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2.
The Mystery in a Nutshell
Gunshot, by Gaslight, with Sea Storm and Ghost
On Thanksgiving Day, 1892, a beautiful and elegantly dressed young woman appeared at the Hotel del Coronado—the most luxurious resort in the region, whose doors had opened just a few years earlier in February 1888. Signing in as Mrs. Lottie A. Bernard, the woman attracted attention to herself from the start. She was traveling alone—frowned upon by Victorian society—and without luggage. She kept anxiously inquiring at the desk—not about her 'husband,' the missing Mr. Bernard, but a man she said was her 'brother.' Her brother, Dr. M.C. Anderson, was supposedly due at any time to help her with a vague ailment. She never mentioned the husband. Both men would prove to be as fictional as Lottie A. Bernard herself. Both were part of the haunting mystery of Coronado that would endure through the centuries.
Over the next few days, she made odd requests of hotel staff (some of them downright chilling when reviewed in the light of new theories). Her health deteriorated rapidly, so that by Monday, November 28, four days after her arrival, she had difficulty walking. Nevertheless, she made an arduous journey on foot, by trolley, and by ferry boat to downtown San Diego, where she bought a gun and some ammunition. She returned to the hotel and was last seen on a balcony with other guests, staring westward at the impending arrival of a great sea storm. The next morning, an electrician found her dead on the back steps, a gunshot wound to the head, and that same gun lying by her side. The Deputy Coroner and his men took the body across the bay to San Diego, where she lay in state for at least two weeks. Thousands of Victorians—mostly women—came to view her embalmed and well-dressed body as if she were a dead princess or, more to the point, a fallen Victorian angel in the best sentimental traditions of the age. The story became an instant national sensation in the scandal-mongering Yellow Press. Daily telegraph dispatches crossed the wires with the latest breathless news, gossip, and innuendoes. What had she been up to? Why had she died? The mystery deepened as people started to realize she wasn't who she said she was. But who was she really?
Even as the police were looking for the illusory Dr. Anderson and a presumed Mr. Bernard, the corpse's identification shifted to that of Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Wyllie, a pregnant and troubled young beauty from Detroit.
That identification was clouded by the allegation that she was really a missing housemaid named Katie Logan from Los Angeles.
Briefly, she was thought to be a renter from Anaheim named Josie Brown. She was also thought to be the wife of a gambler named L. A. Bernard from Iowa.
Except Lizzie Wyllie, all of these women turned out to be fictions, and part of the pattern was that each had a mysterious doctor-brother orbiting unseen somewhere on the periphery, exerting some dark authoritative force that gave Kate Morgan's schemes some ephemeral credibility. Finally, the dead woman was reported to be Kate Morgan of Hamburg, Iowa, a shady lady of many false identities, unknown but dark secrets, and a pungent aura of sexual disgrace that electrified the Victorian imagination. The Kate Morgan legend persists to this day. Nobody has figured out why she came to this hotel, what really went on while she stayed here, or why she shot herself. Some even claim she was murdered.
I suggest in this book that the dead woman was not Kate Morgan but Lizzie Wyllie. If there is a ghost at the Hotel del Coronado, it is that of Lizzie Wyllie, who wants us to know it is she who is buried in a lonely grave up on Market Street, at that time outside town, in Mount Hope Cemetery. I think the mystery of why she appeared under a false name at this great resort was a blackmail plot gone horribly wrong. The owner of the hotel was the only man left standing financially after San Diego's terrible financial collapse of 1889—John Spreckels, heir to a fabulous Hawai'i sugar fortune, and one of the richest men in the United States. Kate Morgan was a ruthless schemer who dreamed up this blackmail scheme. She draped herself in false names with the same ease that Mata Hari tossed scarves about. Kate's target was Spreckels, the place of execution was his grand hotel, and her tool was a pregnant and desperate young Lizzie Wyllie. There were at least two men involved. One was John G. Longfield, Lizzie's lover and former book bindery foreman, a married man with several children, who had been fired from his job along with Lizzie and her sister May when word of their affair became known. The other was a shadowy figure, possibly Kate's husband Tom Morgan, or some lover of hers, who appears briefly in a bank in Hamburg to help deliver a letter of credit for the alleged wife of 'a friend' in California—a woman named Lottie A. Bernard who was staying at the great hotel halfway across the country in Coronado.
I do not quite have a smoking gun, like a blackmail note. In fact, the woman at the Del was seen urgently burning a stack of papers in her hotel room, the day before she killed herself—and those probably included such documents. What convinces me of my case is how my theory solves every one of the dozens of loose ends that have dangled for over a century. It is an old and brittle case—a true cold case, in police parlance—that begins to make sense when you put all these many little pieces together in a way that every last detail makes sense. There are, in fact, several bits of evidence that are so egregious that it is almost laughable not to think that (a) the dead woman was Lizzie; (b) Kate Morgan was the planner who almost literally got away with murder; (c) Spreckels was the victim of a blackmail plot gone bad; and (d) there were also two men involved. Those are highlights of the evidence I sort through in this book.
