Poe and Dumas: The History of a Hoax

[Note: I first published this post on "The World of Edgar Allan Poe" in 2010, but I thought its theme of forgery and general historical monkeyshines was relevant to this blog, as well.]


In 1929, a well-known rare book dealer named Gabriel Wells presented the world with an amazing footnote to history. He announced that during a recent trip to Europe, he acquired a document in the handwriting of Alexandre Dumas. The manuscript gave a detailed account of a time, around 1832, when he had at his Paris residence a strange young house guest named Edgar Allan Poe. Dumas supposedly wrote:

"One day a young American presented himself at my house with an introduction from his fellow-countryman, the famous novelist Fenimore Cooper.

Needless to say I welcomed him with open arms.

His name was Edgar Poe.

From the outset I realized that I had to deal with a remarkable man: two or three remarks which he made on my furniture, the things I had about me, the way my articles of everyday use were strewn about the room, and on my moral and intellectual characteristics, impressed me with their accuracy and truth. On the very first day of our acquaintance I freely proffered my friendship and asked for his. He must certainly have entertained for me a sympathy similar to that I felt for him, for he held out his hand to me and the understanding between us was instantaneous and complete...I offered to let Edgar Poe have two rooms in this house for the duration of his stay in Paris.

...Poe had one curious idiosyncrasy; he liked the night better than the day. Indeed, his love of the darkness amounted to a passion. But the Goddess of Night could not always afford him her shade, and remain with him continually, so he contrived a substitute. As soon as day began to break he hermetically sealed up the windows of his room and lit a couple of candles. In the midst of this pale illumination he worked, or read, or suffered his thoughts to wander in the insubstantial regions of reverie, or else he fell asleep, not being always able to indulge in waking dreams. But as soon as the clock told him that the real darkness had come he would come in for me, take me out with him if I was there, or go forth alone if I was not...In these rambles I could not help remarking with wonder and admiration (though his rich endowment of ideas should have prepared me for it) the extraordinary faculty of analysis exhibited by my friend. He seemed to delight in giving it play, and neglected no opportunity of indulging himself in that pleasure...for him, every man had an open window where his heart was."

And so on, with Poe as part Dupin, part vampire. (This account's obvious resemblance to the opening section of "The Murders In the Rue Morgue" should in itself have been a red flag right from the beginning.)

As may be imagined, Wells' hitherto unknown acquisition caused quite a stir. Poe scholars, always desperately anxious to find means to fill in the many blanks in the poet's biography, were thrilled that they may have been presented with new and exciting information. However, after the first wave of excitement had passed, reality sank in, and the story's manifest improbabilities and impossibilities quickly led them to sadly reject the Dumas story as a hoax. (And for Poe biographers to dismiss a tale as incredible is truly saying something.) In spite of this, the "Poe visited Paris" legend is still repeated as fact here and there (usually on the sort of websites that describe Poe as an international espionage agent who was murdered by the Illuminati.)

In spite of the near-universal dismissal of the story itself, there seems to still be some amount of confusion about whether the manuscript was an odd piece of fiction, but truly written by Dumas, or a particularly demented forgery. This reluctance to dismiss the document as a complete fake is astounding--not only because Dumas was hardly the light-hearted practical joker type, but because of the further history of the man who came up with the strange artifact.

The year after revealing his Dumas story, Gabriel Wells--no doubt flushed with the success of his earlier bombshell--announced his acquisition of another previously undreamed-of addition to Poe lore. He claimed that while in Italy, he had also gained possession of three sketches drawn by Poe, supposedly representing Virginia Clemm, a young Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, and a self-portrait. According to Wells, he bought them from "an elderly American" living in Genoa, later identified only as a "W. Mills," who was the descendant of a man named Henry O'Reilly, who had been given the drawings by Poe himself. (There is no evidence that Poe ever knew anyone by that name, much less that "O'Reilly" ever even existed.) Despite this rather dodgy provenance, Poe "expert" Thomas O. Mabbott--on the grounds, evidently, of a combination of wishful thinking and gullibility--immediately and enthusiastically pronounced the portraits to be "genuine and of the greatest importance historically." Mabbott gushed, "The self-portrait of Poe is in one way the greatest find of all...It not only represents him in his prime, but the self-portrait is probably the most satisfactory picture we have of him at this period...But the picture one rejoiced most in seeing is the lovely head of Virginia Clemm Poe. It is said that the only other picture that is accessible was made after her death. But here we have her as her husband saw her--a most romantic and tragic lady, the poet's best love."

These drawings, unique in Poe's history, and with a romantic background, garnered even more ecstatic attention than the Dumas manuscript. Wells consigned his little treasures to one of his regular agents, a salesman with an extremely shady reputation named C.B. Randall, who sold them to Poe collector J.K. Lilly for nearly nine thousand dollars--quite a tidy sum for 1931. Unfortunately, as was the case with Wells' earlier revelations, the intoxication caused by the discovery of these works soon gave way to the inevitable painful hangover. Mr. Mills--who had made earlier appearances in Poe circles--had shown himself to be extremely untrustworthy. (During earlier attempts to sell these same drawings, he had given them an entirely different history.) Other Poe scholars indignantly refuted Mabbott's authentication. Lilly himself came to the conclusion that he had been sold a pup, but chose to keep the pictures anyway--perhaps because if he had disposed of them, it would have been too humiliating a confirmation of how well and truly he had been gulled.

