The Lady in Black, and the Mysterious Headstone of XYZ

 


In a quiet corner of the Fountain Hill Cemetery in Deep River Connecticut is a tombstone sparse in details except for three letters, “XYZ.”

In 1899, police learned that some hoods were planning to rob the very wealthy Deep River Savings Bank. The town was flush with prosperity from the ivory trade. Police informed the bank managers who hired a night watchman named Harry D. Tyler.

As fate should have it, in the early morning hours of December 13, 1899, between 1 and 1:30 a.m., four men attempted to break into the bank. Tyler fired a blast from his shotgun, killing one of the men as he entered a window. It was a direct hit in the head. The other fled. The man, unidentified, was buried in town with a grave marked, for unknown reasons, only with the letters XYZ.

To this day, no one knows who he was. However, and this is mostly legend, every year a woman dressed completely in black visited the grave until the late 1940s when she no longer returned. According to legend, she took the train into the town and took the train out again and spoke to no one.

At one point, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a good that was amazingly good at what they did duet their street contacts, reported that the dead man was a bank robber named

Frank Ellis (AKA Frank Howard and Tommy Brent) but that had never been confirmed.

But there is some scant evidence, based on a post card found on his person, that the dead man was F. B. King, Formerly of Albany New York. The sender, a bartender in New York’s tenderloin district named T. J. Farley, said that the dead man description matched F.B. King. King, he said, had been a brakeman on the Boston and Albany railroad. The state police assumed, based on the high grade of burglary tools near the body, that the dead man was a professional thief.