Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

by Brad Ricca

  After his conviction and fine, Lagarenne immediately applied for a pardon from Governor Smith. A letter on his behalf read that Lagarenne “has an exceptionally fine record for bravery and valor.” Lagarenne was reinstated at the level of sergeant. In 1920, he was given a temporary assignment as detective “to duty in office of the District Attorney.” He was made a lieutenant in 1921 and a captain in 1929. In 1938, he made full inspector, with acting deputy chief inspector to follow in 1939. In 1942, he became the highest-ranking police official in the Brooklyn West Bureau. He was a member of the Police Honor Legion and the Saint George Society. He died in 1949. His son, Lawrence, became a prominent attorney.

  JOHN SNOWDEN

  After John Snowden was hanged in 1919 for the death of Lottie Mae Brandon, his story continued to haunt the neighborhood he had lived in. For years, people told of the skies darkening on the day an innocent man was hanged. Snowden’s niece Hazel knew about him because of the photograph her father kept alongside a newspaper report of his death. “I would come into my father’s room every day and read that story and look at his picture,” Hazel Snowden said. “He didn’t have to tell me a word. It just burned into me.”

  Hazel, along with other like-minded Baltimore residents, began a grassroots effort to clear Snowden’s name. A private investigator named Tim Turner, his interest piqued by newspaper reports, reexamined the case and concluded that the evidence did not add up to Snowden as the killer. No bloodstains were found anywhere else in the house but on the bed and no murder weapon was ever retrieved. In 2000, after a ten-year crusade, petitioners swayed Maryland Governor Parris Glendening that Snowden’s execution had been a “possible miscarriage of justice.” After much deliberation, the governor concluded that “while it is impossible at this late date to establish his guilt or innocence, there is substantial doubt that justice was served by his hanging.” Governor Glendening granted Snowden clemency. “It’s a long time, but it’s so good to see justice has been done,” said Hazel Snowden. Carlotte Wotring, the seventy-five-year-old niece of Lottie May Brandon, was stunned. “They didn’t have DNA back then,” she said, “but I’ll bet you anything he had lots of scratches on him. My aunt fought for her life.” Snowden’s grave is now marked by a golden plaque commemorating his clemency.

  ANTOINETTE TOLLA

  Antoinette Tolla was the last woman New Jersey ever sentenced to die by hanging. Immediately after her commutation, she was removed to the State Prison at Trenton, where she served out her sentence. During that time, she learned English so well that she conversed fluently on the day of her release, when Grace appeared in a car to accompany her home. Antoinette moved to Crystal Street in Brooklyn with her family. She was naturalized in 1927 as a U.S. citizen.

  At the time of the commutation, the Cincinnati Post offered Grace a bonus of two thousand dollars for her services to Antoinette. Grace instructed the Post to place the money in trust for Antoinette. When she was released, a representative of the paper gave her the money. Near the end of her own career, Grace thought of her fondly.

  As I look back over thirty years to the naïve world in which Antoinette Tolla’s tragedy was enacted, I find the circumstances almost incredible. Here was a poor immigrant woman who had been treated with as little consideration, almost, as a slave before some medieval tribunal. Evidence in her case had been so badly bungled that a gun, and even the autopsy surgeon’s report, had failed to be properly included in the record. The woman’s testimony in court had been translated poorly beyond recognition.

  Antoinette Tolla lives today. After thirty years, in unfailing gratitude and friendship, she still comes to see me occasionally and never forgets to bring some small, hand-made gift. She is a grandmother, for her two daughters have long since married. Obscure though she may be, she is a useful and admirable citizen. I never think of her but with a feeling of gratitude, myself, that it was given me to save this life that would otherwise have been so indifferently lost.

  DOCTOR DEVIL

  On January 12, 1906, Dr. Emmet Cooper Dent, “Doctor Devil,” died suddenly of heart failure, two months after deporting the Romanik family.

