Editor’s note:
Sitting at a lunch counter recently I began thinking of Norman Rockwell and the idealized vision of America, especially small town life, presented in his work. Many of his best-known paintings from the 1950s have Stockbridge, Mass. — where he and his family settled in 1953 — as a backdrop and he often used his neighbors as models.
Growing up I was fascinated with Rockwell’s work, more for the nostalgic value than anything else, but I often wondered if life in a small New England town was as perfect as he pictured it.
I now work in the county where Stockbridge is located. As the Berkshire Eagle Newspaper’s crime reporter, my job is to write about the antithesis of Rockwell’s world. This is what my thoughts revolved around over a grilled cheese sandwich and a side of fries: has Stockbridge, historically i.e. 19th and early 20th centuries, had any big time crimes that shocked the nation? A quick perusal around the Internet seems to indicate that answer to be “not really.”
But I did come across an 1890s burglary spree that had the town’s citizens so frightened they upped the budget for crime fighting, the richer townsfolk began hiring private security and everyone became rather suspicious of strangers who happened to be passing through.
And so I present here “The Case of the Gentleman Burglar”
Charles Southmayd was awakened from a sound sleep with shouts of “the house is on fire!” Running to his bedroom door, he threw it open and there before him stood a man wearing a black mask around the lower part of his face and towels wrapped around his shoes to muffle his footfalls.
The 70-year-old put up a pretty good fight but the burglar, younger and stronger, threw the old lawyer to the ground, ransacked the bedroom and made off with $200 cash, about $4,800 in today’s terms, and quickly made his escape.
While the burglar didn’t behave very gentlemanly in that crime, in others in the fall of 1892 and summer of 1893, his soothing voice and civility shown through when several female homeowners were confronted by the six-foot-tall masked man. They reported that his voice and manners put them at ease as the stranger pointed his gun at them and went through their rooms looking for loot.
Most of the New York society women on vacation at Stockbridge whom the robber targeted demurred to his requests, this was the Victorian era after all, but Laura Field, the daughter-in-law of the eminent law reformer David Dudley Field, put up one hell of a struggle to try and keep a watch worth close to $30,000 (in today’s terms).
It was the robber’s second housebreak on that June 1893 night. He slipped unseen into the Field’s Laurel Cottage on Main Street and made his way through the home and into Laura’s bedroom. She awoke with a start, a hand over her mouth, hot breath on her face. The robber was on his knees groping around the bed looking for any hidden loot. When his hand found her watch she had hidden under her pillow any fear Laura had was replaced by anger.
“You shan’t have my watch,” she screeched, throwing her arms around his neck.
“Be quiet,” he told her, putting the barrel of his gun against her forehead, “or I shall shoot you.”
He straightened up to his full height, but Laura held on, clinging to him, her feet no longer touching the ground.
He argued with her, pleaded, told her she would be hurt, but she continued to fight him. The fracas awoke a valet who ran into the hall where the robber was trying to make his escape, Laura still hanging from his neck.
“Shoot,” she shouted. “Don’t mind me! Shoot!”
The valet stood paralyzed, pistol in hand, before turning around and heading back into his room, mumbling something about getting his robe. The robber finally heaved Laura off, throwing her into a wall, and made his escape out the back door. The valet, now wearing his robe, rushed down the stairs and wildly fired a bullet through the front door.
It wasn’t until seven months later that the man police believed was responsible for the crimes was captured in Long Island City, Queens. Michael Sherlock and his gang were responsible for a number of break-ins in Long Island, mostly preying on the same caliber of very wealthy victims as those in Massachusetts. Around this same time, another gang was picked up in Connecticut, and there was some talk that perhaps that gang’s leader, Thomas Kinsella Jr., a Stockbridge native who served time for accidentally shooting and killing his mother-in-law in 1887, was the “real” gentleman burglar.
While police were able to link recovered items, including Laura Field’s watch — described as small, of Swiss make, with a blue enamel case encrusted with diamonds — to Sherlock, it was believed Kinsella was the leader of the gang terrorizing Stockbridge of which Sherlock was a member at that time. Either way, Sherlock was given the infamous appellation, but both men went to prison. Kinsella did time in Connecticut for a series of Bridgeport break-ins, Sherlock went down for the Stockbridge crimes.
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