The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  The slender German was twenty-six in January 1910 when he traveled one hundred fifty miles north of his hometown of Dortmund, an ancient city on the Ruhr, to the major port city of Bremen, on the River Weser. At the harbor in Bremen, he boarded the modern, magnificent SS Kronprinz Wilhelm, a twin-screw, four-stack steamship capable of an astonishing thirty-three thousand horsepower and a top speed of twenty-three knots. The 637-foot-long Wilhelm carried two six-cylinder, quadruple-expansion engines and sixteen massive boilers that consumed 550 tons of coal a day. A year after launching in 1901, the Wilhelm set a new world record for a transatlantic crossing—from France to New York in five days, eleven hours, and fifty-seven minutes.

  In 1910, Frank Heidemann paid sixty-seven dollars and fifty cents to travel second cabin aboard the Wilhelm. He joined fifteen hundred passengers and a crew of five hundred for the weeklong, westward voyage, traveling from Bremen to Southampton, England, and on to Cherbourg, in northern France, and finally across the Atlantic and into the busy New York Harbor, the Wilhelm’s great steel hull maneuvering slowly past the Statue of Liberty, its copper then a rich brown that was only beginning to green.

  More generally, on that day, Frank Heidemann joined an immense human wave of immigrants heading to America from all parts of the planet around the turn of the century.

  In the five decades between 1880 to 1930, more than 27 million people left their countries for the shores of this more welcoming place, as political conditions changed in their nations, and technological wonders like the Wilhelm—using less fuel to propel more tonnage—made crossing the Atlantic more tolerable.

  In 1910, when Heidemann made his voyage, there were already around 2.3 million German-born immigrants living in the United States, and more than five hundred German-language newspapers thriving across the country. Germans were the fourth-largest immigrant bloc, behind the Irish, the Austro-Hungarians, and the Russians. When Heidemann stepped off the Wilhelm onto U.S. soil on January 18, 1910, he became part of the grand experiment and promise of democracy—one more anonymous dreamer blending into the rich, unfinished fabric of America.

  It was his chance to start over. In Germany, Heidemann had been a loner. His father, a tailor, sent him to boarding school when he was twelve, and when he got older he worked in a Dusseldorf cemetery as an assistant florist. He had no wife or friends. He had three sisters but was close with only one. On his first day ashore in New York City, he rented a room at the Union Square Hotel in lower Manhattan, and in his first weeks he bounced from hotel to hotel, each lowlier than the previous one, as his funds—a total of four hundred dollars—began to run short.

  Early on, Heidemann took out a “Situation Wanted” ad hoping to get a job in the floral industry. It took him three months to find work as an elevator man in a German hospital at 77th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. He was soon promoted to night telephone operator, earning twenty dollars a month. He stayed there until October 1, when he noticed a help-wanted ad for an assistant florist. The ad gave a contact number for Max Kruschka in Asbury Park. Heidemann left his job at the hospital and traveled sixty miles south to his new home on the Jersey shore.

  This, at least, was the clean, uneventful timeline of his life that Frank Heidemann gave Ray Schindler during his interrogation in Sheriff Hetrick’s office. As Schindler would soon discover, not all of it was true.

  During the interrogation, Schindler was informed that a reporter digging into Heidemann’s background discovered he might have worked at the German hospital in Manhattan as early as 1906—four years before he claimed to have first landed in America.

  Meanwhile, Schindler’s own detective, T. P. Bowers, had been canvassing lower Manhattan for any details of Heidemann’s life there in early 1910. Bowers found William Beckman, the owner of a rooming house where Heidemann had stayed. Beckman and his wife told Bowers that Heidemann was a problem tenant. He rarely left his room except to walk up and down 14th Street, “watching the women who frequent that vicinity,” Bowers reported. One such woman, dressed shabbily and looking no older than seventeen, called on Heidemann and spent time in his room. Heidemann told the Beckmans she was his fiancée. He also claimed to be a detective, and showed off a badge, a club, and handcuffs.

  When the young woman’s brother showed up at the rooming house demanding to see Heidemann, however, the German refused to leave his room for four days.

