A Man With Twenty-three Wives.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 302, 26 September 1888, Page 3

A Man With Twenty-three Wives.

A good-lookixu man, about 42 years old, who said that his name was J. B. Aldrich has been arrested in Chicago on a charge of bigamy. He had been living at 6,238, Wentworth Avenue, where he was known as J. B. Wellington, and where he dwelt with a woman said to be his twenty-third wife. The police have been hunting for him for nearly a year. A Detroit detective, who has also been looking for him, informed the authorities that the man was wanted in Detroit, where he had one wife. In that city he was known as J. Aldrich Brown. Another wife is paid to be in Baltimore. The polygamist, in spite of his protestations that he wanted to be tried in Chicago, was taken to Detroit. He went without a requisition, but in a troubled state of mind. A man in Detroit, he said, was waiting to shoot him on sight ; and so worried was he that he threatened to commit suicide, provided he escaped the avenger and was convicted of bigamy in a court ot law. A list of women whom Brown is said to have wedded is as follows : Ida Kelly, Detroit, married in the fall of 1885 ; a Muskegon woman, name unknown, married in January 1886 ; Annie M. Hagel, of Pontiac, Mich., married January 20th, 1887; BsHe Durnell, of Anburn, Illinois, married in August, 1887 ; Mary Kiel, ot Marine City, married in October, 1887; Mrs Robinson, a Detroit widow, married in December, 1887 ; Anna Winters, of Detroit, married in March, 1888 ; Airs Kate Sautello, the last wife with whom Brown was living, when arrested. Moreover, Brown is charged •n ith having a wife before he married Miss Kelly. Chicago detectives who had been working on the case said that he had married no less than seventeen women in the State in the last three years. He lived with no one of his victims more than ten days. He came from Rochester, N.Y., where he had a legal wife and four children living. His victims were generally sewing girls in wealthy families; and hisobject seems to have been mainly to get possession of their little savings their valuables, and wearing apparel, which he would dispose of at the first convenient opportunity for whatever he could get, and then disappear with the proceeds of his dastardly theft.