In the summer of 1904 Bishop Potter unwittingly acted as the accomplice of a burglar who robbed the safe of the Clark Estate office in Cooperstown, and escaped with a quantity of jewels. The newspapers estimated the value of the stolen jewels at from $20,000 to $100,000, and the robbery became a celebrated case in police annals. The burglary was unusual in having taken place in broad daylight, with Bishop Potter calmly at work at his desk on the second floor of the small building. When the clerks left the office for luncheon at noon they locked the outside door, but did not close the vault in which the papers and valuables were kept. It was a brilliant summer day, the seventh of July; villagers and tourists were passing and repassing through the adjacent Cooper Grounds; the clerks were to return within an hour, and in the mean time the Bishop was there. Nobody dreamed of the possibility of a burglary, but it was the unexpected that happened. When the vault was to be closed and locked at the end of the day, a tin box containing a casket of jewels was missing. In the basement of the building the tin box which had contained the jewel-case was found empty, and near by was a hatchet usually kept in the basement, and with which the box had been pried open. The news of the robbery caused intense excitement in the community. The village policeman together with the county sheriff and his deputies met in conference at the Clark Estate office; knots of people gathered upon the streets in earnest discussion; the village press was busy turning out handbills announcing the robbery and offering a large reward for the apprehension of the thief; the telegraph wires hummed with messages to the police of the state and nation. Next morning Pinkerton detectives arrived under the leadership of George S. Dougherty, afterward deputy police commissioner of the city of New York. The clues discovered by the detectives were not encouraging. In the office nothing appeared beyond the fact that the box of jewels had been removed from the safe. In the basement the discarded tin box that had contained the casket of jewels lay upon the floor not far from the hatchet with which it had been opened, and the only remarkable circumstance was that the floor all about the empty box was bespattered with blood. The detectives said also that they noticed the frequent appearance of a woman's footprints which were well defined and seemed to encircle the spot where the empty jewel-box lay.