  Bowers then went uptown, to the German hospital on 77th Street. A superintendent there, Mr. Kortum, confirmed that Heidemann—using the name Frank Hardenburg—first worked there as a messenger starting in August 1906. He left after a year but returned in 1910, and was hired again, this time as Frank Heidemann.

  Schindler confronted Heidemann about the two different names, but he was ready with an answer—he claimed to have fled Germany to avoid military service, and used the alias to avoid detection in the United States.

  In New York City, Bowers also learned that Heidemann worked in a Jewish hospital at the corner of Clausen Street and St. Mark’s Avenue in Brooklyn. The superintendent there, Mr. Strasser, confirmed that Heidemann—again, as Hardenburg—worked as a hall man, night clerk, and telephone operator starting in September 1907. In the summer of 1908, he was fired. Bowers pushed Strasser for details about why Heidemann was dismissed, but Strasser insisted he couldn’t say. In a second interview a few days later, Strasser offered the vague statement that Heidemann was let go for “unsatisfactory services.” Bowers pushed harder. “Well,” Strasser finally said, “when I don’t like the habits or morals of one of our employees and don’t wish to let him know in so many words my reason for doing so, I wait until he makes a mistake of some sort and then tell him or her that their services are no longer required, and get rid of them as soon as possible.”

  “As in the case of Hardenburg?” Bowers asked.

  Strasser laughed and replied, “I cannot say.”

  * * *

  Working on another tip, Bowers found the owner of the Bay View Hotel in Long Island, where Heidemann—calling himself Frank Heitman—worked as a driver and handyman for a few months in 1908.

  “He was always talking about women,” a hotel worker told Bowers. “He used to tell about a French doctor somewhere in New Jersey who caught him committing adultery with his wife.”

  On Bowers’s second visit to the Bay View Hotel, another employee, Lizzie Gerdt, pulled him to the side. The young woman wanted to tell him something she had never shared with anyone except for the wife of the hotel owner. But first Bowers had to promise to keep her name out of the newspapers. Bowers assured her that he would.

  “I always mistrusted Frank,” Gerdt said, before sharing her story. One morning, she explained, when she was cleaning an upstairs room by herself, Heidemann quietly opened the door and snuck in. “I turned around and saw him in his nightshirt,” Gerdt said. “The way he looked at me frightened me terribly. I gave him one yell and I ran into the adjoining room and down the stairs.”

  Later, Heidemann found her in the lobby and asked her not to tell on him. She agreed, as long as he promised to stay away from her.

  “I shouldn’t have told you this,” Gerdt said to Bowers, “except that it might help to show what kind of fellow he was.”

  More incriminating stories followed. Mr. Kortum from the Jewish hospital said that in the weeks before quitting and going to Asbury Park, Heidemann “appeared mentally upset, very nervous and excitable.” A nurse at the German hospital called Heidemann “a smart alec” and “fresh guy” who seemed “extremely nervous” most of the time. Schindler’s detectives found two men who had traveled aboard the SS Kronprinz Wilhelm with Heidemann in 1910, and roomed with him in their early days in the United States. They confirmed Heidemann was preoccupied with taking women out on dates and spending money on them. Most of the women, they told Bowers, were prostitutes working on 14th Street.

  At the time of his interrogation of Frank Heidemann, Schindler did not have all of this information, and did not realize quite how bra
zenly Heidemann was lying to him about a number of things—how long he’d been in America, his employment history, his obsession with women.

  But from his hours of questioning him, and his visit to Heidemann’s bedroom, Schindler did feel certain the suspect was hiding something. The way Heidemann refused to go back over the details of his whereabouts the morning Marie Smith disappeared. The way his lower lip quivered and his body shifted in his chair when Schindler announced, “Bring in the girl.” The provocative postcards in Heidemann’s room.

  Schindler was also realizing, in the course of the interview, that Heidemann was not about to incriminate himself. He betrayed some measure of guilt through his expressions and his evasiveness, but he never came close to caving in and delivering a sobbing confession.

