Alexander Keith, Jr.

Alexander 'Sandy' Keith, Jr. was a notorious nineteenth century criminal from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Keith was born in 1827 in Caithness, Scotland, immigrating to Halifax when he was a small boy. The nephew of Alexander Keith, founder of the Alexander Keith's brewery, Keith worked for a time as a clerk in his uncle's brewery.

Keith became a secret agent for the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, acting mostly as a blockade runner and courier. He was involved with Luke Blackburn in an infamous plot to send clothes infected with yellow fever to northern cities in the United States [ American State Trials: A Collection of the Important and Interesting,by John Davison Lawson, Robert Lorenzo Howard - Trials - 1917, p. 72] .

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.

Hunted down by one of his victims, he fled again with Cecelia to Germany, where they lived the high life in Dresden and Leipzig, hobnobbing with wealthy socialites and Saxon generals under the assumed name of "William King Thomas". When the couple began to run out of money, Sandy Keith concocted a plot to blow up passenger ships and collect the insurance money.

This led to a major catastrophe in Bremerhaven, in December 1875 when one of his bombs accidentally went off on a dock, killing eighty people. At the time, the deed was known as the "crime of the century."

ee also

* American Civil War spies

References

ources

* Ann Larabee, " The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer " (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005).