April 8, 2025 • 34 mins
In part one of two, we take a look at the story of a woman who wanted into east coast high society… and got there. Cassie Chadwick went by many names to cover her tracks, but ended up pulling one of the greatest cons in American history, securing her legacy alongside the upper-class she so coveted.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Mary Kay McBrayer
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth, and Jacob Bronstein
Associate Producer is Leo Culp
Produced by Antonio Enriquez
Theme Music by Tyler Cash
Executive Produced by Scott Waxman and Emma DeMuth
Special thanks to:
Carter, Stephen L.. Invisible. Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
Pre-order Mary Kay's forthcoming true crime book 'Madame Queen: The The Life and Crimes of Harlem’s Underground Racketeer, Stephanie St. Clair' here
Check out Annie Reed's book, 'The Impostor Heiress: Cassie Chadwick, The Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age' at Diversion Books for a deeper look at Cassie Chadwick.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion audio. In October of nineteen oh two, Missus doctor
Cassie Chadwick was in her suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
It was just a short stay before she made the
(00:29):
trip across the Atlantic to tend to her husband, doctor
Leroy Chadwick. He was convalescing from Roman fever in Europe.
Cassie was resting in the parlor, wrapped in a silk
kimono when her maiden knocked. There was a man at
the door who demanded to speak to her. She handed
(00:49):
Cassie his calling card. It read w. H. Theobald, United
States Treasury Department, Custom House, New York, a customs agent
here for her at the finest hotel in New York City,
just as she was about to leave the country. Well,
(01:13):
whoever he thought he was, he had to know that
calling on a woman unannounced was bad manners. She came
to the cracked door and jerked it open. She opened
the conversation by saying, how dare you intrude upon my
privacy without being announced? He reacted just as she wanted.
(01:35):
He was shocked, and then William Theobald regained his composure.
He was here to retrieve the necklace that she smuggled
into the country on June seventeenth, nineteen oh two. She
knew the one, a delicate Art Nouveau piece with diamonds
and rubies. But Cassie scoffed at him. She said she
(01:58):
didn't know what he was talking about. She hadn't smuggled
any necklace, and she wasn't giving him anything. She went
on to say she'd have him arrested. She didn't know
who he really was, and besides, to seize property, well,
he would need a warrant for that. Did he have
a warrant? Could she see it? William was kind of impressed.
(02:23):
Usually people caved when a federal officer came to call,
especially women, especially rich women. This Cassie Chadwick was holding
her own. William said that if she didn't fork over
the necklace, he'd get a warrant, and he'd park his
ass right outside her hotel room in the corridor for
(02:44):
everyone to see until the warrant arrived the next morning.
Cassie couldn't have that a federal agent stalking her could
kill her reputation, so she conceded that she knew what
necklace he meant, even though she did and owe duties
on it. Obviously, she didn't have that fantastic piece of
(03:04):
jewelry on her person at the moment, so she couldn't
give it to him then, even if she wanted to.
That piece was in a safety deposit box downtown. If
William really wanted to see that piece of her collection,
she could meet him at the Collector of Customs office
the following morning, assuming he could get a warrant by then,
(03:27):
she would temporarily surrender the necklace for him to investigate.
William left in a huff, irritated that she'd known her
rights and exercised them. Even when she surrendered the necklace,
he would still feel like Cassie Chadwick had won. Welcome
(04:01):
to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary
Kay mcbraer. Today's episode we're calling the Great Conwoman of
the Gilded Age. It's part one of a two part
series about the story of a woman who wanted into
East Coast high society and got there. I grew up
(04:48):
middle class, so it took me until fairly recently, after
pouring over hundreds of episodes of financial podcasts, to finally
realize if you have enough money to begin with you
can live straight off dividends and then theoretically you just cruise.
The best illustration I have of this in popular culture
(05:09):
is The Adult Kids on Succession. If you're not familiar
with that show in broad strokes, it features a Scottish
immigrant patriarch who bootstrapped himself into huge media conglomerate success
and now has more money than God. Logan Roy's four
kids are, though, as he says, not serious people. It
(05:34):
sounds cruel for a father to say that, but any
regular non blue blood watching the show would have burst
out laughing with me, because he's exactly right. They're completely
out of touch with reality and they've never done a
lick of work in their lives. Money is an abstract
concept to them. People don't matter. The whole family is decadent,
(05:59):
and that's the type of rich that Cassie Chadwick wanted
to get to. By the way, if you've watched Julian
Fellow's HBO show The Gilded Age, you might already be
a little familiar with a fictionalized version of this story.
Remember the character of the heiress Maud Beaten. That character
(06:20):
was inspired by Cassie Chadwick and Honestly, the source material
is just as interesting, if not more so, than the
dramatized version. I want to take a second to cite
our main source for this article, Annie Reid's book The
Impostor Airess Cassie Chadwick, The Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age.
(06:40):
There are a lot more details about how Cassie got
to be so rich in that book. So if you
like what you hear here, and I think you will,
you might want to check out Impostor Airas and we
will link to the book in the show notes. And
at the end of part two, I get to interview
the author, Anny Reid, all about her process of writing
(07:01):
the book and just how difficult it was to track
down a woman who didn't want her name known over
a century ago. Elizabeth Betty Bigley, that was her original name.
She started off as a farmer's daughter in Ontario, Canada.
She was the fifth of eight children. She wasn't especially pretty,
(07:24):
and when she was a kid she lost hearing in
one ear, so she spoke with a lisp, and her
classmates loved to pick on her for that. But Betty
had big dreams and she had a plan to get there.
