The mysterious disappearance of a woman, reported by her husband in July, was finally cleared up. However, a few questions remained, and it is unlikely we will ever get the answers.
From the Arizona Daily Star, Saturday, August 5, 1916:
MC’COY FINDS WIFE BUT BABY IS MYTH
Tucson Woman Who Disappeared Recently Causes Arrest of Los Angeles M. D.
George McCoy, formerly of this city, who came hurriedly to Tucson from Ajo, several weeks ago after receiving a telegram that excited his suspicions as to the safety of his wife, and whose efforts here, seconded by the police, to find Mrs. McCoy were fruitless, has at last found his wife, according to Los Angeles newspapers.
McCoy had gone from Tucson to Ajo to get employment. He succeeded and wire his wife to join him, but the answer that he got was a telegram from another person, a woman whom he did not know and whom the police proved to be a fictitious personage, advising him to cease bothering his wife, saying that she was in a delicate condition and warning him that his insistent letters to her would have a harmful effect.
The telegram aroused McCoy’s suspicions and he took the first train to Tucson, where he showed the wire to the police and asked them to aid him in finding his wife, who was not at the place where they had lived before he went to Ajo. Efforts to find her were futile and after several days McCoy left the city, prosecuting the search for his wife, to whom he appeared greatly attached, alone.
McCoy’s anxiety to find his wife was aggravated by the thought that his wife was to become a mother, which she had, it seems, confided to him. Against the happening of this event, McCoy had sent to his home, in the east, for certain tiny articles of clothing that were heirlooms in his family.
The subsequent development in the disappearance of Mrs. McCoy are related by Los Angeles newspapers, which say, in substance, that a Los Angeles physician, Dr. S. A. Austin, has been arrested charged with filing a false certificate of birth for Mrs. McCoy, the charge being made by the superintendent of a hospital at San Bernardino, who said that Mrs. McCoy had confessed to her that the child named in the certificate had been adopted by her and was not born to her.
According to the superintendent’s story, Mrs. McCoy went to her the later part of July, shortly after her disappearance from Tucson, and asked her to find a baby for her to adopt, but she could find none. The next she heard from Mrs. McCoy, her story says, was a telegram from Los Angeles announcing that a child had been born to her, and a few days later she arrived at the San Bernardino hospital with a new-born baby.
Where McCoy himself had been in the meantime, is not stated in coast newspapers, but it is said that when Mrs. McCoy arrived at the hospital with the babe, the superintendent notified Mr. McCoy, who, it seems, also became suspicious. At that point the woman confessed, it is said, that the child was not hers. Later Dr. Austin was arrested charged with filing a false birth certificate.
It is said by Los Angeles newspapers that McCoy and his wife had left Los Angeles and it was believed that they went to New Mexico.
Officers here express the belief that Mrs. McCoy’s object in attempting to deceive her husband was that she wished to spare him the disappointment of wrecked hopes of fatherhood. Both are well known here, where they formerly resided.
