New York's celebrity detective, with a detour through Goodyear Tires, Don King, and the exclusionary rule

The Woman in the River


On Saturday, September 6th, 1913, police discovered a portion of a woman's torso on the shore of the Hudson River. Two days later, fisherman found more pieces of the body in a pillowcase that had been sunk to the bottom of the river with a rock. For the following two weeks, newsmen delivered the gruesome facts of the case with surprisingly tasteful restraint while sifting through the influx of speculations and false-leads for the New York area's captive readers.

A rambling letter sent anonymously to police called the girl "Ella" and implicated a New York physician, offering detectives a handful a rough clues. None of these clues worked out, however, and police turned their attention to another physician who may have been a love interest of one Annette Day, as whom the body was tentatively identified.

Annette's brother and sister both swore her resemblance to the body, but were later proved wrong.  Poor Casper Janin thought it was his wife Lena for a few days, but she turned up alive when police searched the house of a boyfriend who lived across town- doubly embarrassing since Casper positively identified the torso as his wife's at the morgue. Dr. Stamets thought it was his wife, and Mr. Sterneman swore it was his daughter, but they were all wrong.

The woman in the river was in fact Anna Aumueller, an Austrian-born housekeeper, and the detective who identified her and captured her killer was Inspecter Joseph A. Faurot. The event marked Faurot's ascent into celebrity, and of this we're quite glad, because as it turns out, Inspector Joseph Faurot was host so many adventures that a woman with an extremely familiar looking torso was just the tip of the iceberg.

• Finds killer priest using soaked pillow case
  
  The pillowcase reeled in by those fishermen was traced to its manufacturer, who turned over records on the sale of that particular pattern. Inspector Fauro traced every purchase of pillows from Sach's second hand store, eliminating suspects one at a time. The trail eventually led to an apartment on Bradhurst Ave. under the name "A. van Dyke". That apartment contained tell-tail blood spray, postcards addressed to St. Boniface Church on 2nd Ave. and 47th with attention to Anna Aumueller , and a torn picture of a man.
  
  When detectives questioned the priest at St. Boniface, he told them that Anna had worked as a housekeeper in their rectory but had been let go two weeks prior for health reasons. He also identified the man in the picture as Father Schmidt, of St. Joseph's on West 125th.
  
  As soon as Faurot arrived at St. Joseph's, he spotted Schmidt and began questioning. Within minutes, Father Schmidt cracked and rode back with police to the apartment on Bradhurst to give a detailed confession.
  
  But Father Schmidt wasn't just a murderer. When Faurot searched the rectory at St. Josephs, he found a rent receipt for an apartment on West 134th. There, police discovered an elaborate counterfeiting operation. And that's not all, police also uncovered a box full of blank death certificates. After the arrests of Schimdt and his counterfeiting partner Dr. Earnest Muret, a local physician came forward and told police that the duo had approached him with a scam to insure a handful of future victims and kill them for the policy money.
  
  After a first trial in which Schmidt fained insanity ended with a hung jury, a second trial led to his conviction and he was hanged in 1916. He remains the only Roman Catholic priest ever to be sentenced to death in the U.S.
  
  

• Lives inside awesome buddy-cop comedy
  
  The New Oxford Item of May 11, 1916, quotes Jacksonville, Florida Chief of Police F.C. Roach with: "There's too many confidence men about our fair city. I don't care as long as they confine their infernal machinations to the Yankees that infest us, but some of our best families have been beguiled. They must be arrested." And with that, he sent his officers out to rid the streets of tricksters. Inspector Faurot just happened to be on vacation in Jacksonville at the time.
  
  For many New Yorkers, a host of Southern cops on the lookout for suspicious Yankees might be unsettling, but for Faurot and his friend Seargent Haley, it was a chance to have a laugh. It's clear that the two were picked up by police on suspicion of running a con operation. After that, accounts vary. One version states that the two simply allowed themselves to be held and questioned by detectives until they presented their credentials to the chief, embarrassing the detectives and eliciting bottles of wine from the chief as an apology.
  
  But the version presented in the Times is that Faurot claimed to be a newspaper man, and Haley a traveler, in order to deliberately arouse suspicion as a prank. After being questioned and arrested, Faurot pulls out his badge and the Jacksonville detectives say something to the effect of: "Lol. You dudes are solid dudes", and they all proceed to chill together.

• Independently invents and thoroughly explains world's oldest cop trick
  
  With the quick cadence and rainy, grey-scale texture of a dime store novel, Faurot himself wrote a newspaper piece about the Hans Schmidt investigation. My favorite part? "I had instructed one of my detectives to speak harshly with Schimdt in addressing him. I explained that I would use the reverse tactics, and by this means win him over to me and thus, perhaps, he would volunteer information that I ardently desired."
  
  Wait, slow down. I'm not following. Explain it to me again. He proceeds: "I was correct in my surmise...he confided to me that he heartfily disliked that 'very gruff detective'...and that he woud gladly tell me anything I desired to know, inasmuch as he believed that I was of kinder disposition."
  
  However overjoyed I was that Dick Tracy had just commandeered my inner-monologue to tirelessly explain the wheel, it dawned on me that Faurot hadn't the benifit of "good cop-bad cop". In fact, I don't know that anyone did until almost 60 years later. Apparently the phrase did not drift into the popular lexicon until the early 1970's where, after likely being incubated on television police shows, it was hijacked by newspaper men to describe the carrot-and-stick methods of the Kissinger State Department. Ever-so-slightly earlier, but on the whole concurrently, the term "Mutt and Jeff" was used for the technique. The phrase comes from the popular comic strip by the same name about a tall gambler and his short friend. The earliest use we can find of "Mutt and Jeff" being used as a name for the interrogation method is in 1966. Prior to that, the phrase was a catchall for criminal duos wherein one member was short and the other was tall.
  .

• Sells Tires?
  
  After the excitement of the Anna Aumeueller murder case and the execution of Hans Schmidt, Faurot rose through the ranks to the post of deputy police commissioner. During his time with the New York Police Department, he innovated methods of extracting images of fingerprints and obtained the first ever conviction using fingerprints as evidence. An avid defender of the new technology as a tool to both solve cases and track missing persons, he advertised its usefulness by holding contests in which he would identify other officers after letting them anonymously touch a selected item.
  
