It was a letter that started all of this. A letter sent out by a police chief to his community, a warning about scams. It came to my desk from a reader who had handwritten a note on it: “obscene local racism.”
It ended with a letter, too. This one came from the FBI.
What came in between was a year-long attempt at the truth behind a century of what can only be called “gypsy” panic in Cincinnati. A quest to find out an extended family or group known as the Williamsons, the target of that panic.
Not ring a bell? Around here, they are more famously known as the “Terrible Williamsons” who, as the story goes, show up every Memorial Day to vividly festoon Spring Grove Cemetery in honor of their loved ones, and if the stories are to be believed, scam gullible marks around town.
This is going to take some explaining.
The letter
So, last Spring, Indian Hill’s police chief issued an advisory to residents warning them to be vigilant of cons and scams.
“Early May until Memorial Day is traditionally when we have been visited by the gypsies,” Chief Chuck Schlie wrote. “Although we have not received any reports in several years of gypsy activity, please stay vigilant.”
The chief goes on to describe a blacktop scam in which a con artist will say they have leftover material they are willing to sell for a discount, but the coating will “wash off after the first rain.”
In my role as a reporter, I got the notice from a very unhappy resident who thought it was racist.
Schlie told me at the time he didn’t mean to use that term in a derogatory way. The Indian Hill Police Department was working to raise awareness about leaving out valuables or falling for scams.
Sarah Weiss, chief executive at The Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education, called the use of the word “gypsy” in this context “problematic and troubling.”
Weiss said the term refers to a number of different groups, but primarily the Roma or Romani people, who originated in northern India and migrated throughout Europe.
“There’s a lot of rich history and culture and tradition and also a history of persecution in Europe,” Weiss said.
The Roma people were among the groups the Nazis sent to concentration camps where they were labeled with black or brown inverted triangles and grouped among other “asocials.”
“Sometimes people use language and they don’t even realize it’s derogatory,” Weiss said. “It’s on leaders in whatever areas to really be careful.”
The word, at least in the U.S., has been used incorrectly to describe any number of itinerant or “Traveler” groups, like the Irish Travelers from Murray Village, South Carolina and the subject of a recent high-profile federal court case.
Because these groups traditionally move with the seasons, they embody what it means to be an “outsider.” Fear of outsiders is, historically, very common.
The story
Back to Cincinnati and my quest to get to the bottom of this.
I grew up here and have heard stories about “gypsies” since I was a kid. I also had heard about extravagant displays of flowers and balloons at Spring Grove Cemetery left on the graves, usually around Memorial Day.
As an adult, I wrote that off as urban lore. But where did that story start?
Searching The Enquirer archives for “gypsy” was not helpful. Too many references from songs, movies, ads. But after a few hours, I cracked the Google safe when I found a May 12, 1971 article from the New York Times referring to a slice of Cincinnati life.
“The terrible Williamsons are due back any day now,” the article states, “as regular as springtime, and some merchants here can hardly wait. Every year, just before Memorial Day, the Williamsons return to town, peeling off hundred‐dollar bills to pay for their Cadillacs and their stocks and their funerals.”
“The Terrible Williamsons.” That was the key. Using it, I found dozens of articles in The Enquirer archives spanning nearly 40 years including plenty of law enforcement warnings, like one from October 1968 that calls out the group slick-talking salesmen. “In past visits, the clan has offered blacktopping for driveways … after the first rain the material used washed away.”
That sounded familiar. But the more I read, the more questions I had. Some articles implied they were “Travelers,” shockingly few of the early ones called them “gypsies,” many stated they were Scottish.
So was this a crime family? A gang of swindlers? Or were the Williamsons just outsiders cast as villains?
I also found two national stories – one in Newsweek, another in the Saturday Evening Post – though in neither case did a journalist interview a Williamson.
Journalistically, not a good sign.
The old legends
The New York Times article claimed the family was founded by Robert Logan Williamson, who emigrated to Brooklyn from Scotland in the 1890s. Other claims, like where they lived, were clearly in reference to Irish Travelers. It seemed the lore about the different groups had all gotten mixed up and conflated together, then people just slapped a label on all of it.
But there was so little attribution to any of it. And part of being a reporter is recognizing when things aren’t lining up. That’s why we attribute things. If a reader knows something is wrong, at least they’ll know who got it wrong.
John Kolber penned the Saturday Evening Post expose. He was a prolific crime reporter and would later write a successful biography of Al Capone.
I found myself returning to Kolber’s work because he cited his sources. It just seems that Kolber either never asked, or didn’t see the need to prove, that the Williamsons, as a whole, were criminals. He happily recounted the inter-family violence, many arrests, and claimed to have a series of revelatory letters that had been sent to the Better Business Bureau from a “white sheep” member of the group.
In a Biblical style, Kolber went through the family tree, complete with the nicknames: Jack Horn begot Lady Fingers and the Turk, Buckie begot Peanuts and Elks’s Tooth. The group was, he wrote, run by Uncle Isaac Williamson who used the alias “Two Thumbs” and was married to the “Black Queen Jennie.” For muscle, Two Thumbs used three of his sons: Gopher, Texas and Goose Neck.
“Warn your cities and farmers,” the “white sheep” cautioned.
The letters, Kolbert wrote, were sent to the Better Business Bureau beginning in the 1930s. The BBB doesn’t have them now, if they ever did. Though they were able to locate two very early bulletins from 1934 and 1936 that described the Williamsons as “lace peddlers” who charge “exorbitant” prices for cheap machine-made textiles claiming they were handmade Irish lace.
