The Demise of Cassie

Editor’s note: This article concludes the story of Cassie Chadwick begun in the September/October 2000 issue. It is excerpted from a chapter in the book, “Frankensteins of Fraud,” © 2000 by Joseph T. Wells, CFE, CPA, the Association’s founder and Chairman.  

The Sad Tale of Joe Lamb 

The chorus of Cassie’s wretched deeds told of a life spent a step ahead of her latest lie. She had fallen out with her sister Alice when she was caught, as Elizabeth Bigley, having pawned Alice’s new furniture for $300. Of course the furniture wasn’t worth more than $100, but Elizabeth had pawned it to three different brokers. In 1882, she was married as Lydia Springsteen to a Cleveland doctor. Though William Springsteen was a particularly down-and-out and drunken doctor, seeing a few patients in his back-stair walkup, he nevertheless made good pickings for Elizabeth as she learned a trade more satisfying and lucrative than prostitution, namely fraud. The marriage lasted but 12 days before Springsteen was faced with a pile of bills. “You said your rich Irish relatives sent you all those presents!” he railed. When the three pawnbrokers came round, each with a claim to Alice York’s furniture and a
charge against Elizabeth Bigley, Springsteen sent his little woman packing.

It was said that Cassie spent most of the year 1883 in convalescence with a kindly Lutheran family in Erie, Pennsylvania. She was calling herself Mazie Bagley. To gain the couple’s aid, she’d performed a trick she learned in the Toronto train stations, slicing her gums with a razor and fainting, somewhere very near an obviously good Samaritan. Mazie, a “young heiress,” promised to pay her hosts back with interest once she reached Cleveland.

However, as the good folks of Erie learned,
Mazie Bagley has passed peacefully away, putting her full trust in God, at 2:30 o’clock on March 27, 1884. Poor Mazie’s remains were taken to their native home in Canada for interment and were followed to their last resting place by a large and sorrowing concourse of friends. 

Elizabeth couldn’t resist a parting shot in a less cultured voice.
I thought you had heard. She was a splendid girl, but unfortunately weakminded. 

However, of all the tales resounding through the streets of Cleveland during her celebrated trial, the most revealing involved a poor man named Lamb and an ambitious lawyer who branded a woman for life.

****

During the mid- to late 1880s, in the person of Madame Lydia Devere, Elizabeth left her mark on the city of Toledo, known as Cleveland’s rougher cousin. In some parts of town, Madame Devere was the toast. First in a house on Washington Street, near 12th, and later at Broadway and Clayton, Madame cut a swath through Toledo’s gusto-charged underworld. At Madame’s, said a popular account, “There was high revel by night and well into the morning. Men jollied each other over their beer about the banquets and social sessions with The Devere and her comely associates, for the Madame, a prepossessing woman herself, usually had an attractive friend to assist at the entertainment.”

Madame Devere retained enough charms to enthrall a clerk and to establish herself as a temptress of distinction. Joseph Lamb delivered packages and sorted mail for a small firm in downtown Toledo. To his eyes, Madame Devere was a lady who’d suffered some bad luck, but who nevertheless refused to give up her optimism. As Joe recounted later, Lydia told him she’d married young and moved to England with her husband, who was killed in a riding accident. “After her return to America, she had settled at Rochester. There she married a young physician and they enjoyed every luxury. But the husband, she said, was not satisfied, and later entered a career of debauchery. In a single year he squandered more than $50,000 in riotous living. She left him and removed to Cleveland. Some time later he was arrested for forgery, Madame said. While he was in prison he committed suicide, I believe she said by drinking concentrated lye.”

It was terrible, the way some men treated a lady such as Madame. Joe, who was himself married and the father of five little girls, promised to do everything he could to prevent Madame’s further suffering. He helped out with a few dollars here and there – five, ten, twenty dollars, then a hundred, then two hundred. When Joe came to Madame’s rooms one afternoon and found her in feverish convulsions, he ached himself in sympathy. But he had no way to get the $2,000 Madame said she needed for an operation, she’d confided in a quivering voice.

Confessing to detectives later, his shoulders bowed into the shape of a harness, Joe Lamb related how he used the last few hundred dollars in his savings account to leverage Madame her money: “On February 1, 1888, I got $200 for her on a personal note from the Ketcham National Bank. On February 6, I got $300 more from the same bank. February 20, I got $500 by having my friend J. J. Mattocks endorse a note with me. In exchange for these sums, Madame gave me her note for $1,000, due one year afterward. I also gave her at this time my personal note for $275, payable three months afterward. This note she claimed she gave to her physician. It turned up in the Second National Bank; I learned that she had bought a sealskin sack with the money.... During this week alone, I had raised for her $1,785, and had only her note for $1,000.”

