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She was described as “fabled and sinister” and “the most fabulous and cunning woman criminal in the annals of the Buffalo Police Department.” Cat-Eye Annie turned Buffalo upside down when she stole what would today be $1.3 million in jewels from a home on Linwood Avenue before becoming the first woman to escape from both the Erie County Jail and later Auburn Prison.
Her nickname came from the fact that she had one blue eye and one eye that was blue on top, chestnut on the bottom. She was known in big cities all over the country by a handful of aliases to the point where it wasn’t really possible to pin down her true name– but her MO was as unmistakable as that eye. With a falsified list of tough-to-trace references and an impeccable knowledge of the book of servant’s etiquette, she would join a prominent, wealthy family as a maid. As soon as she could locate the family jewels she’d load up a sack and take off.
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After assuming the identity of Mary McCoy, a well-regarded servant in Buffalo, Annie was hired as a maid in the house of Lewis Surdam, a vice president for F.W. Woolworth who lived at 464 Linwood Ave. Only hours after being hired, on the morning of Dec. 5, 1923, Annie vanished – along with $75,000 ($1.3 million in 2023 dollars) of Mrs. Surdam’s jewels. Among the pieces missing was a platinum ring set with a seven-karat diamond surrounded by 60 smaller diamonds.
She made a clean getaway, but Annie was picked out of a rogues gallery photo lineup by Mrs. Surdam and two maids. Police immediately began their search for the woman known as Lillian McDowell, Mary McCoy, Elsie Webb, Martha Conners, and a total of more than dozen names. Her first Buffalo arrest had come a decade earlier in 1913, but most recently, she’d jumped a $2,000 bail in Cleveland, coming right to Buffalo to lay the groundwork for the heist here. Immediately, Buffalo cops started a nationwide manhunt, with mugshots and a rap sheet sent to police all over the country.
When word reached Baltimore, authorities there recognized the woman in question as “Cat-Eyed Lil,” who they had credited with more than $200,000 in stolen jewels ($3.6 million in 2023 dollars) in the late 1910s and early 1920s. After two years on the lam after swiping the jewels on Linwood Avenue, a detective in Milwaukee saw the woman with the distinctive eye board the street car he was riding. He remembered the all-points-bulletin from Buffalo and arrested her.
Buffalo escape
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Located in about the same footprint as the current Erie County Holding Center, this image shows the Church Street side of the old Erie County Jail. The middle second floor window is the one from which Cat-Eye Annie escaped.
Returned to Buffalo, under the name Lillian McDowell, Cat-Eye Annie pleaded guilty. As she awaited sentencing, she was being held in the “first degree murderer’s cell” at the Erie County Jail. In the early morning hours of Oct. 25, 1925, Annie picked the lock of the cell, placed a dummy on her cot, and made her way to a second floor window from which she jumped onto Church Street and off into the night.
A city bus driver came forward to say he remembered picking up a woman that night– she was walking with a clearly hurt leg and kept squinting one eye. She took the bus to the city line at Kenmore and disappeared. The next day, workers found Annie in the attic of a home under construction a few blocks away on Westgate Avenue. She was feverish and her ankle had swollen to three times its normal size.
After being taken back into custody, two deputies carried her on a chair into the courtroom, she told the court her true name was Lillian McDowell, she was 44, and was born in Louisville, Ky., Judge Noonan sentenced her to the maximum – 10 years of hard labor at Auburn.
Her last words for Buffalo, as she was being carried out of the courtroom were, “If I hadn’t broken my ankle, you fellows would have never gotten a hold of me.”
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Police officials carry notorious thief and escape artist Cat-Eye Annie into the courtroom for sentencing, following her escape from the Erie County Jail in 1925.
Auburn escapes
Six months into her sentence at Auburn, Annie used a spoon to tunnel through the mortar of a brick wall and then climbed the wall surrounding the prison to freedom. Twenty-six hours later, she was found hiding in a haystack on a farm near the prison.
Four years later, in 1930, Annie escaped Auburn again – this time foiled when a man who picked her up hitchhiking, found it strange that she was wearing a man’s coat and hat and called police. Annie was taken back into custody wearing the clothing she stole from a guard’s closet on her way out of the prison.
She was paroled in New York in 1935 but faced charges in other states. Her sentence was commuted and she was released from a Missouri jail in 1941. That’s the last time anyone heard from Cat-Eye Annie. Courier-Express reporter Manuel Bernstein tried to track her down in 1961, but neither the Buffalo Police nor the FBI had any record of her whereabouts after that release.
Longtime Buffalo scribe Dick Hirsch didn’t have any luck tracking her down either in the mid-'50s, but ended his story with the idea that “she could be the spry, white-haired old lady who shops regularly at the corner supermarket. Perhaps we shall never know.”