Society beauty who faked her death to flee £1m life of crime

It’s late on a Saturday night, January 2, 1909, by Penmaenmawr, Conwy, on the Welsh coast. The moon is a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas. 

And a stately Minerva motor car rattles recklessly along twisting cliff-top roads till, fatefully, the young lady at the wheel, and in a flaming crimson cloak, hits an infamous bend, Demon’s Turn.

There is a crash. Shattering glass; toppled stone wall. The vehicle judders to a halt inches from the edge.

Two shaken passengers scramble clear but of the driver there is no sign.

Just days from her 25th birthday, Violet Charlesworth – beautiful, dashing, locally famed, on the eve of coming into an ­enormous fortune – has been hurled through the ­windscreen and into the sea. 

At least that is their story and they are sticking to it.

Violet had long turned heads and lived a life of conspicuous consumption. She loved fast cars: owned six. 

She was ­fragrant in furs; a vision in ­diamonds. She doted on dogs – St Bernards; she had 12 of them – and she ­simply adored Scotland.

She had taken a mansion near Inverness. Decorated it throughout with tartan ­wallpaper. Installed a player-piano that, duly cranked, played Scottish airs on repeat – the equivalent, one supposes, of a Spotify list – and even had herself photographed as a piper, ­complete with plaid and Cairngorm brooch and a tiny Glengarry bonnet perched just so.

Violet and her family had not long been resident in the Conwy corner of Wales. Indeed, they had moved house with odd frequency.

But they lived now in some style in a country residence, complete with coach house and acres of tended garden.

She had donated silver cups for local football competitions and so on and was well thought of.

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As dawn breaks and the search for her begins, the general reaction is horror. On the rocks below, a notebook is found, detailing her restless round of Britain by motor. 

And – oh, the pity of it – a tam o’ shanter bonnet. Reporters are soon swarming everywhere.

The mansion is besieged, assorted nosies peering shamelessly through its windows. 

Sightseers, ghouls, journalists... and, oddly, not a few very rattled people insisting that the late young lady owed them a great deal of money.

Something is off. There is no trace of her body. Her relatives do not even seem that concerned about it. 

There isn’t a spot of blood in the car or on the rocks. The water below is very shallow: the sea very calm.

And the vehicle, considering the accident as described, is remarkably undamaged. The front glass half-smashed, yes, but the headlamps and mudguards as good as new.

This is no longer the tale of a tragic accident. The hue and cry is raised for a woman on the run – a young lady who has deliberately, if a tad clumsily, faked her own death.

There is a great deal we do not know about Violet Charlesworth. Her father was a lowly insurance agent; her mother seems to have been a verit­able Lady Macbeth, determined to turn her daughters into what would now be called ‘influencers’.

The family moved around a great deal and – on blushing hints and whispered confidences, that on her 25th birthday she would come into a £155,000 inheritance – people were only too happy to slip Violet some cash; shops and tradesmen to allow her considerable credit.

To put things in perspective, if you made £200 a year in 1909 you could afford a maid. Violet was spending £4,000 annually.

She owed her stockbroker alone £10,000 – the equivalent of a million today.

A gullible local doctor, to whom she was affianced, had given her £5,000. ‘I was honestly and deeply in love with her,’ he would lament.

Old Mrs Smith next door had lent Violet and her mother £400, ­practically all her life savings – ‘I was simply taken in by them,’ she sobbed – and, as the authorities fast ascertained, a private investigator had already been on Violet’s case for months.

Indeed, only the day before the cliff-top smash, the young woman had been served with a summons for default and, as details of all this bled out to the public, suddenly it was all about a lady on the lam.

Now, Violet Charlesworth’s extraordinary life is the subject of an ­episode of a new BBC Sounds series, Lady Swindlers, presented by that national treasure Lucy Worsley along with tartan noir author Denise Mina and the podcast’s ‘resident historian’ Professor Rosalind Crone.

Violet Charlesworth was beautiful, clever, cunning and ruthless. She dropped names, fluttered eyelashes, claimed that Gordon of Khartoum, no less, had been her godfather.

Even the wronged stockbroker had to grate that she showed a ‘very masculine grasp of business’.

But Violet was no criminal mastermind. Setting out a deadline for her coming ‘inheritance’ was the ­defining blunder that blew up her nice little Ponzi scheme.

She then compounded that with a second. Anyone who seriously wants to disappear heads abroad, or at least to a major city. 

