Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

~~ ARTHUR ORTON ~~

He operated a butcher shop in that place for some years, but made a failure of business and “disappeared into the brush,” owing every one. Trace of his movements then grew vague, but it is known that he was suspected of complicity in several highway robberies, which were staged in New South Wales a few years afterward, and he was certainly charged with horse stealing on one occasion. Later he appeared in Wagga Wagga and opened a small butcher shop under the name of Thomas Castro, which he had adopted from the family in Chile.

In a confession which Orton wrote and sold to a London newspaper[7] years after his release from prison in 1884, he gives an account of the origin of the fraud. He says that some time before Cubitt, of the missing-friends bureau, found him and induced him to write to Lady Tichborne, he and his chum at Wagga Wagga, one Slade, had seen some of the advertisements which the distraught lady was having published in antipodean newspapers. Orton soon adopted the pose of superior station, told Slade that he was, in fact, a nobleman incognito, and finally let his friends understand that he was Roger Tichborne. The whole thing had been begun in a spirit of innocent acting, for the purpose of noting the effect of such a revelation upon his friend. In view of what followed we cannot escape the conclusion that the swinishly fat butcher undertook this adventure because he was mentally disturbed, in the sense of being a pathological liar. A talent for impersonation and imposture is one of the marked characteristics displayed by this common type of mental defective, and Orton certainly possessed it, almost to the point of genius.

[7] The People, 1898.

Whatever the explanation of Orton’s original motive, the fact remains that his friend Slade was impressed by the butcher’s tale and thus encouraged Orton to proceed with the fraud, as did a lawyer to whom Orton-Castro was in debt. He soon went swaggering about, trying to talk like a gentleman and giving what must have been a most painful imitation of the manners of a lord. His rude neighbors can have had no better discrimination in such matters than the British public and Lady Tichborne herself, so it was not a difficult feat to play upon local credulity.

In the last month of 1865, when Cubitt sent an agent to Wagga Wagga, as a result of his correspondence with Lady Tichborne, the legend of Orton’s identity as Roger Tichborne was already firmly established in the minds of his townspeople, and the rumor thus gained its initial confirmation. The reader is asked to remember that Orton was known as Castro, and that his identification as Orton was a difficult feat, which remained unperformed until the final trial, more than eight years later.

Lady Tichborne herself supplied Castro and his backers in Australia with their first vital information. In seeking to identify her son she quite guilelessly wrote to Cubitt and others many details of her son’s appearance, history, education, and peculiarities. She also mentioned a number of intimate happenings. All these were seized upon by the butcher and used in framing his letters to the dowager. In spite of this fact, he made the many stupid blunders already referred to. Lady Tichborne saw the discrepancies, as has been remarked, but her monomania urged her to credence, and she sent the ex-servants, Bogle and Grillefoyle to investigate. How Orton-Castro managed to win them over is not easy to determine. For a time it was suspected that perhaps these men had been corrupted by those interested in having the claimant recognized; but the facts seem to discountenance any such belief. One of the outstanding characteristics of Orton was his ability to make friends and gain their confidence, of which fact there can be no more eloquent testimony than the long list of witnesses who appeared for him at his trials. The man who was able to persuade a mother, a sharp-witted solicitor, half a dozen higher army officers, six magistrates, and numberless soldiers and tenants who had known Roger Tichborne well, to accept and support him in his preposterous claim, did not need money to befool an old gardener and a negro valet.

Indeed, it was this personal gift, backed by the man’s abnormal histrionic bent and capacity for mimicry, that carried him so far and won him the support of so many individuals and almost the solid public. How far he was able to carry things has been suggested, but the details are so remarkable as to demand recounting.

Orton had almost no schooling. He quite naturally misspelled the commonest words and was normally guilty of the most appalling grammatical and rhetorical solecisms. He knew not a word of French, Latin, or of any other language, save a smattering of Spanish, picked up from the Castros while at Melipillo. He had never associated with any one who remotely approached the position of a gentleman, and the best imitation he can have contrived, must have been patterned after performances witnessed on the stages of cheap variety houses. Moreover he knew absolutely nothing about the Tichbornes, not even the fact that they were Catholics. He did not know where their estates were, nor where Roger had gone to school; yet he carried his imposture within an inch of success. Indeed, it was the opinion of disinterested observers at the trial of his civil action that he must have won the case had he stayed off the stand himself.

The feat of substitution this man almost succeeded in accomplishing was palpably an enormous one. He went to England, familiarized himself with the places Roger Tichborne had visited, studied French without managing to learn it, practiced the handwriting of the young Tichborne heir till it deceived even the experts, and likewise learned, in spite of his own lack of schooling, to imitate the English of Tichborne, and to misspell just those words on which the original Roger was weak. He crammed his memory with incidents and details picked up at every hand. He learned to talk almost like a gentleman. He worked with his voice until he got out of it most of the earthy harshness that belonged to it by nature. He cultivated good manners, courtly behavior, gentle ways, and a certain charming deference which went far toward convincing those who took him seriously and gave him their support. In short, he was able to perform an absolute prodigy of adaptiveness, but he could not, with all his talent, quite project himself into the personality and mentality of another and very different man. That, perhaps, is a simulation beyond human capacity.