by Brad Ricca
Private detective John Goudart, who worked at another firm on the third floor, was in the hallway when he heard the whistle. He saw the hat and coat outside the door and ran in. On the street, a traffic policeman named McCarthy looked up and saw Kron pulling on the whistle. Taking a moment to count the floors and windows, McCarthy took off for the front entrance.
When McCarthy entered the room, the boy was advancing on the detectives. The knife was on the floor, and he had pulled an eight-inch cast iron stove lifter out of his hip pocket. He raised it to pound down on Kron’s head. The boy turned around, and policeman McCarthy floored him with his right fist.
The assassin was charged with felonious assault. His name was George Toomey, seventeen, of Tompkinsville on Staten Island. He was sent to Bellevue for observation. Grace returned a half hour later to a very messy office. When she saw Toomey down at the police station, she recognized him. He had visited her office a few days before.
“He said I was talking about him behind his back,” Grace said.
Grace admitted that since her police badge had been taken from her, she had received many threatening letters, and she intimated that she wouldn’t feel safe until she got it back again.
The police made a statement saying that they had received an anonymous telephone message that a murderer was going to call on Mrs. Humiston at six P.M. The police sent a detective to her office to check it out. The detective had arrived at six, waited until seven, and then left. There was no one there. Grace declared that she knew nothing of the message or of this detective.
In the press, Grace was now being portrayed as faded in both appearance and power. “She isn’t even pretty,” one paper reported. “Almost middle-aged—wears her hair parted in the middle, and she doesn’t frivol.” Her office was still “besieged by countless parents” even though “a fashion display had the power to lure her quite as easily” as a real crime. This type of pigeonholed thinking toward middle-aged women was widespread. Newspapers ran advertisements for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, “especially adapted to help women” through the critical time “between the years of 45 and 55 … often beset with annoying symptoms such as nervousness, irritability, melancholia, heat flashes which produce headache and dizziness, and a sense of suffocation.” That was how some people saw her.
A year after Ruth’s disappearance and murder, the motorcycle squad had been completely revamped and the Fourth Branch had been reorganized. William Eynon, Willard A. Helms, Thomas Kerrigan, and John Ochsenhirt, all motorcycle men attached to traffic squad C, were found by the courts to be in violation of rule 39, which covered the issuance and returns of tickets.
On February 22, Detective Lagarenne was finally convicted, after an eight-day trial, of dereliction of duty in the Cruger case. The jury concluded that Lagarenne had failed to adequately search the cellar and had not given Cocchi the focus he deserved. It didn’t help his case that Lagarenne not only called Cocchi “Al” but also told Henry Cruger that Cocchi was a respectable man in the neighborhood. The conclusion was that Cocchi was a man who serviced police bikes and was a favorite with cops. The jury deliberated for four hours before handing their decision to Justice Goff.
During the trial, attorney Frank Aranow, representing Lagarenne, made the point that “the finding of Ruth Cruger’s body in the cellar of Cocchi’s bicycle repair shop was entirely due to Lagarenne and his brother officer, Frank McGee, and no one else. Mrs. Grace Humiston, who took all the credit for the finding of the girl’s body, was not there at the time it was discovered, nor had anything to do with the unearthing of it.”
Frank McGee’s trial was next. Following special prosecutor James Osborne’s lead, Lagarenne even testified against his longtime partner by identifying his signature on some reports. The court found gross negligence not in the way the case was investigated by McGee but in the way Ruth’s disappearance was initially reported. After the first call from Henry came in, the lieutenant on the desk, William Brown, failed to accurately record the call, leaving a fourteen-hour gap between Henry’s desperate call and the assigning of the case to Lagarenne and McGee. Unlike his former partner, Frank McGee was acquitted, but not without incident. During summation, McGee’s attorney, Aranow, had strong words for Prosecutor Osborne.
“Would that I had the power in my hand to indict officials for neglect of duty,” said Aranow, “I would have indicted Mr. Osborne for neglect of duty because he said things to this man (he pointed to McGee) in front of the Grand Jury which he knows is a lie. I don’t make any mistake in that.” At the end of the long table in front of the jury, Osborne rose to his feet.
“Do you mean to say that I lied?” Osborne shouted. He rushed across the room and tried to land a right hook at Aranow, but it weakly sailed past him through thin air. Osborne slowly fell on his own elbow. As the judge banged his gavel and officials jumped in to separate the two, one of the bailiffs snickered, calling Osborne’s punch “a Mary Ann upper cut.” When order was restored, Osborne approached the bench, his head bowed in shame.
“Your Honor, I humbly apologize to you. It is the first time in a practice of thirty-five years that I have allowed my temper to get the best of me in court.”
The last person to be tried was the biggest fish, Captain Cooper, the former head of the Fourth Branch detectives. On August 3, 1917, Cooper had been indicted by the grand jury. Judge McIntyre fixed bail at one thousand dollars. When the trial phase began, only one juror was selected when Justice Goff declared, at the request of Osborne, that he was sure there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Cooper. The judge dismissed the indictment against him.
