The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  Over the years, speculation on this point has taken a great many interesting twists and turns. As with the Jack the Ripper drama at the end of the nineteenth century, the energetic climate of speculation around the death of Mary Rogers has produced a seemingly endless line of suspects, often with little regard for evidence or plausibility. One pair of researchers has carried this theorizing to a fantastic conclusion, pointing the finger of suspicion at none other than Poe himself. Although it has never been demonstrated that Poe ever actually laid eyes on Mary Rogers, this intriguing speculation posits that he not only consorted with the beautiful cigar girl, but also did away with her in a fit of “alcoholic insanity.”

  It is a twist that would undoubtedly have appealed to Poe’s narrative instincts, if not his passion for logical reasoning. “It was not, and could not have been, arrived at by any inductive reasoning,” he wrote in “Maelzel’s Chess-Player,” while discarding a line of faulty assumptions. “To show that certain things might possibly be effected in a certain way is very far from showing that they are actually so effected.” Though Poe himself did not always observe this distinction, he fully grasped its importance.

  A more compelling theory places the blame on the shoulders of Daniel Payne, whose death at Weehawken and the anguished note left behind certainly point to a guilty conscience. In this scenario, Payne discovers that Mary is pregnant and helps to arrange an abortion at the Loss tavern. In gratitude, Mary agrees to marry him and forsake other men, but after the successful procedure she changes her mind and breaks off the engagement. Enraged, Payne lashes out and strangles her, perhaps inadvertently, later telling Mrs. Rogers that she has died at the hands of the abortionist. Unable to live with his conscience, Payne takes his own life two months later.

  The theory is persuasive for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it accounts for both the evidence of an abortion and the obvious signs of death by strangulation. The difficulty is that Payne had an alibi, not only on the fatal Sunday but also the day following, when he was seen to be making a search for Mary at the homes of her relatives. One writer has speculated that the murder did not take place until late Tuesday—two days after Mary’s disappearance—when Payne’s actions are less well documented. According to this hypothesis, Payne could have murdered Mary over the broken engagement, then placed a false ad in the Sun (“it is supposed some accident has befallen her”) in order to cover his tracks. This hypothesis, however ingenious, fails to account for the fact that the ad in the Sun appeared on Tuesday, July 27, and would therefore have to have been placed before Payne’s crime of passion is supposed to have occurred.

  Another intriguing player in the drama is Alfred Crommelin, the jilted suitor who identified the body at Elysian Fields. Mary Rogers is known to have called at his office twice in the days before her death. Although it is entirely plausible that she came seeking money to pay for an abortion, the rose placed in Crommelin’s keyhole invites further speculation. Crommelin may have dared to hope that his romantic feelings were now to be reciprocated. Possibly Mary came in hopes of extricating herself from her betrothal to Payne. Crommelin’s refusal to answer her messages can only have complicated her predicament. In the absence of money from Crommelin, Mary may have been forced to forgo the services of Madame Restell and make recourse to the less expensive and presumably far riskier facilities of Mrs. Loss. If Crommelin knew of her intentions, it might explain how he happened to be on the scene when the body came ashore in Hoboken: He would have been on his way to the Nick Moore House.

  Neither Payne nor Crommelin makes an entirely satisfactory suspect. Both had alibis for the fatal Sunday, and neither had sufficient influence to conceal an involvement with the crime if the authorities or press had known of it. The fact that the papers found on Payne’s body at the time of his death were not put forward as evidence of his guilt argues strongly in favor of his innocence, and the fact that Crommelin made such a nuisance of himself to the police and Gilbert Merritt suggests that he had little to hide. At the same time, if we accept—or at least consider—Poe’s formulation that the murder was somehow linked to the brief disappearance in 1838, it must be noted that Payne and Crommelin probably did not know Mary Rogers in that year, as the boardinghouse had not yet opened.

