The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  In his pocket was a penciled note: “To the World—Here I am on the spot; God forgive me for my misfortune in my misspent time.”

  PART THREE

  The Fatal Sabbath

  “When we are permitted we will lift the veil, and show scenes of blood and brutality that will make the hair stand on end.”

  —Herald (New York), September 17, 1841

  Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society

  Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve.

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug”

  There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect.

  —Friedrich von Hardenburg, “Moralische Anisichten” (Epigraph of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”)

  XIII

  A Somewhat Wasted Heart

  GILBERT MERRITT REACHED Castle Point before Daniel Payne’s body had a chance to cool. Crouching over the lifeless form, Justice Merritt resolved to conduct as thorough and irreproachable an investigation as could be imagined. This time, there would be no charges of mismanagement.

  As a pair of doctors arrived to examine the corpse, Merritt proceeded to round up witnesses. Next he sent word to Robert Morris, the mayor of New York, along with the New York coroner, Dr. Archer, and Justice Taylor, who had presided over the Joseph Morse affair. Finally, Merritt requested a positive identification from Payne’s brother.

  In contrast to the Mary Rogers inquest, Daniel Payne’s death had occurred on a relatively mild October afternoon. Most of Merritt’s woes in the earlier case arose from his eagerness to finish before the remains “consumed themselves.” Payne’s corpse, by comparison, showed few signs of decay. Merritt decided to convene the official inquest the following morning in order to allow time to marshal his evidence and notify the family members. The body would pass the night cooling on blocks of ice.

  By nightfall, as the newspapers learned of Payne’s death, speculation ran rampant. When it became known that Payne had died with a bundle of papers in his pocket, a rumor sprang up that he had left a written confession to the murder of Mary Rogers. One story had it that he had not only admitted killing his fiancée but three other women as well.

  The inquest convened at eleven o’clock on the morning of October 9 in a private room in a hotel opposite one of the Hoboken ferry landings. The site was probably selected as a courtesy to Mayor Morris and Justice Taylor, who had chartered a private boat and braved a heavy storm in order to attend. While extra chairs were brought in to accommodate the distinguished visitors from New York, the body of Daniel Payne was laid out on a table at the front of the room. The dead man’s hat, which had caused him so much anxiety in his final hours, rested on his chest.

  The first witness to be sworn in was Dr. Samuel Griswold of New York, who had been walking with his friend Dr. Clements when they came upon Payne in his final moments, sprawled out in a “state of stupefaction” on a bench by the river. The “peculiar position” in which he lay, with his head lolling off the edge of the bench, might well have hastened his death, Griswold testified. Possibly the man had fallen and struck his head. In any case, it became evident to Griswold within moments that Payne was dying. Nothing remained to be done but to summon help and to try to make the dying man comfortable.

  As Dr. Griswold left the witness stand, his friend Dr. Clements took his place and confirmed Griswold’s testimony. The unfortunate man had been beyond the reach of medical help when they happened upon him, Clements said, and showed no awareness of their presence. Clements added that he had put his nose to the dying man’s mouth and noted that the breath smelled sour.

  After a great deal of irrelevant testimony from a pair of cork cutters who had read of the death in the morning papers, Payne’s brother John stepped forward to be examined. Under prompting from Merritt, he stated for the record that the body at the front of the room was that of Daniel Payne. “He was habitually a drinking man,” John Payne said, adding that his brother had been “out of his mind since the affair of Mary Rogers.”

  John Payne’s testimony was followed by that of Alfred Crommelin. He had not seen or spoken to the dead man since their brief and frosty encounter in the parlor of the Rogers boardinghouse while both men were searching for the missing woman. Crommelin’s value as a witness is highly suspect; he offered no testimony as to the deceased’s habits and background that had not already been elicited from others, and he could throw no light on Payne’s actions in his final days. By this time, however, Crommelin had become the public face of the Mary Rogers saga, and it was well known that he wanted a public hearing in relation to the murder. Although Payne’s inquest could hardly have been said to fill that function, Crommelin’s appearance provides a measure of Gilbert Merritt’s desire to be thorough. If Crommelin hoped at last to give his definitive account of the Mary Rogers investigation, however, he was to be disappointed. Merritt limited Crommelin’s statement to facts related directly to Payne’s death. Crommelin could offer little more than an additional identification of the body and a halfhearted statement of reconciliation toward the dead man: “there was no coolness between us.”

