Fake Telegrams and a Genuine Death: The Elizabeth Cook Mystery

In February 1932, a twenty-year-old Bostonian named Elizabeth Barrett Cook was sailing in the steamer Chinese Prince from Naples to Gibraltar.  However, when she received a cablegram from a Helen James, announcing the death of Cook’s fiancé, St. George Arnold, the young woman naturally planned to head home as soon as possible, although the message, rather oddly, told her “on no account” to return to America.

She never made it.  Soon after she received the tragic news, she fell ill, and soon afterward was found dead in her cabin, with the cable lying beside her.

And here the story turns from mere tragedy to dizzying insanity.  It soon transpired that the cable was a hoax.  No one in the Cook family had ever heard of any “Helen James.”  And Mr. Arnold was alive and in perfect health.  It was also discovered that this was not the first time Miss Cook had been the target of such a cruel stunt.  Found among her papers was another cable she had received the previous June, alerting her to the serious illness of her mother.  That statement had been another ghoulish fiction.

How did this young woman die so suddenly, you may be wondering?  Good question.  Some reports said traces of a sleeping drug were found in her system, indicating either accidental or deliberate overdose.  Other reports discount this, saying she died of pneumonia.  An autopsy was performed, but it was unable to show the cause of Cook's death.  However, no sign of drugs were found in her organs.

Who sent the sadistic “joke” cablegrams?  You tell me.  A theory was floated at the time that, out of a peculiar sense for the dramatic, Miss Cook sent the messages to herself.  The Boston Post ran a story alleging that on a previous cruise, Cook had sent herself a fake telegram announcing the death of her mythical sweetheart, “Malcolm,” after which she staged a melodramatic scene threatening suicide.  

Many people are fond of hoaxing others, but hoaxing yourself would be something of a first.  

"Sheboygan Press," February 24, 1932, via Newspapers.com

The “Post” alluded to reports that sleeping pills had been found in her cabin, and hinted that Cook had used them to stage what she intended to be a fake suicide attempt that, unfortunately, proved to be more realistic than she had expected.  According to one story, it was discovered that the bogus messages were not cablegrams, but telegrams that had been sent from Italy, which suggested she had sent them from Naples just before boarding the “Chinese Prince.”  However, as far as I can tell this was never corroborated.  Having only the conflicting contemporary news stories to go by, it is hard to tell how much of what they printed was solid fact or fanciful fiction.

An intriguing detail was that it was well-known that Cook was an heiress.  The very next year, she was due to receive two legacies that would have made her an extremely wealthy young woman.  It was never made clear who would receive this money in the event of her death.  It is impossible to tell what, if any, connection this had to her strange demise.

If there was any solid resolution to this peculiar case, it evidently was never disclosed.

Weekend Link Dump

 

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

I'd invite you all for dinner, but the kitchen staffers at Strange Company HQ are having One Of Those Days.

The Stull-Best murder.

The trick-or-treat murder.

A plant that is "both ghost and vampire."

Victorian era swapping.

The practice of feeding the dead to vultures.

Railway travel in 19th century France.

Mexico's "back door to Hell."

Why "Fido" became a popular dog name.

Rules for medieval anchoresses.

Ancient fortune-telling tools.

A genealogist goes rogue.

Scary medieval animals.

Scary medieval witches.

A murderous mother.

The range of mystical experiences.

Drunken ghosts!  Cannibal ghosts!

Julius Caesar vs. the pirates.

Humans aren't the only ones who like to tie one on.

When numbers were tactile.

Why ghosts aren't usually naked.

The nature of terror.

An alien abduction case in Los Angeles.  (A caveat: I live in L.A., and it's often hard to tell the extraterrestrial visitors from the native residents.  Just FYI.)

An alien abduction case in New York.

We see them here, we see them there, we see those damned ghosts everywhere.

A visit to the UK's most haunted castle.

A wild story about a royal dentist.

The piece of cheese that nearly destroyed a rocket test.

October 31 is more than just Halloween.

Mark Twain's haunted house.

A brief history of palm reading.

A brief history of the muses.

The grim side of Victorian humor.

A memorial to librarians who died during WWI.

The strange case of the vanishing police chief.