  “It was Heidemann’s practice throughout to admit only to such things questioned of which he was assured data had come into possession of the questioner,” Schindler concluded. “It was apparent he would not admit to anything of a damaging nature. All through his examination he took good care to protect himself.”

  Schindler felt sure Heidemann was lying, but he couldn’t prove it, at least not in any way that would hold up in court. Heidemann shrugged off the suggestive postcards as jokes. He said anyone who claimed he’d been in the United States in 1906 was flat wrong. And Grace Foster’s story was, after all, the testimony of a child. In fact, not a single bit of hard evidence connected Heidemann to the murder of Marie Smith.

  Schindler knew his team would have to work harder. Heidemann, he now understood, was skilled at deception. In his time in America he had used three names and secured several jobs without arousing much suspicion. He was odd enough to be mistrusted, even fired, but he hadn’t crossed over to criminality. He was cagey and secretive, but he wasn’t reckless. Whatever evil existed in his heart, it had only yet to reveal itself as immorality—so far as anyone could prove.

  The interrogation of Heidemann lasted ten full hours, until 8:00 p.m. When it was over, Sheriff Hetrick marched Heidemann across the street to police headquarters, had him fingerprinted, and booked him as a material witness in the investigation of Marie Smith’s murder. When Heidemann couldn’t pay his two-thousand-dollar bail, an officer put him in a cell in the police station. It was the same cell that Thomas Williams—still locked away in the Freehold jail despite not being charged—had been put in the night an angry mob came calling for him.

  When the iron bars closed behind him, Heidemann pleaded his innocence, and then loudly wept.

  After the interview, Schindler returned to the Marlborough Hotel for a late meeting with the coroner, Robert Purdy, and Peter Smith’s boss, Randolph Miller. Schindler filled them in on the interrogation, and they discussed strategy going forward. With Heidemann’s arrest, at least Schindler and his team could rest easier, knowing where he was.

  Then, during the meeting, Schindler was handed a message. It was not good news. Max Kruschka had hired a lawyer to represent his German employee, and, shortly before 10:00 p.m., the lawyer posted bail.

  Frank Heidemann was free.

  CHAPTER 20 Afraid of What They Might Find

  November 28, 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  That night, Schindler restarted round-the-clock surveillance of Heidemann. The next day, Heidemann’s arrest and interrogation were big news. The New York Times covered the story under the headline “German Nurseryman Held.” Heidemann, the article said, endured “a scathing fire of questions,” but did not crack. “Though no formal charge of murder is made against him,” the paper declared, Heidemann’s interrogators “virtually accuse him of the crime.”

  The biggest surprise for Schindler, though, was the coverage of events in the Asbury Park Press. When Schindler picked up the paper and read the front-page story, it was clear that Heidemann, after being bailed out, quickly met up with the Press reporter Alvin Cliver and shared his side of the story. It was a complete refutation of all the evidence that made Heidemann a leading suspect, right down to his lies to Schindler during the previous day’s interview. Alvin Cliver, handed exclusive access to such a prominent figure in the investigation, gave Heidemann all the space he needed to build a case for his innocence—and against the detectives brought in to solve the case.

  “I know I am innocent,” Heidemann told Cliver, “and it makes me so mad to think they are trying to implicate me in the crime.”

  What about the biggest lie Heidemann told Schindler—that he’d never been in America prior to 1910? That was a lie, Heidemann admitted, but he told it for a reason.

  “He withheld this part of the story because of his dislike of one of the questioners”—Ray Schindler—“and his belief that [Schindler] was endeavoring to fix the crime on him,” Cliver wrote.

  “I didn’t like him,” Heidemann was quoted as saying. “He made me so mad with his questions, over and over again.”

  What about the incident with Grace Foster? Did Heidemann tell her to come around to see him alone?

  “I did not tell her that,” Heidemann told Cliver. “The Foster boy and girl came up to me when I was working in the yard and I gave the girl a piece of candy. ‘Have you got any more, Frank?’ she asked me. I told her that I didn’t have any more, but when I got some more, I would give her some. I said nothing to her about sneaking back. The Foster boy, Albert I think it is, said I give him five cents one day and told him to give it to Grace. I did not do this.” Instead, Heidemann claimed, he paid Albert Foster five cents to load a wheelbarrow with wood.

