March 14, 2018 • 29 mins
Cassie Chadwick (born Elizabeth Bigley) committed fraud at a level that would be almost impossible to pull off in today’s world of instant communication. Her biggest con was convincing banks that she was the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Today's episode
is a rather epic tail a really brazen behavior. Uh.
(00:22):
It features fraud at a level that would be almost
impossible to pull off in today's world of instant communication.
And this is the story of Cassie Chadwick. But that
was not her real name, And in fact, naming convention
is tricky here because she switched up her identity so often,
so normally we're gonna go by the name she was
using at the time we were speaking about because she
(00:44):
changes over to a lot of aliases along the way.
This is actually along the lines of a question a
listener asked us recently where they were like when in
the days before we had the today's completely connected world,
and like photographs of people that could just be sent
around instantly, were people able to just walk out of
(01:06):
town and assume a new new identity. And that answer
was basically yes, yes, huh. And we'll see like the
one one of the times that really tripped her up,
which didn't involve photographs, Yeah, uh, And another time, was
just that she was so bold to the point of
just ridiculousness. People started catching onto what was so. Cassie's
(01:33):
birth name was Elizabeth Bigley. She was born on October tenth,
eighteen fifty seven, and Eastwood, Ontario, in Canada. The Eastwood
area is now part of a larger collective of towns
and communities that's known as Norwich. Her father worked for
the Grand Trunk Railway, which connected Toronto to Montreal in
the eighteen fifties, and he was a section boss. Okay,
(01:54):
I'm gonna step outside of the history talk for one
second to like have this moment where like is that
Grandfunk Railroad got their name? Which is just my child
of the seventies question, because I had not heard of
it before. Elizabeth was one of five children. She had
a brother and three sisters. Elizabeth went by Betsy as
(02:14):
a young child, and she allegedly had a fairly flexible
relationship with the truth From quite a young age. She
was known as something of a fiber, and she began
telling lies to get cash when she was just a
young teenager. Her sister Alice, later in life, claimed that
she had seen Betsy practicing other family members signatures over
(02:35):
and over on various occasions, although part of me was like,
who hasn't done that? I used to practice my parents
signatures just because I thought that was how you learned
to make a signature. I was terrible at it. The
one time in my entire life that I tried to
fords a note from my mother excusing me from school,
(02:55):
it no, it was I was immediately like, this will
never work. See, I don't think I ever tried it.
I just wanted to try copying the way people wrote like.
It was just oh, I didn't take the letter to school.
It was clear to me no one was buying that.
But I mean I never even was like I'm gonna
use this and try to do a letter that. I
(03:16):
just never planned to use them that way. So her
first known fraudulent bank account was open when she was fourteen,
and she did this in the town of Woodstock, Ontario.
This is about fifteen miles or north of her home.
She walked into a bank with a small amount of
money and a letter that claimed she was inheriting money
(03:36):
from her uncle in England, and then she opened up
an account, and then she proceeded to write a whole
lot of bad checks. It did not take long for
the establishments where Elizabeth had done business to realize that
her checks were no good, so the fourteen year old
fraudster was arrested for forgery, but because of her young age,
she was released without too much in the way of punishment.
(03:56):
It was kind of a warning, and don't do this again.
At the age of twenty two, she once again assumed
with the role of fake heiress, and this time to
support her claim, she paid to have expensive letter head
printed for the fake letter of notification of her inheritance
to make it look like it came from an actual
attorney's office. She also had calling cards printed up that
(04:19):
identified her as an heiress, and the same as before,
she opened up a checking account based on this false information,
then wrote a lot of bad checks at various merchants,
and this time, instead of just buying things, she also
got cash by writing checks over the amount of the
purchase price of the thing that she was buying and
then having the shopkeepers give her the difference. I think
(04:40):
that's like a scam that continues to be practiced today
by various people, and I'm sure she didn't invent it either. Eventually,
Elizabeth Bigley's older sister, Alice, got married to a man
from Cleveland, Ohio, and Alice moved there, so Elizabeth slashed
Betsy also decided that she would move to Cleveland and
live with them, and once she was the United States,
(05:00):
that's when her career in fraud really began. First, she
used her sister's furniture as collateral for a bank loan.
Like she basically wrote up what each of the pieces
were and what they were worth, and she used that
she didn't actually physically carry the furniture with her to
the bank, but she basically handed over this note that
said you you have ownership of this against this loan.
(05:22):
And when Alice's husband realized what Elizabeth had done, he
kicked her out. This is also when she started using
alias is. The first identity that Elizabeth assumed in Cleveland
was Madam Lydia de Vere. Under the pseudonym, she claimed
to be psychic and started a business telling fortunes. Elizabeth
as Lydia married a man named Dr. Wallace Springsteen in
(05:45):
eight two, and at that time she started going by
the name Lydia Springsteen. But this marriage immediately brought problems
due to a very foolish miscalculation on Elizabeth's part. So
when the nuptials were announced in the newspaper for the
Plain Dealer, complete with a photo of the happy couple,
people that Lydia had fleece saw the notice and immediately
(06:07):
went after the Springsteen's trying to get their money back.
It appears that Dr. Springsteen had been completely unaware of
his new bride's shady dealings, and so the marriage ended
abruptly after twelve days, with Elizabeth a k A. Lydia
kicked out of the house. The divorce was finalized early
the following year, and a new identity was soon born.
(06:30):
This time she was still posing as a psychic, but
she took the name Madame Marie La Rose. Madame Lauroux
soon found herself another husband in John R. Scott, who
was a farmer, and that marriage actually lasted four years.
The pair were already divorced when Elizabeth gave birth to
a child in six It is not known who the
father of the child was. It was a boy named Emil.
(06:53):
After Emil was born, Elizabeth took on yet another identity,
and this was Lydia Scott. She once a end claimed
to be able to tell fortunes, and Emil was sent
to live with relatives. In eighty nine, while living in Toledo,
Elizabeth slash Lydia forged a promissory note for several thousand dollars,
(07:13):
signing the name of Richard Brown of Youngstown, Ohio. She
used a connection that she had made as a clairvoyant
to help her cash the note, and after this was
successful the first time around, she did the same thing
several more times. She and her accomplice were caught, but
the man named Joseph Lamb was acquitted as it appeared
that he actually didn't know that he was participating in fraud.
