Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 60, No. 1, July 4, 1931

The Man Who Died Twice by William C. Davis

To die once is a misfortune; to die twice is a miracle. The ex-confidence man who revealed to me this grimly humorous chapter out of his life, insists that he is the only man who has died twice and made money both times.

His first death followed a deep vermilion spree in Little Rock, Arkansas. His family had literally thrown him out of the house, and he was doing his best to drown his sorrow. A young scion of a Virginia family swimming in tobacco money was suffering from a similar desire in the same city. The two met.

They got to comparing notes and holding post-mortems on happiness and contentment, when the young scion — Muller, we’ll call him — proposed a novel stunt.

“Suppose we send telegrams to our respective and revered families,” he suggested, “to find out how we stand. Judging from what you tell me, you are in Dutch with yours. I’m in the same position with mine. None of our parents seems to care anything about us living; let’s find out how they like us dead.”

The following telegram was framed, a copy being sent the father of each, over the signature of “O’Connor, coroner”:

Having sent the wires, each took a train for his respective home, the confidence man — whom we’ll call Wesley — to Huntsville, Alabama, and Muller to a town in Virginia.

Wesley, who was very drunk when he stepped off the train at Huntsville, never dreamed that his death would be accorded such a demonstration. At least two hundred girls from his father’s college, a score of teachers also, half a hundred boys and girls of his own age and set, over a hundred carriages of prominent citizens, and two heavily laden wagons of floral tokens were there at the station to greet his coffin.

As Wesley climbed heavily down the train steps, there rose a sudden gasp of amazement; or it might have been chagrin. Wesley’s mother promptly fainted. His father registered indignation, put his wife into a carriage and drove home, leaving his “dead” son to attend to whatever obsequies might seem meet.

Most of the crowd faded silently away, though naturally many gathered around Wesley to inquire what it was all about.

“Well,” he explained, answering numerous queries, “I had sent a good many letters and telegrams home without receiving any answers. I decided that nobody cared for me living, so I thought I would see if my death would change their attitude.”

It did. The morning paper — the Mercury, had come out with an article headed “Requiescat in Pace.” The condolences of the journal were extended the bereaved parents. As there was little of good to say about the “deceased,” his record for chicanery being pretty well known, the paper did the next best thing. It spoke highly of the bereft parents.

However, everything considered, the young scamp had been treated with lavish charity.

For a week he remained at the hotel when his mother drove up and asked him to come home. His father was in the house when he walked in with his mother, but the old man treated him with scant consideration. Late that night the boy overheard his father say to his mother:

“The young rascal never told any lie in that telegram. He merely wired that his body would be here on such and such a train. And sure enough it was, though not in the form we expected.”

And then he laughed so heartily over the situation that Wesley began to think the storm clouds had dispersed, and by morning had summoned up enough courage to invade his father’s den, hoping to touch him for a few dollars. But the old man ordered him out of the house, and told him never to return.

How his friend Muller fared he never heard. Wesley’s second death came about in this fashion a few years later:

He was in New York, and having just been handed a suspended sentence in a petty jam, was broke. He wired home for fifty dollars, stating that he had been hurt in an accident and needed the money for medical attention. It happened that a friend of the family was visiting the family home at the time, and he promptly heaved a monkey wrench into the machinery by informing Wesley’s father that all the medical attention needed could be had at the New York free hospitals. So — “Go to a hospital,” was the curt reply in a wire.

Desperately in need of cash, Wesley got a doctor friend in New York to send this wire:

No answer. The following day Wesley had this wire sent:

This, apparently, made the family’s New York friend think there might be some truth in the young man’s reported illness, for he wired a mutual friend for corroboration. The friend made inquiries, and Wesley explained the situation. This wire resulted:

“Bury him there,” came the answer with unwonted rapidity, accompanied by $250.

It got around his home town that the boy had died of an accident, and once again he became the subject of sorrowing friends of his father. Hundreds of floral tokens arrived at the family home, and an obituary notice appeared in the Sun of Jackson, to which city the family had moved following their son’s first “taking off.”

When Wesley was handed the $250, he sent his father the following wire: