The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  Later that night, Schindler received Carl Neumeister’s telegram.

  * * *

  Schindler didn’t waste a moment. That day, March 11, he picked a stenographer and an operative to go with him on an evening train to Atlantic City. He sent a telegram to Carl, telling him to be prepared to meet that night. Schindler booked room 308 at Young’s Hotel, just off a pier on the boardwalk. Carl joined them later for the meeting.

  Their first decision was how to bring Joe Springenberg to life.

  To play the part of Carl’s criminal partner, Schindler selected the man he could trust most in the world—his brother Walter.

  Walter Schindler, who did not resemble his brother enough to rouse any suspicion, had joined Ray’s investigative team back in San Francisco, where he interviewed witnesses and testified in court in the Abe Ruef corruption scandal. When William Burns hired Ray to open a New York office of the Burns Agency, Ray brought along his brother. They hadn’t worked together on many cases, but now Ray needed someone reliable. He called Walter and asked him to take a train down to Atlantic City the following day.

  Meanwhile, in room 308 at Young’s Hotel, Carl sat with the stenographer and relayed his best recollection of Frank’s confession. The stenographer typed up notes for Walter Schindler to study. They needed Frank to give another full confession that the stenographer could take down, and they needed Walter/Joe to ask just the right questions, to get the precise details that would make Frank’s confession useful in court.

  At 6:00 p.m. on March 12, Walter Schindler took his place on the boardwalk, near South Carolina Avenue. Very shortly, Carl and Frank strolled up. Carl and Walter embraced like the oldest chums. Carl introduced Heidemann, naming him only as Frank. The three men sat on a bench and talked. An operative who was shadowing the meeting confirmed to Schindler that the plan was under way.

  Walter took Carl and Frank to dinner at a cafe on the boardwalk and discussed several upcoming criminal jobs. Frank listened attentively and stayed quiet. From all indications, Frank fully believed Walter was the notorious Joe Springenberg. Walter felt confident enough to invite the men back to his room at Young’s Hotel—room 306.

  One room over, in 308, Ray Schindler and his team got into place. All the lights in the room were shut off, and only a small candle lit the stenographer’s notebook, so he could write down what he heard. The men crept as close to the locked door separating the rooms as they could.

  Before long, they heard the sound of a doorknob turning, and the shuffle of feet. Then the murmur of serious men talking.

  In room 306, Carl and Walter continued their discussion of possible jobs and heists. Soon enough, the talk turned to the subject of Frank Heidemann. Should they bring him along, or not? Carl repeated his reservation—Frank had incriminating evidence on him, but he had nothing on Frank. As a result, he simply couldn’t trust him. He needed to have some leverage of his own.

  Frank knew what he had to do. He had to talk about Marie Smith. He could not stall or evade any longer—his life depended on it. When the questions came, this time he decided to answer them—in full.

  What did you do to her? Did she put up a fight? How did you kill her? Did you hit her only once? Heidemann answered them all.

  What was her name? Say her name.

  “Marie Smith.”

  And how did you lure Marie Smith into the woods?

  “I asked her if she wanted to take some flowers home for her father, and in that way I got her to go into the woods with me.”

  CHAPTER 36 On the Square

  March 14, 1911

  Atlantic City, New Jersey

  That was enough questioning for the night. Carl and Frank returned to their own hotel room down the boardwalk. Once they were gone, Ray Schindler got word to Sheriff Hetrick back in Asbury Park. From the adjoining room they had heard every word of Frank’s confession. Now, incredibly, they would need to get him to give a third confession, this one with Hetrick—and the prosecutor, John Applegate—listening in as well.

  Frank Heidemann spent the day strolling the boardwalk with Carl. He seemed happier, more energetic, as if confessing his crime had lifted the awful weight he’d been shouldering for so long. He and Carl got haircuts and visited a palmist, and later went to a movie at the Savoy Theater. Quite possibly, Frank slept a little more soundly that night.

