Billy Greer Mystery, Tracking a Fugitive

[Brian McKenna]

Can you track this guy? Researchers still need his date and place of death.

Billy Geer

Debut October 15, 1874
Final Game May 10, 1885

Real name is William H. Auguier
born in 1849 in New York City to John B. and Lucy Doe Auguier
married at one point to Emily Smith

Became a fugitive.

The police has information that the man who did the smooth act of cashing checks at Heyn’s bazaar and Golding Bros. For $27 each is a noted check swindler named William H. Geer. He was once a ball player, but in 1892 began making his police record by forging a check in Minnesota. He served a term for this in the Stillwater penitentiary. The board of pardons of that state released him on parole in 1896. Then he turned up in Salt Lake City, where he represented himself as an agent of the National Cash Register Company, of Dayton, O., and thereby cashed a number of worthless checks. He operated in Boston later, under the names of R. H. Dwight, George M. Miles, J. B. Rowan, R. A. Myers, J. R. Mott and Edward Lyon. Again he appeared in Providence, R. I., and again in New York. In all these places he played the same game. He usually represents himself as a traveling man for some well-known business house and carries bogus letters from the firms.

(Detroit Free Press, December 3, 1897)

The Sporting Life said he was out west at the end of 1897.

According to Peter Morris, he pops up again in 1907:

arrested for passing bad checks in Richmond, Virginia. Coverage of the arrest stated that police in Freeport, Ill and Boston had first dibs on him.