Illustration by Iain Duffus
On May 31, 1931, Helen Love Bossieux boarded a Broad Street trolley, riding with its windows open. When it stopped at Third Street, her ears picked up a familiar cough. She peered out to see her husband, Carlton Lee Bossieux, who had been missing for five years.
He sat smoking at the wheel of an automobile.
Shocked by the sight of him, Helen scrambled from the streetcar to scribble the license plate number. Then, trembling, she delivered the note with the license number, a desertion warrant from 1929 and a newspaper clipping with his picture in it to the Second Precinct station.
Police traced tag 35102 to “Lee Boisseaux” at a bungalow off Dill Avenue — the home of his mother, Belle — where he’d lived at least a year. They arrested Carlton and held him without bail. His only statement was, “Let her do all the talking.”
Carlton and Helen met in February 1914 while the Bossieux family wintered in Green Cove Springs, Florida, south of Jacksonville. Their annual escape from Richmond’s winter was afforded by Belle’s husband, Edmond, 40 years her senior and a widower when they wed.
Following a three-week courtship, Carlton and Helen married in Jacksonville on March 5. “I did not consider it too hasty,” she recalled in 1931, “because I felt he needed me.”
How Helen presented her earlier life to her new husband is not clear. She was 15 years older and in later newspaper accounts gave her hometown as Buffalo, New York. She claimed to have earned a medical degree from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, where she interned at Bellevue Hospital. The Columbia medical school didn’t accept women, however, until 1917.
The newlyweds moved to Hopewell, where Carlton worked at the burgeoning DuPont factory making guncotton, a nitrate product used in armaments and to produce celluloid film. Helen immersed herself in civic and social affairs and self-identified as a “poetess.” In April 1916, the Bossieuxs collected poems for a booklet celebrating Hopewell’s first birthday. The slender volume rests at the Library of Virginia.
Helen volunteered for the Red Cross and joined the woman’s suffrage movement, marching in Washington, D.C. She also developed an interest in astrology and numerology.
When Edmond Bossieux, age 95, died in 1922, Belle inherited property throughout Richmond’s East End and Shockoe. (The Belle Bossieux Building at 101-109 N. 18th St., restored in 1980 with assistance from Historic Richmond, is cited as beginning the historical preservation of Shockoe Bottom. The restaurant portion later became Awful Arthur’s and today is Margaritas Cantina).
Carlton caught the Florida land-boom fever in 1925. A rising middle class with disposable income and motor cars brought vacationers and speculators to the Sunshine State. Favorable taxes and exciting press descriptions pumped up a real-estate bubble.
He relocated, and a year later, Helen joined him in Miami. Carlton’s dealings caused frequent prolonged absences from home. During his excursions “for business purposes,” he maintained contact with Helen.
“We were supremely happy,” she later recalled, adding that they never quarreled, and his “friendly letters … gave no intimation” of his intentions to leave. She remarked cryptically of unfavorable “influences of others.”
She heard from him in the later morning hours of Sept. 18, 1926. Around noon, a tropical cyclone spun winds clocking in at 145 mph — equivalent to the upper reaches of a Category 4 storm. The storm shredded a significant chunk of boom-time Miami, slinging yachts into Royal Palm Park as a 3-foot deluge filled the streets.
She peered out to see her husband, Carlton Lee Bossieux, who had been missing for five years.
Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter Charles McLean, searching hurricane-stricken Miami, found the petite, redheaded Helen sobbing, bandaged, bruised and wearing loaned clothes in the McAllister Hotel lobby.
“And she might well have cried,” McLean described, “for her husband, Carlton Bossieux, it appears certain, is lost.”
Helen waited weeks for his return. With her residence wrecked and her husband missing, she relocated to Richmond, first at 2400 Floyd Ave. She did not collect on Carlton’s insurance because, she told reporters, she sensed him still alive, though she never “consulted the stars” for fear of their response. The Bossieux family seems to have maintained their distance.
However, she heard rumors of Carlton’s presence in the city. On May 4, 1929, she swore a warrant against him charging desertion and neglect. A year later, on May 15, an enterprising Richmond News Leader photographer seeking to record the arrival of Straw Hat Day – when heavier head garb was traded for summer-weight hats — caught Carlton, smiling and sporting a jaunty boater, near Seventh and Broad streets.
Then came Helen’s fateful streetcar ride, when she heard Carlton’s smoker’s hack.
Summoned by police, Helen took a taxi to the station to find a thinner, pale, “but still fine looking” Carlton sitting in the office. She told the News Leader, “He was a fine man, such a gentleman. The only discourteous thing he ever did was keep his seat when I saw him at the headquarters this morning. It hurt me so.”
Belle Bossieux refused to cooperate with an inquisitive press, except to admit to a son named Carlton.
The subsequent legal wrangling of almost five years provided Richmonders with a serialized newspaper melodrama. Carlton fled Richmond, causing two courts to hold him in contempt. His lawyer, T. Overton Campbell, accused Helen of bigamy at the time of her and Carlton’s marriage. Morton L. Wallerstein, Helen’s counsel, produced a certified copy of her New York divorce from Dr. Lee Bailey Pultz (whose credentials she may have added to her own). Carlton stated that he’d filed for divorce when living in Westmoreland County, citing Helen’s cruelty and neglect, the papers mailed to the nonexistent Miami address.
Around Christmas 1934, Carlton went to Reno, Nevada, to dissolve the marriage.
Designated as “Dr. Bossieux,” Helen went on to enjoy local popularity. A News Leader article labeled her a “leader in social and civic circles.” She belonged to the Richmond Civic Betterment League that, among other concerns, sought to improve conditions in the city jail. The Richmond city directories variously listed her occupation as physician, poetess, astrologer and numerologist. She never obtained a license to practice medicine in Virginia, but her activities, poems and predictions appeared in newspaper pages during the next several years.
She died at the Stuart Grey Rest Home, 425 N. 32nd St., on May 14, 1948. Her Richmond Times-Dispatch obituary repeated the Bellevue internship falsehood. Her Oakwood Cemetery grave is not marked.
Carlton survived his ex-wife by 24 years. In 1936, he married the Nevada-born Dorothy White. In 1940, they lived with their daughter, Dorothy Lee, at 2007 Stuart Ave. They later added a son, Carlton. Their 1951 divorce proceedings also occurred in Reno.
Carlton continued getting into and out of various scrapes, and for a time, he helped manage a casino in Patuxent, Maryland. He returned home to dispute the apportionment of Bossieux family properties. He died at age 79 of pneumonia on March 18, 1972, at Plyler’s Nursing Home. (Now The Columns on Grove.) The death certificate gave Carlton’s marital status as “Unknown.” He, too, went to rest in Oakwood.
He left behind a satchel holding some tools and a pair of work boots.
