The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  “The newspapers quoted the governor as saying that he did not think it mandatory on him to displace the sheriff,” Wells later wrote.

  Wells and her husband sent a telegram to the governor, demanding that he follow the law. The pressure worked, and Deneen dismissed Davis from the office of sheriff. Deneen also sent a telegram back to Wells advising her that, under the terms of the 1905 act, Davis was entitled to appeal the decision, and he had already done so. A reinstatement hearing was set for December 1.

  Frank Davis had good reason to believe he could get his job back at the hearing. Many people had seen him pleading for the mob to let James go, both on the hill in Karnac and under the arch in Cairo. Davis even had to be dragged away by the mob to clear the way for James’s lynching. The sheriff was popular in Cairo, both with whites and blacks, who were pleased to see he hired black deputies. And Davis had strong political connections in Illinois. He would surely bring a team of prominent supporters to attest to his character at the hearing.

  In Chicago, Wells, Barnett, and a small group of activists gathered to discuss the upcoming hearing. For Wells, it simply didn’t matter how well liked Davis was, or even that he might have spoken up for James. What mattered was that the 1905 mob suppression act had to be enforced. If, for any reason, it wasn’t, Wells believed other sheriffs around the country would have license to ignore the law. Wells had also heard from two separate black eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen Davis give a hand signal that helped the mob find Frog James. In either case, the only fact that really mattered was that a prisoner in the custody of a sheriff had been lynched, which meant the sheriff had to go.

  It was also clear that, to ensure this happened, someone needed to be there to speak against Davis’s reinstatement at the hearing.

  Wells and Barnett worked to recruit representatives to testify to the facts of James’s death. But everyone they approached, including the eyewitnesses, turned them down. When they and “others were reminded that it was their duty to fight the effort to reinstate the sheriff,” Wells wrote, “they still refused.”

  Two days before the hearing, they still hadn’t found anyone to speak up for Frog James in court.

  In their two-story home on the South Side of Chicago, Wells and her family sat at the dinner table for their evening meal. Barnett brought up the hearing and told his wife they were out of options.

  “And so it would seem that you will have to go to Cairo,” Barnett said, “and get the facts with which to confront the sheriff.”

  Wells said she would not go.

  “I had already been accused by some of our men of jumping in ahead of them and doing work without giving them a chance,” Wells would later recall of her decision not to go to Cairo. “It was not very convenient for me to be leaving home at that time, and for once I was quite willing to let them attend to the job.”

  “You know as well as I do how important it is that somebody gather the evidence,” Barnett impatiently told his wife. “If you’re not willing to go, there is nothing more to say.”

  With that, Barnett picked up a newspaper, fanned it open, and hid himself behind it. Wells was through with the discussion, too. She picked up her youngest child, Alfreda, and went upstairs. She got in bed and sang her baby to sleep, as she did every night, and then fell asleep herself.

  A while later—Wells couldn’t tell how long—she heard a voice.

  “Mother, wake up.”

  It was Charles, her handsome eldest son, ten years old and nearly as tall as she was.

  “Mother, Pa says it’s time to go,” Charles said.

  “Go where?”

  “To take the train to Cairo.”

  Had his father put Charles up to it? Or had Charles, who heard the entire discussion at the dinner table, decided on his own to talk to his mother? Wells did not know. But it didn’t matter. Wells was not going to Cairo. There was nothing more to say.

  “I told your father downstairs that I wasn’t going,” Wells said. “I don’t see why I should have to go and do the work that others refuse.”

  “Mother,” Charles said, “if you don’t go, nobody else will.”

  A scripture came to Wells’s mind—Psalms 8:2. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.” Then Wells had another thought: “If my child wants me to go, I ought not to fall by the wayside.”

  “Tell Daddy it is too late to catch the train now,” she said to Charles. “I’ll go in the morning.”

  The next day, Wells’s husband and four children went with her to the train station to see her off. She had vowed not to leave them for any stretch of time, yet here she was, boarding a train for a full day’s ride south. Before midnight, she would be in Cairo.

