The other man Ray selected was another Englishman, Holworthy. He was Englishly tall. Burchard asked only one concession: that his proud fiancée should not know that he had gone to jail for gold, but should be led to believe that he was carrying out a secret assignment in some remote place like San Francisco. This meant that the couple would have to send and receive all their mail through Ray’s office.
Since both her letters and his would have to be smuggled into and out of the prison, where he would naturally wear an alias and a number, he asked Ray not to share this intimate correspondence with the whole staff but let no eyes save his own fall on it.
Ray agreed, without realizing that the prison allowed only one letter a week either way, and that Burchard’s envelopes would have to bear a San Francisco postmark. There was no airmail then, and the bride-to-be was so prolific a letter-writer that even special delivery stamps and an occasional forged signature hardly managed to keep up the deception. In fact, it was necessary to overwork a woman operative, who pretended to be Burchard’s sister, called on him at the penitentiary on visiting days, and received his instructions. She had to memorize them, since taking notes was forbidden, and the listening guard must not have his suspicions aroused. They had to use a code.
Ray made a virtue even of this necessity; and if Burchard or Holworthy wanted to tip him off to the fact that a certain guard was going to New York to pick up some heroin, he told the operative to “be sure to get Mary a birthday gift for next Thursday.” Then Ray’s men would tail that guard and turn over to the Federal men what they learned.
Having secured two reliable volunteers, and arranged for their indefinite disappearance from all knowledge of their friends, families and fiancées, all that Ray had to do now was to see to it that the two men should be arrested for committing a penitentiary crime in such a manner that they should be arrested by an officer who thought that it was a genuine crime committed by sincere criminals. This took a bit of doing.
Ray chose one of his operatives, Charles Severance, as the victim of the grand larceny and laid the scene in a little summer resort near Camden. He cast the Sheriff as the arresting officer, without the Sheriff’s knowledge. He engaged Mrs. Severance to be at her husband’s side when he was robbed, and to provide lusty screams while her husband seized his assailant, who was to be little Burchard. Holworthy was to let himself be nabbed by the Sheriff, and the long-legged Englishman was warned that he must run slow or the plump and wheezy Sheriff would lose him.
Everything worked out perfectly. Severance and his wife sauntered along the amusement park followed by Burchard and Holworthy. When they finally located the Sheriff he was arresting a hot dog at a hot dog emporium.
Burchard picked Severance’s pocket and took away his wallet. Severance howled “Stop thief!” His wife shrieked. Severance clutched Burchard by the coat collar and held him fast. Burchard slipped the wallet to Holworthy right before the Sheriffs popping eyes. Then Holworthy struck out for the horizon, keeping one eye over his shoulder for the Sheriff.
Finally Holworthy had to fall over his own feet and lie still till he was overtaken and overpowered after an amateurish pretence of a struggle.
So far so good. But the day was Saturday and the two thieves had to spend the Sabbath in the Camden jail. Monday morning they were arraigned before Judge Voorhees. When Severance and his wife and the Sheriff and his son testified against them, they pleaded guilty. And Judge Voorhees, masking his sympathy for the poor detectives as horror at their wanton lawlessness, sentenced them to two years in the penitentiary.
They were now exposed to inspection in a line-up, and several Philadelphia detectives “recognized” them as various hardened criminals wanted for various crimes. Then the two criminals were deposited in the penitentiary. All the baggage they carried was inside their heads; for they had memorized the names and descriptions of the head keeper, several guards, and certain prisoners who were already under suspicion.
The first days went smoothly enough, while Burchard and Holworthy learned the rules and regulations and adapted themselves to prison life.
Then Burchard’s memory played a mean trick on him. He mistook a new, and honest, guard for one of the suspects. He called the man to him, passed a five-dollar bill through the bars and asked for a “pill.” The new guard summoned the head-keeper.
Naturally the head-keeper was not betraying his narcotic business to the green guard, so he put on a show of virtuous wrath and dragged Burchard before the Warden. The Warden was honestly eager to check the narcotic industry and he gave the helpless Burchard a double penalty for trying to bribe a guard and for trying to buy drugs. The penalty was thirty days in solitary confinement.
This was a triple catastrophe. Burchard could do none of the work he was there for; the operative who posed as his sister was told that she could not see him for thirty days; and the fiancée who was pining away for him while he was “in San Francisco” turned out to be a new problem.
Ray was doing the best he could to keep up the pretence of correspondence between Burchard and his betrothed. But the complication of the solitary confinement led him to skip one letter. This brought the fiancee promptly into the office. She pooh-poohed all of Ray’s efforts to explain that probably Burchard was busy, or in some situation where he dared not mail a letter. Ray even suggested the possibility that the U. S. Post Office might have sent the letter to some wrong address.
She dismissed all these theories and flounced out, only to meet one of the operatives who blurted out the truth that Burchard was not in San Francisco on a mission, but in jail. Before he could also let slip the truth that Burchard was on a mission, the fiancee grimly announced that she would never marry a jailbird, and stormed away.