  In 1926, he retired from the NYPD. He still consulted as an expert in fingerprinting and a creator of anti-theft devices. In the mid-1930s, the Goodyear tire company hired him to investigate the performance of their tires for a nation-wide ad campaign that drew on his celebrity. 

But wait, how did the police get that photograph of Hans Schmidt out of his apartment?

Well, according to Faurot's account in the September 21, 1913 edition of the Pittsburgh Press, they broke in and took it. A reader with casual interest in Constitutional law might ask if this could be considered a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Now days, the precedent is yes. The officers weren't granted a warrant.

Now perhaps Faurot skipped over the part where they first acquired a warrant, but that's considerably unlikely since the letter of the amendment reads that the warrant must be supported by probable cause, whereas Faurot includes in his account: "although we had little or nothing to base our action on, we decided that unless something developed that night we would take summary action [break in]."

Leaving still the matter of a Fourth Amendment violation to legal experts, we might assume that the officers acted in good faith to abide the letter of the law, except that Faurot goes on to say: "That night I told officers O'niell, O'connell, Cassassa, and McKenna, who were with me, that I intended to break into that flat, 'if I went to jail for it.'" Cassassa goes on to break through a window to let the rest of them in, and they find all the evidence they need to catch and convict Schmidt.

Far be it for us here at historytldr to bemoan an occasional broken window if it helps catch a killer-counterfeiter-insurance-scamming priest. But we couldn't help but ask: in the timeline of Fourth Amendment precedent, exactly how many years away is the alternate universe where Hans Schmidt gets off on some technical appeal to the exclusionary rule and the the great Joseph Faurot never rises to become the father of fingerprinting and my very favourite detective?

The exclusionary rule

A first, bad guess would be "one; one year", since that's when the supreme court ruled on Weeks v. United States. A guy named Frederick Weeks was caught sending lottery tickets through the mail, but because the search leading to the arrest was deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that the evidence in the case was inadmissible, and thus the exclusionary rule became precedent. But that was only for federal cases, not state cases like the trial of Hans Schmidt.

The rule was extended to the states in the 1961 ruling in Mapp v. Ohio. You see, in 1957, the home of future boxing promoter Don King was bombed by a numbers runner named Alex Birns. While police were investigating the case, they illegally searched the house of Dollree Map-the former wife of boxing great Jimmy Bivins-  wherein they found a box of pornographic pictures and held Mapp on obscenity charges. She was found guilty, and on appeal, the Supreme Court overturned the decision and ruled the obscene materials inadmissible.

So is the answer 44 years? Perhaps not, since the police used their ill-procured evidence to get a detailed confession. The Court's standing definition of fruit of the poisonous tree didn't explicitly extend to scenarios like this until 1963 in Wong Sun v. United States. And the answer may not be 50 years either. In 1984's Nix v. Williams, the court ruled that if evidence was so unarguably destined to be found by legal police practice that the illegal search only uncovered the inevitable, then it could be admitted.

Verdict

Given the inevitability of discovery, the independent strains of legally procured evidence, and Faurot's knack for catching bad guys, we suspect that there are very few hypothetical worlds where Schmidt gets off. But even in those, we're sure that Inspector Joseph Faurot is doing just fine. 

Once every century, journalists worldwide are given license to make hackneyed allusions to Shakespeare.

The turbulent political climate of Greece during the early-to-mid 20th century was host to tens of government coups and several dozen political parties. They had names like 4th of August Party and Pandemocratic Agrarian Front and championed every ideology one could imagine. But on the island of Crete in 1950, a person's political foundations could be well-enough surmised by whether they sided with one of two social-political-familial groups: the clan of the Petracogeorgi family or the clan of the Kephaloyannis family. The two Cretan clans were bitter rivals, and each was ubiquitous in Hellenic politics.

Incomplete Glossary of Terms
 
Liberals; Venizelists- Opposition group to Greek Monarchy.
Populists, Royalists- Supported 1935 reinstatement of King George II after his 1924 exile and later supported Monarchy under King Paul.
Eleftherios Venizelos- Cretan revolutionary and political leader; held several terms as Prime Minister of Greece during early 20th century; principle founder of Liberal party.
Sophocles Venizelos- Son of Eleftherios Venizelos; held several terms as Prime Minister of Greece during mid 20th century.
George Petracogeorgi- Cretan; Liberal member of Parliament.
Manuel Kephaloyannis- Cretan, Populist member of Parliament
Tassoula Petracogeorgi- George's daughter
Constantine Kephaloyannis- Manuel's brother
 
The Petracogeorgis (Liberals) were pinnacle in establishing a functioning government-in-exile during the Axis occupation of Greece. Family members and allies occupied the Hellenic Parliament and other government positions throughout the mid 20th century, and their influence casts a shadow on Greek politics today. The Kephaloyanniss (Populists) were key players in the British-aided local resistance against German occupation. They too had members who held seats in Parliament, held high rank in the gendarmerie, and progenated current popular statesmen. The two families were for decades at odds, and both were host to armed supporters numbering in the hundreds.

Constantine and Tassoula

In August of 1950, Constantine Kephaloyannis, brother of Populist Party Parliament member Manuel Kephaloyannis, could contain no longer his passions for Tassoula Petracogeorgi, daughter of Liberal MP George Petracogeorgi. While Tassoula and her brother exited a movie theatre in the Crete capital of Heraklion, Constantine and five other men, armed with semi-automatic machine guns, stopped them and snatched Tassoula into a getaway car. A lawyer for Kephaloyannis would later explain: "Here in Crete, Sparta, and the ancient Greek land, it is common practice and tradition for strong men to steal their brides." Constantine said that he would have loved to court Tassoula out in the open, but the family rivalry prevented it.

Constantine, 32, carried the not-too-unwilling captive Tassoula, 19,  into hiding among the caves surrounding Mount Ida. (Incidentally, this is where the goddess Rhea hid Zeus from the god Kronus.) There she fell in love with him, recounting to AP sources later: "My love developed as I was with him in the mountains. His behaviour and respect were beyond reproach."


The angry response of Tassoula's father, Liberal Parliament member George Petracogeorgi, warranted the intervention of Premier Sophocles Venizelos.  Afraid of a possible civil war, Venizelos suspended certain constitutional privileges and instituted a 10,000,000 drachma fine on press releases related to the story. The international press, meanwhile, was no-doubt entertaining themselves with the exceedingly obvious parallel between George and the character Brabantio from Othello, but were simply too preoccupied with the threat of imminent bloodshed to actually employ such an overused reference and risk coming off hokey.