(07:35):
He thought he was cashing legitimate notes. Elizabeth slash Lydia
was convicted and she served time, but she got out
of her sentence early on parole. She first started using
the name Cassie as soon as she got a prison
and that's the name that she's most commonly known as
in the historical record. She used the last name Hoover
when she got out of prison and moved back to Cleveland.
(07:57):
This time, instead of hanging a shingle as a psychic
at clairvoyant, she opened up a brothel, but when she
met a doctor named Leroy Chadwick, who was a widower.
She gave him a very sanitized version of her story.
She was still going by Cassie Hoover, but she told
him that the home that she ran was a boarding
house and not a brothel, and then she feigned shocked
(08:17):
when he assured her that everyone knew it was a brothel,
and she begged him to help her get away from it.
She definitely did get away from it, and we'll talk
about her transition to a life of wealth after we paused.
Very quick word from a sponsor. Right before the break,
(08:38):
we mentioned that Cassie had met a doctor named Leroy Chadwick,
and Cassie and Leroy married in and this marriage opened
up a whole new world to the grifter. Cassie, her
husband had society connections. His house was on Euclid Avenue
in a very wealthy neighborhood. Also, I see it referred
to as Millionaires Row. And the marriage had been really
(08:59):
pretty so most of Dr Chadwick's friends first met Cassie
as LeRoy's wife. Leroy and Cassie traveled to New York
together in the spring of nineteen o two. This trip
ended up being really momentous, but not in a good way.
While visiting the city, she decided to pay a visit
to Andrew Carnegie, a lawyer that she knew through Leroy.
(09:22):
He was named James Dillon went with her. Dylan, it appears,
was not privy to the scam that she was hatching.
He waited outside the mansion at one and fifth in
a carriage. Cassie entered, spoke with the housekeeper under the
guise of asking for a reference for a main she
was considering hiring, and then returned to Mr Dillon in
(09:42):
the waiting carriage. Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish born steel
tycoon who had moved to the United States as a
teenager and made his own fortune. His name is popped
up on the show many times over the years, and
you've probably seen it or heard it in relation to
grant funding. And that's because he eventually focused on using
his wealth for philanthropy, and the foundation that he established
(10:05):
continues and supports all kinds of causes. So yes, at
some point he will be his own episode of the show. Yeah,
I'm pretty fascinated by his story. But at the time
that Cassie went to the Carnegie home, Andrew Carnegie was
widely recognized as one of the wealthiest men in the world,
and when Cassie returned from this social call, during which
(10:25):
she had not ever met Andrew Carnegie, she had a
two million dollar promissory note allegedly issued by the man.
Cassie used this document to fraudulently acquire a lot of money.
Cassie visited multiple banks in the Eastern United States, and
using this promissory note as proof of her worth, was
able to get financial advances against it. Of course, the
(10:47):
question of why such a powerful and wealthy man would
offer a random woman so much money did come up,
but Cassie Chadwick had an answer ready for that situation.
She told those who inquired that she was actually the
illegitimate daughter of Mr. Carnegie. And this was actually sort
of a brilliant lie because she knew that no banker
(11:10):
was going to be willing to go to Andrew Carnegie
and ask this wealthy and important man for verification of
what was considered a really tawdry fact at the time.
They would never ask such a man if he had
an illegitimate child, simply out of politeness. Additionally, thinking Cassie
was a wealthy and important new client. Many of the
banks she conned also wanted to keep her secret for
(11:33):
her and the whole time, Andrew Carnegie had no idea
how much money was trading hands, just through the mention
of his name and a falsified document. The lawyer who
had gone with her, that was James Dillon uh had
been basically a clueless corroborator. Cassie counted on his surprise
(11:54):
and awe at this reveal, which she made when he
questioned her after the visit to the Carnegie mansion that
Andrew Carnegie was her father. She told him it was
a secret that he must tell no one, but she
counted on him being unable to keep that kind of
information to himself. She wanted to feed the rumor mill
and build up her story. Yeah, completely horrendous behavior, but
(12:17):
part of me has to respect her thought process here
where she's like, I know, I'm gonna build this fiction
out so that it seems really galvanized if anybody tries
to question me. So here's how the actual con worked.
Chadwick walked into the Wade Park Bank of Cleveland, and
she presented a box of forged notes allegedly signed by
Andrew Carnegie and promising her various sums of money, including
(12:40):
that one from that visit to his home, and she
handed them to a cashier named Ira Reynolds. The cashier
took the papers, issued a receipt for them, describing all
of the information contained therein and also the fact that
Andrew Carnegie's signature was on them. Now, that right up
from Reynolds meant that Chadwick then had an official bank
document that validated her fraudulent claim. So she was able
(13:03):
to use that document, which was a legitimate document, though
it it legitimized fake things uh to go to other
banks with proof that she was worth millions in order
to get them to lend her large sums of money,
and in some cases she would use borrowed money from
one bank to make payments to another, kind of circulating
(13:24):
some of this money around and keeping the whole charade
going Domino style. One of the primary forged documents in
this whole scheme reads this way, quote no, all men,
by these presents that I Andrew Carnegie of New York City,
do hereby acknowledge that I hold in trust for Mrs
Cassie L. Chadwick, wife of Dr Leroy S. Chadwick of
(13:46):
eighteen twenty four Euclid Avenue, City of Cleveland, County of Cuyahoga,
and State of Ohio, properly assigned and delivered to me
for said Cassie L. Chadwick by her uncle Frederick R.
Mason and his lifetime now to cease, which property is
of the appraised value of ten million, two hundred and
forty six thousand dollars, then lists various bonds and railway
(14:09):
interests that make up this sum. It goes on to say,
quote the income from the above described property I agree
to pay over to said Cassie L. Chadwick semi annually
between the first and fifteenth days of June and December
of each year during the life of this trust, without
any deduction or charges for services or expense of any kind.
