Tag: historic true crime

Dean Jobb continues to promote a false true crime narrative

In a recent interview with the Crime Writers of Canada podcast, Dean Jobb, author of A Gentleman and a Thief, doubles down on his contention that jazz-age jewel thief, Arthur Barry, crashed a Long Island cocktail party in 1924, befriended the Prince of Wales, and whisked his new royal pal off on a secret tour of Broadway speakeasies.  

The claim strains credulity, but Jobb provides the following defense:  

“I lead off with him (Arthur Barry) meeting the Prince of Wales, the future Edward the VIII, who was visiting Long Island in the twenties.  Barry crashes a party, because there were a whole bunch of Long Island parties for the prince and his entourage, and ends up meeting the prince, takes him on a clandestine tour of the bright lights of Broadway and the speakeasies.  

“I mean, a writer has to go, really?  Did this really happen?  Well, start digging into reporters.  I find memoirs or memories of reporters who covered the story, who vouch for it, who did their homework.  The coverage makes it clear that the prince disappeared right at the time Barry says he was doing this.  So, it’s a matter of digging as deeply as you need to in the record to verify for your own peace of mind.  But you owe it to the reader, and if you’re not sure, you tell the reader that.”

As I’ve shown in previous blog posts, all the contemporary newspaper accounts of the party Jobb describes have the Prince of Wales dancing at the Cosden estate until dawn and returning to the Burden estate that morning.  None mention Wales slipping away from the party to experience the nightlife of Broadway.  

Rather than belabor that point here, I’ll address the following contention:  “The coverage makes it clear that the prince disappeared right at the time Barry says he was doing this.”  The “coverage” Jobb refers to involves an episode that occurred the night following the Cosden party.  The “small but jolly” Cosden gathering described in Jobb’s book began late in the evening of Wednesday, September 3, 1924 and continued through the early morning hours of Thursday, September 4.  The period of time when Wales went missing began in the afternoon or early evening of Thursday, September 4 and continued until the next morning, Friday, September 5.

Here is the passage Jobb quotes from to show “that the prince disappeared right at the time Barry says he was doing this.”  The article was penned Thursday night, September 4, one night later than the night of the Cosden party, and appeared in the following morning’s Buffalo Courier.

“The whereabouts of the Prince of Wales were shrouded in mystery tonight.  At midnight he had not returned to the Burden estate where he is stopping.

“He had dinner at the home of J.S. Cosden…It was reported that he left the Cosden home shortly after dinner, but since that time he has been playing a game of hide and seek with those who sought to check his movements.

“Some believe he went for a boat ride up Long Island Sound, others say he attended an all-night dance party at some nearby home, but others believe he went in disguise to one of the white light jazz palaces on Broadway.”

Not only does this passage describe a different night from that of the late-night Cosden party, it describes a completely different set of events.  Wales had dinner at the Cosden home and he left, possibly by boat, and either went to a party or to check out the white light jazz palaces of Broadway.  He’s not fleeing a late night party, he’s leaving after having dinner.  How does Jobb not recognize that these are not only separate dates but separate events as well?  

While the order of events may seem a little confusing to someone unfamiliar with the Prince’s 1924 visit, it isn’t to someone who has casually researched the topic, and it shouldn’t be confusing to someone who has researched and written a work of nonfiction where an alleged encounter between Arthur Barry and the Prince of Wales plays a central role.

The prince’s movements over the 24 hours in question go something like this:  Wales attends a late night party at the Cosden estate and dances until dawn.  He then returns to the Burden estate and sleeps until around noon.  Then he goes to the polo fields for the afternoon.  Sometime in the late afternoon, he returns to the Cosden estate where he either plays golf or takes a stroll around the Cosden’s nine hole golf course.  Then he eats dinner, hops in a motorboat, and disappears off into the Long Island Sound.  From there his whereabouts are unknown for the next 12-24 hours. 

These events are widely covered by the newspapers of the day.  Here’s a question the New York Daily News posed regarding the prince’s missing hours:

“What the folk down Long Island way wanted to know was where the prince passed the time from 2 p.m. Thursday until his reappearance yesterday.”

Does that sound like Wales stole away from a late night party with a stranger he just met, or does it make more sense that he went missing the following afternoon?  How does Jobb miss that unless he’s intentionally taken the route of ignoring the truth and printing the legend?

Before Oom became omnipotent: The clairvoyant vagrant

While Oom the Omnipotent, Pierre Bernard, is nowadays credited with introducing yoga practices to America’s elites, his numerous other accomplishments included founding a tantra commune, managing a baseball team, and serving as a bank president.  He was a yogi, a hypnotist, an occultist, a scholar, and a lecturer.  He also dabbled in dog racing.  Indeed, there was a time when Oom the Omnipotent exerted a mesmerizing influence over some of the flakiest of America’s upper crust.  However, it wasn’t always so.  Becoming omnipotent requires a great deal of trial and error, mostly error in Bernard’s case.  Not to mention that in one’s quest for omnipotence, one is bound to run afoul of local law enforcement authorities who are often reluctant to accommodate a man on his quest for omnipotence.  For certain, in Bernard’s case chasing omnipotence was mostly accompanied by scandal, run-ins with the law, charges of fraud and unshakeable impotence. 