  CHAPTER 28 The Rope

  January 5, 1911

  Union Square, New York City

  It was morning in New York City, and a hard blast of sleet and snow that buried third rails and crippled train service had moved north, giving way to a cold but mostly clear winter’s day in Manhattan.

  Here was the densest borough in the densest city in the world, with 106,000 people squeezed into every square mile. At that moment in time, a moment of great demographic flux and tidal sweeps of immigrants flooding its streets by the tens of thousands, Manhattan was the most populated island city in all of history.

  One more immigrant, traveling discreetly, could arrive and proceed with no heed or notice at all.

  The young German, Frank Heidemann, left Asbury Park in the morning dark and rode a New York & Long Branch railroad train to the Central Railroad Terminal in Jersey City, arriving shortly after 8:00 a.m. From there he took a small ferry across the Hudson River to Manhattan’s Pier 63, which sat at the northern end of 23rd Street.

  Heidemann rode a taxicab ten blocks south and nine avenues east to 306 East 14th Street, a four-story brownstone building a few steps from Second Avenue and across from the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, a prominent hospital with a pavilion designed by Stanford White. The brownstone at 306 was a furnished rooming house, and Heidemann booked a room in the front of the building, on the ground floor. That afternoon, he left the brownstone and hailed a green taxicab, marked No. 29329. He told the driver to take him back to the 23rd Street Ferry Terminal. There he collected his big steamer trunk, loaded it into the taxi, and brought it back to the rooming house on 14th Street.

  Now Heidemann was settled in, and ready for his first night in his new neighborhood. He was in the heart of Union Square, a onetime potter’s field and squatter’s park named for the union of Broadway and Bowery Road, on the northern edge of lower Manhattan. Union Square was a gathering place, a walking place, rich with history. The city’s first electric streetlights, built by the Brush Electric Light and Power Company, lined its streets in 1880; two years later the city’s first Labor Day parade featured twenty-five thousand people marching through the square, calling for a ban on child labor. The area was also a working place, filled with skilled German and Jewish immigrants, and restaurants and meeting halls to accommodate them. It would be easy for Frank Heidemann to blend into the human traffic on its wide, elegant streets.

  For his first night there, Heidemann dressed in a clean shirt, tight-fitting blue trousers, and black shoes. He slipped on a dark gray three-quarter-length overcoat and pulled a pearl gray Alpine hat down low on his forehead, the front rim nearly covering his eyes. He walked three blocks to a restaurant on Third Avenue and stayed for twenty minutes. When he paid his bill, he took a thick roll of five- and ten-dollar bills from his trouser pocket. To anyone who noticed it, the roll appeared to contain at least two hundred dollars, probably more.

  In fact, most of the bills were fake—advertisements made to look like real money.

  Heidemann kept up his tour of the square. He found a saloon on 15th Street, sat at the bar, and drank alone. When he left the bar he stood out front and simply watched people walk past. His eyes followed the younger women, one after another. In just a few minutes, one of the women
caught his gaze and stopped. A bit later that night, Heidemann and the woman spent one hour in a room at the Hotel Irvington. Afterward, Heidemann went drinking at Holberg’s Saloon on Third Avenue, before taking to the streets again and watching women walk by. Finally, at 11:00 p.m., he tired and went to his room. He took off his spiffy outfit and fell asleep, his aimless day of adventure over at last.

  Heidemann had fled Asbury Park to escape unwanted attention, and here on the wide boulevard he found what he needed most—a place to disappear, to catch his breath. On his first day on the run, Frank Heidemann surely felt safe from whispered judgments and peering eyes, a sort of dream come true.

  But it was only a dream.

  * * *

  In Asbury Park, Sheriff Clarence Hetrick shut down surveillance of Frank Heidemann—but he did not forget about the German just yet.

  Early on January 5, Hetrick received a tip that Heidemann had taken a carriage to the train depot. Hetrick ordered an officer to go to the station and discreetly fetch more details. Then he called the New York City office of the Burns Detective Agency and left a message—a steamer trunk belonging to Frank Heidemann had been routed to the West 23rd Street Ferry in Manhattan.

