In the Bob Ford – Jesse James photo hoax formerly written about HERE, a cabal of hoaxers assembled to perpetrate a case of identity theft, at the expense of factual history and in violation of the identity of the Jesse James family.
Through an ample misapplication of fantasy, imagination, slight of eye magic, chicanery, and purposely deceitful tabloid and broadcast journalism, the cabal sought to beguile, hoodwink, and defraud an unknowledgeable audience for the purpose of promoting fake imagery of Bob Ford and Jesse James and for reaping an imaginary million dollar windfall.
THE CABAL OF HOAXERS
Sandy Mills, owner of the fraudulent tintype
Lois Gibson, a drawing artist who claims to have authenticated the bogus image
Dylan Baddour, writer for the Houston Chronicle. He wrote two deceptive stories about the hoax. When presented with factual information and the objection of the James family, Dylan Baddour cowardly vanished into silence.
Houston Chronicle, that broke the story. The Chroncle published two features about the claimed image. Absent from both stories was any reference to factual balance known to counteract the fraudulent claim.
Sarah Laskow of Atlas Obscura. Laskow promoted the fraud by cutting and pasting elements of the Houston Chronicle story, with complete disrgard for facts made known to her.
Atlas Obscura. The web publication replicated the Houston Chronicle story as a curiosity and ephemera.
Arden Dier of Newser. Dier may not be an actual person at all. No personal information about her can be found.
Newser, another news aggregator. In their motto, Newser betrays any pretense to factual journalism. “Read Less Know More.”
Ollie Gillman, a tabloid tattler of the UK’s Daily Mail. Gillman possesses no serious journalism credentials. With a pickpocket’s penchant for stealing, Gillman appropriates the writing of others, presenting it as his own.
News reader & TV personality Jane McCarthy of KREM TV in Spokane, Washington. McCarthy read KREM’s fraudulent story on air. When alerted to the fraud in her story, Jane McCarthy felt forced to defer the James family’s complaint to her new director.
Noah Cooper, news director at KREM-TV in Spokane, Washington. Cooper is a product UK style of tabloid journalism. Cooper stands by his lie that was broadcast by news reader Jane McCarthy that identified Eric F. James as a descendant of Jesse James. Fraud that he is, Noah Cooper simply cannot prove his story, let alone address all the other misinformation in this story broadcast by his station.
KREM-2 in Spokane, Washington, broadcast the hoax . In their story , Sandy Mills and her boyfriend made clear their intention to authenticate Mills’ photo, despite all disbelievers.
Outlier from Indonesia, Erik Pounamra Poutra implanted the hoax with Treeangle.co.id for dissemination worldwide.
Treeangle.co.id claims to be a “reliable news portal.” In this instant, the website is simply a hoaxer with worldwide reach.
Novelist Freda Cruse Harbison attached herself to the hoax. Harbison piggybacked on the second feature published by the Houston Chronicle to promote her fictional book about Frank James.
Shelley Hazen, a news aggregator for Insquisitr. Her focus is to produce items”that are targeted to popular Bing and Google web searches utilizing standard SEO practices.” Factual content is irrelevant to her.
Inquisitr is an online news aggregator. It is dedicated to “find the news you want” regardless of truth, fact, or relationship to reality.
Sandy Mills enlisted RR Auction to further authenticate her fake image of Bob Ford & Jesse James.
Executive Vice-President of RR Auction is Bobby Livingston. In news reports, Livingston judiciously sidestepped the question of Sandy Mills’ photo to say if the image was authentic the photo might fetch a handsome sum. Bobby Livingston is under indictment in a lawsuit for fraud, misrepresentation, and presenting fake historical images as authentic.
The principal motivating forces behind the Bob Ford-Jesse James photo hoax is without doubt Sandy Mills, Lois Gibson, Dylan Baddour, and the Houston Chronicle. Whether the others who followed were witting or unwitting accomplices, each as writer and publishers had a fiduciary duty to investigate and report the truth of the opposite side of Sandy Mills’ story. They did not. But others did.
Among the responsible writers and publishers, the Canadian Broadcasting Company dropped the story from publication altogether. CNN’s Michael Pearson questioned the image’s authenticity and claim. Christopher Klein who writes for A&E’s History rewrote his initial story to present the James family’s objection and argument. Elleda Wilson who picked up the story for the Daily Astorian wrote a followup story when alerted about the hoax.
Without doubt, calling out the hoaxers of the Bob Ford-Jesse James fake photo fraud, will not put an end to the constant flow of images claimed to be Jesse James. Within the period of the present hoax, two more claimed images arrived at Stray Leaves, claiming to be authentic images of Jesse James.
UPDATE: Jan 12, 2017
Robb Burley, owner of Burley Auction Gallery
The next stage in the Bob Ford-Jesse James photo hoax has been announced by Burley Auction Gallery. The auction house and its owner Robb Burley have been added to the cabal of hoaxers engaged in this act of identity theft.
In addition, we also are adding to the hoax cabal, the website PRWeband article author Nikki Thibodeaux. The specific identity of Thibodeaux formerly was unknown until Robb Burley provided an actual photo of her. Thibodeaux is an associate of Robb Burley.