As Michael Deas commented in his fascinating book "Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe," "In retrospect, it seems almost inconceivable that all three portraits could have at one time been regarded as authentic drawings by Poe." Deas--a professional in the art world--noted that while Poe was known to have some artistic ability, at least the "self-portrait" (which, incidentally, could scarcely be said to even resemble Poe) was clearly done by someone with formal training. Also, the drawings, as even my untrained and inartistic eye can see, are completely different in style, and are obviously the work of three separate artists.What is most interesting--and depressingly revealing--about the whole debacle is how not one of the guilty parties involved paid any price for their mistakes and/or crimes. Mabbott was suitably embarrassed by how he had been had--or more importantly, how he had allowed Mr. Lilly to be had--but not too embarrassed to stop presenting himself as an authoritative Poe source. His reputation as an "expert" was in no way diminished by this well-publicized demonstration of his lack of expertise. The shadowy "W. Mills" went on his merry way undisturbed and free to foment further mischief. According to one source, Lilly had spoken of bringing criminal charges against Randall (both he and Wells had evidently known early on about the dubious background of the portraits but chose to simply keep that knowledge to themselves,) but if so, it came to nothing. Wells continued to buy and sell valuable books and manuscripts, with apparently no one being the least troubled by his adventures in historical shenanigans. The honorary doctorate Rutgers University awarded him in 1935 lauded "his importance as a bookman, author, philanthropist, international authority on rare books, and, above all, a man of integrity." Comment seems superfluous, let alone probably actionable. Suffice to say that I myself would feel extremely uneasy about any document, particularly if it related to Poe, that ever passed through this gentleman's hands--and quite a few of them did.

The spurious drawings of Virginia and Miss Royster still pop up frequently on the Internet (including that vast online horror show, Wikipedia,) as authentic portraits--which just goes to show you can't keep a good fraud down.
And so it goes in the World of Poe.

Denis Vrain-Lucas, Prince of Forgers

Denis Vrain-Lucas

"Collecting"--whether it be of stamps, historical documents, paintings, Betty Boop toothbrush holders, what have you--can lead a person into some very peculiar byways. In many cases, the increasing passion the collector feels to add to their stash of personal treasures warps their judgment and utterly clouds their intellect. It is a profound love, of a sort, and everyone knows love is blind.

One of the unlikeliest victims of this phenomenon was Michel Chasles. Chasles held the chair of geometry in the Imperial Polytechnic of Paris and was a member of the French Academy of Science. His distinguished career was built upon a talent for rigid logic and mathematical precision. Chasles was, in short, the last man you'd expect to see playing the role of dupe. Yet, duped he was, and in a manner that would have embarrassed a five-year-old.

Michel Chasles

After Chasles was elected to the Academy of Science in 1850, he began to research the history of science. His immersion in the old books and manuscripts awakened a desire to start his own collection of historical documents. Most unfortunately for him, one of the people who learned of this ambition was a man named Denis Vrain-Lucas.

One day in 1861, Vrain-Lucas introduced himself to Chasles, and made a most enticing proposition: He had for sale an immense collection of books, manuscripts, and autograph letters. They had been, he explained, the property of a Count Boisjourdain, who had drowned while sailing to America in 1791. The collection was now owned by an old man of Vrain-Lucas' acquaintance. He was naturally reluctant to part with any of it, but he badly needed money, so he was willing for Vrain-Lucas to act as his agent in gradually selling items from his stash. Vrain-Lucas said diffidently that he himself had no idea if anything in the collection was of any value, but as he had heard Chasles was an expert in such matters, he was willing to sell them for whatever Chasles thought they might be worth.

When Chasles learned of the treasures Vrain-Lucas was offering him, he could hardly believe his luck. Among the long-deceased Count's collection were letters personally written by Molière, Rabelais, and Racine. And his new-found benefactor was ready to part with them for the equivalent of less than one hundred dollars each!

It seemed too good to be true!

Chasles, of course, did not know anything about Vrain-Lucas and his mysteriously acquired documents--and was too dazzled and greedy to ask--but this "agent" was, to put it mildly, a dubious character. Vrain-Lucas was the son of a poor laborer. He had had little formal education, but after he obtained a clerking job, he had the opportunity to spend much time at the local library, where he became fascinated by old books and manuscripts. He eventually moved to Paris, where he got a job working for a genealogy firm. When this particular business had difficulty finding genuine documents for its clients, the employees worked around this problem by simply forging them. The firm was an excellent training ground for a young man who combined a lust for history with a handy lack of principles, and Vrain-Lucas soon became an experienced forger.

After the head of the genealogical firm retired, Vrain-Lucas set out on his own. By the time he and Chasles had their fateful meeting, he had a long and profitable career of selling highly dubious documents to credulous collectors all over Paris. Like all the great forgers, Vrain-Lucas combined a scholar's genuine love for and knowledge of historical artifacts with a con-man's thespian abilities. Like our old friend Joseph Cosey, Vrain-Lucas was very good at presenting himself as a humble, slightly witless fellow who was, in his ignorance, offering priceless artifacts at bargain rates.

Chasles knew his science. Chasles knew his higher mathematics. When it came to human nature, he was as innocent and gullible as a baby. He eagerly snapped up anything Vrain-Lucas so casually offered him, no questions asked.

The trouble began when Chasles began proudly shared his purchases with the world. In 1865, Florence, Italy, was holding an exhibition in honor of Dante. Chasles helpfully sent them a letter written by the great poet that he had recently purchased. The letter arrived too late for this exhibition, so it avoided any close examination. The next year, he presented to the Belgian Academy two letters written by Charles V to Rabelais. Although some archivists had their doubts about their authenticity, the Academy, much to its later embarrassment, published them.

In 1867, Chasles gifted the French Academy with two letters purportedly written by the poet Jean de Rotrou to Cardinal Richelieu. Again, even though some in the Academy privately muttered some skepticism about these letters, they were reprinted as genuine in the Proceedings of the Academy.

