(Part 3 of Ross Raymond’s Story)
Ross Raymond’s (Surprisingly) Happy Ending
When we left professional swindler Ross Raymond, the year was 1889 and he had just begun serving a ten-year sentence in the UK’s dismal Portland Prison. (In case you missed the earlier stories, here’s Parts 1 and Part 2.)
It appears he didn’t quite serve his full ten years. Raymond shows up next in 1898 in New York City, where, surprisingly enough, he’s getting married – to Elizabeth Artemesia Crain.
But wait – wasn’t this the same Elizabeth he’d been calling his ‘wife’ for the past twenty years? And hadn’t he also married recent widow Emma Newpher in 1881? As far as we can tell, both those things were true. Nevertheless, Manhattan marriage records clearly show Ross and long-term squeeze Elizabeth officially tying the knot on April 14, 1898. Ross Raymond never quite did things the usual way.
Ross and his now-official wife Elizabeth soon relocated to Philadelphia, where she had somehow arranged a position for him at the Philadelphia Times as a city-news reporter. Compatriots would later say Ross proved “highly efficient” in that post. Yet once again, not all his stories bore a strong relationship to the truth. “Bogus babies was his great weakness,” one reporter later chuckled, “and many Philadelphia women wept over his tragic stories of accidents to children that happened only in his fertile imagination.”
Prior to his latest prison stint, newspapers had speculated whether this additional experience behind bars would cause Raymond to turn over a new leaf. Those who knew him best had simply laughed at the question. “He will enjoy – what he calls enjoy – life in his usual way,” one writer predicted, “and he will find just as many dupes as ever till he goes under the sod.”
And sure enough, it wasn’t long before Raymond popped up in the news again.
In late 1899, he booked a room at the Plankinton Hotel in Milwaukee, presenting a (forged) letter identifying him as Major Allanson, a distinguished member of the British Army. That ruse won him an enthusiastic welcome at a prominent local businessman’s club, where he “entertained members with recollections of his [fictitious] services for his ‘Queen and country.’” True to form, Raymond parlayed that camaraderie into several successful swindles, including passing a forged check for $25 at the hotel. And by January, 1900, he found himself “lodged in the House of Correction at Milwaukee,” serving a 30-day sentence for vagrancy, while the police looked into his latest scams.
That fairly minor brush with the law did nothing to quell Raymond’s swindling spirits. But it did apparently encourage him to quickly leave Wisconsin.
He showed up in the news again in late January, 1901, thanks to a stop at Manhattan’s Lincoln National Bank on 42nd Street, opposite Grand Central Station. Introducing himself as “Dr. Sandys” through yet another forged letter of introduction, Raymond claimed he’d just left Baltimore, where he’d been lecturing at Johns Hopkins University.
For this particular swindle, Raymond had manufactured a fresh bit of fiction tailored to appeal to the bank’s president, who’d formerly been U.S. Postmaster General. Raymond claimed to be searching for a relative employed at the New York post office who had “fallen heir to a large estate in Europe.” Raymond, too, of course, expected to receive a “considerable legacy” once the purported relative was found. After the bank president obligingly gave suggestions to help locate this supposed postal employee, Raymond asked to cash yet another forged check, this one for $200 – and purportedly authored by Johns Hopkins University president, Daniel C. Gilman. The banker, fully under his spell by now, said sure.
University-related scams seeming to pay off so nicely, Raymond next scooted east a tad to New Haven, where he employed a similar fiction with President Arthur Twining Hadley of Yale, “representing himself as an Oxford professor, temporarily visiting this country.” Interestingly enough, he struck out when he tried to target a couple of blue-collar businessmen about the same time; an ironworks manager and a shipyard owner both remained unimpressed by Raymond’s smooth talk and “height of fashion” dress.
But swindling prominent men had its downside. The New Haven police swiftly arrested him.
Wife Elizabeth, now back in her hometown of Keene, New Hampshire, wrote a letter to the sentencing judge, begging for leniency. Raymond could get work if he was released, she told the court, and she confidently predicted that he “would not commit any more crimes.”
Manhattan Judge Edward W. Cowing remained unswayed. Noting that Raymond had already served ten years abroad and another ‘two and a half’ (he thought) in the States, he concluded that “sympathy and leniency would do no good.” Raymond was dispatched to Sing Sing for another two years. While there, Raymond put his writing skills to good use, editing the prison newspaper Star of Hope “with great brilliancy,” his former editor would later say.
By the time he finally breathed free air again (roughly 1905), Raymond was approaching 55 years old, and his many years in prison had taken a serious toll on his health. Surprisingly enough, that’s when his life finally seemed to take a positive turn.
According to his former boss at the Chicago Daily News, “On his release, [Raymond] and his wife took a little apartment in an inexpensive quarter of New York City, and he and she worked together, with a very small income, but for the first time in years were really happy.” And, to everyone’s relief, there were “no more escapades.”
Hopeful that a change of climate would benefit his health, Ross and Elizabeth moved west to Carson City in late 19o7 or early 1908. Family connections may have played a part in that decision, too; Elizabeth’s younger sister, Ellen, lived in Carson City, and was married to prominent astronomer and weatherman, Charles W. Friend.
But Ross Raymond’s health continued to slide. He passed away on November 24, 1909, at just 58 years old, with his faithful wife Elizabeth at his side. He was buried in Lone Mountain Cemetery.
Raymond’s obituary in the Carson Daily Appeal – probably written by Elizabeth – made no mention whatsoever of his criminal past. Instead it called him simply a “well known writer,” and noted (accurately enough) that he had “traveled the world over as a newspaper correspondent and magazine writer.” Stretching the truth a bit farther, the laudatory piece proclaimed that he’d been “highly successful” in his writing career, with his work “always . . . in great demand by the various magazines and periodicals of this country.”
