footprints. He made
a search about the house.
Then he noticed that Sarah Jane also
was gone, likewise a coop that Harvey had
made from an old fruit crate. The boy’s
nightcap, presented to him by his grandmother,
also was missing. Harvey has not
been heard from since.
“I believe the boy actually thought I
was going to kill his beloved pet,” said his
broken-hearted father, James New, yesterday.
“He probably will try to make his
way to the home of his grandparents in
Michigan. He loved his grandmother more
than anybody else in the world, with the
possible exception of Sarah Jane.”
When Harvey left he wore a gray suit,
a brown overcoat and a blue cap. He
stammers slightly when excited.
Harvey’s father has promised that Sarah
Jane never will be made into stew.
“ASLEEP AT THE SWITCH”
New York Times
Frank H. Thompson of 981 West Fifty-second
Street, who runs an elevator on
ordinary days, took a day off yesterday and
celebrated so heartily that, when he tried
to buy a ticket to the Crescent Theatre, a
moving picture and vaudeville house at
1,175 Boston Road, the Bronx, at 6:30
o’clock last evening, they refused to admit
him. Thompson then strolled down an
alley leading to the stage entrance, and
finding no one at the door, stepped inside,
leaned heavily against the wall, and went
to sleep.
Inside the theatre, where 600 persons
were gathered to watch the election returns,
which were flashed on the screen
between acts, there was great excitement,
for all the lights went out, even
those of the electric sign outside the place.
Thompson had leaned against the master
switch.
They found him there, turned the lights
up again and turned him over to Policeman
Fitzgerald, who locked him up in the Morrisania
Station.
CHARGED WITH INTOXICATION
New York World
Business has been bad with Isaac Einstein,
who keeps a “gents’” clothing and
furnishing emporium, No. 918 Paris avenue,
the Bronx.
To encourage trade he marked down his
goods until it was a shame to take them at
the prices he asked. The gilded youth of
the Bronx could buy of Einstein a suit of
evening clothes “like King Edward wears,
$2.98: reduced from $29.80.” Still, nobody
would buy the suit.
The lack of customers made Einstein despondent.
It is suspected that yesterday
he sought to drown his low spirits in others.
After a rather long absence he returned to
his store and began to act as if the thought
had struck him, “If I can’t sell ’em I can
give ’em away.”
Einstein pulled in the first man that
came along and made him a present of a
pair of trousers.
“They cost me $4 wholesale,” said Einstein,
tearfully. “I can’t sell ’em for $1.50.
You’ve got fine legs; you will show off this
check well. Take ’em, my friend, take ’em.
But take my advice, too. You are a married
man? Yes. You have children? Yes.
Don’t wear ’em in the house when the
babies are asleep.”
To the next man Einstein gave “a real
Panama straw hat” knocked down
from
$19 to 90 cents; to the third a suit of near-silk
underwear such as “the Sultan wears
when he goes visiting.”
In a very short time 500 men and boys
were scuffling to get into the store. Patrolman
Buck could not restrain the mob, and
sent for the reserves of the Alexander
avenue police station.
“At last I have a bargain crowd,” cried
Einstein. “See what a rush.”
Einstein thoughtlessly left his store.
Policeman Buck grabbed him, charged him
with intoxication and locked him up. Then
Buck locked up the store.
SWINDLE
New York Tribune
Frederick A. White, fifty-six years old,
who says he is a broker and lives at No.
345 West 116th street, was arrested yesterday
by Detectives Fitzsimmons and Flood,
of the District Attorney’s office, charged
with swindling James H. Burns, of Knoxville,
Tenn., out of lumber land in Marion,
N. C., worth $65,000.
Burns says that through fraud and misrepresentation
White obtained possession
of the deeds to the property on May 10.
Burns became suspicious, and, coming to
this city, went to Police Headquarters,
where, according to the police, he picked
out White’s picture, No. 4,391, in the
Rogues’ Gallery. He then communicated
with the District Attorney’s office, and
the alleged swindler was arrested in the
office of W. E. Wells & Co., lumber dealers,
at No. 29 Broadway.
Burns, who is staying at the Hoffman
House, is the owner of extensive lumber
lands in South Carolina. He came to this
city in January, and advertised in an organ
of the lumber trade that he had some property
for sale. He says White, representing
himself as a broker, called on him in answer
to the advertisement, and said he had
a prospective purchaser of the land. He
introduced Burns to Frederick A. Cannon,
who lives in The Bronx, as the ostensible
purchaser. The negotiations which followed
were completed in Washington.
Burns was to receive two bonds for
$25,000 each and three notes for $5,000
each, he says. The bonds, he understood,
were guaranteed by a trust company of
this city. The notes were for three, five
and seven months.
Shortly after the transfer of the property
to Cannon it passed into the hands of the
Standard Lumber Company, of which
White is president and Cannon is vice-president.
Burns says he tried to get possession
of the $25,000 bonds but failed,
notwithstanding repeated demands.
When the first note fell due, on August
20, Burns did not receive the $5,000. Then
the man from Tennessee grew suspicious,
and on investigation he learned that the
bonds were not guaranteed. He learned
also, he says, that the Standard Lumber
Company consisted of three shares valued
at $5 each.
The title to the land subsequently
changed hands again, this time to the
Southern Lumber Company.
White was arrested, the police say, about
five years ago, under the name of Wilce.
FORGERY
Kansas City Star
Sister sick. No work. Money gone.
Everything that could be pawned or sold
outright gone. Then Laura Walsington,
20 years old, 14 West Thirty-second Street,
took to forgery.
That was in July. Since then she has
cashed forged checks for sums from $15 to
$75. She was arrested this morning, was
taken to police headquarters and there
confessed.
Slumped down in a chair in the office of
Larry Ghent, chief of detectives, she wept
bitterly.
“Sister and I were living together,” she
said. “Then she got sick. She had to go
to a hospital and be operated on. We had
a little money, but that soon went. Then
I pawned everything I had, and then everything
Sis had. Then those things were
gone. Then I lost my position. I was desperate.”
After that, she said, she decided on
forgery.
On receipts for supplies of butter and
eggs, she had the name of a dairyman of
Parkton, Kas. After practicing the name
until proficiency had been acquired, she
telephoned to a Lakeview bank to inquire
if the dairyman’s checks were good. Informed
they were, she began, July 23, to
cash checks, signed in his name. The
Eagle Clothing Company, the Smith Garment
Company and the Wilson Coal &
Coke Company all cashed checks for her
aggregating $119.
The name of the physician who had attended
her sister was next. After practice,
Miss Walsington issued checks signed in his
name for sums totalling $170. The checks
were cashed at the London Cloak Company,
Peck’s, French Cloak and Suit Company
and the Mond Suit Company.
Then, November 10, Miss Walsington,
in a downtown bank, found a deposit slip
signed in a woman’s name. After practicing
the signature, she telephoned the bank, inquiring
if checks by that name would be
honored. She drew and cashed checks on
the woman for a total of $45.
Miss Walsington was arrested at the
Wilson Coal and Coke Company this
morning. She was recognized as having
previously cashed bad checks there and
detained until the arrival of two detectives.
“I’ll pay it all back,” she cried in Chief
Ghent’s office. “Only give me another
chance. Why, I’ve been respectable all my
life until this happened.”
She is being held.
WORTHLESS CHECKS
Topeka Capital
Frank Green and Ruth Blair were childhood
sweethearts at New Rapids, Kansas.
Five years ago, when both were 16 years
old, Ruth married a man named Bird, 13
years her senior. The bride moved away
while Frank remained in high school and
tried to forget.
Frank developed into a youthful speaker.
A year ago last September on Labor day,
Green, then 20 years old, delivered the
labor oration before 1,500 persons at New
Rapids. Then he went to Baker university.
Young Green played in several games
with the Baker football team and was active
in the debating societies. He returned
to his home in June to find his former sweetheart
back in New Rapids. Her life with
Bird had been unhappy and she had secured
a divorce.
The old friendship was renewed. In a
few weeks the two were married in Atchison,
“on the sly,” as Green said, because
his parents did not approve of the match.
With a few hundred dollars the happy
couple left New Rapids to make their way.
First Green tried getting subscriptions for
magazines. This failing, other propositions
were tried in various towns, including St.
Joseph and Kansas City. The store of dollars
dwindled until, when Mr. and Mrs.
Green reached Topeka from Lawrence,
where they had looked vainly for work,
only $3 remained. That was a week ago
Saturday.
Still optimistic, Green took his wife to
the Fifth Avenue hotel, confident that he
could find work and meet expenses. But
work was lacking, Green says. Meanwhile
Frank Long, manager of the Fifth Avenue
hotel, suggested several times to Green
that his bill had not been paid.
Completely discouraged Thursday,
Green cashed several small checks not
good. That night two suit cases were
lowered by a rope to the street from the
room occupied by the Greens. Then the
young husband led his wife through the
hotel lobby “to find a dentist to help her
toothache,” as he explained to the night
clerk. The two went to the Santa Fé station
and boarded train No. 117, Oklahoma
City bound.
A telegram from Sheriff L. L. Kiene arrived
ahead of Mr. and Mrs. Green. When
they entered the Oklahoma City station
they were arrested.
“We were taken to the city jail like
murderers,” said Green.
Saturday Sheriff Kiene arrived. The return
trip was ended last night, when Mr.
and Mrs. Green slept in the county jail.
Penitent would hardly describe the feeling
of the two as expressed to big-hearted
Sheriff Kiene. Pretty Mrs. Green was
nearly a nervous wreck from the continued
uncertainty and the shocks. Apparently it
is the first affair with the law for either.
“My record has been clear,” said Green.
“I never have been arrested before. One
hallowe’en night they almost got me, but I
outran the cop.”
How the present escapade will end, is not
known. Last night Green prayed for another
chance for his wife and himself.
“I will make good,” he said.
Note—How, with additional information,
a striking follow-up story can be written a few
hours after the first story was published is well
illustrated by the following two stories, the first
of which appeared in the Saturday evening edition
and the second in the Sunday morning edition
of the same paper.
EMBEZZLEMENT
(1)
Kansas City Star, Saturday evening
edition
John E. Jones, jr., formerly a clerk at
the Merchants Bank, which day before
yesterday was absorbed by the Commercial
Trust Company, is being detained at police
headquarters this afternoon pending an investigation
of his accounts. He is about
22 years old and is married. It was asserted
there was a discrepancy amounting to
something like $9,000.
The difference was found when an audit
of the books of the Merchants Bank was
made in turning over its money, books and
business to the Commercial Trust Company.
In a statement made to the police this
afternoon young Jones told a queer story.
He admitted falsifying the books for an
amount he calculated to be about $9,800.
But he said that he received only about
$500 of that amount, the rest going to a
lawyer friend. The lawyer is being detained
and questioned this afternoon in the
office of Larry Ghent, chief of detectives.
There is some doubt as to whether the
lawyer would be criminally liable although
he got most of the money.
Jones lives at 4510 Walker St. He did
not dissipate or spend recklessly and it is
believed he can restore the greater part of
the money.
This was the method of the bookkeeper
and his lawyer friend. The friend wrote
checks on an account he had in the Merchants
Bank. When the canceled checks
appeared at the Merchants Bank from the
clearing house to be charged against the
lawyer’s account, they first went to Jones,
whose task at the bank gave him that opportunity.