(14:29):
And then the document goes on to state that should
Andrew Carnegie die, Cassie will receive all of the assets
that it named. This was, of course, not the only
document she forged. It was one of many forged documents
that she used to claim a personal fortune that simply
did not exist. It wasn't until a banker in Brookline,
Massachusetts checked around and made inquiries that her scam was
(14:52):
finally uncovered. He had been suspicious, but his investigation revealed
that she had accumulated millions dollars of debt off of
posing as the unacknowledged child of Andrew Carnegie. The Massachusetts
banker named Herbert Newton sued Cassie Chadwick, and this started
an avalanche of creditors coming forward and catalyzed a federal investigation.
(15:16):
Cassie was arrested in New York City, which had become
a second home to her, shortly after the scandal broke,
and at the time she was wearing a money belt
containing one hundred thousand dollars cash. The primary crime that
was cited in the charges involved the Citizens National Bank
of Oberlin, Ohio. This institution had loaned Cassie eight hundred
(15:38):
thousand dollars and consequently had to declare bankruptcy. The conspiracy
charge also involved two men who worked at the bank
in Oberlin. Bank president Charles Beckwith and cashier A. B.
Spear were also accused. Beckwith and Spear had endorsed fraudulent
notes presented by Chadwick bearing the forged signature of Andrew
(15:59):
Carnegie on December tenth, The New York Times ran back
with story he had confessed to federal authorities that yes,
he had conducted transactions with Chadwick, but that he had
done so based on documents that she provided. She had
indicated that citizens National Bank of Oberlin would be made
the trustee of her five million dollar estate and that
(16:21):
all the related documents would be given to the bank
on July one, three. So that was that was what
Beckwith said that she had told to him. Correct. And
where this whole thing gets a little bit uh dicey
is the fact that Chadwick promised both Charles Beckwith and
the cashier ab Spear each ten thousand dollars a year
(16:45):
for handling her financial affairs as beneficiaries of this scheme.
This is where they legally became co conspirators. An article
that ran in the New York Times on December sixte
n four described a meeting between the Oberlin President, Mr. Beckwith,
and Cassie in the latter's jail cell. And it did
not go as you might expect. It read when a
(17:08):
man whose bank and whose private fortune have been wrecked
stood face to face with the woman who is charged
with having been responsible for the wrecking. The two look
steadily at each other for a moment, then they shook hands.
You got us into an awful fix, said the aged banker.
It looks as if it were time for you to
tell all you know. Cassie did not offer up any
(17:31):
information in response to this, and in according to this account,
back With continued, You've ruined me, but I'm not so
sure yet you were a fraud. I've stood by you
to my last dollar, and I do think now is
the time for you to make known all. I always
told you I didn't like the idea of your changing
attorneys so often, get a good one and keep him.
(17:51):
I wanted to include this exchange because it speaks to
just how good Cassie was gaining the confidence of the
people she frauded, even after this man had become a
pariah to his peers, both in the banking community in
the community at large, because his bank had really damaged
a lot of people who had their money there. Uh,
(18:15):
and it was all because of his involvement with Cassie Chadwick,
But he still wanted to give her the benefit of
the doubt. We'll talk some more about how Beckwith was
drawn into the scheme and then strung along. But first
we are going to have another little sponsor break. In
(18:36):
a write up from the Philadelphia North American, written while
Cassie's case was still playing out, so this was a
contemporary account, the paper printed this quote, This extraordinary performance
was accomplished by a woman fifty years old, with neither
physical beauty nor personal charm, by one whose taste in
dress totally lacking in discernment, who is rather deaf and
(18:58):
harsh voice, and who, when it all excited, speaks without
regard to grammar. So she was so charmless, how was
she able to convince these shrewd bankers to hand over
so much money. There were a lot of theories that
she used hypnotism or a similar device to control the
actions of the men that she did business with, But
it really does seem to have come down about her
(19:19):
being really smart about human nature and offering Beckwith and
Spears a significant annual income to manage her financial affairs.
Cassie gave her marks a buy in. Of course, they
wanted her story to be real. They wanted it to
be true for their own benefit. Plus with them, as
with all the banks involved, she had been willing to
accept loans with really high interest rates. The banks thought
(19:42):
they were all going to make a lot of money
off of these deals, and even once suspicions arose in
some cases at that point, fear of feeling or looking
foolish seems to have made many of the people who
had made these bad decisions to trust her stay silent.
Having known people who were the victims of fraud, like
the shame of having been defrauded is powerful, yes, indeed so. Additionally,
(20:09):
Cassie Chadwick was so good at developing her story that
it really drew people in back. With described how she
first told him that she was related to Carnegie. She
kept a portrait of an elderly man in her home,
and she started their conversation with thereby hangs a tale.
When the banker noticed it while visiting her home. Cassie
then spun a yarn about how the man in the
(20:30):
portrait was an uncle, the one referenced in the forged
Carnegie document, and that the uncle, despite not being wealthy himself,
was always providing money to her family. While on his deathbed,
this uncle, she claimed, told Cassie that she was in
fact Carnegie's daughter, and that he had been funneling money
from the tycoon who felt guilty or fearful of being
(20:54):
exposed to the family in exchange for silence in the matter.
Even in his confession, just as the conversation with Cassie
and jail, Beckwith was really reluctant to believe that this
Cassie Chadwick who he entrusted, was a criminal. He seemed
convinced that someone else must have been deceiving all of them.
(21:16):
And then this lines up with his comment to Cassie
that she shouldn't have changed attorneys so often. He seemed
to be indicating that he thought one of her lawyers
was really the one behind the fraud. And even though
the problems with Chadwick's money began to evidence themselves before
her arrest, Beckwith continued to believe her assurances that everything
was going to get fixed. She claimed at one point
(21:38):
that a man named William Baldwin in New York was
one of the trustees of her estate and that they
needed to contact Mr Baldwin to get everything turned over
to the bank in Oberlin. After several unsuccessful attempts to
reach the mythical Mr Baldwin, Beckwith and two other bank
officials traveled to New York to meet with Cassie and
her attorney, which is a Mr. Powers, and they were
supposed to meet with Baldwin himself. But though Cassie seemed
(22:01):
to be cooperating to get the bank the money it needed,
at the last minute a problem arose. She told beckw
that the documents needed to resolve the issue were in
the possession of her husband back in Ohio. So this
whole trip had been a bust, and this was just
the first in a series of concocted complications that kept
Cassie from making good on her debts with Beckwith's bank.