She ventured into her first con when she was just
thirteen years old. Let's talk about promisory notes. It's relevant,
(07:55):
I promise if you're like I was until I started
researching for the episode, you might have heard that term
and equated it with a money thing. That's about all
I knew. I knew I needed one for a mortgage,
and although I understood how to get one, I wasn't
super clear on how it manifested. Now I know that
(08:20):
promissory notes are basically statements of loans. Chase Bank says
that currently promissory notes are agreements that include terms like
the amount you owe, your interest rate, your payment schedule,
the total amount you will pay, the length of your
repayment schedule, if and how the payments will change as
(08:42):
time goes on, and where your payments should be sent.
In the case of a personal loan, which is more
relevant to this story, the note will also include a
signature from the person lending the money. It was a
sort of assurance. So, for instance, if a person came
(09:02):
into your store and wanted to buy groceries on credit,
they'd show you this paper. That's because you, an astute
store owner, would not let just anyone buy on credit,
so you would give the note a lookover. And more
important than any of the information I just said, was
that signature. Depending on the reliability of the person who
(09:27):
loaned your customer the money, you would consider running a
tab for them, because if the guy standing in front
of you didn't pay you, the loaner was good for it.
I'm so grateful for credit cards, man, I mean, imagine
having to keep that form on your person and present
it anytime you wanted to buy something super inconvenient. Plus,
(09:49):
what if the shop owner wasn't familiar with that name?
What if he turned you down? What then? It's not
like you could just pull a different card out of
your pocket. Probably Betty, whom I'm now going to reference
as Cassie just to ease the telling of the story,
(10:11):
even though Cassie wasn't what she went by yet. Cassie
learned about these notes as an adolescent, and she also
learned that the best way to get money is to
convince people you already have a lot of it. Cassie
wrote a letter declaring herself an inheritor of a mysterious
uncle who had died. That uncle did not exist, but
(10:36):
she took it to the local bank, and it turns
out she had created a good enough forgery to fool them.
Cassie asked for checks so that she could use the
money before it sort of hit her account, and she
got them. The banker signed off on her checks, so
basically the checks were real, but the accounts were fake.
(11:00):
So when she wanted to buy something, she bypassed that
promissory note situation and wrote a personal check. Store owners
would have been pretty familiar with checks, so there was
a lot less risk for her. I need to take
a second to remind y'all, she's thirteen years old, tricking
bankers who had been banking their whole lives. If that
(11:24):
was my daughter, I wouldn't know whether to be super
upset at her lack of integrity or very impressed at
her ingenuity. The bank was upset, understandably. After just a
(11:47):
few months, Cassie got arrested and they warned her to
never do it again. What Cassie heard was this way
won't work again, so she took stock of the situation.
Why had she failed, Well, she'd been faking her identity
as an heiress in her hometown, which was full of
(12:07):
people who knew her and had known her family since
before she was born. People knew she was the fifth child,
and they knew her siblings weren't heirs. It was your
simple big fish, small pond scenario. She was simply too
recognizable there. Plus, she'd put all her eggs in one basket.
(12:30):
When that one bank learned her one benefactor was fake,
the con collapsed. She'd have to go around Lake Erie
to meet some new people for a scheme like this
to work again, and of course, diversify, So that's what
she did. Cassie learned from her failure. At thirteen years old,
(13:05):
she once tried to dress as a man to pawn
a gold watch, and she had deduced that it was
easier for men to acquire money than women. But that
didn't work either. She was immediately bounced from the shop.
She realized that her first idea had been a good foundation,
so she revisited that. At twenty two, she walked into
(13:26):
a drag goods store, made her selections, and at the counter,
she showed the cashier a small card. Cassie got printed
cards made that announced her as Miss Bigley, heiress to
eighteen thousand dollars. She explained to the store proprietor that
her relative had recently died and the funds were temporarily
(13:48):
tied up in legalities. Then she produced a promissory note.
It was signed by a farmer in Brantford. Could she
pay with this? It worked, Even though the checks seemed
a little more secure, Promissory notes worked better for her,
at least back then, because they sweetened the pot. Not
(14:09):
only would the proprietor receive payment for what he was owed,
but he'd get that interest percentage as well. So she
also learned that the greed of other people could play
out in her favor too. Cassie also ran a little
cash back scheme. Whatever she bought wouldn't total the amount
(14:30):
on the promissory note, so she'd receive that extra back
in cash, which was even better for her since you know,
cash don't bounce. And she went hard. It started with
Sundry's at the dry goods store, and then it escalated
into buying big things like custom organs the musical instruments.
(14:53):
It worked until it didn't. People couldn't get their banks
to cash the promissory notes. Cassie didn't cave under the pressure, though,
She just explained that this new inheritance was still tied up.
I mean, you know how the court likes to drag
their feet. This time her arrest ended in the courtroom.
(15:26):
The witnesses were endless. Not only were all of the
proprietors whom she duped trotted out to testify against her,
but the men whose signatures she forged were brought into
court too. They shrugged, amused and said this was the
first they'd ever heard of her. After two hours of deliberation,
(15:47):
the all male jury ruled her not guilty. They said
she was insane. So Cassie went back to her parents'
house and I couldn't find any information on how they
reacted to her scheme, So I'm going to ask the
author Annie read about it when I interview her in
part two. Anyway, Cassie started to revise her plan, and
(16:09):
I'll tell you all about it after the break. We
left Cassie regrouping from that arrest and not guilty ruling
(16:29):
at her parents' house. Three years later, in eighteen eighty two,
Cassie moved to Cleveland to live with her sister Alice
and Alice's new husband. She didn't want to impose, She
just needed to get her feet up under her, so
Alice agreed, and while Alice thought she was walking the
beat to find work, Cassie was actually taking stock of
(16:52):
their house. She went to the bank and took out alone,
using her sister's furniture as collateral. Not cool. Alice and
her husband didn't think it was cool either, and they
kicked Cassie out, which was actually fine. Cassie had gotten
her feet under her, and she moved to a different
(17:13):
neighborhood in the same city, and she got a new game.
