Cassie Chadwick was born Elizabeth Bigley on October 10, 1857, in Eastwood, Ontario. Her family owned a small farm and her father worked for the Grand Trunk Railway, so her childhood was comfortable enough, but from an early age she told lies and dreamed of a more lavish life. At fourteen, she moved to Woodstock and committed her first fraud, opening a bank account with a forged letter claiming an English uncle had left her an inheritance. The bank issued her checks based on that false claim, and within weeks she was caught.
Because of her youth and a claim of insanity, no trial took place and she was released. In 1875 she returned home, then followed her sister Alice to Ohio, hoping for a better life. Settling in Cleveland, she hid her identity under the alias Madame Lydia DeVere, claimed to be a widow, and took out a bank loan using her sister’s furniture as collateral to set up business as a clairvoyant. Around 1879 she pulled off another profitable scam, replicating a calling card used by the upper classes that read Miss Bigley, heiress to $15,000.
Because shop practices at the time were lax, she would enter a store, choose an expensive item, write a check for more than the price, and receive the difference in cash. If questioned, she simply showed the card. It worked every time. On November 21, 1882, she married Dr.
Wallace Springsteen in Cleveland and became Lydia Springsteen. The marriage collapsed within two weeks when a local newspaper, The Plain Dealer, published a photograph of the wedding. People she had defrauded, along with her own sister Alice, came to Springsteen’s door and told him about her past. He threw her out and filed for divorce, which was granted by early 1883, though he was forced to pay off her debts.
Left without financial support, she returned to work as a clairvoyant under a new name, Madame Marie de la Rose, to escape her bad reputation as Lydia DeVere. She met and married a farmer from Trumbull County named John Scott, but before the wedding she convinced him to sign a prenuptial agreement that protected her assets in the event of divorce. After four years on the farm, she tired of the life. She went to a lawyer in Youngstown, claimed Scott had been unfaithful, and filed for divorce on grounds of adultery.
Whether it was granted is unknown, but she left his home. The next record of her is in 1899, when she was tried for forgery, found guilty, and sentenced to nine and a half years in prison. She was released on parole after four years for good behavior. In 1893, she returned to Cleveland, changed her name again to Mrs.
Cassie Hoover, and used her savings to open a brothel on the city’s west side. It was there that she met her third husband, Leroy Chadwick, a wealthy doctor whose wife had died a few years earlier. Cassie introduced herself as a widow running a respectable boardinghouse for women, but Chadwick knew it was a well-known brothel. Fearing any connection to the illegal business, she fainted at his words, then claimed she had nothing to do with the establishment and begged him to let her leave with him before anyone suspected her, saying her only job had been to teach the girls etiquette.
In 1897 she and Leroy married. Through him she finally achieved the lavish life she had always wanted, living on Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue, known as Millionaire’s Row. But her wealthy neighbors did not accept her, and she felt out of place at social events. Dreaming of more wealth, she planned one of the greatest scams in American history.
During a visit to New York City, she asked one of her husband’s acquaintances, a lawyer named Dylan, to take her to Andrew Carnegie’s home. She went inside and pretended she had been speaking to Carnegie himself, though in reality she had only spoken to the housekeeper. On returning, she produced a forged promissory note worth two million dollars bearing Carnegie’s signature. She told Dylan she was Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter, and that out of guilt her father had showered her with money.
She further claimed that in her Cleveland home she kept more promissory notes worth around seven million dollars, and that when her supposed father died she would inherit four hundred million dollars. Despite telling Dylan this in secrecy, the information spread across American financial markets, and banks began offering her loans. For over eight years she used her fake background to obtain loans totaling between ten and twenty million dollars. Bankers charged her extremely high interest rates, but they worked on the assumption that Carnegie would repay any debts if she defaulted, and that his inheritance would cover everything.
She believed her scheme was safe because no one would dare question whether she was really Carnegie’s daughter, out of fear of embarrassing America’s richest man. With the money she lived like a queen, buying a golden organ, diamond necklaces, and enough clothes to fill hundreds of closets. But it all came crashing down in November 1904, when Herbert B. Newton, a banker from Massachusetts, gave her a one hundred and ninety thousand dollar loan.
After learning that none of her loans had been repaid, he called in the loan and, when she did not pay, sued her. Eventually Carnegie himself was asked about Cassie and the promissory notes. He said he had no idea who she was and had not signed a promissory note in more than thirty years. Cassie fled to her apartment at the Hotel Breslin in New York, but within weeks she was arrested and taken back to Cleveland to stand trial.
Her husband Leroy filed for divorce and left on a trip to Europe with his daughter to avoid the scandal. The news had huge repercussions for Cleveland’s banking community. Some banks, such as the Citizens National Bank, were forced to shut down due to bankruptcy, and many more lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. At her trial, many of her neighbors from Millionaire’s Row came to watch, and even Andrew Carnegie attended, curious to see the woman who had convinced the nation’s bankers that she was his heir.
On March 10, 1905, she was sentenced to fourteen years in prison and fined seventy thousand dollars for conspiracy to bankrupt the Citizens National Bank and conspiracy against the government. On January 1, 1906, she was transported to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. She brought with her clothes, photographs, and furniture to make her stay more bearable, an unusual privilege permitted by the warden because of her celebrity status. After about a year and a half in prison, her health began to fail.
She wrote down her funeral arrangements and instructed her son to purchase a tombstone for the family plot. On September 17, 1907, she collapsed, possibly from a heart attack, and was left blind. A month later she began suffering from stomach and heart problems, and on October 10, 1907, at the age of fifty, Cassie Chadwick died.
She was buried in the Episcopal cemetery in Canada, today known as Woodstock Anglican Cemetery.