  Charles Scholl picked up the tip and called the ferry terminal. He had a station agent gather whatever information he could about the steamer trunk and where it was headed. Scholl then called Raymond Schindler at Schindler’s apartment on West 109th Street, two blocks from the Hudson River in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Schindler had already left for the office, and Scholl caught him there.

  Schindler was not surprised to hear that Heidemann had fled Asbury Park. After all, he had wanted to dislodge Heidemann from the cover of Max Kruschka’s home. He wanted Heidemann out in the open, where he could watch him and track his movements and behavior. Now that had happened—Heidemann was on the run.

  But what if the plan had worked too well? What if Heidemann were not only leaving Asbury Park, but leaving America?

  Schindler quickly pulled four detectives on the case. They all started work in the very early morning hours on January 5. Charles Scholl took a train south to Asbury Park, where he spoke with a station agent, N. E. Warner, at the train depot. Scholl got a description of Heidemann’s steamer trunk—an old-fashioned model with four strips of wood, stained yellow and fixed decoratively around its middle. Another Burns detective, T. P. Bowers, went to the West 23rd Street Ferry Terminal and had a station agent look up the record of arriving luggage. Bowers got the tag number assigned to Heidemann’s steamer trunk—No. 929687.

  A third detective, Charles Severance, dug around for information about transatlantic voyages from New York City to Germany. He learned the steamship America was leaving for Germany at 11:00 a.m. that very morning. Severance went to the offices of the Hamburg-American Line in Hoboken, New Jersey, to comb through the ship’s passenger list. He didn’t find Heidemann’s name, but he couldn’t be sure the German hadn’t used an alias. Schindler instructed a fourth detective, S. S. Brody, to rush to the departure pier in Hoboken. Brody got there one hour before the America was scheduled to leave. He boarded the steamship and walked through as much of it as he could, searching for Heidemann, to no avail.

  Just a short while later, Severance got a call from T. P. Bowers, who was still at the West 23rd Street Ferry Terminal. Bowers had found Heidemann’s trunk. It was there, at the terminal, which meant it had not been routed to the Hamburg-American pier in Hoboken.

  Which meant Heidemann likely wasn’t leaving for Germany.

  S. S. Brody left Hoboken and joined Bowers at the Ferry Terminal on 23rd Street in Manhattan. The men found hiding spots from where they could survey the luggage area without being seen. They waited for more than two hours with no sign of Heidemann. Then, at 3:00 p.m., they saw him. They had shadowed him for days and days in Asbury Park, and they knew him on sight. The detectives watched as Heidemann claimed his steamer trunk and had it loaded into a green taxicab. As soon as the cab door shut, Brody and Bowers hailed another cab and told the driver to follow Heidemann’s taxi.

  A few minutes later, both taxis arrived at 306 East 14th Street.

  Brody and Bowers got out and watched with quick glances as Heidemann had a hotel worker take his trunk into the rooming house. They waited outside, a safe distance away, for fifty minutes until Heidemann appeared out front again. He was dressed up now, in his Alpine hat and dark overcoat. The detectives followed Heidemann as he began his city adventure. For the next eight hours, the detectives kept their target in sight. It wasn’t always easy. Heidemann stopped often to leer at women walking past him—which made it more difficult for Brody and Bowers to stay unnoticed behind him. They had to frequently duck out of view. Luckily, Brody reported, the target “did not appear suspicious of being watched.”

  At 9:00 p.m., Brody told Bowers to go home. Brody stayed and followed Heidemann to his final stop—the rooming house on 14th Street. He watched the entrance for another twenty minutes before he felt sure his subject was in for the night. He stopped surveillance at 11:30 p.m.

  By dawn, Detective Brody was back outside the rooming house.

  * * *

  Raymond Schindler’s new plan was under way.

