MYSTERY OF MILLIONAIRE WOMAN SOLVED

Taranaki Daily News, 18 August 1934, Page 15 (Supplement)

MYSTERY OF MILLIONAIRE WOMAN SOLVED

Death Casket Reveals That She Disappeared To Evade Taxes

r A 20,000-acre estate on-the Pacific Coast of the United States, dotted with fine cattle-and horses, has yielded the solution of a mystery which for five years has baflled popular imagination. In April, 1929, there disappeared from the toWn of Brownstown, in the State of Washington, its most conspicuous figure—an eccentric, aged woman known as Mrs Sarah E. Smith Scollard, reputed to be worth £3,000,000. Now a silver casket containing her ashes and a document purporting to be her death certificate have been discovered in the private safe of Mr Beese B. Brown, a wealthy horse and cattle breeder who * owned a vast estate at Yakima, Washington. Brown was killed in a motor accident last January shortly after the trustee of Mrs Scollard’s • estate had begun a suit for the recovery of £ 1,~ v 000,000, which it was alleged he had taken from her while she was mentally, incompetent. The missing widow was a striking character, well known both on the Pacific Coast and in Chicago, where she was nicknamed, ' after the famous New York woman banker, “The Hetty Green of La Salle Street.” She had first become wealthy by a death-bed marriage in September,

1908, to James R. Smith, a pick-and-shovel miner. The marriage was Solemnised in hospital, and on Smith’s death a few days afterwards his widow found herself the possessor of his fortune of £BO,OOO in copper shares. ' She then married a popular Yale football player, but divorced him and her third marriage, to a commercial traveller named Scollard, also ended in divorce!' By judicious investments she amassed a great fortune. One of. her eccentricities was to carry immense amounts of money about with her. Brown was her chief adviser and friend, and it is his widow who has now cleared up the mystery of Mts Scollard’s disappearance. Mrs Brown brought the silver casket to the authorities, saying that her son had discovered it. Mrs Brown explained that for some unknown reason her hus-’ band had seen fit to keep secret the fact of Mrs Scollard’s death, which occurred in an hotel in Montreal on July 24, 1932. She had fled to Montreal in 1929 to avoid persecution for income-tax evasions. When she died Brown had the body cremated, and kept the ashes in a silver casket shaped like a jewel box. Mrs Brown’s request to the authorities was to allow the casket to be buried beside her husband.