The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  That’s what everyone in the department called it: Goatsville. It wasn’t on any map, but every officer knew where it was. Goatsville was where you got sent when you shook down a gambling house too hard, or busted a local ward boss in a brothel, or when your service revolver discharged in an unfortunate direction. For Carey, it was for hitching himself to the wrong star; a few years earlier, a corruption scandal meant that some heads had to roll. Carey hadn’t been implicated, but his mentor—the mighty Inspector Thomas Byrnes, the most famous police detective in America at the time—had stepped down, and another faction took over the Detective Bureau at the police headquarters on Mulberry Street. Carey had been in Goatsville ever since.

  Inside his station were Julius Meyer, his sons, and the parcel they’d accompanied on the police wagon. It was turning into quite the Sunday adventure for the two boys.

  Detective Carey listened carefully to their story. Little Edgar, they recounted, had yelled back excitedly to his father from the foot of Undercliff Avenue’s steep retaining wall. He’d found a peddler’s pack. There, on a small shaded ledge that jutted out just before the forest sloped away, was a tightly bound bundle, the sort that a linen or notions dealer might waddle under from one house to another, ready to untie it to lay out his wares. But it was heavy—easily a hundred pounds. A tug on one end had drawn out a putrescent waft. Meyer didn’t know what it was, but he knew something was amiss. He left his boys to guard the find while he flagged down some mounted policemen. They’d needed a stretcher and towing ropes just to hoist the mass up from the ravine.

  Detective Carey and Captain Thomas Killilea carefully appraised the package. The station captain was another Byrnes appointee sent up to Goatsville. He’d been on the force since the Lincoln administration and held a double claim to the precinct: He was also tangled in yet another corruption fiasco just a year earlier, accused of renting out on-duty police to work as security guards at football games. The former police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt had tried pushing Killilea and his cronies out altogether, getting so many top officers under indictment one year that the annual police parade was canceled. Still, even an old-timer like Killilea retained enough of a fondness for his old downtown beat to read of the latest doings beyond Goatsville. And to him, the red-and-gold-patterned oilcloth already looked plenty familiar; in fact, the captain knew exactly where he’d spotted it before. He’d seen it, he explained, in that morning’s New York Herald.

  Detective Carey cut the baling cords and pulled back layers of red oilcloth, burlap, and twine-secured brown paper. Inside was the midsection of a man—and it was very clearly a man—hewn between the ribs up top and about four inches below the hip joints at the bottom. Medical students, others at the station house shrugged. They figured the officers at Tenth Street had been right, and the morning’s newspapers were just out to make something out of nothing.

  Carey wasn’t so sure.

  The bundle would be sent onward to the morgue at Bellevue, of course—an officer was already making the phone call—but Carey wanted a closer look. This wasn’t the cat-up-a-tree work of his precinct that he had before him; and even if nobody else in the station thought so, to Carey it had the feel of something big.

  The detective examined the inside of the parcel. The layer of dirty burlap was secured with faintly pink-colored string, and Carey had seen spools of it before: It was a sort druggists used, a variety called seine twine. Below that was a brown paper wrapping, and then the body. The revolting smell was filling the station house. But Carey wasn’t quite finished: He wanted just one more look before they loaded it up onto the wagon again. Carey rolled the limbless trunk over for a better view.

  There, in the small of the back, adhered another piece of brown paper—a slightly different, smaller piece. He delicately peeled it away and examined it. The paper bore a single, small ink stamp—and the detective knew, in that moment, that he had to return to his old precinct.

  Murder, mused Carey darkly, followed me here.

  THE TRIP from the cows and orchards of the north down to the corner of Houston Street and Bowery was only about ten miles, but Arthur Carey might as well have been traveling to another world. These were his old haunts from his rookie days on Byrnes’s detective squad: a ramshackle and roiling retail polyglot of hagglers, banjo players, dime museums, beer gardens, fruit stands, and discount crockery shops. You could walk full blocks down Bowery and fill your arms with newspapers hawked by newsboys, each one a different title, and none of them in English. It was one of the city’s oldest streets, its name a mocking remainder of the land’s old Dutch farms or bouwerij—but now a cheap, noisy, and beery cacophony of drunk bums and sober business.

