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 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. 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. Hey so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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 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. 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. Hey so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.