Solitary confinement is no fun, and is not meant to be. It is meant to break the stoutest spirit. When the great prison reformer, Thomas Mott Osbourne, became warden of Auburn prison he thought he would try a taste of solitary confinement, just to learn what it is really like. He instructed his subordinates not to pay any attention to anything he said till his twenty-four hours was up. He later stated that, although he knew he was in the dark only for an experiment and was warden of the prison, there was something so hideous in the suffocating black loneliness of the cell that he beat on the bars and screamed for release. He did not wonder that many convicts went insane as a result of such torture. When he came out, he put an end to solitary confinement wherever he had authority.
Osbourne had had one night of it. Poor Burchard had thirty. He had broken no law and defied nobody. But even if he had been willing to expose his whole purpose in being there, nobody would have listened to him or carried a message. He was buried alive for one endless month.
Perhaps Burchard’s presence in the Hole made things more convincing for his buddy, Holworthy, for he was soon as busy as Burchard was idle. Holworthy made no mistake about the first guard he tried to bribe. He bought all the dope he wanted and passed the word in code to the operative, who visited him as his sweetheart.
He finally bribed one of the listening guards not to listen while he talked to his girl in a private room. Now he did not have to use code and the girl could take notes as fast as he dictated them. She came away with a bushel of evidence.
Six weeks after the two men had gone to prison, Ray had enough material for a complete clean-up. He turned it over to the Attorney General, who thought it better not to make a public scandal. He quietly removed six or seven members of the staff, and replaced them with honest men. The guilty inmates were disciplined; and the liquor and drug traffic was ended, at least for the time being.
Now that their business in jail was finished, Burchard and Holworthy naturally “wanted out.” According to the laws of New Jersey, a Supreme Court justice has the power to change the sentence of any prisoner whom he himself has sentenced, when new information is laid before him that there has been a miscarriage of justice.
But now it looked as if Burchard and Holworthy would have to finish t
heir two years’ servitude, for Judge Voorhees, the one who could release them, had suddenly fallen so ill that his life was despaired of. Even his own family was not allowed to enter his presence—much less a Ray Schindler with an elaborate story to tell and the judge’s autograph to collect on a legal document.
So Burchard and Holworthy must languish in durance vile for a whole month. One day the Attorney General telephoned Ray that Judge Voorhees had taken a turn for the better. Ray hastened to his home and the Judge scrawled his signature with a shaking hand on the necessary court-order. The Judge died not long afterward.
Burchard and Holworthy came out into the daylight at last. Burchard’s prison pallor went whiter yet when his fiancee refused even to see him, to say nothing of renewing the betrothal.
He sued Ray for damages, which included the loss of one wife. But he had signed a paper stating that he was fully aware of the risks he was running when he took the assignment for the extra remuneration. He had also absolved Ray from all liability. So he was thrown out of court as quickly as he had been thrown into solitary.
He was so fed up with the detective business that he seized the first opportunity to take up something comparatively easy. World War I came along just then and he “went for a soldier.”
And Holworthy sailed with him. They went home to fight for their dear England.
For a while both of them sent postcards from “somewhere in France” back to their former colleagues. By-and-by the cards came no more. And to this day Ray does not know what became of them. They may have died for their country as they had suffered for justice in this country.
These are only two of the six operatives whom Ray sent to prison. One of his women operatives was sentenced to a Reformatory for a year to learn what was really going on.
But he has also saved from prison many unfortunate and misguided men. One of them was a very young and very promising composer who had written a number of successes, but fell on evil days. His mother was ill and he could not afford a doctor; he was about to be put out of his home for lack of rent money. In his hungry despair he could not resist the lure of some jewelry left on a dressing table at a Hollywood party. It was insured and Ray’s insurance company set him on the trail. He found the man and the Judge sentenced him to prison for a year. But Ray was touched, and he persuaded the Judge to parole the young composer in Ray’s custody.
In another instance, a young genius in the employ of one of the great electrical companies needed some platinum wire and simply purloined it. He was sentenced to three years in the penitentiary. “Good behavior” shortened this to two years, but his future looked dark until Ray, who saw how many fine qualities he had, took him into his organization, where he remained for a number of years. Then he started a business of his own and has won big success.
The New York Parole Board, seeking a job for a well-behaved convict who seemed ripe for parole, recommended him to Ray. Ray made a thorough check of his character and was convinced of his honest intentions. For three years he was a valuable man and then his old appetites came back upon him. He looted Ray’s country home of cameras, typewriters, golf clubs and such things. Then he began to bounce checks and he bounced himself back into prison.
He was only another among multitudinous proofs of the tragic fact that climbing the straight and narrow path is a matter of endurance as well as good intention. Many an athlete is a wonder at a hundred-yard dash, but can never make a mile-run.
This one man was the only one who violated Ray’s trust in him. And there are even now men whom he has put in prison but to whom he has promised help and employment as soon as they are released.
14.
THE KOREAN MIND AND FACE
If by any chance or mischance you should suddenly find yourself in jail, be wary of your cell mate.
It is well, of course, to walk warily in all kinds of society, to be careful about making friendships anywhere or imparting confidences to anybody. In prisons of every sort it is especially advisable to be cautious, because even jailbirds may not always tell the truth. Even when they boast of their reasons for being under sentence, they are apt to handle the facts freely. Instead of pretending innocence, these men often brag of crimes they never dared to commit.
