Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

by Brad Ricca

  “Oh, no,” she said, to some perceived congratulations. “Don’t talk about me, my dear, but little Ruth.” As Grace chatted away, the reporters in the room took notes as they studied her for clues. One noted that Grace had a merry laugh. Another wrote that she reminded him of the late Joe Petrosino. “William J. Burns looks like a detective,” wrote a reporter, “but Mrs. Grace Humiston does not at all look like an investigator. You may see her type presiding over civic or mothers club meetings.” Another wrote that it was like dropping in at Baker Street and having Holmes throw the pipe, the violin, and the hypodermic out of the window and begin to discuss how many strawberries make a shortcake.

  Some of the reporters had done a little digging into the woman in black before their visit. Her family had roots in old New York. Her father was Adoniram Judson Winterton, an influential member of the Baptist Church. Grace grew up in the city and graduated from Hunter College in 1888. She taught for a time at the Collegiate School at West End Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street. After her first marriage to Henry F. Quackenbos, a doctor, ended, she took an evening class at the NYU law school. Five years ago, she married again, this time to a former co-worker of hers at the Legal Aid Society. He was a Yale lawyer named Howard Humiston; they were married in Peru and lived togather with his mother. Rumor said that on their steamship honeymoon to London, the boat came down with typhoid fever. Grace saved the day by single-handedly instituting strict quarantine procedures, thus getting them safely back to England. The story surprised no one.

  There was talk that Grace first studied law only to understand the management of the large property of her family. Grace said that upon the death of her brother some years earlier, she became trustee of the family estate. But her becoming a lawyer was about more than that. One month after her firm was opened, there were 120 cases on her docket. She had the respect of lawyers and judges. She was called the “People’s friend.” She was a protector of the poor who also loved the Ladies’ Mile, the Midtown shopping paradise that included Bergdorf Goodman, Best & Co., and Tiffany, all anchored on the street by the Flatiron Building.

  Once Grace got off the phone, the reporters readied their pencils for her actual words. Almost on cue, she spied Kron lurking in the outer office. She motioned him in. She was determined not to go down alone.

  “Kron is a remarkable man,” Grace said. “A splendid investigator. When I was investigating the peonage cases, I had to do some work among the Hungarians. So I went to a Hungarian newspaper and asked for a capable man who could talk Hungarian. I got Kron. He had not been working long on the peonage cases when he was offered a bribe of $500. He came right to me and told me about it. We set a trap for the would-be bribers and marked money was paid in the old Astor House. We caught them and sent them away. I knew I could depend on Kron.”

  Grace had succeeded in embarrassing her old friend. Reporters then asked Kron about the working habits of his employer on the Cruger case. “How many hours did Mrs. Humiston work?” someone asked.

  Kron shrugged. “Sometimes eighteen and twenty-one hours. She ate her meals in the office here. She is absolutely tireless.”

  Grace shook her head. “I may have done that occasionally, but as a rule I put in only fifteen or sixteen.”

  “How did you solve the Ruth Cruger case?” another reporter asked, cutting right to the question they were here for.

  “Because,” she said.

  The room became quiet again.

  “I started out with the conviction that Ruth Cruger was a good girl,” Grace continued, her head nodding. “I knew that one of her training and character never would figure in an elopement or anything of that kind. Working on this conviction of mine, I knew that the police theory of ‘waywardness’ was all bosh and that Mr. Cruger’s repeatedly expressed belief that his daughter was being forcibly detained was correct—or at least partially so.”

  As the reporters took her words down, they observed details about her. Her eyes were puffy, for one. She wore no earrings but had a thick white locket around her neck. She wore a large blue stone on her left ring finger. Her desk was very messy.

  “Ruth was a good girl,” Grace said again, sitting below her painting of the Madonna.

  Grace put up her glasses and very professionally went over the rough timeline of the case: “We eliminated every clue that led outside New York City. I searched morgues, cemeteries, and hospitals. I became convinced the girl had been murdered and Cocchi could solve the mystery. We investigated the cellar and found the police search of the place had been superficial. We subjected the man’s record to the closest sort of scrutiny. For more than five weeks we clung to our investigation without having a single clue to work on. We were simply convinced that sooner or later we would find the body, and, although there were times when the task grew heavy our little band managed to keep cheerful. We went after Cocchi just because that was the common sense thing to go after we had established his horrible reputation.”

  Grace moved up in her chair. There were papers piled off to the side with names scratched in ink on their spines. “I’ve noticed that some folks are saying that I found the body because I followed my intuition. Every time a women does make a discovery somebody pipes, ‘Intuition!’ Let me say that, in this instance it was just plain everyday common sense on the part of Kron and myself, backed by a determination to keep going until the case had cleared up.”

  She added, “There never was a time when we felt like giving up. We knew that Ruth was a model girl, that she had disappeared, that she had been murdered, and we intended to prove to others—yes, the police among them—that we had the correct view. There was only one unpleasant feature in connection with the search and that was the vile slanders about Ruth that kept cropping up again and again. It may be interesting some time to ascertain just where they all came from.”