At this point in time, we're leaning into the age
of spiritualism, and Cassie was all about that. What a
(17:33):
fantasy that people would pay you money to tell them
lies about themselves. All she had to do was change
her name to something exotic and talking riddles, and she
could call herself a clairvoyant and charge for it. That's
when Madame Lyly LaRose, that's Cassie, by the way, met
doctor Wallace Springsteen. By now she knew that doctors were
(17:58):
always a good investment, and Wallace was enthralled by Lilly.
The papers called her the Lady of the Hypnotic Eye,
and he fell for her hard. They were married in
December of eighteen eighty three, As was standard at the time,
their marriage was announced in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper,
(18:21):
and then the creditors came calling. Literally, merchants saw her
photo in the paper, and they showed up at Wallace's
front door furious, demanding to be paid. Wallace thought the
debts could damage his credit note because she accumulated them
before their marriage. I don't think they would have, at
(18:43):
least not now. But she was his wife, so he
paid them off for twelve days, which is when Wallace
ended the marriage. He also published a note in the
Cleveland Dealer which said quote, I hereby forbid any person
from trusting or harboring my wife is I will pay
(19:03):
no bills of her contracting after this date. Cassie was
not deterred, at least not much. She reinvented herself again.
Cassie became Madame Marie Rosa. She scammed her way through Erie, Pennsylvania,
(19:28):
until she gathered enough to get her back to Cleveland.
When the people who loaned her money wrote asking for repayment,
Cassie sent letters saying that Marie had died. She even
included a falsified obituary Cassie married two of her clients
while she was a psychic. First was a farmer, and
(19:50):
second was businessman C. L. Hoover, whom she claimed as
the father to her child, Emal Hoover. She sent Emial
to live with her family in Canada for a while.
When Hoover died in eighteen eighty eight, Cassie inherited his
estate worth fifty thousand dollars. It was enough to reinvent
(20:10):
herself again. This time she went to Toledo and she
told fortunes as Madame Lydia de Vere. She even scammed
one client, Joseph Lamb, out of ten thousand dollars by
becoming his financial adviser. She was getting sloppy again. She
had Joseph cash promissory notes on her behalf. She'd forged
(20:33):
the signature on them. When the first interaction went off
without a hitch, she had him cash several more, over
forty thousand dollars worth. Before long, Cassie and Joseph were
both arrested. Joseph was acquitted soon after, since the court
regarded him as her victim. Cassie, though again she refused
(20:55):
to cave. She told the prison guard that he'd lose
five thousand dollars in a business deal, which he did,
and then she told him he'd die of cancer, which
he also did. And this is why I don't mess
with fortune tellers. You start to wonder was it gonna
happen anyway, or did it happen because they incepted this idea.
(21:18):
I mean, Cassie is a fraud, but she was also right.
She maintained her clairvoyance during her whole prison sentence. She
started a letter writing campaign to Governor and future President
William McKinley, declaring her remorse and willingness to change. Although
(21:38):
she had been sentenced to nine and a half years originally,
she was so convincing in her letters that she only
served three and a half. Cassie and Emil moved back
in with her sister Alice, but she already had a
(21:59):
reputation around Alice's friends, and her husband didn't want Cassie
there to begin with. Enough was enough time to find
another doctor. Cassie met doctor Leroy Chadwick when he was
forty four and she was thirty nine in eighteen ninety six.
He was a wealthy widower, sole provider for his eleven
(22:22):
year old daughter Mary, his elderly mother, and his elder sister, Clara,
who was partially paralyzed. Leroy was born into high society.
His family home was a brick mansion on Millionaire's Row
in Cleveland. On top of all that, Leroy had rheumatism.
That's the point that Cassie seized on. When she met him.
(22:46):
She was going by the name Cassie Hoover. She offered
a massage and it worked. Wonders. He was smitten almost immediately.
But Leroy was no fool. He'd only been single for
two years, and he knew both that he was a
(23:08):
catch and that he might be a little vulnerable. So,
like any sensible person, he introduced this new woman to
his best friend as a sort of character assessment. Y'all
know how it goes. A new broom sweeps clean. When
you get excited over a new crush, you tend to
only see the positives. Cassie's former husband was a doctor,
(23:31):
so she understood the life. She was charming and perceptive,
and she was so easy to talk to. Leroy knew
this slippery slope, or at least he was wary that
it might be the case. So, like a sensible person.
He introduced this new woman to his best friend listeners.
(23:51):
If y'all aren't doing this, if you don't have your
viper's den of selected friends who will vet your dates
and then be brutally honest with you, you should. You
need the friend that you kind of don't want to
introduce to your new significant other because you know they're
going to give it to you straight. For Leroy, that
(24:14):
was West Park banker Erie Reynolds. Cassie must have known
that meeting Erie was a test, so she turned on
the charm. She asked him all about his work, and
she learned that he was as proud of his bank
as he might have been of his own child. He'd
(24:34):
built the business himself, started it in his own home.
Now it was one of the best banks in town.
Cassie admired him aloud, and that's how she won Erie,
which in turn let her win Leroy. True. Leroy had
other friends who tried to warn him about Cassie, but
(24:57):
those weren't his best friends. He ignored them, and he proposed.
