The Titanic Murders

by Max Allan Collins

  Archie Butt and Frank Millet, with several other passengers, aided in the loading of women and children onto lifeboats; when all of the lifeboats had been dispatched, the gentlemen returned to their card game in the Smoking Room until the slant of the table no longer allowed. Stories of Major Butt on deck fighting off swarthy steerage “rabble” with a walking stick or even a firearm appear to be one of the many yellow-journalistic inventions that pervaded early coverage of the disaster.

  Archie Butt was last seen standing solemnly to one side on the boat deck, stoically awaiting his fate like the good soldier he was. He was apparently in the company of his friend Francis Millet; both men died in the sinking, Millet’s body recovered by the crew of the MacKay Bennett, whose grim task it was to salvage as many Titanic corpses as possible from the icy Atlantic.

  Captain Smith’s fate remains clouded, as do conflicting reports of his demeanor on deck. The press of the day made him out a hero, but considering the source, the reports that he fell into a dazed, near-catatonic state are more credible; still, witnesses recalled seeing him with a megaphone, directing lifeboats to return to pick up more passengers (an order ignored). One story has him committing suicide with a pistol, but more credible is the eyewitness account of a steward who saw his captain walk onto the bridge, shortly before the forward superstructure went under, presumably to be washed away—a suicide of sorts, at that.

  Another crew member reported seeing Captain Smith in the freezing water, holding a baby in his arms, moments before his ship made her final slide into the sea. Legend has it that the captain swam to a lifeboat, handed the child over, and swam off to go down after, if not with, his ship. The last reliable reports of Smith have him, in the water, cheering the attempts of crew members to struggle onto the top of an overturned lifeboat, calling, “Good lads! Good lads!” An oar offered to Smith was out of the captain’s reach, as a swell carried him away.

  Some of the most famous stories of that night—the ones sounding most like legend—are true.

  Isidor Straus, offered a seat on lifeboat number eight in consideration of his age, refused to go when other, younger men were staying; and Ida Straus refused to leave her husband’s side.

  “I will not be separated from my husband,” she said. “As we have lived, so will we die together.”

  And they did; in one final indignity, however, the ocean took Mrs. Straus’s body, while her husband’s was recovered, to be buried in Beth-El Cemetery, Brooklyn. Forty thousand attended the memorial service for the couple, with a eulogy read by Andrew Carnegie.

  Benjamin Guggenheim, at first protesting the discomfort of a life belt, later abandoned it for his finest evening wear. With his valet, he awaited death in style, announcing, “We’ve dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.” Oddly, his final thoughts—or at least his final thoughts of how he might like to be remembered—had to do with his long-suffering wife, writing the following note: If anything should happen to me, tell my wife I’ve done my best in doing my duty.

  This may have been small solace to Mrs. Guggenheim, after Madame Aubert—rescued with the others in lifeboats by the ship Carpathia—came ashore announced as “Mrs. Benjamin Guggenheim.” As a further indignity, Guggenheim’s business affairs were in disorder, his steampump company doing poorly at the time of his death, leaving his children to make do with trust funds of only half a million or so, each.

  Thomas Andrews, one of the first to understand that his ship was doomed, circulated through the Titanic dispensing various stories to various passengers, depending on how well he felt they might bear up under the truth. He worked manfully to see to it that as many women and children as possible were gotten into the lifeboats; but despair, finally, overtook him.

  Andrews was last seen in the Smoking Room, staring at a serene nautical painting, his life belt nearby, flung carelessly across a green-topped table. His arms were folded, his shoulders slumped. When a steward, moving quickly through the room, asked him, “Aren’t you even going to have a try for it, Mr. Andrews?”, the shipbuilder did not even acknowledge the question.

  William T. Stead was also seen in the Smoking Room, seemingly absorbed in the book he was reading, unconcerned about the brouhaha (he had taken a break from his book and was one of the few on deck at the time of the collision with the iceberg). He continued this until near the end, when he was spotted standing calmly at the rail. He had never mentioned to his fellow passengers that he had premonitions of drowning, and that he had—like Morgan Robertson, the author of Futility—written a story about an ocean liner striking an iceberg, with lives lost because too few lifeboats had been aboard.

