SYMHC Classics: The Daring Imposter Cassie Chadwick

This 2018 episode covers the fraud career of Cassie Chadwick. Her biggest con was convincing banks that she was the daughter of Andrew Carnegie.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since Cassie Chadwick got a name drop on
a recent episode on Charles Ponzi, even though that was
not her real name, we thought we would bring out
our episode on her as Today's Saturday Classic. This originally
came out March fourteen. Chadwick falsely claimed to be the
daughter of Andrew Carneggie and if you've heard our episode

(00:23):
on him, you may notice we use a slightly different
pronunciation in that episode than in this one. Here it
is pronounced the way most Americans are familiar with with
the episode specifically on him. It's the pronunciation that would
have been more common in his native Scotland, and which
I think most people at this point think is correct. Yeah,
I think there's still things that are named for him.

(00:45):
A lot of the time still say Carnegie. But yeah,
but I've been talking about the man himself. Carnegie has
become more common. Yes, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello,

(01:09):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. Today's episode is a rather epic tail
a really brazen behavior. Uh. It features fraud at a
level that would be almost impossible to pull off in
today's world of instant communication. And this is the story
of Cassie Chadwick. But that was not her real name,

(01:31):
And in fact, naming convention is tricky here because she
switched up her identity so often, So normally we're going
to go by the name she was using at the
time we were speaking about, because she changes over to
a lot of alias is along the way. This is
actually along the lines of a question a listener asked
us recently where they were, like when in the days

(01:53):
before we had the today's completely connected world, and like
photographs of people that could just be you sent around instantly,
were people able to just walk out of town and
assume a new new identity. And that answer was basically yes, yes, huh,
And we'll see like the one one of the times
that really tripped her up, which did involve photographs, yeah uh.

(02:16):
And another time was just that she was so bold
to the point of just ridiculousness. People started catching onto
what was so. Cassie's birth name was Elizabeth Bigley. She
was born on October tenth, eighteen fifty seven, and Eastwood, Ontario,
in Canada. The Eastwood area is now part of a

(02:39):
larger collective of towns and communities that's known as Norwich.
Her father worked for the Grand Trunk Railway, which connected
Toronto to Montreal in the eighteen fifties, and he was
a section boss. Okay, I'm gonna step outside of the
history talk for one second to like have this moment
where I'm like, is that where Grandfunk Railroad got their name?
But which is just my child of the seventies question,

(03:03):
because I had not heard of it before. Elizabeth was
one of five children. She had a brother and three sisters.
Elizabeth went by Betsy as a young child, and she
allegedly had a fairly flexible relationship with the truth From
quite a young age. She was known as something of
a fiber, and she began telling lines to get cash
when she was just a young teenager. Her sister Alice,

(03:27):
later in life, claimed that she had seen Betsy practicing
other family members signatures over and over on various occasions.
Although part of me was like, who hasn't done that?
I used to practice my parents signatures just because I
thought that was how you learned to make a signature.
I was terrible at it. The one time in my
entire life that I tried to forge a note from

(03:49):
my mother excusing me from school. It no, it was
I was immediately like, this will never work. See, I
don't think I ever tried it. I just wanted to
try copying the way people wrote like. It was just oh,
I didn't take the letter to school. It was clear
to me no one was buying that. But I mean
I never even was like I'm gonna use this and

(04:11):
try to do a letter that. I just never planned
to use them that way. So her first known fraudulent
bank account was open when she was fourteen, and she
did this in the town of Woodstock, Ontario. This is
about fifteen miles or north of her home. She walked
into a bank with a small amount of money and
a letter that claimed she was inheriting money from her

(04:33):
uncle in England, and then she opened up an account,
and then she proceeded to write a whole lot of
bad checks. It did not take long for the establishments
where Elizabeth had done business to realize that her checks
were no good. So the fourteen year old fraudster was
arrested for forgery, but because of her young age, she
was released without too much In the way of punishment.

