THIS IS the remarkable story of Mabel Tinley from Philadelphia, an 18-year-old girl with no Dutch background, who would love to become Dutch. No photograph of her has survived except for a gray rendering in an old newspaper. She was beautiful, it was said, well proportioned, but what stood out most were her eyes. Dick Roelofs fell in love with her, and she with him, because he was of Dutch descent.
Mother Tinley was strongly against it. The family was living hand to mouth, mom wanted a rich man for her daughter, and Dick (photo) was a penniless mailman. Mabel too wanted a rich man. Dutch Americans were wealthy and powerful, she had been told. She knew their names, the men of the day: Vanderbilt, Van Ness, Rockefeller, all Dutch-blooded. So she didn’t budge. Dick and Mabel eloped.
IT WAS the gold rush years, young men went west to dig for gold. Dick joined the rush, Mabel came with him and soon gave birth to a child there, Dick Jr. But it was high and cold and muddy in Colorado, no place for a curly young woman in beautiful dresses. As soon as she heard that her mother had died, she traveled back to collect the inheritance. It disappointed.
Mabel Roelofs changed her name. She became Louise Vermeule, blonded her hair, and moved into an expensive New York hotel until the manager demanded that she pay the bill, so she moved out and checked into another hotel a few blocks down the road. She did everything on credit and her beautiful eyes, including the jewelry, dresses and fur coats that stores delivered to her without collateral. By the time they came for their money, she had already left. And if that didn’t work, she would pay with sight drafts, money checks that were guaranteed by someone else. The name on the falsified check was Dick Roelofs in Colorado. He filed for divorce.
LOUISE Vermeule landed in prison and came out, a few months later, with a new identity, now as Mrs. John van Ness Roberts, born Catherine Stuyvesant. This time she joined the higher society, generals, foreign princes, judges, and politicians. Nobody asked her to prove who she said she was, because that was not done in those days around the turn of the previous century. She looked impressive enough, and she still had that seductive look. Men liked to stay overnight. Mabel-Louise-Catherine did not mind blackmailing them afterwards.
One day, inevitably, it all went awry, and again she had to appear in court. She wasn’t going to do that, though, one prison term was a bad enough experience. Mabel Roelofs took a dose of strychnine and died a painful death, 35 years old, broke.
Six years later, Dick Roelofs found gold in Colorado. From one day to the next he was a millionaire, moved to New York, and lived happily ever after, unmarried. His son Dick Jr. went to Harvard, became a Wall Street banker, and married a girl from the Rockefeller family. If only mom would have mustered a little more patience…
* The New York Journal and Advertiser of December 28, 1898 ran a story about the remarkable Mabel, with a painted illustration behind bars.
