Edna Johnson looked as though she belonged anywhere but in a police cell.
Dressed in a fashionable silk and velvet gown, the young woman appeared educated, refined, and well cared for. But when she stood before a judge in 1913 on a shoplifting charge, she broke down and told a very different story.
Johnson said she was penniless, starving, unable to find work, and without even a nickel to buy food. After a sleepless night in jail, she pleaded guilty and claimed that desperation had driven her to steal rather than face what she described as her only other alternative.
Instead of immediately sentencing her, the court suspended punishment while police tried to locate her family in Kansas City. Beneath the fashionable clothes, the case revealed a young woman who said she had reached the end of her options.
Desperation Cause of Stealing
Declaring that she was forced to steal out of sheer desperation, and that though she was garbed in a silk and velvet dress of the latest fashion, she actually did not have a nickel to buy something to eat with, Edna Johnson, an unusually pretty girl, who says she comes from Kansas City, broken down in police court yesterday afternoon and pleaded guilty to a shoplifting charge.
After spending a sleepless night in a cell at police headquarters, she was in a hysterical condition and wept pitifully. She said that she was penniless and starving and that unable to obtain work, she preferred theft to the only other alternative.
Sentence has been suspended in her case, and the police are making an effort to get in communication with her family. The girl shows every evidence of education and refinement.
Source: The Bamberg Herald. Bamberg, S.C. March 20, 1913.
