The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  “Come on, this will never do,” he said. “We can’t take a story like that into court—they would laugh at us. Give me the straight story so I can figure out from the facts what arguments would work in your favor.”

  Frank turned to his friend Carl.

  “What does Joe think of this?” he asked.

  “Joe thinks it would be for the best to give the whole facts to the lawyer.”

  But there was not much more that Frank could tell them. He couldn’t account for the scattered bloody leaves, because he claimed to have murdered Marie on the spot where she was found. Maybe the wind blew the leaves about. And he didn’t know how Marie got the burn on her nose. He denied having taken her into the greenhouse and down in the furnace pit. Maybe, again, the wind had stirred up burning leaves elsewhere in the woods, and landed one on the child’s face.

  As for Max Kruschka, and whether or not he’d been involved in the crime or in covering it up, Heidemann insisted that he hadn’t.

  Back in Asbury Park, Kruschka heard about Heidemann’s arrest. The Asbury Park Press reporter delivered a copy of the rushed evening edition to Kruschka at his home. His reaction was shock.

  “ ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,’ ” Kruschka repeated over and over, the Press reported. “ ‘Frank never did it, it can’t be. Never, never. I won’t believe it until I hear it from him.’ ”

  Ray Schindler visited Kruschka in his home to ask about the hammer. He got nowhere. Schindler then sent Neumeister, posing as a reporter, to push Kruschka harder about where the weapon might be. Kruschka was friendly enough, until, suddenly, he wasn’t.

  “He changed to a maniac and told me to leave,” Neumeister wrote. “I walked to the door where he blocked my exit, working himself into a passion and saying, ‘I know what you are after. You want the hammer that fits the wounds, but you won’t get it. You’ve got the wrong man.’ ”

  Kruschka punched Neumeister on the side of the nose, and kept swinging at him as he chased him out the front gate.

  Meanwhile, Samuel Peterson continued his ruse as Heidemann’s attorney, visiting him in jail and teasing what he could out of him. It seemed that Heidemann, slowly, grudgingly, was coming around to the reality that he might not be able to escape his predicament, that his shrewdness might not keep him out of the electric chair.

  “If all else fails to get me free, and it’s certain I’ll be convicted and executed, tell Carl to bring poison to my cell,” he said to Peterson. “I will take my own life.”

  Yet he wasn’t quite finished looking for a way out. He suggested his friend Carl could bribe the guards, or eliminate the big witnesses against him, Emma Davison and Grace Foster. “He doesn’t appear to care what means are adopted to get rid of them,” Peterson wrote. Even his friend Max Kruschka could be made to disappear.

  “He will drink whiskey with anyone who will pay for it,” Heidemann said. “When you get him drunk you can do as you please with him. Anything to get him out of the way.”

  Heidemann also expressed the rage he felt against Ray Schindler and his detectives. “I’d like to crack their heads,” he said, “and I will do so if I ever get the chance.”

  The roping of Frank Heidemann had now gone on for seventy-seven days. It could have gone on for many more, if it had needed to. But Ray Schindler knew the time had come to end it.

  There had been a kind of cruelty to it, especially now that Heidemann was a broken figure in a jail cell—but then the pursuit of justice, Schindler reasoned, wasn’t always a pretty thing. Most thought of someone like Heidemann as a monster, deserving of not a single drop of mercy or pity. But Schindler did not see Heidemann as a monster. He saw him as a man who had tipped over to the dark side. Monsters have no interest in redemption. Men do. Men, Ray Schindler believed, want to, need to, be brought back into the fold.

  Heidemann did not yet know that he’d been so thoroughly deceived by a Burns detective. Schindler wanted him to learn it directly from him. He wanted to be there when it dawned on Heidemann that he’d been outsmarted, that his every last hope of wriggling out of his reckoning had been extinguished. In that moment of extreme and awful vulnerability, Schindler hoped, he might be able to get what he’d been seeking for so long—the unburdening of Frank Heidemann’s soul.