  “This is exactly what might take place,” he had predicted in 1886, “and what will take place, if liners are sent to sea short of boats.”

  His body was not recovered.

  Third-Class passenger Alfred Davies lost his life in the disaster; so did his uncle and two brothers. Their father described them, at the memorial service, as “fine big lads” and “the best of sons.”

  In lifeboat number six, Maggie Brown, by standing up to an obnoxious crew member who’d taken charge, found her place in history as the “Unsinkable Mrs. Brown.” Never reconciling with her husband, over whose money she and her children battled for years, Maggie reveled in her celebrity until her death by a stroke in 1932. A Broadway musical loosely based on her life spawned a 1964 MGM motion picture starring Debbie Reynolds, who looked not much like Maggie (who somehow, after her death, became “Molly”); but then neither had Maggie wielded a handgun on a White Star lifeboat.

  First-Class passengers Emil Brandeis and John Baumann were lost in the sinking; the body of the former was recovered, the latter’s was not.

  J. Bruce Ismay worked bravely and hard, seeing that women and children were shuttled onto lifeboats; but he carved himself a place in history as a coward by stepping into one of the last lifeboats, collapsible C, and choosing not to go down with his ship—not even watching the great ship slip under, turning his back to the sight, much as the world would turn its back to him. By June 1913, he had “retired” from White Star, and was vilified throughout the remainder of a life that has been described as reclusive; his wife said the Titanic “ruined” him. Ismay’s charitable acts—and there were a number of these—included establishing a fund to benefit the widows of lost seamen. He died in 1937.

  Charles Lightoller performed professionally, even heroically, going down with the ship, but swimming to capsized collapsible B, and scrambling on top. He was a company man at the two official inquiries, protecting both the late Smith and the very much alive Ismay; but nonetheless fell prey to the White Star Line’s unofficial policy of sabotaging the careers of surviving Titanic officers. He did become a commander in the Royal Navy during World War I, and provided heroic volunteer duty at Dunkirk in World War II. He died in 1952, not living to see himself portrayed as the hero of the film of Walter Lord’s epic version of the Titanic’s story, A Night to Remember.

  Lightoller was the one who allowed Michel Navatril, a.k.a. Louis Hoffman, to place his sons Lolo and Momon on collapsible D, the final lifeboat launched. Michel Jr. (Lolo was the boy’s nickname) recalled his father’s final words to him: “My child, when your mother comes for you, as she surely will, tell her that I loved her dearly and still do. Tell her I expected her to follow us, so that we might all live happily together in the peace and freedom of the New World.”

  Navatril’s body was recovered; he had a revolver in his pocket.

  The two boys—briefly celebrities as the unidentified “Titanic orphans”—were returned to their mother in France. Edmond Navatril (Momon had been his nickname as a child) fought with the French army in World War II, escaping from a prisoner-of-war camp; however, due to health problems suffered during his captivity, he died at age forty-three. Michel Jr., who became a professor of psychology, lives in France.

  Bertha Lehmann, the Swiss girl who was the only person Navatril ever trusted to take charge
of his sons out of his own sight, boarded the same lifeboat as the Navatril boys. She lived in Minnesota and Iowa and raised a number of children; she died in December 1967.

  John Jacob Astor IV guided his wife Madeline into lifeboat number four, but Lightoller refused Astor’s request to accompany and protect his wife, who was after all in a “delicate condition.” Lightoller firmly refused and Astor accepted this judgment, but did ask the number of the boat, whether to locate his wife later, or to register a complaint against Lightoller, will never be known.

  Astor then assumed a casual, confident manner, lighting up a cigarette, tossing his gloves to his wife and assuring her that the sea was calm; saying, “You’ll be all right. You’re in good hands,” adding that he would see her in the morning. He stepped away and receded onto the boat deck.