  One man who did know Mary Rogers at the time of her disappearance from Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium was John Anderson himself. Even the most casual observer of the case would be forced to admit that Anderson’s interest in Mary Rogers appears to have exceeded that of a typical employer. Mary and her mother lived in his home for a time before they purchased their boardinghouse, and when Mary quit her job at the cigar store, Anderson is said to have literally pleaded on his knees to win her return. Then as now, there was no shortage of attractive women in New York; if Mary Rogers had been simply a decorative employee, she could easily have been replaced.

  Anderson’s business grew steadily in the years following Mary Rogers’s death. He branched out into real estate and eventually became one of the wealthiest men in the city. For all of his success, however, Anderson never entirely escaped a taint of suspicion that he had somehow been culpable in the death of the famous cigar girl. Rumors circulated that he had been having an affair with his young employee, leading, perhaps, to an unwanted pregnancy and the disastrous consequence that followed. He had managed to suppress the information that he had been interrogated at police headquarters in connection with the crime, but nevertheless rumors circulated among the city’s leading citizens, creating an impression of the tobacconist as a man with a skeleton in his closet. James Gordon Bennett was among those who knew the details of Anderson’s police interview, and one senses a certain animus toward Anderson in the Herald’s tone at the time of the murder. For all of Anderson’s wealth and political promise, Bennett dismisses him imperiously as “the cigar man” and records that Mary Rogers had “not been at Anderson’s hole for nearly three years.”

  Anderson’s political ambitions soon foundered. At one stage Fernando Wood, the legendary political power broker, tried to persuade Anderson to make a run for the office of mayor, but Anderson declined, fearing that the publicity would churn up even more speculation about the Mary Rogers case. Anderson grew bitter in later life, and frequently blamed Mary Rogers for thwarting his political fortunes. His business partner Felix McCloskey recalled that on one occasion, passing the building that had once been the Rogers boardinghouse, Anderson cursed the murdered girl’s memory as “the cause of driving him out of politics and belittling him in New York.” On another occasion, McCloskey quoted him as saying “I want people to believe that I had no hand in her taking off,” and he went on to offer an assurance “that he hadn’t anything directly, himself, to do with it.” Like Poe’s remark about the mysterious second confession, the statement labors under the weight of what has been left unsaid, and invites closer attention.

  As an old man Anderson fell under the thrall of spiritualism, the belief in communication with dead souls, and confided to several friends that he was now in regular communication with Mary’s spirit. He once claimed that he received particularly sound business advice from the dead girl. Abner Mattoon, a New York state senator, recalled Anderson as saying that Mary Rogers “appeared to him in the spirit from time to time.” Anderson went on to say that “I have had a great deal of trouble about Mary Rogers, but everything is settled now. I take great pleasure in communicating with her face to face.”

  An attorney who looked into Anderson’s business affairs in later years insisted that the murder made “an impression which he was in after years never able to shake off and which, when his faculties began to fail and old age to creep upon him, lent a controlling force which undermined his intellectual powers.” Late in life, Anderson withdrew into a mansion in Tarrytown, where he installed steel-lined shutters to ward off some vaguely defined threat. He came to believe that his children were trying to poison him, and that his cook was plotting to kill him by “putting pins in his roast beef.
”

  Anderson died in Paris in November of 1881 at age sixty-nine, having outlived Mary Rogers by forty years. At the time of his death, he was widely believed to have been insane. As a result, his heirs would contest his final will and testament in various legal challenges that stretched over more than a decade. In May of 1887, the New York Times would report on a suit brought by Anderson’s daughter. Under the headline of “An Old Tragedy Recalled,” the testimony in an otherwise mundane property suit contains a stunning disclosure, delivered in an offhand, matter-of-fact manner. Andrew Wheeler, a former associate of Anderson’s, was recalling a discussion with Anderson concerning Poe and “Marie Rogêt” when he was interrupted by one of the legal advisors in the case, a former judge by the name of Curtis. As the Times reported it: “Ex-Judge Curtis asked him if he did not know that John Anderson gave Poe $5,000 to write the story of Marie Rogêt in order to draw people’s attention from himself, who, many believed, was her murderer.” Wheeler, according to the Times reporter, answered that “now was the first time he had ever heard of such a thing,” and no more was said on the matter.

