Unraveling Begins
In November 1892 the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch published articles about the forgeries, including facsimiles of some of the notes that had been with the letters. One reader recognized the handwriting of a clerk he knew as Alexander Howland Smith. Smith had been working in various law offices in Edinburgh and dealt in ephemera and old documents.
When police questioned Smith, he said that he had been employed as a chief clerk of the lawyer Thomas Henry Ferrie, who had asked him to get rid of old documents in the cellars of his law office. Smith had taken them home, found them to be valuable and begun to sell them. When the supply had run out, he had begun to create new forgeries. He claimed that he could create any kind of document. Smith was arrested.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Howland Smith
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“The fact is, mental philosophy is very like Poverty, which, you know, begins at home; and indeed, when it goes abroad, it is poverty itself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)