The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  Still, they’d have to wait for results, and the warm summer air and firecrackers outside hinted at why: An entire city was about to knock off work for July 4.

  HOW COULD THEY BE ASKING these questions at a time like this?

  Charles Buala was bustling around his wine shop on West Twenty-Sixth Street; it was where Parisian expatriates could still find an old-fashioned cabaret, the kind of place with sawdust floors and rickety tables, where you could split a bottle of cheap Spanish red with a neighbor and play dominoes into the hot summer evenings. But this was a Saturday, the busiest night of the week, and the eve of one of the busiest holidays of the year. New Yorkers stocking up for the next day’s picnics and parades streamed in for bottles of champagne, sauterne, and sweet muscat; some were already well sauced.

  Charles Buala didn’t have time to talk, not about their new tenants or anything else. Mrs. Buala, though, was a kinder sort; her beauty and ready smile were not the least of the store’s charms for its habitués.

  “I do not remember these people very well. I thought they were German Hebrews,” she said in her French accent. That’s why the German caretaker, Mrs. Hafftner, had done so much of the talking with them. “The woman was fleshy, but I cannot remember more. If she was light or dark I do not know.”

  Talking in English was still a bit difficult for Mrs. Buala. Her thirteen-year-old niece was eager to help.

  “Auntie says she couldn’t even tell how the woman was dressed,” the niece piped in.

  “The woman was about thirty-five or thirty-six. The man the same. He was good-looking.” Mrs. Buala smiled. “With alight-colored moustache, but I do not remember if it was straight or curly. He was a good-looking man, though—I remember that.”

  The trolley bells rang from the lines at either end of the block, and more customers piled in. Mr. Braun, she remembered, said he was a shoemaker in the next town over, on Jackson Avenue.

  “They wanted a house to live in. The rent is fifteen dollars a month. They said they would take it.… They were nice looking people, and I thought it was all right. They said they might move in last Tuesday, if not, then Thursday.”

  She was still puzzled by the whole affair. “It is very strange,” she added. “They said they would move in. Why did they not?”

  But Mr. Buala had a pretty good idea why. Breaking away from his rush of shoppers, he dug out a letter and passed it over to the detectives. He’d received it that morning:

  Mr. Buala:

  On account of sickness in my family I will not move into the house before another week or ten days.

  Respectfully,

  F. BRAUN

  The handwriting was immediately recognizable to the detectives—it was the same as in the “Fred” letters to Mrs. Nack—the very ones they now knew to be Thorn’s. And this one from “Frank Braun”? It had been postmarked only yesterday at the West Thirty-Second Street post office, six blocks from where they now stood.

  Martin Thorn was still in the city.

  10.

  THE SILENT CUSTOMER

  THE FOURTH OF JULY wasn’t much of a holiday for Detective J. J. O’Connell. While his colleagues across the river were taking the Sunday off, going to church, or settling in for parade duty and fireworks accidents, he and his partner, Detective Boyle, were arriving in Queens for another search of the crime scene. Newsboys hawked thick Sunday editions the whole way over.

  MURDER TRACED IN DUCK TRACKS, roared the Herald.

  THE HOUSE OF DEATH! declared the World.

  HAIR PULLING MATCH! added the Press. Well, some local news staples didn’t change much.

  Woodside had hung out its bunting for the holiday. A blazing sun rose over the village’s preparations, promising a fine day in root beer and cider sales for the local merchants. But not, it seemed, on account of the Independence Day parade. Something strange was happening in the sleepy neighborhood of Woodside. It began slowly as the detectives walked up Second Avenue—a smirking urchin here, a girl screaming with hilarity there—and slowly gathered force. They came by ferries; they came by trolleys; they came up the roads with their flat caps and angelic curls, with penknives and cheap lockets, dusty rock candy in their pockets and blades of grass between their teeth.

  The streets were filling with children.

