The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  After the briefing, Purdy and Miller took Schindler into the Wanamassa woods, to the spot where William Benson found Marie’s body. They walked the path Marie was thought to have taken when she left the Bradley School the morning she vanished, and from there went to the home of her parents, where Schindler interviewed Peter Smith and his wife. He asked them to focus on any enemies they might have made, but Peter—despite a history of agitation—gave Schindler no useful information. Schindler met with Hetrick one last time in his office before leaving Asbury Park around 5:30 p.m. and heading back to Manhattan.

  Two days later, Schindler was back in Asbury Park, this time with the lead detective on his team, Charles Scholl, one of several Burns detectives who would work the case with him. Once again, they met with Sheriff Hetrick and Robert Purdy in Hetrick’s office.

  At Schindler’s request, Purdy summoned Joseph Ackerman and Earl Wagner, the local physicians who had performed the autopsy on Marie Smith. Schindler had studied the autopsy report, and now grilled the doctors on the precise nature of the wounds, and on the kinds of instruments that might have made them. The main injury to Marie’s head, a clean four-inch by two-inch gash, was likely made with the edge of an ax or a shovel, the doctors told Schindler.

  Could it also have been made by a mason’s tool? Schindler asked. A trowel, for instance? They allowed that it could have. In other words, no one had much confidence in what the murder weapon had been. All they knew for sure was that it had been something sharp. Schindler was frustrated by how little the autopsy had revealed. Too many knowable things were still not known.

  Schindler asked more questions. He learned about the mysterious burns on Marie’s nose and ear. He heard about the small cluster of maggots that had been found on the ground in the woods near Marie’s face, but which had not yet eaten into her skin. He absorbed all the technical information, then asked a different kind of question.

  What was Marie’s expression like?

  “Peaceful,” one of the doctors replied.

  The detail didn’t have much apparent value or relevance to the investigation. But it was important enough for Schindler to include it in his daily notes.

  * * *

  Schindler and Scholl spent the next few hours getting familiar with other characters and locations—scouring the murder site again, visiting the boardinghouse where Tom Williams had been arrested. By early evening they were back in Schindler’s Park Row office, and they stayed there until 9:30 p.m. reading every newspaper clipping about the case and making a list of anyone who could possibly have seen Marie Smith the morning she disappeared. The list stretched to thirteen names, and it became the first true list of potential suspects in the case.

  Very quickly, Schindler narrowed it down to seven names. One of the seven, of course, was Tom Williams. Another was a psychic named Adeline Dey, who had boasted around town of knowing what happened to Marie. The florist Max Kruschka and his apprentice, Frank Heidemann, were also on the list, because they lived in the house near where Marie was last seen.

  The following day, November 22, Schindler sent Charles Scholl back to Asbury Park on his own. Scholl booked a room for several days at the elegant Marlborough Hotel on Grand Avenue, and lined up interviews with some of the people who had already been questioned by police—Miss Emery, Marie’s principal at the Bradley School; Albert Foster, a young classmate who saw Marie the morning she vanished; Emma Davison, the last known person to see Marie alive.

  Scholl also interviewed a local life insurance agent named Francis J. Clancy, who told Scholl that he and some other volunteers had searched the exact patch of woods where Marie’s body was found the night before it was discovered. “He declared that no one with fair eyesight could be shut out from view of an object as large as a child,” Scholl wrote, “and therefore he believes that the body of Marie Smith was placed where it was found at a time after his visit to the spot on Saturday, Nov. 12.”

  Because of that, Clancy told Scholl he strongly suspected Max Kruschka, who had been involved in a sex-related crime some years earlier, and who, unlike other suspects in the case, had cellar space beneath his greenhouses, where he could have hidden Marie’s body for three days before it was discovered.

  Schindler did not want Scholl to interview Max Kruschka yet. Kruschka had already been interviewed and cleared by Asbury Park police, but he was still a viable suspect, and Schindler wanted his team to have as much information as possible from other sources before they approached him. Instead, Charles Scholl continued his tour of the streets and houses near where Marie was last seen.

  One of those houses, a few dozen yards past Max Kruschka’s property, belonged to Seymore Foster, an electrical engineer at the Asbury Park electric light plant. Foster’s eight-year-old son, Albert, was the classmate who left school after morning recess about the same time as Marie the day she disappeared.

  Albert had told his story to police—he had last seen Marie heading toward Max Kruschka’s home—and he told the same story to Charles Scholl when he visited. On his second day in Asbury Park, Scholl returned to the Fosters’ home to go through Albert’s testimony again.

  Scholl knocked on the front door in the early afternoon and Seymore’s wife answered. Her husband was at work and would be home that evening, she explained. She sat with Scholl and discussed her son’s testimony, but it was clear something else was on her mind. She told Scholl she’d just remembered an incident that he might find relevant to the case. It didn’t involve her son, Albert.

  It involved her seven-year-old daughter, Grace.

  Mrs. Foster explained that several days earlier, Grace—whom she described as sweet but rugged—had gone with her brothers Albert and Norman to play with a neighbor’s young son in the neighbor’s front yard.