He held out those checks and
destroyed them. He covered the discrepancy
by making a false entry on his books.
Jones says he received $160 at one time
with which he purchased a motor cycle,
but the rest of his share went to him, he
says, in comparatively small amounts.
Young Jones told the police that he had
been forced by the lawyer to keep up the
system of destroying checks and falsifying
the books after once he started, for fear of
being exposed. The bookkeeper said that
he first fell into the clutches of the lawyer
when the attorney representing an installment
furniture house, threatened to take
back the furniture he had partly paid for.
A payment was due on it and the bookkeeper
could not meet it. He says the lawyer
proposed the scheme for destroying the
checks and falsifying the accounts. Once
he started, Jones said, his master made
him keep it up. The amounts of the checks
at first were comparatively small, but they
kept getting larger until one day the lawyer
compelled him to put over a check for
$2,000.
At 3:30 o’clock this afternoon the police
were still investigating the lawyer. He
cashed the checks, but was in no way connected
with the bank.
(2)
Kansas City Star, Sunday morning edition
After drifting in a current that both
knew must lead to wrack and ruin, two
Kansas City men are on the rocks
today.
One is Henry A. Black, 47, smart lawyer
and man of affairs. His companion in dishonor
is John E. Jones, jr., 21, a pallid
bank bookkeeper.
Accompanied by detectives and lawyers,
Black went to his offices in the Commercial
Building yesterday afternoon and produced
from his safe cancelled checks totalling
$9,800. The checks, drawn on his account
at the Merchants Bank, had been paid by
the bank but never charged against him.
Jones, the tool in this game of foolish
finance, pocketed them as they came in.
Around Black were men in whose class
the lawyer had only recently counted himself.
They were all staring at him. He felt
the need of explanation. He spoke slowly:
“I was under a great financial strain
and I had to resort to methods of raising
money that otherwise I never would have
used.”
He said nothing more and the little
group returned to police headquarters.
Black and the young bookkeeper, who for
months had juggled the lawyer-promoter’s
account at the bank, were held in jail over
night. Tomorrow both will be charged
with a felony, the prosecutor said last night.
Black is a church member and was for
many years a Sunday school teacher. He
is a cold man and even his close friends
have known only in a general way about
his business affairs. He was an exceptional
scholar. In the last ten years he has not
practiced much at the law, but has sought
to promote telephone corporations and large
land businesses. He has a lot of that force
that is sometimes called character but
more often described as personality. He
was the first man possessed of any considerable
personal magnetism who ever
came into the life of John Jones, bank
clerk.
The man of affairs began to notice
Jones months ago and Jones glowed under
the attention. Married at 18 to a girl a
year his junior, earning for a time $35 a
month, while his wife added to this by
wages from a wholesale coffee house, Jones
had had a dull life. He had been graduated
from a grade school at 14 and gone through
a business college. Several jobs followed
and he finally worked in one bank until his
salary was raised to $50 a month. After
that he helped his father in a grocery and
then went to work for the Merchants Bank
for $70 a month. When that bank was
absorbed by the Commercial Trust Company
last week, he was getting $75.
This was the young bookkeeper, pallid,
unassuming, rather thin chested, beside
whose place at the bank railing Black, one
of the bank’s customers, stopped one morning.
Black asked how his checks totaled.
The bookkeeper, returning in a moment,
told him his account would be overdrawn
$110. Black thanked him, said he would
go out and get the money, and passed a
10-cent cigar over the railing.
Many times this happened, Jones said
yesterday. His pocket was quite used to
the “feel” of one or two good cigars by
now.
Then one day Jones, the bank clerk,
needed a friend. He had lost a little home
out on Walker Avenue which he had sought
to buy on installments. Now an installment
house was threatening him for furniture
purchased.
Well, he guessed he had a friend, a
lawyer-friend, too. His intimacy with the
man, whom he considered one of the bank’s
best customers, had grown. Black now
was trusting the bookkeeper to notify him
whenever that exasperating account was
about to be overdrawn.
Jones was not disappointed. The installment
people were placated. In one interview
his friend of the 10-cent cigars arranged
a basis of settlement and even
advanced the first payment of $7.50.
This was the story that Jones told yesterday
to a roomful of lawyers, bankers and
bond company representatives, and to one
woman—the little girl who had married
him at 17.
In the next chapter it was his benefactor
who needed a favor.
It was in the power of the bank bookkeeper,
the financial weakling, to favor the
man of affairs. Black had written more
checks than he could meet. He wanted a
check for $100 held out for a day. It
would
be easy for the bookkeeper to slip it from
the pile that came in from the clearing
house. Of course, the man of affairs might
ask Mr. White, the cashier. But sometimes
Mr. White was willing to favor and
sometimes not. It depended a good deal
on how he felt. And this was important.
That $100 check was not made good
the next day. It went over to the “next
day.”
Others, at the insistence of the man of
affairs, were added to this.
The picture Jones drew in the minds of
those that heard him was of a nervous
young man, hurrying from the bank to
the office of the man of affairs and greeting
him with all the apprehension that had
grown upon him every time he looked at a
bank book.
“For God’s sake get this money and get
this straightened up.”
“Now, that’s all right. I’ll look after
this.”
And after a few minutes Jones would be
surprised to find himself picking up some
of the other’s confidence. He would go
back to his post confident that the money
would soon be raised and his duplicity toward
his employers wiped away.
Jones would get such messages as these:
“Meet me at 7:30 in the morning.”
“Drop in at 6 o’clock at night.”
“93, 94, 95, 96 are coming in. Take care
of them.”
It had reached $9,800 when the prospective
consolidation threatened disclosure.
Jones had the advice of the man of
affairs—to keep quiet and trust in him as
his lawyer.
When arrest came Friday, Jones called
for his lawyer. The lawyer was at church.
The messenger reached the church too
late.
At midnight Black was at police headquarters.
The police would not let him see
his young client. At 8 o’clock yesterday
morning, and again at 10 o’clock, Black
was back at the jail. But Jones, under the
sweating of the detectives, was keeping his
faith.
Then his young wife, leaving their 2-year-old
baby at home, came into the room.
She pleaded for the truth. Then Jones
took her hand and told the queer, pitiful
story.
The chief of detectives stared hard.
“Can you tell that story before Black?”
the chief demanded.
In a little while Black was brought into
the room.
The two men, so radically different in
character, education and manner, sat on
either side of a desk.
Again the young man told his story.
Black played with a lead pencil.
“Well, sir, what do you think of that?”
the detective chief asked sharply.
The answer was ready enough.
“The boy is having a wild dream. It is
preposterous!”
But a little while afterwards Black said,
briefly, that the cancelled checks, given
him by the accused clerk, were in his office
safe.
There the checks were found. And Black,
who had gone to the bank officials the day
before and pleaded for time for his client’s
sake, now pleaded for time for himself,
time in which to clean everything up, time
to make that restitution delayed so many
months.
In the matron’s room at the jail were
the boy and his wife. They had been crying.
“A headache I’ve had for weeks is gone,”
the boy said.
He was not vindictive.
“I was the fool,” he said. “I thought
that he was prosperous and that it would
all come out right.”
The disclosures of the day brought to
police headquarters another wife, Mrs.
Black, from the home at 215 Wilson Place.
With her was the Rev. A. Brittingham
Brown, Mr. Black’s pastor. Black’s 7-year-old
daughter was at home, asleep and
ignorant of the day’s cumulative events.
Mrs. Black brought for her husband in
a valise a change of clothing.
Black was summoned from the cell-room
and conducted to the office of the night
captain. He came in, his hat pulled forward,
head bowed.
Then he saw his wife. They advanced
to
each other with open arms. They kissed
and hugged. Neither said a word for a
long time.
They all sat down, the wife holding her
husband’s hand.
“We are very sorry, indeed, at this sudden
trouble,” the minister said. “The sympathy
of pastor and of members is with you
and we are going to stand by you. This is
a time to stand by a man.”
Black and Mrs. Black wept.
Other friends entered the room. No one
spoke of the case and Black volunteered no
information.
After his friends had gone, Black went
back to the cellroom, leaving on the captain’s
desk the valise brought by his wife.
The pajamas inside would have given
slight comfort on the iron slats upon which
he was to sleep.
BURGLARY
San Francisco Chronicle
Diamonds and other stones to the value
of $3500 were stolen yesterday afternoon
from the apartments of Mrs. Dennis M.
Patrick at 1907 Woolworth street by a
burglar, who ran away in such haste that
he left jewelry to an equal value spread out
on the bed, besides money and other valuables.
The burglar seems to have been familiar
with the hiding places of Mrs. Patrick’s
valuables and with her movements as well.
While she was out of the house between
2 and 4 o’clock in the afternoon, he entered
the rear door with a key which he took
from the place where she had hidden it,
picked up a screwdriver in the kitchen,
and, going straight to the bedroom, pried
open the locked bureau drawer where the
jewels were.
The burglar spread the loot out on the
bed and was evidently engaged in sorting
and packing it up when Mrs. Patrick’s
daughter, Dorothy, came home from school
at 3:30 o’clock. The little girl went up to
the back door, and, finding it locked, went
back to the street and down to the corner.
Apparently, when the child tried the back
door the burglar ran out through the front
way, as Mrs. Patrick found that door open
when she came home half an hour later.
The stolen jewels included thirty-seven
diamonds, eight emeralds and eight pearls,
all set in platinum, principally in the shape
of rings and a lavalliere. Most of the stones
were heirlooms and prized by Mrs. Patrick
beyond their value. The jewels which the
burglar left behind in his hurry included a
diamond bracelet, besides other diamonds
and emeralds, and a quantity of gold jewelry.
Several hundred dollars’ worth of
silverware and about $20 in coin had
not been touched. But the burglar did
take about 55 cents from the little girl’s
purse.
A cigarette on the floor, a room full of
smoke and an excellent set of finger prints
on a hand mirror, which Detective M. T.
Arey found last night, were all the clews
the burglar left.
BURGLARY
Chicago Herald
Helen Walker is 12 years old. Her father
is John Walker, a lawyer, and the family
resides in Oakland Park. Mr. Walker always
has been proud of his daughter. But
he boasts about her now.
Helen’s mother, when she kissed her girl
good-by yesterday morning, had said she
would not be home till late. That’s why
Helen grew suspicious.
She heard some one walking upstairs
when she came home from school. It
couldn’t be her father. And the step was
too heavy for her mother; and, besides, her
mother wasn’t home.
So she tiptoed upstairs and into her
father’s room, and she found a big revolver
in a bureau drawer. Then she walked
quietly into the room where the noise
seemed to come from.
She saw a man putting things into a bag—silverware,
bric-a-brac, ornaments, jewelry—all
her mother’s pretty things.
The girl drew in her breath sharply.
The burglar turned. His little eyes glared
at her—a slim little creature with a halo
of
golden hair and a revolver—and blue eyes
that looked into his unafraid.
For a moment they kept the pose.
Then—
“It’s loaded,” said the girl. “Don’t you
think you’d better drop my mamma’s
silver comb?”
The burglar did. Likewise a rope of
pearls.
“Hadn’t you better turn the bag upside
down on the bed there?” the girl continued.
The burglar, without a word, complied.
Then she made him turn his pockets inside
out, and, keeping the revolver trained
on him, walked him down the steps and
onto the porch.
And there he turned and spoke.
