"Idaho Statesman," August 13, 1976, via Newspapers.com

It’s generally strange enough when a person mysteriously vanishes.  But when they pull off the feat of disappearing twice…

James Thomas Cole of Boise, Idaho, seemed to have a perfectly ordinary middle-class life.  He was 24 years old, married, and a father of a small son.  Since 1970, he had been working as a warehouse foreman at Mountain States Wholesale.  He was a good worker who was liked by everyone who knew him.  In short, Cole was one of the last people you would expect to see get into some very shady business.

Just after 4 a.m. on the morning of August 12, 1976, Cole drove a semi to the Boise Fruit & Produce Company, four blocks from his workplace.  It was expected that he would then walk back to work.  Instead, at around 4:30, a co-worker, Gary Anchustegui, got a startling phone call.  It was from an unlisted number.  A “jovial” sounding man informed Anchustegui that he had kidnapped Cole, and was demanding a $200,000 ransom.  Although Anchustegui assumed the call had to be some sort of childish prank, as a precaution he phoned the night supervisor, Ivan Edney, to check if Cole was there.  He was told that Cole had left for Boise Fruit an hour previously, and had yet to return.  When 8 a.m. arrived with no sign of Cole, police were called in.  When Albertson’s Food Centers, the parent company of Mountain States, was informed of what had happened, an emergency Board of Directors meeting was called, where it was decided that the company had no choice but to pay the ransom.

Around 5 a.m. the following day, the police received a phone call from none other than James Thomas Cole.  Cole said that as he was walking back to work after delivering the semi, someone had abducted him.  He was then drugged and taken to Mission Manor Apartments in nearby Nampa.  Later that day, police arrived at the apartment building to investigate a drunk and disorderly complaint.  Their presence so unnerved his captors, they again drugged Cole, and fled.  When Cole recovered his senses, he went to the Nampa Chief Motel three blocks away, where he contacted the police.

When officers searched the apartment where Cole said he had been held, they found a brand-new Honda motorcycle, as well as a new TV and a motorcycle helmet.  Cole told them that the men who abducted him had been driving a 1972 turquoise pickup truck with a white camper shell.  This was an identical description of Cole’s own car.  Odd, that.  The “odd” factor only increased when police found out that the registered owner of the Honda motorcycle was Gary Anchustegui.  Two employees of the shop where the motorcycle was sold identified the purchaser as James Cole.

But wait, there’s more!  Around the time Cole was abducted (although by this point, everyone was probably putting scare quotes around that word,) over $1600 disappeared from the safe at Albertson Food Center.  Both Cole and Anchustegui had access to that safe.  After the two men both failed polygraph exams, Cole was arrested on August 18 and charged with attempted extortion, embezzlement, and forgery.  (The last charge was because police believed Cole had forged Anchustegui’s name on the forms to buy the motorcycle.)  Police decided that there was not enough evidence to charge Anchustegui with any crime.

Cole initially pleaded “not guilty,” but he eventually admitted guilt to extortion, in exchange for the other charges being dropped.  However, he continued to insist that he genuinely had been kidnapped.  In August 1977, Cole was sentenced to three years in prison (although he only served 30 days) and a $3,000 fine.

So far, we have nothing more than an idiotic petty con gone wrong.  But a year later, Cole’s life took another, even weirder turn.  In March 1978, Cole told people that he had been phoned by someone who claimed to know who had kidnapped him in 1976.  On March 13, Cole was seen going to a pre-arranged location where he was to meet his mysterious informant.

After that, Cole disappeared again--this time for good.  Considering that his car was found abandoned at the Boise Airport, and that he had taken out a $25,000 life insurance policy just one month before he vanished, it was generally assumed that Cole had left voluntarily, but as he was never heard from again, his fate remains unknown.  (After seven years, Cole’s wife was able to have him declared dead, and she finally collected the insurance money.  She remarried, and went on with her life.)

There is a postscript to this case, one that deals with another mysterious event.  On December 4, 1982, a man walked into the Sacred Heart Church in Boise.  He seemed to want to use the confessional, but it was already occupied, so he merely sat silently in a pew.  A few hours later, as parishioners began to gather for the 6 p.m. mass, they were stunned to find the stranger lying on the ground, dead.  It was later discovered that he had swallowed cyanide.

The man was young, dressed in Western attire.  His wallet carried no identification--just $1900 in cash and a note reading:  “In the event of my death, the enclosed currency should give more than adequate compensation for my funeral or disposal (prefer to be cremated) expenditures.  What is left over, please take this as a contribution to this church.  God will see to your honesty in this.”  The note was signed “Wm. L. Toomey.”

No record could be found for anyone by that name, and as it was also the name of a company that manufactured ceremonial clothing for priests, it was presumed the man was using a pseudonym.  Police were unable to trace any of the man’s relatives, or even anyone who knew him, so the church had no choice but to bury him under the name of "Toomey."  (The permission of relatives would have been needed to cremate him.)

There is one haunting clue that may solve the twin mysteries of the disappearance of James Cole and the identity of “William Toomey.”  In 2021, an anonymous letter was sent to the “Idaho Press" about the Toomey case.  The writer suggested “This man may be James Thomas Cole who went missing in 1978.  Compare his picture to that of ‘William Toomey’ and compare the resemblance.”

Some believe that the police sketch of “Toomey” does bear a resemblance to James Cole, and it is not implausible that after four years of being away from his old life, Cole felt he had had enough of a solitary existence.  All one can say is that if Cole was indeed “William Toomey,” he certainly paid a terrible price for his 1976 escapades.

"William Toomey"

Via Newspapers.com

This curious little tale--slightly reminiscent of the famed Kaspar Hauser--appeared in the “Alabama Beacon,” April 5, 1879:

The "Offenbach lady," who has for so many years been a riddle to Germans, has just died in her house at Offenbach, leaving the problem of her name and origin still unsolved.

The London Globe says of her: Nearly all she knew of herself was that she was a Hungarian by birth. On the 9th of November, 1853, a splendid equipage was driven to the border of a large wood near Frankfort. An old lady descended from the carriage, the servants handed out a beautiful little girl to her, and the two wandered some distance into the forest. The old lady, having given the child some meat and bread wrapped in a fine linen napkin, said: "Wait here a few minutes. I must go back to the carriage and will bring mamma to you.”

She never returned. The child wandered, as she said, three days and three nights in the forest, crying for "Mamma" and “Bertha." On the morning of the fourth day she was found by a peasant girl, who took her to a house in a neighboring village, where she slept for one night, but on the next morning she was stripped of her handsome clothes, her ear-rings and a gold medallion, was dressed in poor rags and turned out upon the road. She wandered to the village of Weinkirchen, crying out in Hungarian: "Where is mamma?" The people could not understand her. She was taken before a judge at Offenbach, but, as he knew no Hungarian, he could not get at her story.

She was supposed to be a beggar who had been taught to feign dumbness, for her questioner imagined that her Magyar explanations did not belong to any human language. She was condemned to a month's imprisonment, but her remarkable beauty and the refinement of her manners made such an impression that the sentence was not carried out. The town officials of Offenbach decreed that she should be taught to read and write German, and she remained for a long time the favored ward of the corporation. When she knew sufficient German she certainly unfolded a most extraordinary story. She could only remember two names: "Temeser" (Temesvar?) and "Bertha." She and her brother had been kept for some months in a cellar, where there were geese. Bertha fetched her from the cellar.

Frederick Eck published the story, as taken from her own lips, and it caused a great sensation both in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Vienna papers demanded that stringent inquiries should be made at all the great houses in the neighborhood of Temesvar, but the proposal was never carried out. Professor Hermann Weber, of Kasmark, visited Offenbach, spoke Hungarian with her, and communicated her tale to the Pesti Napto; and other Hungarian scholars interested themselves in the attempt to unravel the mystery. She married an Offenbach, and had two children; but, although her marriage was a singularly happy and prosperous one, she was never able to shake off a certain melancholy, and she has died without any discovery as to who and what she originally was.