Also, to solve the case, I believe I am the first to analyze the situation in its global context. The key to the whole thing is John Spreckels. He owned the Hotel del Coronado. Though still based in San Francisco, he had bought or was buying up much of the financially devastated Greater San Diego, including Coronado. At the moment that Kate Morgan chose to strike with her ill-considered plan, John Spreckels was in Washington, D.C., lobbying with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress to prevent the overthrow of the Hawai'ian monarchy. The monarchy's fall would mean the loss of the Spreckels family's vast sugar plantations in the Hawai'ian kingdom, which the elder Claus Spreckels managed by controlling the monarchy and its royal cabinet appointments. Claus Spreckels was at that very same time doing desperate shuttle diplomacy between San Francisco and Honolulu. It is impossible to imagine that John Spreckels did not have an army of accountants, bankers, reporters, and other workers in San Diego to mind his affairs. That would include the local police and private security agents, possibly Pinkerton people. Spreckels owned the banks, the newspapers, all of Coronado, much of downtown San Diego, the light rail company, the utilities, the water flume, and anything else that could be bought and sold. Kate Morgan not only had an ill-conceived plan, but picked a bad time to put it into effect. As I will point out, there are moments when we can glimpse the dark hand of what I call the Spreckels Machine at work, shielding John Spreckels and his reputation at a time when his enemies would have been glad to smear him. As it would turn out, the corporate and missionary interests bent on ending Hawai'i's sovereignty—and getting it annexed as a U.S. territory—would win a huge victory less than a month after Lottie A. Bernard's death in Coronado. U.S. military and local militia deposed Queen Lili'uokalani at bayonet point on January 17, 1893, and a transitional government (followed by a short-lived republic ruled by Sanford Dole, cousin of the soon-to-be 'Pineapple King' James Dole) was established in preparation for annexation in 1897. On the hundredth anniversary of the annexation, in 1997, President Clinton and Congress would issue an official joint, bi-partisan apology to the Hawaiian people.
To fully understand what happened in the life and death of the 'Mysterious Stranger' at the Hotel del Coronado, it is necessary to understand both the local facts on the ground—outside the doors of the Hotel Del, and beyond what the official book covers—and the context, both national and global—in which those events took place.
And in the end, again, it comes down to the tragedy of Lizzie Wyllie—a beautiful woman, a fallen angel, a betrayed lover, and perhaps a grieving mother—who took her life when she saw no other recourse.
The Heritage Department’s book is filled with more questions and mysteries than answers. My book picks up where the Heritage Department’s book stops—at the border of speculation, where a weird scatter of myriad and ill-fitting facts lies like objects abandoned on the beach after a storm. With some daring, I thought my way through—from fact to puzzling fact, from mischievous clue to frustrating dead end, from loose end to logical trap—until I could finally make sense of it all. There was such a profusion of people’s names and place names that I ended up drawing charts and maps, on which I connected people and places with variously colored pencil lines. When I published the first edition of my book in mid-2007, I decided to release it as historical fiction. After much deliberation and more insights—like about the sponge and medicine bottle she ordered during her stay, of whose chilling implications I have more to say in this book—I am now confidently releasing this as nonfiction, true crime and history. It is the most comprehensive and coherent theory anyone has yet developed to explain a truly complex and tangled web of—yes—sex, violence, deceit, ruthless cunning, greed, and something approaching murder.
Some readers will find the ghost story more intriguing. Others will find that the ghost story pales in the shadow of an 1890s gaslamp true crime mystery that is contemporaneous with the world of Sherlock Holmes and Queen Victoria. Both realms will intrigue you.
There are actually two layers of conspiracy. The inner conspiracy (in which Kate Morgan was the driving force) stretch from Coronado to other cities around the U.S. We can begin organizing the endless profusion of named cities into several clusters of interest: Lake Ontario (Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, Grand Rapids); Iowa/Nebraska (Hamburg, Iowa); San Francisco (San Francisco, Hanford, Visalia); Los Angeles (Los Angeles, Orange, Anaheim); and of course San Diego (San Diego and Coronado).
Independent but relevant is the global conspiracy in which the Spreckels family played their historic and losing defense. Those tentacles of conspiracy (framing the smaller conspiracy at the Hotel del Coronado) reached around the globe, from Honolulu to London, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. They involved the last King and Queen of Hawai’i; a beautiful and tragic Crown Princess of Hawai’ian-Scottish origin; and indirectly the Empress of India herself, Queen Victoria, after whom Crown Princess Victoria Kai’ulani was named.
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