  Boys and girls, some brandishing their flags, thrashed around behind the house—the Den of Murder, the press called it—and into a field of cattails where cows grazed. Others went wading into the local pond, feeling for the mucky bottom. Still more beat the bushes and jabbed sticks into malarial ditches by the roadsides. A rumor had spread of a $1,000 bounty on William Guldensuppe’s severed head, and the city’s children were hooting with delight. A thousand dollars! It was Easter in July—a delightful, appalling Easter egg hunt.

  O’Connell and Boyle forced their way forward to the Bualas’ house, where a local constable struggled to keep the masses at bay.

  Where’s Mrs. Hafftner?

  Nobody knew where to find the caretaker or the owner; the police didn’t have a key to the place. The throngs of children and adults alike grew behind them. Scores became hundreds, their weight pressing against the fence around the property. If they didn’t collect evidence now, they might never get it.

  Let’s go.

  O’Connell and Boyle wrenched open a window and boosted themselves through. In a stroke of luck, the crowd was briefly distracted by a street show: Streuning’s infamous “death carriage” and horse came trotting up to its old Second Avenue haunt. The police had lifted a page from the World and returned with the surrey to jog townspeople’s memories. The duck farmer next door was one of the first to recognize it.

  “Yes, that’s the same rig those people had,” Mr. Wahle said. “I remarked at the time on the black horse and the dark painted carriage, and thought it looked like an undertaker’s rig.”

  The caretaker’s husband, having belatedly arrived after the detectives, was quick to agree with his neighbor.

  “That’s the same carriage,” Mr. Hafftner confirmed. “When I saw that man and that woman come here on Saturday in a carriage I was rather astonished, because Mrs. Buala had told us he was a shoemaker. It seemed strange that a shoemaker could afford to leave his business on a Saturday and hire a horse and carriage just to drive over from Jackson Avenue.”

  The house itself remained as vacant and unremarkable as ever, save for two previously unnoticed clues in an upstairs bedroom: an empty wine bottle and a small cardboard bullet box discarded in the back of the closet. Detective Boyle busied himself with testing planks to find any that might have been recently pried open to hide a body. But Detective O’Connell still had his mind on that ditch outside. Before landing a job on the force, he’d worked as a plumber, and the drainage described by the duck farmer gave him an idea.

  I’m taking out the trap, O’Connell announced as he deftly exposed and disassembled the plumbing under the upstairs bathtub. There was a pastelike sediment in the drain—not hair, not black mildew, but a sticky mush with an awful, deathly smell. Another sample for the lab, O’Connell decided.

  The bathroom window now looked out over a sea of children. More than a thousand of them were romping through the fields and ditches of Woodside, at least one for every dollar of the imagined reward. The borough was swarming with bicycling parties as well. Spurred by the fine weather and a day off, cyclists were getting drunk and crashing wildly into the undergrowth, all looking for the ghastly prize.

  “Between drinks,” a World reporter dryly observed, “this crowd dodged into the woods and sought for the head. Within the depths of these thickets are cat-briers that demand of each that passes through either blood or raiment. Profanity arose with the passage of each.”

  O’Connell tried to ignore the hubbub and stray fireworks outside and focus on the water. The drainage outside didn’t look right. How could it have filled up like that in the middle of the summer? They called over Citizens Water Supply, a local supplier that pumped fresh water out fr
om a spring in Trains Meadow. The water meter showed a whopping 40,000-gallon spike in the last month for the empty house.

  “The amount of water,” the utility’s superintendent said incredulously, “is three times the amount that an ordinary family would use in a year.”

  There were no leaks in or around the premises, either; the water meter hadn’t budged since they’d arrived that morning. As evening descended and the disappointed children and boozy holiday cyclists gently wended their way homeward, the inconspicuous device bore a mute testimony that no grisly find in the fields could have given.

  “The only way I can account for it,” the water representative said with a shrug, “is that all the faucets were open continually. For days.”

  BRING OUT THE BODY, came the order to the night-shift morgue keeper. Even after the tumult of Independence Day, a steady stream of identifiers still came to the morgue each day to view Guldensuppe’s remains. As Bellevue’s superintendent stood nearby, the latest visitor’s credentials were checked and an assistant sent to fetch the remains.