  So, on March 25, Schindler traveled to Freehold, to the Monmouth County Jail, to the cell where his target would be waiting for him.

  * * *

  Schindler brought Carl Neumeister with him. The two men were taken to Heidemann’s solitary cell and led inside. Heidemann looked up at them and, in an instant, realized the deception that had ensnared him.

  “He was overcome,” Schindler would write.

  One newspaper was more descriptive. It reported that Heidemann, realizing Neumeister was working with Schindler, lost all composure and let out a wail of anguish and despair. “It was pitiable,” went the report.

  Schindler allowed the horrible reality to wash over Heidemann and fully consume him. When he could, he refocused Heidemann on the events of November 9, 1910, the day he murdered Marie Smith.

  Heidemann did not resist. He knew now that he was trapped. He admitted that everything he had told Carl Neumeister, and Joe Springenberg, and his attorney, Detective Samuel Peterson, was true. Schindler asked him to lay out the details of the crime once more, this time directly to him. The priest taking confession, the sinner baring all. Whatever he divulged, Schindler warned, could be used against him at his trial.

  Frank Heidemann did as he was asked. He confessed again.

  “Well,” he explained, “I’ll go to the chair anyhow.”

  All told, it was the eleventh partial or complete confession that Schindler had pulled from him.

  Five days later, Schindler returned to Heidemann’s cell with a typewritten statement. This would be Heidemann’s official, final confession. The statement was read to Heidemann, and he was handed a pen. The prisoner signed it, with Schindler and Edward Taylor, a county clerk officer, as witnesses. The roping was over. There was no need for any further deception now.

  Freehold, New Jersey

  March 30, 1911

  I, Frank Heidemann, do hereby voluntarily make the following statement:

  On November 9, 1910, I was employed by Max Kruschka, florist, as helper, and was residing at the residence of Max Kruschka situated on the northwest corner of Asbury Avenue and Whitesville Road, Asbury Park, N.J.

  At about 10:45 a.m. on November 9, 1910, I was at work potting some plants and had stepped inside the entrance of the greenhouse to fix a flower box when I heard the dog bark, and placing the hammer which I was using in my pocket, I stepped over the hot beds until I reached a point on the driveway at the front of the residence near Asbury Avenue. While walking up the driveway, I noticed Mrs. Davison pass the Kruschka residence and she was still in sight walking west on Asbury Avenue when I reached the front of the house. I called the little dog back and as he crawled through the hedge, I noticed a little girl, whom I later learned was Marie Smith, at the point on the Whitesville Road near the first telegraph pole south of Asbury Avenue.

  Prior to this occasion, I had never before seen Marie Smith, but when I did, I admired her and made up my mind to get her.

  Hearing the dog bark, she turned around and looked back and when I beckoned, she retraced her steps until she reached a point on Asbury Avenue, west of Whitesville Road several feet.

  Here I talked to her through the hedge which surrounds the Kruschka property.

  I asked her if she wanted to take some flowers home to her father; she replied that she did, and as she turned to enter the yard by the driveway, I told her to go around the corner on Whitesville Road and that I would meet her at the back of the yard. I walked through the yard and met her in the roadway at the rear of the Kruschka property.

  I told her I had lost my knife while cutting flowers in the woods and asked her if she would help me look for it.

  I took the left hand of Marie Smith in m
y right hand, and she willingly came along with me.

  We walked north on Whitesville Road to Ridge Avenue; crossed the street, and entered the woods at the junction of Ridge Avenue and Whitesville Road [top of Third Avenue].

  We walked through the brush some distance, crossing a drift road.

  Selecting a spot a short distance from the drift road, I asked Marie to lie down.

  As soon as I had unbuttoned her drawers which were of a heavy material, and after turning them down in front, I ran my fingers over the legs and body.

  As Marie was sobbing I placed her handkerchief in her mouth. She finally forced the handkerchief out of her mouth as I placed her stocking cap over her mouth, and tied her hair-ribbon tightly around her neck.