Toft Hill, circa 1967

In February 1823, a young man moved into Toft Hill, a small mining and agricultural village in South Durham, England.  Although he boasted the impressive name of “Josiah Charles Stephenson,” the fact that he settled into a cottage adjoining a turnpike gate soon earned him the snappier nickname of “Joe Piker.”

Joe mined coal in the winter and did farm work in the summer.  He proved to be quite handy at both occupations, which enabled him to earn a comfortable living.  He offered no information about where he came from, or anything else about his prior life, but as he was a useful citizen who caused no trouble for anyone, his neighbors saw no reason to press him for information.  He kept himself as apart from his fellow workmen as possible, and while he made no friends, he made no enemies, either.

Within a year of his arrival in Toft Hill, Joe married Sally, a pretty, amiable servant maid at the village inn.  The couple never had children, but they were a notably devoted pair, entirely content with each other and their simple, humble little existence.  After his marriage, Joe abandoned mine work to support them by doing freelance work on the neighboring farms.  He became known as the fastest shearer of corn and grain in the area, so getting enough work to live on was never a problem.  All in all, he and Sally could be said to be among the most fortunate residents of the village.

This pleasant state of affairs lasted until Sally’s death about thirty years later.  This sad event marked the end of Joe’s happiness.  He was understandably devastated by the loss of the one person in the world he was close to, and vowed he would spend the rest of his days as a widower.  Given all that, it was a great surprise to the villagers when Joe remarried after just a year or so, to a woman whose name is unrecorded by history.

Unfortunately, Joe’s second marriage was as cursed as his first had been blessed.  The new Mrs. Stephenson was soon on such bad terms with her husband that within two weeks of the wedding, she left him for good.  The estranged wife told anyone who would listen stories about Joe that were considered impossible to credit, and as she already had a reputation for dishonesty, her allegations were ignored.

After the quick collapse of his remarriage, Joe became more reclusive than ever, with such a bitter antipathy towards women as a whole that he refused to let any female even enter his cottage.  Never known for his piety in the best of times, Joe soon became, in the vivid words of a local historian, “a most blasphemous old reprobate, whose profanity, excited by the most trivial annoyance, was truly blood-curdling.”

In his later years, on nights when he had too much gin at the village pub, Joe took to dropping hints about his past life.  He once told one of his very few friends that he hailed from Berwick-upon-Tweed, although he furiously rejected any suggestion that he return to his native land, or even communicate with anyone he knew there.  He occasionally muttered that when he eventually died, it would cause the greatest scandal Toft Hill had ever seen.  His listeners tolerantly dismissed such words as the drunken babblings of a bitter old man.

In November 1869, Joe became so ill that it was soon evident that he was dying.  A female neighbor with some experience as a nurse offered to look after him, but she was rewarded with such a torrent of abuse that she fled.  The miserable recluse died alone, which was clearly what he had wanted.

When it was clear Joe’s end had come, a couple of charitable women went to his cottage to prepare the body for burial.  As they prepared to wash the corpse...they suddenly stopped.  The women immediately summoned the village doctor.  And then the village constable.  Before long, Toft Hill was treated to news just as stunning as the dead man had promised:  “Joe Piker” was really a “Jane Doe.”

The rector of the local parish, W.B. Findlay, did his best to trace “Joe’s” true identity.  He learned one interesting story: in the winter of 1822-23--not long before Joe settled in Toft Hill--a young shepherd in Berwick-upon-Tweed jilted his sweetheart, after which, both suddenly and mysteriously disappeared for good.  It was speculated that “Joe” was this wronged girl, who murdered her faithless lover and fled, assuming both his clothing and his gender.  Unfortunately, no one was ever able to satisfactorily establish the identity of “Joe Piker.”  The corpse was buried in the parish church as “an unknown woman.”

Via Newspapers.com

This curious little melodrama was reported in the “Los Angeles Herald,” September 11, 1909:

PARIS, Sept. 10--A strange lost child is perplexing the Paris police. An American mother is claiming the girl as her daughter, but the latter disclaims her mother. The girl is 6 years old, but talks with astonishing volubility. She happened to call on a policeman voluntarily one day, but as she could not speak any apparently known language, he took her to the police station, where all the experts and interpreters at first failed to understand what the girl wanted.

Finally it turned out that she spoke some sort of Armenian dialect, and an interpreter was found. The child said she had been taken away from her grandmother's home in Syria by a strange woman, who wanted to take her to America, and who, in fact, brought her as far as Paris. The little girl said she had taken the first opportunity to run away from the woman. The police were astonished at the fluency with which the girl talked, and were about to send her temporarily to a home when the strange woman of whom she had spoken appeared and said the child was her daughter. "I am not your daughter," retorted the little one.

"I know my mother. She is very different from this person." The police were seriously embarrassed. They put off the inquiry for the day to obtain a second interpreter, for the mother, or alleged mother, herself speaks a strange mixture of English and French.

As soon as the two were again confronted with each other the precocious child threw up her hands and looked at the young woman in horror. "She is not my mother," she exclaimed.

The woman said she was born in Marseilles, but went to New York when very young. She married an Italian in New York when she was 14 years old and had this child. Her husband died the day the child was born. She kept the baby for one year, then sent her to be taken care of by the child's grandfather in Syria. Having heard that the grandfather had died, she went to Syria to secure the child.

On the way the little girl showed a vicious temper and did all the mischief she could. On reaching the Lyons railway station in Paris she sat down in the waiting room and fell asleep. During that time, she alleges, the child took the bag in which she had all her money, amounting to some $600, and gave it to some strange woman, who disappeared. When she woke she slapped the child, who then ran away into the street, and did not know what had become of her child until she saw her picture in the papers.

The child, who does not understand a word of her mother's language, was then told what she had said, and denied it all. For a whole hour the little one contradicted it in every detail.

She insisted the woman was not her mother. Until three weeks ago she had never seen the woman. It is not true her grandfather is dead. She knew her real mother very well, for she left Syria only a year ago, and was married again in a town not far from Jerusalem. She added: 

"This woman came one day to my grandfather's house when I was alone. She told me my grandfather was waiting for me in the train.

“I got in and he was not there. The train started away, and I cried, and wanted to go back. Then the woman beat me, and the train went on. At Beyrouth she took me on board a big steamer and we went to Port Said, Alexandria, and Marseilles.

“As soon as we got to Paris I took the first chance and ran away from her. I do not want to be with the woman any more. She has beaten me and made me suffer. I want to go back to grandpapa. She says my name is Annette.

It is not true. I am called Marianne." 

After this both the alleged mother and the child had a fit of crying, and between the two contradictory statements the police are unable to make out the truth. Curiously enough, however, the child is wonderfully like the woman who claims to be her mother.

Although the story above was published in a number of newspapers in both Europe and America, I was unable to learn how the mystery of the child’s true identity was resolved.

While I wouldn’t say it’s an everyday occurrence for someone to discover a corpse in a chimney, it has happened more often than you’d like to think.  The following story is one that puts a particularly gruesome twist on such tragedies.

September 20, 1987, started out as a perfectly ordinary day of work at the Georgia-Pacific paper mill in Bellingham, Washington.  At around 5:21 a.m., employee Roy Harris noticed that a smoke alarm had gone off for one of the mill’s ten boilers, which were used to preheat steam for use in the mill.  This particular boiler--number nine--wasn’t used often, so was rarely checked.

The boiler was a 10-foot-square steel structure, with a four-foot-wide lid which was usually left open.  Harris climbed to the top of the boiler, and looked inside.  And got what was likely the shock of his life.  He realized he was looking at--in the clinical words of the later autopsy report--a “partially skeletalized, extensively carbonized” human corpse.  The victim had evidently been alive when they entered the boiler, and essentially gradually roasted to death.

Harris instantly notified both plant supervisors and Bellingham police of his macabre find.  Police, in turn, called in the county’s deputy medical examiner, Robert Gibb.

It was, Dr. Gibb later sighed, “not one of my favorite afternoons.”