(22:25):
As he attempted to secure the funds that she owed,
he met with a new excuse at every turn, including
at one point the introduction into the ruse of a
Pittsburgh banking firm that allegedly had power of attorney and
had to be included in the proceedings in order to
make the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin the trustee of
her estate. At this point, the Oberlin Bank's ready cash
(22:45):
was depleted and Beckwith was in serious trouble. At one point,
during a meeting called with the Citizens National Bank directors
and Chadwick at the Chadwick Residents, Cassie claimed that Charles
Beckwith was in an adjacent room with poison and a
revolver in his possession, and that he intended to take
his own life back with When confronted by the bank,
(23:07):
colleague said that he had merely idly suggested that idea,
but wasn't serious. In any case, this whole diversion worked
because the meeting ended and there was no resolution to
the financial issues between the bank and Cassie. In his statement,
as he told his story, beck Was said quote, I
am either an awful dupe or a terrible fool. I
(23:29):
know I have done wrong, but although crushed, I do
not propose to be made a scapegoat to shield the
sins of others. Beckwith, who was pretty elderly at this
time that all of this was playing out, was described
as incredibly distraught and tearful. Charles Beckwith died before the
charges against him were taking a trial. The cashier who
(23:50):
had also been charged, which was a B Spear, pled
guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison. According
to news reports, Spear's wife went insane because of the
stress of the situation. Once Cassie was in custody. Not
only were back within spear questioned, but as you may
have been wondering, yes. Andrew Carnegie was summoned to appear
(24:12):
before a federal grand jury to answer questions in the matter.
He said that he had never met Cassie Chadwick, and
he seemed mostly offended that anyone who had seen the
fraudulent letters that Cassie claimed he wrote would think that
he had such poor spelling and punctuation. Later on, he said, quote,
if anybody had seen this paper and really believed that
I had drawn it up and signed it, I could
(24:33):
hardly have been flattered. He also stated that he had
not signed such a note in thirty years. Cassie's trial
began on March six, and it lasted two weeks. Andrew
Carnegie attended the proceedings. She pleaded not guilty and denied
that she had ever claimed that Andrew Carnegie was her father.
She was found guilty of conspiracy to to fraud and
(24:55):
National Bank and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison
and find seventy thousand dollars. While in prison, Chadwick was
still allowed to keep a lot of the items that
she had gained through her criminal enterprise, particularly her rather
impressive wardrobe. But though she enjoyed a lot of lavish
possessions while she was incarcerated, she still had problems. Her
(25:17):
health really rapidly declined. In mid September of nineteen o seven,
it was reported that she experienced a nervous collapse while
speaking with her son Emil, who was visiting her. After
this collapse, she experienced a temporary blindness, but doctors at
the prison reported that she recovered less than a month later.
On October seven, the papers reported that due to heart
(25:41):
disease and a weak stomach, she was weak and experiencing
doubts of delirium. Cassie Chadwick died in the Ohio Penitentiary
in Columbus, Ohio, on October tenth, nine seven. It was
her fiftieth birthday, and she had been in a coma
in those last hours leading up to her death, and
while she was attended by hospital staff, no one from
(26:02):
her personal life was there. Her son Emil, was informed
of her condition prior to her death, and he was
expected at the hospital, but he didn't arrive until after
her passing. It may never be known exactly how much
money Cassie Chadwick was able to get through fraudulent means.
A New York Times special that ran that ran the
year she was arrested speculated that based on all the
(26:24):
reported disclosures, it could have been as much as twenty
one million dollars. But estimates over the year, over the
years have really been all over the place. Yeah, And
some of the difficulty pinning it down to is that
shame that we talked about earlier. There were a lot
of people that also offered her personal loans, thinking she
was a wealthy and important person, and it's believed that
(26:46):
a lot of them never pursued the issue because they
were too embarrassed that she had made fools of them. Uh.
One of the other problems in assessing the real extent
of her ill gotten fortune was the difficulty that authorities
had in finding all of it. Various items like trunks
and satchels that were believed to contain valuables were difficult
(27:06):
to track down, as Cassie had left a number of
them with various people over the course of her masquerade
as an heiress. Her body was transported back to Ontario
to be buried, which was in accordance with her wishes.
The name on her gravestone reads Elizabeth Bigley. As for
Cassie's husband, Dr Leroy Chadwick, he attempted to get distance
(27:28):
from Cassie. As soon as this scandal broke. He basically
left for Europe to get away from the whole business.
But eventually he did return home, and while he really
had no knowledge of his wife's trail of fraud while
it was happening, creditors still pursued him to try to
get their money back. In late summer of nineteen o eight,
Leroy Chadwick declared bankruptcy. Do you also have listener mail?
(27:50):
I do. It's way more upbeat than being defrauded by
a horrible person. Um this listener mail is beautiful and
I will explain why. And it comes from our listener, Arebara.
She says, Greetings Holly and Tracy. I love your podcast.
I found it less than a year ago and have
been working through the back catalog in between new episodes.
I was super excited by the Skelly Michael episode in
(28:10):
December as I am a native of Ireland very near
to Skellic Michael, and I have visited this remarkable island
twice once when I was twelve, and again thirty years
later in when I took the photos that grace the
front of this card. So that's why I love it.
It's like a custom postcard with her gorgeous photography on it. Um.
That's me next to the rock ray split with her
(28:30):
lightsaber in the last Jedi. That rock is actually known
as the Whaling Woman. On my first visit, the seat
crossing to the island was so rough I thought we
would capsize and drown. But my recent ish second visit
was much smoother, although my husband is still traumatized by
the sheer stone steps. I now live in the UK,
hence the stamps. They're very cool. Um Game of Throne stamps.
(28:51):
Lovely to hear you talk about my home on your podcast.
This is so cool one. Those Game of Throne stamps
are beautiful too. Again, I love that she has beautiful
pictures of skelling Michael three. I understand her husband's fear
of those steps. As you'll recall in that episode, I
commented that I would be terrified to be there. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you could
(29:12):
do so at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also find us across the spectrum of social
media as Missed in History and Missed in History dot
com is the place to go if you would like
to visit our entire back catalog, the full archive of episodes,
more than a thousand of them going way way back
to previous hosts, and any of the ones that Tracy
and I have worked on. Will also have some show
(29:34):
notes with some references that we've used along the way.
