19th Century Identity Theft: An Explainer
19th Century Identity Theft: An Explainer
Copyright © 2026 SYDNEY SCHUSTER — All Rights Reserved
I’ve been going on and on in previous posts about assclowns reinventing themselves in ye olden days. Please enjoy a hearty laugh while I explain how it was done.
I know it’s hard to believe some people died more than once, and changed their identities the way other people change clothes. Gotta love the time before cell phones, when no one could call anyone and blurt “Dog! I just saw your dead wife in Zabar’s — yeah, no, she’s buying Limburger!” People just trotted into city hall, asked for vital records (theirs, somebody else’s, didn’t matter), altered them by hand — crossed things out, wrote other things in — handed them back, and slipped the clerk a tip.
Changing one’s name for legit reasons is legal, of course. People who get married, or their parents named them Bushrod Johnson, they change their names every day. What’s not legal is assuming the identity of another, or changing your name to commit crimes the way Henry Whitney did in my last post. The wankers in this post impersonated others in order to steal stuff and do bigamy, or died and returned to collect life insurance and avoid debts. Or all of the above. Good times!
A heartwarming family example is Vaudeville luminary Lela Gilette Shaw (1880-1918) and her mother, the famous artistic whistler Alice J. Shaw (aka Alice S. Horton, 1853-1918). They vanished the same year.
Alice was a bigger-than-life character noted for her romances and gigantic bosom as much as her art. In 1909 she sued a dead boyfriend’s estate for $40,000 ($1.47 million in 2026 dollars) for abandonment. Alice died of heart failure in 1918 after receiving a poor review of one of her recordings, only to arrive safely in New York in 1928 on a steamship from England.
Lela requires a few more paragraphs. We’ll start in 1894, when she married acrobat-turned-actor Leslie Morosco (1872-1954, aka John Leslie Mitchell) in California when she was 14. They performed together with a touring theater company for years.
Lela was still married to Leslie in 1906 when she married notorious New York insurance fraudster Victor Edwin Freeman (1872-1931, aka Yonkers shoe salesman Valentine Freeman). He was arrested for embezzlement on his way to their wedding, and things went downhill from there. Turns out he had mob connections, which is how he lost some factories.
Lela got bored with Leslie and Victor and ran off with Victor’s brother, Vaudeville performer Arthur Freeman (1874–1936), aka Dr. Agate Freeman, aka Dr Allan Freeman, aka Boston check forger Reuben Lippman, aka book author Robert Appleton, aka Count Roman Ivanovitch de Lippman Zubof, a Russian who didn’t speak Russian. Sergius Stepniak, the famous genuine Russian revolutionary, called Zubof a forger in 1891 before gifting him a black eye.
Arthur (born Arthur Randolph Freeman, in Queens) owed a lot of people money. He wasn’t broke. He just liked stealing. One of his other income streams was trashy novels written as Robert Appleton. In 1894 he published Violet, An American Sappho, a roman à clef about Boston society that was so tawdry, the police confiscated all the copies.
Arthur published his own books, because he knew how. He was probably the Robert Appleton whose publishing company got the crap sued out of it for robbing a shareholder. The lawsuit described Appleton as capable of preparing, writing, editing, and composing printed matter. Robert Appleton Company, organized in 1902, was funded with $100,000 ($3.9 million in 2026 dollars) to publish one book: the Catholic Encyclopedia. That right there totally sounds like a money laundry. Anyway, Appleton fired one of the principals, William T. Dickerson, for not being a Catholic. (Arthur wasn’t one either, of course. He was a Protestant. His mother was Jewish.) Appleton stole $17,500 Dickerson was owed under the incorporation contract. (Dickerson v. Appleton, NY Superior Court of Kings County, Court of Appeals, 1908)
Arthur self-published as Roman Zubof, too. He paid Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. to print his 1890 gothic horror novel Viera: A Romance Twixt the Real and the Ideal. Viera is a ghost who haunts people by playing cards with them, or something. The Book Buyer‘s review in 1890 sniped: “Such books are far from healthy in their tendency, and only show a morbid imagination.” The Critic magazine advised Arthur to lose the ghosts and “the page after page of crude and empty speculation.”
