Making such a nuisance of herself in the penitentiary as no longer to be tolerated in a refined convict community, she proves her madness. In the locked, barred, asylum she proves her cunning at escape. And, once more at liberty, the abandon with which she goes after personal property in any form, at any time and under any circumstances, proves her skill as a thief and her unbalance in the "get away."
There is her escape from the asylum at Elgin on the night of December 25, 1904. Christmas eve she had fainted in the arms of an attendant and in the scurrying which followed had secured the keys to the gates. On the night of Christmas she went out of the Elgin asylum, boarded an electric car for Aurora and bought a railroad ticket to Peoria.
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.
Kept at South Bartonville Without Locks.
Dr. George A. Zeller, superintendent of the asylum for the incurable insane at South Bartonville, having fought for the care of Bertha in his institution, purposes to make her a tractable patient and willing to remain. He has the history of his institution back of him, from whose doors and windows he has torn away $6,000 worth of steel netting and steel bars.
In the first place, "Fainting Bertha" will have nothing to gain by fainting at Bartonville; she is promised merely a drowning dash of cold water when she falls. She can secure no keys by fainting, for the reason that there are no keys to doors. A nurse, wideawake for her eight-hour nursing duty, is always at hand and always watchful.