  I then inserted my index finger into her vagina but as the opening was small I knew I would have some difficulty getting my penis into her vagina, so I took it in my right hand, and while moving my finger around in her vagina, I “spent” on the ground.

  During this time I was in a kneeling position, but after taking my finger out and wiping the blood on the front of my sweater, I got up and as Marie was still struggling I grabbed her by the neck and choked her.

  I then kicked her in the head, I believe it was the left side, and after turning the body over (face downward) I reached into my hip pocket, took out the hammer, and hit her twice on the head, crushing her skull.

  When I left the body the head was towards the drift road and the feet towards Deal Lake. I walked toward the drift road (carrying the hammer in my hand, the handle hanging down between my fingers), turned to the right until I reached Ridge Avenue, thence to Whitesville Road [Third Avenue hill], and entered the Kruschka property from the rear.

  After washing the hammer and my hands in the wooden half barrel which stands in the yard, and in which the goldfish are kept, I walked between the house and the barn and entered the greenhouse, where I placed the hammer back in the rack. I do not figure that I was absent from the Kruschka premises for more than twenty minutes.

  After returning I went about my work as usual, and at lunchtime I ate with the housekeeper and Mrs. Jackson. There was no one else present as Mr. Kruschka and his son were in New York and Mrs. Kruschka was in Asbury Park at Mrs. Kruschka’s store.

  I noticed that Marie Smith was dressed in a greenish colored dress, wore a brown overcoat and black stockings. She was slender and not well developed. I do not remember seeing any gloves belonging to her.

  The scratches reported to have been on her hands and face must have been caused while she lay struggling on the ground.

  I did not aid in the search for the body of Marie Smith at any time nor did I see it again after leaving the body on November 9th, although I went to the spot where it was found on Sunday.

  A blanket was over the body, but I noticed it was in the same spot that I had left her after killing her.

  Signed, Frank Heidemann

  Ray Schindler had one final question for Heidemann, before he left with his signed confession.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked.

  Heidemann’s answer was simple.

  “I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER 38 The Fortress

  April 17, 1911

  Freehold, New Jersey

  Justice for Marie Smith finally had a time and place—the morning of April 17, in the Monmouth County Courthouse. Willard P. Voorhees, the same judge who handled Tom Williams’s habeas corpus hearing, would now preside at the murder trial of Frank Heidemann. At Heidemann’s arraignment on March 30, he told Voorhees he had no means to hire an attorney. Voorhees appointed a former judge, William Hoffman, and a former assistant prosecutor, Andrew Stokes, to serve as counsel for the defense.

  One problem for the prosecution leading up to the trial was that the murder weapon was still missing. Heidemann insisted he’d put the hammer he used to kill Marie Smith back where it was kept, in a rack in Max Kruschka’s greenhouse, and he said he even used it several times after the murder. One of Schindler’s men, Samuel Peterson, went to Kruschka’s property and retrieved four hammers, and brought them to Heidemann’s cell. None, Heidemann said, were the murder weapon. His theory was that Max Kruschka had done away with it.

  “Why would he do that?” Peterson asked him.

  “He likes to do things his own way.”

  In the end, the prosecution never produced the murder weapon.

  Early on April 17, County Constables William Hulce and Jonathan Ackerman brought Heidemann out of his cell in the Monmouth County Jail and marched him the short distance to the courtroom. Rows of people lined the outdoor path that led to the back of the courthouse and watched silently as the constables pulled Heidemann, handcuffed in front, along the path by his arms. A photographer tried to take his picture, but Heidemann quickly covered his face with his hat.

  The constables opened the rear doors of the main courtroom and led Heidemann inside. He was thin and pale, and his mustache was gone. He’d been given a good shave and a well-fitting suit to prepare him for his trial. The courtroom that awaited him had never been more densely packed. Sketch artists, reporters, police officers, curious citizens—including at least fifty spectators from Asbury Park, by one count. Ray Schindler was there and had a seat at the prosecutor’s table. Peter and Nora Smith took their places in front, their daughter Margaret, now three months old, in Nora’s arms. Outside the room, people crowded the hallways and stairwells and spilled out into the public square.