Oom was born Perry Arnold Baker to Erastus W. Baker and Kittie C. (Givens) Baker in Leon, Iowa in 1875.  The couple soon divorced, however, and Kittie remarried to John C. Bernard, with young Perry taking on the surname of his stepfather.  After Perry was sent to Lincoln, Nebraska to live with a cousin, he met Sylvais Hamati and became Hamati’s pupil.  The pair eventually landed in San Francisco in 1893.  Billed as Hamati’s pupil, Bernard taught hypnotism and promoted its use to treat psychological maladies.

In May of 1897, Perry A. Baker partnered with Dr. H. M. Thornton in a venture called the Pacific Hypnotic Institute at 44 Sixth street in San Francisco.  Scandal erupted when the parents of young Edward Kline complained to police that their son “has stayed away from home and been entirely under the influence of the disciples of Mesmer.”  Despite the parents’ repeated efforts to see their son, Baker and Thornton denied knowledge of Kline’s whereabouts.  However, during an interview with an officer McMurray, Perry Baker’s powers of omnipotence began to kick in and he spilled the beans on the recent activities of the young Kline.  

“He said the boy is an excellent subject and when under hypnotic influence is a great clairvoyant.  He sees wonderful things.  The lad is particularly valuable as a subject for students of hypnotism, Baker’s pupils, to practice their newly developing powers upon.  He yields readily to their influence.  In fact, of all his subjects, Baker said, Kline was the favorite.  Baker said that he pays Kline $5 a week, and gives him his board and lodging for his services, and added that the boy is worth three times as much,” the San Francisco Call and Post reported.

During a court hearing convened to determine if Edward Kline was a vagrant, Perry Baker testified that his powers of hypnotism saved the boy’s life.  According to Baker, the boy’s parents objected to his desire to marry a young girl for whom he had tender feelings.  This caused Kline to become suicidal.  “Perry explained that young Kline was saved from death by carbolic acid poisoning by hypnotic powers that were thrown upon him,” said the Call and Post.  Of course, this was all news to his mother who knew nothing of her son’s designs to marry.

But the tale became a great deal stranger when Edward Kline himself made revelations to the court so astonishing that they caused Judge Campbell to comb his whiskers vigorously with his fingers in anxious disbelief.

According to Kline, there was a club of lawyers and businessmen who met weekly on the fifth floor of the Parrot building on Monday evenings.  “The lawyers, so the lad stated, would throw him into a trance to make use of his clairvoyant powers.  They would send his mind to read the minds of their clients in order to secure more facts as to cases in hand.  They would also get him to go out on similar occult expeditions to probe the minds of opposing counsel in order to get ‘tips’ as to what their next moves would be.

“Others, the boy stated, were in search of information as to mining stocks and the probability of certain horses winning at the races.  

“From what he could learn from these seekers for inside facts the lad said he believed he gave them pretty straight ‘pointers.’”

The boy went on to testify that “he feels sure that those for whom he has been a subject will come to his rescue and try to prove that he is not a vagrant and that his mental submission to their wills is not in any way an injury to him,” the Call and Post read.

Ultimately, Judge Campbell decided there was no evidence to support the charge of vagrancy and terminated the inquiry.  He then made a rather unorthodox ruling, ordering the boy be hypnotized to “make him think he has a desire to stay with his mother, and then to send him home.”

Apparently, Judge Campbell’s solution worked because the boy returned home “and declared his intention to remain at home with his mother.”  Additionally, in a follow-up call to the Call editorial room, Baker and Thornton took full credit for young Kline’s change of heart.  “‘You remember,’ said Thornton, ‘that Kline said in court he would rather go to the reform school than go home.  Now he says that he is glad to be home, and that he intends to stay there.  That is because of the hypnotic suggestion I gave him.  The suggestion will influence him as long as I choose.’”

Free from the sinister influence of the Pacific Hypnotic Institute, Edward Kline’s mind slowly began to emerge from captivity.  As the San Francisco Examiner reported a few days later, “Young Kline refers now to the hypnotists as fakirs and declares that they used belladonna and chloroform on subjects and students.  He has not yet recovered from the effects of his stay in the studio.  His nerves are much unstrung.  His mother says that his actions at times are very peculiar.  Young Kline has many marks on his body to show where he was struck, and where pins were stuck into his flesh while he was in either a condition of hypnotism or under the influence of chloroform.”

While it is not known how the lawyers and businessmen of the Parrot building fared after their clairvoyant was returned to his family, there can be no doubt that Perry A. Baker aka Perry Bernard aka Pierre Bernard learned a valuable lesson.  Whatever hypnotic powers or occult wisdom Bernard may or may not have possessed, he certainly grew in his knowledge and ability to exert influence over others and brainwash the unsuspecting, a skill that would serve him well and he would repeatedly employ in his quest to become Oom the Omnipotent.

Sources:

Census records

The Leon Journal-Reporter

The San Francisco Call and Post

The San Francisco Chronicle

The San Francisco Examiner

The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love (2010)