Show AFTER DETECTION Women Shoplifters Always Claim to lie Innocent and Threaten Their Captors A detective in one of the big depart I ment stores up town said recently to aNew i a-New York Sun reporter that his experience exper-ience with women arrested for shoplifting shop-lifting was invariably the same whether the woman was a profession thief or notThere There is always a denial first he said and that is immediately i followed by emphatic r tmo a suit for damages I dam-ages against the firm unless the woman be at once released This happens gen I er < uiy in LIIB JILUC ruoiii lu wmuii no take the women after they have been positively detected and it Is surprising to see the pertinacity with which a woman will stick to the assertion that she is innocent even when the stolen articles have been taken away from her We expect this naturally enough from professional shoplifters but it is surprising sur-prising in the case 01 women who have never been arrested before and may not be justly held responsible for what they have done In those cases where we know the woman is not a professional and Is probably suffering from some mental irreguarity she would probably fare very much better after the articles have been returned if she admitted her weakness and went quietly home But It seems a part of the disease if It is thatto protest innocence and threaten revenge and none of the women ever omits that feature of it One woman for instance was apprehended in the store several tiifies 1 She was the wife I Ji a null uicui vjiu AJiew iiei V > UII < IA ity and had offered to pay for whatever what-ever she took She was always followed and stopped in order to enable us to tell what the extent of her thefts had been Every time that happened she main tamed that she had taken nothing and threatened to bring a suit for damages against us We saw what she had taken sent a bill to her husband and he paid it In another case a girl was arrested and a number f of small articles were found about her She had been watched for some time and there was no doubt of her guilt li she had confessed she was a respectable girl who had never been arrested before that might have ended the matter But her employer engaged en-gaged a lawyer and threatened us with a suit of 32000 for damages For our own protection we had to press the case and the jury convicted the girl without leaving their seats I |