When Joe’s credit ran out, Madame still pushed for more. She presented him with a government bond for $25,000 in the name of Richard Brown of Cleveland. Joe was supposed to take the bond to his bank, where he could cover his notes and open an account for Madame. Then they’d write checks, paying off the debts at the other banks where Joe had borrowed. Their total obligation was crawling past $10,000 and generating interest by the day. A bank clerk at Second National spotted Madame’s forgery on the bond and had both Joe Lamb and Lydia Devere arrested. “The day of my arrest,” Joe recalled, “I pleaded with her, begged her to come to some understanding with the banks. For four hours I talked with her, but she was indifferent. At last, in a passionate outburst of rage, when I again begged her to submit to the bankers, she said, ‘I will do nothing of the sort!’ She told me I should go and get a lawyer and bring him to her house. We would manufacture a story that would save us both. I told her no. I said I had done nothing that I feared. She was terrible mad, called me everything, and said I was the biggest fool in existence. I said, ‘I know I have been a fool and a dupe.’ It was now her turn to beg. She cried, weeping, for me to please send for the lawyer. But I said no.”

Irvin Belford, in the course of winning an acquittal for Joe Lamb, simultaneously convicted Lydia Devere and marked her for the rest of her life as a sorceress. With a smug grin and mock humility vying for his features, attorney Belford told how he won his first big case. “I was preparing to make my final plea for Joe Lamb when I read that a prominent French physician had claimed much for hypnotism in the treatment of cases. It was clear, in
Lamb’s case, that this woman had exerted some remarkable influence over him. Various prominent men and attorneys have told me they felt themselves decidedly uneasy whenever they were subjected to her presence. She had some way of securing their assent to almost anything that she proposed. The ease with which she got a hold of prominent men was wonderful. I remember one old man, very wealthy, who gave her $1,000 and a diamond stud worth $500 without any security, not even a promissory note. After the trial was done and Lamb acquitted, a great deal was written to the effect that we had made hypnotism a defense in America, as the Frenchman had done on the Continent.”

During the trial, Belford didn’t hesitate to direct the courtroom’s gaze at Joseph Lamb’s wife and five daughters, arrayed in a bench near the front. It was said that during Belford’s summation “the spectators were moved to tears and even the jurymen wept.” Cassie Chadwick was sentenced to nine years in the Ohio State Penitentiary. Joe Lamb was acquitted.

In April 1905, while his wife faced her accusers and a salacious mob in a Cleveland courthouse, Leroy Chadwick was playing a $9,000 pipe organ in the display window of a New York music store. The organ had once belonged to Leroy, a present from his wife. These days he drew a weekly salary for playing standards on the instrument as curiosity seekers stood giggling on the sidewalk. For Cassie, the last few days of April would mean life or death. She’d already been to prison once, serving nine years for leading poor Joe Lamb to the slaughter. She couldn’t take it again. The woman known as Cassie Chadwick, née Elizabeth Bigley, was distinguished not only as a notorious fraudster, but also as the first woman imprisoned in Ohio’s penitentiary system.

In one of the few moments she allowed herself to show fear, Cassie told her defense attorney, “If they send me to prison, I’ll die, Mr. Dawley. I don’t mean I’ll die ‘inside myself.’ I mean I’ll die, literally.” Jay P. Dawley, a respected barrister with somewhat large, kindly eyes and a tuft of goat-like beard on his chin, promised to do all he could. But the odds and the evidence were mounting against them. On the positive side, Dawley told his tearful client, the banker Charles Beckwith couldn’t testify against her, since he’d died in February with a wicked case of pneumonia. A.B. Spear, Beckwith’s clerk and fellow accomplice, was taking the Fifth Amendment.

On the negative side, prosecutor John Sullivan had documents written in Cassie’s own hand. In a matter involving Fay & Wurst, a New York City law firm who’d performed some work on Cassie’s behalf, Mr. Fay had informed Mrs. Chadwick that his firm required the $10,000 they were owed right away. Fay wrote to say he was passing through Cleveland and he’d receive her check personally if she’d have one ready. Cassie hastily dispatched a note to the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin, addressed to the clerk, A.B. Spear:
Could we arrange this matter of Mr. W. and Mr. F. in this way: they don’t even know that I have ever met you or done any business with you. I think I might say I was going to make a loan through your bank in connection with the College. Now this he would not repeat because he wants to act for me in every way he can in the future. I would not tell him anything that would ever show that we had ever done any business. I would ask you to certify my check dated October 10th, and this would get the matter out of their hands. I could then get the funds on the goods in the East to meet the check, and you would not be anything out, so if you will draw the check for $15,000 and certify it on your checks I can sign it and he will be none the wiser. Now I will pay you and Mr. B. well for this favor, and am sure it will be safe, and you need not let them know anything about matters. There will be nothing for you folks to say, only that the check will be good on that date.... I send you also my note dated to cover the F&W certified check, and a small commission for your kindness. I think by advice of my attorney I am myself going to be able to do something which will be of great interest to us all. He will prepare the papers today. I was sick and did not get it arranged yesterday. Please phone me if you can do this. If you do this, I save. What I save, I give you.
Very truly, C.L.C. 

