The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  CHAPTER 25 The Hellhound

  December 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  Ray Schindler and his men were out of options.

  They’d been in Asbury Park for more than a month and uncovered no hard evidence linking anyone to the murder. They’d combed the Wanamassa several times, and spoken to just about everyone with any connection to the case. The coroner’s inquest hadn’t been helpful, and now the second autopsy hadn’t yielded any leads. Grit and legwork had only taken Schindler’s men so far, and perhaps as far as they ever would.

  Their diligent interviewing and reinterviewing of witnesses did yield some results. Charles Scholl, for instance, was deliberate in going after Marjorie Coleman, the woman who claimed to hear Tom Williams say he would “get next to” Marie Smith. The county prosecutor, John Applegate, presented her claim as vital evidence against Williams at the coroner’s inquest. Scholl asked around and learned that Williams allegedly made the remark at an impromptu afternoon party in Asbury Park. He tracked down everyone who was there and spoke to them all. He got three of them to sign affidavits declaring Tom Williams never made any remark about any child, much less about Marie Smith.

  Scholl also paid a return visit to the ramshackle boardinghouse where Tom Williams was arrested. There he met a woman named Carrie Higgins, who had insight into two key pieces of evidence—the small towel and the faded blue blanket found near the room where Williams slept. Mysteriously, both items appeared to have blood on them, and were collected as proof of Williams’s guilt.

  But now Higgins had an explanation for the red stains. She told Scholl the blood on the blanket belonged to her son, who had been sick and suffered a nosebleed. As for the towel, Higgins said she hung it on a clothesline just beneath a red underskirt, which dripped on the towel and stained it with red dye.

  Scholl accepted Higgins’s explanation about the towel, but he checked with a local physician about her son’s nosebleed. The doctor confirmed the story. Scholl, then, was able to discount three crucial bits of evidence aimed at Tom Williams—the bloody towel and blanket, and Marjorie Coleman’s claim.

  Yet all that did was weaken the case against Williams. It did nothing to build a case against anyone else.

  Schindler knew the investigation was losing momentum. For a long time, the spectacular crime had absorbed the town’s citizens completely. There had been at least one major story about Marie Smith in local newspapers for twenty-seven straight days. But by mid-December 1910, more than a month after the murder, interest was waning. People were getting on with their lives, and the headlines disappeared. The Asbury Park Press and Alvin Cliver stopped their front-page coverage of the case on December 9. There simply wasn’t anything new to report.

  Here is where Raymond Schindler’s inexperience as a homicide investigator proved helpful.

  Marie’s killing was his first murder case, and in many ways he was still learning on the job. He understood the investigative protocols and parameters put in place by Williams Burns, but he didn’t have a deep well of prior work to draw on. He had yet to be buttoned into any one way of working a case, and he was freer to take chances and follow his instincts than a more seasoned detective might have been. There was room in his still-forming methodology for invention and imagination. For creativity.

  That is how Ray Schindler pushed through the dead spot in the investigation and devised a new plan.

  Admittedly, it was a plan “which on its face seemed foolishly theatrical,” Schindler later confessed. “It was like the wildest sort of fiction, but we hoped it would work.”

  Two people inspired Schindler’s plan—the experimental German psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Schindler’s interest in the psychological underpinnings of crime, as studied and articulated by Münsterberg, led him to believe that, under pressure, human beings could not help but betray their true emotions. A suspect who was guilty would, under the right circumstances, manifest his guilt through some kind of physical tic. “The lips and hands and arms and legs, which are under our control, are never the only witnesses to the drama which goes on inside,” Münsterberg wrote in his seminal essay collection, On the Witness Stand, published two years before Schindler joined the Marie Smith case. “If they keep silent, others will speak.” Investigators, Münsterberg believed, should look for “the involuntary signs of secret excitement”—human nature slowly revealing itself.

  Münsterberg pushed to have his theories adopted by law enforcement professionals, who he felt would hugely benefit from applying experimental psychology to crime detection. His great frustration was that almost no one in the field took him seriously.

