In trash cans and vacuum cleaner bags: in the USA, they have been looking for money hidden by a billionaire before her death for 40 years
'07.09.2020'
Source: Lenta.ru report
The murder of an eccentric millionaire from the United States, who hid her fortune in vacuum cleaner bags, closets and trash cans, was safely solved. However, the fate of her immense wealth has remained a mystery for over 40 years. The amazing story of the robbery and its intricate investigation - in the material "Tapes.ru".
Successful marriage
Marjorie Jackson was the widow of Chester Jackson, whose father, Lafayette Andrew, owned a large grocery chain in Indianapolis and other Indiana cities. In 1931, escaped prisoners ransacked one of Andrew's shops and shot the owner who was trying to protect his business.
His father's business was inherited by Chester. He ran the family business for 16 years, and in 1947 the Jackson chain was bought by a tea company. At that time, his total fortune was estimated at more than $ 25 million (taking into account inflation today, this amount is equivalent to $ 290 million).
Chester and Marjorie O'Connell met while she was working at a local grocery store. He was married, so their romance was secret. Several years passed before Chester filed for divorce. In 1952, he and Marjorie did get married, and two years later they bought a house in the Spring Mill area.
Inheritance
Chester did not trust banks and preferred to keep most of his money at home. In secluded places of his home, up to two million dollars were stored. And Marjorie adopted this strange habit of her husband.
In 1970, Chester died, leaving 60-year-old Marjorie $ 14 million. She transferred almost the entire amount to the bank. With no family or children, the millionaire's widow lived in a house on Spring Mill all alone. According to neighbors, she rarely went outside, the area around her house was overgrown with weeds and tall grass.
Everyone in the neighborhood knew that an eccentric 66-year-old widow lived in this house. Neighbors noticed her talking to birds and animals, performing strange religious practices and shouting racist expressions. In addition, there were two new Cadillacs on its site that no one had ever driven.
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Perfect victim of a robbery
In 1976, Marjorie learned that a bank employee had stolen $ 700 from her account. After that, she began to come to the bank either with a suitcase or with ordinary paper bags and take cash from 500 thousand to a million dollars. At home, she hid money in cupboards, tool boxes, dumpsters, and even dustbags for a vacuum cleaner.
From January to May 1976, she cashed out $ 8,6 million in full from her bank account. She kept a certain amount of funds in other banks. It is estimated that by the day Marjorie died, there were approximately $ 11 million in her home.
Bank officials, police, a local judge, and a prosecutor tried to convince her that keeping such large amounts of cash at home was life-threatening. She asked them not to pry into her affairs and go about their own.
Rumors that the lonely millionaire kept untold wealth at home quickly spread around the neighborhood. 19-year-old thieves Walter Bergin and Douglas Howard Green were the first to rob her house. The juvenile bandits who made their way into her home at night did not have to look for treasures - jewelry lay everywhere. They stuffed their pockets with jewelry, but soon stumbled upon something more attractive: in the dressing room, they found $ 817 in cash.
The thieves left Marjorie's house unnoticed. As he drove through Spring Mill, Green began tossing jewelry out of his car: diamond necklaces and rings, expensive watches, jade and pearl jewelry.
Although Marjorie did not go to the police, the inexperienced criminals gave themselves away. They began to recklessly squander huge sums of money and brag about their booty. When the police came to the widowed millionaire, so that she brought charges against the thieves, she took out a gun and ordered them to get out of her station.
In 1978, after a series of crimes, Green and Bergin were arrested.
A crime with a bloody ending
On the night of May 2, 1977, thieves again sneaked into Marjorie's house. They took out a million dollars, and a few days later returned for the rest of the wealth. However, on their second raid, the mistress of the house woke up and tried to fight back the criminals. The widow was shot and left to bleed on the kitchen floor.
Before leaving, the thieves set fire to the house to cover their tracks, but they did not succeed: neighbors noticed the fire and called the firefighters. The fire was quickly extinguished, leaving most of the building and Marjorie's body intact.
The police found about five million dollars in the house of the deceased. Most of the money was in a huge trash can hidden in the closet. According to Marion County Police detective Lieutenant Robert Kirkman, investigators were at a loss to say if something had been stolen. The house was full of expensive products, luxurious clothes and valuable jewelry, and the only hostess could no longer tell if something specific was missing.
During a search in Marjorie's house, they found 50 loaves of bread, about 70 kilograms of coffee, hundreds of packages of cookies and various cakes with the words "To our Lord from Marjorie". In addition, investigators found several thousand small items wrapped in foil, each with a postcard addressed to Jesus "from your child Marjorie." Inside were all sorts of things, from cheap washcloths to precious jewelry.
Marjorie's dining table was set with expensive china and crystal crockery. In this way, she was supposedly preparing to meet Jesus.
Who is to blame?
The police managed to arrest several people involved in the murder of a wealthy widow. Howard Willard and Manuel Lee Robinson were found guilty. Catching them turned out to be not that difficult: the criminals began to spend large sums of cash within days after the robbery.