As soon as her name was cleared from her parole board,
Cassie married Leroy Chadwick. He knew nothing about her criminal record,
and he wouldn't not for a long time. Coming up
(25:18):
here about Cassie's longest con stay with us, you might
remember both Cassie herself and her new husband, Leroy Chadwick,
(25:42):
both had children from prior marriages. Honestly, the blending of
the families couldn't have gone better. Cassie and Mary loved
each other, and Leroy thought Emil was an exceptionally well
behaved boy. He said, I love him as if he
were my own. It actually seems like Leroy and Cassie
(26:03):
were a good partnership. They each provided the other with
their needs and wants, and their families got along well.
Everything seemed perfect, especially to Cassie. Her social calendar filled
up with balls, luncheons, and trips to the theater, and
society mostly welcomed her, even if they were surprised at
(26:24):
her sudden appearance. Cassie fit herself right in among the
wealthiest society women. And what's even more exciting, in my opinion,
was that she redecorated and it was luxurious. Let me
describe it to you in detail. First, she decorated herself.
(26:52):
She took notes at the galas she attended, and she
stormed the doors of all the stores the ladies mentioned.
She bought gowns black velvet, pink, taffeta, silk chiffon. Cassie
told the salespeople not to bother measuring the fabric, just
send the whole bolt. And she spared no detail when
(27:14):
it came to embroidery and lace, especially the decorative collars.
She bought hats with braids and feathers, marvelous shoes, plush
fur coats, petticoats to give her skirts that coveted bell shape,
and my favorite part the jewels. She put jewels on everything.
(27:36):
She bought silver plates with embedded rubies, pearl dog collars,
and sometimes, y'all, this is a true flex she just
bought loose gems by the tray. Next came the house.
It was gorgeous, to be sure. It wasn't the biggest
mansion on Millionaire's row, but Cassie made it up like
(27:57):
her own, covering the walls with whimsical landscapes, filling the
corners with mahogany cabinets, lamps and cut glass figurines and
marble busts. On every surface. She had mastered the right
ways to show off, and so she started to host
soires in their own home. It was fashionable at the
(28:20):
time to decorate with flowers, so she raided the florist
and she threw theme parties, which is exactly what I
would do if I could spend big money on one
dumb thing. One theme imitated a steamship trip to Europe.
She had custom menus printed with their children's faces on them.
The staff molded ice cream into the shapes of ships.
(28:43):
It was a perfect way to display the Chadwick's wealth,
and she knew the neighbors were counting their money. The
society pages even rode up that party the next day,
saying the whole affair was carried out in perfect taste.
(29:08):
It seemed like Cassie had gotten everything she ever wanted,
and this time she'd done it pretty legitimately. But of
course the story doesn't end here. In eighteen ninety eight,
LeRoy's mother died. The whole house went into mourning for
the spring, but then by the summer, the Chadwicks decided
(29:30):
to travel to Europe as a family of four. LeRoy's
sister Clara stayed behind. It was Cassie's first trip abroad.
Despite the theme of the dinner party, and it felt
like a rite of passage. Wealthy people went every summer,
sure as the season would happen, and the ship itself
was as luxurious as one can imagine, full of smoking rooms,
(29:53):
drawing rooms, and music rooms. In Europe, they skipped from
luxury hotels in London to Paris, to Brussels to Rome,
and the best part about it, at least for Cassie,
was the shopping. The clothes there were totally different. There
was art everywhere, and she bought it at every stop.
(30:16):
She also noticed that Brussels specialized in diamonds. That's where
she discovered that she could have jewelry melted down and remade,
though really France had the best lapidaries. By the way,
this is the best way to get jewelry in my opinion.
If you have a very clever jeweler who knows what
they're doing, and I do so dm me. If you
(30:38):
need a guy in Atlanta, then you can get some
beautiful custom pieces for a very fair price. And you
can reuse, melt down, or trade in any jewelry that
might have been passed down to you and it's just
not your taste or given to you by a shitty
ex for example. Cassie is not like me in that way.
Though he didn't want a good, fair deal. She wanted more.
(31:04):
Extravagance was the thing for Cassie. The thing was, at
this time, customs duties were ten percent from Europe to America.
I don't know if that's still the case, but Columbia
reimburses twelve percent at the border for luxury items. But
that's there. And now, what I do know is that
(31:25):
ten percent ate into Cassie's funds. So she hid her
jewels and she didn't declare them at the border. I
also know that even at that time, there were no
customs duties on melted down jewelry, so this con seems unnecessary.
Leroy had told her to slow down her spending, but
he wasn't really holding her to it. He had money.
(31:47):
Kind of seems like she just carried this one out
for the hell of it. If you remember we're from
the top of the episode, one of those smuggled necklaces
is what brought that customs agent wh Theobald to her
(32:08):
hotel room. Is not clear who snitched on her, nor
how they even knew it had been smuggled. Still, she
got busted. William Theobald was pissed at Cassie when he
left her sweet, but he was also a little impressed,
very impressed. She handled herself well. Most rich women were
(32:29):
kind of airheads, and if they weren't actually dumb, they
played dumb when stacked up against his authority. The fact
was he wasn't used to being stood up to. Cassie
did relinquish the necklace, but only because it meant next
to nothing to her. She had jules galore, and this
little federal agent had only grazed the surface. He didn't
(32:54):
even know that she was the secret, illegitimate daughter of
the Great Andrew Carnegie. Join me next week on the
(33:18):
Greatest true crime Stories ever told. For our second part
of two about Cassie Chadwick, the great con Woman of
the Gilded Age, I'd like to shout out a few
key sources that made it possible for me to tell
this week's story, especially Annie Reid's book The Impostor Heiress
(33:39):
Cassie Chadwick, The Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age. Also
Karen Abbott's article in Smithsonian Magazine, The High Priestess of
Fraudulent Finance, and of course all The other sources I
used are cited in the show notes. The Greatest True
(34:03):
Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted this episode. I
also wrote this episode. Our show is produced by Emma
Dumouth and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Theme music by Tyler Cash.