“Say, kid, you’re all right,” he affirmed,
and walked away.
And Helen went and told the neighbors—and
was afraid to go back into the home
she had just defended—until the arrival of
her mother.
HIGHWAY ROBBERY
Chicago Herald
About to be married and needing money,
Edward Russell, 19 years old, decided it
would be easier to steal the money than
work for it.
So he turned auto robber, and was captured
with three other young men, after
they held up Edward Bessinger and took
his satchel, containing $3,000. They told
their stories yesterday in the Chicago avenue
police station and gave their strange
motives for becoming criminals.
“I was going to be married and knew I
would need a lot of money,” said Russell.
“I couldn’t get enough by working and
thought a holdup would be the best way.”
John Harper said he joined the other
robbers because his father was in trouble.
“He is a saloon-keeper in Walsingham,
Ill., and was caught staying open after
hours,” said Harper. “He needed money
to help him out, and the only way I had
to get it was to steal it.”
“I was just trying to collect what Bessinger
owed me,” declared Arthur Raymond,
who planned the robbery. “I worked
in the Bessinger restaurant at Halsted and
Hamilton streets and got paid next to
nothing for it. You can’t work for such
small wages and have any money.
“I decided I would get enough out of
Bessinger to pay me handsomely for the
time I worked there. I knew he carried
money in the satchel and planned the
holdup.”
“Let the others talk themselves into the
penitentiary if they want to,” said George
Wilson, the fourth prisoner. “I have
nothing to say about it. We tried and fell
down. That’s all.”
The four men were arrested after they
had run their automobile into a fence while
trying to escape with the satchel. They
had knocked down Bessinger, who is a collector
for the Bessinger Restaurant Company,
and the automobile ran over his leg,
causing the machine to swerve. The money
satchel was recovered.
THEFT OR LOSS
Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin
It will be Christmas without the “merry”
for Jules Alexander, Brussels, Belgium,
who will spend it in Milwaukee penniless,
because of either an evil twist of fate or the
daring of a hotel thief.
Monsieur Alexander, a young Belgian,
is an American representative of a large
machinery plant in Brussels. He has been
in Milwaukee about two weeks and is staying
at the Hotel Pfister.
Thursday afternoon M. Alexander decided
that his suit needed pressing. Hurriedly—it
must have been hurriedly—he
made a change of wardrobe, rang for a
bellboy and had the suit taken down to the
hotel tailor.
Little did M. Alexander know that a
$130 roll of crinkly American bills, practically
his assets in toto, reposed in the
left hand hip pocket of the tailor-bound
trousers. In the newly donned suit there
was not a franc, not a sou, not even a
centime.
Later in the afternoon, having left the
hotel, M. Alexander had use for some
change. He felt in his hip pocket and
found nothing. He found the same thing
in all his other pockets. All at once it
dawned on him that he had left the precious
roll of bills in the other suit.
M. Alexander went back to the hotel on
the run. He told the clerk of his loss.
Quickly but quietly a search for the lost
or stolen money was made through the
hotel, but without avail. Evidently both
tailor and bellboy declared that they knew
nothing of the money.
M. Alexander is positive that the roll of
bills was in the pocket of the trousers sent
down to the tailor. As the tailor is in the
same building, there was no chance of the
money’s dropping on the street, and yet
the hotel corridors, elevators and lobbies
have been searched inch by inch.
This morning M. Alexander went to the
central police station and reported the loss,
or theft. Detective Paul Pergande was detailed
on the case.
“It was 650 francs I lose; all I had,
aussi,” said M. Alexander this morning,
with a deprecatory French shrug of the
shoulders. “I do not know what shall I do
if the gendarmerie, the police, soon do not
find the money. It is of a probability, certainement,
that I can get some more, but
it will take time and I am what you call
‘broke’—n’est-ce pas?
“You see, monsieur, my compagnie—it
is in Bruxelles—allow me an expense account
and we representateefs do not carry
with us so much. That which one has
stolen is all that I had. Voila!
“I must find that money, monsieur.
Certainement I can explain to our New
York agents and they will send me some
money to live with. Assuredly I hope that
they will not doubt my explanation and
wonder how I use so much expense account.
Six hundred and fifty francs—it is much,
monsieur!
“King Albert, I? Oh, oui, we have a new
and fine king, but just now I worry so
about my money that I have not thought
much of our new king.”
HOLD-UP
Kansas City Star
Liquor was responsible for starting out
two young men last night on a brief career
as holdup men which lasted only a few
hours and ended in cells at police headquarters
at midnight. The men are Herbert
Wilson, 24 years old, 910 East Nineteenth
Street, and Sherwin Carter, 28 years
old, 143 Payne Avenue. Carter is married.
The holdups were eight in number, occurring
in the district between Twenty-first
and Thirty-seventh streets and Penn
Street and Forest Avenue. The loot obtained
amounted to $12 in cash, eight diamond
rings, four purses and three watches.
The robberies came in quick succession and
so did the calls of the victims to police
headquarters. Two policemen in a motor
car finally caught the pair at Linwood
Boulevard and Forest Avenue.
Carter is the son of Dr. Eugene Carter,
Hampshire Apartments, president of Standard
Lumber Company. Doctor Carter,
when notified of his son’s arrest, immediately
blamed liquor for the young man’s
downfall and said that ordinarily he was a
“good boy.”
“I’d been drinking for three days and
didn’t know what I was doing last night,”
young Carter said this morning at police
headquarters. “I was out of a job and
didn’t have any money to speak of. And,
say, I’m kind of responsible for Wilson’s
getting into this, too. It was my scheme
to hold up people.
“I’ve been a little wild, but I’ve never
been in trouble for holding up people.
Say, this’ll be hard on my wife.”
Wilson, too, blamed liquor.
“I’d never have dreamed of robbing
people if I hadn’t been drunk,” he said.
“Carter thought it would be an easy way
to get some money and so we went and
borrowed a gun from a negro that he knew
and went to holding up people. I’d hold
the gun and Carter would search them.”
Both men were shaking and wild-eyed
this morning. After their continued drinking
of whisky for three days, their nerves
were far from steady.
HOLD-UP
Kansas City Star
See now how real life beats the reel
life every now and then. Here, for instance,
is the strange history of The
Man in the Black Mask, as acted upon
the stage of Kansas City’s streets in the
deserted hours of the morning when
everybody slumbers except holdup men,
belated wayfarers and policemen.
REAL I.
Ed Wilson, alias E. Harry Miller, known
in the family album at police headquarters
as a “gunman,” fares forth very early this
morning with a companion to make his
living. At 2:30 o’clock at Thirteenth and
Charlotte streets, they meet a man and
begin their pleasant labors.
“Don’t do it, gents,” says the stranger,
“don’t do it. It ain’t perfessional. I’m
one of the same. Here’s my gun and here’s
my black mask. See?”
“Excuses,” says Spokesman Ed. “Have
’em back. Luck to you.”
REAL II.
Frank Mathis, one of those belated wayfarers
who afford occupation to holdup
men, is held up half an hour later at Thirteenth
and Charlotte streets by two men.
By the illumination of an arc light he observes
the two closely. So does Timothy
Dalton, policeman. Timothy comes up
rapidly and the two flee, bombarding the
air, Timothy doing the same. The robbers
escape.
Mathis then furnishes Timothy descriptions
of the two, which Timothy, in turn,
furnishes police headquarters, which, in
turn, furnishes them to whatever policemen
can be reached by telephone.
REAL III.
(In two scenes.)
Scene I—Frank Hoover, another policeman
with insomnia, sees a man approach
him at Eleventh and Charlotte streets
about 4 o’clock. The man seems to answer
the description of one of the two holdup
chaps.
Hoover runs and so does the man.
Another batch of shots are fired. This
time they find lodging.
The fleeing man drops with a bullet in
the left leg and another in the left hip.
Hoover stoops down, picks up something
clutched in the wounded man’s hand,
stares at it curiously, puts it in his pocket.
The ambulance arrives and the wounded
man is taken to the General Hospital.
Scene II—Furnished with descriptions
of the two fleeing holdup men, another
policeman at 4 o’clock at Tenth and Holmes
streets, arrests Ed Wilson, our hero of
“Real 1.”
REAL IV.
At police headquarters today Wilson is
identified by Mathis as one of the pair who
held him up.
Wilson agrees with him and tells his
partner’s name.
Mathis then goes to the hospital, but
fails to identify the wounded man, who
gives the name of Harry Walters.
From this Wilson gathers that the
wounded man is not his pal.
But who, then, is he?
“You say this Hoover cop picked up
something when he shot the fellow?”
queries Wilson.
“What was it?”
“A black mask, eh? Well, ain’t that the
limit?”
“Why, that must be the fellow we held
up to begin with and turned loose because
he was in the business.
“And here he goes and gets shot because
a cop thinks he looks like me. That’s
luck for you!”
STREET CAR BANDIT
Los Angeles Times
Two pairs of arms entwined the neck of
Harry Blair, wounded and confessed streetcar
bandit, as he lay chained to a cot in the
Emergency Hospital yesterday
morning.
While his young wife embraced him, sobbing,
their year-old baby laughed and
cooed. He crawled across the pillow on
which Blair’s head rested, and, snuggling
close to his father, threw his chubby arms
around Blair’s neck.
Hospital folk and the police are used to
pathetic scenes in the hospital, but that
sight seemed too much for them, and
silently they stole from the ward and closed
the door, leaving the wife to her grief, the
husband to whatever thoughts he had, and
the innocent babe to its joy.
It was a decidedly hard-luck story that
the Blairs related to the detectives and
nurses. The first year of their married life
happiness and prosperity smiled on them,
they said. But when the stork visited the
Blair household in Dallas it brought not
only a bright-eyed baby but also a nemesis.
Their savings went for doctor’s bills and
clothing for the little one. Then Blair had
difficulty, he says, in finding steady employment
at his trade, painting. When
they were reduced almost to poverty they
decided to come to Los Angeles. They have
been here six weeks. In that time, Blair
says, he was unable to earn enough to
provide properly for his sick wife and impoverished
baby.
The last dollar the couple had went a
few days ago for rent. Weary of tramping
the streets in quest of work, weak from
lack of nourishment, and worried because
he couldn’t buy food, clothing and medicine,
Blair says he conceived the idea of
turning highwayman.
“Even then my nemesis followed me,”
he said, choking. “I got a few dollars from
the conductor and was hurrying home to
give it to my wife for food and things when
I was stopped by a police officer. I escaped
from him and was climbing a fence when
the bullet caught me in the leg.”
Blair will be confined in the criminal
ward at the County Hospital until he is
physically able to be arraigned. He will be
charged with highway robbery, the police
say.
FREE-FOR-ALL FIGHT
New York World
With whistle screeching and hundreds of
passengers yelling for help out of the windows,
a northbound Third avenue elevated
train was held in panic late last night by a
crowd of roughs, who terrorized the passengers
and assaulted a conductor.
More than a dozen women, returning
from the theatre, fainted, and Mrs. Sadie
Arthur, of No. 991 East One Hundred and
Seventy-eighth street, was thrown into violent
hysterics and taken to the Lebanon
Hospital.
The riot started at One Hundred and
Thirty-eighth street and continued all the
way to One Hundred and Sixty-sixth street.
There policemen shoved through a great
crowd, which had been attracted by the
whistling, and arrested Adolph J. Weiss,
eighteen years old, of No. 444 East One
Hundred and Sixty-fifth street. His companions
in the excitement managed to escape.