  If you didn’t mind the occasional fisticuffs or dead body, it was a swell place for an officer—a little too swell, maybe. Teddy Roosevelt had found the neighborhood so obliging to his men that he went around pouncing on on-duty officers for quaffing pints in oyster houses and dive saloons. In their place came recruits who had to pass fitness tests and undergo weapons training, and it was said that you could tell the old and new officers apart by sorting the fat from the slender. But the old sins remained, and then some; there was real money to be had in this neighborhood. The Bowery Savings Bank was improbably becoming one of the world’s largest savings institutions, and for police the temptation to dip in at less reputable businesses was everywhere. Even Carey’s well-regarded old boss retired with a fortune of $350,000—something not easily explained when a typical yearly salary on the force was $2,000. Some departmental accomplishments, perhaps, were better left unsung.

  The Bowery’s packed streets and low-slung tenements overflowed with Germans and Poles, and the storefront of Kugler & Wollens was emblematic of the changing neighborhood. John Jacob Astor IV owned the poky two-story brick building at 277 Bowery—in fact, the Astors owned much of the block, as their long-dead patriarch had made his first land buys a century earlier along this very street. For decades the building had been occupied by a clan of butchers and grocers, the Marsh family; but by the 1870s, as the neighborhood acquired umlauts at an impressive rate, it became a German beer saloon, and then a hardware retailer.

  On this block of narrow brick buildings, hardware in every variety was hawked by Germans. The mighty Hammacher Schlemmer hardware shop held down one end, selling everything from mechanic’s tools to piano fittings. At the other end was the domain of Ernst Kugler. Herr Kugler had been here more than twenty years, outlasting a previous partner, watching the passing of the Bowery Boy gangs, and seeing the latest immigrant wave turn the Bowery Theater into a Yiddish venue. Kugler and his employees knew their business well enough that when a detective turned up with a piece of paper stamped Kugler & Wollens, they knew exactly what it was for.

  At some point, someone connected with that bundled body had been here. It might have been any time and for any purchase from a handful of wood screws to a brass keyhole escutcheon. Like every hardware store, they kept a large roll of brown paper, a stamp, and a reel of twine for wrapping up all manner of purchases. But the shape and condition of this piece was distinct.

  It had been used to wrap a saw.

  SO CAREY HAD ONE CLUE. The other—his only other, really—was the oilcloth that the trunk had been wrapped in. The fabric was still so new that it smelled of the store. But the piece found in Ogden’s Woods had been about four feet wide and fourteen and a half feet long. Unless you had a baronial dining room table, you weren’t buying sheets that long for a tablecloth. Someone had bought this with a task in mind—maybe, given its red color, for catching dripping blood. But where would they have bought it?

  Finding someone in the Bowery who knew about oilcloth wasn’t hard. The street was filled with exactly the kind of peddlers who used the stuff, people who immediately knew where to locate the nearest distributor: Henry Feuerstein, a sharp-eyed Hungarian who wholesaled yarns and fabric just three blocks away on Stanton Street. An Orthodox Jew, Feuerstein was contentedly working in his warehouse on
the Christian sabbath; he personally examined the swatch and identified the maker of the brightly colored red-and-gold floral pattern. “A. F. Buchanan and Sons,” he said. He even knew the pattern number. “Diamond B, number 3220.”

  It was a cheap and unpopular pattern—a leftover from last year’s stock, in fact—and just too gaudy and vivid to sell well. He hadn’t unloaded a roll of it to any store in four months. Most dry-goods customers for oilcloth, Feuerstein explained, preferred something a bit lighter in color.

  Of course, the detective could check the other distributor that Buchanan & Sons used—there was also Claflin & Company, over on Church Street. But that wouldn’t happen without a warrant; its proprietor, John Claflin, had been arrested weeks earlier after dodging a jury summons. He was not known to be overly fond of police. But Feuerstein, you understand, was a reasonable man.

