A Vivid Series of Fact Articles
□ WEIRD CRIMES □
No. 2. The Grave Robbers
THE thief who would "steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes" is proverbially the meanest crook in the world.
Judged by present-day standards, he is also a piker; for, with post-war inflation, like everything else, mortuary thievery has increased its ante.
Robbing the dead, or, more accurately, stealing from the bereaved, is so mean a form of crime that it is, fortunately, seldom met with. Yet a few crooks have specialized in this despicable thievery and found it—while it lasted—exceedingly remunerative.
Late in 1921 and early in 1922 the police of Chicago began to receive complaints from recently bereaved residents of the city's West Side. The articles stolen varied in kind and value, but the circumstances surrounding the crimes were invariably the same. A family which had lost a member would attend the interment, and when they returned they found their home had been burglarized and rifled of every valuable of an easily portable nature.
For three months this funeral burglar carried his flashlight and jimmy in the wake of death in Chicago's West Side. More than fifteen complaints were lodged with the authorities—and the burglaries went merrily on.
At last the police department decided to set a trap for the thief. Special officers were detailed to the case, and when a prominent resident died they asked permission to attend the funeral services.
When the friends and mourners had entered the waiting limousines and driven off to the cemetery the officers remained behind. Scarcely had the last motor in the funeral procession disappeared when the telephone began to ring imperatively. The officers glanced significantly at each other and let the bell continue to jangle.
Five minutes passed. Again the 'phone rang, and again the officers ignored it. Another five minutes, and the telephone rang again, longer this time, as if the party on the line were urging central to make an extra effort to get the family. Again the detectives remained mute.
Hardly enough time to allow a rapid walker to travel from the corner drug store to the residence elapsed before the police heard the sharp click of a rear window being forced, and a neatly-dress young man stepped briskly from the butler's pantry to the dining-room, making with unerring instinct for the sideboard where the family silver was stored.
At the station house he gave his name as Benjamin Shermerkey, aged twenty-one, and admitted being the perpetrator of the series of burglaries which had cost bereaved Chicagoans thousands of dollars.
His system, he told the police, was a simple one. Each morning he searched the obituary columns in the daily papers. When the names of people living in prosperous sections of the city appeared, he made careful note of the day and hour of the funeral, noting whether services be from the home, church or undertaking establishment.
After allowing a reasonable time for the obsequies, he would ring up the family residence. If anyone answered, he would announce himself as a friend of the deceased and offer condolences. Then, after another interval, he would call again. If he received another answer he would repeat the farce of tendering sympathy, and bide his time.
When his telephone call was finally unanswered, or his first ring brought no response, he would go to the house, force a window and make off with silverware, jewelry and anything else easily carried. His genteel appearance averted suspicion, even if he were seen leaving a prosperous neighborhood with a bundle.
A speedy trial followed, and residents of Chicago's West Side will have to defer the doubtful pleasure of entertaining Mr. Shermerkey until he has exhausted the hospitality of Joliet Penitentiary.
AN attempt to practice the same specialty was nipped almost in the bud in New York early in 1922. Samuel Deutsch, a four-times offender against the New York burglary statute, was caught red-handed by a young woman who happened to remain in the house to "straighten up" the rooms while the family was attending the burial of a deceased relative at Woodlawn Cemetery.
When discovered, Deutsch told the young lady, "It's all right; I'm the undertaker."
"You're a thief!" replied the courageous girl, and grabbed him, calling loudly for help at the same time. He shook her off, but was captured before he left the block.
"You've got me right," he admitted to the policemen. "I used to look up the obits., and when I seen a bunch of 'em in the same neighborhood, I'd grab me jimmy an' do me stuff."
Had Deutsch used Shermerkey's precaution of telephoning, the chances are he would still be at liberty. As it is, he had been made very comfortable in his old cell at Sing Sing, where he will continue for twenty years, less time off for good behavior.
No less ingenious, and decidedly safer for its perpetrator, was the scheme conceived by Samuel F. Ware, a negro undertaker of Atlanta, Georgia, for muleting relatives of persons he had buried.
Ware's plan had for its basis the principle of the "Indian gift." He would sell a casket, then steal it back again.
Doctors' and undertakers' mistakes, and often their profits, are usually permanently screened from public view by several cubic feet of earth, and Ware's dereliction might have gone unsuspected indefinitely had it not been for his desire to secure the last split-cent of profit from his perfidy.
An expensive casket might be sold, stolen back and resold two or three times, but after its fourth or fifth interment it began to look shopworn. A little time and expense spent in refinishing it would
