CRIME: Her Favorite Charity

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In the Roseville Methodist Church in Newark, N.J. Mrs. Amelia Carr was a constant ray of sunshine. Almost daily her liveried chauffeur took her to visit the sick in the parish. She was a generous contributor to charity. When her 71-year-old husband took ill, she prayed at his bedside, devotedly nursed him back to health.

William Wachenfeld, the county prosecutor, was naturally incredulous when a neighbor came to him with a complaint against 66-year-old Mrs. Carr. The neighbor accused Mrs. Carr of swindling her out of $4,700. A skeptical detective went out to investigate.

The evidence he turned up made him less skeptical. Mrs. Carr was held while her fingerprints were sent to FBI headquarters in Washington. FBI reported that pious Mrs. Carr had a record dating back to 1891. She had done time in at least three prisons for big & little swindles. Shortly before she had married unsuspecting Mr. Carr, five years ago, she had been released from Washington State's Walla Walla. Six States were still looking for her. Some of her aliases: Mildred Marie Boniface, Mildred Sidebottom, Mabel Heavens.

According to the prosecutor's office, she had taken some $100,000 from neighbors and acquaintances by persuading them that she needed temporary loans to develop sure-thing properties, so lush with oil that the fruit on plum trees turned yellow. Among contributors to Mrs. Carr's favorite charity: a beautician, a druggist, a jeweler. She had never filed any income-tax returns, she said, because "I never gave it a thought."

Investigation turned up another corner of her shoddy past. She had been married several times before, had never bothered about divorces.*

Wept elderly, respectable Mr. Carr: "She has been a queen to me. . . . No woman who has shown so much goodness and loyalty could do what they say."

Mrs. Carr decided this week to throw herself on the mercy of the court, instead of standing trial. Said she: "I don't want . . . those women at the church ... to come . . . and look down their noses at me."

Mrs. Carr had faced her accusers calmly, had parried questions in a hurt, gentle voice—until she was told that one victim of her alleged flimflamming had informed on her. Then came the giveaway. From her lips exploded strange, unladylike, un-churchly words of the underworld: "Oh, a canary, eh?"