Tag: Chicago true crime

Queen of the Con: Buda Godman Marries Tell Taylor

Safely ensconced at convent school in Adrian, Michigan, Buda Godman was midway through her time at St. Joseph’s Academy when a group of travelling players came through town.  It was Christmas Eve and the students were allowed to give a late supper.  One of the invited guests was Mr. Tell Taylor, a young actor and aspiring songwriter from Findlay, Ohio.  He sat across the table from Buda Godman and the pair seemed to hit it off.  However, when the dinner ended, the two parted ways without any intention of continuing the friendship through future meetings or correspondence.

A few years later, a nineteen-year-old Buda Godman was out of school and back in Chicago where her family resided.  One evening in 1907, Buda attended a performance of The Girl Question, a hit musical that enjoyed a run of over a hundred performances at the Lasalle Theater.  There she recognized the man playing the part of Harold Sears as the same actor she’d met a few years earlier.  After the performance, she sent him a note and “their acquaintance was renewed.”  Buda Godman and Tell Taylor proceeded to embark on a whirlwind courtship.  “Several times during the course of the week the young couple were out together, lunching and driving, and Monday evening after dinner together at a downtown hotel Judge Arms was called to the parlor and joined them in marriage,” the Lafayette Journal and Courier reported.  Before going to the theater to catch her husband’s performance that evening, Buda called her parents and notified them of the marriage.  Buda’s father joined her at the theater and after the performance took the couple back to his house where the Godmans held a dinner for the newlyweds. 

While the Journal and Courier reported that the new bride “would not go on the stage,” Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote in Chicago Confidential that Taylor got Buda work in the chorus of The Time, The Place, and The Girl.  According to Lait and Mortimer, following Buda’s performance “Chicago woke up to the discovery of a new rave, Buda Godman.  She was wooed and pursued and she fell.  Taylor tried to kill her and fired several shots at her, but missed.”

There are more than a few inaccuracies in Lait and Mortimer’s account of the life of Buda Godman, so it’s difficult to know how much, if any, of this episode actually happened.  However, one thing that is undeniable is that Tell and Buda’s relationship was stormier than a water spout off of Ohio St. Beach.  To hear Tell Taylor tell it, “I married Buda when we were both drunk and I found out she was quite incapable of loyalty to anyone.”  As Variety put it when Taylor filed for divorce from Buda in 1910, “his complaint mentioned several vaudevillians as ‘affinities.’  Their names were omitted from the final record.”

One thing that is never mentioned in the ‘love story’ of Tell Taylor and Buda Godman is the erratic behavior of Taylor himself.  Life with the songwriter wasn’t always blissful romance by the old mill stream.  Taylor did start a successful music publishing company in Chicago, and he managed to author his most famous tune “Down By The Old Mill Stream” in 1910 while still married to Buda.  However, Taylor had his own ‘affinities’ that caused him to make headlines on more than one occasion.  

In July of 1908, Taylor was fined $3 for disorderly conduct over a fight that took place at Freiberg’s Dance Hall 182 22nd street, Chicago.  In his defense, “Taylor declared to Judge Crowe that as a result of the fracas he was carrying around two highly decorated eyes as well as several and sundry abrasions on different parts of his anatomy and that he did not deserve any additional punishment,” The Inter Ocean reported.  Apparently, Taylor, Tim Jordan of the Brooklyn Superbas professional baseball team, and several other individuals were out “doing the levee” when they wandered into Freiberg’s at around two a.m.  As the Inter Ocean reported, Taylor “created a disturbance in the dance hall, and that when asked to leave he had started a row.”  He was then ejected by two waiters and later arrested when he tried to return to the dance hall.

During a separate incident in August of 1910, Tell Taylor again tangled with waiters at George Silver’s basement saloon at Clark and Randolph streets.  After Taylor made a request to cash a check, he was attacked by Silver and several waiters who “threw him to the floor” and “pounded his head with a billy.”  Silver maintained that Taylor “started the row” when he “used abusive language” and “refused to leave when ordered,” the Chicago Tribune reported.  “O, no, he wasn’t beaten up.  He was just thrown out gently,” Silver said.    

The following month, on September 13, 1910, Buda’s father, Otho Godman, died in New York City at the age of 53.  Less than two weeks later, Tell Taylor filed for a divorce.  While Taylor blamed Buda’s lack of loyalty and affinities for fellow vaudevillians as the reason for the break up, it is pretty clear that his adventures in the levee, his brawling, and public drunkenness demonstrated that he was no more committed to the marriage than Buda.  

Within a few years, Buda Godman would be deploying her theatrical skills to con rich men out of large sums of money.  How a former convent school girl managed to fall in with a highly organized gang of international blackmailers is a bit of a mystery.  She certainly could have encountered some of these characters in Chicago.  Lait and Mortimer write that “her father’s calling threw him in with shady people….”  Could Buda have come in contact with underworld figures among her father’s business associates?  Otho Godman’s obituary said he worked “at race tracks in the big cities, and his services were always in demand.”  As an expert in telegraphy, morse code and wireless communications, Otho Godman’s work at horse racing tracks would have placed him directly in the sphere of big-time gambling interests.  Was it only a matter of time before Buda Godman adopted the life of crooks and conmen?  Whatever the case may be, it appears that once the protective influence of Otho Godman had fallen away, and her marriage to Tell Taylor dissolved into ruin, Buda Godman was set free to relieve rich, philandering fat cats of their beefy bankrolls.