Stray Leaves welcomes black families with the surname of James to submit their Y-chromosome DNA results for comparison and inclusion in our family. Our James family already includes the discovery of black families and even an indigenous Aboriginal family. Of particular interest are any black families whose ancestry came through the Forks of the Road slave market in Natchez, MS, black enslaved of Choctaw and Chickasaw families, and black people with ancestry who came through the Cochran slave market of Alexandria, VA. We are sure there are more of us yet to find. www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2021/02/19/black-families-slavery-dna-oral-histories/4094494001/?f...... See MoreSee Less
Theater advertisements for plays appeared like this in newspapers. This ad for Bloomer Girl appeared in August of 1845. Bloomer Girl was the product of Daniel Lewis James Jr. and principally his wife Lilith Stanward. The following excerpt about them appears in JJSL:
Written against the backdrop of World War II, when blacks were moving out of the South into an industrial workforce, and women also were moving out of the home into the workplace, Bloomer Girl is set in the pre-Civil War era, interweaving themes of black and female equality, war and peace, and politics. The play’s principal character, Dolly, is based upon the inventor of the bloomer, Amelia Bloomer, a contemporary of an acquaintance of Vassie James and Susan B. Anthony. As a fighter in the suffragette movement for women’s rights, Bloomer advocated, “Get rid of those heavy hoop skirts; wear bloomers like men; let’s get pants; let’s be their equal.” In the play, Dolly politicks for gender equality, as her rebellious niece Evelina politicks her suitor, a Southern slaveholding aristocrat, for racial equality. As the play’s librettist, Yip Harburg, stated, Bloomer Girl was about “the indivisibility of human freedom.”
Bloomer Girl opened on Broadway on October 5, 1944. Dan (Daniel Lewis James) insisted Lilith’s (Dan’s wife) name come first in the show’s credits. The play was an instant hit, lasting 654 performances. Dan remained modest about the show’s success, considering his contribution a failure. “...I seem not to have given full credit to my collaborators on the 1944 musical comedy Bloomer Girl...The facts, in brief, are as follows: the originator of the story idea from which the musical grew was my wife, Lilith James, who charmingly chose the perversities of Fashion to dramatize the early struggles of the Women's Rights movement. She also developed the principal characters. I joined her in writing a first draft of the libretto. It failed to satisfy our lyricist, E. Y. Harburg, and Harold Arlen, the composer. It also failed to satisfy us. An impasse developed at which point all agreed to call in the team of Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy who were experienced writers in the field of musical comedy. They reworked the material to the satisfaction of everyone but Lilith and myself, who had hoped to invade Gilbert & Sullivan territory, with what we thought was a light-hearted paradoxical look at history. What I took for a personal artistic failure for which I blamed, first of all, myself, went on to become a lavish entertainment which played on Broadway for eighteen months and has since often been revived in summer theater. If I was not delighted, audiences certainly were and full credit for this should be given to Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy (now deceased) without whom the production would never have taken place...” ... See MoreSee Less
YOU CAN'T HELP BUT WONDER...What might have happened if Alan Pinkerton assigned Kate Warne to track and capture Jesse James?In 1856, twenty-three-year-old widow Kate Warne walked into the office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago, announcing that she had seen the company’s ad and wanted to apply for the job. “Sorry,” Alan Pinkerton told her, “but we don’t have any clerical staff openings. We’re looking to hire a new detective.” Pinkerton would later describe Warne as having a “commanding” presence that morning. “I’m here to apply for the detective position,” she replied. Taken aback, Pinkerton explained to Kate that women aren’t suited to be detectives, and then Kate forcefully and eloquently made her case. Women have access to places male detectives can’t go, she noted, and women can befriend the wives and girlfriends of suspects and gain information from them. Finally, she observed, men tend to become braggards around women who encourage boasting, and women have keen eyes for detail. Pinkerton was convinced. He hired her.
Shortly after Warne was hired, she proved her value as a detective by befriending the wife of a suspect in a major embezzlement case. Warne not only gained the information necessary to arrest and convict the thief, but she discovered where the embezzled funds were hidden and was able to recover nearly all of them. On another case she extracted a confession from a suspect while posing as a fortune teller. Pinkerton was so impressed that he created a Women’s Detective Bureau within his agency and made Kate Warne the leader of it.
In her most famous case, Kate Warne may have changed the history of the world. In February 1861 the president of the Wilmington and Baltimore railroad hired Pinkerton to investigate rumors of threats against the railroad. Looking into it, Pinkerton soon found evidence of something much more dangerous—a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln before his inauguration. Pinkerton assigned Kate Warne to the case. Taking the persona of “Mrs. Cherry,” a Southern woman visiting Baltimore, she managed to infiltrate the secessionist movement there and learn the specific details of the scheme—a plan to kill the president-elect as he passed through Baltimore on the way to Washington.
Pinkerton relayed the threat to Lincoln and urged him to travel to Washington from a different direction. But Lincoln was unwilling to cancel the speaking engagements he had agreed to along the way, so Pinkerton resorted to a Plan B. For the trip through Baltimore Lincoln was secretly transferred to a different train and disguised as an invalid. Posing as his caregiver was Kate Warne. When she afterwards described her sleepless night with the President, Pinkerton was inspired to adopt the motto that became famously associated with his agency: “We never sleep.” The details Kate Warne had uncovered had enabled the “Baltimore Plot” to be thwarted.
During the Civil War, Warne and the female detectives under her supervision conducted numerous risky espionage missions, with Warne’s charm and her skill at impersonating a Confederate sympathizer giving her access to valuable intelligence. After the war she continued to handle dangerous undercover assignments on high-profile cases, while at the same time overseeing the agency’s growing staff of female detectives.
Kate Warne, America’s first female detective, died of pneumonia at age 34, on January 28, 1868, one hundred fifty-three years ago today. “She never let me down,” Pinkerton said of one of his most trusted and valuable agents. She was buried in the Pinkerton family plot in Chicago. ... See MoreSee Less