'Pretty Girl Charged With Clever Swindle': The Women in NYPD's Early Mugshot Files
- Jul 12
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 13
In June 1908, a young Austrian woman named Sadie Schoen was hauled into a New York City police station and photographed twice, once facing the camera, once in profile. The charge on her card read simply: swindling. Her case is one of the ones that gave a later exhibition of these photographs its title, "Pretty Girl Charged With Clever Swindle," a phrase that says as much about how the era's press covered women's crime as it does about Schoen herself. Beyond that card, history doesn't remember much else about her, a name, two photographs, and a nickname she never chose. She's one of thousands of women who passed through the same process in early 20th century New York, and their surviving photo cards are some of the strangest, most oddly intimate documents the city's police department ever produced.
The Frenchman Who Invented the Mugshot
None of this existed in any organised way until a bored Parisian police clerk got fed up with his job. Alphonse Bertillon spent his days filing photographs of suspects with no consistent method behind any of it, no way to search by anything other than a name that criminals lied about constantly. In 1879, he proposed a system built around precise physical measurement: the length of the head, the width of the head, the length of the middle finger, the length of the left foot, and the span of the forearm from elbow to fingertip. Combined with eye colour, scars, and two standardised photographs, front and profile, it created something close to a searchable database, decades before anyone had a machine to search it with.
Paris adopted it in 1882. New York sent a clerk named Charles Baker to go study it firsthand, and by 1897 the NYPD had built its own photo studio and trained officers to run it exactly to Bertillon's specifications. That's the origin of the front-and-profile format everyone still recognises as a mugshot today, even though the measuring and filing behind it has completely disappeared.
The Women on the Cards
The NYC Municipal Archives holds thousands of these Bertillon cards, and the surviving ones for women tell a genuinely strange cross section of what got a woman arrested in early 1900s New York. Lillie Bates, 23 and tattooed, was booked in 1909 for what police called a "badger," a con where a woman lured a man into a compromising situation so an accomplice could burst in and extort him for money to keep quiet. Esther Ginsberg, only 17, was arrested the following year for "keeping a disorderly house," the formal legal phrase of the era for running a brothel. Maggie Moore, a 35 year old Irish woman standing barely five feet tall, was booked for malicious mischief in 1910, her file describing a face already weathered well beyond her years.
Maggie Moore, August 1910. Crime: Mischief: Sadie Schoen, June 1908. Crime: Swindling Catherine Brenzel. March 1914. Crime: Rape Fannie Ecoff. January 1908 Crime: Fagin Esther Ginsberg Jan 1910. Crime: Disorderly House Lillie Bates, June 1909. Crime: Badger
Then there's Lena Keller, a German midwife charged with homicide, a combination that meant one thing to anyone reading a police blotter at the time: an illegal abortion that had gone wrong. Midwives occupied a strange legal grey zone in this period, often the only accessible option for women who couldn't or wouldn't go through a doctor, and Keller's card is a rare surviving trace of how the law actually enforced that grey zone when something went badly.
Not every card ends in a mugshot at all. Isabella Ziegler's surviving photograph was taken in July 1920, not at her arrest for grand larceny but on the day of her release from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a very different kind of institutional photograph, one meant to mark an ending rather than a beginning.
Sarah Palmer, 1947. Crime: Homicide Alleyne Brothers, April 1934 Crime: Assault
The Group Photo Nobody Wanted to Be In
By 1918, the NYPD had added a new format for repeat offenders and people charged with serious crimes: the stand-up, a group mugshot taken when multiple known associates were arrested together. The surviving Brooklyn stand-up cards are a strange little time capsule of organised petty crime across the city's boroughs. In 1933, Margie Goldberg, Sarah Klein, and Anna Miller were photographed together after a shoplifting arrest. In 1934, the Alleyne brothers were booked jointly on a felony assault charge involving a knife. And in 1947, Sarah Elizabeth Palmer was photographed alone on a homicide charge, one of the more serious entries in a collection otherwise dominated by theft and assault. If you find this kind of institutional record-keeping as unsettling as it is fascinating, the Victorian children jailed for petty crimes in the 1870s is a good, equally uncomfortable companion read.
The Twins Who Broke the System
Bertillon's method had one enormous flaw baked into it from the start, and it took a genuine coincidence to expose it. In 1903, a man named Will West was booked into Leavenworth prison in Kansas and measured according to the Bertillon system. His measurements matched, almost exactly, a card already on file for a man named William West, who was serving a life sentence for murder in the very same prison. Guards assumed a clerical mix up. It wasn't one. Both men were real, both were currently incarcerated, and despite the name being nearly identical, there was never any proof they were related at all. The only thing that actually told them apart in the end was fingerprinting, a technology that had been quietly gaining ground for years and was about to make Bertillon's entire measurement system obsolete.
New York phased out Bertillon measurements by 1920, though the photographs stuck around, because fingerprints, unlike carefully measured forearms, genuinely couldn't be shared between two different people. The mugshot survived. The pseudoscience underneath it didn't.
Claire Odds. 1945. Crime: Assault Bessie Globollo, 1947. Crime: Grand Larcency Margie Goldberg, Sarah Klein, Anna Miller, 1933. Crime: Shoplifting
What's Left of Them
Most of these women exist today as nothing more than a name, a date, a charge, and two small photographs staring back at a camera they had no say in facing. The NYC Municipal Archives eventually digitised a portion of its roughly 8,600 surviving Bertillon cards and put a selection on public display in 2016, giving names like Sadie Schoen and Lillie Bates an audience more than a century after the fact. It's an uneasy kind of fame, the exact opposite of what a newspaper headline calling you a "pretty girl" with a "clever swindle" was probably going for at the time. For more on how this same photographic instinct played out on the other side of the Atlantic, the Edwardian women forced to pose for mugshots is worth a look too.