“Tacoma News Tribune,” September 18, 2017, via Newspapers.com

It was estimated that the body had been inside the boiler from anywhere from several days to several weeks.  The victim would not have had an easy time gaining entrance to their death trap.  They would have had to either climb three flights of stairs or ride a vertical conveyor belt to reach the roof of the plant.  From there, they could have either used a ladder to reach the top of the boiler, or climb using pipes as handholds.  It was also conceivable that the person could have jumped from a nearby roof onto a small structure next to the boiler.  Although the plant had relatively little security, which would have enabled an outsider to access the property, boiler number nine was itself remote, largely hidden, and rarely visited.  As the plant superintendent commented, “You would have a better chance on winning the lottery than having someone look down Stack No. 9.”

The autopsy was able to determine that the corpse was--probably--a male between 25 to 35 years old and weighing 130 to 155 pounds.  He was 5’8” or 5’9” inches tall.  The body had numerous fractures, but it was unknown if they were the result of the fall into the boiler, heat stress, or an assault.

The man wore a shirt, jeans, a denim jacket, and size 8 sneakers.  There were indications that the victim had used the clothing to try to protect himself from the heat, and marks on the inside wall suggested that he had made hopeless efforts to escape his doom.  The body was so charred that authorities were unable to test for drugs or alcohol, as well as making DNA testing an impossibility.

The victim had no personal items, such as a wallet, keys, or a watch.  The only thing found on him was a partially-charred piece of a Continental airline ticket or baggage claim.  Unfortunately, it was not readable enough to identify who had bought or sold the ticket.

The first task law enforcement faced was putting a name to this extremely unfortunate victim.  It was easily ascertained that no employees or contract workers at the mill were missing.  The skull was used to make forensic drawings which were distributed to law agencies, police, and the media across both the United States and Canada.  No one came forward to suggest who this person might have been.  Although the victim had dental work, a search of dental records in missing-person files found no match.  In short, the authorities were unable to even make a guess about this person’s identity.

In 2006, a potential clue to the mystery emerged.  A steam engineer at Western Washington University named Richard Severson told the “Bellingham Herald” that in the late summer of 1987, he had given a woman a tour of the University’s steam plant.  He recalled that she began behaving very oddly when she saw the boilers, asking if she could go inside one.  When he directed her to an inactive boiler, she excitedly climbed in, playing inside the thing like a small child frolicking in a jungle gym.  Severson was so disturbed by this strange woman that he asked her to leave.  He said he had mentioned to her the boilers at the Georgia-Pacific plant, which he assumed were inaccessible to non-employees.  When he read about the grisly discovery at the plant, he wondered if there was a connection.  However, police remained reasonably certain that the corpse could not have been female.

The obvious next mystery was: how on earth did this person end up in such a strange, inaccessible place?  Was it a particularly grisly suicide?  A weird, self-destructive environmental protest?  Murder?

Could it have been an evening of “fun” gone very, very wrong?  In 2006, an employee at Mt. Baker Plywood mill told police that shortly after the body was discovered, he talked to a visitor at his plant.  This man claimed to be part of a group who would occasionally sneak into Georgia-Pacific and climb the towers.  An employee at the plant would help them get into the mill after it closed for the day.  He went on to say that if any of these urban explorers feared they had been seen by security guards, this person would blow a whistle and they would all meet in some pre-arranged spot.  The visitor said that someone from New York had recently joined the group, but on their latest outing, failed to turn up at the pre-arranged location.  The obvious implication is that the New Yorker, while prowling around the roof, accidentally fell into the boiler.  State police in New York provided information on five missing men who could possibly be a match for the victim, but these five files were all lacking dental records.  Police were unable to locate the Mt. Baker Plywood visitor, so it is impossible to say if this story can be trusted.

In 2001, the Georgia-Pacific mill closed, and has long since been demolished.  In 2006, Bellingham police closed their investigation, citing their complete lack of leads.  Nothing has happened in the years since then to change their view.  Even the current location of the victim’s corpse is unknown.  Virtually no physical traces remain of this particularly puzzling death.

Via Newspapers.com

Walter Rice

Sometime in 1990, a man named Walter Rice moved from Connecticut to McCormick, South Carolina.  He bought a small lot and a trailer, and settled down to live virtually as a hermit.  He had no job, no friends, no known activities.  So isolated was his life that when he failed to pay his power bill in February 1992, it was assumed Rice had simply abandoned his trailer.  Crews removed his meter, and no one thought anything more about the matter.

In April 1994, McCormick’s police department received a disturbing phone call from a woman who refused to give her name.  She said that two months before, a friend of hers had broken into Rice’s trailer, only to find his dead body lying on the floor.  The woman explained her long silence by saying she assumed someone would discover the corpse, but as the weeks went by, her conscience forced her to alert authorities. When police arrived at the trailer, they did indeed find signs of a break-in. And the very, very dead body of Walter Rice.

The coroner estimated that Rice had died early in February 1992, probably of a massive heart attack.  (He had been injured in a serious auto accident in late January 1992, which might have also contributed to his death.)

"Greenwood Index-Journal," November 7, 1994, via Newspapers.com

It was after Rice’s death that his story went from sad to memorably baffling.  Authorities discovered that Rice had nearly $138,000 in four banks across the Southeast.  Rice’s only known job was when he worked as a hotel restaurant cook in Essex, Connecticut between 1973 and 1983--hardly the sort of profession that enables one to accumulate a small fortune.  A search of his trailer failed to find any normal personal items such as letters and Christmas cards.  As far as anyone could tell, he never married, had no relatives, and lacked any real connection to any other human being.

As part of the effort to trace anyone who might be Rice’s heir, “Unsolved Mysteries” aired a segment about this exceptionally mysterious man.  The publicity brought forward a host of cranks and con artists who presented laughably bogus claims to Rice’s money, but not one person who had any legitimate ties to the dead man.  In the end, the only heir anyone could find for Walter Rice was the state of South Carolina.

The more authorities investigated this man, the weirder he got.  The number on Rice’s Social Security card turned out to be invalid.  He had a passport which indicated he had visited several foreign countries.  Why had he traveled to those places?  Nobody could say, but it’s a good guess that this strange hermit was no casual tourist.  After tracing the passport, talking to certain government officials, and making what use they could of Rice’s fingerprints, McCormick police became convinced that the dead man had some sort of ties to the CIA.  That agency, perhaps significantly, refused to comment.

Rice had paid for everything in cash.  He had no credit cards, or anything else that might leave a trustworthy paper trail.  He had a birth certificate which stated he was born in Abbeville, South Carolina on July 6, 1920, but that city had no record of him.  No one could even say for sure that “Walter Rice” was his real name. It was as if he never really existed.

To date, the life of Walter Rice has remained an unsolved puzzle.  There must be someone, somewhere, who knows his true history and the reason why he so doggedly cloaked himself in secrecy, but for whatever reason, they prefer to keep this information to themselves.

"Cape Vincent Eagle," December 22, 1927

One day in the spring of 1865, a stranger arrived in a small Northern New York hamlet called Fishers Landing.  He was so silent and secretive, it ironically earned him what was undoubtedly unwanted attention.  Years later, a Watertown newspaper recalled that the visitor was “very reticent and refused to talk of cities he had visited or say where his home was located.”  This curious traveler was no ordinary vagrant--he was well-dressed, intelligent, and was obviously what used to be called “a gentleman.”  He was described as about thirty, with swarthy skin, black hair and a noticeable southern accent.

The man took a hotel room, where he holed up for some days.  Then, he moved to Clayton’s Maple Island, in the middle of the St. Lawrence River.  He built a crude lumber hut, which, as it turned out, would be his home for the rest of his days.  He almost completely disappeared from human view, with no company except a supply of books and his violin.  He only left the island to make rare visits to local farms to buy food and other basic necessities.  He paid for his purchases with British gold.

One night in the fall of 1865, the area was hit by a violent storm.  When it was observed that a fire had broken out on Maple Island, those on shore assumed it had been struck by lightning.  Then, three or four men could be seen running around the island, presumably Good Samaritans helping Maple Island’s sole resident escape the flames.

The next morning, when some of the locals went to the island to offer assistance to the hermit, they found that something far grimmer had taken place.  The hut had been burned down, and his boat and stash of gold pieces were missing.  The hermit’s body was found near the shore on the opposite side of the island.  He had been, in a reporter’s graphic words, “literally chopped to pieces with an ax or other sharp weapon.”  