(04:53):
It was kind of a warning and don't do this again.
At the age of twenty two, she once again assumed
with a roll of fake heiress, and this time to
support her claim, she paid to have expensive letter head
printed for the fake letter of notification of her inheritance
to make it look like it came from an actual
attorney's office. She also had calling cards printed up that

(05:16):
identified her as an heiress, and the same as before,
she opened up a checking account based on this false information.
Then wrote a lot of bad checks at various merchants,
and this time, instead of just buying things, she also
got cash by writing checks over the amount of the
purchase price of the thing that she was buying and
then having the shopkeepers give her the difference. I think

(05:37):
that's like a scam that continues to be practiced today
by various people, and I'm sure she didn't invent it either. Eventually,
Elizabeth Bigley's older sister, Alice got married to a man
from Cleveland, Ohio, and Alice moved there. So Elizabeth slash
Betsy also decided that she would move to Cleveland and
live with them, and once she was in the United States,

(05:57):
that's when her career in fraud really gan. First, she
used her sister's furniture as collateral for a bank loan.
Like she basically wrote up what each of the pieces
were and what they were worth, and she used that
She didn't actually physically carry the furniture with her to
the bank, but she basically handed over this note that
said you you have ownership of this against this loan.

(06:19):
And when Alice's husband realized what Elizabeth had done, he
kicked her out. This is also when she started using
alias is. The first identity that Elizabeth assumed in Cleveland
was Madam Lydia de Vere. Under the pseudonym, she claimed
to be psychic and started a business telling fortunes. Elizabeth
as Lydia married a man named Dr. Wallace Springsteen in

(06:43):
two and at that time she started going by the
name Lydia Springsteen. But this marriage immediately brought problems due
to a very foolish miscalculation on Elizabeth's part. So when
the nuptials were announced in the newspaper The Plane Dealer,
complete with a photo of happy couple people that Lydia
had fleece saw the notice and immediately went after the

(07:05):
Springsteen's trying to get their money back. It appears that Dr.
Springsteen had been completely unaware of his new bride's shady dealings,
and so the marriage ended abruptly after twelve days, with
Elizabeth A. K. A. Lydia kicked out of the house.
The divorce was finalized early the following year, and a

(07:25):
new identity was soon born. This time, she was still
posing as a psychic, but she took the name Madame
Marie la Rose. Madame Lauroux soon found herself another husband
in John R. Scott, who was a farmer, and that
marriage actually lasted four years. The pair were already divorced
when Elizabeth gave birth to a child in six It

(07:46):
is not known who the father of the child was,
was a boy named Emil. After Emil was born, Elizabeth
took on yet another identity, and this was Lydia Scott.
She once again claimed to be able to tell fortunes
and all was sent to live with relatives. In eighty nine,
while living in Toledo, Elizabeth slash Lydia forged a promissory

(08:08):
note for several thousand dollars signing the name of Richard
Brown of Youngstown, Ohio. She used a connection that she
had made as a clairvoyant to help her cash the note,
and after this was successful the first time around, she
did the same thing several more times. She and her
accomplice were caught, but the man named Joseph Lamb was
acquitted as it appeared that he actually didn't know that

(08:30):
he was participating in fraud. He thought he was cashing
legitimate notes. Elizabeth slash Lydia was convicted and she served time,
but she got out of her sentence early on parole.
She first started using the name Cassie as soon as
she got a prison and that's the name that she's
most commonly known as in the historical record. She used
the last name Hoover when she got out of prison

(08:52):
and moved back to Cleveland. This time, instead of hanging
a shingle as a psychic or at clairvoyant, she opened
up a brothel. But when she met a doctor named
Leroy Chadwick, who was a widower, she gave him a
very sanitized version of her story. She was still going
by Cassie Hoover, but she told him that the home
that she ran was a boarding house and not a brothel,

(09:13):
and then she feigned shocked when He assured her that
everyone knew it was a brothel, and she begged him
to help her get away from it. She definitely did
get away from it, and we'll talk about her transition
to a life of wealth after we paused for a
quick word from a sponsor. Right before the break, we

