TWELVE “WIVES”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 October 1940, Page 2

TWELVE “WIVES”

WOMAN BIGAMIST CONFESSES. RICH GIRLS TRICKED. “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 Marjorie 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 NewYork 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 21 years of age, and recently given £200,000 as a coming-of-age present by her dad.

O’Leary, 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 who 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 Lewis, 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 parking his car to the public danger. At the police station he was given a searching crossexamination, and finally admitted to the detectives that he was John Wilson alias Reg. O’Leary alias Frederick Johnson. What’s more, he asked for nine other cases 8f “marriage” to be taken into consideration. He had motored around to various towns making marriage a business, and a dozen marriages in 18 months was a pretty good average. Then came 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 gaol for her “weddings that weren’t.”