So come out and visit us at missed in History
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how staff works dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Today's episode
is a rather epic tail a really brazen behavior. Uh.
(00:22):
It features fraud at a level that would be almost
impossible to pull off in today's world of instant communication.
And this is the story of Cassie Chadwick. But that
was not her real name, And in fact, naming convention
is tricky here because she switched up her identity so often,
so normally we're gonna go by the name she was
using at the time we were speaking about because she
(00:44):
changes over to a lot of aliases along the way.
This is actually along the lines of a question a
listener asked us recently where they were like when in
the days before we had the today's completely connected world,
and like photographs of people that could just be sent
around instantly, were people able to just walk out of
(01:06):
town and assume a new new identity. And that answer
was basically yes, yes, huh. And we'll see like the
one one of the times that really tripped her up,
which didn't involve photographs, Yeah, uh, And another time, was
just that she was so bold to the point of
just ridiculousness. People started catching onto what was so. Cassie's
(01:33):
birth name was Elizabeth Bigley. She was born on October tenth,
eighteen fifty seven, and Eastwood, Ontario, in Canada. The Eastwood
area is now part of a larger collective of towns
and communities that's known as Norwich. Her father worked for
the Grand Trunk Railway, which connected Toronto to Montreal in
the eighteen fifties, and he was a section boss. Okay,
(01:54):
I'm gonna step outside of the history talk for one
second to like have this moment where like is that
Grandfunk Railroad got their name? Which is just my child
of the seventies question, because I had not heard of
it before. Elizabeth was one of five children. She had
a brother and three sisters. Elizabeth went by Betsy as
(02:14):
a young child, and she allegedly had a fairly flexible
relationship with the truth From quite a young age. She
was known as something of a fiber, and she began
telling lies to get cash when she was just a
young teenager. Her sister Alice, later in life, claimed that
she had seen Betsy practicing other family members signatures over
(02:35):
and over on various occasions, although part of me was like,
who hasn't done that? I used to practice my parents
signatures just because I thought that was how you learned
to make a signature. I was terrible at it. The
one time in my entire life that I tried to
fords a note from my mother excusing me from school,
(02:55):
it no, it was I was immediately like, this will
never work. See, I don't think I ever tried it.
I just wanted to try copying the way people wrote like.
It was just oh, I didn't take the letter to school.
It was clear to me no one was buying that.
But I mean I never even was like I'm gonna
use this and try to do a letter that. I
(03:16):
just never planned to use them that way. So her
first known fraudulent bank account was open when she was fourteen,
and she did this in the town of Woodstock, Ontario.
This is about fifteen miles or north of her home.
She walked into a bank with a small amount of
money and a letter that claimed she was inheriting money
(03:36):
from her uncle in England, and then she opened up
an account, and then she proceeded to write a whole
lot of bad checks. It did not take long for
the establishments where Elizabeth had done business to realize that
her checks were no good, so the fourteen year old
fraudster was arrested for forgery, but because of her young age,
she was released without too much in the way of punishment.
(03:56):
It was kind of a warning, and don't do this again.
At the age of twenty two, she once again assumed
with the role of fake heiress, and this time to
support her claim, she paid to have expensive letter head
printed for the fake letter of notification of her inheritance
to make it look like it came from an actual
attorney's office. She also had calling cards printed up that
(04:19):
identified her as an heiress, and the same as before,
she opened up a checking account based on this false information,
then wrote a lot of bad checks at various merchants,
and this time, instead of just buying things, she also
got cash by writing checks over the amount of the
purchase price of the thing that she was buying and
then having the shopkeepers give her the difference. I think
(04:40):
that's like a scam that continues to be practiced today
by various people, and I'm sure she didn't invent it either. Eventually,
Elizabeth Bigley's older sister, Alice, got married to a man
from Cleveland, Ohio, and Alice moved there, so Elizabeth slashed
Betsy also decided that she would move to Cleveland and
live with them, and once she was the United States,
(05:00):
that's when her career in fraud really began. First, she
used her sister's furniture as collateral for a bank loan.
Like she basically wrote up what each of the pieces
were and what they were worth, and she used that
she didn't actually physically carry the furniture with her to
the bank, but she basically handed over this note that
said you you have ownership of this against this loan.
(05:22):
And when Alice's husband realized what Elizabeth had done, he
kicked her out. This is also when she started using
alias is. The first identity that Elizabeth assumed in Cleveland
was Madam Lydia de Vere. Under the pseudonym, she claimed
to be psychic and started a business telling fortunes. Elizabeth
as Lydia married a man named Dr. Wallace Springsteen in
(05:45):
eight two, and at that time she started going by
the name Lydia Springsteen. But this marriage immediately brought problems
due to a very foolish miscalculation on Elizabeth's part. So
when the nuptials were announced in the newspaper for the
Plain Dealer, complete with a photo of the happy couple,
people that Lydia had fleece saw the notice and immediately
(06:07):
went after the Springsteen's trying to get their money back.
It appears that Dr. Springsteen had been completely unaware of
his new bride's shady dealings, and so the marriage ended
abruptly after twelve days, with Elizabeth a k A. Lydia
kicked out of the house. The divorce was finalized early
the following year, and a new identity was soon born.
(06:30):
This time she was still posing as a psychic, but
she took the name Madame Marie La Rose. Madame Lauroux
soon found herself another husband in John R. Scott, who
was a farmer, and that marriage actually lasted four years.
The pair were already divorced when Elizabeth gave birth to
a child in six It is not known who the
father of the child was. It was a boy named Emil.
(06:53):
After Emil was born, Elizabeth took on yet another identity,
and this was Lydia Scott. She once a end claimed
to be able to tell fortunes, and Emil was sent
to live with relatives. In eighty nine, while living in Toledo,
Elizabeth slash Lydia forged a promissory note for several thousand dollars,
(07:13):
signing the name of Richard Brown of Youngstown, Ohio. She
used a connection that she had made as a clairvoyant
to help her cash the note, and after this was
successful the first time around, she did the same thing
several more times. She and her accomplice were caught, but
the man named Joseph Lamb was acquitted as it appeared
that he actually didn't know that he was participating in fraud.