  The prosecutor’s office had picked a jury pool of forty-six men. The morning of the trial, the attorneys spent eighty-five minutes winnowing down the pool to twelve jurors. Heidemann, sitting at the defense table, watched nervously, leaning his head on his hand. The jury foreman, John Van Kirk Sr., was a farmer. So were seven other jurors. The rest included a teamster, a lumberman, a painter, and a decorator. Remarkably, all twelve jurors admitted to having formed an opinion on the matter of Heidemann’s guilt. To a man, they believed he was the killer. But they also swore they would listen to the evidence impartially.

  At 11:15 a.m., Heidemann’s lawyers entered a formal plea—nolo contendere. They would not say whether Heidemann was innocent or guilty, nor would they call any witnesses in his defense. No one could recall another such trial where no witnesses had been called. Justice Voorhees rejected the motion on technical grounds, and submitted “not guilty” as Heidemann’s official plea.

  At 3:00 p.m. that afternoon, the trial formally began.

  The prosecutor, John Applegate, stood and read the indictment. It did not take long for Heidemann, somewhat composed at the start of the proceeding, to be overcome. As Applegate described the gruesome crime, Heidemann’s body began to shake, and he wept and hid his face in his hands. Neither of his lawyers moved to comfort him. Heidemann sobbed for some time, and when he was done his face was red and swollen.

  The witnesses came forth, one by one. A surveyor gave an overview of the woods where Marie Smith’s body was found. The coroner, Otto Schultz, discussed the cause of death. Peter Smith took the stand and described the unthinkable events of November 9, 1910. His frail wife, Nora, was the next to testify. She answered questions calmly and slowly, but it was clear she was still sick with grief. At one point, Applegate mistakenly produced the brown overcoat and gray skating cap Marie had worn on the day she was killed. He had not meant for her to see them, but when she did, the sight was too much for her to bear, and she collapsed and sobbed. More than one juror cried along with her.

  Voorhees called an end to the first day of the trial. The following morning, the courtroom was filled again. Voorhees warned that the day’s testimony would be graphic and disturbing, and advised the many female spectators to leave. Not a single woman got up from her seat.

  The star witness on the second day was Carl Neumeister.

  Neumeister relayed all the important details of his roping of Heidemann, from giving him his copy of the Staats Zeitung in Reinken’s Restaurant on Third Avenue, to the staged murder in Yonkers,
to the confession in room 202 of Young’s Hotel in Atlantic City. The Press reported that just as Neumeister recited Heidemann’s grisly confession to the silent courtroom, the clock tower bell rang eleven times, for 11:00 a.m.—about the time that Marie had been murdered on November 9.

  The bells “had a depressing effect upon the prisoner,” the Press noted. “He winced and covered his face.”

  Ray Schindler’s brother Walter followed Neumeister to the stand, and after that it was Schindler’s turn. He described the circumstances surrounding Heidemann’s final confession in his prison cell on March 30. There was much more Schindler could have testified to, but this was enough. The state of New Jersey rested its case. Voorhees sent out the jury to deliberate. The constables led Heidemann back to his cell.

  One hour and fifty-five minutes later, the jury reached its verdict.

  The Press reported Heidemann smiled as he walked up the aisle of the courtroom to his seat. Perhaps he felt that two hours of deliberation meant the jurors had compromised on a verdict of murder in the second degree. That, at least, would spare Heidemann’s life. He sat calmly as the twelve men took their seats in the jury box. Justice Voorhees broke the eerie silence in the courtroom by addressing the jurors.

  “Have you reached a verdict?”

  The foreman, John Van Kirk, rose to his feet and said that they had. Voorhees asked him what the verdict was.

  The farmer spoke the words as clearly as he could.

  “Guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  * * *

  The smile disappeared. Instead, Frank Heidemann cried out loudly.

  “Prisoner, stand up,” Voorhees ordered.