Trying to fend off war, Manuel, joined by representatives of the Petracogeorgi family, met the couple in a secret spot among the caves. There, the Kephaloyannis patriarch plead with his younger brother's dearest love to go back to her father to quell the tension that had erupted after her abduction. She refused, stating that she loved Constantine and was there on her own free will. Manuel left with the plea: "When 5000 soldiers and gendarmes move in to capture you, don't try to shoot your way out. Surrender."  The couple was prepared to kill themselves in the mountains, rather than be captured and reseperated. I know what you're all thinking: this story is almost exactly like a mix between the plots of Air Bud 4 and Timecop



Constantine's Arrest and Release

Liberal Primier Sophocles Venizelos arranged, after negotiations with George Petracogeorgi, that Constantine and Tassoula be given safe passage to Athens. There, if Tassoula would affirm that she was with Constantine by her own free will, then they would be allowed a marriage. All parties consented and the Archbishop wed them. Shortly thereafter, at the insistence of Tassoula's father, Constantine was arrested for kidnapping, forming an armed band, and other weapons charges.

Tassoula, now pregnant, signed an affidavit in lieu of appearing in trial. Reports streamed in steadily throughout the hearings of her being bedridden weeping for the court to "bring Constantine back to me." And she even threatened to formally write the queen in appeal to her husband's defense. Meanwhile, Petracogeorgi charged the Kephaloyanniss with carrying out a psychological seduction campaign that involved Manuel entertaining Tassoula at Athen's nightspots while her husband was behind bars. 


In February of 1951, Constantine was sentenced to two years in prison on weapons charges. Because the decision had been reached using a Greek emergency law, it was ineligible for appeal.  Constantine remained in jail until August, when King Paul commuted his sentence. 


Tassoula's Departure

Three months after Constantine's release, in January of 1952, the couple had an explosive fight. Tassoula reportedly ran to a police station in Heraklion and threatened to commit suicide if her father wouldn't take her back. She said that her and Constantine were incompatible, and that the differences between the two families were too much. It is also indicated that she fancied Athens while Constantine wanted to remain in Crete. The marriage was annulled after some legal manoeuvring by Tassoula's father. Constantine was quoted: "I feel only sorry for having loved so much a woman without a heart, without feelings - a selfish creature."

English sources are pretty sparse on what happened after that. Tassoula remarried in 1954, this time to a Greek physician living in Athens. Constantine remained in Crete and looked after his family's immense olive farming interests. Several Greek-language books were published on the episode, to the disappointment of both families. 


Footnotes 

• Here is the story recounted above told in actual headlines. If you're looking for a pattern, what they all have in common is a strong yet not-forced used of action verbs:  Cretan Hunters Halt Search for 'Romeo,' 'Juliet'...Greeces Juliet Asks Father to Bless Union With Jailed Romeo...Crete's Modern Romeo Tossed In Jail; His Bride Is Hidden Away... Greek Romeo Released from Prison... Juliet Returns to Father, Ends Modern Greek Idyll... Greek Juliet Wins Divorce.
  
• Years prior to this episode, George Petracogeorgi and Constantine Kephaloyannis both played important roles in the Cretan resistance against Nazi occupation. British officers W. Stanley Moss and Patrick Leigh Fermor, who helped lead the resistance, both became wildly successful writers after the war and to many are known primarily for their literary works. Both authors have written accounts of the Cretan resistance that are peppered with references to the the roles George and Constantine played in the fight. Fermor, who developed an extended god-family throughout the conflict by accepting the role of godfather for children of Greek soldiers, was a god-brother to Constantine. Given the widespread tradition of godparenting among Cretan soldiers, it's not unlikely that George and Constantine were thus related.
• The full title to Air Bud 4 is Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch.

The Upside of Civil Unrest

An AP story from September 1, 1950, reported that in the wake of Tassoula's abduction, thousands of police and soldiers flooded the small towns of central Crete to keep the peace. As this was the largest government presence the isolated villages had seen in recent memory, the state took the opportunity to collect on the townspeople's taxes.

Back to basics: uncommonly large items that appear in improbable places

 

The Evening Independent of December 28, 1965, hosts a touching story detailing the journey of a short letter - from the jungle of Vietnam to the somber Kansas home of Lt. Col. Gordon Lippman's widow. The letter was written by actor-comedian Bing Crosby and contained a handful of fat jokes about Bob Hope, whom Lippman was to see before his untimely death from V.C. small arms fire in Lai Khe. The next piece was on the death of a separated Siamese twin.

Conspicuously- more so rudely- the headline Really Big Shoe trumpets from the center of the page. The transition was so unnatural, and the tone change so abrupt, that it was as though even the AP wire itself had grown weary of all the death stories and gasped "really big shoe" as a last ditch effort to distract from the malaised seriousness. And the readers were grateful.


Really Big Shoe

On December 27, 1965, police in Nashville, Tennessee discovered a shoe measuring 32 inches long and 9 inches wide lying in a vacant lot. Papers around the country ran a picture of investigator Borden McNeill holding the shoe with two hands and gazing into its vast opening with a quizzical smile. They all had incredulous captions like the Evening Indpendent's Barefoot Giant?

As it happens: yes, actually. After that first story, calls flooded in from around the country from pranksters claiming that the shoe was theirs. But one call came from an official at the Genesco shoe company, who explained that the company had made two pairs of shoes for an 8 foot 6.75 inch man from Barranquitas, Puerto Rico. One of the pairs was sent to the giant, and the other collected dust in a storage room for a few years and then somehow one of the shoes found its way onto that vacant lot.

But the AP and Genesco's President of Lixico Division F. W. Parker got this story a little wrong. Parker said he could only remember that the shoe-owner went by "Barranquitas Giant" and was 8 foot 6.75 inches tall.  But being 8'6.75'' would make his height the 4th tallest ever recorded. And there is no record of any giant from Barranquitas, Puerto Rico.

The shoe actually belonged to a 7'11'' man from Carolina, Puerto Rico named Felipe Birriel. Birriel suffered from a pituitary tumor which was diagnosed at an early age. A medical device intended to deliver him radio therapy for the problem was sent from the U.S. but spent a full 9 years in transit. Birriel was by all accounts a sweet and gentle man, and is pictured appearing cheerfully at hosts of children's and charity events. But how do I know for sure that it's the same guy? I recognize the shoe.