(09:38):
mentioned that Cassie had met a doctor named Leroy Chadwick,
and Cassie and Leroy married in and this marriage opened
up a whole new world to the grifter Cassie. Her
husband had society connections. His house was on Euclid Avenue
in a very wealthy neighborhood also no see it referred
to as Millionaires Row, and the marriage had been really

(09:59):
pretty sudden. Most of Dr Chadwick's friends first met Cassie
as LeRoy's wife. Leroy and Cassie traveled to New York
together in the spring of nineteen o two. This trip
ended up being really momentous, but not in a good way.
While visiting the city, she decided to pay a visit
to Andrew Carnegie, a lawyer that she knew through Leroy,

(10:22):
who was named James Dillon, went with her. Dylan, it appears,
was not privy to the scam that she was hatching.
He waited outside the mansion at one and fifth in
a carriage. Cassie entered, spoke with the housekeeper under the
guise of asking for a reference for a main she
was considering hiring, and then returned to Mr Dillon in

(10:42):
the waiting carriage. Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish born steel
tycoon who had moved to the United States as a
teenager and made his own fortune. His name is popped
up on the show many times over the years, and
you've probably seen it or heard it in relation to
grant funding, and that's because he eventually focused on using
his wealth for philanthropy, and the foundation that he established

(11:05):
continues and supports all kinds of causes. So yes, at
some point he will be his own episode of the show. Yeah,
I'm pretty fascinated by his story. But at the time
that Cassie went to the Carnegie home, Andrew Carnegie was
widely recognized as one of the wealthiest men in the world.
And when Cassie returned from this social call, during which

(11:25):
she had not ever met Andrew Carnegie, she had a
two million dollar promissory note allegedly issued by the man
Cassie used this document to fraudulently acquire a lot of money.
Cassie visited multiple banks in the Eastern United States, and
using this promissory note as proof of her worth, was
able to get financial advances against it. Of course, the

(11:47):
question of why such a powerful and wealthy man would
offer a random woman so much money did come up,
but Cassie Chadwick had an answer ready for that situation.
She told those who inquired that she was actually the
illegitimate daughter of Mr. Carnegie. And this was actually sort
of a brilliant lie because she knew that no banker

(12:10):
was going to be willing to go to Andrew Carnegie
and ask this wealthy and important man for verification of
what was considered a really tawdry fact at the time.
They would never ask such a man if he had
an illegitimate child, simply out of politeness. Additionally, thinking Cassie
was a wealthy and important new client, many of the
banks she conned also wanted to keep her secret for her,

(12:33):
and the whole time, Andrew Carnegie had no idea how
much money was treading hands, just through the mention of
his name and a falsified document. The lawyer who had
gone with her. That was James Dillon, uh had been
basically a clueless corroborator. Cassie counted on his surprise and

(12:54):
awe at this reveal, which she made when he questioned
her after the visit to the Carnegie mansion that Andrew
Carnegie was her father. She told him it was a
secret that he must tell no one, but she counted
on him being unable to keep that kind of information
to himself. She wanted to feed the rumor mill and
build up her story. Yeah, completely horrendous behavior, but part

(13:17):
of me has to respect her thought process here where
she's like, I know, I'm gonna build this fiction out
so that it seems really galvanized if anybody tries to
question me. So here's how the actual con worked. Chadwick
walked into the Wade Park Bank of Cleveland, and she
presented a box of forged notes allegedly signed by Andrew
Carnegie and promising her various sums of money, including that

(13:40):
one from that visit to his home, and she handed
them to a cashier named Ira Reynolds. The cashier took
the papers, issued a receipt for them, describing all of
the information contained therein and also the fact that Andrew
Carnegie's signature was on them. Now that right up from
Reynolds meant that Chadwick then had an official bank document

(14:00):
that validated her fraudulent claim. So she was able to
use that document, which was a legitimate document, though it
it legitimized fake things UH, to go to other banks
with proof that she was worth millions in order to
get them to lend her large sums of money. And
in some cases she would use borrowed money from one