Although it was assumed that the motive for the murder was robbery, no one had any idea who committed this gruesome deed.  It was said that a week before the murder, three strangers with southern accents had arrived in the area.  On the day of the murder, they rented a boat.  After they returned the boat late that night, they hired someone to row them to Alexander Bay.  They were never seen again.  If these were indeed the hermit’s killers, it does not appear that anyone even tried to have them traced.  After the coroner gave the mangled remains a cursory examination and the corpse was buried on a strip of sandy beach near the burned out-hut, the investigation into this killing was essentially over.  (Regarding this burial, in 1891, a local resident claimed that in 1877 “a certain Wall Street broker, now dead,” had robbed the grave of the hermit’s skull, which he had made into a tobacco box.)

In the years following the hermit’s death, people have had a great deal of fun speculating about who this man was and why he was killed.  According to some reports, his murderers had slashed his chest with three crosses in the shape of a triangle.  This was known to be the symbol of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a pro-Southern, pro-secession secret society.  That led to the theory that the murder of the hermit was some sort of assassination carried out by the Knights.  Many people found it plausible that this reclusive southern gentleman was somehow involved with that ever-popular inspiration for wild legends, the Lincoln Assassination.  In 1896, the “Watertown Re-Union” pointed out that Jake Thompson, a Toronto-based agent for the Confederacy, had paid John Surratt $100,000 in English gold to help assassinate Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and other Union leaders.  Surratt was accompanied by John A. Payne, brother of Lewis Payne, who would later be hanged for his attempted assassination of William Henry Seward.  John Payne was said to be the treasurer of the Knights of the Golden Circle.

Some authorities came to believe that the hermit may well have been John Payne.  According to this scenario, it was Payne who was actually given the $100,000 which was meant to be divided up among the would-be assassins.  Instead, Payne fled with the gold and hid himself on Maple Island, hoping to remain invisible until the coast was clear.  Unfortunately for him, his former co-conspirators succeeded in tracking him down, whereupon they took their bloody revenge.

For what it’s worth, this story was corroborated years later by one Robert McAdam.  As he was on his deathbed, he confided to a friend that he had been another member of the secret society to which Payne belonged.  McAdam and Payne had been part of the plot to kill Lincoln.  McAdam was supposed to get a share in the gold Payne had received.  After Payne betrayed them, he had been one of the three men who had killed him.  After all, by running off with the gold, Payne had broken his oath of loyalty to the Knights, which, according to the rules of the society, meant death.

In 1914, the daughter of a now-dead woman named Jenny Hickey shared her mother’s story.  Hickey had been a dairy maid at one of the farms which sold food to the hermit.  She was often assigned to deliver these goods to the hermit’s island hut.  As the man was handsome and personable, she enjoyed making these visits.

Understandably, Jenny became very curious about why such a charming and cultured man chose such a lonely, sparse existence.  When she questioned him, he was reluctant to share anything about himself, but she was able to learn that he had fought for the Confederacy under Stonewall Jackson and Lee.  He showed her a book of Confederate war songs, revealing that he was the author of one of them, the “Death of Jackson.”  The songwriter was listed as  “John A. Payne.”  The hermit begged Hickey to never reveal his identity, as it could well cost him his life.  A few days later, Hickey’s sailor fiance returned home after a long voyage, and they were soon married.  She never returned to the farm, and never saw the hermit again.

However, local historian A.E. Keech dismissed all the Payne stories as “pure fiction.”  Keech also refuted the allegations that the hermit’s body had been found mutilated with crosses.  According to him, after the fire on the island, the hermit merely vanished forever.  He believed the mysterious man was really another southerner, Godfrey J. Hyams.  During the Civil War, Hyams was first assistant to Toronto’s chief Confederate commissioner.  In 1864, he learned of the Confederate plot to burn down New York City, and tipped off the Federal authorities.  As a reward for this bit of double-dealing, he was paid $100,000 in cash, after which he wisely fled town.  On his way to Halifax, he realized he was being followed, so he changed his route and sought an obscure hiding place, which he found on Maple Island.  As with the Payne theory, the Keech scenario has him murdered by the men he had betrayed, with his body either spirited away or lying on the bottom of the river.

Was the hermit a former Confederate who paid the ultimate price for disloyalty to his friends?  Or, more prosaically, was he just some ordinary uninteresting citizen with, for whatever reason, a strong taste for solitude?  (To be frank, I lean toward the latter.)  In either case, the tale of the Hermit of Maple Island provides New York’s Thousand Islands region with its most colorful legend.

Louisville Courier Journal, January 18, 1921, via Newspapers.com

Ah, Louisville, Kentucky. Famed for the Kentucky Derby, Muhammad Ali, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Louisville Slugger baseball bats, blue quasi-humans roaming the streets…

If you are at all familiar with my blog, you can guess which of the above we will be discussing this week.

The saga of Louisville’s most unusual tourist was first covered in the “Courier Journal” on January 17, 1921, although sightings of the entity which became known as the “Blue Man” had been taking place for some time. In the newspaper’s front-page (!) story on the mystery, one Reese Carrell told a reporter of his encounter with the stranger: “I’ve only been knocked down once in my life, and it did it. It’s been around here every night for the last two weeks. What it’s after, I don’t know. But one night last week when I came home at about 11 o’clock, I saw somebody standing on our front step. I thought it was my father, and I walked right up to him. ‘Looking for the Blue Man, Pop?’ I asked him, and just then, he hit me in the chest. I was knocked against the fence, and when I got up it was gone.” Carrell described the “Blue Man” as extremely tall, and, yes, with a face of a pleasing indigo hue.

The following day, the “Courier Journal” reported on Mrs. Earl Schubnell’s encounter with the being on the previous Thursday evening. She said she was sitting where she could see into her kitchen when she heard the shutter of one of the windows rustling, after which a hand was thrust through a broken pane in the window.

“The hand caught hold of the curtain and pulled it back,” said Mrs. Schubnell. “But when I screamed, it was withdrawn quickly and I heard the sound of someone running out of the alley and down the street in the direction of Kentucky Street.” In contrast to Carrell’s description, Mrs. Schubnell said the hand was “large and white,” one that was impossible to belong to any “blue man.”

A man named Virgil Hobbs claimed to have seen the figure wandering the streets on several occasions. The first time he spotted the Blue Man, a neighbor named Walter Fogel took a shot at it.

“As he shot,” said Hobbs, “I saw a tall figure wearing a black overcoat and a black soft hat climb over the coal shed at the rear of the Fogel yard and disappear into the night.”

Hobbs added, “Five minutes later, when a crowd had gathered in front of the house, I saw a man who, as I remember, looked suspiciously like the figure I had just seen to disappear, walking leisurely down Eighth Street. The man stopped and inquired about the excitement, and when told by one of those standing by, laughed and passed on. On the three other occasions that the intruder was scared off, the stranger passed by and each time the man, who was white and weighed about 180 pounds, wore the same black overcoat and black hat.” Hobbs marveled that the man had so far eluded capture, as on the second night of his appearance the Fogel house was “surrounded by fifteen patrolmen, five detectives and two members of the military force.”

Adding to the strangeness of the whole business is that no one had any idea what the “Blue Man” was trying to accomplish. Louisville residents could only speculate that he--or it--had “iron nerve, no brains, or an irresistible desire to obtain possession of a thing, or things unknown.”

On January 19, the nightly hunt for the “Blue Man” took an unexpected turn. Two detectives standing guard at Eighth and Kentucky Streets saw a man named Stewart Graven walking by carrying a suitcase and a bundle. Their suspicions aroused, the policemen followed Graven to his home. After he had entered, the detectives knocked on the door and politely forced their way inside. The residence, they reported, “looked like a storeroom,” full of expensive goods of all kinds. When questioned, Graven confessed to stealing a large quantity of items from the American Railway Express Company.” He said his only motive for the thefts was that he was out of work, and could not let his wife and small child starve. He was charged with grand larceny and two charges of stealing from a common carrier. There was speculation that Graven was also the elusive “Blue Man,” a theory which made the prisoner laugh. “Me the ‘Blue Man’?” he told reporters. “I wish I was. If I was I wouldn’t be in here right now!”

