December 11, 1909
SPENT $7.50 ON HER
SAYS PARDONED WOMAN.
Fined $500, Mrs. Cross Agrees to Go
With Brother to Ohio and Leave
Aged Admirer of McLouth, Kas.,
Alone.
Mrs. Ada Cross, 40 years old, who is alleged to have been in a plot to swindle an old man named Kenyon, 85 years of age, of McLouth, Kas., and who was fined $500 in the municipal court December 4 on a technical charge of vagrancy, was paroled yesterday by the board of pardons and paroles. She left last night with her younger brother, Fred A. Spray, for Kirkland, Ind., where he told the board he would make a home for her. She never had been arrested here before.
About last August, so the testimony ran in court, the aged man told a friend that he would give $1,000 for a "nice, good wife." The word reached a real estate dealer here, it was said, and Mrs. Cross went to McLouth, where she met Mr. Kenyon.
After being requested to leave the hotel there, the woman went to Lawrence, where a letter to the aged would-be Benedict soon took him. While there the two became engaged, he paying all the bills. From Lawrence the woman is alleged to have gone to Indiana, where she wrote that she had raised the money on a mortgage. After that she was heard from in three cities in Old Mexico, where she is said to have tried to get Mr. Kenyon to invest in land, later trying to get him to sign notes with her in the purchase of a $2,500 hotel in Kansas City.
All of this caused the old man to investigate through the police, and the woman was taken into custody. Mrs. Cross said that $7.50 paid for her hotel bill at Lawrence was all that the aged Lothario had spent on her. Kenyon's son arrived on the scene and assured the authorities that he would take his father home and have a guardian appointed for him.
Mrs. Cross, thoroughly repented, assured the board yesterday that she would go home with her brother, who has a wife and three children on a farm near Kirkland, Ind., and remain there.
Labels: Lawrence, municipal court, parole board, vagrancy