Things began to unravel in earnest the following year, when Chasles presented the Academy with a letter written by Pascal to Robert Boyle, detailing the principles of gravity years before Newton's discovery.

This upending of history raised a few eyebrows. Even more eyebrows were lifted when it was noted that the letter contained serious grammatical errors and jarring anachronisms. It was also noted that the handwriting of this letter differed considerably from assuredly genuine Pascal manuscripts. When Chasles, in an effort to defend the letter's authenticity, brought out more of his Pascal letters, the fat was truly in the fire. They included notes from Pascal to Isaac Newton--which, from the dates, would have been written when Newton was only eleven! There was a letter to Pascal from Newton's mother--where she signed herself by a name she had long ceased to use when the letter was purportedly written.

Chasles' meetings at the Academy became increasingly uncomfortable. Vrain-Lucas, however, was able to soothe all his doubts with various "new" letters which explained all the questions that had been raised about the previous documents. Scholars scoffed at the idea that Pascal would be discussing complex scientific discoveries with an eleven-year-old boy? Vrain-Lucas responded with a letter written by Newton's tutor, commenting on how his pupil had written to Pascal under his guidance. The letter written in French by Galileo in 1641 about his "eyestrain"--when history records the scientist went completely blind in 1637 and never wrote in French? The biographers, Vrain-Lucas assured Chasles, were simply in error. The fact that these letters contained so many previously unknown details only added to their value. And so on.

Before long, however, the long list of blatant textual errors and inauthentic handwritings found in these letters were unacceptable even to Chasles. Two of France's leading manuscript experts were brought in to finally make a thorough examination of Chasles' purchases. It was an impressive list: Over a period of less than ten years, Vrain-Lucas sold him a total of nearly 30,000 manuscripts, allegedly from over six hundred different people. Vrain-Lucas was a one-man forgery empire.

Fortunately for the interests of justice, he was as sloppy as he was prolific. He rarely bothered to even do plausible imitations of the genuine writing of his subjects, and usually merely copied passages out of old books, with little concern for historical accuracy. To add some much-needed verisimilitude to his handiwork, he occasionally sold Chasles some authentic vintage book or manuscript.

These rare examples of honest transactions constituted Vrain-Lucas' sole defense when he was put on trial in February of 1870. He claimed that the genuine items were worth more than the entire sum Chasles had spent on his collection.

It was a feeble argument. Chasles paid out about 140,000 francs for his now utterly-discredited "bargains," while the few authentic specimens were worth--at best--about 500 francs. Vrain-Lucas' attorneys then tried an even more novel argument. The defendant could only be guilty of fraud, they suggested, if his transactions were designed to deceive someone of normal intelligence. Who in their right minds, they argued, could believe they were buying a letter Cleopatra had written to Julius Caesar? Or from Mary Magdalene to Lazarus? Or Alexander the Great to Aristotle? Particularly since all of them were written in French?

The most amazing part of this story is that Chasles evidently did. Even after Vrain-Lucas was found guilty and imprisoned for two years, Chasles refused to admit that he had been well and truly hoodwinked. To the end of his days, he clung to the belief that the mythical Count Boisjourdain and his magnificent manuscripts really existed, and that he had just acquired clumsy replicas of them. In an equally astounding touch, despite his well-demonstrated ability to be gulled, Chasles' reputation survived the scandal, and he remained a respected figure in the field of mathematics. A road in Paris is named after him, and the mathematician is among the 72 worthies whose names are engraved on the Eiffel Tower.

After Vrain-Lucas served his sentence, he promptly found a new victim: An elderly man whom he swindled out of his pitiful fortune and his few valuable books. For this latest escapade, he returned to jail for another three years. He then was nabbed for stealing rare books from a library, which earned him another four years in prison. Sources give varying years for when he died, but it was sometime between 1880 and 1882.

Chasles passed away in 1880, from choking on a marshmallow. Which somehow seems a fitting end to our tale.

The Matricidal Mr. Merrett

In Edinburgh in the year 1926, Mrs. Bertha Merrett lived in a West End flat with her seventeen-year-old son, John Donald. Her husband, an electrical engineer named John Alfred Merrett, was a bit of a mystery. The couple married in New Zealand about twenty years before. They subsequently moved to St. Petersburg. The Russian climate was deemed too harsh for their son, so Mrs. Merrett took little John to Switzerland, leaving her husband behind. Not long afterward, World War I broke out, and John Alfred disappeared from sight. After the war, Mrs. Merrett and son returned to New Zealand, but as far as we know, her husband was never heard from again. Bertha's story was that he was killed during the chaos of the Russian Revolution, although rumor had it that Mr. Merrett was alive and well and living in India, leaving open the possibility that Mrs. Merrett was merely giving out a genteel cover story for a failed marriage. In any case, in 1924, she brought her son to Britain to finish his education. She had ambitions for her only child to enter into the diplomatic service. As a stint at Malvern College had not worked well for John, largely because of his wayward conduct, Mrs. Merrett enrolled him in Edinburgh College, a non-resident institution. She rented nearby housing for the both of them, to ensure he would remain under a mother's watchful eye.

Bertha Merrett, we are told, was charming, upright, cultured, and clever, well-liked and admired by everyone who knew her. Although her son would, once he reached his majority, inherit a substantial sum from his late grandfather, Mrs. Merrett's own income was limited, but she managed her funds with typical self-discipline and sense.

Like many single parents of only children, her whole life revolved around her son, who was her pride and joy. She had reasons for this doting affection. Young John was physically mature for his age, well-mannered, and highly intelligent. Unfortunately, she was blinded to the fact that he was also spoiled, selfish, lazy, and shockingly callous and self-indulgent. It was the classic case of the adoring parent happily oblivious to the fact that she had raised a sociopathic little monster.

