The Ghost of the Street: Seattle’s Most Prolific Teenage Con Artist
Before the age of identity theft, a nameless youth wandered the streets of 1892 Seattle, forging heartbreaking letters of loss to bilk the city's compassionate elite.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Charitable people would do well to beware of a young man, hardly more than a boy, who is working the sympathy dodge with success. Besides being a skillful and versatile liar and bunko man, he has all the earmarks of a dangerous criminal. The young man's name is not known. One of his many aliases is Steven A. Lafferty, and another is Fred Stevens. He appears to be about 18 years old. His most marked peculiarity is a hesitation in speech, which at times becomes painful. When asked leading questions about his past life he stammers and stutters. He writes a beautiful business college hand and can change his style of penmanship with great facility. Therein lies his power for evil. The young swindler first appeared at police headquarters about a week ago. He gave Chief Rogers a letter of introduction from some person unknown, stating that his father and mother had died in San Francisco and that he was destitute. The chief was asked to assist him. He was locked up, but upon release, he appeared at Grace Hospital with a forged letter from a supposed machinist named John E. Stearns, claiming he had come from Chicago to find a brother who had drowned. Superintendent Tremaine took the lad in, only for the boy to disappear the next day. Last evening, he called at the Post-Intelligencer editorial rooms with another letter, signed by a ‘John Mevess,’ spinning a tale of parents dead of typhoid and stolen trunks. When offered a dollar by an editor, the boy said with a smile of innocence: 'Oh, sir, I did not ask for charity.' ‘You may work for it tomorrow,’ urged the editor. ‘Then I will take it, kind sir,’ said the youth. He took the coin and slid out of the room. He will not apply for work today. The newspaper man was only one of fifty or more suckers caught on the same day.
“The young swindler writes the pitiful letters himself and reaps a rich harvest. His turn for doing work is a dangerous trait.”
This story captures a perennial Seattle struggle: the tension between a civic culture of neighborly empathy and the vulnerability of that charity to exploitation. In an era before centralized social safety nets, this ‘sympathy dodge’ was a regular feature of city life, much like today’s complex debates over how to best distinguish between those in genuine need and those gaming the system.
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