  He had a fan in Raymond Schindler, though, and now Schindler was about to put Münsterberg’s controversial theories into practice.

  Schindler, a devoted reader of literature, turned for direct inspiration to one of the most popular current works of crime fiction—The Hound of the Baskervilles, written by the famous English author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and serialized in a magazine for the first time in 1901. The book featured Doyle’s greatest creation, the uncommonly intuitive detective Sherlock Holmes. In the story, Holmes takes on a murder case in Devon and confronts the legend of a fearsome, oversize hellhound prowling the moors of England’s west country. Holmes succeeds in proving the devilish beast is just a bloodhound-mastiff mix painted with luminescent phosphorous to make it look supernatural.

  While the legend persisted, however, the phantom hound was deeply terrorizing, and convinced a family that it had been fatally cursed.

  Here was the tale of people under pressure projecting their own fear and guilt onto a harmless animal. Could Schindler somehow apply the same kind of pressure to Frank Heidemann, to flush out his “secret excitements”? It was, Schindler concluded, worth a try.

  Years later, when he wrote about the case, he explained his thinking at the time. “It is not so much a detective’s business to catch a criminal,” Schindler believed, “as it is to make a criminal catch himself.”

  * * *

  Schindler knew Frank Heidemann’s second-floor bedroom in Max Kruschka’s house had a small window overlooking the backyard kennel where Kruschka’s big watchdog slept.

  One night, shortly before 12:00 a.m., Schindler positioned one of his men, Thomas Bowers, the assistant manager of the New York Bureau, in a dense cluster of bushes and branches behind a fence that ran along Kruschka’s backyard. From that spot, Bowers was roughly twenty yards from both Frank Heidemann’s window and the backyard kennel.

  Bowers had several stones in his pockets. His instructions were simple—at midnight, he was to throw a stone at the kennel, aggravate the hound, then slip out of view. Bowers was told to do the same thing every hour until daybreak. From his discreet perch, he would watch for Heidemann’s reaction to the disturbance, and report back to Schindler.

  The first night in the thicket, Bowers waited until midnight, threw his rock at the kennel, and dropped back into the bushes. The big watchdog ran out howling, his long chain rattling behind him.

  The dog kept up his furious barking, and Bowers watched as the lights came on inside the house. In a moment both Kruschka and Frank Heidemann came out into the yard and walked around the property. They found nothing, and Kruschka scolded the dog before going back inside.

  One hour later, at 1:00 a.m., Bowers threw another stone. Out came the howling hound again, and again the lights came on. This time Kruschka stuck his head out the front door and yelled and cursed at the dog. Eventually the barking stopped.

  At 2:00 a.m., another stone, more yelping. Neither Kruschka nor Heidemann came out. Bowers, however, saw the light come on in Heidemann’s room. The dog barked until he got tired and went back to his kennel. An hour later, another stone brought him out again.

  This went on until dawn. Bowers reported that Kruschka soon blocked out the barking, but at every hour, the racket caused Heidemann to switch on his lights. Ray Schindler sent Bowers ba
ck to the same spot for a second night, and a third night. According to Schindler, the hourly harassment went on for either nine or ten straight nights. Heidemann’s bedroom light, Schindler later noted, “stayed on longer and longer. His shadow could be seen on his window shade. It was evident that he was pacing the floor.”

  Yet after more than a week of continuously agitating his suspect, Schindler had nothing to show for it. Beyond pacing in his room, Heidemann did not betray any secret, hidden emotion besides annoyance. In his later writings, Schindler said he never expected his Hound of the Baskervilles ploy would cause Heidemann to confess to murder. Instead, he claimed, he simply wanted to get under Heidemann’s skin.

  “The howling of a dog at night is supposed to be a bad omen—to be significant of death,” Schindler wrote. “We wanted very badly to unnerve the gardener. We wanted to get him out of that house—out of Asbury Park, if possible. Where a man can’t rest, he won’t live.”