A Sampling of Stories About Large Items Inexplicably Appearing Places


Statues

1. I was not at all surprised to learn that there have been many documented thefts of Ronald McDonald statues. I was surprised, however,  at some of the motives, ransom notes, and especially at the cash value of a Ronald McDonald statue (over $3000). I'll summarise here my two favorite stories of Ronald McDonald statues inexplicably appearing places.
   
   The January 27, 1982, Observer-Reporter reports that police in Huntsville, Alabama found a 7 foot tall Ronald McDonald statue standing in the middle of the street. They identified it as belonging to a franchise that had reported it stolen several weeks earlier. Officers attempted to put the statue in the back of their squad car, but it wouldn't fit. So naturally, they cut its head off. They tried once more to shove the statue in the back of the car, but it still wouldn't fit, so they strapped the decapitated Ronald McDonald statue to the top of their police car and drove it through town back to its owner.
   
   The Southeast Missourian of May 25, 2001, reports that a caretaker for the owner of a large property opened a rarely-entered barn to do some reorganizing and discovered a Ronald McDonald statue sitting on a bench therein. This was the second time that exact statue had been stolen and recovered. The last time, it was found on its back in a forest a quarter mile from the nearest road, with beer cans scattered all around it. Police took the clown back to the station, and a tour group of second-graders were confused and elated to see it.
2.  The Schenectady Gazette of August 10, 1983, describes a scene in which a startled man called police in Bradenton, Florida after spotting a naked body lying in some bushes next to the parking lot of a trailer park. The item did turn out to be a naked body, only it was 400 pounds and bronze and stolen from the mansion of circus-owner John Ringling 5 years prior.
3. A bronze statue of football player O.J. Simpson was abandoned on the side of Interstate 77. Quelling the readers' certain concern, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of July 25, 1995 carried the headline Simpson Statue Found Undamaged. Simpson was standing trial for murder of his wife at the time. No arrests were made on the theft of the O.J. Simpson memorabilia item.
   
   Incidentally, Simpson himself would be arrested a decade later for the theft of O.J. Simpson memorabilia items, along with charges related to the weapons and kidnappings that were necessitated for their procurement.

Pianos

1. The Cape Cod News of November 23, 2008 reports that a grand piano was found in the middle of the woods of a Harvich, Massachusetts conservation area. Police looked throughout the region for reports of stolen pianos, but none were found. It is estimated, based on the location of condition of the instrument, that it took at least 6 people to move.
   
   After no one claimed the piano, police gave the instrument to a local middle school. Several months later, it found a permenant home at the nearby Brooks Academy Museum. The episode inspired the Harwich Conservation Trust to hold a "musical stroll" through the park, allowing visitors to walk the trails of the Bell's Woods conservation while listening to performers of various instruments.
2. In late January of 2011, a 650 pound piano was discovered on a sandbar off the coast of Miami. The story came to an underwhelming conclusion when reporters discovered that it had been placed there by a group of teenagers for the expressed purpose of bemusing onlookers with a piano on a sandbar. The piano was removed after FWC threatened to pursue felony dumping charges.
   
   The party responsible said that they had intended to keep the piano's origin a secret, but set the record straight after a disturbing number of people falsely claimed credit for the staging.
3. "This is the largest, heaviest and most unusual thing we've ever had left on the mountain." This from Sandy Maxwell of the John Muir Trust, a group that maintains a portion of Britain's highest mountain. In 2006, volunteers spotted the top portion of a piano that had been buried near the summit of Ben Nevis, a 4,049 foot-tall mountain in Lochaber, Scotland. Workers dug out the piano and dismantled it so that it could be carried down. The only indication of the piano's origin was a candy wrapper from 1986.
   
   It turns out that it has been common practice to carry things to the top of Ben Nevis. In 1980, a strongman named Kenneth Campbell carried a different piano up the mountain as a part of a charity event, but was noted to have carried back down again. A year later, the summit was scaled by a group of university students carrying bedridden news caster Reginald Bosanquet.
   

Sharks

1. The Bend Bulletin of August 7, 1957 carried the headline Shark Found in Phone Booth. Police in West Looe, England responded to complaints of a 5 foot shark stuffed in a phone booth. They speculated that "it was left there by an absent-minded fisherman."
2. At 11:00 p.m. on September, 8 1985, Police in Downey, California found a dead, 8 foot blue shark in the middle of that city's well-trafficked Lakewood Boulevard. The AP reports that someone, presumably whoever left it there, had pinned a little blue "first place" ribbon onto the body of the animal.
   
   The place of the shark's discovery, Lakewood Blvd at Florence Ave., just happens to be the site of the oldest surviving McDonald's.
    
3.  Dead shark found atop police car, read the second headline of the 5c page of the St. Joseph News-Press of October 2, 1975. In Baldwin Park, California, officer John Smart found a 6 foot blue shark resting on top of a police car behind the station. As there had recently been a string of police car bombings by leftist terrorist groups, officers suspected that the shark might be an elaborate explosives delivery device. So they tied a rope to the sharks body and pulled it off of the car.
   
   Dispatcher Gary Powers was quoted: "When the shark went splash instead of thud, we stopped worrying."

Young boy lost in holiday cold. At least one reader left dismayed at newspapers' dry and unhumorous treatment of story.

The Christmas Eve 1995 edition of The Daily Courier has a packed "National" section on page 8a. Three freight trains crashed in Illinois. Terror suspect Thomas Lavy committed suicide in his jail cell. Actor Jimmy Stewart would be able to go home after being hospitalised for tripping over a house plant. And then on the left: "Boy abandoned at bus station."

A twelve year-old boy was abandoned by his parents at a bus station. He had been wandering the city for six days before finding his own way to a youth services office. What's sadder than that? He was left only with a note from his father and step-mother explaining that they could no longer care for him. Now could there possibly be anything comical about such a thing?

Even still, what's sadder than that? Christmas was the boy's birthday. Imagine him all cold and alone on his birthday. Can a reader possibly so lack common humanity that they might negotiate the personal distance from this story required to find it funny? But it gets worse. The letter goes on to explain that the...the boy's step-mother dropped him off because his dad was dying of AIDS. His father had AIDS and didn't want him around any more, on Christmas, his birthday. And that's tragic, so fight back the feeling that all of this is funny some how, because it's just tragic.

But with stiff upper lip, and charm befitting the becrutched Tiny Tim, the boy called himself a "blizzard baby" because he was born on Christma....

