Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

by Brad Ricca

  Even from outside the cell, Grace barely came up to the man’s chest. So when he turned around, she was surprised to see a shy, chubby face with two, close-set eyes. His mouth was half-disguised by a soft mustache. His hair was thick and curly. Grace looked at him more closely. The skin of this man was whiter than any she had ever seen. Grace introduced herself and spoke with him politely about his case. Charlie Stielow murmured his answers short and to the point. Grace spied some papers and letters on his shelf. She asked very nicely if she might look at some of them. She did so very quickly. All the while, the giant clutched a crusty German Bible. There was one letter in particular that Grace asked if she might borrow. Charlie agreed by nodding. Grace told the man in a stern tone that she could make no promises whatsoever. He nodded once more.

  Once out of the corridor, Miller asked Grace what her first impressions were. Grace calmly asked why she had been asked to meet this man. Miller said there were questions about how Stielow’s confession was procured. Grace nodded and showed Miller the paper she had taken. It was a handwritten note. Miller recognized it as written by Stielow’s eleven-year-old daughter. The letter read:

  God knows, as well as we do, father, that you are innocent. He knows, as we do, that you didn’t go out of the house that night.

  Miller looked to Grace to see what her impressions were. She looked like she was still listening to the words in the air.

  When she got back to New York City, Grace started making inquiries into Stielow’s case. She took the train to Albion and checked out the record of Stielow’s appeal. She stayed inside for three days over the July Fourth holiday and studied the case materials—all 1,450 pages—carefully reading the tiny, typed pages.

  The facts were deceptively simple, yet they formed a story in her mind. Charlie Stielow was a down-and-out laborer looking for work. He met an older man named Phelps who looked at Charlie’s massive size and offered him work on his farm in East Shelby at a salary of four hundred dollars a year. Charlie, who had a wife and two children, thought he had won the sweepstakes. Charlie was given a small house, a cow, feed, potatoes, and fuel for his home. Shelby was a bleak plain of pine trees and melting snow, especially in March, but Charlie had only four dollars to his name and his wife had another baby on the way. So Charlie took the job. His mother-in-law, Mary Jane Green and her son, Nelson Irow Green, arrived from Royalton Center to help with the move and the coming baby.

  On the night of Sunday, March 21, 1915, at 11 P.M., the Stielows were awakened by the sound of a woman screaming. Charlie ran to the front door, trying to listen. There was only silence. Charlie wanted to go outside, but his mother-in-law stopped him, saying that whatever was behind that door might excite his wife into giving birth too soon. Charlie stood inside the door, chafing at its surface, straining his ears to hear past the wood and into the darkness.

  The next morning, at dawn, Charlie woke up, still dressed in his old blue overalls. He covered his head with his favorite black cap, which had a thin front bill. He put on his size 10 boots, their sloping heels just hanging on.

  Charlie opened his front door and found Miss Wolcott, Mr. Phelps’s housekeeper, dead and cold on his doorstep. She had been shot under the left arm. A late, light snow had fallen the night before, coating her in white. Charlie followed a trail of swaying red spots all the way to the Phelps house, which stood directly across from him on the opposite side of West Shelby Road. Phelps’s large two-story house stood out against the withered sky. Charlie ran over and found Mr. Phelps dying just inside his own door with three shots in him. Charlie shouted for Nelson, and they started across the adjoining lots, trying desperately to find a neighbor. They found Mr. Jenkins, Phelps’s nephew, who took some bedclothes, wrapped up his straining uncle, and then called the police.

  When the police arrived, they found very little evidence, except for the bullets themselves and Jenkins’s insistence that a pocketbook with several hundred dollars in it had gone missing from inside. Someone also noticed a single bullet in the back kitchen glass door. There were no weapon and no eyewitnesses except Mr. Phelps, who was in very serious condition. The sheriff quickly questioned Charlie, but only as a formality. No one believed he could be guilty of such terrible violence. He was just the unlucky one who lived on the property. Besides, there were two sets of tracks: one small and barefoot and another harder to make out. The sheriff called for Charles Scobell, of Oneida Castle, who arrived with his big, slobbering bloodhound. The dog snuffled around in the snow. He looked up, then plunked his way along the tree line in a circle toward the henhouse but eventually lost the scent. When Mr. Phelps died hours later, the police put up a $5,000 reward for any information on the crime. Mr. Jenkins asked Charlie to stay on and keep the farm going while they figured out what to do next.

