FEMALE VON VELTHEIMS.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLII, Issue 91, 16 April 1908, Page 2

FEMALE YON VELTHEIMS.

ARE WOMEN CRIMINALS MORE WICKED THAN MEN? :

'One of the most dangerous men the police have ever had to deal with,' was the verdict passed by Inspector Pentin upon Yon Veltheim, who was sentenced the other day to twenty years' penal servitude for demanding money by threats from Mr 'Solly' Joel.

Are there not female Yon Veltheims known to the police who, practising Yon Veltheim's methods, are far more cunning, dangerous, and merciless than ever Yon Veltheim was?

Take, for instance, the case of the notorious Chicago May, who only a few months ago received a sentence of fifteen years' imprisonment for her share in the attempted assassination of .ivudie Guerin. Of her almost unthinkable wickedness something leaked 'out at the trial, but the half was not told.

The police, for example, stated that she had driven three men to suicide by her blackmailing. As a matter of fact, the writer of this article—who was specially employed at the time in investigating her antecedents—discovered no fewer than seven suicides that were directly traceable to her, besides several doubtful cases. She had also been implicated in at least three murders and five attempted murders, excluding that of Guerin. Compared with a record such as tins, Yon; Veltheim's one suicide (that .of Miss Mattis) and one killing (Mr Woolf Joel) seems almost trivial. Yon Veltheim considered as a blackmailer, too, was a mere bungling amateur by the side of Chicago May, who had reduced her horrible trade to a fine art.

She was an expert, and no mistake! She had a /special locked volume wherein, carefully indexed, she kept a record of the names and addresses of her victims, together with the amounts she had succeeded in ex-, tracting from them, and many other particulars. The writer has seen and handled this extraordinary book, which, with its beautifully-tooled red morocco binding, its patent Bramah locks (two of them), and its heavy clasps of solid eighteen-carat gold, could certainly not have been sold for less than a £10 note by the well-

known firm of West-end stationers who supplied it.

Mere is another case in point. It concerns one 'Handsome Polly,' alias 'Polly the Pickpocket,' alias 'The Worst Woman in London.' Although she has only been convicted about half-a-dozen times in all, her longest sentence being one of three years' imprisonment for child-stealing, Polly has a record such as few 2 if any, mere male criminals have ever aspired to. When only fourteen she "achieved the distinction of being elected 'Queen of the Forty Thieves,' a gang of young female pickpockets that haunted the purlieus of Drury Lane some twenty-five years ago. Afterwards she became an artist's model, and her portrait, as Venus, appeared on the walls of the Royal Academy. A serious charge of fraud, however, caused her to be barred from the studios, and Polly became a professional blackmailer, jewel thief, and confidence trickster. By these means she amassed considerable wealth, so that on her last appearance at the Old Bailey she sailed into the dock attired in a Paris costume and bedecked with some £5,000 worth of diamonds. 'Crime does not pay,' they say. Well, it has 'paid' in the case of 'Handsome Polly.' But at" how terrible a cost to the community at large it is well-nigh impossible to say. One of the best-known detectives in London, however, remarked recently to the writer that not even Chicago' May was responsible for so many wrecked homes, so many blighted lives, as this beautiful, maglignant, seductive Crice of the slums.

And as with these two instances, so it is with innumerable other ones. In no branch of crime has man really proved himself superior to woman. One seeks in vain in criminal annals, for example^ for any male counterpart of Mme. Humbert, who swindled some of the shrewdest financiers in Europe out of more than £2,000,000 on the strength of some supposititious documents and an empty safe. Or, where, again, can one find a masculine parallel to the lately deceased Cassie Chadwick, who persuaded scores of shrewd American billdiscounters and bankers that a supposed signature of Andrew Carnegie -—traced by her from a magazine advertisement on a leaf torn out of a child's copyrbopk—was genuine, and on the strength of it obtained houses and lands, and hundreds of thousands of pounds in hard cash?

Or, again, what about Mrs GordonBaillie? She had all the-genius of Mme. Humbert and Mrs Chadwick, although her operations were on a less colossal scale. She, however, was successful in working the confidence trick upon a Government, that of Victoria, from whom she obtained a grant of 70,000 acres of land, on the ground that she wanted it for the evicted Highland1 crofters. No swindler in trousers has ever equalled this latter exploit, which for sheer amazing audacity, and brilliant originality, stands alone in the annals of crime. Even in certain kinds of wrong-do-ing that would seem essentially man's •prerogative, by reason of his superior strength, bravery, and daring, woman has proyed, herself over and over again x if not his superior, certainly his equal. Thus, amongst the outlaws of the Western States of America, Bell Star showed herself a worthy leader of desperadoes of the type of Jesse James and Cole' Younger; nor did she flinch even when the inevitable end came, but died 'with her boots on' in the good old border fashion, fighting revolver in hand, against the Government troops that had been sent to effect herycapture. ~ i It is, however, in crimes of cruelty, and in poisoning cases, that woman has most clearly demonstrated the greater magnitude of her wickedness as compared with that of man. Male poisoners there have been of course, just as there have been male torturers of little children. But these have acted invariably from motives of gain or revenge, or some other easily understandable inducement; whereas the female child-torturer and poisoners whose names are famous in criminal annals have tortured and poisoned, in most instances, from a mere animal lust of cruelty, such as one finds developed elsewhere only in the fiercest and most savage of brute beast's.

_ The Isle of Man folk are greatly disturbed over the railway companies' proposal 'to run Sunday excursions to the island. The Governor (Lord Raglan), who is leading the opposition, proposes a tax of half a crown a head. Across the front of the cottage of Johann Schmid, who lives in the village of; Suhr, in the Canton of Argovie, is the sentence painted in large letters :, "Here lives the happiest man on earth." Schmid, who is fifty-five years of age, said to an interviewer : "I defy you to find, a happier man than myself. I have never worked, never married, never been ill, and have never been anxious for the future. I eat well, drink well, and sleep well. What more would you have?" When in his teens Schmid was left by his father an income of about £1 a week and a small piece of land. He built his cottage on the land, and has occupied it ever since. An interesting departure has (says the Scientific American) been recently made on the Amerika, of the Ham-burg-American line, by taking on board a special tank for keeping about a ton of Inung riyer fish for table use. It is a question whether or not the fish would stand the fatigue of the sea voyage. A large tank of 5.85 | cubic yards capacity, (14.76 feet in length 3.28 in width, and 3.28 in height) had been constructed on the boat deck of the steamer. This tank which is of iron, and divided into two compartments, was protected against the escape of the water in cases of heavy oscillations by roofing, as well as perforated sheet-metal partitions ' similar to bulkheads. The two main compartments of the tank are intended, one for housing trout, and the other for larger fish. As this experiment has been entirely successful, ocean steamers will in future be able to carry fish instead of fish preserved on ice, as much as two tons being readily stored in tanks of the kind described. m . No one need now suffer the- agonising pains of sciatica and acute rheumatism, as quick relief may be had by applying Chamberlain's Pain Balm. This fact has been clearly demonstrated in many thousands of cases. This liniment relieves the pain and makes sleep and rest possible, which is alone worth many times its cost. For sale by J. Benamg, Blenheim, and W. Symes, Picicn. * A York shopkeeper naively advertises himself as a " maker of anticjue iurnifcure." The Berlin dog tax has been raised rrom 20s to 30s,'with the «object of reducing the 38,000 dogs in the city. The late Countess de Loynes left her fortune of £100,000 to the Paris iNignt bhelter Association.