A demon-possessed convent.

More evidence that we've been underestimating Neanderthals.

A diplomatic incident, 1600.

A previously unknown Chopin piece has been discovered.

Victorian scientists were fascinated by ghosts.

Ancient Mesopotamians were fascinated by beer.

The Harvard astrophysicist who's fascinated by alien wreckage.

Maybe we shouldn't meditate.  (And don't even talk to me about hypnosis.  I know someone who was really screwed up by that crap.)

A brief history of the word, "scary."

The skeleton that confirmed a Norse saga.

Why smugglers used to love ghost stories.

The Corpsewood Manor murders.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a young woman's puzzling death.  In the meantime, here's a lovely bit of Bach.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This odd little maybe-it-was-a-poltergeist-maybe-it-wasn't story appeared in the "Greenville (South Carolina) News," May 15, 1960:

GAFFNEY (AP) - It's a little spooky when a milk-filled glass suddenly shatters in the hand. 

Or when the best glass ash tray cracks with a loud noise. 

Equally ghostly is the noticeable break in a sea shell that adorns a living room end table. 

A vase and serving tray also are victims of the silent menace that has plagued the fragile contents of the Brian Eppley home in Gaffney for the past several weeks. 

Mr. Eppley, a former Charlotte resident who recently moved to Gaffney, believes these breakages are caused by frequency waves emitting from his television receiver. 

"You can't hear anything," he states, "but I can feel it...like pressure, beyond the area of hearing, from these waves." 

He says he develops a headache while watching TV.

Mrs. Eppley says that objects break only after the set has been on for a long period. "And the breaks occur only while the TV is on," she adds. 

Mr. and Mrs. Eppley were sitting in front of their TV set a few days ago. Suddenly, they heard a loud report. Their ash tray had split in the center. 

Later, other objects fell under the mysterious spell. 

Then the chain of events was climaxed when a glass broke into pieces while Mrs. Eppley held it and watched TV.

I couldn't find any follow-ups to this mystery, although three months after this story was published, South Carolina papers carried a small news item informing us that Brian D. Eppley, a former Charlotte resident who had recently moved to Gaffney, was arrested on charges of armed robbery.  Maybe he needed to pay for a new television.

A Halloween Mystery: The Disappearance of Pamela Hobley and Patricia Spencer

Halloween is a day of ghosts, witches, goblin cats…and occasionally, as the case below will demonstrate, an eerie real-life mystery.

16-year old Pamela Hobley and Patricia Spencer, who was a year younger, were high school students in Oscoda, Michigan.   The public learned relatively little about the girls, but they appeared to be normal, unremarkable middle-class teenagers.  Pamela was engaged to be married, but I presume the wedding was intended to be in the distant future.  There were rumors that the girls liked to party and did a bit of experimenting with drugs and alcohol, but if so, that does not seem to have had any major negative impact on their lives.

Pamela Hobley

On October 31, 1969, some anonymous idiot decided to celebrate the holiday by phoning a bomb threat to the girls’ high school.  It was believed to be a mere hoax, but Pamela and Patricia signed out of school early.  They were seen walking away from the building at around 2 p.m.  The fact that they left together was considered odd.  The girls knew each other, but were not considered friends.  Neither of them had their purses or any other belongings with them.  

Both the girls had plans to attend a homecoming game that evening, followed by a Halloween party, so when Pamela’s mother, Lois, and younger siblings returned home from trick-or-treating, they were not surprised that she was not at home.  They only started to worry when Pamela’s boyfriend phoned, asking why she was not at the party.  Lois began phoning the families of other students, but none of them had seen Pamela.  When she reached the Spencer home, and learned that Patricia was missing as well, Lois contacted police.

Patricia Spencer

This was one of those missing-persons cases where investigators had almost nothing to work with.  At first, police assumed the girls had simply run away, but if such was the case, why did neither of them take even the basics like money or ID?  Also, both the girls seemed happy enough with their lives, with no discernible reason to disappear.  Police believed that after leaving the high school, Pamela and Patricia hitched a ride to Oscoda’s downtown area, but after that, it was as if they simply walked into oblivion.  We have no reliable clues for what subsequently became of either girl.

