Why crime does not pay

by Sophie Lyons

I was the first to arrive. I went to the leading hotel, announced my plan to add a patent medicine laboratory to the town's industries and began to look around for a suitable location for my enterprise. As I believe I mentioned in a previous chapter, this ruse of the patent medicine laboratory was one I had borrowed from my friend, Harry Raymond—he had used it to splendid advantage in his robbery of the Boylston Bank in Boston.

Of course, it was a part of my prearranged plan with the banker that the quarters I should finally find best suited for my purpose would be a room on the second floor of the bank building, directly over the vault we were going to rob.

I made several visits to the bank before I completed my arrangements with the president—partly to carry out my rôle of the cautious business woman and partly to study the construction of the vault and see where we could best bore our way into it.

By the time the lease was signed the three men who were to be associated with me in the new business arrived. With their help I secured a quantity of bottles, labels, jars of chemicals, chairs, desks, tables, and other things we would need if we were really making patent medicine.

Among the articles of furniture we moved in was an unusually large oak wardrobe. We removed the bottom from this and placed it over the exact spot in the floor where we planned to dig our opening into the bank vault.

Then, while one of the men and I ostentatiously pasted labels on endless bottles of "Golden Bitters," the other two men crawled into the wardrobe where no chance visitor could see them and day after day continued the work of removing the layers of brick and timber which separated us from the vault. We stored the débris as it accumulated in bags and carried it away every night.

It was a long job and a hard one. The floor timbers were seasoned oak and beneath them were two layers of brick.

In the cramped space inside the wardrobe it was hard to work to the best advantage and, besides, the men never knew just how far they had progressed and were in constant fear that an extra vigorous blow would loosen a big strip of plaster in the ceiling of the bank.

To our disgust we found, after we had passed through the floor itself, that the vault had a sort of false roof composed of short lengths of railroad iron placed irregularly in a setting of mortar and brick. This made our task three days longer than we had expected.