  The merchant threw open his ledgers, tracing out the network of dealers and distributors. And once they tallied up all the dry-goods shops and general stores they distributed this stuff to, it became clear: Carey would have something like fifty more shops to visit. Here, right in Feuerstein’s books, you could see how far even an unpopular cloth went. There was a Mr. Bernstein on Belmont Avenue in Brooklyn; a Mr. Bratzenfelder on Avenue D; a Mr. Theimer uptown at Seventy-Second Street; a Mr. Prencky … It went on and on. A roll of Diamond B #3220 even went to the store of Ignatz Rucmark, over in Hoboken. You’d need to hit all five boroughs and then some to track this cloth down. That would take time—and men. Aside from Detective Carey, though, barely anyone else on the force had moved into action yet.

  But if the police weren’t on the case, Carey found, somebody was. Because someone else had been coming here and asking Feuerstein these very same questions.

  Reporters.

  3.

  THE JIGSAW MAN

  SUNDAYS WERE ALWAYS a bit slow at the New York World, and Ned Brown just about had the place to himself. Walking along a vast Park Row newsroom so crammed with rolltop desks that it was nearly barricaded, he read panel after panel on walls placarded with exhortations:

  ACCURACY, ACCURACY, ACCURACY!

  And:

  WHO? WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? HOW?

  And:

  THE FACTS—THE COLOR—THE FACTS!

  These continued around the perimeter of the room, so that in every direction a reporter looked, the World credo was shouted at him. But on this day the room was quiet; only the stale cigar smoke hinted at last night’s fury in getting the June 27 Sunday World out.

  From the windows between the placards, Ned could see out over the rooftops—over every rooftop, in fact—clear out to the East River. The teeming city below had nearly doubled in size over the last generation; it vaulted upward with newly invented elevators, and outward with hurriedly built elevated railways. Towering above it all were the eighteen-story offices of the mighty New York World, the crowning achievement of Joseph Pulitzer.

  A lanky Hungarian immigrant, Pulitzer had enlisted in the Union army, ridden cavalry in Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, and then drifted into New York at the end of the Civil War. On the very site of this newspaper office had once stood French’s Hotel, and Pulitzer, then a penniless veteran, was thrown out of it. Two decades later, in an almost operatic act of revenge, a wealthy Pulitzer returned from out west and razed the hotel to the ground, erecting on the spot the city’s tallest building: his building. He’d lavished two miles of wrought-iron columns to support the world’s largest pressroom and placed his offices on the soaring top floors beneath an immense 425-ton golden dome. The reflection of its gilded surface could be seen for miles out to sea; for immigrants coming to America, the first sight of their new land was not the Statue of Liberty but Pulitzer’s golden beacon. Inside, his sanctum was decorated with frescoes and leather wainscoting; one of his first visitors, emerging from the elevator and into his office, blurted: “Is God in?”

  But when Pulitzer had bought the paper from Jay Gould in 1883, the World was scarcely godlike at all. It was an arthritic operation with a circulation of twenty thousand, and it bled money. Pulitzer fired the old staff, bought a blazingly fast new Hoe press, and dragooned the best reporters and editors, pushing them mercilessly to reinvent the era’s drab uniform columns into bold headlines and sensational woodcut illustrations. No longer would shipping news and market results count as front-page stories; as much a showman as a newsman, Pulitzer unapologetically courted women and immigrant readers with a heady mix of bombast, sentiment, and attention-grabbing promotions that rode on the latest fads. When Jules Verne was on everyone’s nightstand, Pulitzer ordered daredevil reporter Nellie Bly to travel around the world in eighty days; she accomplished it in seventy-two. In the midst of the craze over Martian canals, Pulitzer even considered mounting a giant billboard visible to “readers” on Mars. Rather more pragmatically, the rags-to-riches immigrant seized the moment when the newly built Statue of Liberty lacked a pedestal: a flag-waving World campaign among housewives and schoolchildren raised more than $100,000 to buy one. And Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses” inscription? That came from a World contest.

