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By Root 801 0

against her life. She claimed to have been approached in New Bedford by a drunk who demanded $100,000 or would “send me out of town feet foremost as my father had been,” and outside the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn, by a man who later shot and killed a bank president. “If he had acted in the same way toward me I would have driven a hatpin through his brain,” she said. To this she added perhaps her oddest claim to date: that Edward, six weeks dead, had been murdered. “I am satisfied that he was given an overdose of mercury,” she said. Just why someone would want to kill a dying eighty-one-year-old man with hardly any money under his own control, she didn’t say, other than to suggest that “people wanted him out of the way.”

Editorial pages took a dim view of Hetty’s permit. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which had always been among the kinder newspapers in its treatment of Hetty in the past, suggested on May 9 that her permit was symptomatic of an overgunned and slightly screwy city. “The unlawful carrying of pistols, which resulted yesterday in one murder and two suicides in this city, is winked at by the authorities,” the Eagle stated. “If there is a form of penalty for carrying them, there is perfect freedom to buy and sell them, and any thug or burglar can arm himself as heavily as he pleases. Mrs. Hetty Green … has applied for and obtained permission to carry a revolver, with which to shoot lawyers who may become obstreperous in her presence, or to kill people who suspect her of carrying money and jewelry about the streets. The permit should not have been issued.

“Mrs. Green is well on in years. She is suspicious and hostile. Her attitude toward the world is that it is envious and resentful, and will try to take away the wealth she hoards so earnestly. It is the wrong attitude, of course, for the world regards her merely as a curiosity. But so thinking, she is liable to put a false construction on the words and actions of her fellow creatures, and the impulse to shoot may become ungovernable.”

The editorial concluded: “This woman who believes that her father was killed and her daughter injured by lawyers, yet who constantly resorts to the law and so wearies the patience of courts that she must be regarded as a confirmed litigant, is not the kind of person who should be intrusted [sic] with firearms.”

The Times took a similar, if somewhat more lighthearted tone, with an editorial ending: “The applicant did not set forth that she was an expert markswoman, although she left no doubt of her determination to use upon suitable occasions the weapon which she asked to be allowed to wear. It is rather to be hoped that the Sergeant, before he issued the permit, satisfied himself that the pistol would not go off.”

Edward’s death was followed in May 1903 by the death of George G. Williams, the courtly president of Chemical National Bank, one of the few men of finance whom Hetty liked and trusted, and who liked and understood her. He died of a heart disease at his home on West Fifty-eighth Street. He was seventy-seven. The death of Edward and Williams left her feeling increasingly isolated. Hetty had always feared that people were after her money or her life.

She had first vented the fears publicly during the Barling fight nearly a decade earlier. A Times reporter had followed her down Pine Street in December of 1894 and waited for her to finish doing business in a bank. He asked her plainly if the rumors were true, that she feared for her life.

“Yes, it is true,” Hetty said.

“Have you ever been approached or threatened in the street?”

“Yes, many times,” she said. “I am no enemy of the poor people—the people one ordinarily meets in the streets. They would never attack me. I could go everywhere unmolested, at all times, if it were not for the devices of people who have an interest in annoying me.”

These people, she made no secret, were “the hostile executor and trustees of my father’s estate.”

She added, “The newspapers have printed no end of stuff about my going around with a little black bag with a million or two in cash and