(14:22):
bank to make payments to another, kind of circulating some
of this money around and keeping the whole charade going
Domino style. One of the primary forge documents in this
whole scheme reads this way, quote No, all men, by
these presents that I Andrew Carnegie of New York City,
do you hereby acknowledge that I hold in trust for

(14:42):
Mrs Cassie L. Chadwick, wife of Dr Leroy S. Chadwick,
of eighteen twenty four Euclid Avenue, City of Cleveland, County
of Cuyahoga and State of Ohio, properly assigned and delivered
to me for said Cassie L. Chadwick by her uncle
Frederick R. Mason and his lifetime. Now to see which
property is of the appraised value of ten million, two

(15:03):
hundred and forty six thousand dollars, then lists various bonds
and railway interests that make up this sum. It goes
on to say, quote, the income from the above described
property I agree to pay over to said Cassie L.
Chadwick semi annually between the first and fifteenth days of
June and December of each year during the life of

(15:24):
this trust, without any deduction or charges for services or
expense of any kind. And then the document goes on
to state that should Andrew Carnegie die, Cassie will receive
all of the assets that it named. This was, of course,
not the only document she forged. It was one of
many forged documents that she used to claim a personal

(15:44):
fortune that simply did not exist. It wasn't until a
banker in Brookline, Massachusetts, checked around and made inquiries that
her scam was finally uncovered. He had been suspicious, but
his investigation revealed that she had accumulated millions of dollars
of debt off of posing as the unacknowledged child of
Andrew Carnegie. The Massachusetts banker named Herbert Newton sued Cassie Chadwick,

(16:09):
and this started an avalanche of creditors coming forward and
catalyzed a federal investigation. Cassie was arrested in New York City,
which had become a second home to her, shortly after
the scandal broke, and at the time she was wearing
a money belt containing one hundred thousand dollars cash. The
primary crime that was cited in the charges involved the

(16:33):
Citizens National Bank of Oberlin, Ohio. This institution had loaned
Cassie eight hundred thousand dollars and consequently had to declare bankruptcy.
The conspiracy charge also involved two men who worked at
the bank in Oberlin. Bank president Charles Beckwith and cashier A. B.
Spear were also accused. Beckwith and Spear had endorsed fraudulent

(16:55):
notes presented by Chadwick bearing the forged signature of Andrew Carnegie.
On December tenth, the New York Times ran back with
story he had confessed to federal authorities that yes, he
had conducted transactions with Chadwick, but that he had done
so based on documents that she provided. She had indicated
that Citizens National Bank of Oberlin would be made the

(17:18):
trustee of her five million dollar estate and that all
the related documents would be given to the bank on
July one, three. So that was that was what Beckwith
said that she had told to him. Correct. And where
this whole thing gets a little bit uh dicey is
the fact that Chadwick promised both Charles Beckwith and the

(17:41):
cashier ab Spear each ten thousand dollars a year for
handling her financial affairs as beneficiaries of this scheme. This
is where they legally became co conspirators. An article that
ran in the New York Times on December sixteen four
described a meeting between the Oberlin Bank President, Mr. Beckwith

(18:01):
and Cassie in the latter's jail cell, and it did
not go as you might expect. It read when a
man whose bank and whose private fortune have been wrecked
stood face to face with the woman who is charged
with having been responsible for the wrecking. The two look
steadily at each other for a moment, then they shook hands.
You got us into an awful fix, said the aged banker.

(18:24):
It looks as if it were time for you to
tell all you know. Cassie did not offer up any
information in response to this, and in According to this account,
back With continued, You've ruined me, but I'm not so
sure yet you were a fraud. I've stood by you
to my last dollar, and I do think now is
the time for you to make known all I always

(18:45):
told you I didn't like the idea of your changing attorneys,
so often get a good one and keep him. I
wanted to include this exchange because it speaks to just
how good Cassie was gaining the confidence of the people
she defrauded, even after this man had become a pariah
to his peers, both in the banking community in the

(19:06):
community at large because his bank had really damaged a
lot of people who had their money there. Uh. And
it was all because of his involvement with Cassie Chadwick,
but he still wanted to give her the benefit of
the doubt. We'll talk some more about how Beckwith was
drawn into the scheme and then strung along, but first

(19:27):
we are going to have another little sponsor break, you know.
Write up from the Philadelphia North American written while Cassie's
case was still playing out, so this was a contemporary account.
The paper printed this quote. This extraordinary performance was accomplished

(19:50):
by a woman fifty years old with neither physical beauty
nor personal charm by one whose taste in dress totally
lacking in discernment, who is rather deaf and harsh voice,
and who, when it all excited, speaks without regard to grammar.
So if she was so charmless, how was she able
to convince these shrewd bankers to hand over so much money.