Weiss, who is somewhat of a fighter, was
the ringleader of the disturbers. They began
their horseplay by throwing hats about
the car, smashing hats and jostling the passengers.
Dresses were torn and women insulted;
yet no one took a hand to suppress
the outrage.
“Shame on you men,” cried some of the
women. “Haven’t any of you enough spirit
to protect us?”
Just as one woman received a severe
blow in the face, Conductor Thomas J.
Boyce, of No. 108 East One Hundred and
Twenty-first street, who is known on the
road as “Scrappy Tom,” jumped into the
fracas and hit straight from the shoulder.
“Beat him up,” yelled the gang, and
they all jumped on “Scrappy Tom.”
“Come on, all of you,” he roared, his
fighting Irish blood aroused. One, two,
three of the brawlers hit the dusty mat,
and finally Boyce reached Adolph and
landed hard on his jaw.
The fight ranged up and down the car,
with Boyce taking care of the entire gang.
Three or four women who had fainted and
fallen to the floor were trampled upon.
Windows were raised throughout the
train. Yells of “Murder!” “Police!”
alarmed the Bronx. The motorman started
his whistle going, and this tipped Policemen
Wilson and Dempsey, of the Morrisania
station, who lay in wait at One Hundred
and Sixty-sixth street.
The crowd that was bunched there prevented
their making more arrests and furnished
a means of escape to Weiss’s “pals.”
Pieces of hats, feathers, ribbons and
lingerie were scattered from end to end of
the car. A number of the women had not
revived, and Mrs. Arthur appeared to be
in a critical condition. A hurry call was
sent to Lebanon Hospital, and Dr. Singer,
hastily treating the others, hurried Mrs.
Arthur to the institution. He said she was
in a dangerous hysterical condition.
The line was tied up for half an hour by
the riot.
Weiss looked as though he had stayed
in the ring twenty rounds with Bill Papke.
His face was unrecognizable.
“I never knew that any of these conductors
could fight,” he sputtered through
swollen lips, as he was led to a cell.
“Over in the old country,” said “Scrappy
Tom,” as he watched the ex-champion led
to a cell in the Morrisania station, “I used
to throw a couple of lads like you over my
head before breakfast just for an appetizer.”
MURDER OF BUSINESS MAN
New York Tribune
Walter H. Hammond, a well known business
man of Jersey City and a brother of
Colonel Robert A. Hammond, was shot and
instantly killed yesterday afternoon in the
Pennsylvania Railroad Company’s ferry
house at Jersey City. Peter Grew, a man
he had befriended, was arrested as the
slayer of Hammond.
Mr. Hammond was about to have his
luncheon in the restaurant in the railway
station, on the second floor. He had ascended
the stairs and turned toward the
restaurant, when he was confronted by
Grew, to whom he made a cheery remark.
Without a word in reply, the police say,
Grew drew a revolver, which he carried in
his coat pocket, and fired at him. The bullet
entered the left temple and ploughed
into the brain. Two more bullets were
fired into his body after he fell.
Calmly replacing the weapon in his pocket,
Grew started to walk down the stairs
to the street, but Patrolman Amann, who
was on duty at the ferry house, dashed up
the stairs and, meeting him half way, arrested
him. Grew remarked, Amann says,
as he handed the revolver to the officer:
“The thing is all over, and I might as well
give up.” Later he persistently refused to
admit that he did the shooting.
The police say their investigation has
revealed that Grew, who has been regarded
as eccentric and impulsive, had frequently
threatened to kill Hammond. They say
that Grew had recently been drinking excessively.
The victim of the shooting was the head
of the Hammond and Wilson Stock Company,
dealers in butterine and eggs at Jerome
and 4th streets, Jersey City. He was
a bachelor and forty-two years old. He was
a director of the Second National Bank and
of the Commercial Trust Company, and an
active member of the Union League Club,
of Jersey City. He lived at No. 314 Harrison
avenue, Jersey City.
Grew had been in the same business.
Some time ago, the police say, he was arrested
in Brooklyn for making and selling
oleomargarine without stamping it properly.
Hammond gave him a new start in
business. His business dwindled to nothing,
and he accused Hammond of persecuting
him. Grew owned a flathouse at No. 244
3d street, Jersey City, in which he, his
wife and six children lived. This house
he conveyed to his wife during his business
troubles. It is said that Grew complained
that his wife was under the influence of
Mr. Hammond and refused to permit him
to have any of the revenue derived from
the rental of the building. Ten days ago
he was arrested for beating her. Judge
Harmon, before whom he was arraigned,
ordered him committed to jail for ten days,
but relented when he promised to refrain
from abusing or beating his wife.
Otto S. Wilkins, of No. 21 Park street,
who has a butter business at No. 52 Hudson
street, Jersey City, met Grew less than an
hour before the shooting. He told Captain
Larkins, at the Jersey City Police Headquarters,
of a conversation he had had with
Grew. He said that Grew asked him to
give him a job.
“I then told him,” Mr. Wilkins said,
“that I understood that he was in such a financial
condition that he could live without
working. He said, ‘No,’ that his property
brought him in $120 a month, and that
after he had paid the interest on a small
loan which stood against it, with taxes and
repairs, it left very little to live on; that his
wife would not let him have any of that,
and that Mr. Hammond was responsible
for her attitude in withholding funds from
him. He was in a natural state of mind
to-day, cool and collected, and talked to me
in the same strain that I have always
known him to use. He used to tell me four
or five years ago that he had it in for Mr.
Hammond and would shoot him some time.”
In a statement to the police Grew said he
had known Hammond for sixteen years and
had done business with him. “I am not
going to answer that,” was his reply when
asked if he had had any trouble with Hammond.
He said that he was on his way
home from Manhattan when he met Hammond,
and that Hammond spoke to him,
but he did not reply. “I had the revolver
in my right hand in the inside pocket of my
sack coat,” said Grew, “and that is all I
have to say.” He stated that “Hammond
had been pounding me and had got the
inspectors to pound me.”
Mrs. Grew said that her husband’s mind
had been affected by brooding over his failure
in business, and she shared her husband’s
opinion that he had been persecuted.
MURDER IN LITTLE ITALY
Kansas City Star
Murders in Little Italy Since January 1.
January 9—Mario Ippolito shot down and
killed by unidentified assassin.
January 11—John Kanato shot by John
Herwetine; died two days later.
January 23—John Janoka shot by Nick
Hontrogen; died same day.
January 24—Lusciano Musso murdered by
gunmen in daylight.
February 4—Salvador Cangialosi shot and
killed by Angelo Mannino.
February 24—Giovanni Seculo shot down
by unidentified assassin, will die.
Shootings.
January 24—H. C. Petro, shot in his home,
110 Watkins Avenue, by someone who fired
through the window; not fatal.
February 13—Robert Jordan, 1039 East
Fourth Street, was shot twice by Tony Filo;
not fatal.
That impenetrable air of mystery which
closed down on the attack last night on
two Italians, as it has closed down upon
every one of the weekly murders of Little
Italy, a sable cloak hiding details, obliterating
the trails of assassins who shoot men
in the back and flee, is not such a mysterious
thing after all. There is only one
policeman at night in Little Italy.
Giovanni Seculo and Tony Boni are
walking along Cherry Street near Fourth
Street. It is 10 o’clock at night. A shotgun
barks, once, twice. Seculo falls, a death
wound in his back. Boni falls, shot in the
hip.
Presently a policeman comes, who was
blocks distant at the time.
Little Italy shrugs and avers it was all
sound asleep when Seculo and his companion
were shot.
The assassin escapes.
There is nothing different in the main
threads of the chronicle from those of all the
other unpunished crimes of Little Italy.
Always, the crime is committed in some
part of Little Italy distant from that lone
policeman. Little Italy extends from Independence
Avenue to the Missouri River,
from Oak Street to Tracy Avenue.
“There should be at least four policemen
in that district at night,” said Larry Ghent,
chief of detectives, this morning. Then he
revealed some figures on the police department.
In the district comprising Little Italy,
Hick’s and Belvidere hollows, which are
unsavory negro neighborhoods, and others
almost as notorious, a district
extending
north of Independence Avenue and east of
Main Street to Jackson Avenue, there are
at night only four patrolmen.
In the central district, taking in the
whole of the North Side, fourteen out of
thirty-one police “beats” are without patrolmen
at night.
In all Kansas City there are only 264
patrolmen, exclusive of officers. Many of
these work as clerks in stations. The police
force is at the lowest that it has been for
years. The city is increasing in population.
Ghent withdrew detectives from other
cases this morning and sent four of them,
under the direction of Patrolman Louis
Olivero, into Little Italy to attempt to ferret
out the attack on Seculo last night.
Seculo, proprietor of the Neopolitan
Macaroni factory at 516–18 East Tenth
Street, and an influential Italian, probably
will die. His condition was slightly improved
today, however. Neither Seculo
nor Boni knows why he was attacked or by
whom.
MURDER
New York Sun
Trying door knobs early yesterday morning,
Policeman Merkle of the East 104th
street station found that the door of the
little Italian grocery shop at 321 East 109th
street opened. He entered, thinking that
the place might have been robbed. At the
rear of the dark, smelly little shop he found
another door that opened, and as it did so,
a bulldog sprang at him. The policeman
shut the door and ran out to the street and
rapped for assistance. Policeman O’Connell
came and the two went back into the
store.
They coaxed the dog into good humor,
and, on lighting the gas in the squalid room,
they found its master kneeling beside his
bed in a pool of blood. Another door in the
rear was forced open. Peter Mutolo, who
lives there with his wife and three children,
said they had heard no noise.
They said that the murdered man was
Frederick Cinci, who had kept the shop
about a month. He had been in this country
about a year. No one knew of any
enemies.
On the table were three dirty glasses and
an empty wine bottle. Friends sometimes
came to see him, the neighbors said. Nobody
knew whether visitors came to see
him before his death. On the floor below his
body they found a stiletto, long of blade,
which was bent double. In his neck, lungs,
stomach and kidneys the ambulance surgeon
found five thrusts.
The body was still warm; death hadn’t
come long before the police found him.
Some money, $1.60, was found in his pockets,
and his gold watch had not been taken.
Six dollars was found in the cash drawer of
his shop. No one killed him to rob him of
money. The dog, the police think, would
have attacked a stranger and probably recognized
the murderer.
MURDER
New York World
Pietro de Angelo ran along Columbus
avenue, Montclair, N. J., yesterday.
Plainly De Angelo, a sturdy fellow of
twenty-two years, had run far and hard.
He came from the direction of the Brookdale
section of Bloomfield. He was leg
weary, his steps grew shorter. Panting, he
looked over his shoulder ever and again at
an older man who ran behind him at some
distance.
The older man carried a shotgun which
swung by his side in his grasp as he plodded
along. He seemed to be in no hurry; he
seemed to be able to run forever; straight
he ran, with his eyes fixed always on De
Angelo, who looked back, fearfully.
Christopher street and Columbus avenue
is the most fashionable part of Montclair.
Wealthy persons live in that neighborhood.
Men on the street or looking from
their dwellings had no idea of the tragedy
that was to be enacted. Being law-abiding,
having no reason to run, in flight or pursuit,
the Montclair men thought that De
Angelo and the older man who ran behind
him were both fleeing from the same pursuer.