  The notion that John Anderson commissioned Poe to write “Marie Rogêt” as a means of covering his own tracks appears at first blush to be fanciful. Most commentators on the case have dismissed it, although it does give an index of the degree to which the Rogers case dogged Anderson’s later years. It should be remembered, however, that Poe, as the author of the ill-fated Conchologist’s First Book, would have been known to Anderson as a man willing to undertake almost any sort of hackwork. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, the editor of a definitive scholarly edition of Poe’s works, has noted that Poe must have been on good terms with Anderson as late as 1845, even after the revision of “Marie Rogêt” in Tales, with its hints of a fatal abortion. Two weeks after Poe took the helm of the Broadway Journal, advertisements for Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium began to run in the magazine. At a time when Poe desperately needed money to save the struggling magazine, Anderson paid in advance for three months of notices. Needless to say, the fact that the two men had business dealings, while suggestive, does not establish that Anderson commissioned “Marie Rogêt” as a smoke screen. If nothing else, one must regard the figure of $5,000 with great suspicion. For Poe, who earned only nine dollars for “The Raven,” this would have been a life-altering bounty. Thomas Mabbott, perhaps the most careful of Poe scholars, takes pains to note that the story of Anderson’s involvement with the writing of “Marie Rogêt” is nothing more than a tradition, but he adds, “I have come to regard it with respect.”

  The legal proceedings over John Anderson’s will would stretch out over several years, and in that time the matter of Mary Rogers would be raised several times. On one occasion, during testimony by Felix McCloskey Anderson’s former partner, the judge attempted to quash the topic—declaring that he “could not see what relevancy the witness’s memory of a tragedy that happened 45 years ago could have to a controversy respecting the soundness of mind of the millionaire tobacconist.” In spite of the judge’s reservations, McCloskey soon returned to the subject. In the spring of 1891, McCloskey stated in open court that Anderson once told him that “an abortion had been committed on the girl—the year before her murder took place, or a year and a half—something of that kind—and that he got into some trouble about it—and outside of that there was no grounds on earth for anybody to suppose he had anything to do with the murder.”

  Although McCloskey’s memory of dates may have grown vague with the passage of fifty years, his statement strongly suggests that Mary Rogers’s disappearance from the cigar store in 1838 came as a consequence of an abortion. Whether Anderson was actually responsible for the pregnancy or merely paid for its termination is unclear, but the recollection that he “got into some trouble about it” goes a long way toward explaining his extreme sensitivity over the murder in later years. Even if Anderson had nothing at all to do with the events of 1841, which remains an open question, he would have placed himself in an extremely delicate position if he provided money for an earlier abortion—especially if Mary Rogers died while undergoing a second procedure three years later. Even if, as he later protested, he had “no hand in her taking off,” his complicity in the earlier abortion, to whatever degree, would have branded him as a villain who helped to set her down the path to destruction. Given the level of public outrage, one can only imagine Anderson’s thoughts as he attended the meeting of the Committee of Safety in August of 1841, and pledged fifty dollars toward “the arrest of any or all of those concerned in the late murder.”

  If Mary Rogers truly perished while undergoing a second abortion in 1841—and if the notorious “Swarthy Man” was in fact the abortionist himself—it does not explain how she came to be found with a battered face and a lace cord tied around her neck, and the marks of a man’s fingers visible upon her neck. Although the abortion scenario came to be widely accepted after the death of Mrs. Loss, it did not allow for the obvious signs of strangulation.