Although Mrs. Merrett believed her son was attending classes at the University every week day, John was actually doing no such thing. His real occupation was slipping out every night to attend the local nightclubs (he was romancing a "dance hostess" named Betty Christie,) and venturing out every day to get an education of a more unconventional sort on the seamier streets of Edinburgh. After his first month or so at the University, he ceased to attend classes at all. His mother, of course, continued to stretch her scanty income to pay his school fees.

There was another major secret John was hiding from his mother. For some weeks, he had been supplementing the small allowance she gave him by embezzling from her. He had stolen one of her checkbooks, and by forging her checks and letters to her banks, he had set up a complicated system of withdrawing funds from her accounts, while using other forged checks to make bogus deposits to them, so that--for the moment, at least--Mrs. Merrett was unaware that there was money missing.

This juggling act could not last forever, of course. By March 1926, both her accounts were nearly drained dry. Bertha Merrett's discovery of her son's fraud was not only inevitable, but imminent.

On the morning of March 17, the Merrett housekeeper, Henrietta Sutherland, arrived for work. All seemed normal. Mrs. Merrett was her usual cheerful, courteous self. She and John had just finished breakfast, so the maid first went to clear the table. By the time she finished and returned to the sitting- room, Mrs. Merrett was writing letters at a small table. Young John was sitting opposite his mother, reading. Mrs. Sutherland went into the kitchen.

Just a few minutes after the maid had entered the kitchen, she was startled to hear a pistol-shot, followed by a scream and a thud. Transfixed by shock, she stood still, unsure how to process what she had just heard. Before she could pull herself together enough to investigate, John rushed into the kitchen, exclaiming that his mother had just shot herself. When Mrs. Sutherland gasped her astonishment at the news, the boy said something about how "he had been wasting his mother's money, and he thought she was worried about that."

When they re-entered the sitting-room, the maid saw Mrs. Merrett lying on her back, bleeding heavily from the head. She was unconscious, but still breathing. There was a pistol on the top of the bureau. Mrs. Sutherland had never seen it in the flat before. They called police, who soon arrived on the scene with an ambulance, and the stricken woman was rushed to the hospital.

John told police that he had been reading while his mother was answering her mail. Everything was peaceful until he suddenly heard a shot. When he looked up, he saw his mother fall to the floor. When he was asked why Mrs. Merrett would wish to kill herself, he shrugged and replied, "Just money matters."

The position of the pistol at the time Mrs. Merrett collapsed was, unbelievably, never positively determined. Mrs. Sutherland said she had seen it on the bureau, where, according to John, he had placed it after his mother shot herself. On the other hand, one of the two policemen who were first on the scene later said he had seen his colleague lift the gun from the floor near the injured woman. The other policeman said he could not recall if he had picked up the gun from the floor or the bureau.

After his mother was settled in her hospital room, young John attended to what was, for him, more pressing matters: He bought a motorcycle, and visited his girlfriend's dance hall to take her out for a ride. She later said that Merrett had casually told her that his mother had shot herself "with his own pistol" while the maid was in the kitchen. Later in the day, while talking to a friend, he repeated this story.

So far, the two witnesses, Merrett and the maid, were telling a bizarre story, but at least a consistent one. However, that very day, Mrs. Sutherland--for reasons that have boggled the minds of all students of this case--changed her testimony entirely. According to a CID investigator, she told him that she was in the kitchen when she heard a shot. She then came running into the sitting-room, where she saw Mrs. Merrett fall from her chair, still clutching a pistol in her hand.

Unfortunately, the CID men were unaware at the time of her previous story, so they unquestioningly accepted this account. It was, they instantly decided, as clear a case of suicide as you could ever see.

They found a number of letters on Mrs. Merrett's desk, including two from one of her banks, informing her that her account was overdrawn. There was also a letter she had been in the middle of writing to a friend just at the moment when she was shot. It was a cheerful note, saying how she and her son were now comfortably settled in their flat. This letter was free of blood-stains.

One would think that it did not take a Hercule Poirot to think that there was something wrong with this scene. Surely one would think it odd that the lady would start to pen a breezy, happy note, and then suddenly interrupt it to grab a gun and shoot herself in the head, while miraculously getting no blood on the notepaper in front of her. But, no. The inspectors had decided it was a suicide, and they were damned if they would let any inconvenient facts spoil their nice, quick, tidy investigation. (Incidentally, when Mrs. Sutherland was later asked to explain the discrepancies in her accounts of the tragedy, she explained that she only claimed to have seen Mrs. Merrett holding a pistol because "she was excited at the time." She went back to her original story, saying she had seen nothing. Investigators were content to leave it at that.)

Meanwhile, Mrs. Merrett lay in her hospital room--in the ward reserved for suicidal patients--in very grave condition. X-rays showed a bullet lodged at the base of her skull. Doctors decided it could not be removed. When she regained consciousness, she had no memory of what had happened. All she could say was that "I was sitting writing...when suddenly a bang went off in my head like a pistol." When a nurse asked if there had been a pistol there, Mrs. Merrett responded in astonishment, "No. Was there?" She added that while she was writing, John was "standing beside me, waiting to post the letter." She gave one of her doctors a similar story, adding that she told her son, "Go away, Donald, and don't annoy me." The next thing she heard was "a kind of explosion, and I don't remember anything more." It was, she added in bewilderment, "as if Donald had shot me."

For whatever reason--possibly because everyone assumed she was a would-be suicide--no one gave the poor perplexed woman any hint of why she was in the hospital. Doctors and visitors only told her that she had "a little accident." The Inspector in charge of the case, when told that Mrs. Merrett was dying, but still conscious and capable of speech, did not even bother to interview her.