(34:24):
Executive produced by Scott Waxman.
Diversion audio. In October of nineteen oh two, Missus doctor
Cassie Chadwick was in her suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
It was just a short stay before she made the
(00:29):
trip across the Atlantic to tend to her husband, doctor
Leroy Chadwick. He was convalescing from Roman fever in Europe.
Cassie was resting in the parlor, wrapped in a silk
kimono when her maiden knocked. There was a man at
the door who demanded to speak to her. She handed
(00:49):
Cassie his calling card. It read w. H. Theobald, United
States Treasury Department, Custom House, New York, a customs agent
here for her at the finest hotel in New York City,
just as she was about to leave the country. Well,
(01:13):
whoever he thought he was, he had to know that
calling on a woman unannounced was bad manners. She came
to the cracked door and jerked it open. She opened
the conversation by saying, how dare you intrude upon my
privacy without being announced? He reacted just as she wanted.
(01:35):
He was shocked, and then William Theobald regained his composure.
He was here to retrieve the necklace that she smuggled
into the country on June seventeenth, nineteen oh two. She
knew the one, a delicate Art Nouveau piece with diamonds
and rubies. But Cassie scoffed at him. She said she
(01:58):
didn't know what he was talking about. She hadn't smuggled
any necklace, and she wasn't giving him anything. She went
on to say she'd have him arrested. She didn't know
who he really was, and besides, to seize property, well,
he would need a warrant for that. Did he have
a warrant? Could she see it? William was kind of impressed.
(02:23):
Usually people caved when a federal officer came to call,
especially women, especially rich women. This Cassie Chadwick was holding
her own. William said that if she didn't fork over
the necklace, he'd get a warrant, and he'd park his
ass right outside her hotel room in the corridor for
(02:44):
everyone to see until the warrant arrived the next morning.
Cassie couldn't have that a federal agent stalking her could
kill her reputation, so she conceded that she knew what
necklace he meant, even though she did and owe duties
on it. Obviously, she didn't have that fantastic piece of
(03:04):
jewelry on her person at the moment, so she couldn't
give it to him then, even if she wanted to.
That piece was in a safety deposit box downtown. If
William really wanted to see that piece of her collection,
she could meet him at the Collector of Customs office
the following morning, assuming he could get a warrant by then,
(03:27):
she would temporarily surrender the necklace for him to investigate.
William left in a huff, irritated that she'd known her
rights and exercised them. Even when she surrendered the necklace,
he would still feel like Cassie Chadwick had won. Welcome
(04:01):
to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary
Kay mcbraer. Today's episode we're calling the Great Conwoman of
the Gilded Age. It's part one of a two part
series about the story of a woman who wanted into
East Coast high society and got there. I grew up
(04:48):
middle class, so it took me until fairly recently, after
pouring over hundreds of episodes of financial podcasts, to finally
realize if you have enough money to begin with you
can live straight off dividends and then theoretically you just cruise.
The best illustration I have of this in popular culture
(05:09):
is The Adult Kids on Succession. If you're not familiar
with that show in broad strokes, it features a Scottish
immigrant patriarch who bootstrapped himself into huge media conglomerate success
and now has more money than God. Logan Roy's four
kids are, though, as he says, not serious people. It
(05:34):
sounds cruel for a father to say that, but any
regular non blue blood watching the show would have burst
out laughing with me, because he's exactly right. They're completely
out of touch with reality and they've never done a
lick of work in their lives. Money is an abstract
concept to them. People don't matter. The whole family is decadent,
(05:59):
and that's the type of rich that Cassie Chadwick wanted
to get to. By the way, if you've watched Julian
Fellow's HBO show The Gilded Age, you might already be
a little familiar with a fictionalized version of this story.
Remember the character of the heiress Maud Beaten. That character
(06:20):
was inspired by Cassie Chadwick and Honestly, the source material
is just as interesting, if not more so, than the
dramatized version. I want to take a second to cite
our main source for this article, Annie Reid's book The
Impostor Airess Cassie Chadwick, The Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age.
(06:40):
There are a lot more details about how Cassie got
to be so rich in that book. So if you
like what you hear here, and I think you will,
you might want to check out Impostor Airas and we
will link to the book in the show notes. And
at the end of part two, I get to interview
the author, Anny Reid, all about her process of writing
(07:01):
the book and just how difficult it was to track
down a woman who didn't want her name known over
a century ago. Elizabeth Betty Bigley, that was her original name.
She started off as a farmer's daughter in Ontario, Canada.
She was the fifth of eight children. She wasn't especially pretty,
(07:24):
and when she was a kid she lost hearing in
one ear, so she spoke with a lisp, and her
classmates loved to pick on her for that. But Betty
had big dreams and she had a plan to get there.
She ventured into her first con when she was just
thirteen years old. Let's talk about promisory notes. It's relevant,
(07:55):
I promise if you're like I was until I started
researching for the episode, you might have heard that term
and equated it with a money thing. That's about all
I knew. I knew I needed one for a mortgage,
and although I understood how to get one, I wasn't
super clear on how it manifested. Now I know that
(08:20):
promissory notes are basically statements of loans. Chase Bank says
that currently promissory notes are agreements that include terms like
the amount you owe, your interest rate, your payment schedule,
the total amount you will pay, the length of your
repayment schedule, if and how the payments will change as
(08:42):
time goes on, and where your payments should be sent.