Postscript. I mean I will tell them that I had a deal with the college that will pass through your bank, which is true for I have had, and if they help me further then it will be through you. 

The next day, Cassie followed up her note with clarification:
My Dear Mr. Spear and Beckwith:
I just said [to Fay and Wurst] I would be receiving funds from a deal that would go through your bank in connection with the College. You need only listen to him. I don’t think he will ask any questions. I don’t want him to be in possession of any facts. I think best not to. It will only be necessary to you to say that you
will renew the paper. Mr. Fay said he was going to take the check up and show it to you, and ask you to renew their paper on the strength of the check not being payable before November 1st. Hoping this will pass off all safe, with many thanks to you both,
Very gratefully, C.L. Chadwick 

P.S. He is going first thing in the A.M. He remarked that you would be surprised to see the check in his hands, so you better look surprised. If you do not say it, you can look it. 

Lawyer Dawley promised Cassie he’d do everything he could to keep her out of jail. But if she did in fact possess any powers of mesmerism, Dawley thought to himself, this would be a good time to exert them.

****

1903 turned into 1904 and 1904 was inching toward 1905 and Mrs. Chadwick had still not transferred the Carnegie funds into the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin like she’d promised. Charles T. Beckwith was palsied with fear. Cassie remained, as always, calm.

She’d arranged a bridge loan, she said to Beckwith in her most soothing lisp, through a prominent man in Massachussetts.

Beckwith no longer trusted Cassie’s talk of “prominent men.” Though she and Beckwith had never discussed Andrew Carnegie personally, Cassie had insinuated the man into nearly every conversation. Cassie told Beckwith that she’d spoken with the Reverend Charles Eaton, pastor of the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, whose most famous congregationalist was John D. Rockefeller. Cassie had shared with the Reverend the story of her illegitimate parentage (“a prominent industrialist in the Pittsburgh region”) and her present money woes. Eaton sent her to his brother John Eaton, a Boston lawyer, who arranged for Cassie to meet with an industrialist and financier named Herbert Newton, of Brookline, Massachussetts.

Using a promissory note from Beckwith, itself backed by the phony bonds in Iri Reynold’s vault, Cassie got Newton to loan her $79,000 from his personal account. She also left Brookline with a promissory note, redeemable at any bank, for an additional $50,000. For the $129,000 she agreed to repay $190,000, plus $800 which Newton included to defray her traveling expenses between Cleveland and Brookline. But Herbert Newton hadn’t become a rich man in the back-biting world of industrial America by playing bullshit. He had driven vicious bargains – like $62,000 interest for a $130,000 loan – and he’d held the man across the table to the terms. He made no exceptions for Mrs. Chadwick. In early November 1904, he demanded she at least pay the interest due. She wired to say she couldn’t do so right away. Afterward she did not respond to Newton’s calls or wires, so the old gentleman traveled to Cleveland himself, where Cassie offered to cover the debt with a new note. Newton filed suit against Cassie on November 22, 1904. Word shot from Boston westward that Cleveland’s celebrated spendthrift – who had thrilled scores of bankers by paying back-alley interest for front-door loans – was soon to bust. Two Cleveland banks followed Newton’s lead with their own suits, for $67,000. A pile-on ensued. Elyria Savings Deposit Bank demanded $10,000; the American Exchange Bank of New York City, $29,000;
a Pittsburgh industrialist, James Woods Friend, was owed $75,000; the Euclid Avenue Savings Bank and Trust of Cleveland, $38,000. The debits kept piling up, past $2 million.