  The plan, it seemed, did not work. In the days that followed, Frank Heidemann appeared unfazed. One Burns detective noted in a report on Christmas Day that Heidemann “seemed to feel good, and many times during the day he played with the dog in the yard.”

  Two days later, on December 27, Charles Scholl was called in for a meeting with Clarence Hetrick and Randolph Miller in the sheriff’s office. The news he was given was bad. “It was requested by the Sheriff, and seconded by Mr. Miller, that surveillance upon Heidemann be called off,” Scholl reported.

  Ray Schindler wasn’t pleased. He told Scholl to go back to Hetrick and stress how crucial the surveillance on Heidemann was to the case. Hetrick didn’t budge. On New Year’s morning, Schindler himself spoke with Hetrick, but that didn’t work, either. So far, the Burns Agency had billed the county $3,634.17, plus the seven hundred dollars Schindler paid Otto Schultz for the autopsy. This was well past the original three-thousand-dollar budget—and the money spent hadn’t produced a breakthrough.

  So, in his meeting with Hetrick and Miller, Schindler was told to begin to wrap up his work. “It was decided to have Charles Scholl bring together all the tail ends of the investigation, so that by the end of the week we would be in a position to present the matter to Prosecutor Applegate so he could see exactly what the status of the case is to date,” Schindler wrote. If, at that point, Hetrick could be persuaded to keep Schindler and his men on the case, they would move forward.

  If not, Schindler concluded, “it would probably be useless to continue the investigation as there would be little chance of success without the cooperation of the Prosecutor.”

  So that was it. Schindler was to gather all his evidence and build whatever case he might have—which, he well knew, was no case at all.

  By Sheriff Hetrick’s order, New Year’s Day would be the final day of surveillance on Schindler’s primary suspect, Frank Heidemann. What Schindler had called an intense “system of espionage” came to an official end on January 2, 1911, nearly six weeks after it began.

  Ray Schindler’s mangy hellhound had not, as he hoped, laid bare a murderer’s guilt.

  * * *

  Or had it?

  On January 4, 1911, two days after the end of surveillance, Max Kruschka helped Frank Heidemann put a big steamer trunk in a covered wagon and take it to the North Asbury Park train depot. The trunk was marked with the number 929687 and routed for delivery aboard a ferry to New York City’s West 23rd Street dock. The next day, in the predawn darkness, Heidemann, dressed in a suit, quietly left Kruschka’s home and steered a wagon west to the train depot. At the depot he asked a steward with a thick red mustache to help him unload his other bags. Heidemann had a ticket for the 6:15 a.m. train, scheduled to arrive in Manhattan at 8:17. Just before boarding, Heidemann looked behind him, and to his left and right. He saw nothing troubling. Then he got on the train, which left the station right on time, and carried Frank Heidemann out of New Jersey.

  Schindler later learned that Heidemann had asked Max Kruschka for two weeks’ vacation time, so he could go to New York City to marry a hospital nurse turned chorus girl named Mabel Brightel.

  But there was no wedding, and there was no Mabel Brightel.

  Frank Heidemann was fleeing Asbury Park for good.

  CHAPTER 26 The Hands of Parties Unknown

  June 27, 1895

  Chicago, Illinois

  They came by the hundreds to see Ida Wells, from the North and South, from California and New York, to a place that would soon be called the Black Metropolis—the colored Douglas neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, a few blocks from the shore of Lake Michigan.

  More than nine hundred of them—businessmen and politicians, lawyers and activists—made it inside the magnificent A.M.E. Bethel Church and filled its pews to capacity. Many dozens more lined the streets around the ornate church. Built of massive stone blocks and St. Louis pressed brick, the Romanesque structure stood on the corner of Dearborn and 30th Streets and was, according to one newspaper, “a monument to the enterprise of the colored race.” The Douglas neighborhood, though run-down and neglected, boasted several new black businesses and culture centers. It was only fitting that so many would come to see her there, in the heart of Chicago’s Black Belt, at the start of what was called the Colored Renaissance.

  Yet they did not come to hear Ida Wells give a speech.

