Among the humbugs of thirty years ago was a great fortune-teller or “Asiatic sibyl,” as she called herself, who went by the name of “Madame Lucille.” This woman had an office at one time on Bond street, at another time on Broadway, and advertised herself “as the only livin’ descendant of Hermes, the Egyptian.” She pretended to talk an Egyptian, too; wore a regular “sibyl’s” dress, and had a room all fitted up in Oriental style. Opposite the entrance a mirror was so fixed as to make the room look double. The shutters were shut all the time; the room was lighted by swinging lamps lit with “sacred” oil; there were five lamps of bronzed silver, one at each corner, and one big lamp in the middle; charts and mystic symbols were all over walls, and on the floor were painted the signs of the zodiac. There were a lot of globes, too, and a sort of alter in the middle of the room, burnin’ “incense”. Right in front of the mirror hung two skeletons which, reflected in the mirror, made four, and gave the whole place a startlin’ look.
The “sibyl,” or Lucille, was a tawny, Indian lookin’ sort of a creature, with long hair and wild eyes. Her dress was all sorts of flower colors, worked with all sorts of signs and figures; the skirt was a yard long in the trail, and the sleeves were as flowin’ as a priest’s surplice. She always carried in her hand a big stick or “wand” with serpents twined around it, and altogether she looked mighty imposin’ and “stagey.”
She put on a lot of “style,” and charged five dollars for a consultation. She got it, too, for a while, and she managed her business so well that she astonished the town by the knowledge she seemed to have of people’s past lives.
The way she worked to get this knowledge was clever, because it was simple. She would first hand handle the five dollars; that was the golden rule, from which she never deviated on any account whatever. Upon the cash bein’ paid the visitor would be led into the room I have just described, and then in her flowin’ robes, among the swingin’ lamps and the chart, and the globes, and the incense, and the skeletons, she would ask a lot of what the lawyers would call “leadin’” questions, and repeat a lot of mummery. Then she would tell the five-dollar party that she would “cast his or her horoscope,” and would make an appointment with the party to call again. The second call bein’ free, counted in the five dollars.
Then she would set some men she employed to find out all about the party who had just called. So that when he or she called the second time she really astonished the party by tellin’ a good deal about the past. Then, havin’ thus excited the wonder or the fear of the party, she would proceed to prophesy just what the party liked to have prophesied, and then, havin’ got the party into a real good humor, dismissed him or her, all ready to speak well of her and to send her other five-dollar parties.
I am reminded of this reference to Madame Lucille from the fact that Pinkerton, the detective, afterwards successfully tried her racket in the working up of a suspected murder case. One of the parties concerned in this case was a young music teacher over in Brooklyn, and another was an old sea captain that used to be in the employ of one of the old New York packet companies.
The old sea captain was a good sailor and a good man, but he had two weaknesses. He was, like all sailors, very superstitious, and had an opal ring, which he believed changed its color when any bad luck came to him, or when he had any enemies about. And then he was very fond of a pretty face, and as he had a very pretty young sister he let her do just what she liked.
The young girl married and then separated from her husband, and then took it into her head to teach music over in Brooklyn and to get compromised with a married man, a politician in a Jersey village, who had a lot of property in that village and wanted to own more, and to get to Congress, and who also had a house in Brooklyn, where his wife, who was a Brooklyn woman, lived in the Fall and Winter months.
The old sea captain didn’t like this politician for a cent, but his pretty sister was crazy about him, and so the old sea captain let matters take their course, and notwithstandin’ his sister’s foolish behavior, made his will leavin’ a lot of property in her favor.
After that on three different occasions when his sister was with him the old sea captain was taken sick, each time after he had taken some ale, of which he was very fond, the ale havin’ been handed to him by his sister. Just before takin’ the ale, accordin’ to the captain’s own account, the opal ring had changed its color, warning him of some danger.
Meanwhile the politician and the pretty sister got more and more intimate, and people in Brooklyn got talkin’ about ‘em. But the politician’s wife had gone over to live in the village, where nothin’ was known about the pretty music teacher, and when the husband and wife were together in the village he always treated her so kindly that he passed for a first-class A No. 1 husband.
One Summer the politician’s wife got sick, and then sicker; and her husband got kind and then kinder, and poured out all her medicine himself. But spite of all his care the poor wife got worse and worse, till at last she died, and was buried, from some reason or other, very hurriedly in the graveyard near the village. And that was the end of it, so the politician thought.