Though Iri Reynolds kept quiet publicly, he admitted to the board of Wade Park Bank that he’d loaned Mrs. Chadwick $17,000 in bank funds and $10,000 of his own. That wasn’t so bad for an institution Wade Park’s size, but the direct loans were the least significant aspect of the relationship. As depositors would soon learn, all of Mrs. Chadwick’s loans were drawn against her bonds at Wade Park. The Wade Park board was forced to announce that no withdrawals of more than $100 could be made without 60 days’ notice, lest a run should shut down the bank altogether. There were depositor assaults on many banks, including the little Citizens National Bank in Oberlin. Chairman William Bedortha, pitching in with Beckwith and Spear, kept customers happy until nearly sundown on the Saturday following Newton’s lawsuit. But on Monday, November 28, 1904, a sign greeted anxious travelers who approached the bank’s shuttered doors: “Closed Until Further Notice.” Beckwith rode straightaway to 8214 Euclid, crying, begging, eventually sinking to his knees. Cassie recoiled, jabbering, “I’ll pay, I’ll pay, I’ll pay! But I can’t pay now.” Beckwith howled from the floor, “You must! I must take the funds with me back to Oberlin. We can visit Mr. Reynolds, at Wade Park. You have the securities there.” Beckwith pleaded with his chilly-eyed mistress, “I don’t care for my own money. But the bank’s money, it belongs to others. Its loss means the loss of my honor. I am too old to face disaster now.”

Repulsed by Beckwith’s slobbering on her dress and hands, Cassie turned defiant. “I can’t pay now. I cannot pay now! Good day, Mr. Beckwith.” When Beckwith still wouldn’t rise, she gave him several checks, totaling $50,000. These were made out to her by other parties, and endorsed by Mrs. Chadwick in Beckwith’s presence. He’d have to hold the checks a week, Cassie said when Beckwith rose to his feet. The declaration nearly sent him back to the floor. After leaving the Chadwick house, Beckwith took the checks to the banks they were drawn on, where they were each denied.

At an emergency meeting of the bank board, attended also by the Trustees of Oberlin College, Beckwith swore, “These loans are backed by a note for $500,000 endorsed by a man who can pay it as easily as you or I would pay a nickel at the fruit stand.” When pressed for detail, he shook from head to toe, twisting his thin frame like a crepe myrtle in a blizzard, crying, “I can’t, I can’t. If I lose home, honor, reputation, everything, I must keep locked in my breast this secret. I am bound by an oath I cannot break.”

Chairman Bedortha was furious, calling Beckwith a fool and worse, but the misery-ridden banker would not give up his secret. Herbert Newton had no such scruples. He told the courts and the press that he’d been assured by Beckwith that the debt was underwritten by the name of Andrew Carnegie. Once the Carnegie rumor came out, Beckwith and Iri Reynolds had no more wiggle room. They had to produce the bonds or else.

As Reynolds fumbled with the key to Cassie’s safe deposit box, he said that yes, long ago he should have opened the envelope given to him by Mrs. Chadwick and verified its contents, “but to do so would have evidenced a distrust I did not feel.” Reynolds emerged from the vault with a stack of personal checks and a poorly worded, poorly printed Deed of Trust signed in a poorly forged version of Andrew Carnegie’s handwriting.
Known [sic] all men by these presents [sic], that I, Andrew Carnegie, do hereby acknowledge that I hold in trust for Mrs. Cassie L. Chadwick, wife of Dr. Leroy S. Chadwick of 1924 Euclid avenue [sic], city of Cleveland, county of Cuyahoga, and the state of Ohio, propety [sic] assigned and delivered to me for
said Cassie L. Chadwick by her uncle, Fredrick [sic] R. Mason, in his lifetime (now deceased) which property is of the appraised value of ten million two hundred and forty-six thousand dollars,
$10,246,000. 

Through his attorneys, Carnegie issued a terse statement: “I never heard of, nor saw, Mrs. Chadwick or Mme. Devere. I have never had any dealings of any nature with Mrs. Chadwick or Mme. Devere. I never signed a note for $500,000 or any other amount; and if there is such a note bearing my signature in existence, it is a forgery.”

The following day, Cleveland’s Plain Dealer reported that Charles T. Beckwith was suffering extreme nervosa: Beckwith’s modest home bore a sign saying “Rooms for Rent Here.” He was distraught. When a friend sent him flowers, he burst into tears: “Is it still possible I have one friend left? Is it possible that there is still a single person in the world who has a kindly feeling for me?” “I am a broken, dishonored old man,” Beckwith sobbed. “It is now too late. All is lost.... If I could relieve the sorrow and suffering that I caused, I could die in peace.”

Closing Arguments 

Cassie’s best hope, as attorney Jay P. Dawley explained to her quietly, was the jury. Composed of 11 farmers and a real estate salesman, the group might resent a cadre of wealthy men ganging up on a woman of advanced age (the life expectancy of a woman at that time averaging 47 years). It would also help if Cassie had someone to sit beside her, Dawley suggested, someone offering moral support and a sympathetic figure for the jury to focus on.