(20:12):
There were a lot of theories that she used hypnotism
or a similar device to control the actions of the
men that she did business with, but it really does
seem to have come down about her being really smart
about human nature. In offering backwidth and spears a significant
annual income to manage her financial affairs, Cassie gave her
marks a buy in. Of course, they wanted her story

(20:33):
to be real. They wanted it to be true for
their own benefit. Plus with them, as with all the
banks involved, she had been willing to accept loans with
really high interest rates. The banks thought they were all
going to make a lot of money off of these deals,
and even once suspicions arose in some cases at that point,
fear of feeling or looking foolish seems to have made

(20:55):
many of the people who had made these bad decisions
to trust her stay silent, having known people who were
the victims of fraud, like the shame of having been
defrauded is powerful, Yes, indeed so. Additionally, Cassie Chadwick was
so good at developing her story that it really drew
people in Backwith described how she first told him that

(21:17):
she was related to Carnegie. She kept a portrait of
an elderly man in her home, and she started their
conversation with thereby hangs a tale when the banker noticed
it while visiting her home. Cassie then spun a yarn
about how the man and the portrait was an uncle,
the one referenced in the forged Carnegie document, and that

(21:37):
the uncle, despite not being wealthy himself, was always providing
money to her family. While on his deathbed, this uncle,
she claimed, told Cassie that she was in fact Carnegie's daughter,
and that he had been funneling money from the tycoon,
who felt guilty or fearful of being exposed to the
family in exchange for silence of the matter even in

(22:03):
his confession. Just as the conversation with Cassie and jail
Beckwith was really reluctant to believe that this Cassie Chadwick,
who he entrusted, was a criminal. He seemed convinced that
someone else must have been deceiving all of them, and
then this lines up with his comment to Cassie that
she shouldn't have changed attorneys so often. He seemed to

(22:23):
be indicating that he thought one of her lawyers was
really the one behind the fraud. And even though the
problems with Chadwick's money began to evidence themselves before her arrest,
Beckwith continued to believe her assurances that everything was going
to get fixed. She claimed at one point that a
man named William Baldwin in New York was one of
the trustees of her estate and that they needed to

(22:45):
contact Mr Baldwin to get everything turned over to the
bank in Oberlin. After several unsuccessful attempts to reach the
mythical Mr Baldwin, Backwith and two other bank officials traveled
to New York to meet with Cassie and her attorney,
which was a Mr. Powers, and they were opposed to
meet with Baldwin himself. But though Cassie seemed to be
cooperating to get the bank the money it needed, at

(23:06):
the last minute, a problem arose, She told Beckwith that
the documents needed to resolve the issue were in the
possession of her husband back in Ohio. So this whole
trip had been a bust, and this was just the
first in a series of concocted complications that kept Cassie
from making good on her debts with Beckwith's bank. As

(23:27):
he attempted to secure the funds that she owed, he
met with a new excuse at every turn, including at
one point the introduction into the ruse of a Pittsburgh
banking firm that allegedly had power of attorney and had
to be included in the proceedings in order to make
the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin the trustee of her estate.
At this point, the Oberlin Bank's ready cash was depleted

(23:47):
and Beckwith was in serious trouble. At one point, during
a meeting called with the Citizens National Bank directors and
Chadwick at the Chadwick residence, Cassie claimed that Charles Beckwith
was in an adjacent room with poison and a revolver
in his possession, and that he intended to take his
own life back with When confronted by the bank colleague

