Historical Non-Fiction Work-in-Progress
Despina Davidovitch Storch was a young Turkish woman who made headlines around the world when she was arrested on espionage charges in 1918. Over a hundred years later, almost no one knows her name. The press of the day wrote of Storch’s intelligence conquests, supposedly leading legions of soldiers to their deaths before the age of 25. When she was arrested in New York, it was said that she spent lavishly on the best hotels in the world, buying thousands of dollars worth of flowers and leveraging every connection in her orbit from the lowliest munition plant worker to foreign ambassadors in the service of spying for the German cause. It’s clear from the Bureau of Investigation files at the National Archives that the U.S. government found Storch to be a credible threat, and she eventually lost her life because of it.
However, when exposed to daylight, some of the century-old accusations seem to crumble, while others hint at a truly extraordinary life of intrigue that ended very abruptly. Tracing newspaper clippings, obituaries, Bureau of Investigation case files, and old hotel records, the mystery remains unsolved: who was Despina Storch?
Sampling of Past Clips
Please contact me with any questions about past work.
- A Walk Down Salinger Lane: The Legacy of an Author in a Small Town – Litreactor
- Afghanistan casts a shadow long enough to reach North Shore – The Town Common
- Chasing Truth Across Time: The Highway Killer Case Remains Open – SOCO Magazine
- Police search conducted near I-95 in connection with Peabody homicides – Lynn Daily Item
- Revisiting a crime scene 30 years later – Lynn Daily Item
- The House Doesn’t Levitate: A rural Spiritualist family is not quite forgotten – The Magazine
Leah Dearborn 