  The staffer came back to the morgue’s front desk, disbelief written over his face.

  “The legs …,” he stammered to the superintendent, “are not in the morgue. The arms and trunk are, but … I don’t know where the legs are.”

  The superintendent nearly fainted.

  Morgue staff threw open paupers’ coffins, while reporters took frantic notes. How could they just vanish?

  “Guldensuppe has gained more fame by his death than he could gain by living a million years,” one Herald writer reported drolly. “But for a pair of legs, detached and supposed on expert testimony to be dead, to make a clean escape from the Morgue—that was a mystery.”

  Maybe they were just out for a walk, one wag suggested.

  “One of the theories,” a reporter mused, “was that they had gone to help Acting Inspector O’Brien find Thorn.”

  In fact, the inspector’s search was already going quite well. He’d even taken to praising the newspapers for the fine work they’d done. “I desire,” he announced grandly, “to thank the newspaper men who during the past week have aided me so in bringing about the conclusions which I have reached.”

  It wasn’t often that the Detective Bureau even grudgingly allowed that kind of praise, but it was true: The papers had outdone themselves. Hearst was already boldfacing praise from the coroner, police commissioners, and Mayor William Strong across his pages—“The Journal deserves credit” the latter admitted—and just that night announced the recipients of his $1,000 reward for identifying the body.

  The case had been solved by many people at once, really, but half went to a Murray Hill Baths customer who’d overheard some attendants discussing Guldensuppe’s absence; the fellow sent in what proved to be the first correct wild guess. The other half of the reward was split between Guldensuppe’s coworkers, who had been key in the actual discovery. None, of course, would go to Ned Brown—or anyone else at the World.

  But Pulitzer’s paper was now basking in some fine publicity itself. After a week of humiliations by the Murder Squad, it had begun to regain its footing. The World was the first paper on the scene at Woodside, and lavished its first three pages on the case for the July 4 issue. And the next day the World once again had the best scoop—literally. They’d surreptitiously gouged a stain out of the floor in Woodside and rushed it to an analytical chemist ahead of the police.

  BLOOD IN THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY, crowed its front page.

  Their chemist, Dr. E. E. Smith of Frazer & Company, had cannily used the Teichmann test, one of the few ways to analyze a sample like this one. It was a tricky procedure: He dissolved the stain in an ammonia solution, then precipitated some brown crystals with common salt, acetic acid, and evaporation. Under the microscope, the rhomboid crystals revealed their telltale identity: hydrochloride of haematin.

  “They are absolutely characteristic of blood,” Dr. Smith announced.

  Under the hammering of discoveries by both O’Brien’s detectives and Hearst and Pulitzer reporters, Mrs. Nack was beginning to waver. She denied any murder—denied that Guldensuppe was even dead—but was now hesitantly admitting to O’Brien that, well, she had hired that surrey … and that she had been involved with Martin Thorn … and that she had seen him the week before. In fact, the two had been spotted at a saloon just before her arrest. Thorn had been spied reading about the case in a newspaper—purely as a disinterested party, you understand—and Mrs. Nack admitted that, yes, they had discussed Ferguson’s theory on the then-unidentified victim’s legs being boiled.

  So Thorn was still in town, and in the habit of reading newspaper coverage of the case. Being friendly to reporters now made perfect sense: They were O’Brien’s key to luring Thorn into the open. After flattering the journalists, the inspector fed them a steady stream of misinformation for the next two days. Thorn, he assured the Journal and the Tribune, had surely left the country on a steamship—probably, he added to the Press and the Brooklyn Eagle, escaping via Canada. To the Mail and Express, he was “positive” that Thorn had already fled.

  Finding the murderer would still be harder than, say, finding Guldensuppe’s legs. Those had turned up later that evening in the morgue’s pickling vat; the afternoon shift had forgotten to mention that they were there to their hapless colleagues. The reporters had a fine wheeze over the incident, unaware that O’Brien was quietly laying out his bait in the columns of their newspapers. The inspector was lulling Martin Thorn into a false sense of safety; now all his fugitive had to do was make a mistake.

