In March of 1924, 40-year-old Maude Tefft gave a guest presentation at Rhode Island State College — now known as The University of Rhode Island — on the subject of Banking in Relation to College Societies. Maude was employed as treasurer of the Kingston Trust Company Bank which stood across the street from the college, a branch of the People’s Savings bank of Providence. No one in the audience that day knew that Maude was embezzling money from the bank and would be behind bars the next year.

Born on Oct. 16, 1884, Maude was the daughter of South Kingstown stonemason Andrew Norman Tefft and his wife Hannah Griffin (Sisson). Maude was 21 years old, living at home with her parents and working as a school teacher when her father passed away at the age of 49. After her father’s death, she remained living at the Columbia Street house with her mother and adult siblings and secured a job as a book-keeper in the Town Clerk’s office. By 1920, she had become assistant treasurer at the Kingston Trust Company Bank on Kingston Hill.

In 1923, Maude had become intrigued by offers from Cragg-Matthews & Company of New York who sold stock. Interested in purchasing shares of stock in an oil company, but not having the funds to do so, Maude wrote out two checks to Cragg-Matthews & Company amounting to $12,000 and signed them with a fictitious name.

The Kingston bank collapsed in 1925 and it was soon discovered that not only had Maude personally embezzled a total of $50,000, she was also connected to a group of swindlers who had embezzled another $110,000 of bank funds. Maude was arrested on the evening of Feb. 16. During the ensuing trial, the judge stated that he recognized that her “standing in the community before this occurrence, the trust that her neighbors had in her destroyed, the disgrace she has brought upon herself and the remorse which naturally follows a thing of this kind has punished the defendant considerably.” He would not, however, overlook the crime she had chosen to commit. “I feel obliged, under my oath of office,” he announced, “to send you away as a deterrent for others.”

On March 13, 1925, Maude was sentenced to serve 18 months of hard labor at the Woman’s Reformatory at the Rhode Island State Prison in Cranston. After she arrived, it became obvious that she was physically unable to complete the work required of her due to a spinal injury she had suffered five years earlier. She was therefore spared from physical labor during her sentence.

After half her sentence had been served, Maude went up for parole on Dec. 22, 1925. She was granted parole, which was scheduled to begin on Jan. 1, 1926, however the parole board decided to release her the following night so that she could spend Christmas with her mother. On the evening of Dec. 23, her brother picked her up at the prison and took her to their mother’s house in Peace Dale for an unexpected holiday celebration. 

The Kingston Trust Company was forced into receivership and never reopened. The building, located at 2587 Kingston Road, now houses the South County Art Association.

After her siblings married and moved away, and their mother passed on, Maude continued living in the Columbia Street house, alone. She died in 1969 and is buried with her family at Riverside Cemetery in South Kingstown.

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.