The Case of the Camera-Shy Thief (1903)

Harry Grayson, who made his living robbing post offices, didn’t like to have his picture taken. Maybe he worried the camera would steal his soul, or perhaps he feared his likeness would become a fixture in rogue’s galleries, and the camera would literally steal his freedom. Whatever motivated this phobia, he didn’t want to pose for the police photographer in late December 1902 following his arrest for robbing the Greene post office in Kansas.

“Harry Grayson,” wrote a correspondent for the Topeka State Journal on December 19, 1902, “had his picture taken yesterday afternoon under protest. He was loth [sic] to part with his likeness, and had to be dragged out of his cell by force. He wore his most unpleasant expression when the shutter was snapped, and the picture is not expected to be one of which Grayson will be proud.”

Grayson and accomplices William Burns and Frank Weaver—described as “Old crooks” by the Topeka State Journal—dynamited a safe at the Green post office on Halloween, 1902. After pilfering $400 worth of stamps (later reduced to $135 in some news accounts), they made their getaway on a railroad handcar. But they didn’t get far. Post office inspector Slusser from Denver, accompanied by Clay County, Kansas, Sheriff Need, collared the trio of petit thieves at Clay Center.

Need, the tough-as-nails lawman from Clay Center, was a genuine wild-west lawman with plenty of experience tracking fugitives. In March 1903, he tracked cop-killer William Hoxi to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where Hoxi lived under the alias Joe Manley. Four years earlier, Hoxi broke out of the Clay County jail while awaiting trial for the murder of Sheriff Ed Coleman.

While Hoxi sweated out the days awaiting trial (he was later convicted of manslaughter), Grayson faced a judge for post office robbery. Found guilty in late May 1903, thirty-three-year-old Grayson was sentenced to five years of hard labor at Ft. Leavenworth penitentiary.

Meanwhile, his likeness, snapped by a police photographer in December 1902, would be affixed to a card approximately the size of a 3” x 5” index card containing information about his crime and punishment. Duplicates would be made and sent to various police departments. Detectives would place the card in a cabinet, or “rogues gallery,” and use it as a reference. If anyone matching Grayson’s description committed a crime, they would match the likeness of the suspect to the photograph of Grayson. If he did commit another crime, then, the camera would have literally taken his freedom.

The camera-shy thief would be released from Leavenworth in 1907.*

*A November 23, 1903, news account detailing the participants in the infamous 1901 Leavenworth “mutiny,” which led to the murder of a guard, mentioned a “Harry Grayson” who was sentenced from Vinita in 1899, but since Harry Grayson first entered Leavenworth in 1903 from Salina, Kansas, this is a mistake; the “Harry Grayson” who participated in the mutiny and who subsequently received an additional three years to his sentence was in fact David Grayson, sentenced in Vinita in 1899 on a conviction for larceny. This second sentence of three years, entered after David Grayson pled guilty to manslaughter, accounts for his second Leavenworth inmate number. Both David and Harry were incarcerated at the time of the article; the writer simply mixed up the two!