Theft in the Daily Dispatch & Richmond Dispatch, 1900 & 1920

The case of the wicked servant and the chained child is based on a long con that the servant was attempting to pull on the family that she worked on. The wicked servant would steal valuables and hide them where the daughter of the family resided in the house and then she would let the blame shift to the daughter. This would continue in more extreme thievery where the servant ignited the house on multiple occasions in order to make items of value disappear from the house as if they had been consumed in the flame. At the time the child had been blamed and a doctor diagnosed her with kleptomania and her family saw her as a danger to herself so her father chained her to the wall of her bedroom. This long con would come to an end when the mother eventually hired a detective to keep an eye on the servant whom he learned had been stealing the items and removing them from the house this whole time. 

In terms of how this relates to the crime reporting and understanding of theft at the time this is quite an unusual case. The theft is commited by a woman against a woman which is quite unusual as the crime is often considered a man against man or man against woman crime. Furthermore theft is not often considered as a crime commited against people who know each other. So this case is quite strange in comparison with the theft narrative, although this case is quite strange in general so I would view it as an extreme outlier rather than an unexplored trend.