  Grace took in a breath. “That day we started to dig I knew that our search was ended. Hole after hole was made and although nothing came to light, we were convinced that every time a shovel went into the earth, it might disclose what we sought. What happened … you know.”

  Reporters could sense that the topic should be altered. A reporter asked her about the new nickname that the papers had been using for her: Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.

  “No, I never read Sherlock Holmes,” responded Grace, laughing. “In fact, I am not a believer in deduction. Common sense and persistence will always solve a mystery. You never need theatricals, nor Dr. Watsons, if you stick to a case.”

  Another asked her views on the women’s vote. Grace thought of her friend Inez. When they worked on the Stielow case together, Grace had dreams of bringing Inez on as a full legal partner when it was all over. She never had the chance.

  “I am not a suffragette,” Grace said. “But I certainly am not an anti-. If giving the vote to women could abolish white slavery or the other nefarious practices, if it could make better the lot of womankind then by all means let us vote. As a matter of fact, I’m much too busy to ally myself with any organization for or against suffrage.”

  Lastly, someone asked if she preferred life as a detective to life at home.

  “As between a professional career and home?” Grace asked, surprised, her eyes lighting up. “Assuredly, I prefer home—possibly that sounds old-fashioned. Well, to me there’s nothing like my home.” She smiled, and everyone laughed, if only in release. Their questions, even light ones, could not mask the deep occasion of this story’s end. There was silence again. But Grace found more fire. Though Ruth had been found, Grace vowed to get to the root of the problem rather than endlessly toil in its wake.

  “Vice conditions here in the city are astounding,” Grace said. “The ‘good people’ of New York are as much asleep to the nastiness of their city as the nation appears to be to the seriousness of our war. The records of the police department show hundreds of girls disappear every year. There must be many whose vanishing is not reported to the authorities because of the notoriety.”

  She c
ontinued. “There are little, harmless looking shops scattered all around some of the high school and public schools,” Grace said, her voice rising. “Loungers of the most depraved type infest these places and watch the girls going to and from school. When a girl is insulted in one of these places, she usually broods over the horror of it. Never could she tell her parents, for she feels she is partly to blame. Little by little her seducers batter down her moral stamina and soon another girl is ‘missing.’”

  Grace observed, “New York does not yet realize how systematic the danger is for the girls who live in it. The public readily says, when a girl disappears it was as much her fault as the man’s.

  “I know better,” Grace said.

  The woman in black had a plan. “What I think is needed is a bureau, supported by voluntary contributions that would prevent girls from getting into the hands of these beasts, rescue them if they were already snared, and then cure them of their moral ailment. Why, had I the power, I would cause to be inserted in the laws of every state an act that would make the tempting of a girl a serious offense, punishable by an adequate penalty, I would call such practice ‘criminal persuasion’ and I think that if the white slaver knew he violated the law at the beginning of his ‘trade’ there would be fewer girls in the underworld.”

  She added, “I would have agents throughout the city, but the headquarters of the organization would be out of town—on a farm, best of all. Once the girls were rescued I would send them out to the farm, where their environment would be entirely different. Secluded there even from their own kind with light work to do, placed where nobody except the attendants—all women—would know of their past, the girl would start life anew. If funds are provided, I think the best plan would be not to have the bureau part of the police department but, of course, to work in full sympathetic co-operation with it. If this bureau is made powerful enough it can do something the police and public sentiment have as yet failed to do—wipe out immorality in this city.”

  The reporters were struggling to keep up.

  “In one year,” Grace said, “828 persons disappeared from the streets. In three of the five boroughs there were 244 murders. These conditions indicate either that New York is the most criminal city in the world or the police force is inefficient.” Grace said that in her three-month investigation, she found twenty-two cellars where girls were made victims of men. But she couldn’t do what was needed. Even her hunt of Ruth Cruger was incredibly difficult, she admitted, far more so than it should have been. She paused and dropped her voice a bit.

  “I found myself blocked by some mysterious person at every step,” Grace said.

  She sighed. “I have been utterly tired out by my work on poor Ruth,” Grace admitted. “Let the public show that it wants something of that sort, however, and I am willing to drop everything and begin the work.”

  “Why couldn’t the police have found the same thing?” someone asked.

  “I don’t know,” was Grace’s reply. “I don’t know why they didn’t. Something told me to keep on digging and I just couldn’t stop, although they told me that I was foolish. I was told that there might be a civil suit. I was not to be dissuaded by that.

  “You put two and two together,” Grace said, simply. “That is, you do if you are a woman. If you are a man you don’t, or you get the addition wrong. ‘She ran away with the dago;’ ‘they quarreled with her at home;’ ‘girls won’t stand for strict parents’ were some of the theories put forward by members of the city’s police and detectives. And all the time the child’s body lay buried beneath Cocchi’s cellar, and someone helped Cocchi to escape.”

  When a reporter asked, “Do you still believe capital punishment ought to be abolished?” the reporter wrote that Mrs. Humiston declined to answer. “It hurt her,” the reporter wrote.