  Sometime after, as the snow melted, a private detective named George W. Newton swung into town from Buffalo. He had been hired by the county to solve the case. They already had a suspect by the name of Kirck Tallman, a former worker of Phelps’s who had left under unfriendly circumstances. But Newton had a different idea. He began to hound Charlie Stielow instead. Reading the report, Grace couldn’t see why. She was surprised, then, to read that on April 20, Nelson Green, Charlie’s brother-in-law, confessed to Detective Newton that he had helped Charlie kill Phelps for his secret heap of money.

  Grace couldn’t understand how the next part happened, but apparently Newton was able to take Charlie Stielow, without a warrant, over to the county jail at Albion. There, Stielow was jailed for two days, after which Newton emerged with a lengthy confession, complete with an X at the end of it. Charlie Stielow had confessed to a story where he and his brother-in-law used a mop stick and a gun to kill and rob Phelps and his housekeeper. Meanwhile, Detective Newton’s men had found two .22 caliber guns in Charlie Stielow’s barn.

  After the confession had been signed, Charlie’s mother-in-law came to visit him in jail. She told him that his wife had given birth to a daughter that morning. Charlie was overjoyed. She also told him that Nelson was in jail, too. Charlie was confused and asked her why.

  District Attorney Knickerbocker put them both before the grand jury. Nelson Green pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was given life in Elmira. The court had termed him “mentally deficient.” In court, Charlie said he never confessed, but he was still sentenced to die on September 5, 1915. He was taken to Sing Sing—and the Death House—immediately.

  Grace read the next part a couple of times. There was some sort of ballistics expert who proved that the bullets were definitely from the nickel-plated, black-handled Young American pistol found in Stielow’s barn. Grace didn’t know how that could be proved, although she wondered why the defense was not allowed to call a refuting expert.

  Grace pushed herself back from the overwhelming words and voices on the pages in front of her and wondered why she was here. Like any criminal matter, there were two sides to the case. The bottom line was that Charlie had seemingly been caught by a combination of bad detective work and backstabbing family politics. There might have been some of the third-degree from this Newton character, but there was definitely evidence to convict. She still couldn’t get herself to close everything up. She fished around in the files until she found Charlie’s confession: two pages bursting with cramped black type. She touched the paper in her hands. She knew right then that Charlie Stielow was innocent.

  Grace wrapped up the Gennaro Mazella case by successfully knocking him down to a life sentence. She knew that they were cheering in the Death House, as the residents always did when one of their own got off the Last Mile. As Grace thought of that small, dense hallway, cheering and loud, she couldn’t help thinking of the gigantic Stielow and that small note from his daughter. In July, some newspapers reported that Charlie had already gone to the chair. Grace’s breath caught when she heard this, but the papers were wrong. Charlie was still breathing in Sing Sing, though his hours were growing short. She made up her mind. Grace knew that there would be
no vacation for her this summer. She was getting used to that.

  Grace remembered the Tolla case again and how, in those early years of her career, she had to do everything herself. She was wiser now. She picked up the phone and called David White, Charlie’s young attorney, who, though he had made mistakes in the case, had never given up. White wrote Charlie nearly every day and was working hard to get him a new trial. After getting off the phone with Grace, White then contacted the curly-haired Misha Appelbaum, the outspoken leader of the public-morals group the Humanitarian Cult, which met every two weeks in Carnegie Hall. The group was fiercely against capital punishment and now boasted over 100,000 members after just two years of operation. Grace added her own Stuart Kohn, a sharp lawyer who worked with her, as the new head counsel for the appeal. Their enemies called them the “Emotionalists.”

