Hitler's Forged Diaries

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of her mother Mrs. Cora DeBoyer, a strong-willed woman who had been married at least five times. Sedgwick employed the Rev. William E. Barton, 67, a Boston minister who had written books about Lincoln, to study the letters.

A scholar of sorts, Barton found the letters too pat to be credible. But when he met Minor in Los Angeles, his doubts were undermined by her charm. Lonely after the death of his wife, Barton, while on his train journey home, wrote a warm letter inviting her to visit him in Foxboro, Mass., and to "come and sleep under my pines and see my Lincoln material and swim in my little lake." He added: "Tell your mother I made love to you and hope to do it again."

Experts who had never met the winsome lady read the correspondence and found it compelling. "These new letters," said Poet Carl Sandburg, perhaps Lincoln's most famous biographer, "seem entirely authentic— and preciously and wonderfully coordinate and chime with all else known of Lincoln." Muckraking Journalist Ida M. Tarbell, who had also written a Lincoln biography, wrote to Sedgwick: "You have an amazing set of true Lincoln documents—the most extraordinary that have come to us in many, many years." After publication of the Atlantic's first installment, however, a storm of criticism erupted. "You are putting over one of the crudest forgeries I have known," protested Worthington Chauncey Ford, 72, editor of the Massachusetts Historical Society, in a letter to Sedgwick. Even Barton sadly wrote to Minor, "I have come to the conviction that the letters which you are sending to the Atlantic are not genuine. And, my dear, I am afraid you know it."

The conspiracy crumbled under the scrutiny of experts. One noted that Lincoln signed his alleged letters to Rutledge "Abe," when he was known to have abhorred the nickname. Others pointed out that Lincoln, once a land surveyor, had cited "Section 40" in a letter supposedly written at a time when such sections were not numbered higher than 36. Lincoln referred to "Kansas" at a time when the region was commonly called "Indian country."

Private detectives hired by the magazine helped unmask Mrs. DeBoyer as the mastermind of the forgery and her daughter as the willing purveyor of the deceitful goods. Minor signed a statement that was not quite a confession, but near enough to close the case. Her mother had composed the letters, she admitted, but had received the messages from the spirits of Lincoln and Rutledge while in a trance. Claimed Minor: "The spirits of Ann and Abe were speaking through my mother to me, so that my gifts as a writer combined with her gifts as a medium could hand in something worthwhile to the world." Neither mother nor daughter was prosecuted.

By coincidence, the century's second great publishing forgery was concocted by another mother-daughter team. In 1957 Rosa Panvini, then 75, and her daughter Amalia, 43, both of whom lived in Vercelli, in northern Italy, offered diaries they said had been written by Benito Mussolini to the Rome office of LIFE magazine and to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The daughter contended that one of Mussolini's ministers had handed her father a package one day with the admonition, "For the love of God, Panvini, hide them in a safe