(24:10):
said that he had merely idly suggested that idea, but
wasn't serious. In any case, this whole diversion worked because
the meeting ended and there was no resolution to the
financial issues between the bank and Cassie. In his statement,
as he told his story, Becka said quote, I am
either an awful dupe or a terrible fool. I know

(24:31):
I have done wrong, but although crushed, I do not
propose to be made a scapegoat to shield the sins
of others. Beckwith, who was pretty elderly at this time
that all of this was playing out, was described as
incredibly distraught and tearful. Charles Beckwith died before the charges
against him were taking a trial, and the cashier who

(24:52):
had also been charged, which was A. B. Spear, pled
guilty and was sentenced to seven years in prison. According
to news ports, spears wife went insane because of the
stress of the situation. Once Cassie was in custody. Not
only were back within Spear questioned, but as you may
have been wondering yes. Andrew Carnegie was summoned to appear

(25:14):
before a federal grand jury to answer questions in the matter.
He said that he had never met Cassie Chadwick and
He seemed mostly offended that anyone who had seen the
fraudulent letters that Cassie claimed he wrote would think that
he had such poor spelling and punctuation. Later on, he said, quote,
if anybody had seen this paper and really believed that
I had drawn it up and signed it, I could

(25:35):
hardly have been flattered. He also stated that he had
not signed such a note in thirty years. Cassie's trial
began on March six, and it lasted two weeks. Andrew
Carnegie attended the proceedings. She pleaded not guilty and denied
that she had ever claimed that Andrew Carnegie was her father.
She was found guilty of conspiracy to fraud and National

(25:57):
Bank and was sentenced to fourteen years in prison and
find seventy thousand dollars. While in prison, Chadwick was still
allowed to keep a lot of the items that she
had gained through her criminal enterprise, particularly her rather impressive wardrobe.
But though she enjoyed a lot of lavish possessions while
she was incarcerated, she still had problems. Her health really

(26:19):
rapidly declined. In mid September of nineteen o seven, it
was reported that she experienced a nervous collapse while speaking
with her son Emil, who was visiting her. After this collapse,
she experienced a temporary blindness, but doctors at the prison
reported that she recovered less than a month later. On
October seven, the papers reported that due to heart disease

(26:43):
and a weak stomach, she was weak and experiencing bouts
of delirium. Cassie Chadwick died in the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio,
on October tenth, nine seven. It was her fiftieth birthday,
and she had been in a coma in those last
was leading up to her death, and while she was
attended by hospital staff, no one from her personal life

(27:05):
was there. Her son Emil, was informed of her condition
prior to her death, and he was expected at the hospital,
but he didn't arrive until after her passing. It may
never be known exactly how much money Cassie Chadwick was
able to get through fraudulent means. A New York Times
special that ran that ran the year she was arrested
speculated that, based on all the reported disclosures, that could

(27:27):
have been as much as twenty one million dollars, but
estimates over the year over the years have really been
all over the place. Yeah, And some of the difficulty
pinning it down to is that shame that we talked
about earlier. There were a lot of people that also
offered her personal loans, thinking she was a wealthy and
important person, and it's believed that a lot of them

(27:48):
never pursued the issue because they were too embarrassed that
she had made fools of them. Uh. One of the
other problems in assessing the real extent of her ill
gotten fortune was the difficulty that authorities had in finding
all of it. Various items like trunks and satchels that
were believed to contain valuables were difficult to track down,

(28:09):
as Cassie had left a number of them with various
people over the course of her masquerade as an heiress.
Her body was transported back to Ontario to be buried,
which was in accordance with her wishes. The name on
her gravestone reads Elizabeth Bigley. As for Cassie's husband, Dr
Leroy Chadwick, he attempted to get distance from Cassie as

(28:30):
soon as this scandal broke. He basically left for Europe
to get away from the whole business, but eventually he
did return home, and while he really had no knowledge
of his wife's trail of fraud while it was happening,
creditors still pursued him to try to get their money back.
In late summer of nineteen o eight, Leroy Chadwick declared bankruptcy.

(28:55):
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(29:16):
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