The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  In the days following Mary’s death, a number of newspapers had reported on a quarrel overheard by Phoebe Rogers’s housemaid. A few days before Mary’s disappearance, it was said, she and her mother had a heated exchange that ended with a promise from Mary that she would not marry Daniel Payne. Phoebe Rogers offered no confirmation of the rumor, but the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy affords a different interpretation to the story. If Mary had been carrying Payne’s child, she may have agreed to marry him with the expectation of having the baby. If she later thought better of the situation—perhaps owing to her mother’s objections—and determined to end the pregnancy, some of her subsequent behavior falls into place. On the morning of her disappearance, Mary deliberately lied to Payne about her plans for the day. Possibly she did not wish him to know that she planned to end the pregnancy, an action she might well have seen as a means of freeing herself from the obligation to marry him. Or perhaps Payne had expressed reservations about the engagement, driving Mary to extreme measures. Whatever the truth of the situation, it clearly left Payne with a tortured conscience, as evidenced by his alcoholic decline, his agonized death, and the guilt-ridden message he left behind.

  On November 19, a week after the death of Frederica Loss, a contentious hearing convened in the court of Justice Stephen Lutkins in Jersey City. Lutkins, Merritt, and several other magistrates subjected the two older Kellenbarack boys to a grueling round of questions, attempting to expose the “nefarious nature” of their late mother’s clandestine business at the Nick Moore House, and her role in the fate of Mary Rogers. By all accounts, the proceeding was a confused and disappointing affair. A team of three lawyers appeared to represent the interests of the Loss family, with the result that even the most pointed of the magistrates’ questions were deflected into a tangle of legal prevarication. With their lawyers guiding their testimony, the Kellenbarack brothers easily turned aside the accusations against them, and dismissed the most grave of the charges as harmless hearsay. Even the “great secret” alluded to in an earlier statement was now explained away in mundane terms; it was, they explained, merely a reference to a private cure for rheumatism.

  The hearing closed on a disappointingly inconclusive note, with no formal charges filed. Merritt and Lutkins went directly into a closed-door session with Mayor Morris, leading observers to conclude that further action would be taken. “It is understood there is something more of deep and overwhelming interest yet in the wind,” wrote Bennett in the Herald. “The magistrates are on the scent and these investigations will not end here.” The Courier, having backed away from its report of Mrs. Loss’s confession to Merritt, continued to insist that some admission of guilt had been made: “That it was made to someone we have little doubt; and we firmly believe that the statement we give embraces the true explanation of the manner of this unfortunate woman’s death.”

  ALTHOUGH JUSTICE LUTKINS’S HEARING had been inconclusive, the city’s newspapers appeared to unite behind the notion that Mary Rogers had died during an abortion. “The case of Mary Rogers remains, it seems, legally unexplained,” wrote the Newark Daily Advertiser. “But we understand the investigation will be pursued, as it is believed that the recent statement of the manner of her death is true.”

  Neither of the two coroners who examined Mary Rogers’s body, Dr. Cook of Hoboken or Dr. Archer of New York, offered any comment. For Dr. Cook, in particular, the Weehawken scenario promised a fresh wave of public ridicule. At the initial inquest, Cook’s testimony concerning Mary Rogers’s sexual violation had been strangely ambiguous. While he had stated confidently that the victim had been “brutally violated by no fewer than three assailants,” he also asserted that prior to that time Mary Rogers had evidently been a properly virginal young woman. Now, in light of Justice Merritt’s theory concerning the Nick Moore House, it seemed likely that Dr. Cook had mistaken the evidence of a horribly botched abortion for signs of sexual violation.

  If this were the case, however, several crucial questions remained unanswered. Mary Rogers had been found with a lace cord tied “fast around her neck” and deep finger-mark bruises at her throat. Whatever ambiguities may have clouded Dr. Cook’s conclusions about the “feminine region,” he had been perfectly clear about the evidence for strangulation. He offered concise and unequivocal descriptions of “echymose” prints in the shape of a man’s fingers, and a “crease round the neck” caused by the lace garrote. A bungled abortion procedure, no matter how horrific, could not account for these clear signs of strangulation.