  Grace was flabbergasted that this case had received almost no press coverage outside upstate New York. Grace knew that she would be busy on the ground, so she made a call to a young writer whose work she liked. Sophie Irene Loeb had been writing for the New York Evening World for years, starting with columns about husbands and cooking before running a deep exposé of the lives of New York’s tenement children. Sophie wrote about the heaps of choking dirt and refuse that surrounded these boys and girls like a sprawling monster. Sophie despised inhumanity, in all its ugly forms. She changed welfare laws, wrote news articles, and gave lectures. But she wasn’t like one of the old temperance reformers with their lace and velvet; she was a young divorcé who wore a short hairstyle with pearls and wrote electric sentences. She immediately agreed to join their crusade.

  Someone suggested they contact another Humanitarian Cult member, Inez Milholland Boissevain. She was bona fide famous, beautiful, and rich: her father had made his money in the pneumatic tube business. Her true claim to fame was wearing a flowing gown while riding a white horse named Gray Dawn as she led a sea of suffragists at the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson in 1913. She was a member of the radical National Woman’s Party, captain of the hockey team at Vassar, and an outspoken voice for women in America. She got her law degree at the New York University School of Law in 1912 after being rejected by Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge because of her sex. She also famously said that it took only ten minutes a day to complete her housework. Inez worked for a time at Osborne, Lamb, and Garvan, where she had to investigate some of the crueler conditions at Sing Sing. At the time, Inez wanted to see what it felt like to be an inmate, so she had herself handcuffed to one. With their defense team now formed, Grace took off for northwestern New York. She knew that her role in this case was not that of a lawyer. She needed to be the detective.

  Grace arrived in Buffalo and took a room at the Iroquois, a stylish hotel done up in the French renaissance style. As soon as she was settled in, Grace set out to investigate what was left of the crime scene. Orleans County in July was full of apple trees, now out of their full bloom but still green and bright. About three miles south of Medina, the largest town in the county, stood the town of Shelby. When Grace finally got there, she counted about a dozen small houses, a grocery store, a saloon, and a church, all placed around four corners, where the two main roads crossed. Grace continued on to a mile-length stretch of road to the town of West Shelby. The houses there, white and flaking, were set at long distances from each other, separated by farmland. There were trees and fields and broken fences.

  In a town this small, Grace knew that people tended to know each other’s business. So even if the murderer knew everyone in town or was a complete stranger, someone must have seen something. In the following days, Grace followed up on rumors all over Shelby and greater Orleans County. In Newton’s Corners, where Phelps had hired Stielow, people in coveralls with dogs gave her strange looks. Most people liked Charlie Stielow, but they disliked outsiders even more. Grace learned that Phelps was said to be a rich but miserly man, in possession of a secret fortune somewhere close around his person. He hired tramp labor for nothing. Grace looked into a few of his previous employees, but didn’t find anything. She did hear a few people tell of a rag picker named Erwin King who had been seen around the Phelps house earlier on the day of the murder. And there seemed to be evidence—a strange third place setting at the table that morning—that suggested Phelps had a houseguest that night. There was also an unknown man at the funeral who had acted strangely aloof. These were the ghosts that Grace was chasing.

  Back at the Iroquois, Grace checked in on the telephone with Kohn and Loeb. Parts of the story were starting to spill into the papers, which they all agreed was good. But they had to try something else if they wanted a reprieve for Charlie. The clock was ticking. Luckily, Grace had a new theory on where to start.

  Detective George Newton was the head of Byrne’s Detective Agency and took any job presented to him. The famous Pinkerton agency did, too, but they had a higher standard of work, at least according to their advertisements. But Byrne’s rates were cheaper. And Newton got results, though clients knew better than to ask how. While Grace was picking around Shelby looking for clues, Newton was in New York City tailing some man who was supposedly cheating on his fiancée. It was a “hotel job,” as they said in the detective game. To tell the truth, Newton hadn’t even seen the man; he just took the job and was biding time until his client, some old rich lady, called again. Her daughter was the fiancée. Poor gal.

  Newton finally got the call that afternoon. Mrs. Wintergreen, the mother, asked if Newton might give his report to her lawyer in the city, a man named Mr. Welch, who had an office over at 80 Maiden Lane. Newton agreed; he put on a tie and headed over. He knew how paranoid these rich society types were about their secrets. They needed everything to be official.