But the old sea captain had made up his mind by this time that there was somethin’ behind the three glasses of ale that made him sick, given him by his sister, and the sudden death of the wife of the politician who had infatuated that sister, and so he called on Pinkerton and told him the facts of the case. Pinkerton didn’t have the least bit of faith in the opal ring, but he made up his mind to two things: that the pretty sister had evidently made an attempt to get her brother out of the way of the money he had left her in his will, and that the politician had poisoned his wife, so as to be able to marry the pretty sister.
So he told the old sea captain to go back to his sister, pretend to be awfully angry with her for the way she was goin’ on with the politician, and to tear up in her presence the will he had made, and to threaten to make a new one leavin’ the property to somebody else. He did as he was told, and got the benefit of it. For although the pretty sister was kinder than ever to him, tryin’ to make things right again between ‘em, she didn’t doctor his ale any more, because if she had and the old fellow had died, she would have been worse off instead of better.
Then, havin’ got the old sailor safe for awhile from his sister, Pinkerton made a set at the politician, to see if he couldn’t trip him up for the murder of his wife.
But the first thing, of course, was to prove that the wife had been murdered by poison, and the only way to do that was to get hold of the body of the dead woman and to have it examined by a doctor, to see if there was any trace of poison in it.
But when a woman is once dead and decently buried, and her family are satisfied that her death was perfectly natural and couldn’t be helped, and her husband is an influential man, who feels his loss, but bears it like a Christian, what are you goin’ to do about it? In this state of affairs it is a mighty hard thing to get the chance to get that body out of its grave and get it examined by a doctor.
But by means of his spies, and havin’ his men go to the village and talk, Pinkerton got it to come to the ears of the coroner of the village, who was, by the way, a fast friend of the politician, that there were some people talkin’ about there being suspicious circumstances about the death and hasty burial of the politician’s wife. Then the coroner, thinkin’ it incumbent on him, in his friend’s absence (the politician just then bein’ in Brooklyn with the pretty music teacher), to defend his honor, and takin’ all this talk about foul play and suspicious circumstances as a reflection on his own official integrity, at once ordered an investigation. Then he notified the politician in Brooklyn what he had done, tellin’ him that he regretted the circumstance, but that of course it would all result in only one thing, in the triumphant vindication of the politician as a husband, and of himself as a coroner, and the confusion of all malicious slanderers.
By the next train came straight to the Jersey village the politician, justly indignant at the terrible actions so heartlessly breathed about his dear wife’s death, and although, of course, he did not blame his friend, the coroner, for permittin’ an examination of her body, he protested against it as an awful and unnecessary hurtin’ of his feelin’s.
And on the night of a very day that he came back to the village the politician was seen in deep talk with the sexton of the graveyard in which his wife was buried.
The sexton looked like a man who would do anythin’ for money. So Pinkerton made up his mind at once that something was up, any formed a pretty good idea of what it was.
So he got a lot of his men, who were in the village under one pretense or another, together, and told ‘em to take their pistols and to come along with him that night, after the rest of the village had gone to bed, and to take their places hidin’ among the graves in the graveyard.
After hidin’ as best they could, and waitin’ among the graves, the detectives saw three men, with a smoky lantern, busily engaged in diggin’. They were regular “experts” at body-snatchin’, and in a few minutes they nearly got the coffin they were diggin’ for out of the grave, and the body they were goin’ to snatch, out of the coffin.
Then, stealin’ on the three ghouls as quickly as possible, the detectives got to some hazel bushes, when, at a signal from Pinkerton, they rushed at the body-snatchers. The ghouls let go the coffin, which fell into the grave again, and then they took to their heels. The detectives ran after ‘em, but the ghouls, naturally enough, knew the graveyard a deal better than the detectives did, and made faster time among the tombstones. So the officers gave up the hunt, and after waitin’ long enough to make certain that the ghouls wouldn’t come back to the graveyard that night, went back to the village ‘emselves, bein’ told by Pinkerton to keep mum about their adventure.
The next mornin’ two excitin’ reports got circulated around the village. One was that some body-snatchers had tried to violate the grave of the politician’s wife and to steal her body, but had evidently been prevented from doin’ their vile work, as they had left all their tools behind ‘em in the graveyard. The other report was that some of the same gang of wretches had taken another body from the paupers’ burial ground, the body of some woman, which had been found, lyin’ on its shroud, near the opened grave of the politician’s wife. The village folks explained all this by attributin’ this double body-snatchin’ to a desire to sell the two bodies for dissectin’ purposes to some medical college; but Pinkerton knew better than this; he knew that the body-snatchers had been employed by the sexton whom he had seen talkin’ with the politician. The plan was to get a poor woman’s body, who had no friends, and to substitute it for the body of the politician’s wife, so that at the new examination by the coroner and doctors it would be found all right.
