75-year-old jewel thief looks back

“Do you have a preference of stones?” they asked.

“You go where he takes you. You just play it by ear. He’s talking to you about quality and beauty,” she said.

She usually hid the ring in her hand, or sometimes on her finger in plain sight, then strolled out of the store into a waiting cab (she didn’t own a car). Then she went straight to the airport to get out of town. Almost as soon as she stole, she sold.

Once she went to a fine dress shop in Pittsburgh and asked to see a satin robe on the mannequin in the store window. Payne was wearing a ring she had just stolen and the sales lady commented on it.

Tears flowed from Payne’s eyes and she told the woman she had to sell it, something about her divorce. The woman thought she could help and left to speak to the owner.

The owner paid her $3,500 cash.

From then on, she had no fear of being caught. As she explains it, it was as if her victims became her silent partners.

Going international
Payne got most ideas for her thefts from ads and articles in fancy magazines, especially Town & Country. She flipped through the pages, spied a ring she liked and then traveled from her base in Bedford, Ohio, to the store which advertised it.

The Jewelers Security Alliance, an industry trade group, got on to Payne in the 1970s. Bulletins went out, warning jewelry stores about a slick, well-dressed black woman who was stealing diamond rings.

Where others might hit a store for several pieces of jewelry, Payne only took one or two expensive rings at a time. But what really made Doris Payne different was that she was so prolific and so good.

“She pretended and gave all kinds of stories out over the years, of illness, of this and that, of sweet talking people and making deals,” said John Kennedy, president of the Jewelers Security Alliance. “She was just very clever at what she does.”

In the early 1970s, Payne tried her skills overseas. First Paris. Then Monte Carlo, where she flew in 1974 and paid a visit to Cartier, coming away with a platinum diamond ring. When she got to the airport in Nice, custom agents suspected she had the ring and stopped her. The ring was never found.

During the investigation, Payne says she was kept in a “fifth-rate motel” by the Mediterranean. One day she asked the woman in charge for nail clippers and for a needle and thread to mend her dress. She used the clippers to pry the ring from its setting, sewed the diamond into her girdle and then tossed the setting into the sea, she says.

She wore her girdle day and night, even when it was wet from washing. Her room was searched every day, but the diamond remained hidden.

She wasn’t always so lucky. She’s been arrested more times than she can remember. One detective said her arrest report is more than 6 feet long — she’s done time in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Colorado and Wisconsin. Still, the arrests are really “just the tip of the iceberg,” said FBI supervisory special agent Paul G. Graupmann.

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