Julius Van Cram

Julius Van Cram is the name attached to Germaine Laboine’s remembered husband and, in a Danish police report, to a Dutch-born bank employee who disappeared with funds. Elsewhere, however, investigators encounter an international confidence trickster whose name and nationality remain officially unknown. The conflicting records make Van Cram both a person in Germaine’s intimate past and a constructed identity within a long career of fraud.

Identity and the Istanbul Encounter

Germaine says that she met Van Cram in Istanbul when she was thirty-eight. He was staying at the Pera Palace, and she remembered him as a man who looked like a real gentleman. That polished appearance is consistent with the documented confidence trickster’s cultivated respectability, though the account of the meeting comes from Germaine and does not independently establish his identity.

A few weeks after Germaine became pregnant, Van Cram asked her to marry him. They married in Istanbul, but the circumstances left the legal status uncertain: he took her to an office whose location she could not identify, where she signed papers and took an oath. Germaine believed they were married because he told her so. The scene joins the intimate and the unverifiable: her memory preserves the promise and her trust, while the precise documentation and location remain beyond her knowledge.

A Career Under Many Names

The police search does not find a single, settled identity. In a card drawn from the international-criminal files, the man appears as Hans Ziegler, also known as Ernst Marek, John Donley, Joey Hogan, and Jean Lemke; the card states that his real name and nationality are unknown. Other records add the names Jules Stieb and Carl Spangler. Julius Van Cram is therefore not simply confirmed as the man’s true name: it is one identity proposed by a separate police record and connected to Germaine’s account.

The file describes Ziegler as a specialist confidence trickster who spoke fluent French, English, German, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish, as well as a little Polish. Thirty years earlier, Prague police had circulated his photograph after he and an accomplice swindled a large sum of money. He reportedly claimed to have been born in Munich and wore a blond moustache. In London he appeared as John Donley, supposedly from San Francisco; at Copenhagen he was arrested under the name Ernst Marek. His trail across cities and languages is also a trail of changing biographies.

Methods and Public Appearance

The records show a practiced division of labour. On most occasions when he was arrested, he carried nothing incriminating. The stolen money had already disappeared, passed unnoticed in a crowded bank to an accomplice, who carried it away. This method helps explain why repeated arrests did not necessarily settle the question of what had happened to the proceeds: the evidence in his possession could be clean while the money was already elsewhere.

His appearance changed over the years. He had once been tall and thin, though broad-shouldered; later he gained weight and acquired what the account calls a certain dignity. He was good-looking and well dressed, and stayed in prestigious hotels, including the Savoy in London and a large hotel on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Such respectability was not incidental to the record of his frauds: he repeatedly moved among the best establishments and used a system familiar to other confidence men, but pursued with unusual brilliance.

Conflicting Records and Significance

A Danish police report offers the strongest documentary link between the confidence trickster and Julius Van Cram, but its wording is explicitly cautious. According to statements the police had been unable to verify, the man might actually have been Dutch, named Julius Van Cram, and born in Gröningen. The report described him as the son of a good family, educated, multilingual, and a member of the Amsterdam Yacht Club. At about twenty-two he began working at an Amsterdam bank directed by his father; two years later he vanished, and the bank discovered that he had absconded with part of its funds.

Even this apparent origin remains provisional. The Danish account was unverified, and investigators had been unable to obtain photographs of Van Cram or fingerprints with which to confirm the identification. The files thus offer a plausible history without closing the case of identity. Against that uncertainty stands Germaine’s personal certainty that the man she met and married was Van Cram. The contrast is central to his portrayal: he could offer a convincing name, background, and promise of marriage, while leaving behind records that multiply identities rather than resolve them.