Despite this sad distraction, the Blue Man continued his rounds. One night, Mrs. Emma Perkins heard “whisperings” outside her home. She investigated, but saw nothing. The following night, she saw someone peeping into her window. However, by the time she opened the door, no one was to be seen. Several days later, on January 20, someone raised a window in the apartment of Stewart Friend, who boarded with Mrs. Perkins. Grabbing his revolver, he ran to the window and shot at a figure standing just a few feet away. He saw “it” fall against the fence. Mrs. Perkins ran out with her gun and also fired at the intruder. Both were positive they had pumped “it” full of lead. Eerily enough, however, when the area was inspected, all that was found was a few bullet holes in the fence. No blood, or any other trace of the “Blue Man” was found.

The following night, Mr. Blue took to letter-writing. Around 9:30 p.m., one Henry Etzel heard a light knocking on his door. This was strange, as the gate in front of his home always creaked when opened, and he had not heard it do so. He had also not heard any footsteps in the adjoining alleyway. When he opened the door, no one was there.

Assuming his ears had played tricks with him, Etzel went back to his newspaper. A couple of minutes later, he heard more knocks, louder than before. He dashed to the door and threw it open. He still saw no one.

There was nothing for it but to return to reading, but he stayed wary. Then, someone or something kicked the door several times. Etzel was able to open it before the noise ceased, but he still failed to see anyone. All he found outside his door was a note reading, “I will call again. Don’t be afraid. Your friend, the ‘Blue Man’ till we meet again.”

On the night of the 22nd, Mrs. L.I. Dilly heard someone trying to force open her apartment door. She ran to her neighbor, Mrs. G.S. Spalding, to sound the alarm. Mrs. Dilly then went out a side door and to the back of their residence. She saw a man jump over the back fence.

When police were summoned, they could find nothing, not even a footprint in the soft ground. Fifteen minutes after the policemen left, Mrs. Dilly, who was back in bed trying to go back to sleep, heard footsteps. Again, she heard someone turning her doorknob and pressing against the door. The intruder gave up on the door and retreated. A moment later, Mrs. Dilly saw a shadow on her window. And then, a face was pressed against the glass.

Mrs. Dilly grabbed her gun and ran outside. Seeing a figure fleeing into the night, she shot at it. Once again, prowler managed to escape. For the second time that night, the police fruitlessly searched the vicinity for footprints.

Immediately after Mrs. Dilly retired to bed, she had to call the police for a third time. She told the policemen that as she was drawing the covers about her, she heard a faint noise. She clutched her gun, waiting for whatever might happen next. The shadowy face returned to her window. She and Mrs. Spalding ran to the side yard, and Mrs. Dilly again fired at the prowler. This time, she heard a moan of “Oh, oh!”

She got the Blue Man at last!

However, when the police arrived they once again found...not one damn thing. No footprints, no blood. If the Blue Man was not a ghost, it did a very fine imitation of one.

Early on the morning of January 23, Mrs. J.G. Crider was awakened by her telephone ringing. When she answered, she heard a strange, husky voice saying, “The ‘Blue Man.'..last seen Eighth and Walnut!” Then the caller hung up. Police, as usual, found no clues to this latest bit of Blue Man Eccentricity.

On the night of the 29th, Blue Man entertained himself by ringing doorbells. At 9 p.m., Mr. and Mrs. E.O. Mershon phoned police complaining of hearing “three different kinds of strange noises” around their house. First, the bell was rung several times. That was followed by noises like snow sliding off the roof “only it wasn’t.”

Then, Mrs. Stanley Searcy reported that her doorbell had been ringing almost continuously from dusk to 11 p.m. It was, she said indignantly, the third night in a row she had been pestered with incessant ringing. Although she stood watch from her window, she saw or heard no one. Just the ringing.

The police, the “Courier Journal” sighed, “passed a restless evening.”

By early February, it seemed that the “Blue Man” had acquired a distaff sidekick. Several female residents of the Richter Apartments at Fourth and Oak Street reported being frightened by the appearance of someone wearing a blue coat suit and a large black hat. This person would knock on doors asking for a glass of water, in a manner the women found very unnerving. Although the visitor was wearing female clothing, the “large physique” made the alarmed residents believe it was probably a man.

Later that month, newspapers reported that a member of the Fogel family bedridden by illness was being pestered every night by a face “blue and terrible” pressed against the pane of his window. “It has been shot at and the bullets struck thin air. When the image appeared members of the family run to the outside, but never have seen anything more than darkness.”

When the family consulted a fortune teller, she told them that when the “thing” got what it wanted, it would go away.

What did it want? She couldn’t say.

Reese Carrell’s name returned to public print. He told reporters that the “Blue Man” had been hanging around his home for days. One night, it even crept into the Carrell home and stole a pair of trousers. Reese shot at the intruder several different times, with the usual failure. Doubting the efficacy of his son’s aim, Reese’s father tried shooting at the stranger. “I never missed a rabbit or a bird in my life,” Mr. Carrell complained, “but the shots went right through him.” When asked if he thought the intruder was a ghost, Carrell Sr. retorted, “Ghost? What would a ghost want with my pants?” One night, a patrolman fired no less than seven shots at close range without causing the slightest effect on the “Blue Man.”

Kansas City Star, January 22, 1921

As they say, all good things come to an end. Such was the case with our “Blue Man.” Whether he feared being caught at last, or simply got bored with his capers, by the end of March, the story disappeared from the newspapers. The “Blue Man” was evidently never captured, and the motive--if there ever was one--behind his activities remained a mystery.

"New York Daily News," November 25, 1956, via Newspapers.com

There are a number of tragic cases where people lose all memory of who they are, and, for whatever reason, no one is able to help them recover their identities. However, few such stories are as complicated and uncanny as the long, long search for the real “Charles Jamison.”

One day in February 1945, an ambulance arrived at the emergency entrance of Boston’s U.S. Public Health Service Hospital. Inside was an unconscious, middle-aged man whose condition was so obviously grave that the nurse on duty dispensed with the usual formalities and had him immediately admitted. She asked the ambulance driver for the man’s name.

“Charles Jamison,” he replied. The man would not or could not say anything more about the patient. Then he disappeared, along with the ambulance, never to be heard from again.

For some time, it was uncertain that “Jamison” would survive. He suffered from an acute stage of osteomyelitis (an infection of the bone marrow.) He had hideous sores all over his body, and his back was badly scarred with what doctors guessed were shrapnel wounds. After weeks of treatment, his life was finally out of danger. However, the infection left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down, and his speech was so impaired that anything he said was almost unintelligible. On top of all this, Jamison was suffering from complete amnesia. He was unable to say who he was, or what had happened to him.

At first, authorities assumed they could trace his identity. Surely, there had to be some record somewhere of this terribly ravaged man. But the more they tried to investigate the patient’s past, the more mysterious he became. The shabby clothes he had worn contained no identification of any sort, and they even lacked labels or laundry marks. No one ever called the hospital to ask about him. Inquiries to every ambulance service in and around Boston revealed that none of them had dispatched an ambulance to the Public Health Service Hospital on the day Jamison had been admitted.

Jamison was around sixty years old, with graying hair and brown eyes. He was six feet tall and weighed about 200 pounds. There was a two-inch scar on his right cheek, the index finger of his left hand was missing, and both arms were covered with tattoos. His appearance was so distinctive that it was thought it might help identify him, but that failed to be the case.

The tattoos were a mixture of flags and hearts. Some of the flags were American, others British. One faded tattoo had a scroll that seemed to say “U.S. Navy.” This led to the assumption that Jamison had been a sailor in the naval and/or merchant service, a belief bolstered by the fact that he had been brought to the only hospital in Boston that specifically treated seamen. There was a theory that Jamison had been aboard a freighter that had been shelled and torpedoed by a German submarine, but that could never be verified. However, after being sent Jamison’s fingerprints, both the FBI and the military replied that they had no record of him, which would not have been the case had he served in either the Navy or the merchant marine. His photo was sent to missing persons bureaus across the country, but that proved to be just as futile as every other effort to identify him.