  SOPHIE IRENE LOEB

  Sophie Irene Loeb worked in many arenas of urban reform during the course of her life. In 1917, she served as the first woman strike mediator, settling a complicated taxicab strike in seven hours. During these same years, she worked on a commission to codify child welfare legislation in New York State. She believed that if any child failed to receive proper food and clothing, “the Government must stand in place of his parents.” In 1924, she helped to found the Child Welfare Committee of America and coined its motto “Not charity, but a chance for every child.” She reported for many years at the Evening World, wrote books, and publicly engaged the Palestine question. When she died of cancer on January 18, 1929, at age fifty-two, she was praised as “one of America’s most distinguished public servants, an indefatigable worker.”

  EDWARD SWANN

  Edward Swann was district attorney of New York City until 1921. He ran for the New York Supreme Court in 1920 but lost, spurned by Tammany bosses who wanted him out. Swann was later accused of fraud by James A. Delehanty of the Court of General Sessions. Delehanty alleged that Swann had mysteriously dismissed several major indictments of Bowery criminals “without any real investigation of the case and without any witnesses.” Swann responded by pointing out that Delehanty was going to be a Republican candidate for DA the following year. Swann died on September 19, 1945. Before he finally left office, Swann summed up his role as district attorney in New York City:

  There is an epidemic of crime. Why? Some say it is due to the war—that the spirit of unrest and consequent disorder always follow wars. Perhaps in part that was the cause for the initiation of a crime wave spreading over the country. It is not the cause for the continuance and increase of crime. The chief cause of the continuance and increase of crime is imitation.

  HUMBERTO PIERINI

  The onetime worker at Sunny Side who helped Grace expose its practice of bringing Italian immigrants across the Atlantic for contract work later patented a mousetrap. The device would lure its prey across a plank only to drop the mouse into a small container of water to drown. The Pierini trap was patented on June 20, 1922.

  JOSEPH GRIGG

  Joseph W. Grigg covered much of the news in Europe for United Press and UPI over a nearly fifty-year career. He covered the Blitz in London, saw the Wehrmacht thunder into Poland, had torpedoes shoot at his boat, was taken into custody by the Germans after Pearl Harbor, and had to bang out a story in Algiers as teargas was coming in the window. He met Hitler and Eisenhower, Stalin and Churchill, De Gaulle and Adenauer. He died on October 29, 2000, at the age of ninety.

  JOHN DOOLING

  John “J.T.” Dooling remained a legal advisor for Tammany Hall even after his career as a district attorney ended. He was especially useful when when it came to election year questions and loopholes. Dooling also managed a very successful private practice with his firm Knox & Dooling. He died in 1949 at the age of seventy-eight. When New York Governor William Sulzer was impeached in 1913 for misues of campaign funds, among other things, Dooling was questioned about monies he had given to Sulzer.

  HERBERT ROEMMELE

  The shy boy who once sketched out a map of Cocchi’s basement for Grace, Herbert F. Roemmele, became a beloved professor of mechanical engineering at Cooper Union, where he taught for forty-two years. When introduced at an alumni function years later, some of his students noted that he had “a photographic memory for faces and names.” He died in 1983 at age seventy-nine, leaving five children and one great-grandchild.

  HENRY STIMSON

  Henry Lewis Stimson enjoyed a monumental career in public service. His bloodline reached back to the president of the Continental Congress. As a child, his great-grandmother told him stories of meeting George Washington. At Yale, he was Phi Beta Kappa and was tapped for the mysterious Skull and Bones. After his stint as a U.S. distri
ct attorney, Stimson ran for governor of New York in 1910. He lost, badly, and was nicknamed the “human icicle” for his campaign trail demeanor. He served as secretary of war under Taft, where he oversaw the Panama Canal construction and visited the Philippines. On the home front, he was against suffrage. “It is not needed to right any substantial grievance,” he said, “and will introduce too many voters who don’t know what they’re doing devoid of business training and experience. It would certainly tend to throw a disproportionate amount of political influence and power into certain localities and classes of citizens of the state as against other localities and other classes.” When the suffragettes marched on Washington, one of them on a horse, Stimson called in the troops.