  Several tavern keepers and other witnesses offered a patchwork account of Payne’s drunken wanderings during the final two days of his life. Justice Merritt had taken great care to conduct the inquest according to established protocol. As a result, the woman whose testimony was the most potentially explosive had been shuffled in with this group of otherwise inconsequential witnesses. Mrs. Frederica Loss, the proprietor of Nick Moore’s Tavern, now stood to testify on behalf of her twelve-year-old son, who had served Daniel Payne one of his last drinks.

  A great deal hinged on Mrs. Loss’s statement. Although Daniel Payne had been questioned repeatedly and cleared of all suspicion in the murder of Mary Rogers, there were many on both sides of the Hudson who doubted his innocence. Although his alibi had appeared unshakable, questions remained about his conduct and his apparent lack of concern following the report of her murder. Now, in the aftermath of Payne’s dramatic death, these doubts returned to the fore. An unspoken agenda lay behind Merritt’s methodical adherence to procedure: Could Payne have been with Mary Rogers on the day of her death? Was he the mysterious “Swarthy Man”?

  The room fell silent as Mrs. Loss made her way forward. Dressed in a Sunday frock, the innkeeper seemed well aware of the gravity of the situation, and not at all displeased by the attention focused upon her. She nodded companionably at Justice Merritt as he came forward to question her, as though he might be offering a cup of tea. Merritt, for his part, appeared stone-faced. His tone was brisk and businesslike as he asked his first question: Did Mrs. Loss recognize the man whose body lay at the front of the room, the late Daniel Payne? Mrs. Loss hesitated, apparently taking the measure of the room. Yes, she said after a moment. She knew the dead man’s face.

  A low murmur went through the gallery of witnesses. Merritt’s face tightened as he took a step forward. How, he asked, did she know him? She had not been present when her son Ossian served Payne his brandy on the day before his death (Ossian had already been questioned privately). Was Daniel Payne the man who had accompanied Mary Rogers to the Loss inn on the day of her disappearance? Again Mrs. Loss hesitated. She looked up at Justice Merritt with a cool and steady gaze. No, she said. That man had been “younger, thinner and not so tall.” Daniel Payne did not resemble him at all.

  Merritt stepped back, a scowl pulling at his features. Clearly, his feelings toward Mrs. Loss had not warmed since their first encounter in his chambers, when he concluded that she knew more than she was saying. A note of anger crept into his voice as he repeated his earlier question: How, then, did Mrs. Loss come to recognize t
he dead man? Had Payne visited the tavern on some other occasion? Yes, Mrs. Loss answered airily, Payne had once gone hunting in the vicinity, she believed. Perhaps he stopped in for a drink. The answer did not satisfy Merritt. He continued his questioning, asking in various ways if Mrs. Loss might perhaps be mistaken on this point. Perhaps Payne might have been the stranger who accompanied Mary Rogers after all? Mrs. Loss would not be swayed: Daniel Payne, she insisted, was not the Swarthy Man. Although she recognized his face, and could not be quite certain where she had seen him before, she was adamant that he had not accompanied Mary Rogers to the tavern. Frustrated, Merritt brought his interrogation to a close.

  Merritt’s shoulders slumped as Mrs. Loss returned to her seat. All hopes of a decisive breakthrough in the Mary Rogers murder were now dashed. As Dr. Cook, the Hoboken coroner, was sworn in to report on the findings from Payne’s autopsy, the proceedings reverted to a routine inquest.