For years, the poor man spent long days sitting in his wheelchair in a blank silence. He rarely made any sounds, and seemed to take little notice of the world around him. Then, in 1953, the hospital’s newly-installed medical director, Oliver C. Williams, became intrigued by this most enigmatic of patients. He felt there had to be some way to learn who this man really was.

Dr. Williams decided the only way to learn Jamison’s identity was by finding a way to communicate with the man himself. He devised a simple word game, where Jamison would be given a phrase or simple question, and asked what, if anything, it meant to him.

When asked how old he was, Jamison stubbornly insisted that he was 49, although it was clear that he was far older. “How old is your wife?” made his eyes briefly light up, but after struggling to think for a moment, he sighed and said, “I don’t know.” He knew who Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone were, although he spoke of them as though they were still living British statesmen, not historical figures dead for many decades.

This communication method elicited information in a very slow and difficult manner, but Dr. Williams managed to learn enough to convince him that Jamison was an Englishman who had served in the British Navy. At one point, while looking at pictures of various parts of England, Jamison suddenly remarked “I’m from London!” Unfortunately, all he could add to that was the statement that he lived in “a gray house.”

Jamison said he had no living relatives, and that he had gone to sea at the age of 13. He recalled that he had attended the gunnery school at Osborne in 1891 or 1892. When he was shown an issue of “Jayne’s Fighting Ships,” he recognized the British battleship Bellerophon. It was commissioned in 1909, and took part in World War I. “I served on her when she was new,” he commented with evident pride. When asked what ships he had served on during the Great War, he was reluctant to reply. He said, “They were all in convoy, under secret orders. They had no names, only numbers, and if I knew them I couldn’t tell you.” Even when it was pointed out to him that the war was long over, he refused to give any more information on his wartime duties.

The little information Jamison provided about his career was sent to British naval authorities. However, they found no record that anyone named “Charles Jamison” had attended the gunnery school, or served in their navy. The British were equally unable to find any record of his fingerprints. More dead ends.

At this point, Jamison was able to provide one more clue. He told Dr. Williams that one of the tattoos on his arms was the British ensign crossed over a U.S. shield, with the motto “United.” The other was of an English clipper he had sailed on called the “Cutty Sark.” When contacted about the ship, London authorities confirmed that there had indeed been a clipper by that name...but it had been retired almost fifty years earlier, and no other ship had carried that name since.

The "Cutty Sark"

Then, the Jamison mystery took an even weirder turn. The name “Charles William Jamison” was found on the manifest of a U.S. Navy troop transport ship which had docked in Boston on February 9, 1945. This was just two days before Jamison had arrived at the hospital.

The manifest’s information about Jamison was all handwritten in ink--an inexplicable detail in an otherwise typewritten document. It claimed that he had been repatriated after spending four years in a German POW camp. He was picked up by the transport ship on January 24, in Southampton, England. His age was given as 49, and his birthplace was Boston.

The manifest also said that he had been a sailor on a ship which had been torpedoed. The name of the ship was “Cutty Sark.” Which had not been on the seas for five decades.

Records showed that no Charles William Jamison had been born in Boston between 1885 and 1905. No one by that name had been made a naturalized citizen. No one connected with the transport ship had ever heard of anyone by the name of “Charles William Jamison,” and they could not say who had made the handwritten notations about him.

Jamison was quickly becoming the spookiest amnesiac on record.

Authorities in Invercargill, New Zealand cabled the hospital that Jamison’s description sounded identical to that of a crew member of the freighter “Hinemoa” named James Jennings. As it happened, Jamison had mentioned the ship a few times. He remembered that at one time, he had been a mate on the Hinemoa. It had carried nitrates from Chile to England until it was sunk by the Germans. However, the name “James Jennings” rang no bells with him. Research proved that Jamison’s information about the Hinemoa was correct, but the freighter’s crew lists did not have Jamison’s name, or anyone matching his description.

It was discovered that a Charles William Jamison had been born in Illinois in 1908. His name appeared in the Coast Guard’s file of merchant mariners, but no further information could be found about him. When asked about this man, Jamison replied with only a blank stare.

In 1956, a segment dealing with the Jamison riddle aired on national TV. A viewer in Texas thought Jamison resembled his father-in-law, Frank J. Higgins. Higgins had been a chief engineer in the merchant service before he disappeared many years back.

As seemed to happen at every turn in the case, this fresh lead just led to more mystery. Higgins, who was born at approximately the same time as Jamison, was a New Yorker who spent his adult life as a sailor. On December 9, 1941, his ship, a freighter named the “Frances Salman,” docked in Galveston, Texas. It was in port for less than a week before it sailed for Portland, Maine with a load of sulphur. On January 12, 1942, Higgins’ wife Rosalie received a letter from him. He was at St. John’s, Newfoundland, about to sail to Corner Brook, Newfoundland.

Higgins and his freighter were never seen again. The Frances Salman failed to arrive at Corner Brook, and its fate is unknown to this day. In the words of the ship’s owners, “She simply disappeared from the face of the earth.” Although we’ll likely never know what became of Frank Higgins, we can at least rule out the possibility that he was “Charles Jamison.” Their fingerprints didn’t match.

Thus ended the search for the true identity of Charles William Jamison. He died in the same hospital in January of 1975, still unable to say who he was, where he came from, or how he wound up at PHS. He was, in the words of a fellow patient, “the living unknown soldier.”

Jamison playing checkers in 1973. "Dayton Daily News," January 21, 1975, via Newspapers.com

Ramendra Narayan Roy, in the days when no one questioned that he was alive.

One of the most famous court cases of the 19th century revolved around Arthur Orton’s years-long campaign to prove that he was, in fact, Sir Roger Tichborne, a wealthy young man who had disappeared in a presumed shipwreck many years before. As strange (and protracted) as the whole Tichborne matter was, it was eclipsed in both length and weirdness by a lesser-known case which played out in India not many years later.

In the early 20th century, some areas of India were ruled directly by the British, others by Indian princes (kumars) operating under British control. One of the bigger and wealthier examples of the latter was the Bhawal Estate, in what is now Bangladesh. It was ruled jointly by three princes. The middle prince, Ramendra Narayan Roy, was a bit of a lad, with the unfortunate result that he was diagnosed with syphilis in 1906. While undergoing treatment in Darjeeling, he suddenly fell seriously ill and died on May 8, 1909, at the age of 25. He was cremated the following day.

The end of his story? Hardly. Ramendra hadn’t even begun causing trouble.

In 1910, the oldest of the Bhawal princes died, and shortly afterward, the remaining prince was ruled to be unfit to manage the estate on his own. (He died in 1913.) The estate was put under the control of the Court of Wards, a legal body created by the East India Company to protect estates when the heir, for whatever reason, was incapable of acting independently.

Not long after this, odd rumors began to circulate in Bhawal. It was said that Ramendra Narayan Roy was not, as everyone assumed, a heap of ashes, but alive and well and acting as a holy man in the city of Dhaka. Ramendra’s nephew went to Dhaka to see this mysterious figure for himself. He decided that the holy man did indeed resemble his presumably late uncle, but he could not positively say it was him. The pseudo-Ramendra was brought to Bhawal to meet other relatives. After speaking with him, some were convinced that it was the prince. They were particularly impressed that he remembered the name of “his” wet-nurse, something which was not public knowledge. Others, most notably Ramendra’s widow Bibhabati Devi, were equally convinced the man was an impostor.

At this point, British officials interjected themselves into the controversy. After interviewing all interested parties, they ruled that Ramendra Narayan Roy, like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, was still dead.

The end of his story? Ha!

There were still a great many supporters for the Claimant, and they and his detractors essentially went to war. The issue of his identity became so heated that at one of the pro-Claimant demonstrations, at least one man was fatally shot. In 1930, the Man Who Would Be Ramendra went to court to establish that he was the second Bhawal prince, although the trial did not actually begin until 1933.