As for her loving son, when told by a doctor that his mother was very ill, but still had "a fighting chance," John replied with obvious unease, "So it's still on the cards that she will recover?" He did not bother to inform her two sisters or any of her many friends of her grave condition.

Mrs. Merrett lingered in physical pain and mental unease until March 27, when she sank into a coma. On the morning of April 1, she died.

Mrs. Merrett's sister, a Mrs. Penn, flatly refused to accept the official verdict of suicide, although she naturally shrunk from accepting the only possible alternative. She chose to convince herself that her sister's death was due to some dreadful freak accident. Before she died, Mrs. Merrett had begged her sister to "look after Donald," and Mrs. Penn tried to do just that. She and her husband moved into the Merrett flat with her now-orphaned nephew. A few days later, Mr. Penn found an empty cartridge case a few feet from where Mrs. Merrett had been sitting at the time when she was shot, and he informed police.

When questioned about this discovery, John told police that he had bought the gun to serve as protection. A couple of weeks before the shooting, his mother took the gun from him and put it in her bureau, and that was the last he saw of it. He added that after his mother was shot, he picked up the pistol and placed it on the bureau.

Mr. and Mrs. Penn remained in the Merritt flat until the lease expired. Meanwhile, John went back to his double life: ostensibly attending classes, in reality haunting the local dance-halls. In June, the Penns returned to their home. John was, according to the terms of his mother's will, left in the care of a Public Trustee until he reached his majority and came into his inheritance. This guardian sent him to a country vicarage in Buckinghamshire. The plan was that he would study under a private tutor to prepare him for another attempt at University life.

It was only when this Trustee took over Mrs. Merrett's estate that her son's exploits in forgery and embezzlement were uncovered. It began to dawn upon the police that perhaps they had just been a wee bit hasty in dismissing the lady's death as an obvious suicide. The CID did their own experiments with ballistics and handwriting analyses, and the result was that an arrest warrant was issued for John Donald Merrett. He stood trial for murder and forgery in January 1927.

As you may have already guessed, the case against young John looked very grave. Mrs. Merrett's doctors and nurses also testified that they had not seen any gunshot residue around her wound, indicating that she had not been shot at close range.

However, John Merrett did have some things in his favor. The particular horror attached to the crime of matricide, coupled with the defendant's youth, led many to find it unbelievable that this suave, articulate young man could commit such an unspeakable act. One woman on the jury was heard to say during the trial that "I'm so sorry for that poor boy!"

Merrett's counsel suggested that in the hospital, Mrs. Merrett was so mentally confused that she was simply unable to remember shooting herself. They made a great deal of the fact that the doctor who had autopsied Mrs. Merrett's corpse, and who was now testifying about the improbability that she had shot herself, originally called her injuries "consistent with suicide." They also emphasized the police's unbelievable negligence in not taking a dying deposition from Mrs. Merrett. If this had been done, the defense suggested, their client would never have been put on trial at all. With such contradictory and inconclusive evidence, they asserted, the jury had no choice but to rely on the presumption of innocence.

The jewel in the defense crown, however, was the testimony of Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Spilsbury was the most famous pathologist of his day. At the time of the Merrett trial, he had acquired such a reputation--albeit one not always deserved--of infallibility that juries inevitably accepted his views without question, no matter what evidence there might be to contradict him.

He told the jury that he believed Mrs. Merrett's wound was not inconsistent with suicide. The heavy bleeding might have washed away any gunshot residue from the entry wound. (Although under cross-examination, he had to admit that the position of the wound was an unusual one for a suicide.)

The defense had less success explaining away those forged checks. Also, doubts were raised whether Mrs. Merrett had ever seen the letters from her bank stating that she was overdrawn--the letters which were only later found on her desk and used by her son as a motive for her suicide. Only John Donald could have answered all the lingering unsolved questions surrounding his mother's death--and he declined to testify at his trial.

After deliberating less than an hour, the jury decided the defendant was guilty of forgery. As for the charge of murder, they delivered that peculiar Scottish verdict of "Not Proven." It was, as a local newspaper commented, "An unsatisfactory ending to a rather unsatisfactory case."

Merrett was sentenced to a year in jail. He served his time in an open prison, under far from unpleasant conditions. Upon his release, he was given a temporary home by a Mrs. Bonner, a friend of Bertha Merritt's who took pity on this unfortunate young man who was now alone in the world. Merrett's way of thanking her for this act of kindness was by eloping with his hostess' pretty seventeen-year-old daughter Vera. The young couple married in March 1928. Three months after the wedding, the newlyweds were arrested on a charge of obtaining goods by false pretenses. It seems that, feeling nostalgic for the good old days, Merrett opened a bank account under a false name and bought a large amount of goods from local tradesmen. As he had only deposited the sum of one pound in this account, the checks he have these merchants immediately bounced. Merrett soon found himself in a considerably less desirable prison, doing nine months with hard labor.

True-crime doyen William Roughead wrote of the Merrett case only a few years after John Donald's second conviction, and so his account ends there. Roughead was a lawyer, well aware of the laws of libel. As the subject of his essay was still alive, Roughead contented himself by commenting that the public had heard nothing more from Merrett, "but you never can tell: we may do so yet."

We did indeed, but that was not until 1954, two years after Roughead's death. After being released from prison the second time, Merrett claimed his grandfather's inheritance, settling part of it on Vera. He changed his name to "Ronald Chesney," and embarked on a full-time career of smuggling, theft, gun-running, drug-dealing, and many similarly sordid crimes. He spent more time in prison than out of it. After his money ran out, he began to cast covetous eyes on the share of his fortune that was in the possession of his wife. However, the two of them had been bitterly estranged for many years. (Vera, a Roman Catholic, refused to consider divorce.) The only way he would get that money back was if she predeceased him.