(07:35):
He thought he was cashing legitimate notes. Elizabeth slash Lydia
was convicted and she served time, but she got out
of her sentence early on parole. She first started using
the name Cassie as soon as she got a prison
and that's the name that she's most commonly known as
in the historical record. She used the last name Hoover
when she got out of prison and moved back to Cleveland.
(07:57):
This time, instead of hanging a shingle as a psychic
at clairvoyant, she opened up a brothel, but when she
met a doctor named Leroy Chadwick, who was a widower.
She gave him a very sanitized version of her story.
She was still going by Cassie Hoover, but she told
him that the home that she ran was a boarding
house and not a brothel, and then she feigned shocked
(08:17):
when he assured her that everyone knew it was a brothel,
and she begged him to help her get away from it.
She definitely did get away from it, and we'll talk
about her transition to a life of wealth after we paused.
Very quick word from a sponsor. Right before the break,
(08:38):
we mentioned that Cassie had met a doctor named Leroy Chadwick,
and Cassie and Leroy married in and this marriage opened
up a whole new world to the grifter. Cassie, her
husband had society connections. His house was on Euclid Avenue
in a very wealthy neighborhood. Also, I see it referred
to as Millionaires Row. And the marriage had been really
(08:59):
pretty so most of Dr Chadwick's friends first met Cassie
as LeRoy's wife. Leroy and Cassie traveled to New York
together in the spring of nineteen o two. This trip
ended up being really momentous, but not in a good way.
While visiting the city, she decided to pay a visit
to Andrew Carnegie, a lawyer that she knew through Leroy.
(09:22):
He was named James Dillon went with her. Dylan, it appears,
was not privy to the scam that she was hatching.
He waited outside the mansion at one and fifth in
a carriage. Cassie entered, spoke with the housekeeper under the
guise of asking for a reference for a main she
was considering hiring, and then returned to Mr Dillon in
(09:42):
the waiting carriage. Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish born steel
tycoon who had moved to the United States as a
teenager and made his own fortune. His name is popped
up on the show many times over the years, and
you've probably seen it or heard it in relation to
grant funding. And that's because he eventually focused on using
his wealth for philanthropy, and the foundation that he established
(10:05):
continues and supports all kinds of causes. So yes, at
some point he will be his own episode of the show. Yeah,
I'm pretty fascinated by his story. But at the time
that Cassie went to the Carnegie home, Andrew Carnegie was
widely recognized as one of the wealthiest men in the world,
and when Cassie returned from this social call, during which
(10:25):
she had not ever met Andrew Carnegie, she had a
two million dollar promissory note allegedly issued by the man.
Cassie used this document to fraudulently acquire a lot of money.
Cassie visited multiple banks in the Eastern United States, and
using this promissory note as proof of her worth, was
able to get financial advances against it. Of course, the
(10:47):
question of why such a powerful and wealthy man would
offer a random woman so much money did come up,
but Cassie Chadwick had an answer ready for that situation.
She told those who inquired that she was actually the
illegitimate daughter of Mr. Carnegie. And this was actually sort
of a brilliant lie because she knew that no banker
(11:10):
was going to be willing to go to Andrew Carnegie
and ask this wealthy and important man for verification of
what was considered a really tawdry fact at the time.
They would never ask such a man if he had
an illegitimate child, simply out of politeness. Additionally, thinking Cassie
was a wealthy and important new client. Many of the
banks she conned also wanted to keep her secret for
(11:33):
her and the whole time, Andrew Carnegie had no idea
how much money was trading hands, just through the mention
of his name and a falsified document. The lawyer who
had gone with her, that was James Dillon uh had
been basically a clueless corroborator. Cassie counted on his surprise
(11:54):
and awe at this reveal, which she made when he
questioned her after the visit to the Carnegie mansion that
Andrew Carnegie was her father. She told him it was
a secret that he must tell no one, but she
counted on him being unable to keep that kind of
information to himself. She wanted to feed the rumor mill
and build up her story. Yeah, completely horrendous behavior, but
(12:17):
part of me has to respect her thought process here
where she's like, I know, I'm gonna build this fiction
out so that it seems really galvanized if anybody tries
to question me. So here's how the actual con worked.
Chadwick walked into the Wade Park Bank of Cleveland, and
she presented a box of forged notes allegedly signed by
Andrew Carnegie and promising her various sums of money, including
(12:40):
that one from that visit to his home, and she
handed them to a cashier named Ira Reynolds. The cashier
took the papers, issued a receipt for them, describing all
of the information contained therein and also the fact that
Andrew Carnegie's signature was on them. Now, that right up
from Reynolds meant that Chadwick then had an official bank
document that validated her fraudulent claim. So she was able
(13:03):
to use that document, which was a legitimate document, though
it it legitimized fake things uh to go to other
banks with proof that she was worth millions in order
to get them to lend her large sums of money,
and in some cases she would use borrowed money from
one bank to make payments to another, kind of circulating
(13:24):
some of this money around and keeping the whole charade
going Domino style. One of the primary forged documents in
this whole scheme reads this way, quote no, all men,
by these presents that I Andrew Carnegie of New York City,
do hereby acknowledge that I hold in trust for Mrs
Cassie L. Chadwick, wife of Dr Leroy S. Chadwick of
(13:46):
eighteen twenty four Euclid Avenue, City of Cleveland, County of Cuyahoga,
and State of Ohio, properly assigned and delivered to me
for said Cassie L. Chadwick by her uncle Frederick R.
Mason and his lifetime now to cease, which property is
of the appraised value of ten million, two hundred and
forty six thousand dollars, then lists various bonds and railway
(14:09):
interests that make up this sum. It goes on to say,
quote the income from the above described property I agree
to pay over to said Cassie L. Chadwick semi annually
between the first and fifteenth days of June and December
of each year during the life of this trust, without
any deduction or charges for services or expense of any kind.
(14:29):
And then the document goes on to state that should
Andrew Carnegie die, Cassie will receive all of the assets
that it named. This was, of course, not the only
document she forged. It was one of many forged documents
that she used to claim a personal fortune that simply
did not exist. It wasn't until a banker in Brookline,
Massachusetts checked around and made inquiries that her scam was
(14:52):
finally uncovered. He had been suspicious, but his investigation revealed
that she had accumulated millions dollars of debt off of
posing as the unacknowledged child of Andrew Carnegie. The Massachusetts
banker named Herbert Newton sued Cassie Chadwick, and this started
an avalanche of creditors coming forward and catalyzed a federal investigation.
