Clicking around in a free trial on newspapers.com, I’ve added some information to the little we knew about a family scandal of a century ago. My 2nd cousin twice removed, George D. Wheatley, vanished in 1914, a couple of days before the Americus National Bank (where he was the First Assistant Cashier and kept the books) had to close because most of the money was gone. He was charged with embezzling $350,000. A year later the secret service asked the police in Lincoln, Nebraska to arrest operatic tenor Walter Wheatley on suspicion of being George. That’s right: I seemed to be related (O the shame!) to a tenor. Walter spent a couple of days in jail, until some folks who knew George made the trip from Georgia and cleared him. George’s boss the Cashier got five years. George never resurfaced, though his family took hope from the appearance of his name on a casualty list in 1918, that he had redeemed himself on the field of honour.
The best part of the story, though, is Walter’s ingenuity in applying new information technology to a difficult social problem. He produced “operatic records made for a talking machine record company” by Walter Wheatley in England in 1910, when George was hard at work in Americus. He proposed to sing the same piece in court and prove that it was the same voice. Unfortunately “the imagination of the government inspectors was not equal to the occasion”, according to the Lincoln Daily News, and they preferred to wait pedantically for the Georgia witnesses.
See also
- “Examiner Dunlap is Named Receiver of Americus Bank” (Atlanta Constitution, 6 Feb. 1914)
- “Levy on Stockholders in Americus National” (Atlanta Constitution, 10 June 1914)
- “Americus Bank Heads Indicted” (Atlanta Constitution, 15 Nov. 1914)
- “Await Government Witness” (story of the arrest of Walter Wheatley, Lincoln Journal Star, 26 Apr. 1915)
- “Unable to Solve Wheatley Riddle”, and continuation (a full account of the case including the proposed use of the recording, Lincoln Journal Star, 27 Apr. 1915)
- “Man Held in Nebraska not Georgia Wheatley” (Atlanta Constitution, 1 May 1915)
- “Missing Wheatley Boy Now Believed Wounded in France” (Atlanta Constitution, 3 Nov. 1918)