Background
She was born in Edenmore, Ballinamuck, County Longford, Ireland.
She was born in Edenmore, Ballinamuck, County Longford, Ireland.
She referred to herself as the "Queen of crooks". Upon arrival in New York she supported herself by prostitution and picking pockets. The marriage gave her American citizenship.
She moved to Chicago, to take advantage of the large influx of visitors at the 1893 World"s Columbian Exposition.
She teamed up with another prostitute. One would rob customers while the other was having sex with them.
She returned to New York, where she worked as a dancer, but was soon arrested for stealing a wallet, earning her first jail sentence. After this she called herself May Churchill Sharpe.
She soon established herself with the local criminal underworld, becoming involved in various crimes, mostly of a petty nature, including fraud, assault, brawling, drunk and disorderly behavior, beggary and pickpocketing.
She had various criminal lovers, but she graduated from petty criminality to major crime when she met Eddie Guerin, who organised a robbery of the American Express office in Paris. May was imprisoned for her role in the crime. She operated her schemes on four continents and in nine countries.
She reached the height of her career in England, when she was taken up by aristocrat Sir Sidney Hamilton Gore, who is said to have proposed marriage to her - shortly before he shot himself.
After Geurin escaped from a French prison island, he made his way to London where he met May again, but the relationship turned sour. She took up with a burglar named Charley Smith.
In 1907, during an altercation with Geurin, Smith shot him, wounding him in the foot. Smith and May were both accused of attempted murder.
May was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years.
She was released in 1917, and returned to America. By the 1920s she was living in Detroit and had become virtually destitute. Number longer young, she was reduced to propositioning men on the streets and was repeatedly arrested for soliciting and common prostitution.
She hoped to make money from her former notoriety by writing magazine articles and an autobiography with the help of a journalist, which was published in 1928 as Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks.
Her former lover Guerin published his own life story at the same time, under the title I was a Bandit. She died in 1929 at the age of 59 years.