CHICAGO MAY’S CONFESSIONS

Hokitika Guardian, 14 November 1929, Page 7

CHICAGO MAY’S CONFESSIONS

CROWDED RECORD OF CRLME

(London paper.)

Alay Churchill, the famous reformed criminal known as “Chicago -May,” who died a Hew months ago left an autobiography. ~ Chicago May—-'Her Story ” is a frank, unashamed, crowded record of an astonishing career, of crime. hike most criminals she decided at length that “ crime does not pay.” ”My overhead charges were +oo great. The fences, lawyers, courts, hifbo takers, and leeches had got ninetenths of my gross profits. I had good times and hard times, but J had to work hard and suffer much for the good times, and the hard times came in sipte of me, like bad seasons -with ,the farmer.”

In the course of her life she was, in the jargon of the thieves’ kitchen, a ” badger, pay-off, note-layer, creep, panel, and blackmailer.” In other

words she decoyed men with more money than brains, doped them, robbed them of all they possessed, and exacted hush-money for years from victims who would pay >to the uttermost to avoid publicity. Blackmail is the most unsavoury of crimes, and Chicago May was an adept. “l ain never tempted to steal (she wrote) just been use I see an easy chance to do so. I used to steal because I wanted money and could not get work which would pay me enough to live on.

“ 1 never stole for the mere pleasure of stealing, 1 am not a kleptomaniac. There is no particular feeling of virtue on my part when T am not stealing.” ROBBED HER FATHER.

SI 10 was horn in Ireland, robbed her father of £OO when she was 14, and made her way to the United States. A year later she was married to a highly successful crook in Chicago. She ‘‘graduated,” as she expresses it, in New York, and her finishing school was London.

She is less interested in her . big crimes—the attempted murder of Eddie Guerin and the American Express Company robbery—than in the details of her petty pilferings and blackmailing exploits'. But she gives her version of the shooting of Guerin, one of her former criminal associates, who escaped from Devil’s Island.

According to her, she owed nothing to Guerin; being warned that he was mad with jealousy because he thought that she had deserted him, she and Charlie .Smith, who was accused with her, bought a pistol and were told that Guerin had also bought one. When the encounter came Smith knew that Guerin was armed, and fired, says Chicago May, in self-defence.