The Adventuress: Murder, Blackmail, and Confidence Games in the Gilded Age

True Crime History

by Virginia A. McConnell

The engaging tale of a nineteenth-century black widow Intrigue, deception, bribery, poison, murder―all play a central role in the story of Minnie Walkup, a young woman from New Orleans who began her life of crime when she was only sixteen years old. Born in 1869 to Elizabeth and James Wallace, Minnie was a natural beauty and attended convent school where she learned social graces and how to play the piano. After the divorce of her parents, she was raised in multiple boardinghouses owned by her mother, and at one of them, met her first husband, James Reeves Walkup. At sixteen, she married Walkup, a forty-nine-year-old successful businessman and acting mayor of Emporia, Kansas. One month later, Walkup died from arsenic poisoning and his young wife was accused of murdering him. Her trial became one of the most sensational cases in Kansas history and was covered by reporters across the nation. The Adventuress details Minnie Walkup’s remarkable life and criminal activities. Using newspaper articles, census and probate records, and descendants’ reports, true crime writer Virginia A. McConnell depicts a captivating story that is full of scandal, gossip, theft, and murder and that includes events taking place across the South and Midwest. McConnell reveals a fascinating cast of characters revolving around Minnie Walkup, including a former Louisiana governor and senator, a prominent Ohio banking family, the partner of a famous railway tycoon, and a sleazy district court judge from New Orleans. The Adventuress offers a Gilded Age soap opera that seems too far-fetched to be what it is―true. A substantial contribution to crime history, The Adventuress is a welcome addition to any true crime reader’s collection.

Genres: True Crime, History

264 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2010

Reviews

[Nightwitch · Rating 1 out of 5]

As others have mentioned, the book starts strong, but rapidly goes downhill. McConnell begins with Our Heroine's background and marriage, proceeds to the crime, and then gets bogged down in the minutia of the trial. It rapidly became apparent that McConnell was working almost entirely from newspaper reports and census records; she goes off on tangents, talks far too much about the reporters themselves, and - worst yet - seems to take every single newspaper article at face value, which given the morals of the Victorian-era press is more than slightly ridiculous. Falsifying interviews, making up names, or playing a game of telephone with someone else's reportage were all possibilities - but McConnell assumes that each and every news report is accurate, that each and every interview happened, and that just gets irksome. She also has decided, beyond all doubt, that Minnie was guilty, and as the book progresses to Minnie's subsequent life, that gets more than a little ridiculous. Minnie's second husband, an extremely ill alcoholic, very conveniently dies - and an autopsy doesn't show foul play? That's okay, McConnell's going to figure out how Minnie did it without leaving a physical trace. Later, we learn that Minnie changed her surname, and McConnell indicates we don't know whether it was just a pseudonym or because she married a guy, but if there was a guy, by X date he had been disposed of from Minnie's life "by fair means or foul." Yes, she's essentially being accused of possibly murdering someone who may not even have existed. Come on.

Later in the book, as Minnie enters the somewhat shadowy world of the demi-monde, McConnell had a real possibility to do something interesting, but instead she's just straightforward and judgmental, basing everything she tells us on news reports and scandals. She doesn't seem to have done any secondary research on Victorian prostitution... and because the courts and news reports were biased in favor of the "respectable men" being "blackmailed" by these women, that's the slant McConnell gives us, too, which is more than a little uncomfortable. At one point we meet a prostitute and petty con artist who adopted a daughter six years before; the orphanage gets wind of mom's profession and decides to repossess the kid (yes, really); mom, dad, and daughter bolt. "Given (the mother’s) lifestyle," McConnell writes, "she hardly seems the type to want to raise a child, so the question must be asked: to what purpose did she acquire this little girl?" Um, really? Because this woman is a prostitute she cannot possibly love her own daughter? She must have some nefarious purpose in mind? Given the general conditions of many 19th-century orphanages, frankly she could just have wanted to keep the kid out of the orphanage, no affection involved, and she'd still have been doing a good deed.

Anyway, McConnell runs out of news reports and returns to census records. We learn everything that happened to everyone even tangentially mentioned earlier in the book, including the name of the woman eventually married by that one guy who briefly claimed to have had sex with Minnie in the jail which no one really believed, because we totally care. Minnie had an interesting life and there was an interesting book to be written about it, but that book is not this book. I originally had this at two stars but by the time I finished writing this review I was so mad at the treatment of all the women in it that I took it down to one.

[Deanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. Reading about crime in the 1800's is fascinating. I would recommend this book to everyone who likes true crime.

[Fishface · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started out interesting, but flattened out badly as I went along. The story bogged down in legal details and unending cross-examination.