In the case of a personal loan, which is more
relevant to this story, the note will also include a
signature from the person lending the money. It was a
sort of assurance. So, for instance, if a person came
(09:02):
into your store and wanted to buy groceries on credit,
they'd show you this paper. That's because you, an astute
store owner, would not let just anyone buy on credit,
so you would give the note a lookover. And more
important than any of the information I just said, was
that signature. Depending on the reliability of the person who
(09:27):
loaned your customer the money, you would consider running a
tab for them, because if the guy standing in front
of you didn't pay you, the loaner was good for it.
I'm so grateful for credit cards, man, I mean, imagine
having to keep that form on your person and present
it anytime you wanted to buy something super inconvenient. Plus,
(09:49):
what if the shop owner wasn't familiar with that name?
What if he turned you down? What then? It's not
like you could just pull a different card out of
your pocket. Probably Betty, whom I'm now going to reference
as Cassie just to ease the telling of the story,
(10:11):
even though Cassie wasn't what she went by yet. Cassie
learned about these notes as an adolescent, and she also
learned that the best way to get money is to
convince people you already have a lot of it. Cassie
wrote a letter declaring herself an inheritor of a mysterious
uncle who had died. That uncle did not exist, but
(10:36):
she took it to the local bank, and it turns
out she had created a good enough forgery to fool them.
Cassie asked for checks so that she could use the
money before it sort of hit her account, and she
got them. The banker signed off on her checks, so
basically the checks were real, but the accounts were fake.
(11:00):
So when she wanted to buy something, she bypassed that
promissory note situation and wrote a personal check. Store owners
would have been pretty familiar with checks, so there was
a lot less risk for her. I need to take
a second to remind y'all, she's thirteen years old, tricking
bankers who had been banking their whole lives. If that
(11:24):
was my daughter, I wouldn't know whether to be super
upset at her lack of integrity or very impressed at
her ingenuity. The bank was upset, understandably. After just a
(11:47):
few months, Cassie got arrested and they warned her to
never do it again. What Cassie heard was this way
won't work again, so she took stock of the situation.
Why had she failed, Well, she'd been faking her identity
as an heiress in her hometown, which was full of
(12:07):
people who knew her and had known her family since
before she was born. People knew she was the fifth child,
and they knew her siblings weren't heirs. It was your
simple big fish, small pond scenario. She was simply too
recognizable there. Plus, she'd put all her eggs in one basket.
(12:30):
When that one bank learned her one benefactor was fake,
the con collapsed. She'd have to go around Lake Erie
to meet some new people for a scheme like this
to work again, and of course, diversify, So that's what
she did. Cassie learned from her failure. At thirteen years old,
(13:05):
she once tried to dress as a man to pawn
a gold watch, and she had deduced that it was
easier for men to acquire money than women. But that
didn't work either. She was immediately bounced from the shop.
She realized that her first idea had been a good foundation,
so she revisited that. At twenty two, she walked into
(13:26):
a drag goods store, made her selections, and at the counter,
she showed the cashier a small card. Cassie got printed
cards made that announced her as Miss Bigley, heiress to
eighteen thousand dollars. She explained to the store proprietor that
her relative had recently died and the funds were temporarily
(13:48):
tied up in legalities. Then she produced a promissory note.
It was signed by a farmer in Brantford. Could she
pay with this? It worked, Even though the checks seemed
a little more secure, Promissory notes worked better for her,
at least back then, because they sweetened the pot. Not
(14:09):
only would the proprietor receive payment for what he was owed,
but he'd get that interest percentage as well. So she
also learned that the greed of other people could play
out in her favor too. Cassie also ran a little
cash back scheme. Whatever she bought wouldn't total the amount
(14:30):
on the promissory note, so she'd receive that extra back
in cash, which was even better for her since you know,
cash don't bounce. And she went hard. It started with
Sundry's at the dry goods store, and then it escalated
into buying big things like custom organs the musical instruments.
(14:53):
It worked until it didn't. People couldn't get their banks
to cash the promissory notes. Cassie didn't cave under the pressure, though,
She just explained that this new inheritance was still tied up.
I mean, you know how the court likes to drag
their feet. This time her arrest ended in the courtroom.
(15:26):
The witnesses were endless. Not only were all of the
proprietors whom she duped trotted out to testify against her,
but the men whose signatures she forged were brought into
court too. They shrugged, amused and said this was the
first they'd ever heard of her. After two hours of deliberation,
(15:47):
the all male jury ruled her not guilty. They said
she was insane. So Cassie went back to her parents'
house and I couldn't find any information on how they
reacted to her scheme, So I'm going to ask the
author Annie read about it when I interview her in
part two. Anyway, Cassie started to revise her plan, and
(16:09):
I'll tell you all about it after the break. We
left Cassie regrouping from that arrest and not guilty ruling
(16:29):
at her parents' house. Three years later, in eighteen eighty two,
Cassie moved to Cleveland to live with her sister Alice
and Alice's new husband. She didn't want to impose, She
just needed to get her feet up under her, so
Alice agreed, and while Alice thought she was walking the
beat to find work, Cassie was actually taking stock of
(16:52):
their house. She went to the bank and took out alone,
using her sister's furniture as collateral. Not cool. Alice and
her husband didn't think it was cool either, and they
kicked Cassie out, which was actually fine. Cassie had gotten
her feet under her, and she moved to a different
(17:13):
neighborhood in the same city, and she got a new game.