  When Grace came home that day, she told her mother an odd story. While she and her brothers were playing, a man approached her and asked her to come back to the yard the next day, so he could give her some candy. He asked her to come alone, without her brothers.

  Mrs. Foster warned her daughter to never accept anything from strangers. Then she forgot about the incident. But the next day, her son Norman came home from playing in the same front yard, and handed his mother a nickel.

  What’s this? she asked.

  It was from the same man who spoke to Grace the day before, the boy said. The man told Norman he’d promised Grace candy, and since she hadn’t shown up, he wanted Norman to give her five cents so she could buy candy on her own.

  Mrs. Foster took the nickel from her son and put it on a shelf. She warned him, too, not to accept anything from strangers. That Sunday, she brought the nickel to the First Congregation Church and dropped it in the collection plate. And again, she forgot all about it.

  Three days later, Marie Smith disappeared.

  Scholl scribbled down his notes and asked if he could talk to Grace himself. She was at school, so Scholl arranged to return that evening, when both Grace and her father would be home.

  Later that day, Scholl knocked on the Fosters’ front door again, and this time Seymore Foster answered. Seymore knew the story of Grace and the man and the nickel. His wife had told him about it when it happened, but, like her, he hadn’t been overly troubled by it. He knew the man in question, but did not consider him threatening. The Fosters had not considered, as Scholl later noted, “the underlying motive and possible criminal intent” of the man who approached Grace.

  But now, in light of Marie Smith’s murder, everything was different. The events carried much more weight. When Seymore Foster talked about Grace’s story now, Scholl wrote, “he was incensed.”

  Grace was in bed when Scholl arrived. Her mother went to wake her and brought her to the sitting room. Grace stood in front of Scholl and told her story again, clearly and without hesitation. The man had promised to buy her candy if she came back the following day by herself.

  As Scholl listened to Grace talk, he noticed her father becoming enraged. Without a word, Seymore stood u
p, went to the front door, and put on his winter coat. Scholl caught him at the door.

  We have to bide our time, Scholl told him. That will further our chances of uncovering the perpetrator of Marie Smith’s murder, who could be this very man.

  Scholl got Seymore to calm down and take off his coat. He thanked young Grace and thanked her parents and told them he would be in touch soon. Back at the Marlborough Hotel, Scholl hastily transcribed his notes. This new evidence, he concluded, pointed strongly toward the man in Grace’s story “as being somehow seriously connected with this case.”

  Scholl wrote down the name—Frank Heidemann.

  CHAPTER 15 My Besetting Sin

  March 2, 1892

  Memphis, Tennessee

  It began with two boys shooting marbles on an unusually warm spring day following a nearly snowless winter. They were laughing and teasing in the front yard of the home of Cornelius Hurst Sr., the father of one of the boys, Cornelius Jr. The Hursts, a white family, lived in a mixed-race neighborhood just outside of Memphis known as “the Curve,” named for the sharp bend of the streetcar tracks around Mississippi Boulevard. Hurst was a shotgun messenger, or express messenger—a guard hired to protect safes and strongboxes being shipped by train. That day, his son was playing with his friend, Armour Harris, a black boy who also lived in the Curve.

  Something went wrong with their game of marbles, and they argued. Then they fought. It was likely a well-matched fight, and nothing too serious, but the Nashville Tennessean would later describe it as a “half-grown Negro lad [striking] a little son of Cornelius Hurst.”

  What followed was a tragic chain reaction.

  The elder Hurst ran out to the lawn and punched young Armour Harris. The black boy’s father, W. H. Harris, either saw or heard about what happened and rushed to the Hursts’ yard. He brought along two black men, Will Stewart and Calvin McDowell, who worked in the Negro-owned People’s Grocery near the Hursts’ home. They confronted the elder Hurst and, as the Tennessean reported, “abused him in the vilest terms.” Hurst “sallied forth and gave Harris a clubbing,” too.

  Soon a team of police officers arrived. Then citizens by the dozens, white and black, filled the streets. There was more fighting, and in the melee a white man named William Barrett was clubbed. He identified his attacker as Will Stewart, the black clerk at the People’s Grocery.

  Police stopped the fighting, and the crowd thinned away. The next day, an officer went with William Barrett to the People’s Grocery, in search of Will Stewart. Calvin McDowell stopped them and told them no one matching Stewart’s description was there.

  Barrett, unhappy with that answer, pulled out a revolver and struck McDowell in the face with it, knocking him to the floor. In the process Barrett dropped his gun, and McDowell picked it up and shot at him. McDowell missed, but even so, his fate was sealed.

  The two sides retrenched. There were newspaper reports of black citizens banding together and vowing to rid the Curve of “white trash,” and reports of whites enlisting town officials to break up “a nest of turbulent and unruly negroes.” A judge issued a warrant for the arrest of Calvin McDowell, and another for the arrest of the young boy, Armour Harris, for allegedly striking his white friend. Several white men were quickly sworn in as assistant deputies.

