About a year ago, I was working on what is basically my currently-defunct podcast, doing research in Trinity County. I was pointed to the above individual, and notified that, despite the frequent overviews about her life, no one had done a book. So OI decided to do so.

Today, it is published. But it comes on the heels of life events that stole my breath for a while. Challenged my faith to the near edge. The events are still present, but my faith remains.

Let me give you a brief overview of what has been a very fatiguing journey—not because the subject matter is laborious but because its impossible to imagine that one person could do as much malfeasance as she did. Here’s an insultingly-brief synopsis of this person.

She moves to California from New York, and meets a Weaverville miner 26 years older than her.

She feigns a pregnancy, goes to new York, meets a adoption broker, who helps her fake a birth episode in a hotel room, acquiring a birth certificate.

Comes back to Weaverville and presents her husband with his heir.

Husband becomes ill, suspiciously dies. She gets a $10,000 insurance payout, and his estate. The community knows something bad happened but couldn’t prove it.

Her husband’s brother, a wealthy Weaverville mine owner, living in San Francisco, gets sick under the exact same circumstances and dies. When his wife goes to probate, this woman shows up to court with an alternate will, granting 1/3 of his high-value estate to his “nephew”

The original Will goes missing for a while as well.

It goes to court, and a lot of uncomfortable testimony takes place. Ultimately, handwriting experts proclaim her version of the will to be a fraud, and she loses. In the middile of this, her husband’s body is exhumed and examined for Arsenic. None is found from the desiccated tissue left after a year.

She takes her loss, and writes a play about her life, and attempts to forge an acting career. She winds up in New York, auditioning for Lady MacBeth, and is panned as too old and talentless.

Newspapers trash her acting ability in other places and other work.

She burns down a couple of her own properties for insurance money, and the company refuses to pay. She goes to court and loses. She shows up at the insurance company’s President’s house, and pulls a gun on him.

In 1907, a bomb goes off at the house of the Judge presiding over her insurance cases.

In Weaverville she burnt down her own house and poisoned the neighbor’s dog to prevent barking that might save the house from an insurance claim.

Meanwhile, her “son” is growing up and being subjected to abuse and being forced to commit crimes, including poisoning the sugar at the general store. Plotting to bomb the local judge, postmaster, and even poison the district attorney. She even forced her son into a plan drop cyanide into a the water source to kill all of Weaverville. It failed on logistical grounds.

In 1908, a barn burns down, and her son is arrested. It’s clear that he committed the crime, but as he was separated from his mother, he begins to confess that he did it under duress. She is arrested at the Lorenz Hotel for Arson, and booked into Trinity County jail on a felony—the first woman to wear that distinction.

Her son, now 16, confesses to the bombing in Alameda county and she is transferred to Oakland for Attempted murder. 

I’ll leave the ending for you. The book is currently available from the publisher Here.