The first question to be addressed was the one that probably first occurred to you: How in the hell did this guy survive cremation? The Claimant’s story, in brief, is this: his wife and brother-in-law had plotted to kill him. The diagnosis of syphilis had been merely a hoax, designed as an excuse to bring him to Darjeeling. There, he was poisoned and pronounced dead. His brother-in-law arranged for him to be taken to a funeral ground to be cremated. However, a sudden hailstorm which broke out before the pyre could be lit forced everyone to flee for safety, leaving him on the funeral grounds. There, some holy men happened to come across his inert form and carried him away to safety. They nursed him back to health, but the traumatic experience caused memory loss, which for several years made him forget who he was.

Top: Photo of the prince.  Bottom: The Claimant

The case almost totally revolved around “expert witnesses” for both sides. This worked about as well as you might think. The Claimant’s handwriting witnesses swore that the plaintiff’s writing was identical to that of the prince. The handwriting witnesses for the defense swore that there was no resemblance at all. A photographic expert for the Claimant swore that photos of the plaintiff and the prince were definitely of the same person. Photographic experts for the defense told him to pound sand. Doctors who had tended Ramendra in his “final illness” were brought in. The ones who testified for the Claimant said he was really not all that sick, and could easily have survived. The ones who appeared for the plaintiff said recovery had been impossible. And so on. And so on. For more than a year, literally a thousand witnesses offered equally contradictory testimony. Then, the defense presented their case. For yet another year, they brought forth four hundred witnesses, including Ramendra’s widow, who all denounced the Claimant as a shamelessly brazen fraud. The widow of the eldest prince also believed the plaintiff was a fake. On the other hand, the widow of the third prince was of the opinion that yes, the Claimant was actually the real deal.  For every bit of evidence which proved the Claimant was the prince, another was brought forward which proved he wasn't.

In short, the trial was a confusing mess on a truly epic scale.

The legal marathon finally adjourned on May 20, 1936. The long-suffering judge took three months to study the voluminous evidence and write his report. He judged in favor of the plaintiff, and ordered that he be given his rightful one-third share of the Bhawal Estate.

The end of his story? Oh, surely you jest.

Despite this verdict, the British remained convinced the Claimant was a hoaxer, and filed an appeal, which was heard before the High Court in Calcutta in late 1938. While the case was being heard, one of the three appellate judges made what was meant to be a brief trip to England. Then--as if things weren’t complicated enough already--World War Two broke out, leaving the judge unable to return. After a year or so of hoping the world would calm down enough for him to get back to India, the stranded judge finally sent over his written judgement. It turned out that there was a split decision: one of the judges supported the appellants, while the other two (including the one stuck in England) ruled against them. For a second time, the legal system had decided that the Claimant was indeed Ramendra Narayan Roy.

The end of his story? I think that by now, you know the answer to that.

Ramendra’s widow (or, in the view of the High Court, his wife) was determined to fight on. She brought her appeal to London’s Privy Council. The ruling on her case had to be delayed until the end of the war. Finally, July 30, 1946 saw the end of this other long, messy conflict. The Privy Council dismissed her appeal, leaving the Claimant again triumphant.

For a while, at least. Before the Privy Council delivered its verdict, an astrologer told Bibhabati that she would lose her case, but that the Claimant would gain no benefit from his win. As it happened, he was quite correct. Just hours after he learned of his victory, the Claimant suffered a massive stroke which killed him two days later.

Whether or not this man was truly Ramendra Narayan Roy--something which is still debated by historians--his story was, at long last, indisputably over.

Montreal Gazette, October 13, 1857, via Newspapers.com

William Townsend was, on the whole, a very ordinary sort of villain. His numerous grim deeds were brutishly uncomplicated, wholly lacking any of the originality, enterprise, or even flashes of humor that go to make some crimes permanently capture the public imagination. Townsend, in his private life, had a talent for mimicry that in other circumstances might have led him to become a successful actor, but other than that there was little to be said for the man. The one thing that has caused him to be remembered by crime historians--and that renders him worthy of mention in the hallowed grounds of Strange Company HQ--is that he managed to cap off his undistinguished career of evil with an impenetrable mystery that, in his day, managed to captivate all of Canada.

Our story opens at the home of one John Hamilton Nelles, a shopkeeper in a small village named Nelles Corners, near Lake Erie. Living with Nelles was his wife and their small child, plus his mother and younger brother Augustus. A temporary houseguest was Mrs. Nelles' sister Lucy Humphreys.

On the night of October 18, 1854, everyone in the Nelles household was peacefully asleep, except for the head of the house, who was performing some unspecified household tasks. The stillness was suddenly interrupted by a loud knock on the front door, immediately followed by three men bursting into the house. Ominously, their faces were heavily disguised.

The intruders demanded money.  Nelles refused, and ordered the robbers to leave his house.

So one of the men shot Nelles three times.

The sound of gunfire brought Mrs. Nelles and her sister rushing into the room. The bandits ignored the screaming, hysterical women and began ransacking the house, looking for money. They found nothing but Nelles' watch, which they pocketed. They then fled as suddenly and brazenly as they had appeared.

A doctor was summoned, but he could do little to aid the clearly mortally wounded man. Nelles was conscious, but all he could say was that he had no idea who his assailants were. Three hours after being shot, the shopkeeper was dead.

When the local police officers were informed of the tragedy, they instantly went in search of the bandits. A clue as to where the criminals had gone came when two farmers reported that while they were on the road from Nelles Corners to Cayuga, a group of five men (two had evidently waited outside the Nelles cottage) waylaid and robbed them. Then, a constable named Robert Flanders reported that five men had spent the night in his barn, after which they took the early train bound for Buffalo, New York. Flanders recognized one of the men, who appeared to be the leader of the gang, as a known criminal named William Townsend. Flanders believed these were the same men who robbed the two farmers and killed John Nelles.

Flanders and six other policemen took the first available train to Buffalo, where they contacted the local police. A search was made of the city, but their homicidal birds had already flown. By the time the constables arrived in New York, the fugitives had doubled on their tracks and returned to Canada.

A few days after this fruitless search, word came that Townsend had been seen in St. Catherines, where he pawned Nelles' watch. A posse surrounded him, but Townsend managed to shoot his way out, after which he boarded a boat bound for Oswego, an American port on Lake Ontario. Robert Flanders was dispatched to Oswego, which he reached before the vessel arrived in port. When the ship arrived, Flanders was disappointed to learn from the captain that a man matching Townsend's description had indeed boarded the vessel at St. Catherine's, but at Port Dalhousie, the passenger went to another ship bound for Kingston. It was later determined that Townsend subsequently made his way to the home of his brother-in-law, where he went into hiding for some weeks. (Local rumor--which we can only earnestly hope was true--stated that Townsend disguised himself as a woman.)

Some of Townsend's confederates were less fortunate. One of his gang, John Blowes, was captured in a Hamilton brothel run by one "Limping Jenny," and another, George King, was also arrested near Hamilton. Soon afterward, a third fugitive, William Bryson, was apprehended near Toronto.

In April 1855, Blowes, King, and Bryson were brought to trial for the murder of John Nelles. Although no one doubted Townsend had been the one who shot Nelles, Canadian law at the time held that any confederates in a murder were just as guilty as the actual assassin. Accordingly, they were all found guilty. King and Blowes were hanged, but Bryson turned Queen's evidence, which led to his sentence being commuted to life imprisonment.

In the meantime, the chief villain of the piece, William Townsend, evidently tired of a life in hiding, or corsets and petticoats, or both. He soon returned to his usual criminal ways. In December 1855 he robbed a farmer near Port Robinson. The victim managed to track him down to the village inn, and alerted the village constable, Charles Richards. Richards went to the inn to arrest Townsend, but before he could lay hands on his quarry, Townsend pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot the constable dead. As the witnesses to the scene were too afraid to tackle the bandit, he easily made his escape.

A couple of days later, police learned that Townsend was on a train bound for Woodstock, in the western area of the province. The local sheriff was sent a detailed description of the fugitive, with orders that when the train arrived, Townsend should be arrested for murder.