“The police are after those fellows,”
said one Montclair man.
“Or the game wardens,” said another.
“See, the second chap has a shotgun—been
poaching most likely. The young fellow
has outstripped him.”
Not so. Where Christopher street intersects
Columbus avenue De Angelo
halted, swayed, almost fell. His bolt was
shot, his breath was spent. He turned and
slowly walked back to the older man, who
did not even hasten his gait, but approached
De Angelo—approached as inexorably as
death itself. As he got nearer, De Angelo
stretched out his hands toward him in
mute pleading. The older man, never
hurrying, never slackening his gait, got
within ten yards of De Angelo, stopped,
raised his shotgun to his shoulder, pulled
the trigger, and sent the charge from one
barrel into De Angelo’s left breast.
The younger man pitched down on his
face, arms extended, palms down. The
older man looked down at him an instant—yes,
one barrel was enough—then, dropping
the gun from his shoulder, he kept on
running, no faster, no slower, than before.
And he escaped. A dozen most respectable
citizens of Montclair all had the same
thought, to notify the police. The dozen
rushed to their telephones. When the police
arrived De Angelo was dead. He had
died instantly.
Deputy County Physician Muta went
from Orange and had the body taken to
the Morgue at Orange. De Angelo lived
at No. 961 Wilson street, Montclair. His
parents say he had dinner with them there
at noon, then went out. They do not know
where he went. The police are trying to
learn.
MURDER
Kansas City Star
In the parlor of the rooming house at
57 Green Street A. C. Hobson was busily
tuning the piano this morning. As he bent
above the humming wires, the lid of the
instrument thrown back, a light step
sounded down the corridor. Then he heard
a fresh young voice, singing softly. Hobson
smiled and ceased his work to listen.
The voice sang a line or two touching on
cows and green fields.
“A kid from the country,” Hobson said,
and went on.
A heavier step clumped on the stairway
leading up from the street entrance. The
song ceased abruptly.
“Hello, Maggie,” Hobson heard a man’s
voice say. “What made you leave me?”
There was a little pause; then a girl’s
voice answered sharply:
“Why do you follow me, anyhow? I
don’t love you.”
“I came to take you back with me,”
said the man. Hobson had stopped his
tinkering. The sound of the man’s heavy
breathing came in to him through the open
doorway from the dim corridor. “Kiss
me,” the man’s voice commanded.
The girl’s voice rose. “No,” she cried.
“No. I don’t love you.”
The man swore. “Then no one else’ll
have you,” he shouted.
Hobson stood motionless, as though
paralyzed. Then he heard a scuffle; the
girl cried out sharply. The restraint on
him was broken at that, and Hobson rushed
into the corridor. The struggling forms of
man and woman were disappearing through
the doorway of another room down the
hall. An instant or two later, Hobson heard
the crack of a revolver shot followed
closely by a second. Then the moans of a
woman in agony succeeded. Hobson ran
into the room. Man and woman writhed on
the bed.
Going to a telephone, Hobson summoned
the police. Sergt. James O’Rile, acting
captain of the Walnut Street Police Station,
responded. It was twenty-five minutes
before the ambulance arrived.
The woman was Mrs. Maggie Towes,
24 years old, who left her husband, John
Towes, in Homeville, Mo., four months
ago. Towes came to Kansas City a week
ago, finally, this morning, finding his wife
at the rooming house of Mrs. Mary Howe,
where she had found employment as housekeeper.
Towes is a blacksmith’s helper and
is 32 years old.
As he lay on the bed in that twilight
state between the conscious and the unconscious,
Towes reached a hand gropingly towards
his wife.
“Kiss me, honey,” he mumbled; “kiss
me before I go.”
They were taken to the General Hospital.
Mrs. Towes was shot through the
abdomen, Towes through the left breast.
Both probably will die.
MURDER
New York Sun[A]
Mrs. Catherine Sheehan stood in the
darkened parlor of her home at 361 West
Fifteenth street late yesterday afternoon,
and told her version of the murder of her
son Gene, the youthful policeman whom
a thug named Billy Morley shot in the
forehead, down under the Chatham
Square elevated station early yesterday
morning. Gene’s mother was thankful that
her boy hadn’t killed Billy Morley before
he died, “because,” she said, “I can say
honestly, even now, that I’d rather have
Gene’s dead body brought home to me, as
it will be to-night, than to have him come
to me and say, ‘Mother, I had to kill a man
this morning.’
“God comfort the poor wretch that killed
the boy,” the mother went on, “because
he is more unhappy to-night than we are
here. Maybe he was weak-minded through
drink. He couldn’t have known Gene or
he wouldn’t have killed him. Did they
tell you at the Oak Street Station that the
other policemen called Gene Happy Sheehan?
Anything they told you about him is
true, because no one would lie about him.
He was always happy, and he was a fine-looking
young man, and he always had to
duck his helmet when he walked under the
gas fixture in the hall, as he went out the
door.
“He was doing dance steps on the floor
of the basement, after his dinner yesterday
noon for the girls—his sisters I mean—and
he stopped of a sudden when he
saw the clock and picked up his helmet.
Out on the street he made pretence of
arresting a little boy he knows, who was
standing there—to see Gene come out,
I suppose—and when the lad ran away
laughing, I called out, ‘You couldn’t
catch Willie, Gene; you’re getting fat.’
“‘Yes, and old, mammy,’ he said, him
who is—who was—only twenty-six—‘so
fat,’ he said, ‘that I’m getting a new dress
coat that’ll make you proud when you
see me in it, mammy.’ And he went over
Fifteenth street whistling a tune and slapping
his leg with a folded newspaper. And
he hasn’t come back again.
“But I saw him once after that, thank
God, before he was shot. It’s strange,
isn’t it, that I hunted him up on his beat
late yesterday afternoon for the first time
in my life? I never go around where my
children are working or studying—one I
sent through college with what I earned
at dressmaking, and some other little
money I had, and he’s now a teacher; and
the youngest I have at college now. I don’t
mean that their father wouldn’t send them
if he could, but he’s an invalid, although
he’s got a position lately that isn’t too
hard for him. I got Gene prepared for college,
too, but he wanted to go right into an
office in Wall street. I got him in there, but
it was too quiet and tame for him, Lord
have mercy on his soul; and then, two
years ago, he wanted to go on the police
force, and he went.
“After he went down the street yesterday
I found a little book on a chair, a little
list of the streets or something, that Gene
had forgot. I knew how particular they
are about such things, and I didn’t want
the boy to get in trouble, and so I threw on
a shawl and walked over through Chambers
street toward the river to find him. He was
standing on a corner some place down there
near the bridge clapping time with his
hands for a little newsy that was dancing;
but he stopped clapping, struck, Gene did,
when he saw me. He laughed when I
handed him the little book and told that
was why I’d searched for him, patting me
on the shoulder when he laughed—patting
me on the shoulder.
“‘It’s a bad place for you here, Gene,’
I said. ‘Then it must be bad for you, too,
mammy,’ said he; and as he walked to the
end of his beat with me—it was dark then—he
said, ‘There are lots of crooks here,
mother, and they know and hate me and
they’re afraid of me’—proud, he said it—‘but
maybe they’ll get me some night.’
He patted me on the back and turned and
walked east toward his death. Wasn’t it
strange that Gene said that?
“You know how he was killed, of course,
and how— Now let me talk about it,
children, if I want to. I promised you,
didn’t I, that I wouldn’t cry any more or
carry on? Well, it was five o’clock this
morning when a boy rang the bell here at
the house and I looked out the window and
said, ‘Is Gene dead?’ ‘No, ma’am,’ answered
the lad, ‘but they told me to tell
you he was hurt in a fire and is in the hospital.’
Jerry, my other boy, had opened
the door for the lad and was talking to him
while I dressed a bit. And then I walked
down stairs and saw Jerry standing silent
under the gaslight, and I said again, ‘Jerry,
is Gene dead?’ And he said ‘Yes,’ and he
went out.
“After a while I went down to the Oak
Street Station myself, because I couldn’t
wait for Jerry to come back. The policemen
all stopped talking when I came in,
and then one of them told me it was against
the rules to show me Gene at that time.
But I knew the policeman only thought
I’d break down, but I promised him I
wouldn’t carry on, and he took me into
a room to let me see Gene. It was Gene.
“I know to-day how they killed him.
The poor boy that shot him was standing
in Chatham Square arguing with another
man when Gene told him to move on.
When the young man wouldn’t, but only
answered back, Gene shoved him, and the
young man pulled a revolver and shot Gene
in the face, and he died before Father
Rafferty, of St. James’s, got to him. God
rest his soul. A lot of policemen heard the
shot and they all came running with their
pistols and clubs in their hands. Policeman
Laux—I’ll never forget his name or
any of the others that ran to help Gene—came
down the Bowery and ran out into
the middle of the square where Gene
lay.
“When the man that shot Gene saw the
policemen coming, he crouched down and
shot at Policeman Laux, but, thank God,
he missed him. Then policemen named
Harrington and Rouke and Moran and
Kehoe chased the man all around the
streets there, some heading him off when
he tried to run into that street that goes off
at an angle—East Broadway, is it?—a
big crowd had come out of Chinatown now
and was chasing the man, too, until Policemen
Rouke and Kehoe got him backed up
against a wall. When Policeman Kehoe
came up close, the man shot his pistol right
at Kehoe and the bullet grazed Kehoe’s
helmet.
“All the policemen jumped at the man
then, and one of them knocked the pistol
out of his hand with a blow of a club. They
beat him, this Billy Morley, so Jerry says
his name is, but they had to because he
fought so hard. They told me this evening
that it will go hard with the unfortunate
murderer, because Jerry says that when a
man named Frank O’Hare, who was arrested
this evening charged with stealing
cloth or something, was being taken into
headquarters, he told Detective Gegan
that he and a one-armed man who answered
to the description of Morley, the
young man who killed Gene, had a drink
last night in a saloon at Twenty-second
street and Avenue A and that when the
one-armed man was leaving the saloon he
turned and said, ‘Boys, I’m going out now
to bang a guy with buttons.’
“They haven’t brought me Gene’s
body yet. Coroner Shrady, so my Jerry
says, held Billy Morley, the murderer,
without letting him get out on bail, and I
suppose that in a case like this they have to
do a lot of things before they can let me
have the body here. If Gene only hadn’t
died before Father Rafferty got to him,
I’d be happier. He didn’t need to make
his confession, you know, but it would
have been better, wouldn’t it? He wasn’t
bad, and he went to mass on Sunday without
being told; and even in Lent, when we
always say the rosary out loud in the
dining-room
every night, Gene himself said
to me the day after Ash Wednesday,
‘If you want to say the rosary at noon,
mammy, before I go out, instead of at
night when I can’t be here, we’ll do it.’
“God will see that Gene’s happy tonight,
won’t he, after Gene said that?” the
mother asked as she walked out into the
hallway with her black-robed daughters
grouped behind her. “I know he will,”
she said, “and I’ll—” She stopped with
an arm resting on the banister to support
her. “I—I know I promised you, girls,”
said Gene’s mother, “that I’d try not to
cry any more, but I can’t help it.” And
she turned toward the wall and covered her
face with her apron.
MURDER
Kansas City Star
A boy of 19, carefree, enamored of the
life of the road, ran away from a good home
in Elm Grove, Kas., on a sunny day last
March.