Willard and Robinson were taken to the surface by salespeople at the dealership. Staff became suspicious when customers were willing to pay cash for several new cars. Soon, the criminals returned to the auto center to buy more cars for cash. The police were alerted to suspicious buyers.
Robinson was arrested first. Patrolmen found a suitcase with $ 1,6 million under the bed in his apartment. The detainee claimed that this money was transferred to him for safekeeping by a certain person whose name he allegedly did not know. Under pressure from investigators, Robinson gave the owner of the money's phone number. It turned out that the number belonged to Willard's girlfriend.
Willard and his girlfriend tried to escape, but the police quickly found them. They were caught in the state of Arizona buying two used trailers for $ 50 in cash. Willard was returned to Indiana and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Marjorie. He died in June 1987 while jogging at a correctional center.
Robinson was cleared of murder charges, but convicted of burglary and arson. In 1988, he was released from prison, but two years later he was arrested for another crime and sentenced to ten years in prison.
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Stolen money
Robinson claims that the authorities pocketed about $ 450 he stole from Marjorie's house in 1977. Willard's girlfriend led the FBI agents to the place where the money stolen from Marjorie was hidden. In the Arizona desert, 1,5 meters below the sand, investigators found two boxes containing $ 1,7 million in cash.
At Willard's trial, she testified that the famous lawyer Lee Bailey advised Willard to divide the stolen money and hide it in parts in several places in order to protect from treasure hunters.
“I told him that I would only represent him if he gave up and returned the money,” Bailey said. “But while negotiations are underway with the police, I suggested that for the safety of the child who was traveling with them, he hide the money in a safe place,” - Li Bailey, lawyer.
Journalists are confident that Bailey and the now deceased FBI agent in charge of the Marjorie case have seized part of her inheritance. One Indianapolis lawyer, John Schwartz, believes Willard and Robinson could have stolen up to $ XNUMX million.
“Nobody knows how much money there actually was,” says Schwartz. “There is still one open question: is the widow's money hidden somewhere else, and if so, where exactly?”
FBI Mystery
In 2015, at that time, 81-year-old investigative journalist from Arizona Don Devereaux claimed that he guesses where some of the missing money went. He believed that the FBI was hiding important information in the case to protect the agency's reputation. According to him, one of the former agents took part of the loot after the arrest of one of the criminals.
Not everyone agreed with the elderly journalist's hypotheses. While some argued that the scenario outlined by Devereaux was the ravings of a madman, others considered it quite logical and plausible.
Devereaux had every reason to suspect the FBI of a cover-up. In 2014, he asked the agency to record the Marjorie case, citing the Freedom of Information Act. In response, I received a notification that in 1993 the file was partially destroyed. According to the journalist, during his practice, he requested more than 50 different files from the FBI, but he never received such a notification.
The Federal Bureau declined to explain why part of the archive was destroyed and what documents were removed from the file.
Secret agent
According to Devereaux, one of the FBI agents found a much larger amount of cash than stated in the case record. After that, the agent allegedly transferred some of the money to an account in a Swiss bank.
The dossier states that the stolen goods were found only in one place. Devereaux believes that the agent could have hidden some of the money during the search, or returned to that place later and took the remaining amount.
Devereaux suspects the agent withdrew his savings from the Swiss account when he retired. With this money, he purchased expensive real estate in Phoenix, Arizona. The journalist found banking records confirming his words.
The investigator managed to put together all the puzzles of this intricate case, having received a tip from a law enforcement officer. The source admitted to the journalist, who was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, that he considers the loss of part of the inheritance strange, since both criminals actively cooperated with the investigation. His words prompted Devereaux to re-request the FBI for documents on the Marjorie case.
What he saw in the dossier shocked Devereaux: the name of the agent he suspected of stealing was not changed in the documents. Moreover, this employee of the Bureau of Investigation was mentioned not once, but as many as six times. Devereaux, who has worked with the FBI files for many years, saw this as a secret sign from other agents of the federal bureau.
The journalist believes that they also suspected a colleague of theft, so they repeatedly wrote down his name in the dossier. At the same time, his identity was carefully hidden in public documents.
“Once is an oversight, but six times is already a message. At least that's how I took it, ”- Don Devereaux, investigative journalist.
After learning that part of the dossier in the Marjorie case had been destroyed, the journalist called on the US Department of Justice, under whose leadership the FBI is located, to investigate.
“There is a lot of suspicion in this case. And although we understand what happened a long time ago, I do not consider this an excuse to continue to ignore it, ”- said Devereaux.
As a result, the FBI notified the journalist that the Internal Investigation Department, which reviews allegations of serious misconduct by agents, will not take any action on this request.
Retired police officer Steve Keers, Marjorie Jackson's nephew, estimates that at least $ 1,6 million has gone missing. He came to this conclusion, referring to the amount that Marjorie withdrew from the bank account before her death. However, how much money actually disappeared during the robbery and subsequent investigation, and who is responsible for their disappearance - perhaps, will remain a mystery forever.
