The Cincinnati region has been connected to monumental crimes and criminals in years past. Here is a look at one of them.
On Nov. 30, 1904, The Enquirer's front page was dominated by a sensational story: A then-suspected fraudster named Cassie Chadwick was suspected to have killed herself.
That turned out not to be true. Chadwick – who soon after transitioned from a suspected fraudster to a convicted one – was alive and well and would continue to dominate news Ohio-wide for months to come.
Her story served as fodder for newspapers because it was almost impossible to fathom: Chadwick, who'd grown up poor, had somehow made herself ridiculously wealthy by claiming she was the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie, then the richest man in the world.
A new book titled "The Impostor Heiress: Cassie Chadwick, the Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age" details the scam artist's unlikely rise to, and ultimately fatal fall from, high society. Author Annie Reed spoke with The Enquirer to lay out the tale.
The background
Cassie Chadwick went down in history under the name she went by in Cleveland, Ohio, after marrying her third husband, a doctor named Leroy Chadwick. She'd been born in Canada in 1857 as Elizabeth Bigley, the third daughter in a family of eight boys and six girls. Her father, Daniel, worked on the railroads.
Betsy, as Chadwick was known in her youth, ran away from home young and was quick to pick up the art of financial scams. In 1878, she was arrested for trying to borrow money using a stolen pocket watch as collateral. Later, she learned that the easiest way to get money was to convince people she was already rich, so she began passing herself off as an heiress. To do that, she crafted a backstory, Reed said.
"She had these cards made that said, 'Miss Bigley, heiress to $18,000," Reed said. "She told everyone that a relative had died and left her all this money, but it's still being probated so she can't get to it. Alongside the cards, she forged all these promissory notes from neighboring farmers, different men in the area, and she would use them as payment or as collateral for loans at a bank."
The promissory notes convinced others that she really was rich and was due money on set dates, so other people would loan her money expecting to be paid back when she was paid back.
Trouble was, the notes were fake and no money was coming in. Eventually, she got caught. In 1879, she stood trial for passing forged notes but managed to evade conviction, Reed said.
"She pled insanity: I'm not responsible for my actions because I was insane at the time," Reed said. "And that actually worked. It's a little bit silly, but it worked."
Chadwick took the win and parlayed it into a life of crime.
The clairvoyant
Chadwick had a few schemes up her sleeve at all times. After moving to Cleveland to be close to a sister, she continued to play the fake-heiress role but also adopted a fortune-teller alter ego called Madame DeVere. As DeVere, she would claim to read people's fortunes in exchange for pocketing their money. But Chadwick was never able to live within her means, so even as she bilked people, her debts continued to grow.
In November 1882, she married a Dr. Wallace Springsteen in Cleveland. Soon after the nuptials, however, Springsteen caught wise to her duplicity. Springsteen paid off her creditors but also tossed Chadwick from the house and filed for divorce, which was granted in early 1883.
Chadwick then took on another fortune-teller persona, this time by the name of Madame Marie LaRose, and made decent money in Toledo, where she sized up men of means and told them what they wanted to hear. But in 1889, she was arrested and convicted of forgery for the first time, resulting in a nine-year prison sentence, though she was released in just four. After that, she returned to Cleveland and found her final husband.
As Mrs. Chadwick
The woman Dr. LeRoy Chadwick married was erudite and elegant. He believed she came from money because she was frivolous with it in the way that born-rich people often are. She wore designer clothes and adorned her walls with expensive-but-tasteful art. She threw lavish parties with jewels strewn across dining tables.
Slowly, she built up to telling a few powerful and rich men her alleged secret: She was the illegitimate daughter of Carnegie, she said, going so far as to get one lawyer to accompany to her to Carnegie's home, where she entered, dawdled for 15 or 20 minutes and returned with Carnegie's forged signature on a promissory note worth $7 million.
"She tells this attorney, 'Oh, don't tell anyone, though,' and obviously he tells a lot of people," Reed said. "It was part of this ploy to get this story circulating that she was in the Carnegie house, so she must really be Andrew Carnegie's daughter."
Based on this lie, Chadwick was loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars by people who should have known better, including the president of a major bank in Oberlin, Ohio.
Reminder on Carnegie
Chances are you recognize his name from various buildings and libraries christened in his honor. At the turn of the 20th century, Carnegie was known best as a flesh-and-blood man born in Scotland who came to America with his family when just a boy. His was a rags-to-riches story that earned him the nickname the Steel King.
While Carnegie was occasionally dogged by controversy – including the deadly Homestead steel strike of 1892 – by century's end, he was focused on burnishing his legacy through philanthropy. Chadwick likely assumed her tales of being his illegitimate daughter would never reach him, and, if they did, he'd be inclined to hush them up rather than deny them for the sake of his reputation.
The Oberlin bank
Charles Beckwith was the respected president of the Oberlin-based Citizens' National Bank who bypassed his own security measures to loan Chadwick money because she promised him that when she got her $7 million from Carnegie, Citizens' would be entrusted to manage the funds.
Beckwith was so sure about Chadwick's story that he even loaned her his personal money. He grew increasingly anxious as time passed and the transfer date kept getting pushed. When Chadwick's house of cards finally collapsed in 1904, Beckwith continued to defend her, insisting there was no way she could have pulled off such a complex heist.
He was wrong.
After Chadwick's creditors began coming forward, Carnegie publicly denied she was his daughter. Experts eyed the signature on the supposed $7 million promissory note and declared it a forgery. Citizens' National Bank collapsed and the elderly Beckwith died in disgrace soon after.
Chadwick was convicted in March 1905 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but she only survived for two. While her death certificate listed the cause as neurasthenia – a poorly defined condition marked by fatigue that's no longer recognized as a cause of death – Reed suspects she most likely suffered from heart failure exacerbated by the stress of her downfall.
"She was collapsing, she was losing weight," Reed said.
Chadwick died on her 50th birthday in 1907. She left behind one son, Emil Hoover, who was 20 when she died.
Investigative reporter Amber Hunt is host of the podcast Crimes of the Centuries and co-founder of the Grab Bag Collab podcast network.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Queen City Crime: A look back at Cassie Chadwick, Ohio's 'impostor heiress'
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