75-year-old jewel thief looks back

It became a teenage game. Payne would enter a jewelry store with her girlfriend and try on watches. “I simply tried to cause the man to forget how many they would show me. I always managed to be able to keep one on my arm,” she said.

She didn’t steal. Not yet. But she made it clear to the sales clerk that she could have.

After high school, Payne went to work at a nursing home, the last legitimate job she would ever have. By then, it was just Payne and her mother living together, her mother having left her abusive father. Payne was pregnant at 18 with a son, and would later have a daughter, too.

Doris wanted her mother to know that she had figured out a way to raise money, to take care of her. “I know how to cause the man in the jewelry store to forget,” she confided.

“That’s stealing,” her mother warned.

“It’s not stealing because I’m only taking what they give me,” Payne said.

Her mother’s reaction was so harsh, Payne never mentioned it again.

But “I began to cause it to happen,” she said.

She knew she needed the right lingo, the right plan, the right dress. Clerks had to assume she had money. A cheap purse wouldn’t do.

She started with bargain jewelry stores. But she found out quickly that cheap stores obeyed by the rules. They never pulled out more than one item at a time.

So when she was around 23, she took a Greyhound bus to a Pittsburgh fine jewelry store and easily walked out with a square-cut diamond with a price tag of $22,000.

“Now I got to get rid of it. I don’t have a clue. I’m scared to death,” she said.

A song came to mind. “There’s a pawn shop on the corner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” she sings, remembering the lyrics with a smile.

She went to a pawn broker and told the man she wanted to sell the ring. He asked how much. She wasn’t sure, so she divided the price by three and came up with $7,500.

No questions. No ID requested. She got the cash.

She was off and running.

Double life
Soon, she was living two lives: the plain, single mother who liked to cook and go to jazz clubs, and the worldly woman with places to go, work to do, gentlemen to dine with.

Her success was remarkable. She just had to go into a jewelry store, all dressed up, and more times than not, things went her way.

At first, her longtime boyfriend, a tavern owner, gave her tips. Don’t talk too much. Don’t give too much away. Don’t even give your name. Sometimes he called a store beforehand and told them he was an attorney and he had a client coming in to shop who was settling an estate.

But mostly, Payne was a one-woman gang, with her own patter. Maybe she’d come into some money and wanted to buy a few pieces of jewelry. Or maybe her jewelry had been stolen and she needed to replace it.

The story didn’t matter; she took her leads from the sales clerks and confused them easily. She had them take rings out all over the store and tried many on, asking about the cut, clarity, the carat. Usually jewelry stores only show one expensive item at a time. But when a customer comes in and claims they have thousands of dollars to spend, rules are often relaxed.

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