This inevitably led to certain trains of thought.

In January 1954, Merrett/Chesney was in Germany. He used a stolen passport to make an undetected return to England, where he snuck into the flat Vera shared with her mother and drowned his wife in the bathtub. While creeping away from the murder scene, he unexpectedly ran into his mother-in-law. From his point of view, there was nothing for it but to strangle the woman so he could make his getaway.

Vera Merrett

The elderly woman had bravely put up a lengthy fight for her life--scraps of flesh were found under her fingernails--and Merrett was spotted leaving the scene. This proved to be his final undoing. Merrett, on the lam in Germany, read the newspaper accounts of the double homicide--his arms still raw from where Mrs. Bonner had clawed him--and learned that he was wanted by the police. He knew that this time, there was no escaping the gallows.

Merrett had spent his entire life cheating everyone around him, so it was fitting that his last act was to cheat the hangman. Before the authorities could catch up with him, he had withdrawn into a lonely forest by the Rhine, where he put a pistol into his mouth and shot himself.

Roughead's prediction came true possibly even more horrifically than he had imagined.

The Baron of Arizona

In 1883, an aristocratic-looking man suddenly appeared in Phoenix, Arizona, and calmly announced that thanks to his possession of the Spanish titles of Baron de Arizonaca and Caballero de los Colorados, he owned the entire city and an area surrounding it that amounted to nearly eleven million acres. The territory included not only the state’s capital city, but the Silver King mine, a treasure in copper, gold, and silver ore, and, oh, yes, the right of way of the Southern Pacific Railway.

James Addison Reavis had just proclaimed himself the Baron of Arizona.

Reavis’ astonishing rise to fortune began when he was a soldier in the Confederate Army, when he accidentally discovered that he had a remarkable talent for forging passes of leave for himself and his friends. Having an intelligence and ambition to match this unexpected gift for criminality, he naturally began to think of exercising his abilities on a larger scale.

After his discharge from the army, he made his way to St. Louis, where he became a real estate agent. His skill in forgery came in handy, as it allowed him to “discover” property titles and other paperwork that served the interests of his clients.

In 1871, he met George Willing, who alleged he had bought a large Spanish land grant in Arizona from a Miguel Peralta, although his documentation was extremely shaky and informal. Reavis and Willing eventually formed a partnership to promote this claim. In 1874, Willing went to Prescott, Arizona to file his claim, but the very next morning, he died suddenly. The cause of his death was unknown, but—especially in the light of later events—many dark rumors spread about his convenient exit from the scene. Reavis eventually gained possession of Willing’s papers relating to the Peralta grant, got Willing’s widow to sell him her interest in the claim, and began to dream. If he was going to go to all the trouble of pressing Willing’s questionable grant, why not make it for something really worth owning?

Reavis concocted an eighteenth-century grandee, Miguel de Peralta, a leading ornament of the court of King Ferdinand of Spain, and a long list of Peralta ancestors and descendants. And then he gave them all a place in history. Literally. Incredible though it may seem, he managed to tour archives in places ranging from Mexico to Spain to Portugal, where he deposited for the benefit of skeptics his forged historical documents providing a legal record of the Peralta clan. Reavis then established his link to the Peraltas by concocting documentation that "proved" George Willing had, for a trifle, bought from Miguel Peralta—who just happened to be a direct descendant of the original Miguel de Peralta—the ownership of the enormous Peralta land grant that King Ferdinand had bestowed upon the family.

How could anyone doubt the truth of Reavis’ story? He had all the papers to prove it!

The new Baron brought his impressive stack of aged documents to the government’s surveyor general, along with a petition to be declared owner of the great Peralta grant. He also posted public notices all over Phoenix warning all the “trespassers” on his land to make acceptable financial settlements with him.

This caused, as one might imagine, a good deal of disquiet among the citizens of Arizona, and a positive panic in the board rooms of the Southern Pacific, the Silver King mine, and all the other companies within the new Peralta empire. The businessmen screamed for their lawyers, who painstakingly examined Reavis’ documentation and announced in no uncertain terms that…Reavis had them over a barrel. They advised their clients that the easiest way to deal with the interloper was to settle with Reavis as quickly and inexpensively as they could. The Southern Pacific gave him $50,000, the Silver King $25,000. Meanwhile, Reavis began negotiating with the federal government a settlement of a cool $25 million. The new Baron radiated such self-assurance that he was able to secure the financial and moral support of some of the most important men of his day, such as Robert G. Ingersoll, the San Francisco millionaire John W. Mackay, Charles Crocker, and Senator Roscoe Conkling.

Reavis decided to cement his claim to the grant by linking his lot with someone he could pass off as the real Peralta heir. He found a suitable candidate in a young house servant, Sophia Treadway. He informed the girl that she was no penniless orphan, but heiress to a large fortune in Arizona, and, after concocting the necessary documentation that rechristened her “Doña Sophia Michaela Maso Reavis y Peralta de la Córdoba,” married her.

The Baroness of Arizona

The new Baroness must have felt like Cinderella on the big party night. Reavis bought her a suitably aristocratic wardrobe and saw to it that a convent school taught her how to be a great lady. He changed his name to Don James Addison de Peralta-Reavis, and asserted a secondary claim on his Arizona land on behalf of his wife and children, the true blood kin of the once-mighty Peraltas.