  It was a largely secret strategy, mentioned only in passing in Schindler’s January 2 agency report as “the plan outlined.” He’d discussed it with Sheriff Hetrick and Randolph Miller in their final one-hour meeting on the day Hetrick shut down surveillance of Frank Heidemann in Asbury Park. Hetrick didn’t agree to go along with it, at least not right away. He wanted to see if the first step of the plan—Heidemann fleeing Asbury Park—would come to pass, as Schindler predicted.

  When Heidemann did leave on January 5, Hetrick saw Schindler had been right, and agreed to let the Burns detectives stay on the case.

  Heidemann had absently wandered straight into Schindler’s sights. Just thirty city blocks south of Heidemann’s rooming house, Schindler kept track of his target’s movements from his Burns Agency office in the stately Park Row Building in lower Manhattan. He received regular reports from his “shadows”—the detectives following Heidemann—and he began to search for patterns. His plan depended on anticipating Heidemann’s behavior—on understanding his impulses.

  Schindler’s intention was to “rope” Frank Heidemann—the old trick he’d learned from Walter J. Burns while working corruption in San Francisco. The rope, as Schindler described him, would be a detective “assigned to form the acquaintance of Heidemann, the object being the establishment of friendly relations with him, which would develop into intimacies, with a view to obtaining his confidence, securing a knowledge of his character, his antecedents, his means and mode of living, his associates and affiliations—all for the purpose of securing direct evidence as to his knowledge, culpability, or innocence of the Marie Smith murder.”

  In other words, Schindler was after a full and detailed confession from Frank Heidemann—his only remaining hope to solve the case.

  It was an unusually elaborate plan, expensive and labor-intensive, with little precedent in murder cases and any number of ways to fail, starting with Heidemann figuring out he was being tailed. One careless slip at any point could doom the whole operation. And even if it worked perfectly, and the rope managed to befriend Heidemann and gain his full confidence, there was no assurance Heidemann would ever confess.

  Schindler, however, believed that every criminal, as Hugo Münsterberg suggested, desperately needed to “give up his identity with the criminal and eliminate the crime like a foreign body from his life.” Schindler believed Heidemann needed to confess his sins, and would confess them, under the right amount of pressure.

  The most crucial decision was picking the right rope. Schindler selected a detective named Carl R. Neumeister. His qualifications included “many years experience in this particular branch of detective work,” Schindler wrote, as well as a reputation as “one of the best qualified experts in the business.” Like Heidemann, Neumeister was born i
n Germany and spoke the language fluently, and he had “a thorough acquaintance of the German Empire,” Schindler wrote.

  Neumeister also projected a sense of calm authority. He had a sturdy build and a square face, and he wore his thick black hair swept up and high over his forehead. He had a substantial mustache and eyebrows, and his appearance was precise but warm. He could have passed as a banker or businessman, or even a friendly politician.

  Schindler set up a fake identity for Neumeister. He would use his real name, but pose as a longtime resident in America and a recent arrival to New York City. His story would be that a relative back in Germany had died, and named him in the will as a beneficiary. He was in Manhattan to work with an international banker and clear the way for him to receive his inheritance. In the meantime, he was receiving seventy-five dollars a week from the estate. Schindler arranged for an actual New York City banking firm, Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne, to provide Neumeister with phony bank records and assist him in the ruse.

  One thing Schindler did not do was brief Neumeister on the details of the Marie Smith murder case. He didn’t want the rope to know what Heidemann had been accused of, or why he was being followed. He believed that knowing what had been done to Marie might affect Neumeister’s emotions and actions. It would be better to feed him information as he needed to know it.

  Neumeister went to work on January 6, 1911, Heidemann’s second day in Manhattan. He showed up at the Burns Agency on Park Row, and traveled with Detective P. T. Bowers to 14th Street, where Heidemann had his room. Two other detectives, including S. S. Brody, were already there staking out the entrance. Neumeister went into the rooming house and found the landlady. He asked to rent a room for himself, but none were available. Neumeister’s first contact with Heidemann would have to happen elsewhere. He stayed on 14th Street just long enough for Bowers and Brody to discreetly point out Heidemann to him. Now he knew the man he was roping. The strange ballet had begun.