On April 18, 1918, John Lagarenne, the only one to be convicted, went before Justice Goff for sentencing. Lagarenne was offered the choice between a $250 fine and 250 days in jail. John Lagarenne paid the money and was released. When the final bill for the investigation came out of the comptroller’s office, the district attorney had spent $7,302.01 for “Special Expenses in Connection with the Murder of Ruth Cruger.”
That same month, in a different courtroom in Baltimore, John Snowden was found guilty of murdering Lottie May Brandon. The jury deliberated for thirty-five minutes. Snowden, who had never once confessed, nearly collapsed in court at the verdict. The judge waited a week to sentence him in hopes that the volatile atmosphere of marchers and crowds would settle down. Neither the Times nor the Post ran the story on the first page in an attempt to defuse a violent reaction. On February 13, 1918, Snowden was sentenced by Judge Duncan to hang. The governor would fix the date.
By October, the case finally reached the court of appeals. It is there that the world finally heard Val Brandon’s full story. On that fateful day, Val took the ferry from the experimental navy station, walked through the front door of his home, and whistled. There was no response, so he walked through and went into the bedroom. He saw his wife on the bed. Already seven months pregnant, she was lying on her side. He called her name, but there was no answer. He began to worry if she was sick or had fainted, so he walked up to her and touched her shoulder. She still didn’t say anything. All of the shades were drawn. He left the room, then the house, and went to the neighbor’s house.
From there, Val went down to the bakery, where they tried to telephone for a doctor, without luck. Val then ran into a Mr. O’Neill, who went to go get a doctor. O’Neill told Val to go back to his house and wait. By the time Val arrived at his home, the doctor had just arrived.
“Did you see your wife after that?” the prosecutor asked.
“Not until late that evening. I got in there, and the doctor went in to the middle room and shut the door and left me in the front room with some of the neighbors; I didn’t know really what happened until late that night when several detectives came around and took me with them and I identified the body of my wife.”
“You didn’t lift her up to see whether she was fainting or she was dead?”
“No, sir.”
“That is all you did, laid your hand on her
shoulder?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That was as far as you went?”
After receiving no answer, the prosecutor resumed his questioning. “On Tuesday night after you retired, it has been testified you had intercourse with your wife. What did you do after that intercourse? What was done, what did your wife do?”
“She got up right away and went out in the other room,” Val said, his eyes downward.
“What did she do?”
“Well, she didn’t tell me what she was doing, but I know what she was doing.”
On February 22, Governor Harrington said that he would meet with any last-minute petitioners at eleven o’clock in his office. All other appeals had failed; only a single man’s mercy remained. Somewhere between two hundred and four hundred people showed up, many with signs and song. All of the jurors who convicted Snowden, save one, were present, having signed a petition for his release. Sixty leading white businessmen signed the same document and stood out in front with the crowd. A band played gospel music outside.
Ella Rush Murray was there too, as well as the mother of the two girls who were the key witnesses, Edith Creditt and Mary Perkins, who had since moved from the area altogether, having become scared for their safety. Murray had changed her mind about Snowden and now wanted him freed. Grace was there as well, though not as a reporter or as an ad hoc detective. She wanted Snowden—the man she had helped convict—to be freed.
Snowden’s sentence weighed heavily on Grace because she knew she had helped put him there mostly through circumstantial evidence. So she had returned to Baltimore to do the thing she did best—set the dead free. She had been working on the case since she last left Washington. But Grace had something more than argument; she had new evidence about the Brandon marriage. Grace had knowledge of a “mysterious friend” and an alleged confession by Val Brandon that was overheard as he was dreaming.
Governor Harrington listened to Grace. But he still believed that the case was simple at heart. “I was inclined to think it was robbery,” he said, “and for that purpose the woman’s stockings were taken off, believing that she kept her money in her stocking and that coming into contact with the white woman’s flesh aroused the beast within him and he committed the greater crimes, murder and rape. He has had a fair trial,” the governor said. “It is not up to me to try this case. I will not interfere.”
On February 27, the night before the scheduled execution, two companies of infantry with fixed bayonets, ordered up by the governor, appeared at the jail to patrol any unruly crowds. The city was under martial law. Snowden had only been to school for six months of his life. Earlier that day, the sheriff passed out white tickets of admission to anyone who wanted to witness the hanging of John Snowden at daylight. Inside his cell, Snowden was still proclaiming his innocence, meekly and quietly.
Grace was still trying a full range of legal tactics, but the governor was unswayed.
“I am firmly convinced of Snowden’s guilt,” he said, “and you can appeal to me until Doomsday for ‘clemency’ and you will not get it. I wish that my lips were unsealed and I could tell you all I know, and they will be unsealed if necessary.”
Grace then allegedly tried to induce Ida Burch—one of the witnesses who claimed to have seen Snowden leave the Brandon home—to change her testimony. The district attorney told Grace that she would be arrested if she continued to badger his witness. Murray rushed to Grace’s defense and said that the DA’s bullying was just “one of many endeavors made by certain interests to discredit a woman who was appointed assistant to Attorney General Charles Bonaparte by President Roosevelt.” That old title still carried weight in Washington. Murray also revealed that she was “strongly warned by three highly prominent men, all connected with the case, not to bring Humiston back to Annapolis.” Time was running out, but Grace had, as always, one more card to play.