  The long article published in the New York Sun after the interview built Grace up like one of the new Gotham skyscrapers. The accompanying photograph featured the smiling face of the woman, clad in black, who had found Ruth Cruger. Mrs. Humiston was now the mystery confronting readers. Who was this woman who solved the crime that had so baffled the police? And how did she accomplish it? “She never gives up on anything,” the reporter said. “She shuts her teeth and goes on and on, no matter what happens. Trying to stop her is like flashing a red flag in a bull’s face.”

  “She would have made a detective,” the article observed. “Indeed she is a detective.”

  But she wasn’t in it for fame, it seemed. “It may well be,” reported the Sun, “that she does not care a rap for her own gain or her own reputation in all this. You feel that when you are talking to her that she is above self.” After all, “she is a born and bred New Yorker,” the reporter said.

  This was not the same Grace Humiston with ebony hair who darted about the South in disguises and rode mules over Italian mountaintops. Grace now had more wrinkles and, after the Cruger case, clearly needed some rest. But that was all just appearance. At forty-eight years old, her words—and what was behind them—commanded more authority than ever. The reporters in that room now understood why. The nation could hear it, too. After the articles came out, Grace’s mailbox was soon flooded with requests by desperate parents begging her to look for their lost daughters. The New York American, a staunch supporter of Grace, even hired a “missing-girl editor” to keep up with the topic. Grace was even reported as having signed an exclusive contract with the Hearst family of newspapers to only speak to them.

  A laudatory tribute to Grace appeared in the New-York Tribune in the form of a poem, “Lines to Mrs. Humiston,” written by Alice Duer Miller. “Lines to Mrs. Humiston” was certainly complimentary, but it had a wickedly sarcastic tone of warning to it:

  Oh, Mrs. Humiston, oh, Mrs. Grace

  Humiston, can it be you have not heard

  The last, the master-word?

  You haven’t without doubt,

  Or else you’d not be out

  Milling about

  Doing man’s work, when home is woman’s place.

  A woman’s duty is to praise and please,

  To make men feel proud, competent and strong.

  Never to hint by word or deed or glance

  That not all men have qualities like these:

  That’s very, very wrong.

  Besides, it kills romance.

  Oh, strange it seems to me,

  You do not see

  That deeds like yours imply a criticism,

  And criticism vexes,

  And makes antagonism

  Between the sexes.

  I know, of course, what you will say,

  The thoughtless, weak excuse that you will make–

  You wished to help young girls. A great mistake!

  For in the end,

  My friend,

  You’ll find the only way.

  The gentle, charming, yielding best of ways

  Is to stay home and praise

  All men,

  And all they do,

  However strange;

  And to condemn

  Women, and all things new–

  Ay, any change.

  * * *

  New York faced a hot summer: many days reached ninety-six degrees, and by midsummer 142 people had already died from the heat. A man living in the Pennsylvania countryside claimed he had found the body of Satan himself, petrified near a riverbank. Cocchi was in jail, and Ruth was being mourned, but the trail of evidence connecting Cocchi to her murder was similarly hazy. Authorities had Cocchi’s confession but very little else. The La Rue story was being pressed by Inspector Faurot and his band of diggers. Meanwhile, William J. Flynn, chief of the Secret Service, had identified a new suspect in the case named Jose A. Del Campo. This man had been inquiring about La Rue’s condition and had recently given her a large sum of money. When questioned about La Rue, Del Campo would only say that “she comes from one of the best families in Argentina.” With the aid of the police, Flynn was investigating a larger Sout
h American white slavery ring that stretched all the way to Buenos Aires. The police were now convinced that “Cocchi and his associates systematically plotted the ruin of young school girls … planning to ship them to Latin-American countries after they had been disgraced.”

  In the grand jury hearings, the heat was making the long days feel even longer. When Assistant District Attorney Talley began his questioning of witnesses at the end of July, it was with the same old questions: Where were you on February 14? What did you see or hear? In late July, the person answering those questions had his legs dangled beneath him under the chair. Arturo, Alfredo Cocchi’s young son, called Athos by his father, told Talley that he was in his father’s shop after three o’clock on the afternoon of February 13 and that he heard his father and one or two other men talking in the cellar. This was the day of Ruth’s death and was several hours before her disappearance was reported by her family.

  Athos was sure of the date because it was the day after Lincoln’s birthday. He knew the time because it occurred when he came home from school, when he would usually go down to the shop to play. The current police theory was that Ruth was killed at two in the afternoon. Her watch had stopped at two thirty.

  “Papa was not in the shop when I got there,” Athos said. “But through the hole in the floor where the heat comes up, I heard him and other men talking in the cellar. I started to go down stairs, but Papa met me and made me go back. The back room of the shop was locked.”

  Talley let the boy off the stand. He had heard enough. He thought of him playing in that basement, alone and unaware.

  As the grand jury hearings proceeded, Grace was in court for some other matter. She had just filed an injunction against the Universal Film Manufacturing Company for their newsreel “Woman Lawyer Solves Ruth Cruger Mystery,” which included views of Grace on the day Ruth’s body was found. The newsreel was part of the Universal Animated Weekly series that ran before most feature films. When Grace saw it, she was furious. The particular portion of the film that Grace objected to was a still photograph, used alongside ordered story cards, that told the news of Ruth’s body being found.