I admit it: I like Eleanor Jarman (1901-???) although she was a criminal and did something I don't like.
Eleanor was born into a large family of German descent. She had 9 surviving siblings, and, as might be expected, the family was poor. After dropping out of school because of the poverty of the family, she started to work as a waitress at the tender age of 12. When she married and had two children her husband left her after some years to live a life as the sole bread-winner. Maybe that was the reason why she let the criminal George Dale move in with her and her children. As it is, he did what he could to support the family, which unfortunately meant that Eleanor and her children now had to rely on his robbing small shop owners.
In 1933, Eleanor took part in a robbery which led to the death of a shop owner who was shot by George Dale. Even though she didn't kill the unfortunate victim of George Dale and their associate, Leo Minneci, she was sentenced to 199 years in prison.
I find that much too much, and so did she obviously as she only served 7 years before she, climbing a prison fence, escaped and vanished for good. This successful escape earned her a reputation as extremely devious and dangerous, something which I think is ridiculous. Yes, she took part in a robbery with a fatal outcome, and yes, she escaped, but she wasn't the "tigress" - or "superwoman" - that some newspapers dubbed her.
For 35 years Eleanor let her family know that she was all right "somewhere out there" by posting coded messages in newspapers, but nobody knows for sure how she lived after her escape, and how she died. However, in 1975, when she was 74 years old, she had a secret meeting with her son, Leroy, one of her brothers and his wife, but after that she disappeared once more, never to be heard of again, except by her coded newspaper-messages, which didn't taper off until mid-1990s.
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