  A possible explanation is suggested in the pages of Tale of a Physician: or the Fruits and Seeds of Crime, the 1869 novel by Andrew Jackson Davis. When the heroine, Molly Ruciel, presents herself at the “foeticidal” establishment of Madame La Stelle, it emerges that she had been there three years previously: “Oho! The pretty store-girl come again, eh? About three and a half years ago, I’m thinking, you disappeared from this hospital with your life, and in fair health, didn’t you, Miss Molly Ruciel?” When the frightened young woman expresses misgivings, the hopelessness of her situation becomes apparent. “Don’t trouble yourself, Miss Molly,” she is told. “Your wealthy lover, the gallant Jack Blake, has been here. It’s all fixed. The handsome villain paid all fees and left full instructions. He says that you’re a candidate for ‘still and lost’ treatment, and he footed the bill accordingly.” When the unfortunate store clerk perishes during the procedure, the physician is wildly alarmed. “Everybody in New-York knows that girl!” cries his assistant. “We’ve got a hell of a job on hand, I’ll bet.” Loading the corpse into a cab, they hatch a plan to cover the traces of the deed: “This passenger will put all New-York in a thundering quiver of excitement.…She must be found floating with every imaginable evidence of violence committed by several men.” Having reached this conclusion, the guilty men set about to inflict “sufficient marks of cruelty” on the corpse, while dispatching assistants to dispose of her tattered clothing in Weehawken. The battered corpse is then dumped into the Hudson, and four days later “the great city of New-York is convulsed with a profound and intense excitement.”

  Poe might have admired the ingenuity, if not the prose. It is worth mentioning that Andrew Jackson Davis met Poe on at least one occasion, and that his activities as the “Poughkeepsie seer” may well have overlapped with those of John Anderson, the eager adherent of spiritualism. Unfortunately, as Poe would have acknowledged, the value of such coincidences is open to debate, and even the revelations of the John Anderson court case, coming fifty years after the death of Mary Rogers, must be treated with caution. Whatever value one might place in Poe’s Calculus of Probabilities, it must be admitted that by the time of Anderson’s death the secrets of Mary Rogers had passed beyond mere ratiocination.

  In time, Poe himself might have come to appreciate this. “There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told,” he wrote in “The Man of the Crowd.” “Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes—die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The case of Mary Rogers presents many challenges to the modern researcher, not the least being the scarcity of contemporary records. “As there was never any trial,” observed the write
r Edmund Pearson in 1930, “the facts must be sought in the files of the New York newspapers of the late summer of 1841—when this sensational murder, discussed by everyone, was mentioned perhaps not more than thrice a week, usually in a paragraph of small type, tucked away on the editorial page. The sight of me, hunting for the news would be enough to make my optician beam with honest pleasure.”

  My optician, too, has had cause for satisfaction over my interest in the fate of the beautiful cigar girl. Unlike Edmund Pearson, however, I have also had the benefit of a rich vein of more recent scholarship concerning the case and its aftermath. I would like to express my gratitude and admiration for the work of Amy Gilman Srebnick, John Evangelist Walsh, Raymond Paul, William K. Wimsatt, and Samuel Worthen. At the same time, I am indebted to the work of many distinguished Poe scholars, including Thomas Ollive Mabbott, John Ward Ostrom, Kenneth Silverman, and Jeffrey Meyers.

  I would also like to acknowledge the generous assistance of the following people and institutions: The New York Public Library, The New-York Historical Society, The Municiple Archives of New York City, The Museum of the City of New York, Thomas Mann and the staff of The Library of Congress, Jackie Donovan and The American Antiquarian Society, The Poe Museum of Richmond, The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum of Baltimore, The Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site of Philadelphia, The Edgar Allan Poe Cottage of New York, the gentlemen of Squatting Toad and especially Allen Appel and Larry Kahaner, Sean Tinslay of The Antique Bookshop of Australia, Ben Robinson, Jon Lellenberg, Lloyd Rose, Mitch Hoffman of Dutton, Erika Kahn, Donald Maass of the Donald Maass Literary Agency, David Stashower, and Sonny Wareham.