  Payne’s stomach had been opened, Dr. Cook reported, but the contents revealed nothing unusual apart from the remains of a last meal that appeared to have been potatoes. The brain was found to be congested with blood, possibly the result of the lowered position of the head at the time of death. Cook also thought that he detected the smell of laudanum in the brain, though this “might have been imagination” sparked by the discovery of the empty vial at the murder thicket. Payne’s other organs, Cook testified, appeared to be normal, although the heart appeared “somewhat wasted, which might account for his melancholy.”

  Cook stopped short of declaring an exact cause of death, and the vagueness of his conclusions suggests that he was attempting to cover all contingencies. Payne’s death was widely reported as a suicide, the result of despair—or perhaps a guilty conscience—over the death of Mary Rogers. Payne’s actions in his final days, together with the note found in his pocket, strongly supported the notion that he had come to Weehawken to take his own life. For the purposes of the inquest, however, the evidence was by no means decisive. Many of the accounts of Payne’s death—both at the time and subsequently—referred to the vial of laudanum he had purchased as “vile poison,” but this was largely rhetorical bluster at a time when the drug was both legal and widely prescribed. Certainly the drug was capable of a toxic effect if taken in large or prolonged doses, but it was not generally perceived to be poisonous. When abused, however, laudanum could easily cause a fatal overdose—“the eternal sleep of melancholia,” as a writer of the day phrased it. Painless and readily obtained, laudanum was popular with those who wished to end their own lives, and accidental overdoses were frequent among those with a weakness for the drug.

  In Payne’s case, the coroner could not make a categorical statement of intent. The quantity of laudanum Payne consumed was unknown: He had smashed the vial against a rock at the murder thicket, and apparently no one inquired at the Ann Street apothecary where he had purchased it. In the absence of other evidence, Cook concluded vaguely that Payne’s “manner of passing the previous twenty-four hours of his life must have tended to his death,” and added that the “peculiar position” of the head during his final stupor on the bench had “probably hastened” his death. The jury deliberated briefly and returned a verdict that death had occurred owing to “congestions of the brain, supposed to be brought about by exposure and irregularity of living, incident to aberration of mind.”

  It was a maddeningly inconclusive set of findings, in spite of Merritt’s determined efforts. Once again, the press scented blood. Justice Merritt was accused of being “utterly ignorant of the rules of evidence,” and it was suggested that no right-thinking person would be caught dead in New Jersey. Much comment focused on the documents Payne had with him at the time of his death. Although the contents of his supposed suicide note had been released, the other papers remained under wraps, giving rise to speculation about incriminating letters and an anguished confession. Hoping to quiet the rumors, Merritt announced that there was nothing to be gained in the release of the dead man’s papers, as they shed no light on the death of Payne or the murder of Mary Rogers. This did not satisfy everyone. “What has the Learned Justice to hide?” asked the Sun, but Benjamin Day’s Tattler took a more diplomatic view: “Except in melodramas, villains are not in the habit of leaving tell-tale bits of paper about, or committing themselves with paper and ink.”

  For the most part, however, the Tattler took a very dim view of Merritt and the Weehawken findings. Incredibly, Benjamin Day was still clinging manfully to his theory that Mary Rogers was alive, and he appeared determined to shoot down any contradictory fact or supposition that appeared in the pages of James Gordon Bennett’s Herald. A few days before Payne’s death, Day had sent one of his best men to examine the murder thicket and to interview Mrs. Loss, hoping to poke holes in the new evidence. After a day in Weehawken, Day’s reporter returned and filed a lengthy report in the pages of Brother Jonathan, the sister publication of the Tattler. The new findings, as Day was quick to point out, cast serious doubt on the testimony of Mrs. Loss with respect to the final hours of Mary Rogers: “If the narrative throws a little discredit on a portion of the chain of circumstantial evidence which has been paraded in the newspapers, we cannot help it.”