Leroy Chadwick was still playing his organ in New York City, so Cassie was alone. However, she had a son, she revealed to Dawley. Born in 1886, sometime after Mazie Bagley and before Madame Devere, the boy was named Emil. He’d been raised by Cassie’s mother, Alice Bigley. Dawley arranged to have 19-year-old Emil Bigley join his mother, whom he’d seldom seen, at the defendant’s table for the duration of the trial. His arms spread wide before the jury box at the end of testimony, Dawley groaned, “A woman stands alone on one side of this courtroom.” Turning to the defendant’s table, he gestured toward Cassie. His eyes drooped in sadness as he watched her clutching a black handkerchief, her gaze fixed with horror on the courtroom floor. “Arrayed against her on the other side are all the forces of the great, the powerful, the magnificent United States government, the strongest, the mightiest, the most feared government in the world. And this tremendous crushing power stands as the accuser of this one weak woman....”

In his turn, John J. Sullivan began by praising Andrew Carnegie. Sullivan told how Carnegie had not wanted the innocent victims at Oberlin College to suffer for Charles Beckwith’s folly, so Mr. Carnegie had covered the bank’s losses with a personal check. After a thank-you visit with Oberlin College’s president, Henry King, Carnegie donated another $165,000 to expand the college’s library.

But John Sullivan warned his jury not to allow Mr. Carnegie’s beneficence to obscure the real and enduring threat of the woman called Cassie Chadwick. He reminded them of Deputy Sheriff Porter, who had guarded Mrs. Chadwick. Porter had said, “Every time she looked at me I became dizzy. I can’t understand those eyes of hers. The first time Mrs. Chadwick got a good, square look at me I began to blink under the piercing gaze, until I was forced to turn my eyes in another direction. I grew dizzy from the effect, but something, I don’t know what it was, would make me return my gaze to hers.”

“You have the opportunity to do right today. And you have the opportunity to do wrong. Whatever you may do, I feel I have done, in my humble way, the best that I know, to convict a criminal of such conspicuous note, a notorious and dangerous character, the most dangerous criminal known to human society today.”

Awaiting the verdict, Cassie was among the most composed persons in the court. The jury reviewed the case for five hours, during which time Cassie sat at the trial table, clad in ripples of black silk, with Emil at her side. Only a few spectators were left when the jurors returned. A writer in the Cleveland Plain Dealer narrated the announcement of the verdict: “‘Guilty,’ the clerk read, and the sound of that word was like a shot. But Mrs. Chadwick was hard of hearing; and of all the persons there, she alone had not heard. Emil put his arms around his mother’s neck and whispered in her ear. A spasm of pain crossed her face; her head gradually fell forward, and for a moment she was silent. It was as though the blow had crushed her completely. A few tears welled from her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She put her handkerchief before her face to stop the sudden flow, but it was useless. Her weeping grew until she was sobbing like a child. Thinking his client hadn’t made out the wording, Dawley leaned over to tell her, ‘We have lost, Mrs. Chadwick.’”

When the bailiff approached, she became agitated, awkwardly stumbling from her seat, reaching for either her parasol or Emil’s arm, it wasn’t clear which. “Let me go!” she screamed as the bailiff’s hand cupped her elbow. “Oh my God! Let me go. I’m not guilty, I’m not guilty. Let me go.”

****

Cleveland attorney John A. Smith, tired of the legends, told the Plain Dealer in 1919 that Cassie’s magic came from a quite natural source: “I don’t want anyone to talk to me about hypnotism or anything of that kind. The quality and quantity of her nerve can only be estimated when it is remembered that she left the penitentiary [in 1893], settled within 100 miles of her former operations; married a respectable man, created an elaborate establishment on Euclid Avenue; made a play for society, and won out to some extent. She numbered the financiers of the city among her intimate friends; she borrowed upwards of $1 million and faked it for years. Mrs. Chadwick had not a figure that charmed; her person evoked sympathy, if noticed at all. Her face did not attract, but it did appear to indicate honesty. Her eyes cast no spell. They were sharp, seeing eyes, the windows of her clever brain. From her lips came no blandishment, but a ready story. She made words fit any situation, vanishing obstacles with her woman’s tongue.”

On a cool sunny afternoon in late April 1905, Elizabeth Bigley, the Canadian farm girl who grew up to become Cassie Chadwick, the most notorious woman of her time, was sentenced to ten years in the Ohio State Penitentiary. She died there in October of 1907.