Inside the jail, as John Snowden looked straight at the camera in front of him, he could hear hammering somewhere in the background. The sound of iron and wood was strangely comforting. Snowden was wearing his brand-new blue suit, black tie, and black shoes. The suit fit nicely across his broad shoulders. Another man walked in, and Snowden could feel the muscles in his legs fly away into air.
“Marshal Carter,” Snowden said to the man. “I want to say before I go, that I forgive you for the way you treated me in that sweatbox in Baltimore.” A man then took his photograph. Snowden did not smile. The words attributed to him appeared in a newspaper.
Outside, a band played. John Snowden could hear lots of footsteps as he walked out to cheers and song. He walked up the stairs.
Many people in the crowd said that it was a good thing that John Snowden was a client of Mrs. Grace Humiston. She had met with him just last night, and they all knew she was working on some last-minute plan.
When the hood was placed over John Snowden’s head and he dropped through the trapdoor to his death, his body swinging in the chilly Annapolis air, over one hundred people stood outside the jail singing “God Will Take Care of You.” His body, in the best suit it had ever worn, was taken down and given to his sister. A three-hour funeral followed.
A few hours before he was led to the gallows for the murder of Lottie May Brandon, Snowden had said a few words:
In a few hours from now, I shall step out of time into eternity to pay the penalty of a crime I am not guilty of. God knows that I am telling the truth, and after I have been hanged, I am asking the authorities to please continue to search for the murderer. Though I have suffered, if it would have proved to the world that I was innocent, I would have willingly gone through that awful degree again.… I could not leave this world with a lie in my mouth.
A few days after the execution, the sheriff’s office received a printed letter from Washington, D.C. It read:
I am sorry you killed Snowden today. He is not the guilty man. I am the man. I could not stand to see another man live with my heart so I put Lottie May out of my way. I hope his sins fall on my head. He is not the man. God will bring things right some day.
The letter was unsigned.
21
The Invisible Places
Bologna was a medieval town once dominated by tall stone towers, piled up into the cloudy sky. But over the years, most of these towers had fallen, having been destroyed by invaders, or having been built too high and hopeful to begin with. Of the few left, the most famous were the two—the leaning Garisenda and the taller Asinelli—that could be seen from anywhere in the city. The Asinelli had been used by medieval philosophers to study the rotation of the earth. During the Second World War, it was a post for rescue efforts. The Garisenda ominously leaned toward the ground. Dante referred to the tower in the “Inferno”: “like the Garisenda looks / from beneath the leaning side, when a cloud drifts / over it, so that it seems to fall.”
The towers could be seen from the square of the beautifully ornate Barochi palace, where Cocchi’s trial was to be held. The outdoor piazza was always filled with a moving, murmuring crowd, who were now discussing every detail of the family history of Cocchi and commenting on the identities of the ten jurors. Venturini, Cocchi’s lawyer, argued that his client had never lost his Italian citizenship. This had been ratified, some thought, by the fact that Cocchi was a reservist in the Italian army. Even though Italy did have an extradition treaty with the United States, she did not give up her citizens lightly. Especially in times of war. So Cocchi was stuck in his dungeon cell, with his father and brother forced to provide food from outside for him, as was the custom. As all parties prepared for his trial, the mayor of Bologna sent a formal letter to the New York City government to express his deep regret and shame over Cocchi’s horrific acts.
On June 23, 1919, Alfredo Cocchi, son of Giocondo, born at Malalbergo on June 24, 1881, appeared before the Italian court of assizes at Bologna, accused of attempted rape, murder, and giving misleading information while entering the kingdom under a series of false names.
Inside,
the court of assizes was dark and wooden, very much like a church. The high ceilings had dark panels with small lights. Yellow murals on the walls served as background to white marble statues of men in robes. The floor was stone, and a high chandelier watched over the room like an ironwork cloud.
Now, two years after Cocchi’s confession, Judge Zucconi was gone. Chief Justice Signor Bagnoli now sat in a wide, wooden chair on one end of the room. Chairs lined the sides. On a riser stood a few more rows of stiff-backed chairs and the dreaded cage, where the accused would stand. A balcony set out on the opposite wall. The center of the long room was ready to be filled—as it was every day—with somehow different versions of the same story.
After the room filled and it was time for Cocchi to testify, they let him step into the middle of the court. He looked nervous. Despite all the buzzing in the square, it was not expected to be a long trial. The Americans needed a trial, and the city needed to just put Cocchi away in that cell for good. These proceedings were a foregone conclusion. Cocchi had already confessed to the crimes so no one was expecting any surprises. It would just be a matter of how much his lawyer could pare down his sentence.
Free of cells or shackles, Cocchi started walking down one end of the space in front of the bench. Some wondered if he might make a swift run for the doors. Instead, Cocchi began to talk, gesturing with his hands, pointing through people and at things that weren’t there, to show where things in his bicycle shop were placed thousands of miles away and several years before. Cocchi noisily moved desks and pointed to clerks to act as stand-ins for pieces of furniture and people. He started to tell the true story of that day in his shop.