  They came to see her get married.

  She would wed Ferdinand Lee Barnett, an accomplished black lawyer ten years older than she. Barnett’s first wife died five years earlier of heart disease, when their children were four and two. Wells had worked with Barnett on a libel case she filed against a Memphis newspaper in 1893. That same year, they collaborated on a pamphlet protesting the lack of black representation at the Chicago World’s Fair.

  The Nashville-born Barnett, like Wells, was a journalist, activist, and civic leader. At twenty-six, he cofounded Chicago’s first black newspaper, the Conservator, and published a steady collection of antilynching stories and columns. He was popular and dashing, fond of silk hats and Prince Edward coats, and when he fell for Ida Wells he made sure she had a letter from him waiting at every stop of her speaking tour. They were, it seemed, wonderfully suited for each other.

  Yet Wells postponed their wedding three times, in order to deliver antilynching speeches. She did not want a big, fancy ceremony, until a Chicago women’s club inspired by and named for her asked for permission to manage the affair. Wells agreed, and her wedding became a major social occasion, with finely printed invitations, a long guest list of notable figures, and a front-page mention in the New York Times.

  “The interest of the public in the affair seemed to be so great,” Wells would write, “that not only was the church filled to overflowing but the streets surrounding the church were so packed with humanity that it was almost impossible for the carriage bearing the bridal party to reach the church door.”

  The ceremony, set for 8:00 p.m., was late to start. Ten women from the Ida B. Wells Club, dressed in white, served as ushers. The young Rev. D. A. Graham, with his fierce muttonchops beard and logical, practical oratorical style, waited at the altar. The organist Gertrude Johnson played Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” the wedding march from the opera Lohengrin. The flower girl, Betty Womack, sprinkled petals down the aisle, followed by Wells’s sisters Annie and Lilly, wearing lemon crepe dresses with white ribbons, slippers, and gloves. Ida Wells was next.

  Then thirty-three, she wore a white satin wedding gown trimmed with chiffon and orange blossoms. She walked down the church’s left aisle, ahead of two groomsmen, R. P. Bird and S. J. Evans, who came down the right side. Ferdinand Barnett took his bride-to-be’s hand at the altar. The organist played a sweet rendition of “Call Me Thine Own,” and Rev. Graham proclaimed the couple man and wife. Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” rang through the church as little Betty Womack led the procession back down the aisle, scattering more petals as she went.

  Rather than give up her own last name, Ida Wells became Mrs. Ida Wells-Barnett.r />
  By all accounts, the wedding was a simple and beautiful celebration of love and community, and for Wells—who’d spent the previous three years traveling relentlessly throughout the United States and Great Britain on her antilynching crusade—a deserved respite and blessing.

  And yet many saw it as a betrayal.

  As soon as Wells’s wedding was announced in June 1895, “there arose a united protest from my people,” she wrote. “They seemed to feel that I had deserted the cause, and some of them censured me rather severely in their newspapers for having done so.” Many argued it would be impossible for Wells to devote the necessary energy and passion to the movement she created once she was married and raising a family.

  Even the reformer and women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, who had become friendly with Wells, seemed unhappy with her decision to wed. A year after the birth of her first child, Wells was a guest in Anthony’s home while both were working on launching the Afro-American League, a collective that would protest racial injustice. After a few days together, Wells noticed how Anthony “would bite out my married name when addressing me,” she wrote. “Finally, I said to her, ‘Miss Anthony, don’t you believe in women getting married?’ ”

  “Oh yes,” she remembered Anthony replying, “but not women like you who had a special call for special work. I too might have married but it would have meant dropping the work to which I had set my hand.”

  Anthony did not try to be diplomatic. She blamed Wells for a loss of momentum in the movement for black rights. “I know of no one in all this country better fitted to do the work you had in hand than yourself,” Anthony said. “Since you have gotten married, agitation seems practically to have ceased. Besides, you have a divided duty. You are here trying to help in the formation of this league and your eleven-month-old baby needs your attention at home.”