Stole $1,000 Worth of Goods in Two Days.
On the way to Peoria she relieved the conductor of $30 in bills, secreting them in her hat. In Peoria, within forty-eight hours, she had stolen a thousand dollars' worth of goods from stores, registered at three hotels under assumed names, and was in a chair car with a ticket for Omaha when the Peoria police had followed her easy tracks through the city. Perhaps the broadest, most easily identified track was that which she left in a barber shop in the National Hotel, where she appeared for an egg shampoo. Two eggs had been broken into her shiny hair when Bertha promptly fainted and rolled out of the chair. As a count of shop equipment showed nothing missing an hour later, the barber shop proprietor was at a loss as to the purpose of the faint.
This girlish young woman, with the baby dimples and skin of peach and cream, the innocent blue eyes, and the smiles that play so easily over her face as she talks vivaciously and with keen sense of both wit and humor, is a study for the psychologist. There is no affectedness of speech—for the moment it is childishly genuine. She could sit in a drawing room and have half a dozen admirers in her train.
But reform schools, asylums and penitentiaries are institutions through which this young woman has graduated up to that pinnacle of notorious accomplishment which today is centering upon "Fainting Bertha" Lebecke the official attentions of a great state. What to do with her is the question.