Wow, I did not intend to take a month off between sordid tales. The third part of the trilogy will come more quickly! So to recap, William Voegtlin avoided his bigamy charges and went on painting sets for another 7 years until his death. His oldest son Emil, however, was convicted of crimes severe enough to land him in NYC police inspector Thomas F. Byrnes’s guide titled Professional Criminals of America. As we can read in the picture below, Emil was a hotel and boarding house thief.
Emil Voegtlin mug shot from page 111 of Thomas F. Byrnes, Professional Criminals of America (New York, Cassell & Company, 1886), http://archive.org/details/cu31924096989177.
Like all the other rogues in this rogues’ gallery (a phrase Thomas F. Byrnes reportedly popularized), Emil has a biographical entry in this book. He is number 47 of the 204 listed criminals, each of whom has a photo, physical description, and criminal record listed therein. His first name spelled with a final e, Emil’s appearance is sketched with brief phrases:
“Twenty-six years old in 1886. Born in United States. Single. Scenic artist by trade. Medium build. Height, 5 feet 10-1/2 inches. Weight, 155 pounds. Brown hair, hazel eyes, dark complexion. Wears black mustache and side-whiskers. Has a very genteel appearance.”
That seeming gentility gets reinforced in the first line of his record, which calls him “the son of very respectable people.” Like his father who skipped town after his trial, leaving a bunch of bills behind, I get the sense that Emil had expensive taste that his scene painting salary could not quite support.
NYC detectives first arrested Emil in April of 1882. The Voegtlin family had been living in a boarding house on Fifth Avenue just north of Washington Square Park. Over a six-month period, residents reported thefts of jewelry and other valuables, including “a long gold watch chain, a ladies chain, a diamond and ruby pin, an onyx pin, a diamond ring” and more recently $1500 in government bonds. The landlady spotted Emil leaving another boarder’s room with that man’s coat over his arm. She summoned the detectives; Emil confessed, and they found a stolen scarf-pin in his trunk.
According to Byrnes, when Emil Voegtlin was arraigned he received a suspended sentence due to the respectability of his family, his admission of guilt, and his promise to reform. And the rest of the stolen goods? The first account, published in the New York Times on April 23, reads “Young Voegtlin said that he had squandered the proceeds of his theft in dissipation.” The second, published the following day, ends this way: “He declined to give the officers any information in regard to the manner in which he had disposed of the missing jewelry, and it is believed that he made presents of the articles to women with whom he was associated.” I had initially assumed these accounts conflicted, but I supposed that giving your stolen jewels to women with whom you are associated is one way of squandering them in dissipation.
This seems like Emil’s m.o. When he stole jewelry from another person’s room in another boarding house later that year, he gave a locket to his fiancee who was either named Hattie or Nellie Haight. Miss Haight, a sales clerk at Macy’s and the daughter of a primary school janitor, signed the deposition against her fiance. At the trial, he said goodbye to Miss Haight in a manner more befitting an actor than a scene painter: “he pressed her hand, struck his forehead, and waved a theatrical adieu which was so stagey that the spectators laughed and Miss Haight looked embarrassed.” Emil ended up serving his sentence at Sing Sing, and it doesn’t seem like the rest of his short life was a happy one. But I want to end on this moment of at minor comedy, thinking about the sad-eyed guy from the picture who maintained his genteel appearance to the end, even if it was gentility learned from plays.