Alexander Keith Jr.

Alexander 'Sandy' Keith Jr. (1827 – December 18, 1875) was a Scottish-born Canadian smuggler and mass murderer. During the American Civil War, he was employed by the Confederate States of America as a spy, and after the war attempted to use a time bomb to destroy the merchant ship Mosel for insurance fraud in 1875, resulting in the deaths of 81 bystanders and his own suicide.

This article is about a murderer. For other uses, see Alexander Keith (disambiguation).
An illustration of Keith

Biography

Keith was born in 1827 in Caithness, Scotland, immigrating to Halifax, Nova Scotia when he was a small boy. The nephew of Halifax businessman Alexander Keith, he worked for a time as a clerk in his uncle's brewery. Apparently envious of the wealthier life his uncle lived, Keith Jr. was determined to make a name for himself by any means necessary. He began by scamming railroads by delivering cheap product instead of the expensive products he promised.[1] During the American Civil War, when Halifax was home to many Confederate sympathizers, Keith acted mostly as a blockade runner and courier. He helped a Confederate sympathiser escape British capture in the Chesapeake Affair. He was also involved with Luke Blackburn in a plot to send clothes infected with yellow fever to northern cities in the United States.[2] In 1865, he swindled his associates-in-crime and fled to St. Louis, Missouri, settling finally on the prairie. There, he married Cecelia Paris, a milliner's daughter from St. Louis.

Aftermath of the Mosel bombing.

Hunted down by one of his victims, Keith fled again with Cecelia, this time to Germany. He hobnobbed with wealthy socialites and Saxon generals under the assumed name of "William King Thomas". When the couple began to run out of money, remembering a series of fraudulent insurance claims on blockade-running ships that sank at sea, Keith eventually determined to just destroy a ship himself. Using a variety of aliases, he set about purchasing timers and dynamite. He obtained around 150 British pounds of insurance for what he claimed was a barrel of caviar to complete his scheme.[3] His initial target was a Norddeutscher Lloyd ship, the Mosel.[4] This led to a major catastrophe in Bremerhaven in 1875, when a time bomb he had placed in the "caviar" barrel accidentally went off on the dock, killing 81 people.[5] According to one witness: "A mushroom-shaped column of smoke rose approximately 200 meters above the harbor. Everywhere people were crying and whimpering beside ruins. The entire pier was covered in soot: it was like the gateway to hell." At the time, the deed was called the "crime of the century."

Monument to the 81 victims of the Thomas Crime in Bremerhaven's Wulsdorf Cemetery.

Keith was aboard another ship in Bremerhaven at the time of the Mosel explosion. He went to his suite and shot himself twice with a revolver, but survived for a week. After the tragedy was revealed as a murder/insurance scam on a large scale, the disappearances of other ships were investigated to see if Keith and his possible associates were involved. One was the disappearance of the SS City of Boston, which vanished in January 1870. The allegation was proven to be false.[6] He was reputed to have been buried in an unmarked grave in Bremerhaven. His severed head was kept at the Bremer Police Museum and was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. Newspapers called it "The Thomas Crime."

Regarding his time bomb, Keith's biographer Ann Larabee wrote: "Keith was not responsible for the political passion of these violent political groups, but he played a role in showing them a means of action."[7]

In Fiction

The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Story of Alexander Keith Jr., Nova Scotian Spy, Con-Artist, and International Terrorist[8] by Ann Larabee was published in 2005. The book in turn inspired The Inventor,[9][10] an opera by Bramwell Tovey and John Murrell that was performed by the Calgary Opera Company and Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in 2011.

Alexander Keith Jr. is also a character in Boris Pronsky and Craig Britton's novel Forty-Ninth,[11] central for the execution of the Alaska Payment Conspiracy in their book. Alexander Keith Jr. is introduced by the name of William Thompson, as it was one of the many aliases[12] used by Alexander Keith Jr.

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References
  1. Grimes, William (29 June 2005). "A Man of Many Facets, All of Them Monstrous". The New York Times.
  2. John Davison Lawson, Robert Lorenzo Howard. "American State Trials: A Collection of the Important and Interesting," Trials. 1917, p. 72
  3. Grimes, William (29 June 2005). "A Man of Many Facets, All of Them Monstrous". The New York Times.
  4. "S.S. Mosel". Eltiste. Retrieved 28 February 2022. S.S. Mosel. Built by Caird & Company Greenock Propulsion - Steam, single screw, 13 knots. Re-engineed by Elder with compound engines -1882. Launched - Tuesday, 20 August 1872. Built 1872. Type: passenger cargo ship. Tonnage - 3200 Gross Tons. Length 349 Feet. Breadth 40 Feet. Accommodation for 90 1st Class, 126 2nd Class, and 600 3rd Class passengers. Owner: Norddeutscher Lloyd, Bremen. Sunk - 8 September, 1882.
  5. (in German) Deutsche Geschichte: Als die Höllenmaschine Bremerhaven erzittern ließ, Cord Christian Troebst, Der Spiegel, 7 augustus 2006
  6. Larabee p. 182
  7. Larabee p. 195
  8. Larabee (2005). Dynamite Fiend : The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer. ISBN 1551095319.
  9. "reviewvancouver: VSO + Bramwell Tovey's The Inventor - John Jane". www.reviewvancouver.org. Retrieved 2023-08-08.
  10. "The Inventor: the story behind the opera". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2023-08-08.
  11. Boris, Pronsky. Forty-Ninth. ISBN 9798201386238.
  12. Standingwellback (2013-07-01). "Alexander Keith and the Crime of the Century bomb". Standing Well Back. Retrieved 2022-02-23.

Sources
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