I hate to blow the lead like this, but he's an adult woman. You can laugh now. It's hilarious. The tragic little blizzard boy is a 25 year-old female drifter named Birdie Jo Hoaks. And for an industry known for groan-worthy puns and word-play headlines, I think the press' treatment of this Christmas tale was especially cold.

Hoaks fools locals with a big falsification.

It was a hoax. But for Birdie, it was par for the course. After serving time for welfare fraud in South Dakota, Hoaks raised suspicion in Vermont while posing as a 13 year-old abandoned boy to receive gifts and services. After serving a light sentence there, she wandered around for a bit and tried the same trick again in Salt Lake City. Since the Vermont police read the story of the Salt Lake abandoned boy and phoned authorities there, the con only lasted a couple of days. It was then uncovered that she had performed similar scams in 11 states, wore bandages to wrap her breasts, and had a cesarean scar.

In the first days of the new year, Hoaks stood trial for her deceptions. Her lawyer tried to explain that Hoaks was travelling with good intentions, but people on her train thought she was a runaway child so she departed to avoid their harassment and was subsequently turned away from a women's shelter, leaving her out of options. But Hoaks proved to be a difficult client to defend and the judge did not show leniency. She was sentenced to a year in jail. A psychiatric evaluation was scheduled, but she would be held until its completion just in case Birdie was a flight risk.
 
Hoaks uses abandonment story with reckless lack of care. Law enforcement release Birdie to be as free as an unimprisoned person.

An almost identical story appears in the May 30, 1993 edition of the Portsmouth Daily Times, when Birdie was 23. By that time, she had already performed the con in Idaho, Maine, New Jersey, Texas, New York, and West Virginia. And local papers went on printing the same story in different cities once every few years from 1993 to 2004, when the mother of three was arrested for trying to enrol in a Kansas middle school. Each time, she got out and retried the act somewhere else.

Birdie Jo Hoaks has twin. Two apt to be nicknamed "scam sisters" due to their repeated deceptions.

While many of the small town stories focused on Birdie Jo, she executed several of the scams with the help of her twin sister Becky Jo. The two were raised by their grandmother in Hoopeston, Illinois. Inseparable, they joined the National Guard after high school graduation. After their discharge, they went to New York City to follow evangelist David Wilkerson. After departing from New York, they travelled around the country. For extended stints, Becky Jo would try living straight while Birdie Jo presented herself as an abused boy in small towns across the country, but they always ended up together, on the road.

That was until in 2003, when they showed up in Galena, Kansas. Birdie started into her routine as "Chris Gomez" at the Galena Assembly of God while Becky Jo posed as his Aunt Becky. Church leaders urged the young boy to enrol in school, which he did. Birdie Jo Hoaks attended Galena Middle School for two weeks before finally being approached by members of the Assembly of God who had grown suspicious.

As she had done so many times before, Birdie Jo came clean and told the church officials about the desperate lie. But something different happened this time. The local prosecutor threw all of the charges out. He said the sisters weren't worth wasting time over. And the church, they offered the sisters forgiveness. For the next three years, the Galena Assembly of God would care for Birdie and Becky Jo Hoaks and their mother.

As explained in the May 17, 2007, Chicago Tribune, the good times came to an end when the sisters stole the church's safe and were brought up on felony burglary charges. But the charges couldn't stick due a legal fluke involving an FBI investigation of the county prosecutor.

In 2011, Birdie Joe was held in Tulsa after her son stole a purse from a church deacon who then chased Birdie Jo out the church, across the street, and tackled her before police arrived.

Jim Schmidt's tuberculosis; James Pou's abusive father- a tldr history of criminal wife desertion.

No-fault divorces are a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. Prior to the 1950's and often after, divorces had to be granted by the court after establishing some injurious behaviour on the part of an offending spouse, and the closest thing to a no-fault divorce most couples could attain was the typical situation in which a wife unenthusiastically stated that her husband was an adulterer, alcoholic, and woman-beater while the husband nodded in agreement and onlookers more or less read between the lines.

In this environment, "desertion" was a common path to fault attribution, allowing couples to be granted divorce. Desertion is the voluntary abandonment of one spouse by the other in such a way that the court is satisfied as that the abandoned party did not provoke or consent to the other's departure. Criminal desertion, for which a party could be imprisoned, was abandonment of a spouse- usually a wife- who was dependant on the other for health, safety, or financial support.

How to get charged with criminal desertion

Jim Schmidt died of consumption in 1903. His remains were sent to his wife's house (whose present-day location is the exit 1 overpass of the Major Deegan expressway in the Bronx). But his wife Bridget, in her grief, was never able to actually look at the body. She should have.

In the July 29, 1905, edition of the New-York Tribune appears a story entitled "Dead Husband" Walks. Woman Has Man Arrested- Charged with Desertion. As Frederick Washburn walked to work on the morning of the 29th, Bridget Schmidt flagged down an officer and screamed for Washburn to be arrested for  criminal desertion. On the insistence of Mrs. Schmidt, Washburn was taken in and held on the charge that he was actually James Schmidt and had changed his name after faking his own death- all as a means to abandon his wife.

Magistrate Finn was the judge in the case, and took Mrs. Schmidt's claims very seriously. He asked her if Washburn would have any marks on his body that might prove he was James Schmidt; she indicated a couple of marks on his body that would identify him, neither of which checked out. Even still, Mrs. Schmidt was so insistent that Washburn was her husband that Magistrate Finn ordered he be jailed overnight on $200 bond, giving Bridget Schmidt enough time to collect witnesses who would affirm her claims.

Even the compassion and good faith of Magistrate Finn would not be enough, however, to keep the case going. A court officer dug up the death certificate of James Schmidt, and the judge had to let Washburn go, despite the cries of "papa!" from Mrs. Schmidt's 11-year old son.

Magistrate Finn must have sympathised with Mrs. Schmidt and believed that she was on to something. He held Washburn for over a day and outwardly regretted having to throw out the case out. He even let Bridget Schmidt know that the case was disposed with no prejudice, so that in the event that she could produce another witness, he would drag Washburn back in.

On one hand, courts prior to 1950 appear to have been especially accommodating to women who were alleged victims of abandonment. In this case, for instance, a perfect stranger may have spent a night in jail on the mere accusation of a widow. On the other hand, if Washburn had actually been James Schmidt, then his treatment would be not much unlike any of a host of contemporary cases in which husbands attain legal divorces and later fail to pay child support or alimony.