Count Zubof was himself a reviewer of literarature by his betters, in the days when exhaustingly long sentences were considered brainy. Which is to say that among literati, he sucked. Below is one especially tedious sentence he wrote about Walt Whitman in an 1887 issue of The Writer:
In 1896 the New York Times reported that “Count” Zubof (the Times always called him “Count” with quote marks) “spent money like a prince” and “drove a pair of fast horses and entertained lavishly.” That year the New York police arrested Zubof for stiffing the Hotel Cambridge out of months of rent. They caught him boarding a ship to England with a gun, a knife, and a big wad of cash. He committed suicide in the Jefferson Market jail. (Actually, his father snuck him out. During the Tammany Hall era, you could do stuff like that if you greased the right palms. Arthur learned from the best. His uncle was prolific scamster William Burtsell Freeman. See The Awful Henry Whitneys and Their Magnificent House.) Zubof’s $15,000 life insurance policy (worth $600,000 in 2026 dollars) was cashed by one “Daniel Romaine Van Riper,” who was actually — surprise! — Arthur’s father. The insurance company that issued the policy was owned by — surprise! — also Arthur’s father, and his brother Victor.
Thirteen years later, in 1909, Arthur Freeman and Lela Shaw were performing in Binghamton, NY, when they were married as Alphonso Phillips and Leila (with an i) Shaw of Chicago. (In Chicago she spelled her name Lelia and told everyone she was English.) Arthur was still married to his first wife, Carolyn, his father’s third wife’s sister. They had two children. Lela was still married to Arthur’s brother, Victor Freeman, with whom she had children in 1911 and 1915.
She was also still married to Leslie Morosco. Lela and Albert were living together in Chicago when Leslie got tired of competing with Albert, Arthur, and Victor and divorced Lela. Leslie and Lela never worked together again. In 1910 Leslie married Broadway showgirl Dorothy Holmes. He proposed in a department store on their second meeting (not a date, they ran into each other while furniture shopping). Twelve years later he married another showgirl, Beatrice Ebert. I just report these things.
By 1909 Arthur Freeman and Alphonso Phillips had transformed into Vaudeville actor Albert Phillips (1875-1940). (Albert was his father’s name. Phillips was a Freeman family name.) His Binghamton wedding license says he was born in New York City; his newspaper obituaries say Edwardsville, Indiana; Playbill said Edwardsville, Illinois; the Brooklyn Eagle said Brooklyn. Lela often performed with Albert. They became huge stage stars. He was usually billed over her. I bet she loved that. So did Leslie Morosco.
Click the photos to see them better.
In 1918 it all fell apart. Arthur joined the armed forces. Victor cut Lela loose. She died, according to the Times, “after a lingering illness.” (Well, that’s one way to describe the Freemans.) After her burial in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester, she and her late mother went to teach at the California School of Artistic Whistling in Los Angeles. Alice said Lela whistled beautifully.
Fun Fact! Lela’s sister, actress Elsie Shaw, died in 1918 as well, “after a brief illness.” (Her husband’s name was Porter, in case you’re wondering.) After being buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, she recovered enough to perform in a musical comedy at the Broadhurst Theater, “Ladies First,” two months later.
Four years later Lela was back, too, acting her dead heart out in a Vaudeville shtick called “There She Is Again,” using her real name in a variety show headlined by Mrs. Lucille Anderson’s Diving Belles. Nobody cared that Lela died. The Albany Times-Union‘s reviewer called her “a robust personality who has a funny little chuckle.”
Albert Phillips and Arthur Freeman lived separate lives after returning from WWI. Lela never performed with them again. In 1921 Arthur appeared at the Shubert Theater in “Irene,” playwright Samuel Johnson’s greatest failure. He also worked New York dives in a song-and-dance duo called Freeman and Apollo, and played organ at church and masonic lodge concerts, while introducing someone around town as his brother. Orpheum Theater player Jerry Freeman was actually Arthur’s cousin, Jerome Friedman, who ten years earlier was Harold Julien Friedman, disgraced Democratic assemblyman from Manhattan’s 29th district.
In 1911 Harold held up a state senatorial election for a record 74 days, amidst much public fanfare. Tammany Hall threatened his life, and a corruption investigation by the Assembly Judiciary Committee was underway. Harold stole some jewelry for reasons, got arrested, jumped bail, and was never heard from again until Jerry Freeman arrived in town. New Yorkers either never made the connection, or ignored it. Jerry married a showbiz groupie who was already married to someone else. So was Jerry. He murdered his other wife in California to be with her, and oops died in prison.