  When older boys were being turned away by Lightoller from lifeboats as “men,” Astor impulsively grabbed a girl’s large hat off a nearby head and shoved it onto a boy’s, saying, “Well now he’s a girl,” gaining ten-year-old William Carter a seat and his life. One of his last acts, apparently, was to go to the kennels and let out all of the dogs there, including the Astors’ Airedale Kitty, whom Madeline Astor claimed to have seen, from her lifeboat, running about the boat deck as the ship was sinking.

  Astor was seen at the railing with Archie Butt and others, but did not drown; his crushed, soot-covered remains, recovered, indicated he’d apparently been killed by the falling forward funnel. In the pockets of his blue serge suit were $2,400 in American money and smaller amounts in French and English currency.

  Madeline Astor was granted the income of a five-million-dollar trust and various mansions, as long as she did not remarry; but she married again, anyway, having two more sons by elderly stockholder William Dick, and married yet again—after a divorce—in 1933, to an Italian prizefighter, divorcing him five years later, also. Presumably her son John Jacob V, who had his own five-million-dollar trust fund, saw to it his mother didn’t starve. She died in 1940, in Palm Beach, Florida—a suicide, according to some sources—rarely speaking of the tragedy, and younger than her husband had been when he died.

  Henry B. Harris, ushering his wife René to where Lightoller was restricting seating on the collapsible D, was told his wife could come aboard, but that he could not. He said softly, “I know—I’ll stay,” bade her farewell, and stepped back into the crowd.

  René sued White Star for a million dollars, receiving only $50,000 (the standard payoff for a First-Class death aboard the Titanic—steerage was a thousand dollars). Plucky as always, she bucked the standard sentiment that a woman could not be a theatrical producer, and had a long and prosperous run doing just that; for years she had hit plays running in her own theaters, living a life strewn with yachts, Central Park penthouses, various homes and various husbands (though always using only “Harris” as her surname). The stock-market crash of ’29 sank her finances, but not her spirits; when she died, penniless, in a one-room apartment in a welfare hotel, at age ninety-three in 1969, she was still (in the words of Walter Lord) “radiantly blissful.”

  Wallace Hartley and his orchestra—the full eight members playing together for the first time on the deck of the sinking ship—performed until the ship went down. Some say the impromptu concert ended around half an hour before the final plunge; even if this is so, their cheery on-deck ragtime is an enduring legend, and fact, of the tragedy. Despite adamant opinions to the contrary, their last number probably was “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  Actress Dorothy Gibson—one of the twenty-eight persons in boat number seven, capacity sixty-five—sailed the Titanic to fifteen minutes of fame. One month after the sinking, a moving picture starring and written by Miss Gibson—Saved from the Titanic, in which the silent-film star’s costume was the very dress she’d worn that memorable night—appeared in theaters to huge crowds. It was her last success. She married film distributor Jules Brulatour, divorcing two years later (with a hefty $10,000 a year in alimony), dying in obscurity in Paris in 1946.

  Official records list John Bertram Crafton and Hugh Rood as having gone down with the ship; neither body was recovered by the MacKay Bennett.

  One of the enduring mysteries of the night the Titanic sank is whether Alice Cleaver behaved as a heroine, or a villain. Hudson Allison had left the family’s C-deck suite to find out what exactly was wrong; soon his wife Bess was in mild hysterics, and Alice Cleaver seized up baby Trevor into her arms, wrapped the nightgowned child in a small fur blanket, and assured the boy’s mother that she would not let the child out of her arms much less her sight.

  Alice then rushed out, apparently passing Hudson in the hallway; but the stunned parent seemed not to recognize either Alice or his boy. The nanny hurried onto deck, where, with the help of steward William Stephen Faulkner, she made her way to lifeboat eleven. As she climbed into the boat, Faulkner held the child for her; rather than accept the child from the young man, Alice pulled him into the boat after her. Because he was holding a baby in his arms, this was allowed.

  The Allisons—Hudson and Hugh and golden-haired Lorraine—were lost in the sinking; Lorraine was, in fact, the only First-Class child to die. Even as newspapers were praising the blunt-nosed nanny for her courage and quick thinking, the families of Hudson and Bess Allison accused her of an act tantamount to murder.

