Thursday, January 18, 2018

On This Date in Minnesota History: January 18

January 18, 1913 – By piecing together fragments of a letter, detectives today frustrated a plot to blackmail the owners of a Minneapolis hotel. They arrested a woman, who said her name was Mrs. Clara Goodwin, and believe that in her arrest they have broken up a gang of blackmailers, which have been preying on hotel keepers of the West.

Mrs. Goodwin, confronted by the carefully pieced letter, confessed the scheme and is now held in jail on a minor charge of vagrancy while the police are seeking two men she named as members of the gang. They are also endeavoring to establish the identity of the woman.
The letter was taken from the woman after she had torn it into bits and was attempting to swallow the pieces. It was pasted together under a magnifying glass. Then the woman told police how she and other members of the gang expected to blackmail the owners of The Williston Hotel, 500 Tenth Ave. S. (across the street from what is now U. S. Bank Stadium).


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From her statements, the police gleaned the following:

Friday afternoon she went to police headquarters and told Chief Martinson that she had been sent to The Williston Hotel by an Omaha employment agency. She said she went to work at the hotel Tuesday night, was kidnapped an hour later, carried to a room on the first floor and imprisoned there until 3 a.m. Friday when she was rescued by one of the men sent to annoy her, who had taken pity on her.

She said she had been subjected to brutal and indecent attacks while a prisoner in the room, but had finally been liberated when one of her tormentors returned early Friday, broke open the windows to her room and carried her, sick and weak, to the La Mar Hotel, 719 Third St. S., where she regained her strength.

Today Detectives and Irving were sent to investigate the truth of the story. She persisted in the story before employees of the Williston Hotel. The detectives were suspicious and Broderick found a letter in her handbag. In an instant, she seized it, tore it in strips, stuffed it into her mouth and began to chew it. The detectives grabbed her by the throat and regained the torn fragments.

The letter was to a man in a North Dakota city, and told of the success of an attempt to blackmail a hotel keeper in Omaha.

She confessed to the detectives then that she had come to Minneapolis to play the same game on the owners of The Williston Hotel. She said that the story she had told Chief Martinson was untrue and that she had left the hotel after staying there a day to lay the foundation for the rest of the plot that was to have been carried out by her two male companions. She said that the plan was that when she had sworn out a warrant against the keepers of the hotel, her companions would make an offer to the keeper to have prosecution against him dropped if he would pay them a sum of money. Then they and the woman would leave the city.

She told the detectives they had worked the scheme successfully in Fargo, N. D.; Aberdeen, S. D.; Omaha and Fremont, Neb.; Helena, Mont. and in other northwestern cities, which she could not recall. She later denied the truth of her confession, then denied that she had denied the story.

She is about 24 years old, said she had been married, told the detectives that Goodwin was not her real name and defied them to learn her identity.

The Minneapolis Morning Tribune; “Torn Letter Spoils a Blackmail Attempt.  Police Seize Fragments From Woman and Patch Them for Evidence. Mrs. Clara Goodwin Then tells of Plot Against Hotelkeepers. Asserts Scheme Worked in a Number of Western Cities.”; Jan. 19, 1913; p. 7.

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