Followin’ out this plan the ghouls had succeeded in stealin’ the poor woman’s body from the Potter’s Field, and had brought it as near as they could to the grave of the other woman. Then they had laid it down and gone for the other grave, but when the detectives had rushed on ‘em they had been obliged to give up both of the dead and to take care of the three livin’.
Still, although Pinkerton knew all this he couldn’t prove it, and so he had to hold his tongue till he could get more evidence. That day the coroner held a sort of inquest or examination over the body of the politician’s wife, and it was so carelessly conducted, just as a matter of mere form, to satisfy people, that of course nothin’ came of it, except that the politician was more popular than ever.
But a good detective has got to be like a good general, he mustn’t know when he is licked. So Pinkerton bluffed for a while with the politician, and tried a dodge on the pretty music teacher. She, like her brother, the sea captain, was very superstitious. She believed in dreams and omens, and fortune tellin’, and all that. So Pinkerton, who had known all about the Madame Lucille racket, got up one of his female detectives, a Mrs. Warne, to play another edition of this Madame Lucille, put an address in the papers about her wonderful power “to read the mystic stars at the midnight hour,” and took care of that a copy of the advertisement was put in the pretty music teacher’s way. She read it, and determined to call upon this wonderful “daughter of Hermes” right off.
Mrs. Warne had made every preparation for her comin’, and when the pretty music teacher entered the secret chamber of the mighty reader of the planets, she found swingin’ lamps and signs of the zodiac on the floor, and two skeletons grinnin’ at one end of the queer place near a mirror, and reflected double in it. And sittin’ in such a place as this, with her superstitious nature, the pretty music teacher was prepared for anythin’.
Mrs. W. put on a lot of frills, and actin’ on hints given her by Pinkerton, told the pretty music teacher the history of her life accordin’ to the detectives theory. “You have fallen in love with a married man,” said Mrs. W. The pretty music teacher bowed her head in assent. “He has fallen in love with you, and to get rid of his wife he has poisoned her, with your knowledge and consent, in order that he might marry you.” The pretty music teacher fell at once upon her knees before the sibyl, the mighty reader of the midnight stars, and confessed her guilt. “True, too true,” she muttered. Then, on her knees, she continued: “But I loved him, and he loved me, and he did it for my sake, and I consented to it for his.” Then Mrs. Warne, the detective, extracted from the pretty music teacher the whole history of the crime that the politician had committed. He had administered arsenic in regular and increasin’ doses to his sick wife, and of this arsenic she had died. The politician had also instigated the sexton of the churchyard in which his wife was buried to hire men to substitute a female pauper’s body for his wife’s body at the examination or re-inquest ordered by the village coroner, but had failed in his attempts to do so. Finally the politician had taken his chances at the inquest or re-examination, and had come off first best. The pretty music teacher, under the superstitious dread excited by Mrs. Warne, told all she knew, and confirmed Pinkerton’s suspicions at every point.
The rest of the work was easy. A searching examination of the stomach of the politician’s wife was had, and enough arsenic was discovered to kill three or four ordinary women. The politician was convicted and sentenced to be hung for a murder, though the sentence was afterwards commuted to ten years in the State prison.
The politician died in the ninth year of his term of sentence, and to this day there are not twenty people who know how the evidence that sent him to State prison was procured.
Through the influence of the sea captain his pretty sister’s name was kept out of the trial, and although the captain himself is dead, the once pretty music teacher is still livin’, an old, shriveled woman, in Williamsburg–livin’ on the interest of her brother’s property, but havin’ little interest in life.
[Editor’s notes: The above story is a heavily adapted version of a novelette, “The Murderer and the Fortune Teller,” published in the 1875 title The Detective and the Somnabulist “by Allan Pinkerton.” Pinkerton did not write this title–a ghost writer did. The published story named the principal figures: Captain J. N. Sumner; Annie Thayer, his sister; her husband, Henry Thayer; and the murderer, Alonzo Pattmore, a hotel owner in Greenville, Ohio. Also, in the story, Annie is made pregnant by Pattmore, and the captain arranges for an abortion in Chicago (a story element missing in the Harry Hill column).
Though Pinkerton and his female detective, Kate Warne, were real enough, there is little reason to believe the story with the above characters was anything other than a fiction.
Even so, Harry Hill’s ghost writer took the tale of Pinkerton’s ghost writer and changed it, making the sea captain a New Yorker; placing the murderer in a “Jersey village”; making the murderer a politician; and suggesting that Madame Lucille was an actual New York fortune-teller, rather than a role that Pinkerton invented for Kate Warne to assume. The Pinkerton “Madame Lucille”, i.e. the role created for Warne, was based in Chicago, not New York. All these changes were made to fit the theme of the column, i.e. characters and events centered around the New York City region.]
