Daring High Bridge Horse-and-Buggy Thief Captured

Stories about horse thieves conjure up images of the Old West, but that wasn’t the case in the winter of 1909 when the long arm of the law caught up with a man who stole a horse and buggy in High Bridge.

Livery stablekeeper Daniel Fritts rented out his best horse-and-buggy rig to Albert Fuller on October 23, 1905. Fuller said he needed to drive out to the German Valley and Bernardsville. Fuller, a relatively tall man with a sandy moustache, bluish gray eyes and thinning dark brown hair, hopped on the rig, headed down the road and was never heard from again, The Hunterdon Gazette reported.

That is until almost four years later.

It turns out Fuller was the leader of a gang of horse thieves that operated on an extensive scale throughout the eastern states for more than four years. In February 1909, Fuller appeared in Westerly, Rhode Island under the name of W. O. Potter of Lynn, Mass. and sought to hire a rig to go to Clark’s Mills. And, as in the High Bridge instance, Fuller drove off in the rig and didn’t return. The police were contacted, and a few days later, Fuller was arrested. Fuller claimed he never would have gotten caught except he made a careless remark to a hotel clerk while registering for a room.

Five hours later an “automobile posse” on a lonely byway on the Thames River Valley ran him down, according to The Day newspaper of New London, Connecticut on May 7, 1909.

When a bag Fuller carried was searched, a large bundle of papers, hotel keys, various disguises, and pawn tickets were found on him. There also was a notebook dated from Sept. 1905 to February 1909, which gave the places and dates of where he stole horses. There were 73 entries. According to this memo, horses and buggies were stolen in 1906 from Newton, Freehold, High Bridge, Somerville, Red Bank, Morristown and Stanhope. In 1906, he stole horses from Point Pleasant, Bordentown, Woodbury, Hopewell, Dover, Princeton, Hackettstown and Lakewood. By the following year, he began concentrating his thievery in Connecticut, though in March he slipped down to Moorestown and stole a horse and buggy there.

Fuller was arraigned before a judge before being remanded to the Washington County Jail in Kingston, Ct. While in jail, Fuller refused to shave, growing a full beard in the hopes of baffling witnesses, who would be called upon in court to identify him.

That didn’t work, and Fuller was convicted by a jury to serve a year in prison. And he would be sent over to Massachusetts according to news accounts next to stand trial there.