We'll never know if James Schmidt faked his own death and was guilty of criminal abandonment of his dependent wife, or if Bridget Schmidt was hysterical and accused the wrong man of desertion. But we do know that either case is not unheard of.

Three women who had strangers they mistook for their husband arrested for wife desertion

1. A title in the December, 9th 1922, Woodville Republican reads "Has Wrong Man Arrested". May Harrison passed by Joseph Pierce while he was playing cards and promptly had him arrested. She would later explain to Magistrate Dooley of Brooklyn Family Court that she believed the man to be her husband. Upon being questioned further, she backed down a bit saying: "I'm almost sure." Questioned a second time she concluded: "I can't swear to him out and out." The case was thrown out.


2. The October 26th, 1901 edition of Melbourne's The Argus reports that Catherine Reade spotted Joseph Nobbs on the street and convinced an officer pull him in to be prosecuted for wife desertion. Nobbs denied the charge and said he didn't know the woman. Luckily, the real Mr. Reade in Sydney had already confessed to the crime and word was a just little slow to reach Melbourne. Nobbs was free to go, and "Mrs. Reade [would], no doubt, be quite satisfied to transfer her unwanted attentions to the man who admit[ed] having married her."

3. The New York Times of February 19, 1871, reports that a Polish woman named Jane Goldsmith was angry.  The Tombs Police Court resonated with outbursts of angry Polish after Jane, with the help of her council and one of the witnesses in the case had Wilhelm Goldstein arrested for desertion. She testified that Goldstein's real name was Lewis Goldsmith, that she had known the defendant for several years, and that he had abandoned her shortly after she became pregnant with their daughter, who was now six. One witness testified that he had seen the two marry and that the defendant was Goldsmith. Three other women gave similar testimonies, but these were later thrown out by the magistrate as inadmissible.  For his part, Goldstein produced an Austrian passport to prove his identity. Angered, Jane held her child up by her shoulders and shook her, yelling in Polish: "Look at your daughter!"

The key evidence in Jane's case was a photograph of Lewis which Jane claimed she had received in a post-card. It was later uncovered that she had never received a post-card at all, but had gotten the photograph of her husband from a friend after arriving to The States and thought that it looked like Goldstein. The judge examined the picture and let Goldstein go, noting that: "though the general outline of the features were the same, the defendant's forehead was much lower."



Now, for the sake of fairness, here are three stories that validate Bridget Schmidt's suspicions.

Three men who faked their own deaths to leave their families



1. The Miami Daily News of November, 29, 1959 reports that Toronto teacher Alfred Greene had been discovered alive after living for over a year in St. Louis. In order to start a new life with his also-married lover Beatrice, the father of four faked his own death by crashing his car, staining it with blood, and leaving behind a rifled wallet.

He would have gotten away with it if only Beatrice hadn't contacted her husband to petition for a divorce. Instead of granting the divorce, Beatrice's husband called immigration officials and had his Australian-born wife arrested. Beatrice was then coerced by law enforcement to lay a trap for Greene.




2. The Huntington Daily News of July 30, 1959 carried a story entitled Former Pitt Instructor is Indicted. Ronald Fields, an assistant instructor at University of Pittsburgh was found alive in California less than a month after faking his death in order to gain a fresh start with his mistress. As with Alfred Greene, the mistress was a student, this time an 18 year-old coed from University of Pittsburgh. Like Alfred, Ronald crashed his car and left blood stains to trick police. And as with Alfred, Ronald's girlfriend cooperated with authorities.

Although the police brought no charges against Ronald for his deception and evasion, he was held for criminal desertion of his wife and children and brought back to Pennsylvania to stand trial. His wife was granted $12,500 from the inheritance of Ronald's father, who had passed away during the stressful episode.

Somewhat ironically, the man who faked his own death by wrecking his car to trick law-enforcement would eventually act as safety consultant for the Automobile Club of Southern California and, in that capacity, award local police departments with the club's "No Fatalities Award".




3. When James Douglas Pou was eulogised at his funeral in 1987, the airman was celebrated as a hero. Indeed, his record as a pararescuer included that he saved the lives of 12 men. But James Doug Pou wasn't actually dead. He had left a wallet a shoe next to a river and let the Air Force, along with his wife and children, believe that he had drowned.

After disappearing, Pou took the name of a 10 year-old boy who had died some years earlier, began a successful wooing campaign for the heart of an unwitting love interest- complete with throwing pebbles at her window late at night, and then operated a successful business renovating houses. According to the October 28, 1992 LA Times, things only started to unravel five years later when Pou impregnated his neighbour. The angry second wife did some investigating and uncovered Pou's lies, subsequently turning him over to the Air Force to be tried for the other kind of criminal desertion- and bigamy.

While being held in the brig, Pou was brought up on additional charges related to a bank robbery he committed while pretending to be dead which was now attributable to him. Pou was quoted as saying that his cell in the brig could not contain him and that he could leave at will.

He was right. Pou escaped and lived free for two weeks camping in the woods before tiring and returning to base to turn himself in. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

Pou claims that he was motivated to leave his old life behind for fear that he would become an abusive father. Pou's own father was abusive and he says that he was afraid he would follow the pattern. To this effect, the Cleveland Plain Dealer of Thursday, January 28, 1993, reported that Pou's sister won a 10 million dollar judgement against their father for his abuse. In the proceedings, she recounted "incidents which involved men, including her father, standing in a circle around a fire with hoods, cat's blood, live cats, dead cats, candles, [and] chants and threats of violence".

You can learn more about the exploits of James Pou from the 1997 made-for-tv drama "The Lies He Told", where he was played by Gary Cole- Bill Lumbergh from Office Space.

Jean Naccarelli was pretty too. And she really was dying.

There's a quirky little tale that's hidden inside 50 years worth of local stories in Pittsburgh-area newspapers.  It's about two women with the same last name, born in the same neighbourhood around the same time. At different times in their lives, they would both have flattering stories and embarrassing ones printed about them. But the story that gathered the most headlines would involve them both. 

There were two Miss Lennons born in Beechview, Pennsylvania in or around 1915. One was Jean, born possibly as early as 1913. And one was Marguerite, born in 1915.

They would go on to lead very different lives, and there is little indication that they had ever met or known of each other until Jean, at the age of 46, claimed to a reporter that she had won the title of Miss Pittsburgh in 1932.