Meanwhile, Albert Phillips’ career was going like a freight train. He performed on 50 radio programs and made two silent movies in 1923 and 1924, portraying Ulysses S. Grant. His last stage performance was in 1939, as Stephen A. Douglas in “Abraham Lincoln in Illinois” at the Adelphi Theatre in New York.
Albert Phillips (or someone) died in 1940, of a heart attack in a room at the Hotel Langwell on West 44th Street. By then that part of New York City was well established as the gangland known as Hell’s Kitchen. Sounds like karma. He was 65.
Photo: New York City Municipal Archives
O
kay. This part will blow your doors off.
In 1925 Arthur Freeman needed money, I guess, or maybe he was just bored. He moved to England for a year. Calling himself Arthur Vectis Freeman, he published crime reports as Frank Power, a Philip Marlowe-type European journalist he invented (unless he was impersonating London Times war correspondent Frank Power, not realizing he died in 1884). As Power, Arthur wrote a series of weekly columns for the Sunday Referee, a British newspaper, “investigating” the disappearance of Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener. Kitchener was the war hero lost when his warship sank near the Orkney Islands in 1916.
Frank Power claimed to have possession of Kitchener‘s body. In those days, a Kitchener sighting was equivalent to a posthumous Elvis sighting. Anyway, Arthur tried to sell an empty coffin to the British government. The Westminster coroner stated the coffin “was apparently new and obviously had not contained human remains.” Arthur accused Scotland Yard of stealing Kitchener‘s body from him. They were not amused.
Arthur had recently wrested control of a film about Kitchener made by a business associate, journalist Singleton Gates. Gates told the New York Times that Arthur’s investigative series was a stunt staged to publicize the film, How Kitchener Was Betrayed. It was all lies, Gates said, the biggest being finding Kitchener’s body. A few weeks after Arthur’s corpse scam, showings were advertised of Frank Power’s “remarkable” new film. It was banned by the London County Council.
Power also published a companion book, The Kitchener Mystery. Here’s a sample:
In England, the police were looking for Frank Power. They never found him, In America, everyone knew he was Arthur Freeman, including the New York Times and even the Brooklyn Eagle. They found him tiresome. Eventually the British decided they couldn’t prosecute Frank Power for possession of a box of rocks.
The photos below show the headshot Arthur Freeman used for business in 1919 (left), when he was 45 years old. It looks like a bar mitzvah photo. In the photo right he’s 52-year-old Frank Power.
Back in New York again, Arthur leaned into advertising. He did have ad experience, sort of. In the aughts he worked for the Consumers’ Company and the Nichols-Finn Advertising Agency in Chicago, when Albert Phillips was acting there at the National and Marlowe theaters. Then he did window displays at the National Department Stores and R.H. Macy in New York. Before all that he worked at his father’s insurance companies that got kicked out of two states. Eventually Arthur was in demand as a marketing speaker and lecturer. One of his spiels was actually titled “Applying Department Store Merchandising Methods to Insurance Selling.” And of course, he published books. What is a conman if not a marketer?
He left Macy’s in 1916 to be Gimbel Brothers’ advertising director, the same year he toured Montana as Albert Phillips. After boinging around the junk end of retail fashion for years, he left Gimbel in 1919 to join Einson Litho, an advertising printer with a big art studio and factory in Queens. They produced sales posters for department store windows, baseball trading cards, and box games. In 1920 Arthur left Einson Litho to manage the Sadowsky chain of 13 “cloak and suit” retail stores.
He rejoined Einson Litho in 1924 and became its president. The company changed its name to Einson-Freeman.
In 1925 Arthur took 10 months off to f*uck aound in England with his Kitchener movie and start his own company in New York, Arthur Freeman Window Display Advertising Service. Einson no doubt appreciated all that. In 1926 Arthur left Einson (or was shown out). In August he went to work for Gimbel Brothers again, in Philadelphia this time, as general manager. In October, Albert Phillips was in residence at the Longacre Theater on Broadway, playing Orville Mason in “An American Tragedy,” no doubt causing scheduling conflicts with his job in Philly.
In 1928 Arthur returned to Einson and was named chairman. He left again in 1932, to be VP of the Baltimore-based Joseph Katz Company advertising agency.