  Heidemann’s conversation with Cliver changed the way he was perceived in Asbury Park. After the article ran, people who encountered Heidemann in public went up to him to shake his hand and tell him they believed he was innocent. Men and women all over the town crossed streets and avenues to get to Heidemann and announce they were on his side. It was a strange and instant celebrity for someone who until then had been all but invisible in Asbury Park.

  One person who seemed to agree that Heidemann was being railroaded was John S. Applegate, the county prosecutor who’d been left out of the decision to bring Schindler into the investigation. Applegate was on record as believing Tom Williams was Marie Smith’s murderer. The day after the Heidemann interrogation, Applegate told one of Schindler’s operatives that their interview with Heidemann hadn’t produced any new evidence. Grace Foster’s testimony, Applegate said, was worthless because it wouldn’t stand up in court. Similarly, any information about Frank Heidemann’s past life in New York City was not relevant to the murder case, since none of it had resulted in any time served for a crime. By Applegate’s estimate, Schindler and his men had been on the job a full week and gotten exactly nowhere.

  As for Frank Heidemann, he had only recently emerged as a suspect in the murder. But just as quickly, the case against him, at least in the court of public opinion, had fallen apart.

  * * *

  It had never been part of Ray Schindler’s plan to ignore Tom Williams as a suspect. Even before he interviewed Heidemann, Schindler devised a scheme to interrogate Williams, who was in a jail cell in Freehold and telling the same story to all his many interrogators—that he was innocent and knew nothing of the crime. Schindler’s method would not be a formal interview. Instead, he was going to “rope” Tom Williams.

  One day after the Heidemann questioning, Schindler finalized his plans with a Burns detective whose identity was closely guarded, even in company reports. Known only as R.W.E., the black man would pose as a criminal named “Russell,” and—through Schindler’s arrangements with the warden of the Freehold County Jail—be placed in a cell either with or next to Tom Williams. There he would gain Williams’s trust and find out how much Williams knew about the murder.

  Once the plan was activated, it worked quickly, and well. In his first evening in jail, “Russell” befriended Tom Williams and got him talking. Russell asked him what he was in for, and Williams told him about Marie Smith. Williams said that on the night before Marie disappeared, he sta
yed out late drinking, which caused him to get up late and miss an appointment with a man who had hired him for a job. After that, Williams said, he went to the saloon at Griffin’s Wanamassa Hotel to drink some more. He never saw Marie Smith that day, and knew nothing about her disappearance. The next day, he helped Marie’s father, Peter, search for the girl in the woods.

  There were thousands of people all through the woods where the girl was found, Williams told Russell. That stretch of woods was trampled over every inch. The girl must have been put there the next night.

  Russell mentioned that he had a white lawyer, and Williams asked if the lawyer could represent him, too. Williams was particularly interested in having a white lawyer, and said he wouldn’t trust a black one. Here was a chance to have another “rope” question Williams.

  “Advise that a white man be sent to” impersonate the lawyer, Russell suggested in his report. “Advise that [Ray Schindler] come himself, as Williams is crazy to see my lawyer at once.”

  * * *

  Ray Schindler liked the idea. He was anxious to question Tom Williams himself, and here was the perfect opportunity to do it without betraying that he was a detective. Not long after Russell’s first encounter with Williams, Schindler showed up at the Freehold County Jail late one afternoon. He spoke with Deputy O’Brian about the plan, and O’Brian led him to the anteroom where prisoners met with visitors. Tom Williams was waiting for him there.

  Schindler asked Williams if he had requested to see a lawyer. Williams said that he had. I need a good lawyer, Williams explained, as it is my intention to bring a lawsuit up against the state for false imprisonment.

  Schindler sat across from the prisoner, and they talked over the proposed lawsuit. Schindler wanted to take him through the details of the case, but the room was too public for that. Instead, they discussed how Williams planned to pay for his defense: he claimed to have friends in New York who would raise funds for him, and he promised to give their addresses to Schindler in his next visit to the jail.