There is one odd footnote to this disturbingly vague case:  Shortly before the girls disappeared, an old boyfriend of Patricia’s named Francis Tebo got into some sort of trouble with the law, which caused him to be sent to Whitmore Lake Boys’ Training School.  In November 1969, he underwent an appendectomy in a Detroit hospital.  Soon after the operation, Francis ran away from the hospital and vanished.  At first, there was speculation that Francis’ disappearance was somehow linked to the Hobley/Spencer mystery, but it appears that the boy was subsequently traced, and police were able to satisfy themselves that he knew nothing about the two girls.  

Police learned that in 1968, one of the girls had, without her knowledge, been given a drugged drink by an airman at nearby Wurtsmith Air Force Base, after which she was found “in the woods having hallucinations.”  (The airman was subsequently convicted of the crime.)  However, no one could find any connection between this incident and the girls’ disappearance.

Despite the long passage of time, police are still hoping to solve the case.  Over the years, they have pursued various leads, but without any success.  The girls’ remaining family members are also actively searching for answers, but at least some of their relatives are convinced Pamela and Patricia were murdered soon after they vanished.  Pamela’s sister Mary Buehrle, who was eight when her sibling vanished, told a reporter in 2023 that "We watched my mom on her deathbed and she saw Pam.”

Weekend Link Dump

 

"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan Mandijn

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

As an aside, I suspect that everyone who's lived with cats is used to being awakened in this way.

What the hell was Trunko?

A marshal's unsolved murder.

Why "W" is sometimes silent.

How "snake oil" became a term for fraud.

Elizabethan witchcraft and the legal system.

The people obsessed with Find-a-Grave.

A submerged 2,000-year-old temple.

When election ballots were works of art.

One freaking big geoglyph.

A tiny, but elaborate, house in Pompeii.

A haunted lighthouse.

The latest in the search for Noah's Ark.

A brief history of gremlins.

The fine art of being a British villain.

A look at the Qatar Digital Library.

The rediscovery of the graves of four Continental soldiers.

The mystery of "Syndrome X."

A mysterious mathematical genius.

The last chapter of the Vietnam War.

When your dead relatives come to tell you, "You're next."

Easter Island and the Earth's mantle.

The history of two prominent 18th century families.

The moon-eyed people of Appalachia.

Vintage London fogs and smogs.

Some really weird plants.

Captain Elton, who just couldn't stay buried.

Why you never want to cross paths with a mega-meteorite.  Unless, of course, you like boiled oceans.

London's haunted pubs.

The man who may have been Britain's first black voter.

A lament for the lost art of letter-writing.

Artifacts of medieval women.

The first dedicated attack chopper.

The spider that changed astronomy.

The inn that's the seventh-most haunted place in the world. I had no idea there was a competitive ranking for such things.

The notorious Hammersmith Ghost.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a Halloween mystery.  In the meantime, here's a cute little instrument that I'd never heard of until the other day.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Everyone loves a good death omen account (unless you’re the unfortunate one to see it, of course,) and this is something of a doozy.  The “Moncton Transcript,” August 20, 1896:

WILKESBARRE, Aug. 20.--Robert Montgomery, of Wanamie, near here, died today under very peculiar circumstances, and evidently from fright or a belief that he had been warned of his approaching death by a wraith, and that he had a premonition that he could not live.

For years Montgomery has been employed as pump runner in No. 18 colliery of the Lehigh and Wilkesbarre Coal Company at Wanamie. He was a brave soldier in the late war, and was not easily frightened. Two weeks ago he said that while he was attending to his work he heard a peculiar noise in the mine. He paid no attention to it at the time.

A few moments later a peculiar feeling came over him as though there was an awful draught circulating through the mine and he became chilly. He looked up from his work, as he had just started to oil the machinery, at the repetition of the strange noise. He claimed he felt as though there was some one else about besides himself. He could not see any one, and strained his eyes far into the dark recess. Then he beheld a white object about the size of a man.