  The next day, March 14, Walter Schindler rented two adjoining rooms at Young’s Hotel—rooms 200 and 202. He resumed his role as Joe Springenberg, and joined Carl and Frank for the afternoon. They visited several brothels, and Carl lent Frank five dollars. Carl and Walter waited while Frank took a room with a woman named Rita. Afterward, Carl reported, “he told us revolting stories about his doings with her.”

  Later that afternoon, Schindler checked into room 200 at Young’s Hotel. He brought along a new stenographer, Ed Handley. Neither Hetrick nor Applegate could be there for the third confession, but Randolph Miller—Peter Smith’s boss and the driving force behind the exhaustive pursuit of Marie’s killer—did make the trip. The Asbury Park treasurer, Reuben Norris, was also there, serving as a disinterested party—someone unconnected to law enforcement who could be an impartial witness to events.

  Schindler bought a small pendant cord and lightbulb to plug into a socket in the room, providing just enough light for Handley to transcribe the confession. Schindler also had three split-cane chairs sent to the room, but in the end he spread a blanket and pillows on the floor near the door connecting the rooms. The men lay down and put their heads as near to the space beneath the door as they dared. Operative Peterson knelt next to them and pressed his head near the doorjamb. Handley propped pillows around his lightbulb, dimming it even more.

  A signal had been arranged. When Walter felt he had the full confession he needed, he would flush the toilet in room 202 three times, to let Ray Schindler know they were leaving. On his end, Ray worked out a plan with Handley; he would squeeze Handley’s arm a set number of times to denote who was speaking in room 202—one squeeze for Walter, two for Carl, three for Frank.

  At 8:20 p.m., the men heard the door opening and closing in the adjoining room. They listened in as Carl, Frank, and Walter, as Joe Springenberg, engaged in small talk.

  “Well, it’s warm tonight in here, isn’t it?” Walter began. “Let me fix the window. Take off your coats. Frank, how is that little blond down there?”

  “All right.”

  “Did you give her a run for the money?”

  Frank mumbled something Handley couldn’t hear.

  The men talked about Honduras—Springenberg’s preferred getaway destination. Honduras had no extradition treaty with the United States, which meant they could stay there as long as they liked. They talked about what boat they could take, and other measures that would help them get into the country unnoticed. Suddenly Walter brought up Asbury Park. He asked Frank to tell his story again.

  Frank changed the subject.

  A few minutes later, Walter brought it up again.

  Again, Frank slipped out from under.

  They knew he was cagey. They knew he was mentally agile enough to talk his way out of corners. And Carl had seen how hard it was to get Frank to talk about something he didn’t want to talk about. Had his first confession frightened him? Was he starting to suspect something? Walter and his brother had worked out another plan—if Frank began to resist talking about Asbury Park, Walter and Carl should step out of the room under the pretense of buying cigars, and leave Frank alone with his thoughts. So they did just that.

  From room 200, Schindler could hear Frank, alone in the next room now, pacing back and forth and nervously opening dresser drawers.

  Then he heard Frank walking. Walking toward the door connecting to room 200. Walking toward him. The footsteps stopped. Frank Heidemann was standing mere inches away from his nemesis Ray Schindler, lying on the floor on the other side of the door. Schindler listened as Heidemann took the doorknob in his hand, and turned it.

  The do
or was locked.

  Heidemann turned it once more, then pulled on it, trying to force the door open. Schindler and his men held their breath. Finally, to Schindler’s great relief, Heidemann gave up and resumed his pacing.

  Soon Walter and Carl returned. The questioning continued. Walter and Carl were arguing now, and Walter was angry. He was angry with Carl about a discrepancy in Frank’s first confession and what he had just told Walter. Had Frank taken Marie Smith into Kruschka’s greenhouse, or had he taken her directly into the woods?

  “You ought to know goddamn well I won’t stand for anything like this,” Walter yelled at Carl. “You never knew me all the time we have been together to take any chances. You knew damn well I was straight, and yet you stood for this, and you thought I was going to stand for it, too, didn’t you?”

  “I meant to tell you about it,” Carl pleaded.

  Frank was alarmed. What was wrong?

  “You said you took that girl into the greenhouse,” Carl said.

  “No, I never said that. You misunderstood me.”

