From a highly respected Kentucky distilling family, William H. “Will” Headley’ story is one of deceit, theft, desertion, and, if my reading of the evidence is correct, adultery. When his well-known distiller father, John, died in 1891, 34-year old Will inherited his share in the Woodland Distillery and became its treasurer. Thought to be a good family man, sympathy for Will was widespread in Lexington and Fayette County when his wife died in 1893 leaving him with three children in their teens and a baby not yet a year old.
Meanwhile, to no one’s knowledge, for several years Treasurer Headley diligently had been siphoning money from the distillery. Will’s scheme was one fairly common in the liquor industry. Crooked distillery owners were known to sell forged warehouse receipts on whiskey said to be aging in their warehouses, whiskey that actually did not exist, or to sell securities on the same whiskey to several buyers. As treasurer Will was the only officer at the Woodland Distillery authorized to issue warehouse receipts and he was cheating.
In February 1894, apparently fearing discovery of his misdeeds, Headley told his family he was leaving on a business trip. Before departing he visited his local bank and withdrew $900 in company funds. Several days later his oldest daughter who was looking after the other children, received a letter from her father indicating he had absconded to Mexico and admitted having issued $50,000 in fraudulent warehouse receipts, equivalent to $1,100,000 today.
What could have caused Will Headley to have executed such a massive theft? He was not known as a gambler or heavy drinker, character flaws that might have made his behavior more understandable. My judgment that it was love, likely an adulterous affair, that had led to downfall. The fraud had begun more than a year before his wife’s death, to my mind an indication of Will’s earlier need for funds to bankroll a “back street” love affair. This speculation is backed up by a visa certificate Headley received from the U.S. Consul General in Mexico City, dated October 1, 1910.
Shown here it documented that Will had married again, his wife’s name given as Aanna Nelson, originally from Peoria, Illinois. They were accompanied by a son named Nelson who had been born to the couple in Penjamo, Mexico, the previous February. Since Will could not have returned to the U.S. without going to jail, the assumption must be that Aanna joined him “South of the Border.” He had abandoned one family in Lexington to start another in Mexico with a woman he had known in the U.S. No evidence exists that Headley ever returned to America or made any restitution before his death in 1913.
As San Francisco liquor dealer Herman Braunschweiger was struggling hard to build his business and provide for his family, he and his wife were having increasing difficulties controlling their second son, Herman Junior. At the age of fifteen the boy ran away from home in 1888, stealing his mother’s jewelry to finance his fling. Found and brought home, Junior now 17 absconded a second time. Braunschweiger tracked him down and had him arrested on a vagrancy charge. A San Francisco newspaper told the story: “Last night the father found his son in a lodging house at No. 17 Fourth Street in company with a dissolute woman named Frankie Ray, with whom he had been living. In the lad’s possession was found a lot of valuable jewelry, which he had stolen from his parents’ house….”
Send abroad for a time, Junior returned to a job as a salesman for his father’s company but could not keep out of trouble. He was involved in the death of a friend after a drunken party on a yacht but went free. That incident was dredged up by the press four years later when Junior once again made the headlines in San Francisco newspapers. In August 1896 Junior was married in Oakland by a justice of the peace to Sadie Nicholas, a woman who not only was a dozen years older than his 24 years, but known to be a notorious brothel madam who once had been arrested for keeping her young daughter resident in her house of ill fame.
His father swore out a warrant and had Junior arrested on the grounds that he was insane and required institutionalization. The judge, after listening to the testimony, ordered Junior released: “His Honor said that, although the young man might be irrational when drinking, he was no fit subject for an insane asylum.” Despite walking out a free man, Junior could not stay out of trouble. After the trial the Braunschweiger family cut off all financial assistance to him. When he and Sadie accosted her female cousin for money, Junior is said to have seized her by the throat and choked her. Saved from further injury by the interposition of the landlady, the cousin swore out an assault warrant. The headline in the San Francisco Examiner read “Braunschweiger in Trouble Again, Attacks Wife’s Niece.”
It is not entirely clear what the future brought for Junior. It would appear that the battery charges were dropped. He and Sadie divorced, an event that may have smoothed his welcome back into the Braunschweiger fold and even to working again at the liquor firm. Junior married again but died at 37 years old. As a sign of this “prodigal son” having reformed and welcomed back into the Braunschweiger fold, Junior’s ashes are adjacent to those of his family in the San Francisco Colombarium.
Imagine yourself in the shoes of a successful Cincinnati liquor dealer named Julius L. Moyse, plagued with a “black sheep” first cousin who bore an identical name. Born in the same Mississippi town, the two were bound to be confused in the public mind. The other Julius L. Moyse, passing bad checks and perpetrating scams, spent his life in and out of jail, That Julius also wedded nine women over his lifetime, frequently using phony names while committing serial bigamy.
By the early 1890s the “good” Julius had moved north to Ohio, settling in Cincinnati, a city in which making, buying and selling whiskey was a major industry. There he established a liquor house called Moyse Brothers, located at 62 Main Street, and involving his brothers Alphonse and Eddie in the management. The liquor house appears to have been success from the start.
Meanwhile elsewhere The Other Julius L. Moyse, shown right, was carving out an entirely different life for himself. Why he had been given a name identical to his older cousin has not been explained. By the time he was fifteen years old The Other Julius was already getting into trouble. Vicksburg newspaper accounts reported him scamming money and passing bad checks in 1894. That same year he was jailed in Marshall, Texas, for posing as a relative of a candy manufacturer and swindling the company. It was just one of many guises The Other Julius would adopt over his lifetime.
In 1898, perhaps trying to carve a new identity, The Other Julius enlisted in the U.S. Army for the Spanish-American War. He is pictured here in military uniform. The experience sent him on a new identity path as Lieutenant Moyse. That took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he cashed some bad checks and ran out on his hotel bill. Caught and charged, he spent several months in a state prison farm, shown below. There followed years of his scams: In Birmingham, Alabama, The Other Julius was a Catholic priest; in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the son of the governor of Virginia; in Parsons, Kansas, a drug salesman; in Milwaukee, the son of a top official of Kuhn, Loeb New York financial house. Press reports would indicate that frequently those charades were unsuccessful and The Other Julius spent more time in jail.
He married nine woman, usually under an assumed name and sometimes under circumstances of bigamy. Three wives are shown above. Meanwhile back in Cincinnati, Julius Moyse, given the extensive press coverage, must have been painfully aware of the exploits of his namesake cousin. The Other Julius also had made Cincinnati the scene of one or more of his schemes, using the Moyse name. The prospect of confusion was an ever present possibility. When statewide prohibition was enacted in Ohio in 1916, Julius shut the doors on Moyse Brothers and moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where he died in 1958 at the age of 88. The Other Julius preceded his cousin, dying in Oklahoma at the age of 55 in 1934, apparently still married to wife #9.
Note: Longer articles on each of the individuals treated here may be found elsewhere on this website: Headley, February 18, 2020; Braunschweiger, April 14, 2020, and Moyse, August 13, 2020.
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