  By the same token, Merritt’s theory failed to account for much of the behavior of Mrs. Loss and her sons. The scattering of Mary Rogers’s clothing in the so-called murder thicket had been discovered by the Kellenbarack boys, and brought to the attention of Gilbert Merritt by Mrs. Loss herself. If, in fact, Mrs. Loss had been running an abortion parlor in a secret room of her tavern, it is difficult to understand why she should have called attention to herself in this manner. Up to the point she came forward with Mary Rogers’s effects, there had been no connection between the Nick Moore House and the murder. Although the tavern enjoyed increased business as “the place where Mary Rogers was last seen alive,” this could hardly have been worth the risk of drawing suspicion where none had existed before.

  Even so, for all of the doubts and contradictions, the notion that Mary Rogers had perished during an abortion took a firm hold. The Courier joined several other newspapers in declaring that “the mystery has at last been solved.” This eagerness to accept an unproven verdict had more to do with a sense of public outrage than with evidence. Once again, the death of the beautiful young cigar girl had become entwined in a thread of civic concern, as with the earlier assumption that she had fallen victim to a gang. With clergymen decrying Madame Restell from the pulpit, and newspapers such as the Advocate of Moral Reform producing hand-wringing editorials, the Mary Rogers saga took on a new and even darker currency. At the same time, Mary Rogers herself came to be seen in a different and not altogether flattering light. If the accusations against Mrs. Loss were true, it would no longer be possible to view the cigar girl as an innocent “specimen of maidenhood,” as one newspaper had described her. She now came to be seen as an unfortunate, if not entirely blameless, victim of a barbaric practice—a sacrifice to the horrors of Madame Restell. “O mothers! Save your innocent daughters from a fate like this,” wrote a popular novelist of the day, “and O daughters! Behold one of your sisters treading the black path to the tomb. Pity her! Save her!”

  Amid this building tide of public indignation, it was easy to overlook the fact that it had not been clearly established that an abortion had actually taken place. By the end of November, the furor in the press subsided, though further developments were expected at any moment. Gilbert Merritt continued trying to build a case against the Loss family, though the Kellenbarack boys had long since been released for lack of evidence. The Courier expressed a hope that a final resolution would not be long in coming. For now, the paper admitted, nothing further could be learned: “This mysterious matter sleeps for the present.”

  FOR EDGAR ALLAN POE, the drama in Weehawken could not have come at a worse moment. The third and final installment of “Marie Rogêt,” containing his fictionalized solution to the case, was only days away from publication. Up to this point, Poe believed that he had crafted an elegant and entirely plausible hypothesis. Now, however, as the notion of Mary Rogers’s death at the hands of an abortionist took hold, Poe’s conclusions would be proved false, laying him open to a potentially devastating public humiliation at the very moment that he was seeking to restore his beleaguered fortunes. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe had created a chilling scene in which the “lofty and enshrouded” figure of Madeline Usher rises from her coffin and drags her brother to his death, while their Gothic mansion collapses around them. Poe might have seen the specter of Mary Rogers in much the same light, emerging from her grave to preside over his ruin.

  The critics, Poe
knew, would be ruthless. There were many in New York who had not forgotten the savagery of his reviews in the Southern Literary Messenger, and most especially his evisceration of Theodore Fay’s Norman Leslie. That novel, like “Marie Rogêt,” had been based on a sensational New York murder case, and Poe had gone out of his way to sneer at its “poetical licenses.” Now that Poe had availed himself of the same licenses, he could well imagine the sound of knives being sharpened.

