Cash & Capital Gains

With her genteel English-Southern accent, her silver-haired good looks, and her lavish parties, Mrs. Janet R. Gray was one of Atlanta's most popular hostesses. At her ranch-style home on 15 wooded acres in suburban Doraville, the charming divorcee entertained scores of Atlantans at parties beside her swimming pool hard by the circular exercise track for her show horses. She made friends everywhere. On regular visits to the beauty parlor downtown she always tipped the operator $2 for a shampoo, $5 for a silver rinse. By entering her blonde, buxom niece, Candace Victoria Laine ("I call her Candy") in Atlanta's smart Westminster School for girls, she automatically became a candidate for the Social Register.

Raising prize cocker spaniels, everyone knew, was Janet Gray's hobby. She filled her kennels with more than 40 purebred cockers, including buff-colored Ch. Carmor's Rise and Shine (price: $5,000), judged Best in Show at Manhattan's 1954 Westminster Kennel Club competition, dogdom's Olympiad. Mrs. Gray worked as business manager of the small Decatur Clinic, about ten miles northeast of Atlanta, and everyone realized that she could not live so luxuriously on a bookkeeper's pay. Her friends agreed that she must be "independently wealthy." Last week they discovered how independent she had been in amassing her wealth.

Cocker Caravan. Calling her Margaret Lydia McGlashan Burton instead of Janet Gray, the FBI arrested her, following charges that she had embezzled some $100,000 in two years from the cashbox of the Decatur Clinic. They also arrested Westminster's Candy, who turned out to be not Margaret's niece but her daughter, Sheila Joy Burton.

Margaret's exposure had started last month, when her doctor employers hired a new business manager to handle the finances of their growing clinic. Not that the doctors had any complaints (routine audits by a big Atlanta firm showed nothing amiss), but they needed a manager with more experience. When the new manager, John C. Walsh, arrived in Atlanta from New Orleans, Margaret graciously hosted a welcoming party. But on his third day at work Accountant Walsh happened to check through the bank deposits. "It suddenly struck me," he reported, "that there were no deposits of currency," even though the clinic daily took in as much as $300 in cash. When the shortage added up to $100,000, one of the doctors called Margaret and asked her to kindly come in and explain. Why, of course she would, she said.

From then on Margaret moved swiftly. She mobilized her five servants, overnight loaded two rented moving vans with furniture and a third with the cocker spaniels. Next morning, putting the doctors off with the excuse that she first had "to drive some friends to the airport," Margaret got behind the wheel of her flamingo-hued, air-conditroned 1957 Lincoln Capri, put Sheila Joy behind her in a white-and-brown Mercury station wagon, and led the bizarre caravan highballing out of Atlanta.

Back at Work. In Greensboro, N.C., while the doctors fretted back in Decatur, Margaret met Connecticut Dog Trainer Ted Young Jr., who, for such a good customer, had obligingly responded to a long-distance call and had driven some 630 miles south to pick up her dogs for safekeeping. She kept the most valuable cocker. Rise and Shine; surprisingly, she included Capital Gains among those sent to Connecticut. Bidding the servants farewell, abandoning the furniture vans, Margaret and Sheila Joy drove north to Baltimore, then west to Oklahoma. The FBI put out a nationwide alarm.

In Tulsa, fatefully true to form, Margaret promptly got a bookkeeper's job in a doctor's office, enrolled Sheila Joy in a local business college. But her resemblance to the FBI description, played up in the newspapers, aroused the suspicions of the office receptionist, who tipped off the police. Margaret's was an old case in the FBI files. She had been playing the same confidence game across the country and offshore under at least 22 different aliases since 1939. Among the accumulated charges: embezzlement in Honolulu, grand theft in Los Angeles, grand larceny in Vancouver, B.C., stealing $2,000 in Norfolk, Va. Cockers, furniture vans and daughter in tow, Margaret had always sped on--just ahead of police --to find the next golden opportunity.

Margaret's many friends in Atlanta were stunned and saddened. Cried Dog Fancier D. S. Estes, who had plugged for Margaret's appointment as southeastern representative for the American Spaniel Club: "It was like picking up the paper and reading that President Eisenhower was a spy for the Communists."

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