It moved about as though floating in the air and kept a certain distance from him. He spoke to the strange apparition several times, but not a sound came from it, and it soon disappeared from view, keeping its face toward him all the time. Montgomery at once made a search, but failed to find anyone lurking or hiding about, and he was in a quandary to the matter. He was very much affected, and told his friends he regarded the wraith as an omen of death. He at once gave up his position and, a couple of days later, took to his bed although he had no specific sickness which the doctors could discover.

He continued to talk of the wraith and said it was of no avail to take medicine or care for himself, that he was doomed, and might as well reconcile himself to death. Some of his friends tried to dispel his thoughts about death, by saying it was a man sent in by the company to see if he performed his duty. But the deceased would never believe anything else but that it was the omen of death, and grew gradually weaker until the death he had looked for came early this morning.

The Mystery of Flight 23

The Boeing 247 was the first modern passenger airline.  It was considered a wonder in its day.  For the first time, a passenger plane was soundproof, air-conditioned, and so quiet that those onboard could speak to each other without having to yell.  However, what the plane is perhaps best known for was its involvement with an enigmatic tragedy.

At 6:57 p.m. on October 10, 1933, United Flight 23 took off from Cleveland, Ohio for a Chicago-bound flight with seven people on board, including the crew.  It seemed a perfectly routine journey.  The plane carried the pilot, Harold Tarrant, his co-pilot A.T. Ruby, stewardess Alice Scribner, and passengers Dorothy Dwyer, Emil Smith, Warren Burris, and Frederick Schoendorff.  They were average, decent people going about their normal lives.  Tarrant, Scribner, and Dwyer were all engaged to be married.  At 8:46 p.m., Tarrant radioed from North Liberty, Indiana, that the plane was on-track to land in Chicago at 9:47.

This was the last word from anyone on Flight 23.  At around 9:15, when the plane was five miles southeast of Chesterton, Indiana, it exploded so violently it sent shock waves through the normally peaceful farmland below.  The tail end, containing two of the passengers, plummeted straight downwards.  The other half of the plane, in the words of one witness, “shot to earth like a blazing comet” near Jackson Center Township.  Seven souls had just suffered a sudden and horrifying death.

"Vidette-Messenger," October 11, 1933, via Newspapers.com

At first, investigators assumed the explosion had been caused by some tragic, unforeseen accident.  Perhaps a motor or a gas tank ruptured.  Or maybe a passenger’s cigarette ignited gas from a broken fuel line.  Was the plane hit by lightning?  A meteorite?  Some predicted that, considering there were no survivors to explain what had happened, the cause of the catastrophe was fated to remain unknown.

However, Melvin S. Purvis, the head of the FBI’s Chicago office, believed that Flight 23 had been brought down by a bomb, and FBI agents were sent to secure the wreckage.  Dr. Clarence W. Muehlberger, a crime detection expert for Chicago’s coroner’s office, studied the debris.  The shrapnel holes he found on many of the remains caused him to conclude that the plane had been brought down by some sort of very powerful explosive.  (The FBI eventually determined that nitroglycerin had been used.) It became accepted that they were not dealing with a simple freak accident, but the first act of airline terrorism in American history.

But what was the motive?  Did someone on the plane commit an act of suicide/mass murder?  Did unions or gangsters sabotage Flight 23 for some as-yet unknown reason?  Did one of the passengers or crew have a very, very deadly enemy?  Did a passenger, unwittingly or not, carry the bomb aboard, or was it secretly placed in the plane when it made a routine refueling stop in Cleveland?

The FBI first turned their attention to Emil Smith, who had boarded the flight when it made a stop in Newark.  Their suspicions were aroused by the fact that the day before, Smith had purchased life insurance promising a payout of $10,000 if his plane should crash.  Witnesses said Smith had brought on to the plane a handgun and a brown paper sack, which they thought was odd.  However, Smith, a WWI veteran who lived with his aunt, appeared to be a quiet, prosperous man completely incapable of any sort of evil.  Eventually, the paper sack was located, and although its contents were never made public, the FBI announced that Smith was clearly an innocent victim.

The investigation dragged on until September 20, 1935, when J. Edgar Hoover announced that “all undeveloped leads in this case have been exhausted,” and therefore, the Bureau was closing the books on the crime.  Since that day, no new information in the case has surfaced.  It is likely we will never know who planted a bomb on Flight 23, let alone why they did so.