The Woodstock jailer, George Forbes, and four constables were sent to meet the train. Then things began to get a bit strange. On one of the cars, Forbes noticed a man he thought matched the description of the wanted man. As he stared, the passenger casually said, "Oh, I know what you are at. You take me to be Townsend."

"Yes, I do," Forbes replied.

"Oh," the man replied cheerfully. "I do favor the description very much; I have been taken for him once before today, but I am not he. I am going west, and come from the east of Rochester."

Forbes was flummoxed. The man was so well-dressed, and sported such an air of calm confidence, that he did not dare arrest him on the spot. The jailer went to confer with the other constables, who decided that the passenger must be detained until people arrived on the scene who could identify Townsend. They found him on the platform, where he submitted quietly, offering only a mild protest that he was an innocent traveler who only wished to go west. However, as the train began to leave the platform, the man "darted away like a deer," and jumped on the last platform of the last car, leaving his would-be captors behind. Once again, William Townsend--yes, it was he--had eluded justice.

Townsend seemed to have vanished for good. Then in April 1857, a Canadian man named John Iles, who had known Townsend some years back, was washing glasses in his Cleveland, Ohio hotel bar when a railway conductor came in with one of his passengers. The conductor explained that the man was unable to pay his fare, but offered his revolver as collateral. "This young man owes me $3.50," said the conductor. "When he pays you that, and his lodging, let him have his revolver."

When Iles got a good look at the passenger, he instantly realized he was staring at the noted robber and murderer William Townsend. "I was so surprised," Iles later testified, "that I let a glass drop and it smashed." Iles immediately contacted police, and, at long last, the fugitive was arrested. After the extradition process, the prisoner was placed in the county jail at Cayuga.

The trial began on September 27, 1857. The defendant's long and colorful life on the lam brought great attention to the case, making the proceedings a media sensation. The prisoner pleaded "not guilty."

The first prosecution witness was Lucy Humphreys, who identified the defendant as one of the men who had broken into the Nelles home on that fatal night. William Bryson was then put on the stand. He described the formation of the Townsend gang and the many crimes it had committed, and closed with asserting that the man in the dock was indeed his old gang leader. He was followed by ten other witnesses, including John Iles, all of whom swore that the prisoner was indeed the infamous William Townsend. By the time the prosecution rested its case, it appeared to all that Townsend's fate was well and truly sealed.

Then it was time for the defense to present their evidence. And this beautifully open-and-shut legan proceeding began to unravel. The prisoner's lawyers brought in no less than forty-nine witnesses who swore with equal certainty that the man on trial could not possibly be William Townsend. Foremost among them was constable Robert Flanders, who stated that he was willing to bet a thousand dollars that they were putting the wrong man on trial.

The jury, understandably enough. was deeply confused by all this. They were left hopelessly deadlocked, with seven voting for conviction and five for acquittal. The jurors were discharged and the prisoner returned to his cell to await a new trial.

The second trial of Townsend--or, if you believe the defendant, "Not Townsend"--was not for the murder of John Nelles, but that of Charles Richards. The prosecution evidently believed they'd have better luck with the second murder attributed to the prisoner than they did with the first. In the meantime, the accused wrote an open letter to the newspapers, scornfully denying that he was William Townsend. He stated that he was really Robert J. McHenry, a Scotsman who emigrated to America in 1837, where he found work as a mariner on Lake Erie. Furthermore, he claimed that during the period when Nelles and Richards were murdered, he was in California prospecting for gold.

Montreal Gazette, October 10, 1857 via Newspapers.com

His trial was, he stated, a "conspiracy," with the witnesses against him being bribed to commit perjury. "Until I have collected all the perjurers' names who will be willing to slip up and swear to a falsehood, in consideration of money, or to please some interested party in my conviction, will I say but little who I am, for never was there such a gross fraud attempted upon the public. What a compliment this decision will be to the intelligence of Haldimand, when handed down to posterity, when the rising generation will raise the finger of scorn and say, 'there goes a Townsend juror,' and when it becomes a byword and a common saying, 'you are as ignorant as a Townsend Juror,' or, 'you are as intelligent as a Townsend Juror.'"

The prisoner concluded, "When I have exposed to the public the base and diabolical plots that have been organized to convict me of this charge, then will you pause to think on what base purposes the machinery of the law is applied to. If I suffer in your estimation in those imputations that have been cast upon my character, I earnestly desire you to be patient, I am willing to suffer that good may come thereof."

Townsend Trial 2.0 opened in the town of Merrittsville on March 26, 1858. It had many of the same parade of witnesses, although when William Bryson again took the stand, he was forced to admit that he had not initially recognized the prisoner as Townsend. In addition, although Townsend had worn earrings, Bryson had not seen any holes in the defendant's ears. However, Bryson pointed out that Townsend was "a person of a great deal of agility" in impersonations. Jacob Eviner, one of the two farmers who had been robbed by the Townsend gang outside of Nelles Corners, had identified the prisoner as Townsend at the first trial. He now backtracked on his earlier statement, saying that he was "not now prepared to say whether he is or is not the man."

Those who had been present at the murder of Constable Richards offered somewhat qualified identifications of the defendant. One witness said the prisoner "acted the same as Townsend...though the prisoner seemed the larger of the two." Another said, "I don't think I could recognize" Townsend if he saw him again, but "his height was the same as that of the prisoner." Several others testified in much the same terms: they thought the defendant was William Townsend, but they couldn't be certain of it. In contrast, George Forbes expressed no doubts whatsoever that the man in the dock was the same fugitive he had so embarrassingly let slip through his fingers at the train station. John Iles, who claimed to have been "well acquainted" with Townsend, also stuck to his identification. In short, thirty-five witnesses professed to be certain the prisoner was William Townsend, while a handful of others were less convinced. However, the Crown suffered one humiliating setback when a man who had known William Townsend since childhood, and had briefly run into the fugitive in 1856, said on the stand, "My opinion of the prisoner is that I never saw that gentleman before." The defense followed this by putting on an even larger number of witnesses--all of whom were considered sane and highly respectable people--who swore under oath that whoever the defendant really may have been, he was not William Townsend. Townsend boasted a number of tattoos. The prisoner did not. Townsend had abnormally large joints in his toes. "McHenry" did not. "McHenry's" handwriting did not resemble Townsend's. There was conflicting testimony on whether or not "McHenry" had scars similar to Townsend's.

This time around, the jury had little trouble coming to a consensus, even if it was not one the Crown wished to hear. After a brief deliberation, they announced, "the prisoner at this bar is McHenry, and is not guilty."

Montreal Gazette. October 10, 1857

The defendant had yet to be cleared of the murder of John Nelles, but the prosecution concluded that pursuing that charge was a lost cause. The prisoner was released on £100 bail, but he was never retried. Robert McHenry--or William Townsend--or whoever he was--went on his merry way, and disappeared from history.

In the many years since the two murder trials, Canadian historians have had great fun pondering the question of the prisoner's true identity. Some point to the many positive identifications of him as William Townsend, and assert that this clever criminal put on the performance of a lifetime, bamboozling his way out of a much-deserved date with the gallows. Also, if he truly was McHenry, why did he wait until his second trial to assert that he was in California at the time of the murders? On the other hand, there were seemingly equally credible witnesses who were certain the man was not Townsend. Reportedly, even the Crown prosecutor came to believe he had tried the wrong man for murder.

Just to complicate matters further, there is the view expressed by William Wallace Stewart in his 1931 book "Murders and Mysteries." Stewart proposed that the man twice tried for murder was neither Townsend nor McHenry. Stewart had uncovered a Townsend family tradition that their black sheep had, after going into hiding for two years, escaped across the border, where he fought in the American Civil War and died some years later in Mexico.

Wallace's research failed to find any evidence that there was ever a "Robert J. McHenry" in Scotland during the right time period. He theorized that the man calling himself "McHenry" was a deserter from the British army in Canada. This man had the bad luck to bear a striking resemblance to the murderer, but could not give his real identity for fear of facing the capital charge of desertion.

Was Wallace right? We will never know. There is only one thing anyone can say with certainty about this case: one way or another, William Townsend got away with murder.