  If the critics poured scorn on “Marie Rogêt,” Poe knew that his hopes for launching his own literary magazine might well be dashed. “Touching ‘The Stylus,’: —this is the one great purpose of my literary life,” he wrote. “I wish to establish a journal in which the men of genius may fight their battles; upon some terms of equality, with those dunces the men of talent.” In the final months of 1842, as the first of the Ladies’ Companion installments appeared, Poe began discussions with Thomas C. Clarke, an influential Philadelphia editor, about financing the magazine. When Clarke agreed to enter into a partnership, Poe had reason to believe that his dream would soon be realized. He told a friend that George Graham had made “a good offer” to have him return as editor of Graham’s, but he felt sufficient confidence in the prospects of his own magazine to decline. “It is my firm determination to commence…on the first of January next,” he wrote in early October of 1842. “The difficulties which impeded me last year have vanished, and there will be now nothing to prevent success.”

  Poe was in desperate need of that success. His financial distress, according to his friend Frederick Thomas, had sent him to new depths of poverty. Worse yet, according to Thomas, Poe had slipped back into a pattern of drinking to disastrous excess, leaving his household and ailing wife in a state of agitation and disarray. An acquaintance who met him during this period described how Poe begged him for fifty cents so that he might get a meal: “Though he looked the used-up man all over—still he showed the gentleman. I gave him the money—and I never saw him afterwards.”

  In November, Poe’s plans for The Stylus received a serious blow. The financing of the magazine was contingent on Poe’s ability to obtain a comfortable sinecure at the Philadelphia Customs House, a prospect he had sabotaged with his renewed drinking. “I would write more,” he complained in a letter to a friend, “but my heart is too heavy. You have felt the misery of hope deferred and will feel for me.”

  Poe wrote those words on November 19. The following day, news of the developments in Weehawken appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper under the headline of “New York Mystery Solved.” Poe realized at once that he would have to take action. The first two installments of his story had already appeared. The third and final section, containing his solution, was scheduled for the following month, and may already have been set in type. If that final installment appeared as originally written, all of Dupin’s theories and conclusions would appear misguided and even naïve in light of the happenings in Weehawken. Even more embarrassing, all of Poe’s brash pronouncements about “scarcely intelligible coincidences” and the Calculus of Probabilities, already published in the initial installment, would be exposed as empty boasts.

  With the publication date looming, Poe proceeded much as Auguste Dupin had done in the first installment of “Marie Rogêt”: He locked himself away with the newspapers, studied the problem “more generally” than he had done before, and plotted a way forward.

  XVII

  The Vanishing Rowboat

  AS HE STRUGGLED to salvage his story, Poe took a close look at what he had already written. His original solution to “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” had been a marvel of ingenuity. Although the late-breaking developments in Weehawken now forced him to reexamine it, Poe’s initial version offered a compelling and altogether unique approach to the affair. As he returned to the narrative in the light of the new information, Poe saw how difficult the task before him would be.

  Dupin had already laid the groundwork for his solution in the early stages of the story, through his careful reading of the six newspaper extracts. Dupin was particularly intrigued by the extract concerning the “atrocious” assault on a young woman at the hands of a gang of ruffians. According to the newspaper account, the victim had been out rowing with her family when a gang seized her and subjected her to “brutal” treatment, only to release her unharmed some moments later.

  To Dupin’s mind, there seemed to be a remarkable coincidence at work. It struck him as improbable that this outrage should have occurred in a manner so precisely similar to the one that was supposed to have been perpetrated on Marie Rogêt—and at almost exactly the same time and place. The two events had so much in common, Dupin believed, that the coincidence had served to influence the tide of public opinion—leading people to believe that both assaults must surely have been the work of gang members. In fact, Dupin insisted, the strange concurrence of the two attacks should have had the opposite effect. If anything, the fact that a gang assault was known to have taken place in the one instance, involving the girl and her family, stood as a powerful argument against an identical assault being carried out against Marie. “It would have been a miracle indeed,” Dupin said, “if, while a gang of ruffians were perpetrating, at a given locality, a most unheard-of wrong, there should have been another similar gang, in a similar locality, in the same city, under the same circumstances, with the same means and appliances, engaged in a wrong of precisely the same aspect, at precisely the same period of time!”

