The Scrubwoman and the Con Man
A Seattle police investigation into a mail-fraud scheme uncovers a hidden stash of stolen goods, implicating a woman who used her job as a cleaner to pilfer from city buildings.
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.
SEATTLE, Feb. 26.—Margaret McClellan, alias Mrs. Frank Boland, alias Mrs. Edward Stubley, wife or companion of Edward Stubley, the Englishman now held by United States post office inspectors on a charge of using the mails to defraud, has been arrested as his accomplice. In the woman’s room, loot worth hundreds of dollars was recovered. With her arrest, two thefts that have for more than a year puzzled the police were cleared up. In the woman’s trunk, jewelry missed from the Pacific block and the Peoples Savings Bank building was found. The Stubley woman admitted to police she had taken the items while employed as a scrub woman. Detectives claim that Stubley, whose record reaches from Portland to British Columbia, has thousands of dollars on deposit in Seattle banks under various aliases, including Frank Boland. The woman declares she is from Lawrence, Massachusetts, and a niece of General George B. McClellan.
“The Stubley woman admitted to the police that she had taken the articles from rooms in the buildings while she was employed as a scrub woman.”
This story highlights the precarious nature of domestic labor in the early 20th century, where workers had access to offices but were often treated as invisible. It’s a classic urban crime report from an era where police relied heavily on 'room searches' and aliases to track transient populations in growing Pacific Northwest cities.
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