Cassie Chadwick

Cassie Chadwick (1904)

Cassie Chadwick (born October 10, 1857 in Eastwood, Ontario , Canada , † October 10, 1907 in Columbus, Ohio ) is the best-known name of a Canadian-born impostor who defrauded banks in the Cleveland, Ohio area by she claimed to be an illegitimate daughter of millionaire Andrew Carnegie .

Early years

Born under the name Elizabeth Bigley , she was a daydreamer as a child and often told lies. Elizabeth committed the first documented bank fraud at the age of 14 when she successfully tried to open a bank account with a forged letter from an alleged uncle in England and paid for goods with bad checks. She moved to Cleveland near her sister at the age of 20 and worked as a fortune teller under the name Lydia DeVere . At the age of 22, she was arrested in Woodstock, Ontario for counterfeiting , but was released for insanity . In 1882 she married Wallace Springsteen in Cleveland, Ohio. Her husband threw her out of the house eleven days later when he learned of her past, which he only became aware of when the wedding photo was published. Numerous creditors contacted Springsteen who recognized his wife in the wedding photo.

Elizabeth changed her name to Marie LaRose and became a fortune teller again. In 1886 she married the farmer John R. Scott and lived on the farm for four years as his wife Lydia Scott . Tired of her husband, she filed for divorce on trumped-up grounds and got paid off accordingly. After the divorce, she returned to work as a fortune teller, reverted to counterfeiting and was sentenced to 9½ years in prison in Toledo, Ohio . Four years later she became the parole released and returned to Cleveland. Here she took the name Cassie Hoover and opened a brothel in the west of the city. There she met her future husband Dr. Know Leroy Chadwick.

Cassie knew that Dr. Chadwick was newly widowed and well-off. She played the role of "Mrs. Cassie Hoover", a noble widow who ran a private boarding house for women. When Dr. Chadwick told her that the establishment was a well-known brothel, "Mrs. Hoover" passed out. After she came to, she claimed that she would never run such a business and asked the doctor to take her out of this house immediately so that no one would assume she had anything to do with the business. In 1897 she married Dr. Chadwick, knowing nothing of her past except what his lovely new wife was telling him. It is not known whether he knew about her son Emil Hoover, whom she left in the care of one of the brothel ladies.

As Cassie Chadwick

In her time as the wife of the widely respected Dr. Chadwick outperformed Cassie's spending than her well-heeled neighbors on Cleveland's Euclid Avenue , a street widely known at the time as "Millionaire's Row." Instead of welcoming her to the exclusive enclave of the Rockefellers , the Hannas , the Hays and the Mathers, Cassie Chadwick was viewed more as a strange woman who tried in vain to buy the goodwill of some of America's wealthiest families. If she was invited to any occasion, it was out of consideration for Dr. Chadwick, whom the local residents liked.

Cassie Chadwick disguised her and her son's identities in different ways. In the US Census of 1900 (District 97, Cleveland, Cuyahoga County Ohio) she gave herself as Cassie Chadwick, born on 3. February 1862 in Pennsylvania from. Her son Emil Hoover was counted as Emil Chadwick, born in September 1886 in Canada ( England ). However, in court in Toledo, Ohio, she pretended to be single and childless when she was charged with counterfeiting and sentenced to prison. After the Carnegie scam, Emil was referred to in the press as her son or stepson.

The Carnegie scam

After she met Dr. Having married Leroy Chadwick, Cassie began her biggest cheat by posing as Andrew Carnegie's daughter. While visiting New York City , she asked an acquaintance of her husband, a lawyer named Dillon, to accompany her to Andrew Carnegie's house. She only went to his housekeeper there on the pretext of wanting to produce a testimony. When she came out again, she dropped a piece of paper. Dillon picked it up and saw that it is an exchange traded more than two million dollars, provided with Carnegie's signature. She asked Dillon to maintain secrecy and then "revealed" to him that she was Carnegie's illegitimate daughter. Carnegie was supposedly so consumed by guilt that he showered her with huge sums of money. She further claimed that she had $ 7 million bills in her Cleveland home and that after Carnegie's death she would inherit $ 400 million. Dillon found a locker for her documents.

The news leaked to the financial markets of northern Ohio and banks began offering their services. For the next eight years, she used her fabricated family relationships to obtain large loans in exchange for promissory notes that eventually ran to $ 10 million to $ 20 million. She rightly assumed that no one would dare ask Carnegie about an illegitimate daughter for fear of embarrassing him. In addition, the loans were made at exorbitant interest rates - so high that the bankers did not discuss them. Cassie faked additional collateral on Carnegie's behalf, and the bankers assumed that Carnegie would be responsible for all debts and that it would all be repaid after Carnegie's death - and that they would make a nice profit on the interest.

Cassie began to lead a lavish life on the money. She bought diamond collars, enough clothes to fill thirty closets, and a gold organ. She became known as the "Queen of Ohio".

In November 1904 , she received a $ 190,000 loan from HB Newton, a Boston banker. Newton was shocked to learn of the other loans Cassie had received and asked for his money back. Cassie couldn't pay and the bank went to court. At the time, she was about five million dollars in debt. Now it was also revealed that some of the collateral received by other banks was worthless. When asked about her, Carnegie denied ever seeing her and also stated that he had not signed a bill in more than 30 years. Chadwick fled to New York, but was soon arrested at her apartment in the Breslin Hotel and taken back to Cleveland. When she was arrested, she was wearing a money belt containing more than $ 100,000. When the scandal broke out, Leroy Chadwick and his adult daughter left the city in a hurry to go on a trip to Europe. Before leaving, Chadwick filed for divorce .

The news caused a shock in the Cleveland banking world. A bank that Citizen's National Bank of Oberlin who had lent her $ 800,000, experienced a massive onslaught of customers and was forced into bankruptcy.

The process

Carnegie attended the trial because he wanted to see the woman who had successfully tricked banks by pretending to be his heir. Members of the Millionaires' Row families she had tried so hard to recognize were also there. The process was a media circus. On March 10, 1905 , Cassie Chadwick was sentenced to 14 years in prison and a $ 70,000 fine for conspiracy to destroy Citizen's National Bank and for conspiracy against the government because Citizen's Bank was considered a federally owned bank. On January 1, 1906 , she was admitted to the Ohio State Prison in Columbus .

For a while, the Chadwick House on Euclid Avenue and 82nd Street became a tourist attraction. In the early 1920s , the building was demolished to make way for the Euclid Avenue Temple (now the Liberty Hill Baptist Church ).

After the Carnegie fraud

When Cassie arrived at jail, she brought suitcases full of items for her cell, including animal skin rugs and clothes that she was allowed to keep and wear. As her health deteriorated, she began to write detailed instructions for her funeral. She even directed her son to send some of her secret assets to Canada to buy a tombstone for the family grave. Cassie Chadwick died in prison on her 50th birthday. She was buried at her birthplace in Eastwood, Ontario, Canada.

literature

• Christoph Nettersheim: Terribly nice women , Bucher, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-7658-1883-7 , pp. 24-30

Web link

• Women in History