At this point in time, we're leaning into the age
of spiritualism, and Cassie was all about that. What a
(17:33):
fantasy that people would pay you money to tell them
lies about themselves. All she had to do was change
her name to something exotic and talking riddles, and she
could call herself a clairvoyant and charge for it. That's
when Madame Lyly LaRose, that's Cassie, by the way, met
doctor Wallace Springsteen. By now she knew that doctors were
(17:58):
always a good investment, and Wallace was enthralled by Lilly.
The papers called her the Lady of the Hypnotic Eye,
and he fell for her hard. They were married in
December of eighteen eighty three, As was standard at the time,
their marriage was announced in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper,
(18:21):
and then the creditors came calling. Literally, merchants saw her
photo in the paper, and they showed up at Wallace's
front door furious, demanding to be paid. Wallace thought the
debts could damage his credit note because she accumulated them
before their marriage. I don't think they would have, at
(18:43):
least not now. But she was his wife, so he
paid them off for twelve days, which is when Wallace
ended the marriage. He also published a note in the
Cleveland Dealer which said quote, I hereby forbid any person
from trusting or harboring my wife is I will pay
(19:03):
no bills of her contracting after this date. Cassie was
not deterred, at least not much. She reinvented herself again.
Cassie became Madame Marie Rosa. She scammed her way through Erie, Pennsylvania,
(19:28):
until she gathered enough to get her back to Cleveland.
When the people who loaned her money wrote asking for repayment,
Cassie sent letters saying that Marie had died. She even
included a falsified obituary Cassie married two of her clients
while she was a psychic. First was a farmer, and
(19:50):
second was businessman C. L. Hoover, whom she claimed as
the father to her child, Emal Hoover. She sent Emial
to live with her family in Canada for a while.
When Hoover died in eighteen eighty eight, Cassie inherited his
estate worth fifty thousand dollars. It was enough to reinvent
(20:10):
herself again. This time she went to Toledo and she
told fortunes as Madame Lydia de Vere. She even scammed
one client, Joseph Lamb, out of ten thousand dollars by
becoming his financial adviser. She was getting sloppy again. She
had Joseph cash promissory notes on her behalf. She'd forged
(20:33):
the signature on them. When the first interaction went off
without a hitch, she had him cash several more, over
forty thousand dollars worth. Before long, Cassie and Joseph were
both arrested. Joseph was acquitted soon after, since the court
regarded him as her victim. Cassie, though again she refused
(20:55):
to cave. She told the prison guard that he'd lose
five thousand dollars in a business deal, which he did,
and then she told him he'd die of cancer, which
he also did. And this is why I don't mess
with fortune tellers. You start to wonder was it gonna
happen anyway, or did it happen because they incepted this idea.
(21:18):
I mean, Cassie is a fraud, but she was also right.
She maintained her clairvoyance during her whole prison sentence. She
started a letter writing campaign to Governor and future President
William McKinley, declaring her remorse and willingness to change. Although
(21:38):
she had been sentenced to nine and a half years originally,
she was so convincing in her letters that she only
served three and a half. Cassie and Emil moved back
in with her sister Alice, but she already had a
(21:59):
reputation around Alice's friends, and her husband didn't want Cassie
there to begin with. Enough was enough time to find
another doctor. Cassie met doctor Leroy Chadwick when he was
forty four and she was thirty nine in eighteen ninety six.
He was a wealthy widower, sole provider for his eleven
(22:22):
year old daughter Mary, his elderly mother, and his elder sister, Clara,
who was partially paralyzed. Leroy was born into high society.
His family home was a brick mansion on Millionaire's Row
in Cleveland. On top of all that, Leroy had rheumatism.
That's the point that Cassie seized on. When she met him.
(22:46):
She was going by the name Cassie Hoover. She offered
a massage and it worked. Wonders. He was smitten almost immediately.
But Leroy was no fool. He'd only been single for
two years, and he knew both that he was a
(23:08):
catch and that he might be a little vulnerable. So,
like any sensible person, he introduced this new woman to
his best friend as a sort of character assessment. Y'all
know how it goes. A new broom sweeps clean. When
you get excited over a new crush, you tend to
only see the positives. Cassie's former husband was a doctor,
(23:31):
so she understood the life. She was charming and perceptive,
and she was so easy to talk to. Leroy knew
this slippery slope, or at least he was wary that
it might be the case. So, like a sensible person.
He introduced this new woman to his best friend listeners.
(23:51):
If y'all aren't doing this, if you don't have your
viper's den of selected friends who will vet your dates
and then be brutally honest with you, you should. You
need the friend that you kind of don't want to
introduce to your new significant other because you know they're
going to give it to you straight. For Leroy, that
(24:14):
was West Park banker Erie Reynolds. Cassie must have known
that meeting Erie was a test, so she turned on
the charm. She asked him all about his work, and
she learned that he was as proud of his bank
as he might have been of his own child. He'd
(24:34):
built the business himself, started it in his own home.
Now it was one of the best banks in town.
Cassie admired him aloud, and that's how she won Erie,
which in turn let her win Leroy. True. Leroy had
other friends who tried to warn him about Cassie, but
(24:57):
those weren't his best friends. He ignored them, and he proposed.
As soon as her name was cleared from her parole board,
Cassie married Leroy Chadwick. He knew nothing about her criminal record,
and he wouldn't not for a long time. Coming up
(25:18):
here about Cassie's longest con stay with us, you might
remember both Cassie herself and her new husband, Leroy Chadwick,
(25:42):
both had children from prior marriages. Honestly, the blending of
the families couldn't have gone better. Cassie and Mary loved
each other, and Leroy thought Emil was an exceptionally well
behaved boy. He said, I love him as if he
were my own. It actually seems like Leroy and Cassie
(26:03):
were a good partnership. They each provided the other with
their needs and wants, and their families got along well.