Charlesworth instead made for the wilds of Scotland.

The Britain of 1909 was extraordinarily sophisticated. Many journeys by public transport – for instance, from Brodick to Glasgow Central – could be done faster then than now.

The post was so efficient you could mail a note to a friend elsewhere in the city in the morning, know they would have it by tea, and be sure of their reply by breakfast.

And it was an age of newspapers. Many Scots bought four or five a day. 

The circulation of the Daily Mail alone was more than a million – and that season’s must-have ­garment for the ladies, a brilliant red cloak, plummeted from fashion overnight as the papers reported the fugitive running about the ­country in one.

Then a stylish young woman ­calling herself Margaret Cameron MacLeod checked into a hotel in Mull, off-season and insanely conspicuous.

Early the following morning she sneaked downstairs, snipped her details out of the register and fled – without settling her bill – to Oban. 

Still more carelessly, she had left behind the shreds of a telegram, addressed to her real name.

The hotel’s enraged wire presum­ably made Oban first. For, quite undone, she stepped off the steamer and into a host of journalists.

At first, ‘Miss MacLeod’ played coy. The infamous Violet Charlesworth was, she gathered, very tall, ‘and I am only five foot five and a half’.

Then, in cynical calculation, she decided the best strategy was to monetise her infamy.

‘There is no use my denying it any longer,’ she whimpered to a sort of press conference in Edinburgh, daintily dabbing an eye. ‘I am Miss Violet Charlesworth.’

She might as well cash in, she ­calculated. One newspaper, after all, was already advertising postcards of her, ‘in six different costumes’.

A hit song, Goodbye Girlie, was being licensed to music halls. And the London Hippodrome was already staging a melodrama, The Cliff Road, complete with water tank, to pass splashily for the Irish Sea.

Violet now sold her story to the Daily Mail, for a gulping £400. Did another deal with the Daily ­Despatch – a three-week series, The Story of My Life. 

She even secured a film deal – The Welsh Cliff ­Mystery, in which, naturally, she would be playing herself.

She no doubt calculated that celebrity might ­suffice to escape justice. And that many of her humiliated creditors would be too ­embarrassed to come forward. 

As Worsley observes, Violet Charlesworth ‘has gone from a woman on the run to someone with major earning potential’.

Folk joked that she was more famous than the King or the Prime Minister; someone even named a racehorse after her.

But her earning power proved most limited.

It rapidly became apparent that Violet could not act and was prone to awful stage fright. ­Exasperated audiences started booing her off it.

Nor could the authorities ignore her spectacular debts – some £12,000 owed to friends, shops and creditors; another £12,000 in stock-exchange liabilities – or, in at least two instances, obvious criminality.

By year’s end Violet and her ­proto-Kardashian mother had been arrested. 

They stood trial on February 23, 1910, when, despite Violet’s protestations that she had been promised a fortune by an Australian admirer, not a shred of evidence was given that ­‘Alexander MacDonald of ­Melbourne’ even existed.

The jury took just 20 minutes to convict them and the pair were sentenced to five years of penal servitude – quickly reduced to three, when the judge reconsidered things.

Violet ‘was obviously a woman of great talent,’ rumbled m’lud. ‘She might have had a distinguished future if she had properly applied her ingenuity.’

Their appeals against conviction were thrown out.

Violet Charlesworth served only two years, returned to Scotland in February 1912 – and disappears from history.

Nothing at all has ever been uncovered about her subsequent life. She may have married, she may have emigrated, she may have perished in the 1919 pandemic.

One professional genealogist has suggested that a May Charlesworth, whose Stoke-on-Trent demise is recorded in 1957, could have been Violet.

‘I think she is amazing,’ muses Rosalind Crone, ‘and quite ­sinister. I mean, three years isn’t a lot for that amount of money when you think about the damage that she did.’ 

Lucy Worsley thinks that, at a critical point in the ­pursuit of their full rights, Violet Charlesworth did profound ­damage to womankind.

‘Violet was hungry for riches, for fame, for attention, and to get those things she took advantage of new freedoms.’

Only confirming the general fears of Edwardian men – ‘that empowered women can be ­dangerous; even criminal’.

But part of you rather likes to think Violet fetched up in America, married some doting millionaire with a dodgy ticker and died in the 1970s after decades of rich, widowed, hale old age.

And down by Penmaenmawr? They haven’t called that vicious bend Demon’s Turn in a century. 

It is, for always, Violet’s Leap.