ADVENTURES OF AMY BOCK.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3177, 30 April 1909, Page 5

ADVENTURES OF AMY BOCK.

Showing her cleverness. Mr Maurice O'Connor, licensee of the Waverley Hotel, Auckland, and late Chief Detective, at Christchurch, once had the now famous Amy Bock in his hands. It wag just after this clever woman's arrival from Melbourne in 1884, that Mr O'Connor arrested tier on a charge of false pretences. She was then young and pretty, so slight in build as to be almost tiny. "I don't know how she would pass muster in male attire," said the late chief detective, "but she must certainly have filled out considerably since then, as she was the last person in the world that you would expect to be able to pas 3 as a man if you knew her." As the incident in which Mr O'Connor was interested happened nearly 25 years a;?j, the details have passed out of his memory. On that occasion, as on the many subsequent occasions, that she fell into the hands of the police, she gave no trouble, and pleaded guilty, without making the least fuss it. Asked what could 'have been the reason of the notorious woman's latest outbreak in going through the form of marriage with another woman, Mr O'Connor said that the only explanation is that the woman is mad on this particular phase of crime. Most criminals, he said, follow one particular line, and Amy Bock has always figured under false pretences. When hardened to it, criminals actually take a delight in their own cleverness, and in the woman Bock's case she was no doubt revelling in her own ability of deception. "She is evidently mad on that point," the ex-chief detective added, "and was seeing how far she could carry on under false pretences."