  According to Brother Jonathan, Mrs. Loss had given a new statement that “destroyed a great part of the unity of the Weehawken murder narrative,” and even reversed many of the conclusions that had been drawn by the police. Previous reports had stressed that Mary and the so-called Swarthy Man had arrived and departed separately from the other couples taking refreshment in Mrs. Loss’s parlor that afternoon. In her statement to Brother Jonathan, however, Mrs. Loss no longer appeared certain of this point. It was possible, she now admitted, that Mary and her companion might have departed with the larger group. If so, there would have been perhaps a dozen people who were aware of Mary’s presence at Weehawken that day. It seemed incredible that not one of them had come forward—whether they had a hand in her murder or not—especially in light of Governor Seward’s promise of immunity from prosecution for any accomplice who came forward.

  Mrs. Loss also appeared to waver on her earlier account of the screams she had heard outside her home that evening. Her previous statements had been extraordinarily precise, employing terms such as “choked” and “stifled.” Now, under close questioning from the Brother Jonathan reporter, she backpedaled. There had been a scream, certainly, but perhaps only one, and the sound was rather indistinct. Adding to the confusion, Mrs. Loss claimed that upon hearing this scream she hurried from the house and passed within ten feet of the thicket, but she had not heard or seen anything amiss.

  Brother Jonathan also cast doubt on the Herald’s claim that the evidence could have passed unnoticed for so many weeks. Unwilling to take Mrs. Loss and her sons at their word, Day’s reporter tracked down another neighbor, who happened to be the tenant of the property where the thicket sat. When questioned, this gentleman merely “shook his head incredulously at the circumstance of the clothes having lain so long in the thicket undisturbed.” He had seen no signs of anything unusual, and knew nothing of any of the so-called evidence, such as the missing fence railings, until he read the newspaper reports. “The fence is in perfect order now, at any rate,” he insisted.

  Brother Jonathan also tracked down Adam Wall, the coach driver who reported seeing Mary heading toward Weehawken. Wall’s testimony, the paper believed, was entirely worthless. “He did not remember having seen the girl on that Sunday until a month afterward,” the reporter protested, “and is not very clear upon it now.” Furthermore, Wall’s friend, who had supposedly jogged the coach driver’s memory on the subject, had not been produced. “Why,” asked Brother Jonathan, “has he never come forward amid all the outcry that has been made?”

  The questions raised in the pages of Brother Jonathan cast serious doubt on the prevailing theories concerning the murder thicket. Benjamin Day’s motives were far from pure—even when discussing the coroner’s report, his reporters dutifully preserved
the fantasy that the cigar girl was still alive, making tortured references to “the supposed body of Mary Rogers”—but the results sparked a fresh round of debate over what had transpired in Weehawken. Even in the description of Mrs. Loss as “a very clever intelligent little woman of about forty,” the paper managed to convey a sense of cunning and deceit. “We left the ground far from satisfied that ‘the thicket’ had been anything more than the depository of the garments, etc., by interested hands,” noted the reporter, “long after the disappearance of Mary C. Rogers.”

  Inevitably, Mrs. Loss and the Weehawken murder theory soon found a champion in James Gordon Bennett. The Herald lost no time in heaping scorn on Benjamin Day and his newspaper’s claims: “It is worse than idle on the part of many persons who ought to know better to attempt to throw a doubt over the locality of the murder of this poor girl. It was undoubtedly done at Weehawken.” Bennett also offered a gallant defense of Mrs. Loss, who was described as “a fine, intelligent good-looking lady” of presumably laudable German descent. For good measure, he also shaved ten years off the Sun’s estimate of her age, placing her at “about thirty years.”

  The Herald brought out its heavy artillery to defend the thicket itself. A detailed illustration of the Weehawken shoreline appeared at the end of September, with labels showing the location of the thicket, the abandoned road that ran alongside, and other points of interest. To Bennett’s way of thinking, the sketch provided inarguable proof that the thicket was so remote and isolated that a “thousand persons may pass the spot even now and not notice it.” For these reasons, he insisted, it was entirely probable that the crime could have been committed without drawing notice, and that the evidence could have lain undisturbed for several weeks. “So much then,” the Herald sniffed, “for the silly statement that the articles must have been recently put there or they would have been discovered before.”