  Stimson served as a lieutenant colonel in the 305th regiment out of Camp Upton. He spent nine months in France. He became secretary of war for a second time, this time under FDR. During the Second World War, Stimson met with generals and commanders, supervised the internment of the Japanese, and yet still found time for vigorous games of deck tennis and quiet evenings at home with his wife.

  When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt suddenly died, it was Stimson who briefed President Truman on the existence of the Manhattan Project, of which Stimson was the senior advisor. Once the decision was made, it was Stimson who selected the targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stimson retired to Highold, his Scotland estate, where he died on October 20, 1950, at age eighty-three.

  VAL BRANDON

  After his wife’s murder, Val Brandon joined the army and fought in France with the 135th machine gun battalion of the Thirty-seventh division. While stationed at Camp Meade, he was reported to have “admitted the crime in a dream.” He sued the newspaper that reported it for slander. Once he returned home, Val relocated to California, remarried, and became very active in veterans work. He was elected commander in chief of the California and Nevada divisions of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at its national convention in 1927. He died on August 15, 1968, at seventy-two.

  PADDY SOLAN

  Paddy worked as the superintendent of building maintenance at Grand Central Terminal until his retirement. He invented the nonslip ramps in the terminal. He retired to West Englewood, New Jersey, where lived with his wife, Sadie, for twenty-three years. He told friends for years that he had solved the Ruth Cruger case.

  MARIA COCCHI

  By 1944, Maria and her son lived in Brooklyn, at 362 Elton Street. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

  RUTH

  Ruth Cruger skates on cold glass dusted with white snow. There is frost along the edge of her silver skates. She smiles and closes her eyes. She was born on December 8, 1898.

  Across the ice, Ruth spots a boy and looks away. Of course, it is more complicated than that. Perhaps she is hot under her heavy coat that she hates or she is angry with her father. Or none of those things at all. That doesn’t matter.

  Ruth pushes off and cuts across the ice. She feels the cold snow spraying her ankles. People are in coats and mufflers. She catches her skate on an edge and almost pitches forward. She feels her heart in her chest, but stops herself. Everything is fine. She looks at the ice. Like everyone, she wonders what is beneath it. The lake or fishes or just the ground, none of which are that scary, after all.

  She laughs and continues on, with an endlessly long afternoon ahead of her. There are no more minutes to even think about. She smiles and is quiet and her cheeks are red and cold. The tips of her fingers sting, but it makes her feel alive. There cannot be skating, after all, without a long dark lake, and skating without one isn’t really skating at all. She tips her weight to the right and both skates are on the edge of things now, pushing toward the bright, open space.

  GRACE

  Grace Winterton was born on September 17, 1869, in Greenwich Village, New York, to Isabella and Adoniram Judson Winterton. Her father, who was named after the famous Baptist missionary, was an insurance claims adjuster. He was not a lawyer, but he very often appeared in high-level court, testifying and providing judgment on claim cases. Grace told reporters that he would sometimes take her to court with him and that she worshipped at his knee. Grace had two sisters, Jessie and Nelly, and a brother, Adoniram Judson Winterton Jr. Their family had deeper claims to fame and history. Grace’s grand-uncle was Admiral Hull, who fought on the U.S.S. Constitution in the War of 1812. Her grandfather was Henry S. Hull, a brief, onetime partner of the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

  After primary school, Grace attended Hunter College. In her early twenties, she taught at the Collegiate School, an all-boys school on the Upper West Side. She married Dr. Henry Forest Quackenbos on June 5, 1895, when she was twenty-three. At the turn of the century, Grace enrolled in the night class at NYU law school; she and Henry divorced soon after. In 1906, Grace attended her ex-husband’s second wedding as a guest. A gossip magazine later said they split when he was caught engaging in “peephole practices” with his female patients at work.

  Grace’s mother passed away on June 29, 1903, in Manhattan at the age of sixty-six. Almost a year later, Grace’s father died on February 26, 1904, at the age of seventy-one. The cause of death was pneumonia. Soon after, Grace began wearing her signature black wardrobe.