  “This is one proposition where there is no chance of misunderstanding,” Walter interrupted. “He knows damn well that I never take any chances.”

  “I never said I took her in the greenhouse,” Frank said.

  “We have got to be on the square. You can’t hand me anything.”

  “I told you all. It is the same thing I told him.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Walter said. “I’ll just take my little wad right here and you fellows can just get out of this the best way you can. How do I know the whole game isn’t a frame-up on me?”

  Frank was desperate now. Carl suggested they all write down their crimes, and secure their confessions in a lockbox that all three would have a key to. Frank didn’t like that idea. It was becoming clear that Springenberg was just about done with him.

  “Frank,” Walter said wearily, “suppose you tell us right here everything that happened, and I promise not to mention this thing again.”

  “Frank will do it,” Carl said.

  “Just state the facts as they were. Go slow now. Don’t talk too fast. I want to hear everything.”

  Once again, Frank knew what he had to do.

  “Now listen,” he finally said.

  Then he began to confess his sins once more.

  * * *

  Sometime later, Ray Schindler heard three flushes. The questioning was over. The stenographer, Ed Handley, and the observer, Reuben Norris, went into the hallway and positioned themselves away from the door to room 200, but near enough to be able to see Carl and Frank leave. That way, Norris could testify in court that it had indeed been Frank Heidemann he heard make the confession.

  Schindler contacted Sheriff Hetrick and John Applegate in Asbury Park. He told them he had Frank Heidemann’s full, detailed confession. They agreed to meet in Red Bank, a shore town eighty-five miles north of Atlantic City, and just north of Asbury Park, the following morning.

  In Red Bank, things happened quickly. The prosecutor, John Applegate, so reluctant to abandon his certainty in Tom Williams’s guilt, filled out an application for a warrant for the arrest of Frank Heidemann, charging him with the murder of Marie Smith. A judge in Red Bank signed off on the warrant. It would not work to arrest Frank Heidemann in Atlantic City, since that would create jurisdictional issues. He committed his crime in Monmouth County, and the best thing would be to arrest him somewhere in the county. That meant getting him on a train.

  The plan, therefore, was to arrest Heidemann that same day, March 15, as he and Carl Neumeister took a train up the New Jersey coast, straight toward the one town Heidemann wished he would never see again.

  Asbury Park.

  CHAPTER 37 “It Won’t Bring Her Back”

  March 15, 1911

  Red Bank, New Jersey

  Once the third confession was in hand, Carl Neumeister, still in character, told Frank Heidemann what he was desperate to hear—that Joe Springenberg had agreed to bring him along to Honduras. Joe would get the tickets, and Carl and Frank would meet him in New York City the next day.

  Meanwhile, one day after hearing Frank’s confession from the bordering hotel room, Ray Schindler took an 8:45 a.m. train from Atlantic City to Red Bank, ten miles north of Asbury Park. There he and Randolph Miller met with John Applegate, Sheriff Hetrick, and Elwood Minugh, the county detective who earlier in the case had grilled Tom Williams in a long interview. The physically formidable Minugh had always been the one to make the difficult arrests.

  Now he’d been selected to arrest Frank Heidemann.

  Schindler gave the room an update about the confession. Only days earlier he had nearly come to blows with Prosecutor Applegate, but now Schindler had been proven right, and Applegate dropped his resistance. He could not question the validity of the confession, not after so many people besides Schindler had heard it. After clinging for so long to Tom Williams as the killer, he gave up on the theory in an instant. That morning, Applegate petitioned James H. Sickles, a justice in nearby Red Bank, for an arrest warrant for Frank Heidemann.

  While that was happening, Carl and Frank had breakfast at Child’s Restaurant in Atlantic City. Afterward, they returned to their rooms to pack for the trip to New York City. They traveled light, with only one small satchel each. They returned to Child’s for lunch and finally checked out of Young’s Hotel at 1:45 p.m. From there they went to the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad station at Missouri and Arkansas Avenues, and boarded the 2:10 Atlantic City Express to New York City.

