CURL SNATCHERS

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 53, 30 August 1912, Page 9

CURL SNATCHERS

LATEST WEST-END SENSATION. STRANGE DESPOILERS AT WORK. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, 27th July. Shopkeepers and ladies in the West End are highly alarmed over the activity of a despoiler who snatches curls of artificial hair from the heads of shop-window gazers. It is a lucrative business, for the curls are made of human hair and are worth a guinea an ounce. It is recalled that Montmartre, the gay quarter of Parisj was the scene of exploits of this kind in 1910, the culprit being a mad Englishman who had a mania for cutting off women's hair. Earlier in the same year women and girls in Berlin were terrorised by a young Hungarian named Fodor, who was a victim of the same mental abnormality. Fodor's victims numbered hundreds. He often contented himself with stealing small quantities of hair, but he more often secured thick tresses, the loss of which caused much embarrassment. His skill in stealing hair was extraordinary, and he frequently victimised as many as a dozen persons successively. To catch the perpetrator a large fovoe of detectives scoured the streets of the capital. After he was arrested just outside the Kaiser's Palace, in the act of severing a schoolgirl's long plaits, his lodging was found stacked with hair of all hues, bound with different coloured ribbons, to which were attached cards classifying them in colour and texture. Many tresses had strange inscriptions attached to them. In July, 1902, Secondo Revera, an Italian kitchen porter, who earned for himself the name " Jack Clipper," was sentenced at Marlborough-Btreet Police Court to four months' imprisonment and recommended, for deportation for., having cut a piece out of the back of the dress of a theatre attendant while on the top of an omnibus going from Charing Cross ; he had tflso cut the tail of a woman's coat on an omnibus in Regent-street, and when arrested had four pieces of material, which had evidently oeen cut from other women's coats, in his pockets, j DRESS SLASHING EPIDEMIC. An epidemic of dress-slashing disturbed tube and elevated railway passengers in New York in the summer of 1009, when hundreds of cases of mutilation to dresses and coats were reported within a month. The perpetrator was n^ver discovered. Many people suggested it was the work of an unscrupulous dressmaking or tailoring firm to increase trade, but no proof of this was available, and monomania was ultimately accepted as the only reasonable explanation. Men with a mania for ink-slinging are perpetually annoying women in the streets, and many beautiful dresses have been ruined in this way. In June of i 1905 and November of 1907 there was a great outbreak of ink-slinging in Bondstreet, Oxford-street, and Regont-streßt, and only in May of this year the terror reappeared, in the West End, the sufferer being a Hanover-square lady, who had a ten-guinea dress- spoilt. Not long before that a lady's seventy-guinea ermine stole was ruined in this way. In January of this year a now occupation was disclosed at Marlborough-street Police Court, when a man confessed that he chewed up bread and dripping, which he threw on ladies' dresses, and was often well paid for wiping them clean by unsuspecting women. This man had previously been charged with throwing green paint over a lady's dress 'at Earl's Court Station, almost covering her from the shoulder to the waist.