Down in the wilds of Northern Arkansas,
riding in a freight car, one day in the middle
of March, a brakeman came upon him
and they fought—the brakeman angered
at the lad, the boy hot with the lust of
youth that welcomes a fray.
The boy, Charles Hyde, hit the brakeman
on the head with a bolt. The brakeman
went down, like a shot thing, and fell
from the car under the flying wheels, which
ground him to death.
Then the boy went on. Later he heard
a coroner’s jury had reached a verdict of
“accidental death.”
Then began the flight. It was flight—not
from the far-reaching arm of the law;
for the verdict of the backwoods jury had
placed no suspicion on any man. But it
was flight from a dread thing that haunted
him, making his nights of no comfort and
his days of dark despair.
Conscience, men call it, and Retribution.
But by whatever name, under whatever
guise, the dread thing caught the boy at
last, caught and enfolded him. And the lad
who had been carefree a few short months
ago, now a trembling, quaking, white-faced
wreck, stumbled into the Mulberry
Street police station, down in the West
Bottoms yesterday—and surrendered.
“I killed a man,” he said. “I killed a
man when I didn’t have any idea of
doing it. And he’s been after me. I’ve
got to give myself up; I’ve got to confess.
It’s the only way I can get rid of
it.”
They heard the boy out, those policemen
in the bottoms, not understanding,
sensing only dimly the fear that was on
him. Then they took him to police headquarters
and wired to the authorities in
Arkansas.
“Last night wasn’t so bad,” said Hyde
at police headquarters this morning. “It
wasn’t so bad, now that I have given myself
up. That’s made me feel better. But
all the other nights since it happened have
been hell. We’d be fighting in the car
again, with the wheels clicking away underneath
us, him hot and gettin’ the best
of me. Then I’d stumble against something
and pick it up and feel it in my hands, and
know he was mine.
“My God!” said Charles Hyde, helpless
toy of fate, entrapped in the coils of
a retributive nemesis. “My God!” And
he covered his gaunt boy’s face with shaking
hands.
Back and forth, up and down, across the
harvest lands of the Middle West, went
Hyde, riding in freight cars, clinging to the
rods of trans-continentals, always seeking
to escape from the thing that pursued him—and
always failing. In the hot fields,
laboring with his hands, staggering in the
heat of the day but pressing on, he found
no surcease. And then, despite his efforts,
hard work brought no sleep at night. And
he was alone with his fear.
“I know the law’s got me,” he cried.
“I know it can hang me or put me in
prison. But I had to do it. I had to give
myself up.
“And to think I never meant to kill him,
only to lay him out and make him let me
alone!”
Then Charles Hyde cried, not the tears
of blessed relief, but the scalding tears of
those who must stand helpless and non-understanding
before grim-countenanced
Fate.
A WAYWARD GIRL
Chicago Herald
They called her Mandy on the farm and
they made much of her.
She was the only daughter the Noyers
had and nothing was too good for her. So
“dad” said—and mother agreed.
Mandy didn’t realize how happy she was.
She was ambitious and wished to see the
city. She had an aunt in Chicago, Mrs. H.
Bole, of 1856 Dolphin street. Why couldn’t
she go to Chicago, study stenography and
live with auntie?
Her parents didn’t like to have her go,
but she insisted. So they kissed her and
sent her away.
She went to the Weston School at 175
North Wabash avenue for some time—and
then, last June, she had a quarrel with her
aunt and went to live at 1809 West Wilson
street.
She made the acquaintance of Thomas
Hazen of 4009 Jackson boulevard and
Mandy quit the school. Only she wasn’t
Mandy any more. Her name was Thelma
Beyers.
Hazen and the girl, who is only 16 years
old, were arrested by Detective Sergeant
George E. McCormick and Mandy wept
and told her story.
It had been a gay life, she said, fascinating
and swift.
But if mother and “dad” down in Siddon,
Ill., will forgive her she will go home
and stay there for good.
But Mandy is needed as a witness against
Hazen and five other young men for whom
warrants were obtained yesterday.
And she will have to appear against the
proprietors of the Congress Café, Charley
West’s, the Café De Luxe, the Delaware,
and eight or ten other cafés which sold her
gin fizzes, highballs and other drinks; and
against the owners and proprietors of eight
or ten hotels that admitted her—a girl just
out of short skirts—without asking questions.
Then there is a woman of a good family
on the West Side who will be charged with
contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
So it will be a long time before Mandy
can go home.
VIOLATION OF MANN ACT
Kansas City Star
Michael O’Rourke loved his wife and his
two little daughters and their little home.
That was in Airdale eight years ago.
Then one day Michael discovered something
that broke him up completely. His
little girls’ mother was not the kind of
woman he had believed her to be. It cost
Michael more than outsiders could realize,
but he got a divorce. The court gave him
the custody of his daughters, Rosie and
Maggie.
He brought them to Kansas City in an
effort to forget—and to get away from
their mother. He put them in St. Joseph’s
Orphan Home, Thirty-first and Jefferson
streets, and went to work there himself as
coachman.
But the mother did not stay in Airdale.
She followed her children here and tried
to take them away from the home. Several
times she tried it, but the watch kept on
the little girls was too close and she did
not succeed. At last, Michael, fearing that
sooner or later he would lose them, gave up
his job and took the girls away. Rosie, the
elder, did not want to go. Even in those
days she was attached to her mother.
Michael took Rosie and Maggie to Seattle,
where he put them in a convent.
Most of his earnings went to pay for keeping
them there. After a year or two he
joined the navy and intrusted to Uncle
Sam the payments for their education from
his wages as a sailor.
The long voyages kept him from seeing
them more than once or twice a year and
he fancied they were forgetting him. That,
and the difficulty of providing for them on
what he was earning, made him desperate.
He deserted the navy. He took his daughters
from the convent and made a home
for them.
One day when he was away at work a
veiled woman drove up to the cottage in a
motor car.
“Why, it’s mamma!” exclaimed Rosie,
and rushed to greet her.
When the woman drove away, the girls
and their belongings went with her.
Michael came home that night to an empty
house.
He found them in Airdale—in their
mother’s house, where the blinds were
drawn all day long. He started habeas
corpus proceedings and got back the
younger girl, then 15 years old. Rosie had
become 18 in the meantime and refused to
leave her mother.
Michael took Maggie to St. Louis and
put her in a convent there. Up to this time
the government officials had not troubled
him and he had almost forgotten that his
desertion was still hanging over him. But
someone told, and Michael was arrested.
He was convicted and taken to the naval
prison in New Hampshire.
A short time later a woman in a motor
car stole Maggie from the convent. This
time there was no one to follow them.
Yesterday in Airdale a house was raided
by government officers. Rosie and Maggie
were found there. Their mother, who is
known now as Mrs. Pearl Perkins, was
arrested. She was charged with transporting
Rosie from Seattle in violation of the
Mann Act. She will be arraigned before
the United States commissioner in Springfield
today.
Rosie has gone far on the path her
mother led her. Maggie was rescued from
the same life in the nick of time.
Michael, in his cell, can only wonder
what has become of them.
CAPTURE OF ESCAPED CONVICT
Chicago Inter Ocean
Every evening at 5:33 a fast train
whizzes through the mining town of Denville,
Ill., favoring the little, box-like station
with a derisive flirt of its tail car as
it takes a curve. Every evening at 5:30,
except when infrequent duties interfere, it
is the custom of the village constable of
Denville to saunter up to the “deepo”
and solemnly watch the flyer pass. Once,
they say, a pretty girl waved to him from a
Pullman window.
George Brown, station agent at Denville,
knows the constable’s time as well as that
of the train. When he thought it was getting
pretty near the hour for the appearance
of constable and flyer yesterday afternoon,
he looked at his watch. It was 5:20
o’clock.
The station agent was particularly anxious
to see the constable, for he had real
news to relate. A short time before, answering
a ring at the station telephone, he
had been informed by the deputy warden
at Joliet penitentiary that Matthew Starn,
a life convict, with two coldblooded murders
to his discredit, had escaped from the
prison and was believed to be headed in the
direction of Denville.
“He’s a cool hand and a mighty desperate
man,” warned the warden. “Don’t
take any chances with him if you see him.”
A few minutes later, while Brown was
straining his ears for the distant sound of
the flyer’s whistle and his eyes for a glimpse
of the constable, a man wearing an ill-fitting,
rough, all-enveloping garment of
blue and a blue cap of the same material,
walked into the station.
“When is the next train to St. Louis?”
he asked, his eyes boring into Brown’s.
The station agent had instantly recognized
the odd garb of the man before him
as the Joliet uniform. He fought to keep
his tone even and casual as he replied:
“Can’t get out tonight.”
Brown turned away, pretending to consult
a time card hung behind the wicket.
Really he was looking out the window,
hoping to see the familiar form of the constable.
“Well, ain’t you curious about me?” demanded
his visitor. “How do you think I
got here?”
“Beat a freight, I suppose,” Brown hastily
guessed. “That’s against the rules,
but I always have a lot of sympathy for
a man like you. What’s your trouble?”
“Broke!” said his visitor, tersely.
“I
ain’t had nothing but hard luck these last
five years.”
In the distance the whistle of the flyer
tooted. The man in blue eyed a stack of
bills in the open cash drawer.
“I don’t know whether to beat it or to—to
visit a while with you,” he murmured,
glancing at the station door, and then back
again at the cash drawer.
Brown consulted the time card again—and
looked out the window, inwardly
breathing a prayer. Sure enough, there
was the constable, trudging down the road
toward the station, a bit behind schedule
but not speeding to make up lost time.
“I guess you—you’d better—stay!”
said the agent.
Brown went through a few tense moments
after that remark, that he said
later he wouldn’t experience again “if
they made me president of the road.”
The constable took up his stand, not on
the station platform, as usual, but a couple
of hundred feet away. Stolidly he watched
the flyer pass, then looked undecidedly
toward the station. He seemed to be debating
whether or not to forego his routine
visit with the agent. Twice he turned his
back and started away, only to halt, wheel
and resume his meditation. A Niagara
of sweat coursed down Brown’s cheeks as
he waited. The man in blue was standing
close to the wicket, still peering into the
drawer. His right hand was in his hip
pocket.
Brown dared direct his gaze out the window
no longer. He stood silently watching
his blue-clad visitor, waiting to see what
would be in his hand when it came from
the bulging hip pocket.
Then the station door opened. In it
stood the constable. He took in the significance
of the blue figure as Brown’s
sinister visitor wheeled, and the Denville
police revolver, rusty with age, but loaded,
flashed from his pocket.
“Hands up!” remarked the constable.
Ten minutes later Matthew Starn, escaped
“lifer,” who had worsted the restraining
walls of Joliet, was held securely
a prisoner in the amateurish village calaboose.
Starn, who is 26, shot and killed two
Joliet business men, who had the misfortune
to resist him when he robbed their
stores. The “five years of hard luck” had
been spent in prison, where, despite his
criminal record, he became a “trusty”
through good conduct in the penitentiary.
At 7:30 o’clock yesterday morning he was
given a message to deliver outside the
prison walls. When he did not return within
an hour two posses of guards, deputies
and policemen started on his trail and
word was flashed through the surrounding
territory. Denville is about twenty miles
southeast of Joliet.