He returned to Einson-Freeman, of course, a job he leveraged to position himself as a big-time advertising expert. The Boot and Shoe Recorder called him “one of the best known authorities in the country on display and advertising.” He wrote countless articles for trade publications. When anyone sought erudite counsel on world-shaking issues with store standees, Arthur had the answers. He also had an affinity, for some reason, for the YMCA. The Arthur Freeman who worked in advertising didn’t have kids, or a wife. He didn’t even own a home. Maybe he lived at the Y.
His career makes my head explode.
For those keeping score: Advertising Arthur, Vaudeville Arthur, Frank Power, and Broadway/screen star Albert Phillips existed concurrently, from 1909 to 1940. In 1921, when he was giving advertising lectures at mobbed trade venues and appearing on theatrical stages all over America, the Brooklyn Eagle ran a feature about Arthur’s residency at the Shubert, with his picture. Granted, it was a very old picture — his photo was published quite a lot, really — so you have to wonder why no one noticed he was four people. Or if they did, why didn’t they say anything? He was a celebrity, for Pete’s sake. I like to imagine fans ambushing him for his autograph, and Arthur having to ask “Which one?”
He flogged his career at Einson-Freeman until it killed him. Or anyway, it killed Arthur Randolph Freeman, in 1936 according to his NYC death certificate.
Einson-Freeman told the public a different story. The New York Times and Sales Management Magazine, among many other publications, reported Arthur’s “resignation” from Einson to become VP of merchandising for a competitor, Ketterlinus Lithographic Manufacturing.
Arthur spent the next 22 years managing businesses that booted him, including businesses he founded. Ghosting your company for extended periods of time isn’t a good look. Frank Power was “writing” in Europe for a year when he was supposed to be working for Einson-Freeman. Albert Phillips spent 9 months on Broadway when he was supposed to be working for Gimbel Brothers. According to Variety, he also spent significent time acting in Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Philadelphia. Bonus Ghostage! I doubt it’s a coincidence that most of Arthur’s companies had branches in Boston.
Career Recap of Arthur Freeman, Fruitfly
● Dec. 1936: Left Ketterlinus for a job with the same title at the Peck Advertising Agency.
● June 1937: Left Peck to start Freeman & Stern, Inc., with offices in Rockefeller Plaza. Provided sales development for chain and department stores.
● Aug. 1938 — Nov. 1938: Director of merchandisiing and advertising for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Left when Albert Phillips began his run as Stephen A. Douglas in the play “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” with Raymond Massey, Howard da Silva, and Kevin McCarthy. Arthur’s official reason for quitting the World’s Fair: differences of opinion with the president’s office. (Billboard)
● April 1939: Arthur (not Albert) appeared as a senator in Shakespeare’s “Othello” at Chicago’s Federal Theatre Project.
● November 1939: Arthur co-founded a nonprofit do-gooder group called Realists, Inc. According to the Rochester Times-Union, their mission statement was “to uncover the real causes of unemployment, depression, poverty, dictators and wars, and mobilize American ability to solve these problems through sounder distribution of buying power, to the end that democracy be preserved.” I don’t know what that meant, but I can guess who wrote it. They published a magazine, The Realist. Their only plans were a billion-dollar New York City slum clearance program and a national network of superhighways.
● 1940 to mid-1944: Black hole. The 1942 Standard & Poor’s Register of Corporations, Directors and Executives does not list Arthur as an executive at any company during this time. No more Albert Phillips gigs; he “died” in 1940.
● April 1944: Executive staffer at Meyer-Both Co., New York, an advertising and commercial art syndication company HQed in Chicago.
● 1946: Arthur took over the intra-store division of the Cine-Television Studios in New York, managing (according to the Times) “programming of all types of visual-action sales aids for department stores,” whatever that means.
● 1951: Freelance consultant, giving speeches and judging industry contests.
● 1954-1956: Executive director of the National Commitee on the Observance of Mother’s Day, NYC.
● Dates unknown: General sales manager of the promotion division of Kirby Block & Co., a department store buying business.
● 1958: 83-year-old Arthur was named managing director of the New York communications center of Dunhill International List Co., a B2B direct marketing firm based in Florida. The New York division doesn’t seem to have launched.