  Dupin applied a similar piece of reasoning to his contemplation of the murder thicket. “Notwithstanding the acclamation with which the discovery of this thicket was received by the press, and the unanimity with which it was supposed to indicate the precise scene of the outrage, it must be admitted that there was some very good reason for doubt,” Dupin allowed. “That it was the scene, I believe—but there was excellent reason for doubt.” Under the guise of examining these doubts, Poe undertook a rigorous examination of the clash between Benjamin Day and James Gordon Bennett over the questions surrounding the thicket. Dupin began by raising the possibility that the murder may actually have occurred elsewhere, possibly even at Marie’s doorstep. If this were the case, he reasoned, it might follow that the murderer or murderers had cause to fear that the true scene of the crime would be discovered. “In certain classes of minds,” Dupin stated, “there would have arisen, at once, a sense of the necessity of some exertion to redivert this attention.” What better way could be imagined, Dupin suggested, than to plant articles of clothing in this obscure thicket, so as to put the investigators onto a false scent?

  In order to present this theory as plausible, however, Dupin must first deflate the arguments advanced in a newspaper called Le Soleil—which closely parallel those of Bennett’s Herald—concerning the rotting and mildewed state of the articles of clothing, and the manner in which grass had sprung up over some of the items. Dupin began his discussion by observing that grass grows rapidly in warm weather, “as much as two or three inches in a single day.” (This cannot be counted as one of Dupin’s more compelling remarks—at that rate, the grass inside the thicket would have reached a height of more than seven feet by the time the articles were found.)

  Dupin’s discussion of the mildew discovered on some of the dead woman’s effects must also be treated with caution. “Is he really unaware of the nature of this mildew?” he says, scoffing at the editor of Le Soleil. “Is he to be told that it is one of the many classes of fungus, of which the most ordinary feature is its up-springing and decadence within twenty-four hours?”

  However misleading Dupin’s scientific data may be, his tone of conviction lends a persuasive veneer. In fact, he claims, “it is exceedingly difficult to believe that these articles could have remained in the thicket specified for a longer period than a single week.” Dupin gives several additional reasons for this conclusion. First, he remarks, experience has shown that it is extremely difficult for a “lover of nature” to “slake his thirst for solitude” amid the wooded regions on the
outskirts of a major city. This is especially so on a Sunday, he continues, when all manner of “town blackguards” find themselves released from the bonds of labor, and free to seek “escape from the restraints and conventionalities of society.” In such circumstances, the idea that the murder thicket could have remained isolated during the crime and undisturbed for weeks afterward must be looked upon “as little less than miraculous.”

  In addition to town blackguards, in Dupin’s view, the thicket would also have been a magnet to the sons of Mme. Deluc, who lived in the nearby tavern. With its dense foliage and splendid arrangement of stones it formed a natural hiding place and play area. Its proximity to their house (“within a few rods,” Dupin points out) would have made it a daily destination, along with the fact that the boys were frequently sent out looking for sassafras bark in the vicinity. “Would it be,” Dupin asks, “a rash wager—a wager of one thousand to one—that a day never passed over the heads of these boys without finding at least one of them ensconced in the umbrageous hall, and enthroned upon its natural throne? Those who would hesitate at such a wager, have either never been boys themselves, or have forgotten the boyish nature. I repeat—it is exceedingly hard to comprehend how the articles could have remained in this thicket undiscovered, for a longer period than one or two days.”

  That being the case, it strikes Dupin as far more likely that the items found within the thicket had been placed there within a day or so of their discovery. In support of this contention, he points out the strangely artificial arrangement of the clothing, which has been placed “as if upon shelves” by a careful hand: “On the upper stone lay a white petticoat; on the second, a silk scarf; scattered around, were a parasol, gloves, and a pocket-handkerchief.” To Dupin’s way of thinking, this suggests careful staging, rather than the signs of a genuine struggle. “Here is just such an arrangement as would naturally be made by a not over-acute person wishing to dispose the articles naturally,” Dupin insists. “But it is by no means a really natural arrangement. I should rather have looked to see the things all lying on the ground and trampled under foot. In the narrow limits of that bower, it would have been scarcely possible that the petticoat and scarf should have retained a position upon the stones, when subjected to the brushing to and fro of many struggling persons.”