In the 1930s and 1940s, in New York City, there was a doll shop on Madison Avenue. It was pretty well known, for a doll shop, and customers from around the US would both visit and send their damaged dolls there to be repaired in the “doll hospital.” The customers were generally wealthy women, since the dolls in this shop weren’t just toys, but collectors’ items. The proprietor, Velvalee Dickinson (who was born October 12, 1893) was a pleasant woman who chatted with her customers about what was going on in their lives, and even kept in touch by corresponding with some of them.
Then in 1942, something odd happened. Not in New York — at least not at first. What happened was that a woman in Buenos Aires, Señora Lopez de Molinali, moved without leaving a forwarding address. She had lived on O’Higgins Street (and there’s probably a story explaining why there’s an “O’Higgins Street” in Buenos Aires). Accordingly, four letters from the US couldn’t be delivered to her, so they were returned to their senders. Four different people, in four different US cities, including Springfield, Ohio and Colorado Springs. Each of those people was a woman, and they had a couple other things in common. For one thing, they were comfortably well off. For another, they all collected dolls. And for yet another, none of them had ever heard of Señora Lopez de Molinali.
The letters, which the four women hadn’t written, included details about them and their lives (and their doll collecting hobby), as well as some inexplicable information. The letter returned to Mary Wallace in Ohio referred to a “Mr. Shaw,” and mentioned that although he’d been ill, he would be back to work soon. Ms. Wallace didn’t know anyone named Shaw.
The whole thing was strange enough that the FBI took notice, and they noticed a couple of things. For one, the letter was signed by Ms. Wallace in what appeared to be her real signature, and had her return address on the envelope. For another, it was postmarked in New York. Ms. Wallace had never been to New York. And for yet another, they realized that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which had propelled the US into World War II, had damaged a Navy destroyer called the USS Shaw, and the ship was being repaired and would shortly rejoin the fleet.
Even though Mary Wallace had never visited New York, she had done mail-order business there, with a certain doll shop on Madison Avenue. This was what was known, in the elite investigatory circles of the FBI, as a clue. Following that and other clues, the FBI discovered that Velvalee Dickinson was not only a doll-shop proprietor, but a spy. All the letters had coded information about US naval operations. Dickinson had apparently gotten the information by simply corresponding with various customers on the west coast of the US, and she’d typed the letters, forged the signatures, and sent them off to Buenos Aires where Señora de Molinali (if there was such a person) passed the information to the Japanese.
At least that’s probably what was going on. Velvalee Dickinson was convicted, but maintained her innocence for the rest of her life. The FBI claimed that she and her husband had been paid $25,000 by Japan, but no trace of the money was ever found. And as far as they could discover, she had never hidden any contraband or secret information inside a doll, which anybody who’s seen movies knows is exactly what a real spy would do.