Ties to Cincinnati
Notably, Kolbert claimed to have tracked down Sweeney & Johnson, the group’s Cincinnati-based materials supplier. I quickly found them in my archive. The business placed classified ads in The Enquirer dating back to the 1920s but hasn’t had a single mention in the paper for 70 years.
The last headline I found about the family was “Detectives Sift Connections of Five Taken in Columbus; Gypsies Are Well Financed.” Seems some expensive appliances were found in some packing crates. Multiple Williamsons were among the arrested.
This article said the FBI was investigating. I curbed my enthusiasm. Every story about the Williamsons says that.
The family’s fondness for Cincinnati is not well-explained beyond that it’s a crossroads city. Cincinnati Magazine recently reported that other Traveler groups also frequent local cemeteries. There are similar reports in Nashville and other cities.
For the record, there are 221 Williamsons buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, according to its website. There’s no way to know how many of them are related to “the” Williamsons, but every first name Kolber mentioned is buried there, sometimes in multiples.There are two Isaacs buried in 1877 and 1937 and only one Jennie buried in 1992.
I did the math and those are not a great fit for the timeline. There are seven Roberts, but nothing points to one as the patriarch.
The family
So who were the Williamsons?
After digging through the history, I quickly found that while there has been a lot of reporting and even academic work done about Irish – not Scottish – Travelers. Lt. Joe Livingston with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division was quoted by publications across the country in the 1990s and early 2000s as an expert on Travelers. Sadly, he is no longer with the agency, and officials there said the Williamson name “didn’t ring a bell.”
I went back to the Better Business Bureau.
Kate Olberding, the vice president of brand engagement for the bureau, said that Cincinnatians have not registered a consumer complaint regarding Traveling communities in at least the past three years.
I’m going to count that as a dead end.
Then I found Jared Harper who has published a number of scholarly works on Travelers and is likely one of the only people outside the group who claims to know some of the language used by Irish Travelers. On the phone, he said he didn’t know anything about Williamsons, but they definitely were not Irish.
Another dead end.
Then I called Mary Beth Andereck. Her doctoral dissertation, “Irish Travelers in a Catholic Elementary School,” was widely quoted in articles about Travelers.
She told me that the way she had learned so much about Irish Travelers was by working with them. It was on-the-ground anthropology that seemed to open the door for her. She taught their children.
She backed up what Harper said. The Williamsons were not Irish, but Scottish or English. Had heard of them. Then, I ran the other names that I had come across in my reporting, the five listed in the 1952 story: McDonald, Stewart, McMillan, Gregg and Johnston.
Nope, nope and nope.
She said despite the differences between Irish Travelers, who are devout Catholics, and Scottish and English Travelers who tend to be Protestant, there are plenty of similarities, explaining why law enforcement might mix them up.
She explained that even if a Williamson would speak with me, that person’s version of the family history might be radically different from one told by another member of the family.
“They only know what their mothers tell them,” she said, a statement that rings true for most people when it comes to their own family history, but especially true to those who choose to reject mainstream life.
Then, almost as an afterthought, she said: “Have you checked Sondra Celli’s Facebook page?”
I had no clue what she was talking about. I made her spell it for me. Celli is a Boston-area dressmaker and garnered a national TV audience on the TLC shows “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” and “Bling It On.” (According to Andereck, Travelers have mixed feelings about the shows, but many Traveler women agree that Celli’s dresses are awesome.)
Celli’s social media has since become more restricted, but I was able to search her friends list and found about half a dozen Williamsons. Most of the Facebook pages seemed infrequently used or the posts were private, but there were a few interesting leads.
An expectant mother posted a photo of a onesie and a matching T-shirt showing a photo of a coy toddler dressed up like a boxer: “Terrible Willamson”(sic) was printed around the picture.
Another woman had received the now-traditional wall of comments wishing her a happy birthday. Among the generic well wishes was this phrase: “Happy birthday and have a Cadillac day!”
Did a dressmaker and reality TV star get me the best leads yet to a 70-year-old crime story? In April, I sent them all messages. I told them I was a reporter and I wanted to set the record straight.
Not a single reply.
The feds
The FBI was my last, best hope.
I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency.
Over the years, the Department of Justice has released dozens of high-profile files: Martin Luther King Jr., Ernest Hemingway, Tupac Shakur. The FBI surely had something on the Williamsons and wouldn’t balk about releasing it.
In a letter dated March 7, sent by standard post, the FBI responded to my query: “Records potentially responsive to your request were destroyed.”
The answer
When I publish a story, there is always a fear that I missed something. This scenario plays out in my head: The phone rings and the person on the other end has the one piece of information vindicating someone who has been unjustly accused.
This is the only story I have ever written where I know I’m missing an entire side.
There are so many unanswered questions. What impact did their notoriety have on the Williamsons? Were they driven underground? Was all the news about crime sensationalized?
It is hard to imagine how American culture would have viewed the Williamsons in the 1950s. It was an age when few people traveled, but the Williamsons did. It was also a time when people knew their neighbors and could spot a stranger. These days national conventions bring thousands of outsiders to Cincinnati every few months and we don’t even notice.
In this day of instant connection and information, or maybe especially in this day, stories can have a life of their own with unintended consequences that can last years – in this case, 70 of them.
All that said, if there are any Williamsons out there that want to reach out, I’m just an email away.