That title had actually belonged to Marguerite.

Jean's Life

The press had a distaste for Jean after they discovered this lie and took none of her other claims seriously: for instance her claim that she had cancer with only a few months to live, or her claim that her 16 year-old estranged daughter was an accomplished medical professional, or that her uncle "John" had been the brains behind the Queen Mary and had left her an estate worth millions of dollars. And they had good reason; all of these claims were demonstrably false.

But Jean Naccarelli, formerly Jean Francis, formerly Jean Lennon of Beechview, Pennsylvania really was an interesting person, and a good woman. And damn it, I think she was rather fetching.

We can first spot Jean in the June 17, 1937 edition of The Pittsburgh Press when she was Jean Francis. She had gotten herself tangled up in a bigamy case on account of another woman's unsettled marriage to her husband Roy.  Ruth Francis, Roy's first wife, was trying to get a divorce but the court was slow to grant it. So Jean came to the rescue to testify for her so that she might be granted the divorce. All the while, Jean loyally stood by Roy, saying: "We've been through a lot together."

Jean and Roy would have two daughters, Noreen and Jean, before they split up and the girls left with their father. At this point, Jean would marry Italian immigrant Felice Naccarelli. Now things start getting a little strange.

In late July of 1957, Jean saw a police car crash and burst into flames. What is unquestioned and verified by the officers involved is that Jean Naccarelli dragged the two unconscious policemen out of the car, returned to the car to cut the ignition and control the fire, and then gave first aid to the officers while waiting for an ambulance. For the next month, she was a hero. She even received an award from the mayor of Pittsburgh.

But months after the attention died down, more stories trickled in about Jean Naccarelli. And each of seemed more desperate than the last. In the June 19, 1958 edition of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jean was again lauded for her heroism after announcing that she faced eminent death. According to Jean, a doctor had told her she only had three months to live, and the press came out to do a short piece on her.

Jean Naccarelli apparently had a deep desire for attention. Her daughter Noreen and husband Felice would tell the press that Jean had a habit of sending herself telegrams and flowers addressed from other people, and Jean twice claimed of having cancer with only three months to live, in separate press reports that spanned over three months.

In August, 1958, the AP reported that Jean had been rescued from her burning home by a heroic young soldier who carried her out of bed. Oddly, the soldier was able to go back inside for her pets, and the fire department estimated damages at under $4,000. It was lost on no one that Pittsburgh's famed rescuer had now been rescued herself. And Jean was again in the papers, garnering sympathy for her troubles and admiration for her past heroism.

Then, in late August of 1959 came the most remarkable story to date. Jean told reporters that she had a Scottish uncle who had left her millions of dollars, but that she wouldn't be able to enjoy it because she had cancer and only twelve months to live. She also indulged reporters with a handful of comments about her family and personal history, including that she had won the title of Miss Pittsburgh in 1932. Her odd remarks to reporters during this time made pretty much everyone suspicious, and by September 3rd, the truth was out about the cancer, the uncle, the beauty pageant, the telegrams; as far as the press was concerned, Jean Naccarelli was an attention-craving mad woman. After this, there's no trace of Jean Naccarelli in the papers, with the exception of a late 1959 story in which Felice had to borrow a few bucks for bail after getting arrested for a fight, and the angle was: "Har har, isn't it funny that the 'millionaire' had to borrow money?"

But the thing is: Jean Naccarelli really was dying. (She had an uncle John, too; he just wasn't rich.) And by all accounts, she really did rescue those cops. Apparently, the whole time she was giving those stories to the press about having only a short time to live, she really was wasting away. It just took her a little longer to die than she thought, and instead of cancer, her death was likely due to a painful liver ailment that had been brushed over by reporters in the September 1959 stories. She was buried in Pittsburgh's Homewood Cemetery in 1965. She was between 50 and 52 years old.


Marguerite's Life

The life of Marguerite Puskar, formerly Marguerite Lennon is fairly well-documented. She enjoyed some minor fame in 1932 upon being crowned Miss Pittsburgh and Miss Pennsylvania, and once every decade or so after that, someone would run a story about how gracefully the 'pretty thing that stole our hearts back when' has been ageing.

Every story written on her describes her as beautiful, and even the hospital picture of her fresh out of labor in the June 1, 1941, Pittsburgh Press is quite striking. As her family had fallen on rough times during the Depression, she used her beauty to fetch some extra money. In her late teens, Marguerite was spotted in a department store trying on hats and was asked if she wanted to model for the local stores. Some time into her modelling stint, she arrived home one day to find her father holding an ad for a local beauty pageant. He decided that she should enter it for the prize money. She won that one, and several more, giving all of her winnings to her family.

She would later marry a Postmaster and after some time become a Postmaster herself. In 1979, she retired from the Post Office, and in 1985, she passed with her loving family by her side. She died of cancer.


Something in Common


It's unclear what Jean knew of Marguerite. She at least must have known that she shared a last name with the local beauty queen. And there is no evidence that Marguerite had heard of Jean. The only documented connection between the two Lennon girls from Beechview, Pennsylvania was Jean's lie to reporters about the Miss Pittsburgh pageant. But Marguerite had what Jean wanted: attention from the community and a family that loved her.

The July 7, 1963 Pittsburgh Press, printed four years after Jean's breakdown and two short years before her death, shows a happy Marguerite surrounded by her family. When the beauty pageants are mentioned, the enthused children point to several broken, dusted trophy cups in old boxes--the coveted evidences of a loving public and a life well lived.
   
On a lighter note, it would not appear that Jean was the only Lennon girl to ever be a bit dishonest to the press. A barely legible New Castle News story from December 12, 1931 describes a very pretty blonde girl named Marguerite Lennon from Beechview, Pennsylvania who had offered herself up for marriage to any white, American man who would give her family $10,000. She received so many phone calls begging her not to go through with it that she withdrew the offer. The two stories from that time mark her as being 18, a legally and socially appropriate age for the transaction. But our Marguerite Lennon of Beechview, who notedly entered pageants the same year to make money for her family, would have only been 16 at the time.