Everything seemed perfect, especially to Cassie. Her social calendar filled
up with balls, luncheons, and trips to the theater, and
society mostly welcomed her, even if they were surprised at
(26:24):
her sudden appearance. Cassie fit herself right in among the
wealthiest society women. And what's even more exciting, in my opinion,
was that she redecorated and it was luxurious. Let me
describe it to you in detail. First, she decorated herself.
(26:52):
She took notes at the galas she attended, and she
stormed the doors of all the stores the ladies mentioned.
She bought gowns black velvet, pink, taffeta, silk chiffon. Cassie
told the salespeople not to bother measuring the fabric, just
send the whole bolt. And she spared no detail when
(27:14):
it came to embroidery and lace, especially the decorative collars.
She bought hats with braids and feathers, marvelous shoes, plush
fur coats, petticoats to give her skirts that coveted bell shape,
and my favorite part the jewels. She put jewels on everything.
(27:36):
She bought silver plates with embedded rubies, pearl dog collars,
and sometimes, y'all, this is a true flex she just
bought loose gems by the tray. Next came the house.
It was gorgeous, to be sure. It wasn't the biggest
mansion on Millionaire's row, but Cassie made it up like
(27:57):
her own, covering the walls with whimsical landscapes, filling the
corners with mahogany cabinets, lamps and cut glass figurines and
marble busts. On every surface. She had mastered the right
ways to show off, and so she started to host
soires in their own home. It was fashionable at the
(28:20):
time to decorate with flowers, so she raided the florist
and she threw theme parties, which is exactly what I
would do if I could spend big money on one
dumb thing. One theme imitated a steamship trip to Europe.
She had custom menus printed with their children's faces on them.
The staff molded ice cream into the shapes of ships.
(28:43):
It was a perfect way to display the Chadwick's wealth,
and she knew the neighbors were counting their money. The
society pages even rode up that party the next day,
saying the whole affair was carried out in perfect taste.
(29:08):
It seemed like Cassie had gotten everything she ever wanted,
and this time she'd done it pretty legitimately. But of
course the story doesn't end here. In eighteen ninety eight,
LeRoy's mother died. The whole house went into mourning for
the spring, but then by the summer, the Chadwicks decided
(29:30):
to travel to Europe as a family of four. LeRoy's
sister Clara stayed behind. It was Cassie's first trip abroad.
Despite the theme of the dinner party, and it felt
like a rite of passage. Wealthy people went every summer,
sure as the season would happen, and the ship itself
was as luxurious as one can imagine, full of smoking rooms,
(29:53):
drawing rooms, and music rooms. In Europe, they skipped from
luxury hotels in London to Paris, to Brussels to Rome,
and the best part about it, at least for Cassie,
was the shopping. The clothes there were totally different. There
was art everywhere, and she bought it at every stop.
(30:16):
She also noticed that Brussels specialized in diamonds. That's where
she discovered that she could have jewelry melted down and remade,
though really France had the best lapidaries. By the way,
this is the best way to get jewelry in my opinion.
If you have a very clever jeweler who knows what
they're doing, and I do so dm me. If you
(30:38):
need a guy in Atlanta, then you can get some
beautiful custom pieces for a very fair price. And you
can reuse, melt down, or trade in any jewelry that
might have been passed down to you and it's just
not your taste or given to you by a shitty
ex for example. Cassie is not like me in that way.
Though he didn't want a good, fair deal. She wanted more.
(31:04):
Extravagance was the thing for Cassie. The thing was, at
this time, customs duties were ten percent from Europe to America.
I don't know if that's still the case, but Columbia
reimburses twelve percent at the border for luxury items. But
that's there. And now, what I do know is that
(31:25):
ten percent ate into Cassie's funds. So she hid her
jewels and she didn't declare them at the border. I
also know that even at that time, there were no
customs duties on melted down jewelry, so this con seems unnecessary.
Leroy had told her to slow down her spending, but
he wasn't really holding her to it. He had money.
(31:47):
Kind of seems like she just carried this one out
for the hell of it. If you remember we're from
the top of the episode, one of those smuggled necklaces
is what brought that customs agent wh Theobald to her
(32:08):
hotel room. Is not clear who snitched on her, nor
how they even knew it had been smuggled. Still, she
got busted. William Theobald was pissed at Cassie when he
left her sweet, but he was also a little impressed,
very impressed. She handled herself well. Most rich women were
(32:29):
kind of airheads, and if they weren't actually dumb, they
played dumb when stacked up against his authority. The fact
was he wasn't used to being stood up to. Cassie
did relinquish the necklace, but only because it meant next
to nothing to her. She had jules galore, and this
little federal agent had only grazed the surface. He didn't
(32:54):
even know that she was the secret, illegitimate daughter of
the Great Andrew Carnegie. Join me next week on the
(33:18):
Greatest true crime Stories ever told. For our second part
of two about Cassie Chadwick, the great con Woman of
the Gilded Age, I'd like to shout out a few
key sources that made it possible for me to tell
this week's story, especially Annie Reid's book The Impostor Heiress
(33:39):
Cassie Chadwick, The Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age. Also
Karen Abbott's article in Smithsonian Magazine, The High Priestess of
Fraudulent Finance, and of course all The other sources I
used are cited in the show notes. The Greatest True
(34:03):
Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted this episode. I
also wrote this episode. Our show is produced by Emma
Dumouth and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Theme music by Tyler Cash.
(34:24):
Executive produced by Scott Waxman.
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