Arthur was probably as good at advertising as he was at writing. Magazines published his work anyway. He authored a particularly stultifying defense of window advertising for The Talking Machine World in 1919. Below is one excruciating paragraph-long sentence. Enjoy!
I was unable to track Arthur’s precise whereabouts after 1958. He may be the Arthur Freeman who died in 1974 and currently resides in Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, with his great-uncle and aunt, Alfred and Adele Freeman. But in the interim, he may have been writing another book. I think I know where he went.
Along the Way Oops Something Happened.
Back in 1935, a fellow in Massachusetts named Frank Allen Burt (1885-1971) obtained a master’s degree in education at the dusty age of 50. People usually get those to qualify for college teaching jobs. Frank already had one. Maybe he just thought it looked good on his résumé. Maybe it was just a way to get published.
Fun Fact! It used to be possible to, um, buy a degree from Ivy League colleges. That’s how Arthur Freeman’s uncle, Frederick A. Freeman, got a law degree from Harvard in 1855 after one semester of undergrad study, and a medical degree in the late 1890s with no study via a sketchy process Harvard called “out-of-course.”
Frank Burt scored his master’s degree from Boston University with a sweeping 405-page thesis about job counseling at his local YMCA. (For purposes of comparison, Harvard’s master’s thesis limit is 300 pages.) The main thing it demonstrated was Frank’s struggle to write sentences less than a paragraph long. Here’s one about selling life insurance:
Frank was born in Newton, MA in 1885. In 1908 he received a bachelor of science degree from Amherst, with a focus on astronomy. By 1913 he was on a career track as a court reporter until veering into advertising. He was determined to dazzle the local intelligentsia with his books, his magazine articles, his lectures, and his impossibly long list of completely unrelated jobs seemingly transferred to his résumé directly from someone else’s.
Frank wrote three profoundly unmemorable published books: two 1940 textbooks to support advertising classes he taught at Amherst, and How to Conduct Army Correspondence in 1943. He co-wrote the latter with Henry C. Coleron, a specialist on the subject. It’s not a terrible book, largely owing to Frank’s contribution being limited to a few overstated concepts like this:
Somewhat fortuitously, publishers were bugging Frank’s father to write an autobiography. Frank Hunt Burt was a famous court reporter who’d covered infamous criminal trials. He wrote a lot of books — about travel, history, and education — and was the assistant secretary of the Illinois YMCA. He was also a wilderness explorer and the editor of Above the Clouds, a summer daily newspaper published atop Mount Washington in New Hampshire. He died in 1946 without getting around to a book about himself, but left behind a trove of journals.
And so his son, the other Frank, authored the book based on his father’s memoirs. Or part of it, anyway. The Story of Mount Washington was exactly the kind of project an ambitious but not necessarily talented author — or two — could make into a meal.
The Story of Mount Washington was published in 1960. It became a cult classic among outdoorspeople and New Hampshire history buffs. It was the jewel of Frank Allen Burt’s checkered career.
Below is a typical paragraph-long sentence, dripping with drama, from The Story of Mount Washington:
For someone so bent on celebrity, it’s odd that Frank barely had his picture published. The exceptions are a 1940 Boston University photo (not shown), and (below, left to right) his 1908 Amherst yearbook photo; 1949 photo for Northeastern University; 1960 headshot in The Story of Mount Washington; 1910 pic of someone’s ass. Click the photos to see them better.
Who Frank A. Burt was and what he was really doing from 1908-1960 is debatable. I collected many CVs he provided to various publishers over the years. Let’s just say that Frank tended to embellish his credentials. Below is the mess that Amherst, his alma mater, published in their College Biographical Record of 1951:
Frank’s bio in his 1960 book The Story of Mount Washington calls him a camper, outdoorsman, and lawyer.
Frank’s history is interesting more for what isn’t there: the artfully omitted 10-year employment blackout from 1930-1940 that concluded the year Albert Phillips died, followed by Arthur Freeman’s 1939 to mid-1944 employment blackout during which Frank Burt’s three textbooks were published.
Let me splain:
Frank disappeared in 1930. His only professional achievements of that decade, as listed in 1951 by Amherst, were freelance, voluntary, and advisory jobs that he hadn’t listed prior to 1951. He reappeared in 1940, four years after Arthur Randolph Freeman died and the same year Albert Phillips died, to write textbooks and “over 300 articles.” Frank may have reasoned that, being dead, the Freeman twins were out of his hair and the coast was clear. They weren’t. It wasn’t.