  They found seats in the smoking car, but not together; Frank sat one row behind Carl. He hung his black coat on a hook by the window and draped it partially across his face for cover. He was nervous. He handled the first part of the trip well, but when the train stopped in the town of Lakewood, just twenty miles south of Asbury Park, he panicked.

  “By God, this train may go through Asbury Park,” Frank said.

  Carl turned around in his seat and told him to calm down.

  A few rows behind Frank, Samuel Peterson, one of Schindler’s operatives, watched and waited.

  Not long after leaving Lakewood, at 3:52 p.m., the train stopped in the town of Farmingdale. Detective Minugh was on the platform and climbed aboard. He walked down the aisle, past Frank Heidemann, half-hidden behind his coat. Frank saw Minugh and recognized him. He whispered to Carl that they had a problem. Again, Carl shrugged it off.

  Detective Minugh calmly took his seat next to Samuel Peterson.

  “Where is he?” Minugh asked.

  Peterson pointed out the target.

  The train rattled up the eastern edge of New Jersey. Minugh got up and slowly walked back up the aisle. The seat next to Frank was open. Minugh sat down in the seat.

  “Frank Heidemann,” he said quietly, “you’re under arrest.”

  The German’s instinct was to deny he was Heidemann. But he quickly realized it was pointless. He knew Minugh, and it was clear Minugh knew him. He was trapped. This was it. The end of the line.

  “He submitted quietly,” the Asbury Park Press reported.

  * * *

  Ray Schindler was waiting at the Red Bank station when the Atlantic City Express arrived at 4:18 p.m.

  He watched as Minugh stepped off the train with the prisoner in his grip. Frank Heidemann had been Schindler’s obsession for four months, and here he was, in handcuffs, pale and shrunken. Minugh put Heidemann in a waiting car and drove to Freehold, to the same jail that held Tom Williams. There Heidemann was put in solitary confinement and watched over by guards. His suspenders were confiscated.

  Carl Neumeister got off the train, too, and when Minugh drove away with Heidemann, his work for the day was done. He boarded the next train to New York City and slept in his own bed that night.

  Word of the arrest quickly spread through Asbury Park. The town was struggling with an outbreak of German measles, and officials were considering closing the schools. But when an Asbury Park Press reporter—whom Sheriff Hetr
ick had allowed to witness the arrest—returned with the news that evening, it seemed no one much cared about measles anymore. The next day “little business was transacted here, for every tradesman, every housewife, nearly everybody else in the town were discussing the arrest of Frank Heidemann,” the New York Times reported. “Never before in the history of the town has popular interest been aroused to its present pitch.”

  Before long, Marie’s parents, Peter and Nora Smith, heard the news, too. Though they had a new baby now, little Margaret, born two months after Marie’s body was found, they had not recovered from the nightmare of losing their beautiful daughter Marie.

  “It won’t bring her back to me,” Peter said somberly of the arrest, “but we will have justice and that is what we ask for—only the justice the law gives, but that in full.”

  A day after the arrest, Carl Neumeister was back on the job. Ray Schindler, it turned out, wasn’t done roping Heidemann yet. He had a solid confession, but he wanted one more thing to bolster his case against Heidemann—the murder weapon. Neumeister, resuming his role as a criminal, visited Heidemann at the Monmouth County Jail and spoke with him through a screened door to his cell. “Subject appeared broken in spirit,” Carl reported, “but relieved when he saw me.”

  “What became of the hammer with which you killed the girl,” Carl asked him.

  “It must be still in Kruschka’s place.”

  “Joe says we have to get that, and he will pose as a reporter and swipe it. Describe the hammer so he can find the right one.”

  Carl learned what he could about the weapon, and where it might be found, before Frank became paranoid. He believed a guard spoke German and was listening in on them. Carl promised to send him an attorney, and urged Frank to tell him everything, the whole story.

  The attorney would be another Burns operative, Samuel Peterson. The following day, Carl returned to the jail with Peterson and introduced him to Frank. Once again, Frank assembled the grim pieces of the story of how he had murdered Marie Smith. But there were still several unanswered questions—the burn on Marie’s nose; the bloody leaves; the role Max Kruschka played in it all. Peterson pushed for more.