The case of late Miss Louisa Nottidge's 5728 pounds

Just Another One of Those Free Love Cults

I was flipping through the May 4, 1826 edition of The Coshocton Spy when I spotted a personal ad entitled "Wife Wanted" in which a poetic bachelor describes his ideal mate while not-so-subtley sprinkling in terms like "hymeneal bliss" and "conjugal band". I figured I could get an easy story by collecting an assortment of amusing antebellum personal ads. Instead of looking through the old papers and crossing my fingers, I motioned to stick with what worked and search Google's archives for "wife wanted". That's when I unintentionally came across a story about television personality Spade Cooley murdering his spouse because his wife wanted to join a free love cult.

These are all very promising ingredients, so there has to be an interesting story in here somewhere... wait, go back to "free love cult". It was striking how casually the words were repeated throughout the article, as if when the reporter wrote "free love cult", he meant: "you know, one of those free love cults that are always lying around".  Apparently the phrase used to be a whole lot more popular than it is now. Naturally I went off looking for free love cults.

The Palm Beach Daily News of January 24, 1925 inconspicuously delivers what I'm sure isn't a bad double entendre: "Free Love Cult Enlarging Self". That's where, for the first time, we meet the Agapemonites. They're a communal sect that spun off from the Church of England and lived in Spaxton on a property that they called "Agapemone" or "abode of love" or sometimes even "Agapemone or abode of love" (seriously, they would write that whole thing in legal documents).

The church was started by a man named Henry James Prince. From the late 1840's to around 1860, he was the bane of UK newspaper reporters- who, although they knew a juicy story when they saw it, were frustrated to be running out of polished Victorian ways to imply the word "fuck" (e.g. "that the rights of heathen freedom were habitually celebrated" (dabs forehead with kerchief)).

Prince's claims of divinity, his erratic behaviour, and the sexually provocative nature of his group garnered a lot of headlines. One example is a snippet that the Lloid Weekly ran in their miscellaneous section about how Prince put himself as "head of household" on the 1860 census and listed all 64 other people on the Agapemone premises as "relation to head of household".

According to court deposition papers sourced in the May 12, 1850 Lloids Weekly, Reverend Prince grew a small following while operating what should have been regarded as an extortion scheme. He met young women, and "by affectation of extraordinary piety, inoculated them with his peculiar tenets". After that, he cornered them and bullied them into marrying men who were under his control (for some reason he also insisted that they wear black dresses for the weddings). After the marriages, Reverend Prince would use his status as a messiah, some group intimidation,  and the unfortunate treatment of gender in Victorian Britain to separate the women from their money.

While the women themselves didn't often complain, their families and the public at large certainly did. That brings us to four young sisters known affectionately to reporters as "the Misses Nottidges". The four heiresses were pinnacle to the church's early growth. Three of the sisters would marry close followers of Prince. Two of these married sisters would live happily in the Abode of Love for many years.

The other married sister, Agnes, would eventually be banished from the church after angering Prince. The court deposition papers mentioned above come from an 1850 case in which Agnes' estranged husband attempted to kidnap her son. But our focus is not that case. Our focus is on a court case that happened 10 years later involving Agnes' sister Louisa.

Can You Prove Someone Doesn't Think They're Anointed by God? 

As for the fourth sister Louisa who remained unmarried: she died in 1860 after giving all of her money to Prince.

Well, that's not the whole story. Actually, 10 years earlier she was forcibly taken away from the Agapemonites by two relatives before she could give her money away to Prince, and she was held against her will in an insane asylum because it was thought that she was unfit to act on her own behalf. Then Louisa demonstrated to the satisfaction of the court her sanity. Then she returned to Agapemone and gave all of her money to Prince. Then she died.

But her brother sued Prince for the money back. On face value, it doesn't seem like a case like this could possibly stand up. The girl already proved to the court that she was sane and could act as her own guardian 10 years earlier when she was abducted. However, Mr. Nottlidge claimed that his sister was not of sound mind while giving the gift since she was seduced by Prince's claims of divinity. The case went to court, and the lawyers discussed whether or not Prince's claims of divinity constituted fraud.

The vice-chancellor in the case is quoted as saying (courtesy of an op-ed joyfully celebrating the death of the much-hated Prince in the Febuary 25, 1899 Auckland Star): "By imposing a belief in his supernatural character upon her weak mind...imposter was the influencing motive for the gift, therefore vitiating it entirely."

There's something really strange about the vice-chancellor's argument; he says: "By falsely and blasphemously pretending to a Divine mission he had imposed on these weak women, [Prince] obtained a gift of the whole of their fortunes." So in order for the vice-chancellor's argument to hold water, one would have to show that Prince: 1) was in no way priveledged with some divinely granted power, and 2) didn't honestly believe that he was.     

But it seems pretty clear that Prince did believe that he was granted with divine power. Here's a 63 page book of Prince's early letters to his congregation, complete with diagrams of souls connecting to God. And that was just his early stuff, long before the days of Agapemone. How can, with the preponderance of evidence that Reverend Prince really did believe that he was divine, a court rule that he was wilfully defrauding congregation members?

Help in the Form of an Obscure Century-Old Ruling

Fortunately for Nottidge's lawyers, this conversation became unnecessary when it was found that the law had already set precedent. The case Norton v Kelly in 1764 had established that any gift from a practitioner to a confessor would, if ever questioned legally, be deemed as being given during a time where soundness of mind had been suspended due to the confessor's capacity to exert mental control over the practitioner (seriously). So Prince had to give all the money back to the estate of the late Miss Nottidge so that it could be distributed among the next of kin.

But sit on that next of kin thing for a second, because two of the Nottidge sisters were still followers of Henry James Prince and would just give the money back anyway.

What Became of the Agapemonites?

A whole lot. The court case above is a drop in a bucket of absurdities and coincidences. From herds of spiritual widows following upright caskets to angry mobs trying to exact retribution and inadvertently putting tar and feathers on an innocent bystander to a "spiritual bride" having a  Reverend Prince love child that was later condemned as a satan-baby, the Agapemonites definitely produced a lot of offbeat stories.

After Prince's Death, the church would be taken over by John Hugh Smyth-Pigott. He named his kids things like "Life" and "Power" and was a lot less equivocal with his divinity claims; he went full Jesus on his congregation. Apparently he quelled a lot of anger by giving generously to the local community. He also geared a lot older on new recruits because he was afraid of making the local outsiders angry and fearful for their daughters' safety.

Since the church had a history of going after middle-aged women, and since hardly anyone in the church's history had kids, the whole thing fizzled out and all the members are now dead.

In 1958, the compound was sold off and developers built around and over it. Currently, Celebrity Big Brother contestant Vanessa Feltz lives on the property.