TEXT 24: Butch Cassidy, 1866—1910 and the Sundance Kid, d. 1910
Butch Cassidy, whose real name was Robert Leroy Parker, was the leader of a gang of American outlaws called the Wild Bunch who operated mainly from a secure hideout in Wyoming Territory called Hole in the Wall. Other members of the gang were the Sundance Kid (real name Harry Longbaugh), Bill 'News' Carver, Ben Kilpatrick and Harvey Logan. The Wild Bunch rustled cattle, held up banks and robbed trains, all with varied success. On one occasion they stole $40,000 in notes that were so new that they had not been signed, and their clumsy attempts to forge the signatures failed miserably. Having made things too hot for themselves by robbing the Union Pacific railway rather too frequently, in 1902 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid moved to South America accompanied by pretty schoolteacher Etta Place. This combination carried out a number of robberies, before the two outlaws were ambushed and killed in a gunfight with the Bolivian army in 1910. However, rumours persist that either one or both men returned to the USA and lived on peacefully to die of old age. The film of their life and death, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, managed to catch the flavour of criminal exploits almost perfectly.
TEXT 25: Mata Hari (born Gertruda Margarete Zelle), 1876—1917
Mata Hari, who was executed by a firing squad in France in October 1917, is probably the most famous spy of all time. She is renown for her beauty, her numerous military lovers, her provocative oriental dancing, and, above all, her espionage. Yet in fact, she was not oriental, or even a spy. Mata Hari was a stage name adopted by a plump middle-aged Dutch divorcee, named Mrs. Margaretha MacLeod, who had left her alcoholic bcottish husband and opted to become a dancer in Europe. The evidence of her alleged espionage on behalf of the German Kaiser is based merely on her being mistaken for a well-known German agent Clara Benedix, by the British in November 1916. In that month Mrs. MacLeod was arrested in Falmouth, Cornwall, on board of the ship Hollandia while she was on her way to Holland. The police released her when they realised the mistake. Later she was arrested in France and charged with having been in contact with German intelligence officers in Madrid (though she had never even been there). At her trial in Paris her lurid life-style was used to damning effect It was only in 1963, when the secret files relating to her case were released, that the legend was reassessed. Most historians now think that, far from being a spy, Mata Hari was simply an innocent scapegoat — shot because the French government wanted to cover up its military ineptitude by fabricating an all-powerful ring of German agents.
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TEXT 26: Captain Alfred Dreyfus, 1859—1935
The name of Dreyfus is one of the most famous in the history of espionage. He was a French army officer of Jewish ancestry who in 1894 was sentenced to life imprisonment for selling military secrets to the Germans. The high command of the French army was strongly anti-Jewish and Dreyfus was a convenient scapegoat. His court martial was carried out as if he had already been found guilty. To serve his sentence he was sent to Devil's Island, the French prison colony off the coast of Guiana. In 1896 an army intelligence officer found proof that Dreyfus was innocent, but the army chief of staff refused to accept it. Support for Dreyfus grew and in 1898 the writer Emile Zola published a famous open letter, "J'accuse", calling for his case to be reopened. At last, the army brought Dreyfus back from Devil's Island and retried him in 1899. To the amazement of everyone, this second court martial again found him guilty. Such was the public fury that the President pardoned Dreyfus immediately, but it was not until 1906 that his name was fully cleared, and the real traitor exposed.
TEXT 27: Lizzie Borden, 1860—1927
Lizzie Borden is known worldwide through a poem which was written about her. It goes:
Lizzie Borden took an'axe And gave her father forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her mother forty-one.
This cruel verse refers to the fact that Lizzie Borden was accused of having killed her father and stepmother by chopping them to pieces with an axe at their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. She was tried for the two murders and acquitted, but the trial has become a legend, and many books have been written about it.
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