The 1940 census shows Frank as a Boston U advertising instructor, and Boston U’s yearbook shows Frank (or someone calling himself Frank) as an associate professor. Then from 1940-1944, when advertising exec Arthur Freeman — a dreadful writer who’d do anything to be published — went AWOL, “Frank Burt” published three forgettable books for a captive audience (students).
Frank was no longer associated with Boston U in 1945, when he became a Northeastern University lecturer on advertising and marketing. Sounds prestigious. Didn’t last. The 1950 census shows Frank as a 65-year-old ad agent. That’s a sales job. Sales is a massive downgrade from agency owner or account manager or college lecturer. Sales is guys with holes in their shoes spewing annoying high-pressure blather at prospects desperate to get away.
The next and last thing Frank did was spend ten years writing a book about Mount Washington and his famous father — subjects so extensively documented, the book should’ve written itself, but Frank may have had help he didn’t want.
Obviously, Frank’s job history as stated by Frank cannot all be true. (Lawyer? WTF!?) And so much of his career journey — remember his grand jeté from court stenography to corporate marketing? — sounds not only improbable, but also suspiciously like Arthur Freeman’s: ad agency proprietor, manufacturing company ad manager, ad agency VP, ad agency account exec, special lecturer on advertising, Shakespeare Fellowship member, and 200 magazine and newspaper articles written on advertising and Shakespeare’s plays. And don’t forget the YMCA.
Shakespeare. Seriously? Dude, pick a lane.
Bottom line, Frank was just like every other camera-shy fame whore of yore, when no one anticipated an internet would one day expose … well, everything. I don’t know what kind of person he was, but I find it interesting that Frank is missing from his famous father’s FindAGrave page. Anyone who fudged facts as much as he did might be open to doing worse things. Arthur Freeman certainly was.
Here’s what I’m saying: Frank Burt’s and Arthur Freeman’s writings were strikingly similar, in a very distinctive way, because Arthur was moving in on Frank’s action, including writing Frank’s stuff. Think about it. “Frank Allen Burt” became a character invented by a wannabe Hollywood producer who thought Frank’s book about manly mountaineering would make a great movie, if he could only get his hands on it.
Here’s what I know: Frank was based in Boston, where Count Zubof and Reuben Lippman had so profitably grifted high-society suckers back when Frank was still picking his nose in Newton. Next thing you know, Frank abandoned court reporting for exec jobs in advertising, where he had neither training nor experience. He obtained a master’s degree with a Sears-catalog-sized thesis about the YMCA that sounded like a Count Zubof book. You know those 300 magazine and newspaper articles Frank claimed to write? I did the deep dive. Hundreds — didn’t happen. One that did was the award-free “The Pirate’s Legacy,” contributed to The Occult Digest in 1927, about using “psychical research” to communicate with a dead pirate to find lost treasure. Remember Count Zubof’s Viera?
Also like Count Zubof, Frank enjoyed trashing other writers’ work in print. During his decade-long hiatus, Frank (or someone) wrote the following two brain-breaking sentences in a critique of someone else’s Saturday Evening Post piece:
How could this even happen? Well, Arthur spent his entire life being other people. And I told you he became untrackable in the 1940s, but wasn’t dead. Maybe Frank Burt stepped away from his wretched life for awhile, or died, and Arthur Freeman filled the vacuum. What if people noticed, but nobody said anything?
Now, you might wonder why New York crime dynasty scion Arthur Freeman would get all up in Beantowner Burt’s business in the first place. Welp, it’s like this: Notable over-achiever Frank Allen Burt had an over-achieving wife. In the 1950s she inexplicably became the national chair of the Motion Pictures Committee of the Daughters of the American Revolution — as if an ancient Boston society dame would know anything about showbiz. Her name was Leila Shaw. Yes, that Leila Shaw.
Leila and Frank Burt were married in Brookline in 1912, when she was still married to Arthur and Victor Freeman, and Albert Phillips was tied up with a theater gig in Chicago. She’d been pregnant just prior to, or during, the Burt/Shaw wedding, with her daughter Ruth by Victor Freeman. Frank Burt couldn’t possibly have not known. Leila had family in Boston. Maybe they arranged the marriage to help her out of a hot mess, or Frank’s family did because he was 27, single, maybe gay, and his father was a Christian fundamentalist.