(15:16):
Cassie was arrested in New York City, which had become
a second home to her, shortly after the scandal broke,
and at the time she was wearing a money belt
containing one hundred thousand dollars cash. The primary crime that
was cited in the charges involved the Citizens National Bank
of Oberlin, Ohio. This institution had loaned Cassie eight hundred
(15:38):
thousand dollars and consequently had to declare bankruptcy. The conspiracy
charge also involved two men who worked at the bank
in Oberlin. Bank president Charles Beckwith and cashier A. B.
Spear were also accused. Beckwith and Spear had endorsed fraudulent
notes presented by Chadwick bearing the forged signature of Andrew
(15:59):
Carnegie on December tenth, The New York Times ran back
with story he had confessed to federal authorities that yes,
he had conducted transactions with Chadwick, but that he had
done so based on documents that she provided. She had
indicated that citizens National Bank of Oberlin would be made
the trustee of her five million dollar estate and that
(16:21):
all the related documents would be given to the bank
on July one, three. So that was that was what
Beckwith said that she had told to him. Correct. And
where this whole thing gets a little bit uh dicey
is the fact that Chadwick promised both Charles Beckwith and
the cashier ab Spear each ten thousand dollars a year
(16:45):
for handling her financial affairs as beneficiaries of this scheme.
This is where they legally became co conspirators. An article
that ran in the New York Times on December sixte
n four described a meeting between the Oberlin President, Mr. Beckwith,
and Cassie in the latter's jail cell. And it did
not go as you might expect. It read when a
(17:08):
man whose bank and whose private fortune have been wrecked
stood face to face with the woman who is charged
with having been responsible for the wrecking. The two look
steadily at each other for a moment, then they shook hands.
You got us into an awful fix, said the aged banker.
It looks as if it were time for you to
tell all you know. Cassie did not offer up any
(17:31):
information in response to this, and in according to this account,
back With continued, You've ruined me, but I'm not so
sure yet you were a fraud. I've stood by you
to my last dollar, and I do think now is
the time for you to make known all. I always
told you I didn't like the idea of your changing
attorneys so often, get a good one and keep him.
(17:51):
I wanted to include this exchange because it speaks to
just how good Cassie was gaining the confidence of the
people she frauded, even after this man had become a
pariah to his peers, both in the banking community in
the community at large, because his bank had really damaged
a lot of people who had their money there. Uh,
(18:15):
and it was all because of his involvement with Cassie Chadwick,
But he still wanted to give her the benefit of
the doubt. We'll talk some more about how Beckwith was
drawn into the scheme and then strung along. But first
we are going to have another little sponsor break. In
(18:36):
a write up from the Philadelphia North American, written while
Cassie's case was still playing out, so this was a
contemporary account, the paper printed this quote, This extraordinary performance
was accomplished by a woman fifty years old, with neither
physical beauty nor personal charm, by one whose taste in
dress totally lacking in discernment, who is rather deaf and
(18:58):
harsh voice, and who, when it all excited, speaks without
regard to grammar. So she was so charmless, how was
she able to convince these shrewd bankers to hand over
so much money. There were a lot of theories that
she used hypnotism or a similar device to control the
actions of the men that she did business with, But
it really does seem to have come down about her
(19:19):
being really smart about human nature and offering Beckwith and
Spears a significant annual income to manage her financial affairs.
Cassie gave her marks a buy in. Of course, they
wanted her story to be real. They wanted it to
be true for their own benefit. Plus with them, as
with all the banks involved, she had been willing to
accept loans with really high interest rates. The banks thought
(19:42):
they were all going to make a lot of money
off of these deals, and even once suspicions arose in
some cases at that point, fear of feeling or looking
foolish seems to have made many of the people who
had made these bad decisions to trust her stay silent.
Having known people who were the victims of fraud, like
the shame of having been defrauded is powerful, yes, indeed so. Additionally,
(20:09):
Cassie Chadwick was so good at developing her story that
it really drew people in back. With described how she
first told him that she was related to Carnegie. She
kept a portrait of an elderly man in her home,
and she started their conversation with thereby hangs a tale.
When the banker noticed it while visiting her home. Cassie
then spun a yarn about how the man in the
(20:30):
portrait was an uncle, the one referenced in the forged
Carnegie document, and that the uncle, despite not being wealthy himself,
was always providing money to her family. While on his deathbed,
this uncle, she claimed, told Cassie that she was in
fact Carnegie's daughter, and that he had been funneling money
from the tycoon who felt guilty or fearful of being
(20:54):
exposed to the family in exchange for silence in the matter.
Even in his confession, just as the conversation with Cassie
and jail, Beckwith was really reluctant to believe that this
Cassie Chadwick who he entrusted, was a criminal. He seemed
convinced that someone else must have been deceiving all of them.
(21:16):
And then this lines up with his comment to Cassie
that she shouldn't have changed attorneys so often. He seemed
to be indicating that he thought one of her lawyers
was really the one behind the fraud. And even though
the problems with Chadwick's money began to evidence themselves before
her arrest, Beckwith continued to believe her assurances that everything
was going to get fixed. She claimed at one point
(21:38):
that a man named William Baldwin in New York was
one of the trustees of her estate and that they
needed to contact Mr Baldwin to get everything turned over
to the bank in Oberlin. After several unsuccessful attempts to
reach the mythical Mr Baldwin, Beckwith and two other bank
officials traveled to New York to meet with Cassie and
her attorney, which is a Mr. Powers, and they were
supposed to meet with Baldwin himself. But though Cassie seemed
(22:01):
to be cooperating to get the bank the money it needed,
at the last minute a problem arose. She told beckw
that the documents needed to resolve the issue were in
the possession of her husband back in Ohio. So this
whole trip had been a bust, and this was just
the first in a series of concocted complications that kept
Cassie from making good on her debts with Beckwith's bank.