  Mrs. Allison’s mother asserted that the Allisons had obviously stayed aboard the ship, searching for their baby, and missed their chance at a lifeboat. Space was the birthright of their gender for Bess and Lorraine, and Hudson Allison—with the baby in his arms—could just as easily stepped into that lifeboat as the young steward.

  After all, Hudson Allison’s only crime was hastily accepting a last-minute replacement for the position of nanny, without sufficient time to check references. (His body was recovered but not his wife’s, or his daughter’s.)

  Lending credibility to the theory that Alice Cleaver was more coward than heroine were the lies she told reporters, giving her name as Jane Andrews. Obviously, the nanny did not wish to see the glowing reaction of the press tainted by knowledge that the woman who saved the Allison baby off a sinking ship was a mother who’d thrown her own baby off a train.

  Alice Cleaver lived out her life in North America, fading into obscurity, dying in 1984. What became of her relationship with William Stephen Faulkner—the only person she would let near baby Trevor, on the rescue ship Carpathia—is unknown.

  Baby Trevor was raised by his aunt and uncle, George and Lillian Allison, and grew to manhood, only to die in his teens of ptomaine poisoning. His parents’ fortune became the object of a struggle between his aunt and uncle and a woman who claimed to be (but never was able to prove she was) his now grown-up sister, Lorraine.

  May Futrelle, rescued in lifeboat nine, never remarried. She spent the rest of her life in Scituate, mostly in the home she’d shared with her husband. While their children’s education was well provided for, May felt a responsibility to pay back $17,000 in cash advances that had gone down on the ship, along with Jack’s half a dozen new “Thinking Machine” stories.

  She oversaw the publication of her husband’s final posthumous works, as well as aggressively sought reprinting of his earlier work. The straightforward, journalistic style of Futrelle’s “Thinking Machine” stories allowed his wife to keep many of them in print, for many years; and of course “The Problem of Cell 13” became an acknowledged classic of the mystery genre.

  Active with the Authors’ League of America and first chairwoman of the American League of Pen Women, May published a number of her own novels, and was a pioneer in conducting writers’ workshop-style clinics for beginning writers, leading to a CBS radio show in the thirties, Do You Want to Be a Writer?

  Well into the 1960s, she was pushing the republication of her husband’s fiction—witness the bestselling 1959 Scholastic Book Club collection of “Thinking Machine” stories—and shortly before her death in 1967, May signed exclusive rights for radio adaptat
ions of twenty-eight Futrelle “Thinking Machine” stories, many of which were presented on CBS Radio Mystery Theater. She is buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Scituate.

  Throughout her life, as her daughter Virginia reported, May would carry out the ritual of tossing a bouquet of fresh flowers into the sea on the anniversary of the tragedy. The memories of that last night remained vivid and with her always.

  Futrelle had come rushing into their stateroom, saying, “Get dressed at once—throw anything on. The boat is going down.”

  She recalled the screams of women and shrill orders of officers on deck, “drowned out intermittently by the tremendous vibration of the Titanic’s bass foghorn.”

  Futrelle remained calm, telling May, “Hurry up, dear, you’re keeping the others waiting,” kissing her, then lifting her like a bride over the threshold and placing her into the lifeboat, one of the last to leave.

  “There’s room,” May said frantically, looking about the boat as it began to lower. “Look! Come with me! There’s room!”

  “I’ll be along later,” he said.

  Her last memory of him, she carried with her—to that cliff, from which she tossed her flowers, and to her grave.

  Their lifeboat had not been in the water for more than a few minutes when the Titanic made its final plunge. Over the years she came to question whether or not it was only her imagination…

  … but she always swore that she’d seen Jack, standing, clinging to the rail with one hand.

  And waving good-bye to her with the other.

  A TIP OF THE CAPTAIN’S HAT

  The basic idea for this novel, as my prologue indicates, extends back to my childhood enthusiasm for Jacques Futrelle’s “Thinking Machine” tales, and my fascination with the notion that he—and a number of his stories—went down with the Titanic.