Crime-of-the-Week

In Manhattan's Surrogate Court last week were held the last five hearings on the claim of Thomas Patrick Morris, 52, infirm Scottish housepainter of Brooklyn, to the $30,000,000 fortune of the late, eccentric Ella von Echtzel Wendel. Miss Wendel, last of her line, kept a succession of poodles named Tobey in a fabulously valuable side yard adjoining her lower Fifth Avenue home. She died last year leaving all her money to charity. Claimant Morris, one of some 1,800 less enterprising aspirants to the fortune, maintained that:

Miss Wendel's dead brother John Gottlieb Wendel married one Mary Ellen Devine in New York City in 1876, that he was the offspring of the union, brought up by some Morrises in Dundee, Scotland.

That in 1901, at Dundee, John Wendel gave him a book. The Blockade of Phalsburg, on a flyleaf of which was a will making him, Morris, sole heir to John Wendel's estate.

That he met and talked with his alleged father in Manhattan's City Hall Park in 1906.

That in 1908 he and his "papa" visited the Wendel mansion on St. Patrick's Day, whereupon he was asked to leave the house.

That in 1909 John Gottlieb Wendel visited him in the West aboard the Wendel private car, Buffington.

From Scotland and the U. S. came "evidence" and many witnesses in Claimant Morris's behalf. A nurse and a taxicab executive testified that the late John Wendel, supposedly a bachelor, had confessed to them his secret marriage and the existence of a son. Piece de resistance of the Morris claim was a bust of John Wendel executed in bronze by one Julian Bowes. Sculptor Bowes said that the science of dynamic symmetry had enabled him to reconstruct a perfect three-dimensional likeness of his subject from two old photographs. To the vast amusement of the audience and embarrassment of the Court, it was demonstrated that the bust's spectacles, mustache and derby were Removable. Attorneys for Claimant Morris saw a striking likeness between their client and the Wendel image (see cut).

Then John Marshall Harlan, shrewd young attorney for the Wendel estate, went to work on the Morris claim. He tore it to shreds. Publishers of the Bible from which the "1876" marriage license blank was torn testified that it could not have been procured earlier than 1913. Handwriting experts showed the flyleaf will to be a bungling fraud. Contemporary evidence proved that Mr. Wendel was not in Dundee in 1901 or in Manhattan in 1906. On St. Patrick's Day, 1908, Claimant Morris was working in an Arizona copper mine. In 1909, said Pullman Co., the Buffington had not been built.

Bang! went Surrogate James A. Foley's gavel. He indignantly dismissed the Morris claim as "false and a forgery." Promptly the District Attorney had Claimant Morris jailed in default of $10,000 bail as a material witness for the Grand Jury. Claimant Morris, no intellectual giant, seemed dazed at this upshot, mumbled: "Now I don't know whether I'm John's son or not. But I wouldn't go through those court hearings again if I was positive." His public, doubting him shrewd enough to have concocted his case, waited to see what manner of rascal the District Attorney would show up as author of a plot for $30,000,000.

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