Reavis began living less like a Baron and more like a feudal king. He formed lumber and mining companies and began developing his new empire. The citizens of a good chunk of Arizona—who were now essentially his serfs—paid him in return for quitclaim deeds to what they once thought were their properties. Many others simply abandoned their homes and properties rather than fight what was being presented as an unassailable claim. If the Southern Pacific caved in to this man, what chance did these humble individuals have? At Reavis' peak, he was pulling in some $300,000 a year. He owned mansions in St. Louis, Washington D. C., Madrid, and Mexico. His wife and sons dressed in the style of Spanish royalty.

It is difficult to believe that Reavis, deep down, thought this could last forever, but his empire, amazingly, was allowed to flourish until 1890, when the surveyor general finally completed his investigation into Reavis’ claims. In short, he stated flatly that Reavis had sold everyone a pup.

Reavis responded by filing a lawsuit against the government for damages and continued on his merry way until the next year, when the U.S. Court of Private Land Grant Claims was established. Practically their first order of business was to take a very, very close look at the Baron of Arizona. Their agents followed the trail of documents Reavis had deposited from California to Spain, and subjected them all to expert forensic examination. They soon realized that they were looking at the most ingenious, audacious, extensive, and beautifully crafted fakes any of them had ever witnessed.

Unfortunately for the Baron, by the time his claim came up for review before the Land Grant Court in January of 1895, he had spent all his new-found fortune as fast as it came in. He did not even have money left for legal representation. The government had no problem whatsoever proving that Reavis was a forger on a truly epic scale, with the imagination of the most prolific novelist. As one of the Land Grant investigators later put it, “In all the annals of crime there is no parallel. This monstrous edifice of forgery, perjury, and subornation was the work of one man. No plan was ever more ingeniously devised; none ever carried out with greater patience, industry, skill, and effrontery.”

It all makes one wonder what Reavis could have accomplished in the world if he hadn’t been such a dyed-in-the-wool skunk.

The “wholly fictitious and fraudulent” Peralta claim was dismissed, and Reavis then found himself facing criminal charges of forgery and conspiracy to defraud the government. The ex-Baron was inevitably found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail, which frankly seems like a light sentence considering the incredible havoc he had caused.

The ex-Baron turned jailbird.

After his release, Reavis made efforts to launch new development plans for Arizona, but unsurprisingly failed to find any backers.  As he was apparently unable to imagine any way to make an honest dollar, this once-dynamic con man quickly slid into complete poverty. His wife divorced him in 1902 on the grounds of nonsupport.

Reavis died in a poor house in Denver, Colorado, on November 20, 1914. According to some reports, he consoled himself during his last years by haunting public libraries, where he could read old newspaper stories about himself and relive the days when he was heir to one of America’s richest land grants.

Joseph Cosey, Confounding Copycat

[Note:  I originally published this post over at The World of Edgar Allan Poe in 2010. I have a soft spot for old Joe, and he seemed to fit this blog nicely, so I’m repeating it here. Hope you don’t mind reruns.]

The period of the 1920s-1950s was a Golden Age for Edgar Allan Poe-related "discoveries." During these years, many previously unknown letters and documents of the legendary poet surfaced for the first time. Unfortunately, a great deal of credit for these additions to Poe lore can be given to an astoundingly imaginative, talented, and energetic forger named Martin Coneely.

Coneely, who was born in 1887, is best known by his favorite alias of "Joseph Cosey." Little is known of his early life. He ran away from home at an early age, and henceforth led a solitary, nomadic life, supporting himself through a series of petty crimes. He apparently had no friends or family ties. Despite his shady and hardscrabble background, he was a highly intelligent man with an instinctive love for books and history--19th century Americana in particular. In other circumstances, he would have become a genuine scholar, but as it happened, his fate was instead not to merely study history, but to make it. Literally.

In the 1920s, he paid what proved to be a life-changing visit to the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. His motives in requesting to see signatures and documents belonging to such greats as Jefferson and Washington were entirely innocent--he merely wished to gratify his passion for Americana. However, once he was able to actually see and touch these priceless relics of the past, he felt he could not let them all go. Settling his desire upon a pay warrant signed by Benjamin Franklin in 1786, he slipped the paper into his pocket, and, in those more trusting times, left the library unnoticed.

A year or so later, he was living in a tenement in New York City, drunk, alone, and flat broke. Desperate for money, he steeled himself to sell his one prized possession--his stolen Franklin document. Upon taking it to a book dealer, however, he was stunned and indignant when the man scornfully rejected it as a forgery. In his disgust, Cosey resolved to teach this impertinent fool a lesson. He, himself, would create a real forgery and sell it to him! He haunted the local public libraries, studying facsimiles of the handwriting of historical figures. He found that Abraham Lincoln's signature came easiest to him, and after some months of practice, whipped out a handsome "Yrs. Truly, A. Lincoln" on a scrap of paper. The same dealer who dismissed his authentic Franklin bought the bogus Cosey for ten dollars.

It was an epiphany. Cosey, after a lifetime of aimless and unproductive wanderings, felt he had finally found his mission in life. He threw all his previously dissipated energies into his new calling, and he exceeded beyond all expectations. He became to manuscript forging what Tiffany's is to diamonds. G. William Bergquest, an expert on literary hoaxes, called him "the greatest forger of his kind in this century." The renowned book and autograph dealer Charles Hamilton went even further, describing Cosey as "the most skilled and versatile forger of all time." During his long and prolific career, he forged many items of Americana, particularly ones imitating the handwriting of Lincoln and George Washington.