  On June 8, 1911, while in Lima, Peru, Grace married Howard Donald Humiston, a Yale lawyer and partner at Humiston, Olcott & Hincks. He had worked with Grace before at the People’s Law Firm. Rumors said that when she heard he was in Peru, she followed him and proposed to him directly. She was forty-two. In November 1921, the Tatler claimed that Grace and Howard were “living apart” and that he was “in a habitat in Greenwich Village.” He had also “sought companionship elsewhere.” Experts claimed they split because of Howard’s alleged excessive drinking. Howard lived most of the year in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Cod with friends and acquaintances in a white three-story house. He died in bed of capillary bronchitis on July 21, 1943, at the age of sixty-five. His ashes were interred in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. Grace was buried in New York.

  Grace’s brother, Adoniram, died on December 22, 1929, at Flower Hospital on Fifth Avenue. Grace had previously told reporters that he had died years earlier.

  Grace’s sister Jessie outlived her, dying on February 27, 1953. Jessie’s grandson remembered seeing his auntie Grace when she would come to the apartment on Sundays. He couldn’t remember much, other than that she was tall. He was the only person I could find who had actually met her. After our discussion, largely about the grandeur of old New York, he got back in touch with me. He remembered another detail that he was wary of sharing. He remembered overhearing his relatives refer to Grace, behind her back, as “Auntie Disgrace.”

  On January 15, 1906, Grace wrote a letter to Edward C. Stokes, the governor of New Jersey, as she attempted to sway him about the Antoinette Tolla case.

  I hope you are not influenced by any newspaper notoriety which I seem to have received. It is all so intensely distasteful to me that I have been forced to take a room in Newark where I can escape in the day time from Yellow Journal reporters who are only combing for secusation. I beg you to believe that whatever items of news they have gleaned for their papers, they have not received them from me.

  After the Cruger case, the New York Police Department’s apparatus for finding missing people went from unofficial assignments in a branch house to an evolving, centralized system of integrated police work that would come to be known as the Bureau of Missing Persons and, later, the Missing Persons Squad. Presently, there is no twenty-four-hour delay after victims are reported. In fact, victims of crimes are acted on immediately. But if the victim is eighteen or older, according to Joseph Giacalone, a former sergeant with the NYPD, “we just file paperwork.” In 2014, thirteen thousand people were reported missing in New York City. The year before, eight thousand of that number were children. Before Grace, girls who were labeled “wayward” or “lost” were given a moral and categorical distinction that stopped most people from looking for them. G
race, whose given first name was Mary, felt differently. When she spoke about her career late in life, it was with wisdom gained at great cost: “I want to tell you just a little about my girls,” Grace said, “for they are all mine; each and every one of them, of all the thousands I know well, has a particular place in my heart.

  “It is the unfortunate truth,” Grace said, “that too often the attitude of the official police of the United States is the girl was bad to begin with. It is because the search for the missing girl is so often conducted upon the basis of this utterly false possibility that so many cases, in my opinion, are annually dropped from the police department as ‘unsolved’ and the hopes of so many parents crushed to the ground.”

  “Ruth was not a willful girl who left her home voluntarily,” Grace said, “as every police official connected with the search assured me that she was. They had no proof—none of them had a single fact against her—but they all said that she could not possibly have been abducted. They admitted that a little child might be overpowered and made away with in a store like Cocchi’s, situated on a busy street, but a girl eighteen years old—never. They pitied me for my faith in girl nature and, wisely shaking their heads, insisted that she must have gone off of her own will—the old, sad story.

  “But I have proved that she didn’t leave home that way. I have proved that she was a brave, good girl and that she died in an effort to shield her honor. It was not the ‘old, old story’ that the police harp on when a girl disappears and detectives fail to trace her. It was a murder.

  “It is convenient, or course,” Grace continued, “to assemble meager evidence that the girl was seen boarding such and such a train or taking a certain mysterious taxicab in company with a young man, always unknown. This promptly curtails the searching activities. This exceeding proneness to put the entire burden of responsibility upon the shoulders of the missing girl herself is a great evil. Occasional crimes against womanhood by degenerates must always figure as one of the horrible possibilities of community existence. But the wholesale sacrifice of young womanhood upon the altar of ignorance and vicious conspiracy can be checked.”