  The following day, March 3, a group of armed white men made their way to the People’s Grocery. They would claim their only aim was to enforce the warrants. But there was a wrinkle to the story—William Barrett, the man whose accusation against Will Stewart led to the arrest warrants, was the owner of a rival market not far from the People’s Grocery. His market had been losing business to the new store. The Curve’s black residents believed the true aim of law enforcement was to shutter the People’s Grocery and reestablish William Barrett’s monopoly.

  The encounter at the store was disastrous. The black men were waiting and armed, and shots were fired. Three deputies and two black men were injured. Press reports called it an ambush, but the pastors of Memphis’s black churches insisted the white men who surrounded the grocery gave no indication they were deputized sheriffs, and looked like part of an advancing white mob. After the shooting, more than one hundred white citizens were hastily deputized, and some forty black men and women were arrested and taken to jail.

  Armour Harris, the boy shooting marbles, was among them, as were Will Stewart, Calvin McDowell, and the president of the People’s Grocery, Thomas Moss.

  The arrests prevented what might have become a full-blown race riot. There was outrage in the neighborhood, on both sides, as black lawyers tried to free the prisoners and white-owned newspapers exaggerated the injuries of the deputies who’d been shot. The Curve’s black citizens assembled a small militia to watch over the Shelby County Jail, lest Will Stewart or anyone else meet the fate of the many dozens of unlucky men who’d been lynched by white mobs in Tennessee since the end of the Civil War.

  For three days, all was quiet at the jail. The tension in the town began to give way. Surely Memphis had come too far to permit another atrocious lynching in such a high-profile case. Surely the modernizing city, where economic opportunity blossomed for both whites and blacks, would not take such a drastic step backward. No doubt “there was serious apprehension of further violence, especially a lynching,” the black pastors would later write in their description of the events. But there was also, it seemed, some faint hope for a fair and bloodless resolution to it all, and on the third night, the black militia disbanded and no longer kept an overnight watch at the jail.

  They were too optimistic.

  One night later, on March 9, 1892, at 2:30 a.m., some seventy-five white men in black masks and hoods gathered on Front Street, near the Shelby County Jail. They were quiet in the night. “No one saw them assemble, no officer of the law noticed their passage,” one newspaper reported. Inside the jail, a night watchman named O’Donnell chatted with a friend called Seat. A loud ring sounded—someone was at the front gate.

  “Who’s there?” O’Donnell called out.

  “Hugh Williams of White Haven. I have a prisoner.”

  O’Donnell said, “All right” and opened the gate.

  Three masked men pushed in. O’Donnell reached for his pistol and asked, “What does this mean?” Before he could draw it, he was tackled and pushed hard against a wall. Then he heard a terrible sound, a deep rumble, thundering, insistent. More men were coming. All the watchman could do was meekly ask an unnecessary question—“What do you want?”

  “The keys to the cells where the Negroes are,” was the reply.

  * * *

  In 1892, the year of the trouble at the Curve, Ida Wells was twenty-nine years old. Five years earlier, in 1887, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned her surprise legal victory over the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railway, and Wells went back to teaching—this time in rural Memphis—to pay off the debts from the trial and the verdict. It was a difficult time financially for Wells, who was still caring for part of her family. But while she had lost the case, Wells had gained things of value—a reputation, and a voice.

  As the biographer Paula J. Giddings put it in her definitive biography of Wells, A Sword Among Lions, Wells became “certainly the most famous teacher in the Memphis school system.” She taught first grade in two different rural Memphis schools, and earned an impressive fifty dollars a month. She built a reputation that was only partly based on her activism and persistence in the black cause. She also became known for her uncommon literary mind.

  In an era when more than half of all blacks were illiterate, Wells was steeped in books—“a voracious reader,” as she put it. She consumed every bit of fiction she could find in her local libraries, and discovered a sort of romance to losing herself in literature. “In the country schools where I had taught many times there was no oil for lamps and there were no candles to spare,” Wells wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice. “I used to sit by the blazing wood fire with a book in my lap during the long winter eveni
ngs and read by firelight. My only diversion was reading, and I could forget my troubles in no other way.”

  She read Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Brontë and Walter Scott. She knew the Bible cover to cover (it was the only book her parents allowed her to read on Sundays), and by one account Wells read every work of both Dickens and Shakespeare before she turned twenty.

  In Memphis, while teaching first grade, Wells joined other local teachers in a group called the Memphis Lyceum, part of a national movement of gatherings devoted to literary and scholarly activities—speeches, readings, debates, lectures. Wells’s lyceum met every Friday afternoon in the Vance Street Christian Church, and she was one of its stars. She was a confident public speaker, and she was picked to read essays and news articles to the group. She acted in staged plays and began writing small items—notes, poems, ideas, criticisms—for the Memphis Lyceum’s modest publication, the Evening Star.

  The Lyceum, Wells wrote, “was a breath of life to me.”

  And it was at the Lyceum that Wells’s truest talent emerged—not teaching, as it turned out, but rather reporting.

  Wells was surprised when, after the Evening Star’s unpaid editor, Virginia Broughton, gave up the position, the members of the Memphis Lyceum elected her to be the new editor. She was humble about it—“I tried to make my offering as acceptable as [Broughton’s] had been,” she wrote. But she was also delighted. “Before long,” she would write, “I found that I liked the work.”