This month: Espionage on 3 continents, Madeline Webb remembered, and The Case of the Missing Sentence.

Agents in the Field

The Gestapo called her the “White Mouse” for her ability to evade capture while leading escape networks for Allied airmen.

By 1943, she was the most wanted person in France with a 5 million-franc price on her head. After a harrowing escape over the Pyrenees, she trained with British Intelligence and jumped back into the fray to coordinate airdrops of weapons and cash.

Her endurance was legendary; she once cycled 500 kilometers through enemy territory in just 72 hours to reestablish radio contact with London.

It was only after the liberation that Wake learned the true cost of her service: the Germans had executed her husband, Henri Fiocca, because he refused to betray her location. Australia’s most-decorated WWII servicewoman died in 2011, three weeks shy of her 99th birthday.

Captured by the Gestapo in Hungary, Skarbek escaped by biting her tongue until it bled and convincing her captors she was dying of tuberculosis—a trick later taught to other agents.

Operating under the name Christine Granville, she carried out some of the war’s most daring missions. In southern France, she persuaded a Gestapo officer to defect and secured the release of two British agents who were to be executed that day.

Peace brought little reward. Struggling to find work in London, she took jobs as a clerk, waitress, and cruise ship steward.

In 1952, a rejected admirer stalked her - and stabbed her to death. He was hanged later that year.

Spies and Dolls

Behind the scenes, Zheng had joined the resistance.

In 1939, she was assigned to get close to Ding Mocun, the security chief of the puppet government, and help set up his assassination. Ding survived two attempts and ordered her arrest.

Zheng refused an offer to switch sides and was executed in February 1940. She was 22.

Investigators traced the letters back to customers of a New York doll shop owned by Dickinson—and discovered the signatures had been forged.

In fact, Dickinson herself had written them. The “dolls” were U.S. Navy ships, and the letters reported on their condition and West Coast defenses.

Unbeknownst to her, the Japanese had already shut down the Buenos Aires address she was using. The letters came back – and exposed her.

Facing espionage charges that could have meant death, Dickinson pleaded guilty to violating wartime censorship laws. She spent seven years in prison.

After the War: Atomic Secrets

From the Case Files

Madeline Webb came into my life in the late 1960s.

She walked into the News-Press in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and asked to read the stories about her 1942 New York City murder trial.

I knew who Madeline was. Almost everyone in Stillwater did. She was the hometown beauty who fell in love with the wrong man and became entangled in the sensational killing of a wealthy Polish refugee, Susie Reich.

Her lover, Eddie Shonbrun, went to the electric chair. Madeline received a life sentence and was sent to the women’s prison at Bedford Hills, 40 miles from New York City.

After 25 years, her sentence was commuted by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. She liked to say it was “the best Christmas present ever.”

When she returned to Stillwater, her family shunned her. She found a place instead with a telephone operator named Jonita Milligan, who had followed her case and offered to help. The two eventually became a couple.

The day she came to the News-Press, Madeline wore a dark pleated skirt, a loud print blouse, and black high heels in need of repair. Her eyebrows were carefully penciled, her makeup heavy, her lipstick bright red.

Alice Church, who presided over the paper’s “morgue,” brought her to my office. Madeline asked to see everything the paper had written about her. Mrs. Church climbed the stairs to the attic and returned with envelopes stuffed with yellowed clippings.

Madeline sat down and began to read. She went through every story. Some she read twice. Now and then she stopped, as if the memories were too much.

Finally she said, “I could have written some of these stories so much better myself.”

I didn’t comment.

There was much more to her story than those clippings revealed. See the full piece →

Case of the Missing Sentence

The true crime book club selection for March at Story on the Square in McDonough, Georgia, was In Cold Blood—and I couldn’t have been more pleased. Reading and discussing Truman Capote’s pioneering “non-fiction novel” brought up a couple of memories.

The first took me back to summer 1966 and trips to the municipal pool. Every towel seemed weighted down by the fat, just-released paperback. I didn’t read it then—I wasn’t quite 10—but I saw the movie in my teens.

The second memory involved Bill Brown, director of Student Publications at Kansas State University when I wrote for the Collegian in the 1970s. When the Clutter killings occurred, Brown was editor of the Garden City Telegram, just down the road from the Clutter farm.

Brown disliked In Cold Blood and its author. He thought Capote invented scenes and dialogue and focused too much on the killers. Capote, in turn, didn’t much like Brown. Legend at the Collegian held that Capote described him as “plain as his name: a thin, rumpled man with mud-colored eyes and a beige complexion.”

That was the phrase I had been eager to see myself. But it never appears in the book. Brown is mentioned only once, as editor of the Telegram and one of “Garden City’s two professional town criers.”

A little digging revealed the phrase appears in Capote’s 1966 New Yorker essay, “Ghosts in the Sunlight: The Filming of In Cold Blood.” Capote wrote that Brown fought to keep the “Hollywood people” out of Garden City and called him “the only genuine enemy I made there.”

The association of "plain as his name" with the book is so strong that it even appeared in Brown’s 2016 obituary in the Wichita Eagle. Brown, a stickler for truth, would have disapproved.

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