  MY HUSBAND’S SEEN HIM, said a nervous woman the next day in the Central Office. Perhaps the beads of sweat on her brow were just due to the heat. It was getting past one in the afternoon, and with the hottest July 6 on record, the police were logging one sunstroke case after another: the ironworks owner who’d left his home that morning crying, “The heat! The heat!” who was later found raving in a cab for a ride “to the gates of heaven”; the fellow who went berserk on Broadway, hallucinating that he had turned into a cable car; the ladies who simply removed their flowered hats and crumpled out in the sun.

  He’s seen him, she insisted.

  Of course he had. Thorn was everywhere and nowhere, a heat mirage. Two suspicious look-alikes had already been swept up from city streets, and they were indeed criminals, it turned out—a fugitive Louisville embezzler and a Brooklyn con man named Sleeping Jake—but, alas, neither was Thorn. A suicide found in a Jersey City cemetery, who’d swallowed acid and died in agony over a grave, surely that was Thorn. And what about the body that veteran stage actor George Beane found in the water while yachting off Staten Island, its face blown off at close range? Headlines wanted to know: IS THIS MARTIN THORN?

  Why should someone walking in off the street know any better? The suspect’s own kin couldn’t even be sure.

  “I don’t suppose I would know him if I saw him now,” Thorn’s younger sister Pauline told a Journal reporter who had tracked her down to an apartment on Forty-Second Street. The last time she’d seen Martin, she explained, was on July 4 … nine years earlier. “I have never heard from him to this day,” she added. “He was at that time suffering nervous troubles, and he wrote to a doctor in Boston about it two or three times.”

  Not to be outdone, World reporters located Thorn’s older brother John in Jersey City. Not only hadn’t he heard from his brother Martin lately, he hadn’t even heard from the police.

  “I can only hope that the police are mistaken in their belief that Martin is implicated in it.” He sighed. “But about that I have my misgivings. The description fits him.”

  He’d always despaired of his brother, he said.

  “There are four boys and two girls in our family,” the older brother explained. “Martin is the black sheep of the flock. As long as fifteen years ago I had trouble with him. I gave him money so that he could learn the trade of barber, but he did not appreciate my efforts to make a man of him. He preferred to loaf.
… When I got married I forbade him from my house.”

  No, he didn’t know where Martin was now. But his last encounter with him, after years of silence, made him fear the worst.

  “I did not see him again until a year ago. He came into my store under the influence of liquor and I ordered him out. He had a revolver on him and he showed it to me.

  “ ‘See that,’ he said. ‘Well, some day you will hear of me using this on someone.’ ”

  The accounts in the paper that day made detectives look at one another significantly: Pauline had been married to one Ludwig Braun. And the shop that John Torzewski ran? It was a shoe repair. Pressed for a false identity, Martin Thorn had grabbed the closest materials at hand—his brother’s profession and his brother-in-law’s surname. And the disguise had worked well. The last confirmed sighting of Thorn was by a moving company that he’d tried to hire exactly one week earlier—the previous Wednesday, in the hours before Mrs. Nack’s arrest. As soon as news of her arrest hit the streets, he’d vanished.

  But the woman in the Detective Bureau’s office seemed insistent.

  My husband, she explained, is John Gotha.

  The detective on duty sat bolt upright. Gotha was a tall and lanky German barber, and one of Thorn’s old pinochle friends. O’Brien had hauled him in on Saturday for questioning, to which the barber had innocently protested that he hadn’t seen Thorn in a fortnight.

  Well, Mrs. Gotha explained, that was true—he hadn’t. But now …

  They raced back uptown with Mrs. Gotha. She didn’t want to make a scene at her husband’s workplace, so detectives waited impatiently at the 125th Street El station while Mrs. Gotha walked over to Martinelli’s Barber Shop. Her husband already knew what she was going to pester him about.