  The facts—the color—the facts! Circulation had risen fifteenfold since he’d bought it, making the World one of the largest dailies in the world. The paper itself had swollen, too, its immense three-cent Sunday edition becoming a thing of sensational beauty. Pulitzer had created the world’s first color comics section, featuring the antics of a bald tenement kid with ears like jug handles: the Yellow Kid. His popularity inspired competing papers that year to scoff that the World was comic-strip journalism—yellow journalism, they called it. Perhaps, but it was an absolutely brilliant hue of yellow. Past the day’s front-page grabber from the East Eleventh Street pier—BOY’S GHASTLY FIND—the paper was bursting with an exposé of a Chicago diploma mill, an account of a Maine aeronaut taking flight with a giant kite, fashion tips for women, and ads for everything from Hoff’s Malt Extract to Dr. Scott’s Electric Hair Brush. A thick periodical section promised “More Reading Material Than Any Four Magazines” and was fronted by a thundering headline on unregulated “baby farm” orphanages: NOTHING SO CHEAP IN NEW YORK AS HUMAN LIFE!

  At the front of the newsroom was the ringmaster for this printed circus: the city editor, who regularly bellowed from a wooden platform for more copy. But today it was just the substitute editor enjoying the luxurious lull of Sunday afternoon.

  And then the phone rang.

  Ned Brown was motioned over. A second oilcloth-wrapped body part had been found up by the Bronx and was due to arrive at the Bellevue morgue any minute. Ned was to run over and meet up with Gus Roeder, the World’s crack morgue correspondent.

  “Do whatever Gus tells you,” the editor snapped. “The Journal’s probably got forty guys there already.”

  The competition! The newly launched Evening Journal had been nipping at the paper’s heels for months, and here the emptied World offices would get caught flat-footed on the story. It could be a new victim, or a second helping of yesterday’s East River find; either way, it was sizing up to be another front-pager, and the editor knew they’d have to grab it.

  “If the pieces fit, it’s the same stiff,” he declared, and hurried his rookie to the door. “If it’s part of a different stiff, then the guy with the red oilcloth has murdered them both.”

  RUNNING FROM THE EL STATION to the Bellevue morgue, Ned Brown was a sight: A short and stringy bantamweight, his blond hair swept up in a pompadour like his boxing heroes, he sprinted along Twenty-Sixth Street while dodging newsboys and Sunday strollers. The nineteen-year-old NYU student had been angling for any news assignments he could get over the summer. Today was his break, his first real story.

  Gus Roeder was waiting for him when he flew into the morgue. So were Deputy Coroner Philip O’Hanlon’s findings on the river bundle, the result of several hours of painstaking autopsy. Gus—a dour, red-faced German with a thick accent—bustled into the crowd of reporters to listen to Dr. O’Hanlon, while Ned
went to examine the arms and shoulders found by the pier. By the skin he could immediately see that the victim was probably fair, about thirty-five years old; judging by his soft hands, he was not a manual laborer.

  But who was he, and who had done this?

  “At first,” O’Hanlon admitted to the gathered reporters, “it looked to me as though it were the fore section of a body prepared for photography so as to show the position of the heart and lungs, as might be done in a medical college. But I do not believe so now.”

  Observe: not only did the torso still retain all its organs, the body contained no trace of any preservative. On the contrary: inside the broad chest of a powerfully muscled man, the tissue of the lungs was still spongy and the heart was filled with blood—the very blood that had stopped flowing after a knife was plunged between the victim’s fifth and sixth ribs.

  What?

  The reporters looked closely at the body. The flesh stripped away from the chest—and, perhaps, an identifying tattoo along with it—had also quietly hidden two previously undetected stab wounds on the body. A casual observer would not spot them among the gore—but O’Hanlon had.

  “They must have been inflicted before death,” he flatly stated.

  Making incisions around the stab sites, the deputy coroner found that blood had entered into the surrounding tissue—that is, it was pumped into them. That only happened in the living; a stab or incision made on a dead man created different internal damage than one on a living body. He’d also looked inside these stab wounds. A stab will typically show threads of clothing driven into the wound; but this one had none. So the victim, O’Hanlon concluded, had been alive and naked when stabbed.