Leila and Frank had two children, officially: Dorothy Burt born in 1915, and Leila Burt in 1926. I don’t know where they came from, but I can guess. According to the 1920 and 1930 censuses, Leila and Frank also had a third daughter: Barbara. Born in 1913, she completely disapppeared and, except for Amherst’s 1939 alumni bio for Frank, was scrubbed from Burt family records. (She may be the Barbara Burt who lived in Providence, RI in the 1940 census, working as the personnel director of a retail department store.) It can’t be a coincidence that she and her father both scrammed in 1930.
In 1930 Leila was living with her mobster husband Victor Freeman in Rochester, NY under fake names, according to the census. When Frank and Barbara evaporated in 1930, maybe it was because they were scared. Who wouldn’t be?
When Frank reappeared in Boston in 1940, Leila returned, too. She burst onto the Boston do-gooder scene, becoming the general chair of the Brookline Women’s Club, then a prominent member of the DAR, Daughters of Colonial Wars, and the Bostonian Society. In 1843 she directed a Christmas gala at the Hotel Gardner for the Children of the American Revolution. The entertainment was a marionette show by Charlotte Horton — Alice Shaw’s sister, and Lela Gillette Shaw’s aunt. If I’m guessing, I’d say you’re witnessing Leila’s and Arthur’s retirement grift plan. He was still alive, remember, giving barnstormer speeches about run-of-press to drunk marketers.
In her own way, Leila was scarier than the Freemans. She had two fathers and a phony 1885 Massachusetts birth certificate with her name spelled “Lula.” In the 1900 census she appears as a 14-year-old (she was 20) with her Boston father, Lieut. John Hamilton Shaw (1843–1916), a milk or grain dealer (depending on census year). His Boston Globe and Herald obituaries state he was a Civil War hero wounded at Gettysburg (shot in the leg, according to his military pension application), and commander of Fort Slocum in New Rochelle, NY, when Lincoln was shot. His obituaries say he died on November 24, 1916. It should creep you out bigtime that his state death certificate says he actually died two weeks after his obits ran, on December 6, of gas poisoning.
The day before, Leila Shaw performed at Boston’s Copley Theatre. Two weeks later she was performing her comedy “The Truthful Liar” at another Boston theater. That tells you three things: Her relationship with her father sucked, and she hadn’t given up showbiz or Arthur Freeman. A year earlier she was touring Nebraska, Washington, Wisconsin, and Illinois with Albert Phillips. Leila’s husband Victor Freeman was still around, too, threatening to move to England with their kids. It all seems like more than enough drama to convince a cuck like Mrs. Burt’s husband to flee.
Lieut. John Shaw may have been related to Leila’s birth father, New York City salesman William Holland Shaw (1838–1900). More likely, John Shaw was William Shaw. William’s genealogy trail is nonexistant (just like Arthur Vectis Freeman’s and Albert Phillips’); it starts in 1866, with the birth of his first child with Alice Horton, the artistic whistler, when she was 13. One story about their split says William abandoned Alice and their six kids years before their divorce. (Lieut. John Shaw had in fact married his wife Isadora Howe in 1871.) Another version claims Alice divorced William in 1888 to marry Buffalo Bill Cody.
The next year someone tipped off the New York Times that William Shaw was lurking at a Pittsburgh performance by his ex. The Times stringer who buttonholed him asked a lot of questions William refused to answer. He did say Alice looked fat, and that everyone involved in their divorce was forbidden from talking to the press about it, “it” probably being that he had two wives. “I had to concede her the children when I gave the divorce,” he said, “but I will have them back again some of these days — and that pretty soon.”
Infer from that what you will. He certainly succeeded with Leila.
Like I said: No way did Frank Burt not know who Leila really was. Maybe people in Boston knew who Leila really was, too, and said nothing. But I am not making this up.
Text Copyright © 2026 SYDNEY SCHUSTER — All Rights Reserved
I write books! You can purchase any of them by contacting me through the Message or Feedback forms below.
Sydney Schuster and Dead Spot Books neither approved nor endorse any non-Dead Spot Books advertising that may appear here, nor do we derive any income from it. Some of it is really gross and we apologize, but the web host puts it there and we have no control over it. Try to ignore it. Thanks.
Leave a Reply