TWELVE "WIVES

Taranaki Daily News, 24 September 1940, Page 3

TWELVE "WIVES

WOMAN TRICKS GIRLS "Don't they make a handsome couple?" murmured several people as John Wilson and his bride, Marjorie Mason, left the small church in New Jersey. The bridegroom had not been courting his bride for more than six weeks. It had been a case of love at first sight-and the fact that Majorie had recently been left a fortune of £15,000 may have had something to do with it. Anyway, soon after their wedding the bridegroom began to bet heavily, spending his wife's money in large sums; then, when she was nearly penniless, he disappeared, writes a New York correspondent of a London paper. About two months later, Reg. O Leary, a young Irishman, was wed to Doris Hare, at New Orleans. The bride was the pretty daughter of a manufacturing chemist, just twenty-one years of age, and recently given £200,000 as a coming-of-age present by her dad.

Poliee on Trail. O'Learly, like John Wilson, hadn't known his bride long. and, strangely enough, he followed Wilson's example by running away when he had spent a large part of his wife's fortune. A noted police official wh.o happened to remember the Wilson case checked it with O'Leary, and decided there and then that there was some connection. Now the thing to do was to try to track down this handsome lover who believed in the old adage of "love 'em and leave 'em!" All the weddings in the State were carefully watched. One day he noticed that Maria I.ewis, the daughter of old William Lewis, wealthy publisher and printer, was to marry Frederick Johnson. There had been many suitors for Maria's hand, but this Frederick had arrived on the scene a week or so before. Now he had beaten his rivals and was going to marry Maria. To the police official it looked as though his man was at work again, so just as the bridegroom was about to enter the church, two hefty men tapped him on the shoulder. "Just a minute," they said. "We want a word with you!" He was arrested for parkin g his car to Ihe public danger. At the police station he was given a searching crossexamination, and finally admitted to the detcctives that he was John Wilson, alias Reg O Leary, alias Frederick Johnson. What's more, he asked for nine other cases of "marriage" to be takcn into consideration. He had motored around to various towns making marriage a business, and a dozen marriagcs in c'ighteen months was a pretty gooel average. Then canie the biggest shock of a whole series of front page stories. The man who could twist women around his little finger was not a man, but a woman ! Helen Clare decided on this desperate measure when out of work, but she had to spend three years ^ in jail for her "weddings that weren't."