Queen of the Con: Buda Godman’s early life and first brush with the law

In 1916, Buda Godman gained national attention for her role as the lost damsel in a badger game con that garnered much fanfare after touring New York, Atlantic City and Chicago, when authorities there finally brought its run to a close.  News of a former convent school girl running with a gang of international blackmailers shocked the nation, and many believed Buda was as much a victim of the con as its mark, wealthy widower Edward R. West.  But Buda Godman was nobody’s victim, and West was not the first knight in shining armor she had taken for a ride.

Although Helen “Buda” Godman was born and raised in Chicago, her parents, Otha and Julia, both hailed from Indiana and were married in Lafayette.  Due to family ties, the Godman’s spent a great deal of time visiting relatives in Lafayette, and some newspapers report Buda’s family even resided there for a time.  It was in Lafayette that little Helen Godman had an older cousin or aunt also named Helen Godman, which may partly explain how little Helen came to be referred to as Buda.  

As a pint-sized entertainer, little Buda Godman dazzled the townsfolk of Lafayette, Indiana, dancing her way into their hearts long before embarking on her life of crime.  In September of 1898, Miss Buda Godman performed three numbers at a benefit for St. Ann’s church, 612 Wabash Avenue.  

According to the Lafayette Sunday Times, “The feature of the evening’s entertainment was a cake walk, skirt dance and contortion work by Miss Buda Godman ….  This little miss is the personification of grace, and her three numbers were greatly enjoyed and enthusiastically applauded by the large gathering present.”   

The Journal and Courier declared, “This small graceful child completely captivated the audience with her dances….  She is about 9 years old and is one of the most accomplished little dancers in the country.”

In May of 1899, little Helen Godman again delighted the people of Lafayette, singing and dancing to great acclaim at Grand Army hall.  As the Lafayette Journal gushed, “While several of the numbers were encored, the singing of Master Harry Hannagan and the singing and dancing of Little Miss Helen Godman…received the greatest favor.  Miss Helen was recalled several times and her part in the entertainment was one of the most enjoyable features of the evening.”

But it wasn’t just the local townsfolk who found Buda’s performances captivating.  Even a big city impresario became enchanted by her act.  “Little Buda, a short time ago, attracted the managerial eye of Col. John D. Hopkins of a large circuit of theatres, having houses in Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis and other cities.  The colonel offered Mr. and Mrs. Godman a very tempting sum for their daughter’s services, but the parents were opposed to her just now becoming associated with the stage,” the Lafayette Sunday Times wrote.

It seems, even at an early age, Buda Godman had already developed the power to send rich men reaching for their wallets.

It wasn’t just the townsfolk of Lafayette that delighted in little Buda’s talent and charm.  Up the road in her hometown of Chicago, she became something of a backstage celebrity among the many who turned out to catch a glimpse of the beautiful and engaging song and dance sensation.  

In Chicago Confidential, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer report, “One of the principle theatrical hangouts was the basement table-d’hote under the Brevoort Hotel, adjoining the LaSalle Theater, and it was there the town came to peek at and gasp over Buda Godman, who was called the prettiest girl ever born and raised in the town….  Her beauty was so fearsomely fascinating that before maturity she stopped traffic on the streets.  She was petite, a wee trifle plumpish, with big steel-blue eyes, a tip-tilted nose, an oval face with a dimpled chin, a peewee mouth, and tiny hands and feet.”

Clearly, Buda possessed the power to charm the socks off of just about anyone who beheld her beauty or discerned her many talents.  But, as a race track sheet-writer, Buda’s “father’s calling threw him in with shady people.”  So, while her parents may have wished to shield her from a life of the stage and protect her from the many unpredictable and unsavory characters who inhabited her father’s profession, they likely never considered the threat that loomed almost literally inside the home. 

On July 13, 1903, a young couple was arrested by Milwaukee police at the Cream City Opera Garden, which some news reports described as a beer garden.  A 14-year-old Helen Godman of 1169 Lexington Street, Chicago was found in the company of her 20-year-old cousin Norvin Godman of 1133 Lexington Street, Chicago.  Norvin was a barber by trade and lived with his parents just down the street from his little cousin Buda.  

Accounts of how they came to be at that location together were somewhat unclear.  One said Buda had asked her cousin to take her to Milwaukee, to which he obliged.  Other versions said the pair had eloped.  What is clear is that Buda’s parents did not approve of her associating with the young barber and forbid her to see him.

The proprietor of the Cream City Opera Garden, Frank Nolan, was a friend of Norvin Godman.  It was reported the pair had planned to reside with the man.  Buda’s parents were aware of Norvin’s association with Frank Nolan and likely directed authorities to that location.  While Buda’s parents would later deny the couple planned to elope, and the whole affair was simply a misunderstanding, Buda and Norvin’s comments in the press seemed to contradict that assessment.  

According to the Chicago Examiner, Norvin Godman told detectives, “‘I love Helen,’ he said, ‘and I want to marry her.  I don’t see that this is any of your business.’”  Despite the young man’s protestations, the police made it their business, and Norvin Godman was treated to a few nights in jail. 

Buda told reporters, “Of course, I’m too young to marry, but I guess I would have married my cousin, Norvin Godman, if my father hadn’t prevented me.”  

Attempts by Buda’s parents to portray the incident as an innocent miscommunication were likely an effort to avoid additional scandal.  While it is difficult to judge whether the sordid affair contributed to Buda’s eventual pursuit of a life of crime and deception, her parents may have seen the writing on the wall.  A year later when Buda was fifteen, her parents sent her off to St. Joseph’s Academy, a Catholic girls’ school in Adrian, Michigan.