But while still only a teenager in 1934, she showed her mettle as the beautiful and beguiling redheaded apprentice of Mob bookmaker Joe Epstein in the rough and corrupt city of Chicago. Hill, born in 1916, was surely something of a mental case, perhaps diagnosed today as bipolar, sociopathic, borderline personality or worse. An Austrian official concluded the 49-year-old Virginia died of a self-administered overdose of sedatives, not a surprise given her history of near-fatal pill-swallowing going back to the 1940s. The woman was Virginia Hill, the onetime so-called “Queen of the Mob,” a courtesan and entrusted cash courier for household-name American gangsters from the mid-1930s through the 1940s. A possible suicide note indicated the person was simply “tired of life.” Her coat was neatly folded on the ground. On March 24, 1966, passersby walking on a footpath beside a picturesque brook near Salzburg, Austria, found the body of a woman in the snow beside a tree. Third in a series of profiles for Women’s History Month.
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