Before sailing for New Orleans detective Hotchkiss had an interview with Crawford, in the presence of the Spanish officials, and obtained from him a written confession of his guilt. While admitting that he had been a party to the robbery, the absconder tried to lessen his own crime by declaring that the plan to plunder the bank had been suggested to him by two men, named Brown and Bowen, whom he had met accidentally on a railway-train in New York, and with whom he had afterward become very friendly. These men had taken him to Brown's house on Thirty-eighth Street, somewhere between Eighth and Ninth avenues (Crawford could not locate the place more precisely), and introduced him to a fine-looking woman presented as Mrs. Brown, who was also in the conspiracy. They told him that he was earning very little money for a man in such a responsible position, and that he might easily make a fortune if he would put his interests in their hands and be guided by their advice. The outcome of several conversations was a plan to get possession of a valuable money package on some day when Crawford should know a large sum was to be sent away from the bank. He claimed that on the day of the robbery one of his fellow-conspirators, Bowen, followed behind himself and Earle after they entered the Adams express offices, and managed to substitute a bogus package for the real one while the two messengers were going up the stairs. He did not make this attempt until he saw the bank detective McDougal turn back up Broadway. Crawford said that he managed it so as to precede Earle in going up the stairs, which gave Bowen, who was standing at the first turn, in the shadow, an opportunity to open the satchel and quickly make the substitution. Crawford declared that the conspirators gave him only twenty-five hundred dollars as his share of the booty, although promising him more. This sum he put in two envelops and sent to his aunt, the one to whom he afterward intrusted the package supposed to contain gloves. Crawford stated further that Brown and Bowen, having been forced to flee the country, sent him word from Paris, some time later, in a letter written by Mrs. Brown, that the greater part of the stolen money had been buried in a flower-bed in the southeast corner of a yard on West Thirty-eighth Street, and asked him to dig it up and send it to them. A remarkable fact in this connection is that the yard referred to on West Thirty-eighth Street belonged to the house of the friend and benefactor with whom Crawford was living at the time of the robbery.