Newspapers across the country and, indeed, the world picked up the story of Raymond’s death, recounting his history of creative swindles. Reporters seemed particularly surprised by Elizabeth’s unfailing devotion. “Why have I clung to Ross all these years? Because I love him,” she was quoted as saying. “Some day in another world, when all this insanity of sin has passed away, I shall see him as he is – a grand, big-hearted man, a genius now temporarily lost in darkness and shame.”
And when Elizabeth herself finally passed away from a stroke in 1928, 18 years after Ross’s passing, she would be buried at Lone Mountain beside the man she loved. Interestingly enough, Elizabeth’s own obituary noted that in her younger years she “took up journalism, working on several of the large dailies in New York and Philadelphia,” and later “traveled extensively through Europe, taking up her residence for a time in London.” All that sounds oddly reminiscent of Ross Raymond’s own career, leaving a reader to wonder how many of Ross’s highly-acclaimed newspaper pieces Elizabeth might have helped him write.
By the time of Ross Raymond went on to whatever better life in the hereafter that hopefully awaited him, he had become one of the most famous scammers in the world, leaving begin what some estimated as “hundreds” of victims. His name — and details of his scams — had been shared for decades all across the United States, and as far away as Australia, South America, Canada and Great Britain.
Yet even acknowledging the pain he brought to so many, there’s a certain mystique to Ross Raymond and his life of crime. He certainly was brilliant. No less an authority than the New York Times called him “one of the brightest and cleverest swindlers that ever lived. . . (with) a career that is almost a romance.”
Raymond’s “ability to pass for a clergyman, a college professor, a distinguished soldier, or a scientist of fame” was simply amazing, his former editor confided. “His stock of information on almost every conceivable subject was sufficient to deceive anyone.”
And set-backs never deterred him. “[E]ven fresh from prison, he manages to ‘raise the wind’ within forty-eight hours after he gets rid of his prison garb,” a Canadian newspaper once gushed. “The fact that he was an ex-convict did not trouble him in the least, and certainly did not seem to interfere with his success.”
Some criticized his writing style, while others remarked on Raymond’s journalistic talent, noting that his pen “always commanded big pay,” though hedging that “he’d duped nearly all the leading papers with very sensational fictitious stories.” But as the New York Times put it, Raymond seemed to prefer to make a living “by dishonest rather than by honest means.”
What could cause someone with so much talent to go so far astray? Former editor Melville E. Stone was convinced Raymond’s escapades were the product of insanity. Even at sentencing he had behaved strangely, Stone said, “manifest[ing] the utmost indifference.” And alcohol, he believed, was the root of Raymond’s problem. “So long as he avoided alcoholic stimulants he led a perfectly orderly and honorable life. But given one glass of intoxicant and he would instantly set about swindling some one,” Stone added. “When his spree was over he would return to his newspaper work and slave without relaxation.” Wife Elizabeth, too, blamed Ross’s troubles on liquor.
But when Stone suggested that Raymond raise insanity as a defense he simply grew angry, insisting he would never saddle his family with such a “stigma.” Prison was his best option, Raymond insisted, “because if by any chance he was permitted to go free, he knew he would get into trouble again very soon.” All of which, you have to admit, sounds remarkably sane.
It’s impossible, of course, to diagnose someone long-dead, in hindsight. But Raymond’s erratic behavior bears at least some similarity to what we know today as bipolar disorder — episodes of manic grandiosity, recklessness confidence, and extraordinary energy, followed by periods of recovery or depression. And in some individuals, alcohol can indeed precipitate manic episodes.
A friend once described Raymond’s troubles in a way echoing that pattern: “When Ross begins to drink the potion [alcohol], the devil of insanity takes possession of him. He is no longer the genial, honest, warm-hearted man we have admired . . . and the man becomes a monster of cunning stupidity. He forgets his name and his family’s honor. The horrors of prison life are forgotten. He runs his wild course, a maniac in crime, until some morning he awakens in his right mind and the deep abyss of his shame yawns before him like Dante’s hell. It is too late. The deed has been done, and again his term of punishment must begin.”
Or was Raymond a sociopath, perhaps — brilliant, but with no moral compass? His ability to hoodwink people into trusting him might fit that explanation as well. “It was the experience of those who knew him that he could go into a place a perfect stranger and in a few hours so work upon the credulity of people he met that they would be more than willing to trust him with anything,” noted a different newspaper.
As for Raymond himself, he simply declined responsibility. “He said a power beyond his control took possession of him when he drank and he was not responsible for the extraordinary episodes of his life,” a newspaper once reported.
Ross Raymond was clearly both brilliant and wildly audacious. And he obviously loved the “game.” It’s easy to see why his imaginative exploits once garnered so much attention.
How ironic , then, that this man who was once so famous has been entirely forgotten. You’d think there would at least be a book or a movie about him (though there’s none that I’ve found). Even Ross Raymond’s grave – and his wife Elizabeth’s – bear only small, temporary markers.
What do you think? Was Ross Raymond a world-class criminal? Or was he a brilliant guy who sadly struggled with a mental illness that physicians back then generally didn’t recognize?
If you enjoyed Ross Raymond’s amazing story, I’d love it if you’d share it with another history lover. That’s what keeps forgotten history alive!
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Like to help the Lone Mountain Headstone Project install permanent markers on forgotten graves like Ross Raymond’s? Donations can be sent to “Foundation for Carson City Parks and Recreation,” P.O. Box 3266, Carson City NV 89702. Just add a note specifying that the gift is intended for the Lone Mountain Headstone Project. The Foundation is a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 47-4750761; donations are tax-deductible.