The story of West Palm Beach’s murderous postmistress...
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Lena Marietta Thankful Clarke, 35, had confronted her former assistant, Fred Miltimore, in an Orlando hotel room on Aug. 1, 1921. She said she suspected him of stealing $32,000 the previous week. She later told the police chief she only had drugged Miltimore, but then admitted to shooting him, saying he’d planned to implicate her in the theft.
Finally, she admitted it was she who had stolen the money, and she had tried to get him to take the fall for it. Clarke, who had succeeded her brother as West Palm Beach postmaster, reportedly admitted she had discovered a $38,000 shortage in 1918 and suspected Miltimore.
Miltimore, married with four children, had left the post office job three months earlier and was running a small restaurant in Orlando. “Old-timers in West Palm Beach say it was common knowledge that Lena Clarke and Fred Miltimore had an ongoing romantic affair and that he jilted her, hence the killing,” Judge James Knott wrote in a two-parter on Clarke in his famed “Brown wrapper” series in The Palm Beach Post.
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https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/...ch/9084494002/