Sept. 6, 1957

Los Angeles

Kindly, mild-mannered and quiet, The Traveler, 51, was the last person
anyone would suspect of a crime. He seemed more like a Sunday school
teacher, which he had been, or perhaps an itinerant newsman. In fact,
he  had worked at newspapers throughout the West, including jobs as a
reporter, rewrite man and copy editor in Oklahoma City and Salt Lake
City.

But beneath that disarming facade, The Traveler was a bitter,
vindictive man. Wrongly accused of writing a bad check in 1942, "he
determined to revenge himself by becoming a forger," The Times said.
For the next 15 years, The Traveler crisscrossed the nation, writing
half a million dollars in bad checks in nearly every state before being
arrested in Middleburg Heights, Ohio.

"Why, he didn’t look like he had that much intelligence," Fay Branch
told detectives.  "I thought he was a real nice guy but a complete
failure in life."

Being nondescript worked to The Traveler’s advantage and he used a
simple but effective method: He always stayed 20 miles from where he
committed his crimes and earned a victim’s trust by paying cash for a
few minor items before making a larger purchase with a bad check for
$65 to $85 ($465.74-$609.05 USD 2006).

A success at crime, The Traveler was hopeless in the business world. At
times, he tried to go straight and ran a hamburger stand and prospected
for uranium, but when those efforts failed, he returned to easy money.
"I was well aware of what I was doing, but it was a conflict between my
conscience and expediency," he said.

"I wasn’t particularly smart. It was just that merchants are so
careless. Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley are among the
toughest places in the country to cash phony checks. Cooperation
between police and merchants is very close," he said.

The Traveler perhaps got careless in Oregon, where Lane County
sheriff’s investigators noticed him staying in a motel about the time a
number of bad checks were reported. Oregon investigators sent his
license plate number to the LAPD for further inquiry.

Although The Traveler wasn’t home, information led Sgt. D.R. Sheldon of
the Valley Division to The Traveler’s storage sheds in Sylmar. In a
cache that eventually measured 6 feet high, 6 feet wide and 100 feet
long, police found photo equipment, canned good, appliances, record
albums, electric guitars and scores of road maps, The Times said, along
with a copy of "How to Use Your Imagination to Make Money." The LAPD
also found information indicating that The Traveler was in Ohio.

The Traveler was convicted in Los Angeles and sentenced to one to 14 years in prison.
Although he used 350 aliases, police said, his real name was Charles
Robert Speedie.

We don’t know what happened after that. The Social Security Death Index
shows that Speedie died June 4, 1988, in Jessup, Ga. But I wonder: Did
he retire or was he at the federal prison there?

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