(22:25):
As he attempted to secure the funds that she owed,
he met with a new excuse at every turn, including
at one point the introduction into the ruse of a
Pittsburgh banking firm that allegedly had power of attorney and
had to be included in the proceedings in order to
make the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin the trustee of
her estate. At this point, the Oberlin Bank's ready cash
(22:45):
was depleted and Beckwith was in serious trouble. At one point,
during a meeting called with the Citizens National Bank directors
and Chadwick at the Chadwick Residents, Cassie claimed that Charles
Beckwith was in an adjacent room with poison and a
revolver in his possession, and that he intended to take
his own life back with When confronted by the bank,
(23:07):
colleague said that he had merely idly suggested that idea,
but wasn't serious. In any case, this whole diversion worked
because the meeting ended and there was no resolution to
the financial issues between the bank and Cassie. In his statement,
as he told his story, beck Was said quote, I
am either an awful dupe or a terrible fool. I
(23:29):
know I have done wrong, but although crushed, I do
not propose to be made a scapegoat to shield the
sins of others. Beckwith, who was pretty elderly at this
time that all of this was playing out, was described
as incredibly distraught and tearful. Charles Beckwith died before the
charges against him were taking a trial. The cashier who
(23:50):
had also been charged, which was a B Spear, pled
guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison. According
to news reports, Spear's wife went insane because of the
stress of the situation. Once Cassie was in custody. Not
only were back within spear questioned, but as you may
have been wondering, yes. Andrew Carnegie was summoned to appear
(24:12):
before a federal grand jury to answer questions in the matter.
He said that he had never met Cassie Chadwick, and
he seemed mostly offended that anyone who had seen the
fraudulent letters that Cassie claimed he wrote would think that
he had such poor spelling and punctuation. Later on, he said, quote,
if anybody had seen this paper and really believed that
I had drawn it up and signed it, I could
(24:33):
hardly have been flattered. He also stated that he had
not signed such a note in thirty years. Cassie's trial
began on March six, and it lasted two weeks. Andrew
Carnegie attended the proceedings. She pleaded not guilty and denied
that she had ever claimed that Andrew Carnegie was her father.
She was found guilty of conspiracy to to fraud and
(24:55):
National Bank and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison
and find seventy thousand dollars. While in prison, Chadwick was
still allowed to keep a lot of the items that
she had gained through her criminal enterprise, particularly her rather
impressive wardrobe. But though she enjoyed a lot of lavish
possessions while she was incarcerated, she still had problems. Her
(25:17):
health really rapidly declined. In mid September of nineteen o seven,
it was reported that she experienced a nervous collapse while
speaking with her son Emil, who was visiting her. After
this collapse, she experienced a temporary blindness, but doctors at
the prison reported that she recovered less than a month later.
On October seven, the papers reported that due to heart
(25:41):
disease and a weak stomach, she was weak and experiencing
doubts of delirium. Cassie Chadwick died in the Ohio Penitentiary
in Columbus, Ohio, on October tenth, nine seven. It was
her fiftieth birthday, and she had been in a coma
in those last hours leading up to her death, and
while she was attended by hospital staff, no one from
(26:02):
her personal life was there. Her son Emil, was informed
of her condition prior to her death, and he was
expected at the hospital, but he didn't arrive until after
her passing. It may never be known exactly how much
money Cassie Chadwick was able to get through fraudulent means.
A New York Times special that ran that ran the
year she was arrested speculated that based on all the
(26:24):
reported disclosures, it could have been as much as twenty
one million dollars. But estimates over the year, over the
years have really been all over the place. Yeah, And
some of the difficulty pinning it down to is that
shame that we talked about earlier. There were a lot
of people that also offered her personal loans, thinking she
was a wealthy and important person, and it's believed that
(26:46):
a lot of them never pursued the issue because they
were too embarrassed that she had made fools of them. Uh.
One of the other problems in assessing the real extent
of her ill gotten fortune was the difficulty that authorities
had in finding all of it. Various items like trunks
and satchels that were believed to contain valuables were difficult
(27:06):
to track down, as Cassie had left a number of
them with various people over the course of her masquerade
as an heiress. Her body was transported back to Ontario
to be buried, which was in accordance with her wishes.
The name on her gravestone reads Elizabeth Bigley. As for
Cassie's husband, Dr Leroy Chadwick, he attempted to get distance
(27:28):
from Cassie. As soon as this scandal broke. He basically
left for Europe to get away from the whole business.
But eventually he did return home, and while he really
had no knowledge of his wife's trail of fraud while
it was happening, creditors still pursued him to try to
get their money back. In late summer of nineteen o eight,
Leroy Chadwick declared bankruptcy. Do you also have listener mail?
(27:50):
I do. It's way more upbeat than being defrauded by
a horrible person. Um this listener mail is beautiful and
I will explain why. And it comes from our listener, Arebara.
She says, Greetings Holly and Tracy. I love your podcast.
I found it less than a year ago and have
been working through the back catalog in between new episodes.
I was super excited by the Skelly Michael episode in
(28:10):
December as I am a native of Ireland very near
to Skellic Michael, and I have visited this remarkable island
twice once when I was twelve, and again thirty years
later in when I took the photos that grace the
front of this card. So that's why I love it.
It's like a custom postcard with her gorgeous photography on it. Um.
That's me next to the rock ray split with her
(28:30):
lightsaber in the last Jedi. That rock is actually known
as the Whaling Woman. On my first visit, the seat
crossing to the island was so rough I thought we
would capsize and drown. But my recent ish second visit
was much smoother, although my husband is still traumatized by
the sheer stone steps. I now live in the UK,
hence the stamps. They're very cool. Um Game of Throne stamps.
(28:51):
Lovely to hear you talk about my home on your podcast.
This is so cool one. Those Game of Throne stamps
are beautiful too. Again, I love that she has beautiful
pictures of skelling Michael three. I understand her husband's fear
of those steps. As you'll recall in that episode, I
commented that I would be terrified to be there. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you could
(29:12):
do so at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also find us across the spectrum of social
media as Missed in History and Missed in History dot
com is the place to go if you would like
to visit our entire back catalog, the full archive of episodes,
more than a thousand of them going way way back
to previous hosts, and any of the ones that Tracy
and I have worked on. Will also have some show
(29:34):
notes with some references that we've used along the way.
So come out and visit us at missed in History
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how staff works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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