Alas for Poe scholarship, Cosey also had a personal devotion to the author of "The Raven," which he expressed in his own singular manner. He also, for whatever reason, had a predilection for Poe's literary contemporary Nathaniel Parker Willis. He is known to have created more than one letter from Poe to Willis, and enjoyed adding forged notations by Willis to his "Poe manuscripts." Physically, they were impeccable pieces of work, but Cosey occasionally made several factual errors in the text. The errors were relatively minor--I've seen far worse in many Poe biographies--but they were enough to discredit the documents. Otherwise, the letters may well have been permanently accepted as genuine. In fact, Hamilton stated that all of the extant Poe/Willis correspondence has to at least be suspected as being Cosey's handiwork. (All this makes me very curious about a manuscript copy of Poe's poem "For Annie" which sold at auction not long ago for a cool $830,000, even though very limited information was given about the document's provenance. Among the distinguishing features of this artifact were notations added by none other than N.P. Willis.)

Cosey was considerably more ambitious than the typical forger. Not content merely with reproducing signatures or brief snippets of already-published texts, he did serious preliminary research on his subjects, enabling him to convincingly channel the literary style of Poe and his other favorite targets, churning out with unnerving speed and agility interesting letters, artifacts such as account books and legal papers, and long samples of documents (including manuscripts of "The Poetic Principle," "The Raven," and "The Fall of the House of Usher.") His instinctive skill for replicating handwritings was coupled with the savvy to use genuinely antiquated paper and writing implements, including a distinctive brown ink specific to the 18th and early 19th centuries. He even became adept at forging letters of verification to accompany his creations. All this combined to make him a formidable menace to the world of manuscript collecting.

Cosey was also clever enough to take advantage of an odd quirk in the penal codes of New York (and a number of other states.) According to the law, merely forging any "archaeological object" was not in itself illegal. The crime occurred only when the owner of the "object" deliberately presented it for sale it as a genuine artifact. Cosey would merely diffidently present his documents to dealers or private collectors as objects of unknown value that he had "inherited," or "been given," or simply "found," and left it up to the prospective buyer to decide whether it was of any worth. Ironically, his seeming casualness about the documents served to enhance their plausibility. And if the forgery was detected, all he had to do was innocently state that he had never claimed the manuscripts were anything other than old pieces of paper.

Another thing that made Cosey notable was that, like many other great figures of his unusual profession, he saw himself as no mere criminal, but as an artist, a craftsman. He took great pride in his output, which he invested with a care that arose not merely from a desire to avoid exposure, but from a love of the work itself. He was, in the words of one of his parole officers, "a likable, ingratiating fraud." To paraphrase one of his favorite subjects, for him forgery was not a purpose, but a passion.

What is more, he convinced himself that he was actually doing a public service. After all, relatively few of even the most ardent Poe devotees have the money or opportunity to possess a letter or other document in his writing. Thanks to Joseph Cosey, many more of them would get that chance! He once told a story about going to a bookstore with a "Poe letter" he had created. "The owner was out," he said, "but his secretary told me she was a student of Poe and would be thrilled to see something in his handwriting. I finally sold it to her for three dollars, but only because I was broke. Well my conscience bothered me about it for weeks, and the first time I had three dollars I went back to the shop to tell her it was a counterfeit, and buy it back from her. But when I heard her talk about how much pleasure that letter had given her, I didn't have the heart to disillusion her. So I walked out and let her keep it and believe in it."

I'd like to know where that letter is now. And how often it has been quoted as source material in Poe biographies.

For all his natural gift for chicanery, Cosey did sometimes turn out product sufficiently flawed to be exposed by the experts. He often ignored the fact that a person's handwriting inevitably changes with age. A Cosey "Benjamin Franklin," for example, would have the same signature in old age that he had in his prime. He would occasionally cut corners by chemically treating modern paper to give it the appearance of age. Such mistakes led to his arrest in 1937, after he sold an "Abraham Lincoln" letter. It was dated "December 2, 1846." but, with uncharacteristic sloppiness Cosey wrote it on paper bearing a discernible 1860 watermark. (By this time, Cosey was not only an alcoholic, but a heroin addict, which undoubtedly affected his talents.) His victim was content to chalk it up to the hazards of the business, but after he heard Cosey was attempting to sell a similar letter to another dealer, the police were summoned. The detectives who brought him in for questioning immediately saw from the marks on his arms that he was a drug user, and evidently promised him a much-needed "fix" if he confessed. He did, and was convicted of petty larceny. He was paroled after less than a year, and he inevitably immediately went back to his life's work. He is believed to have kept up his cheerfully felonious ways right until his death, which is generally thought to have taken place around 1950, when he simply dropped out of sight. Some sources, however, believe he was still producing "artifacts" for some years afterwards. His end, appropriately enough for a Poe impersonator, is a mystery.

Thankfully, many documents have been exposed as his handiwork. (A fine example can be seen here.)  Such is his reputation, that many of them have fetched high prices at auction as "Genuine Cosey Forgeries." A side industry even emerged of--seriously--forged "Cosey forgeries." The New York Public Library did him the dubious, if unmistakable, honor of setting up a permanent collection of his "Greatest Hits." (One of the founding items in this file was an assortment of notes Poe supposedly wrote in relation to the printing of "Tamerlane.") However, it is acknowledged that there are many, many more "Coseys" in circulation that have gone undetected. Early on in this blog, I posted a quote from Charles Hamilton (who made a particular study of Cosey's career.) "Long ago," he wrote, "I concluded that there must be far more forgeries of Poe by Cosey than there are original Poe letters."

Considering how many leading items of Poeana--items which largely have a sketchy or nonexistent history--first appeared during Cosey's prolific heyday, Hamilton's words should be memorized by any student of Poe's life. And it must be remembered that Joseph Cosey was hardly the first Poe forger, nor the last. Caveat emptor. And then some.