Escape of the heart
Warden’s wife falls for cons, helps them flee
LOVE CAN make you do some crazy things, as we’ve seen with the case of the lady prison worker charged with helping free a pair of convicted killers from Dannemora. It’s happened more than once in recent history, but a weak woman succumbing to an insane infatuation is not a new phenomenon. One of the most spectacular instances of a lonely woman falling for a killer and busting him out of jail dates back to 1902.
Her name was Kate Soffel, wife of the warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh.
The object of her affection was Ed Biddle, 24, a career criminal and member of a group of thieves known as the Chloroform Gang, so named because of their method of disarming victims. Ed and his seven siblings were the children of a man who crossed the border from New York into Canada to escape conscription at the start of the Civil War, wrote Arthur Forrest in an early account of the case, “The Biddle Boys and Mrs. Soffel: The Great Pittsburgh Tragedy and Romance.” The father was a drunk and the children had to fend for themselves. For Ed and his brother John, that meant a life of crime.
Endowed with good looks and powerful magnetism, Ed made his way around the country, swindling and stealing, with John, the less charismatic of the two, tagging along. They spent time in jail and were run out of at least four towns before they landed in Pittsburgh sometime in 1901, where they were behind a string of robberies.
On April 12, the Biddles and three accomplices, two of them women, tried to use the chloroform technique on Thomas Kahney, a grocer in Mount Washington. Something went wrong and Kahney ended up shot dead. To this day, no one really knows which of the gang members actually pulled the trigger.
Police quickly zeroed in on the Biddles, well-known troublemakers, and attempted an arrest. The brothers responded with gunfire, killing Detective James Fitzpatrick with a bullet to the chest.
One of the gang members turned state’s evidence, and the others, the women, were quickly acquitted, although there was strong evidence that a feminine hand fired the shot that killed Kahney.
When the brothers came to trial in December 1901, women flocked to the courthouse, some carrying flowers and presents, all drawn by the legendary good looks of the deadly defendants.
When the Biddles were found guilty and sentenced to hang, their feminine admirers responded with tears and deafening shrieks.
Kate Soffel was no match for Ed Biddle’s strange power over the fair sex. She was considered homely, by one description having a “hook nose, buck teeth and a hunchback.” (In a 1984 movie about the escape, however, she was played by screen beauty Diane Keaton, and Ed Biddle was brought to life by a sexy, young Mel Gibson.)
She was also unhappy in her marriage, and physically and emotionally fragile, and had spent years in a sanitarium. When she recovered her strength, she passed her time visiting convicts, trying to rehabilitate them.
Armed with a Bible, Soffel came to save the souls of the condemned Biddle brothers. Ed saw her as an escape from the gallows and turned on the charm.
Soon the warden’s wife had joined the ranks of the brothers’ admirers, including nuns, who were desperate to save the brothers’ lives. She made tearful appeals to the governor on their behalf.
When that failed, she helped plan the break, tucking saw blades into the pages of the Bibles that she passed to them.
At night, the Biddles sawed away, disguising their work in daylight by keeping the bars in place with chewing gum.
On Jan. 30, 1902, Soffel borrowed a method the brothers had found so effective during their crime spree. She knocked out her husband with chloroform.
While she was making sure that the warden would be no trouble, Ed cried out to the guards for help, saying his brother, in an adjacent cell, was suffering from life-threatening cramps. The moment the guard came with medicine, Ed pushed out his sawed-off bars and overpowered him.
Revolvers, which had also been smuggled in by Soffel, kept the rest of the guards under control until the Biddles could lock them in the dungeon.
In stolen street clothes, the brothers strolled through the warden’s home and out the front door to freedom, the warden’s wife in tow.
On foot and by trolley, the trio made it out of Pittsburgh and into Perrysville, where they bought ham sandwiches and stole a one-horse sleigh. They continued their flight, a posse close on their tails.
Frail and unable to endure long stretches of travel through the cold, Soffel slowed them considerably, insisting on frequent rest stops.
Police caught up with the fugitives in Mount Chestnut, and both brothers were shot in a gun battle. They lingered long enough to deny killing anyone. A self-inflicted wound was the cause of Ed Biddle’s death.
As for their tragic accomplice, she also attempted suicide during the capture, but the bullet she aimed at her heart failed in its mission.
She recovered, and spent two years behind bars for aiding the escaped convicts. Her husband divorced her and most friends and family turned their backs.
Efforts to reenter society by changing her name and opening a dress shop fell flat, as did a stab at capitalizing on her notoriety with a play and a run at the vaudeville stage.
By 1909, she was dead, a victim of typhoid fever.