  Newton sat down with Mr. Welch—a typical lawyer—and made up a bunch of stuff about the man cheating on the fiancée. He made it sound good, but not too sensational. Just enough to shock Mrs. Wintergreen when she heard the report. Newton said he needed more time and resources to know for sure, which of course meant more money. Welch was sympathetic; he knew the game and was just here to placate his client, who had money to burn. As they were finishing up, Welch asked Newton about the Stielow case he had been reading about in the papers. Newton’s name had been printed as the star detective who got the giant murderer to confess.

  “Well, you see, that was part of my method,” replied Newton, proudly leaning back in his chair. “I wanted to get him all excited and worked up, letting him think we had the real murderers. I told him a whole lot of things about this and that, made a lot of motions, got him excited, had my two men there with me and at the psychological moment, I rushed at him, grabbed him, shook him and threw him against the wall and said: ‘Charlie, who murdered old man Phelps?’”

  Welch soaked in the words. He then asked Newton if he had hit Charlie.

  “Well,” paused Newton. “Not very hard. Charlie said ‘I don’t know.’ I rushed at him again, grabbed him by the throat and said ‘You _ _ _, who killed Phelps?’ ‘I don’t know, I don’t know’ he said. I grabbed him again and said ‘Come along with me.’”

  Newton continued. “We brought him over to the hotel and held him there all night … I finally told him that if he would tell me that Nelson shot Phelps, I would let him go to his wife. We got Nelson, who used Stielow’s confession against Nelson and worked the two of them against one another. Nelson said that he held old man Phelps while Charlie shot him.”

  “My God” said Welch, clearly impressed. “That was a clever piece of work. Your rushing at the man like you did at the psychological moment practically scared the confession out of him. How do you account for this?”

  Newton smiled. “That was the master mind over the weaker victim.”

  Welch smiled himself at that last line. As he did, he stood still for a moment. Welch called to the adjoining room, and a stenographer came out with a transcript from a Dictaphone. Newton’s shoulders fell into a slump. The whole conversation had been recorded.

  “My na
me is Stuart Kohn,” said Welch.

  Newton locked eyes with the man speaking in front of him. Newton knew that Stuart Kohn was part of Stielow’s defense team. But they had never met. A moment passed. Until now, Newton realized. “Mrs. Wintergreen” was probably Grace Humiston herself, he thought. Newton slumped in his chair, defeated, as the rest fell into place.

  Once the group went over Newton’s confession, Grace told Sophie to write the piece she had been preparing for. On July 18, readers of the New York Evening World read the full story of Charlie Stielow and his struggle for justice. In her article titled “Man Facing Death,” Sophie assured her loyal readers that “[t]he most vivid imagination of Sherlock Holmes could not evolve more dramatic elements than those which surround the case of Charles Frederick Stielow.” She went on to relate the entire story of the Dictaphone sting that had been thought up by Grace. Sophie repeated some of the leads they had made in the investigation into Charlie’s innocence. She also made the point that even the officials at Sing Sing thought Stielow was innocent and deserved to be free. And, after her article, countless readers agreed.

  On the Friday before the execution, Sophie was supposed to make the final plea for clemency to Governor Whitman. But earlier that week, her own health failed her. Sophie’s doctor diagnosed her with nervous exhaustion and told her that it would be suicide for her to go to Albany. The doctor said that she should obliterate the Stielow matter entirely from her mind or face protracted illness and possible death, an impossible request for Sophie Loeb. By Tuesday night, she had a new project in mind.

  Meanwhile, Inez Milholland was going from Albany to Albion, drumming up support for Charlie’s release in the form of a petition to the governor. The only sleep she was getting lately was on trains. When Inez finally arrived at her home near Westchester, she too collapsed into bed. Sophie Loeb phoned her just before dawn. Even confined to bed, Sophie was serving as the group’s de facto organizer. Sophie excitedly told Inez about her newest idea: she wanted to hold a public rally in Medina to garner more signatures for Charlie before their last trip to see the governor. Inez, though exhausted herself, agreed immediately. She hopped on a train that day and convinced Misha Appelbaum and Stuart Kohn to help. Inez then went to Medina to secure the theater and start advertising. She sent out riders on horseback onto the roads and trails stuffed with handbills announcing the event. Sophie called Grace, who was still tracking down the story of a mysterious rag picker. Grace agreed that the event was a good idea and set off in a car.