Sometimes this is merely the work of an inferiority complex, the pathetic effort of a petty crook to pass himself off as a big shot. But sometimes he may be only pretending to have committed any crime at all. He may be an otherwise virtuous man who is in jail to find out the very things you are trying to conceal.
Suppose, now, that you have committed a murder. It may be what De Quincey spoke of as “one of those little murders that you thought nothing of at the time.” It may be a killing that you are proud of, an act of what you felt to be divine retribution. But you run afoul of human “justice” and they put you in a safe deposit box while they try to find evidence enough to prejudice even a jury against you.
By and by some total stranger is thrust into your cell and you have to share it with him. The housing situation is almost as bad inside prisons as it is outside.
Well, your roommate at first shows no interest in you and is very secretive about what brought him there. This may be only a lure, cheese in a rat-trap. Gradually he begins to slip it to you in strict confidence that he has done a lot of things the law has never suspected. It is human nature to repay confidence with confidence.
Even in the narrow confines of a cell, your fellow-criminal may be a detective in disguise, a human suction-pump put there to extract the very truths you are most anxious to conceal. The technique is to swap pretended secrets for your real ones.
So, if you find yourself in jail, awaiting trial for a crime, don’t mention it to your cell mate, however long you may have dwelt with him. He may be one of Ray Schindler’s temporary jailbirds though the device is an ancient one used long before his time. But, so far as I know, he is the first man who ever put on amateur theatricals in a cell. This was probably the littlest of all Little Theaters.
Ray was driven to this desperate expedient by one of the hardest nuts he ever had to crack. Ray calls this case “one of the strangest I ever handled. I found myself matching wits with an Oriental.”
This fellow was born in Korea and his strength of purpose showed itself when he was only thirteen years old. He was so determined to get to the United States that he walked four hundred miles to reach an America-bound ship. He studied at a Presbyterian school in the midwest, then took up chemistry. He went through courses in spiritualism and Christian Science, then practiced as a tailor, a cook, and a valet. He ended his long journey as a houseboy for an elderly, wealthy couple in White Plains, New York.
Lawrence Churchill and his wife, Ida, came to rely on Chang Soo Lee for nearly everything. He was a whole troop of servants, from cook to gardener, valet to chauffeur.
One evening at their winter home in Florida, Lawrence Churchill was suddenly stricken at his dinner table with what the doctor called a cerebral hemorrhage. In three days he was dead. His widow returned disconsolately to her home in White Plains. The faithful Chang went with her, of course.
In her loneliness she invited her niece, Louise Reeves and her husband George to live with her. They were well-to-do but, out of sympathy, they accepted the invitation. Chang met them at the train as chauffeur, unpacked their things as valet; made their dinner ready as cook, and served it as waiter. He arranged everything, foresaw everything like a mind-reader. But nobody could read his mind. He ran the house and made it impossible or inadvisable to interfere. He made the purchases and kept his own accounts in an illegible language that may have been Korean.
Mrs. Churchill was more than eighty years old and so deaf that everything had to be shouted at her. Like most deaf people she was suspicious of any conversations she could not share; like most deaf people she assumed that everybody else was as hard of hearing as she was, and she shouted her most intimate confidences.
One evening, in the voice of an auctioneer, she announced that
she had seen her lawyer and made a new will, leaving practically all of her six hundred thousand dollar properties to Louise and George Reeves, with George as executor.
This was very pleasant and the only thing George Reeves could find to complain of was that his sleep of nights was broken by an all-night racket overhead. It was literally a case of squirrels in the attic. They rifled the garden where sweet corn was grown and soon had it stripped down to nine ears.
Chang, overhearing the complaint, went out in the rain to shoot the squirrels with an air-rifle but the rifle was not his weapon. He turned to poison, and soon there were no more squirrels in the attic or in the garden.
But soon George Reeves was being kept awake by gnawing pains in his stomach. He had been sent to bed with two broken ribs suffered when he fell from a ladder. Before long, his wife began to have pains in her stomach, too. The doctor put her to bed, also. He gave them morphine and other medicines for their pain; but finally had to install a nurse.
One day the nurse overheard Mrs. Churchill murmuring in a loud voice to Chang that the niece and nephew she had imported to care for her had become a burden instead. Chang said he didn’t mind. He not only prepared the special foods the doctor ordered, but decorated the sick rooms with flowers.
Finally George Reeves howled to Mrs. Churchill his belief that he and his wife were being slowly poisoned to death. He asked for another doctor. A specialist was called in who ordered the couple to a hospital at once. Experts examined them and found distinct evidences of both lead and arsenic poisoning, probably given them in the form of powders.
The District Attorney was notified and, when Mrs. Churchill, after one visit to the hospital, drove away to visit a relation in Pennsylvania with Chang as chauffeur, the police seized the opportunity to ransack the house.
They found arsenic as well as cyanide of potassium in the cupboard; in the cellar a supply of acetate of lead. They searched Chang’s room and found a veritable card index of poisons as well as a diary in Korean script.
The Complete Detective Page 22