STORY OF ESCAPED CONVICT
Chicago News[B]
Lockup Keeper O’Malley brought him
out of the cell in the detective bureau and
he stood in the sun, blinking—a little man
with brown eyes and a sober, deadly sober
face.
“A fella wants to see you, George
O’Brien,” said Lockup Keeper O’Malley,
and left the little man, an escaped “lifer”
from Joliet, standing against the cell wall
and blinking. The sun that came through
the dirty basement window fell full on his
face and he stood staring into it, twisting
his felt hat in his hands.
“They’ll take me back in the morning,”
said the little man, as if he were talking to
himself, as if he were repeating something
he had sat up all night in his cell thinking
about. “And I won’t see her. I want to
explain to her. Good God.”
It was a prayer. The little man’s throat
trembled, the muscles of his face quivered
and his eyes glistened in the sun.
Four days ago the little man was married,
after three months of liberty. Fourteen
years lay behind him when he walked
away from the honor farm at Joliet. He
told the story himself, the whole story
without any omissions. But first he said
again:
“I don’t care so much about going back;
I’m used to the life down there. But they’ll
put me in solitary, with a ball and chain on
my feet, and I won’t be able to see her for
six months—if I don’t see her before they
take me back.”
Tears came now and rolled over the
drawn face of the little man and his voice
was so low that the listener had to bend
down to hear.
“She didn’t know about my being an
escaped lifer,” he went on. “I couldn’t
tell her. I was afraid. She was the first
woman who smiled at me after fourteen
years—when I got my job—and she was
like an angel to me.
“I want to see her and tell her—so’s to
let her know all about it. I’ll tell it to you,
and, if I don’t see her, print it in your
paper just as I say—so’s she can know.”
The little man seized his listener’s hand.
He couldn’t talk, but he clung to the
hand until his voice cleared, and then he
said: “So she’ll know I was trying to live
straight—so she’ll not think I was all
wrong.”
So here’s your husband’s story, Mrs.
O’Brien, the story he never told you because
you seemed like an angel to him and
he was afraid of losing you. They’ll tie
ball and chain on his feet and seat him in a
cell for six months and then they’ll take
the ball and chain off and let him live inside
the walls the rest of his life. Never
mind that. He said he didn’t care if he
could only get this story to you, so that
you wouldn’t think rotten of him, Mrs.
O’Brien.
“If I could only see her for a minute,”
he murmured, and then he went on as he
had promised.
“I was a kid,” he said, “about 17, and
I had a good home. But I fell in with a lot
of fellows who weren’t any good. And one
of them—Larsen—planned to hold up
somebody. He got me to get a gun for him
and we both went out. The gun was half
cocked and it went off in the holdup and
the man was killed. I was standing away
at the time. I was a kid. They sent us
both up for life. That was in 1901. And I
lived in the prison until July. D’ye understand?
Every day was the same, every
night was the same, and I lived in the
prison for fourteen years. D’ye understand?
And they made me an honor convict.”
The little man laughed.
“I saw fellas come for worse things than
I’d done—regular criminals—and get
out, pardoned. And they’d come back
again—and get out. And I lived in the
prison. Fourteen years. All the time I was
young. Every day was the same. And I
dreamed of gettin’ out. But they wouldn’t
pardon me. I never knew any politicians.
I was only a kid when they sent me up.
“And every night was the same. Good
God. I wanted to get out. I wanted to
live. I knew I was straight. There was
nothing wrong with me. I was only a kid
when it happened. And I learned in the
prison. It was fourteen years.”
The little man’s face was shaking and
his hands trembled as if they were on fine
springs.
“So one day I walked out. I was an
honor convict. I broke my pledge. But
I knew, I knew I could be straight. And I
wanted to live. Every day was the same
down there. Tell her that,” said the little
man. “You can write it better’n I can
talk it. But get it to her—I was only a
kid when they sent me up—and every
day was the same and I wanted to live.
Then I got out. I went to Lakeside and
boarded. My brother knew, but didn’t
tell. He gave me a chance. I got a job.
They didn’t ask me for references. It was
with the American Motor Machine Company.
The fella looked at me and hired
me. I worked. They raised my pay after
I’d been there a month. I was livin’
straight.
“And then I met Sarah Wilson. She
worked in the office. I used to dream of
women—of some one like her—and she
liked me, even though I am a little fella.
Aw say, she was an angel. If I could only
see her for a minute—to tell her.”
The little man was shaking all over.
“We got married four days ago,” he
went on, “and I had it all planned. Nobody
was goin’ to know about me bein’
a lifer. I was goin’ to forget it myself. Say,
I was happy.”
A rare smile came into the little man’s
face.
“Say, I had a home—a home.”
The smile changed and he laughed in a
peculiar way. He laughed until Lockup
Keeper O’Malley looked up and said: “Cut
it out!” And then he went on talking.
“I had it all planned—every bit. I
was a good worker, had a job in the stockroom.
I was going to live with her. Last
night she called me out of the kitchen.
I was fixing the sink. I came out all smiling.
I liked company and she said there
was someone to see me.
“I came out. God. I’ll never forget. I
came out in my slippers—say, they were
waitin’ at the door, six of them. And they
took me away. They didn’t let me talk
to her. They took me away and I won’t
see her again—if she don’t hurry up and
come. They’ll take me down this morning.
But I don’t care if you’ll print this
story—say, I don’t care. I’m used to it.
Only get it over to her—God—and I’ll
pray for you.”
“George O’Brien!” called a voice down
the stairway. “He’s here,” said Lockup
Keeper O’Malley. Two men, one of them
the parole agent, came walking down the
steps. “They’re takin’ me back,” whispered
the little man. The two men walked
over to him. One of them dangled a pair
of handcuffs.
SUICIDE OR ACCIDENT
New York Mail
With gas pouring from an open jet in a
bathroom adjoining his sleeping room,
Frederick H. Herman, the indicted ex-president
of the Universal Reserve Life Insurance
Company, was found dead in his
bed to-day at his home, 851 East Seventy-eighth
street.
He drew his last breath just as his family
entered the room.
Members of Mr. Herman’s family scouted
the theory of suicide, declaring that his
death was purely the result of an accident.
The police reported the case as a “supposed
suicide from gas poisoning.”
Coroner Acritelli, after making an examination
of Mr. Herman’s room, said
that death undoubtedly had been due to
accidental gas asphyxiation.
The coroner said that his physician,
Dr. Weston, would make an examination
of the body this afternoon, and that an
inquest would be held later this week.
Dr. Ralph Wilson, of 836 Madison avenue,
who was summoned immediately, declared
that the gas in the room was not
enough to have caused death alone, and
that Mr. Herman had died from a combination
of heart trouble and gas inhalation.
Mr. Herman, said Dr. Wilson, also had
been a sufferer from diabetes, and in his
weakened condition was not so able to resist
the influence of the gas as a man in
normal health.
The discovery was made by Mrs. Herman
at 5.30 a. m. She slept in a room alongside
that of her husband. On awaking she
smelled gas and went to Mr. Herman’s
room to investigate.
Adjoining the bedroom is a bathroom,
the door of which was open. The gas was
coming from that room.
Mrs. Herman hurriedly summoned the
butler, who went into the bathroom and
found that the valve of a pipe leading to a
small gas heater was open. This he shut off.
Dr. Wilson was telephoned for, but before
he arrived Mr. Herman was dead.
Two or three minutes after Mrs. Herman
entered her husband’s room his son, Frederick
R., went there in response to his
mother’s call. He found his father propped
up in his bed just breathing. At the elder
Herman’s side lay an opened magazine and
his eyeglasses.
Windows were thrown open and an attempt
made to revive Mr. Herman but it
was unsuccessful.
The gas was carried to the heater by
a pipe that led from the wall. There were
two valves on the pipe, one near the wall
and the other near the heater.
The family declares that the lower valve
had been turned off, but that the one at the
wall was on full and in some way the gas
had succeeded in escaping.
John L. O’Brien, the personal
counsel
for Frederick H. Herman, was notified of
his client’s death and arrived at the house
shortly after. Mr. O’Brien saw reporters
who called at the house, explaining that
members of the family did not care to be
interviewed.
Mr. O’Brien denied that Mr. Herman
committed suicide. He said that the circumstances
surrounding his death made
it appear that it had been accidental.
“Mr. Herman’s death was purely accidental;
of that I am convinced,” said Mr.
O’Brien. “He was not worried by the civil
litigation in which he was engaged with the
receivers of the Universal Reserve Life
Insurance Company, and he long ago became
satisfied that he would never be
brought to trial for the criminal indictment
that was hanging over his head in
connection with the alleged misuse of
money to influence legislation at Albany.
“If it had been Mr. Herman’s plan to
take his life by gas he would have gone about
it differently. The gas in his own room was
turned off, and it is reasonable to assume
that if he had had suicide in mind he would
have turned on the gas in his room.
“He was fully twenty feet away from
the gas heater in the bathroom and there
was a constant current of air flowing between
the two rooms.
“There was some trouble with the furnace,
and Mr. Herman, who likes his room
warm, had turned on the gas in the bathroom.
Air was coming from the open furnace
register.
“It is evident that Mr. Herman had been
reading, had gone into the bathroom and
turned off the valve near the heater, had
then returned to bed, read a while, and
finally turned out his own gas.
“He went to bed at 11.30, and must
have remained up reading through the
night.
“I had never seen Mr Herman more
optimistic than he was in the last few weeks.
He had been busily engaged with me in
preparing for litigation in connection with
the Universal Reserve Company affairs.
He had no financial troubles that I know
of. His family life was most peaceful and
happy.”
Mr. Herman’s bedroom was on the second
floor, directly over the parlor. Other
members of his family slept on the same
floor and the servants on the floor above.
Mr. Herman’s son, Frederick R., his
daughter-in-law, Ethel, and the latter’s
mother, Mrs. William Wilson of 961 Columbia
Avenue, Worcester, Mass., were in
the house. Mrs. Wilson had come to New
York to spend the holidays with her
daughter and son-in-law.
Dr. Wilson, on being questioned by reporters,
said:
“The case appeared to be purely accidental.
The gas was escaping from the
stove, and from all appearances, after Mr.
Herman had turned off the gas, he accidentally
turned it on again. Mr. Herman
had a weak heart, and the gas undoubtedly
affected him more quickly than it would a
person with a stronger heart.”
Dr. Wilson said that shortly before 6
a. m. he called up the coroner’s office to
report the death, and a clerk there told
him to notify the police. This was done,
according to the physician, and a policeman
from the East Sixty-seventh street
station arrived at the house.
An ambulance was also sent to the residence,
although, according to Dr. Wilson,
he had told the police that he was a physician
and that Mr. Herman had been dead
for some time.
Note.—The different points of view from
which the same facts may be told in news stories
are very well shown in the two following examples.
SUICIDE
(1)
New York World
Facing starvation, Victor Schwartz and
his wife, Louise, a respectable old Swiss
couple, committed suicide yesterday by inhaling
illuminating gas in their rooms back
of a small confectionery and stationery
store, which they carried on at No. 85
Arnold street, Williamsburg.
Each was sixty-seven years old. They
had made careful preparations for their
deaths. Every hole and crevice in their
sparsely furnished rooms had been plugged
with paper and rags, and in several places
tacks had been driven into the woodwork
to make sure that neither the rags nor paper
would become dislodged. It was this hammering
on Sunday night which caused
neighbors to wonder what the old couple
were doing, as they always retired before
10 o’clock.
When the Schwartzes rented the store
and two rooms back of it eight months ago
for $12 a month, they told neighbors that
three years before their only child, a
daughter of thirty-one years, had died.
They said they had never recovered from
the shock.
Business during the summer had been
very poor, and of late Schwartz and his wife
had a hard struggle to get along. The
woman frequently told neighbors that she
believed their misfortune would soon end.
On Sunday evening Schwartz and his wife
distributed much of their stock in the store
to the children in the neighborhood. It is
evident that they had decided on suicide.
Mrs. Rose Black, who has a grocery adjoining
the Schwartz store, and Mrs. Kate
Weck, a second floor tenant, heard the
couple hammering in their rooms up to
midnight Sunday, and yesterday at daybreak
the two women were the first to detect
the odor of illuminating gas from the
Schwartz apartments. Policeman McCaffrey,
of the Hamburg avenue station, was
called in and, forcing an entrance, found
Schwartz sitting dead in a chair in the
kitchen, fully dressed. He had one end of a
rubber tube in his mouth, the other end of
which was fixed to an open gas burner. The
woman lay dead on her bed in a night dress
with a rubber tube in her mouth, fastened
to another open gas burner. Ambulance
Surgeon Sibbel, who came from the German
Hospital, said the couple had been
dead several hours. On a small card was a
request that Edward Black be telephoned
for at “421 Thirty-eighth street.” A dime
lay on the card to pay for the telephone message.
In the room was found 67 cents. The
bodies were removed to the Brooklyn
Morgue.
(2)
New York Times
“Auntie Schwartz” was the way in
which Mrs. Louise Schwartz soon came to
be known to the children of the neighborhood
when she and her husband, Victor,
each of them 67 years old, opened a small
candy and stationery store at 85 Arnold
Street, Williamsburg, about eight months
ago.
Her small customers just kept the business
going in the little shop, but it was a
penny business, and when the rent of the
store was raised recently from $12 to $15
a month, “Auntie” Schwartz almost despaired
of continuing to make a living. Her
face grew sad and careworn, and one day,
when one of her little customers was grieving
over the loss of a pet doll which a dog
had chewed up, “Auntie” Schwartz did
not console her with a cheerful word and a
chocolate drop or two, as she was wont to
do. Instead she took her on her lap and
told of the little girl she had lost three years
ago. She did not explain that her “little
girl” had been 31 years old, and that she
had helped greatly in making a living for
the old folks, who were now staggering under
the burden of age, increased rent, and
a precarious trade. The old people seemed
always oppressed by the sadness of the loss
of their only child.
Day by day recently the children noticed
that “Auntie” Schwartz was less cheerful
that usual. Their elders seldom visited
the little store, and so none who might
have helped knew that old Victor Schwartz
and his wife were almost starving to death,
or that the old couple were slowly making
up their minds to end their troubles together.
So it was that the children were the
first to discover yesterday that the little
store was not open for business when they
passed it on their way to their first day at
school, and “Auntie” Schwartz lost many
pennies which her small customers had
intended to expend for lead pencils and
erasers. “Auntie” Schwartz had called
them all in on Sunday evening and had distributed
among them all her small stock
of
candy, telling them that she would have a
full new stock for the beginning of school.
Meantime, Mrs. Kate Weck and Mrs.
Rose Black, who live above the store, were
puzzled by the odor of gas which permeated
their apartments. At last the women
traced it to the store, which they found
closed and locked. The gas came from the
two living rooms which the Schwartzes occupied
behind their store, and Mrs. Weck
and Mrs. Black finally got Policeman McCaffrey
of the Hamburg Avenue Station to
smash down the door.
The policeman and the women found the
old man seated in a chair in the kitchen, a
gas tube clutched between his teeth, the
other end of which was made fast to a gas
jet. He was dead. In the little bedroom
they found also the body of Mrs. Schwartz
dead like her husband from the gas which
she had inhaled. Like him, too, she had
tied the tube around her head, so that it
should not slip from her mouth.
A search of the rooms showed that the
old couple had been in the most abject
poverty. Only 67 cents was found in the
flat.
SUICIDE
Milwaukee Sentinel
CHICAGO, Ill., March 3.—Emma Johnson
died on Monday. She was the grave
faced little seamstress from La Crosse,
Wis., who used to sit every day near a
dingy window at 42 Wilson avenue, plying
her needle in silence, wearing an expression
like that of a nun. And every one
said she “looked so peaceful.”
But the coroner’s jury found that the
little woman, in whom no one would have
suspected deep emotion, had been tempestuously
in love, that she had not been
able to win the man she wanted, and that
she had sat there at her seams, “praying
for strength to wait for a natural death.”
She did not want to kill herself. But she
did.
She went to the home of Mrs. Jennie
Nelson, 4212 North avenue. Mrs. Nelson’s
brother, William Larson, is the man she
wanted to marry. He “was fond of her,
too,” as Mrs. Nelson said, “but his health
was poor and he did not want to marry for
the present.”
Emma Johnson turned on the gas and
died. She left a letter, in which she said:
“Dearest Friends—When you have
read this I have crossed the bar. Ambition,
energy and strength have deserted me and
every hope and dream is shattered. Death
is the only relief. I have called upon
heaven to save me from myself—to send
me a natural death. I don’t want to die
like this. I want to live and be happy, but
that is not to be.
“I’ve had my hell here, but it is hard
to go like this, hard to bring this sorrow
upon my folks, bitterly hard.
“For the one who has driven me to do
this I feel only love, and if I am permitted
to enter heaven I shall wait for him.
“Perhaps he will love me then; he will
feel bad about this, but help him understand
that I forgive all, and I hope some
one else will be to him what I never could,
a joy and a comfort, and that she may
make him happy as I had hoped to do.
I wish I could look upon the faces of my
dear father and brothers and sisters again.
I can’t still the voice in my heart. I
haven’t the strength. Forgive me and
pray for me. Only another lost soul.”
SUICIDE OF SCHOOL GIRL
Chicago Tribune
Rose Lubin’s younger brother, Max,
wanted help with his “home work” last
night. Rose, who is 16, is proud of her
standing at the head of the eighth grade
in the Winfield school.
“I can’t do my own work and yours,
too,” she told Max. “I’ve got enough to
keep me busy till bed time and I’m not
going to lose my marks on your account.”
Max went to his father and the father
went to Rose.
“If you don’t help your brother I’ll take
you out of school,” said Lubin.
Whereupon Rose changed her mind
about the manner in which the nickel
she
had earned in the afternoon was to be
spent. She bought acid with it, returned
to her home at 951 West Fifteenth street,
and drank the poison.
Rose will not be at school today. Perhaps
she will never go back. She is in the
county hospital. Physicians there fear
she will not recover.
CAUSE OF ATTEMPTED SUICIDE
New York Evening Post
Mary Stober, eighteen years old, of 951
East 135th Street, who tried to kill herself
last week (Friday) because she has no piano,
is home again from the Lincoln Hospital,
and is starting in to live again in a world
where no hope is, since she cannot have a
piano.
To dream every night that you have
a piano and “play just grand,” and then
wake up to hear the alarm clock buzzing
six o’clock; to forget where you are, and
half close your eyes and pretend that the
movements your fingers are making are
on a piano, instead of having something
to do with the bobbin of a machine in
an embroidery factory; to hear beautiful
music suddenly in the midst of your work,
and listen, startled and ecstatic, for a moment
until it is lost in the endless whirring
of the machines—these things, if you have
never done them, may seem a certainty
that Life is, after all, very splendid while
there is such a thing as imagination, and
that the gray of it is woven full of unexpected
and vivid threads of color.
Or it may impress you as deliciously
funny that the lack of a piano can seem
tragic, if you have a big enough view of
tragic things to see that some of them are
greater. But to this girl, who does them
every day and night of her life, they are
simply the things which have twice made
her try to kill herself, the reason why she is
“disgusted, always disgusted,” as she says,
very simply.
Mary Stober has a pale, strong face,
with a stubborn chin and a wistful smile,
very gray eyes, light brown hair in a bang
on her forehead, and very red lips. She
looks very young and very determined and
very wistful and somewhat sullen. Her
hands are red and rough and square-fingered
from hard work.
She was dusting one of the rooms this
morning in the soggy apartment house of
which her mother is janitress, and where
they and the six other children live and
pay half-rent. She goes back to the factory
on Monday. She sat down in one of the
innumerous chairs to tell her story, fingering
the grimy dust-cloth with her red fingers,
which are never quiet for a minute.
Her mother stood up through the recital—the
little German mother who speaks English
only brokenly, who wears a little shawl
over her head while she sweeps down the
long flights of stairs and who used to play
the piano herself when she was a girl in
Germany—and looked at Mary with a
worried, gentle, almost heartbroken look.
“When I was ten—that was when I
stopped school and went to work—I
thought always about when I would be
eighteen and a grand piano player,” Mary
began, fingering the dust-cloth. “Then I
was eighteen and I didn’t have a piano yet,
and I was almost crazy. Eight years I
have worked, and I haven’t got anything
yet. And what’s worrying me now is where
we’re going to go. We can’t stay here.
Other places we’ve been we’ve had coal
and things, and our money could all go for
the food and clothes. But now we’ve got
to pay for a stove and coal.”
She and her sister, who is nineteen and
who can play the piano by ear when she
can find one to play—Mary herself can
only play with one hand by ear, and “people
don’t like to hear that kind o’ playing,”
she says—and the oldest brother, are the
only ones who make money. Mary makes
seven dollars a week. All of these details,
which she tells simply, go to show that
there is little hope for a piano. The little,
crumpled mother from behind the chair
she is leaning on says, in her broken way,
that a piano is not so easy to get, and looks
hopelessly at her daughter.
“Then we got phonograph, but she only
cry every time he play,” the mother
said.
“I can’t bear to hear it,” interrupted
Mary. “I’d rather play myself.”
And so finally the brother took the
phonograph away, about a month ago,
since it only made the girl more miserable
than ever.
“And in every house I go to,” she said,
“there is a piano. And one girl comes to
the factory, saying she can play grand,
and her father wants her to play in a cabaret.
She’s only sixteen, too. I can’t be
happy,” she finished simply. “I can’t be
happy. And it gets my goat when anybody
laughs. And every single night I dream
I’ve got a piano and play so nice, and
every day at work I imagine I am playing.
All I want to do is to play a piano. I don’t
want clothes. If I have good clothes the
girls would want me to go out with them,
and I don’t want to go out. It is only
trouble comes of it. All I want to do is to
stay home and play the piano.”
All the family like music, it seems, “but
none of them but me would die for it,” she
says. “And my father hated it. He wanted
me only to work, day and night to work,
since I was ten. But he’s gone away now.
They took him away—Randall’s Island.”
It was when the father was home, though,
and earning a little now and then, that the
phonograph, which proved a doubtful blessing,
was made possible.
Mary Stober says, and her chin looks
very square, that she knows she could pay
for lessons—she would walk to the factory
instead of riding and go without lunch—if
she only had a piano to practice on at home.
It was a mixture of lysol and iodine that
she took last week—the only things she
could find. “I don’t care what I take,” she
says, “if I can’t get what I want. Eight
years I’ve worked and I haven’t gotten
anything yet.” It was last August that
she tried before to kill herself.
