The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  But now, he said, it was time to examine the facts.

  “Somewhere, at some time, by somebody a most terrible tragedy has been enacted,” he began. “Was this a crime? And if so, who were the actors in it?” Youngs paced the floor of the courthouse, looking searchingly at the jurors.

  “The person alleged to have been murdered is William Guldensuppe, the place a cottage in Woodside, the time June 25, 1897, and the man accused of the murder sits there.” He swung out his arm and pointed at the prisoner, sitting just a few feet away. “Martin Thorn.”

  The accused returned his gaze coolly, with scarcely a flicker of his eyes.

  “The evidence will be mainly circumstantial,” Youngs continued. “A murderer of this kind does not seek the broad highway for the place of his crime, but we shall show you link after link of evidence that will bind Thorn in a fatal embrace.

  “Mind you,” he added, “the head is still missing.”

  Youngs gave the jury a quick recounting of the case—the love triangle, the fatal cottage in Woodside, the body cut in four, the head forever hidden in plaster—and he turned to the jury box.

  “Where is Guldensuppe?” he asked warmly. “He was well known to many. The great newspapers of the country have published his pictures.” The roomful of reporters basked in his momentary attention. “There are few people in the East that have not seen a picture of the missing man. If he were alive, hundreds of witnesses would be produced by the defense to prove it. He has never been seen since he entered that cottage with Mrs. Nack.”

  And they, the jury, would not be fooled.

  “You have been selected with great care,” the DA assured them, at last returning to the prosecution team’s table. All eyes turned to Howe and Thorn.

  “I shall also prove”—here Youngs suddenly leapt back up from his seat like a billy goat—“that Guldensuppe ‘snored’ in the bathtub even after Thorn had begun to turn the knife.”

  The men visibly shuddered. The trial of Martin Thorn had truly begun.

  WHEN YOUNGS CALLED his first witness, the air in the room had already grown foul again, and it was about to get worse. Youngs slipped on black rubber gloves and produced a piece of red oilcloth. He hesitated before passing it to a court officer. The officer, he suggested, should wear gloves, too.

  “It is covered in blood,” Youngs explained, “and if you have a cut on your hand, it might be dangerous.”

  John McGuire was called to the stand; the fifteen-year-old boy had picked out some friends of his in the gallery and was grinning broadly at them. He’d already been signing autographs at just fifty cents a pop on their new copies of the latest Old Cap. Collier dime novel: The Headless Body Murder Mystery.

  The prosecutor briskly turned the boy’s attention to more serious matters.

  “Where were you shortly after one o’clock last June twenty-sixth?” he asked.

  “I was at the foot of Eleventh Street,” the teenager replied. “East River.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “I seen a bundle a block away from there in the water,” McGuire answered earnestly. “I showed it to Jack McKenna. He swam out and got it and brought it in. There was a wrapping of brown paper, and then a wrapping of oilcloth, and then a wrapping of cheesecloth with a bloodstain on it.”

  An attendant held a creased and fetid piece of red-and-gold oilcloth up to the boy.

  “Was this the oilcloth?”

  “Yes.”

  His friend Jack McKenna proved to be a saucer-eyed twelve-year-old with none of Johnny’s bravado, and unsure whether Judge Smith or Counsel Howe was in charge of the courtroom.

  “What was in the bundle?” the prosecutor asked him gently.

  “The upper part of a human body, with arms and hands on it,” the boy stammered. “There was no head.”

  The prosecution team shuffled through a stack of morgue photographs that lay on the exhibit table, one observer marveled, “like a ghastly pack of cards,” and plucked out a grisly shot of the severed thorax.

  “Is this the part of the body found by you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His turn over, the boy gratefully bounded away, and Howe stood up to cross-examine Officer James Moore, the first policeman on the scene.

  “Some portion of the breast was removed. How deep was the incision?”

  “I can’t say, exactly,” the policeman replied modestly.

  “Were any bones splintered?” Howe pressed.

  “I can’t say.”

  “How was the head severed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How was the lower part severed?”

  “I can’t tell that, either.”

  Wasn’t it possible, Howe reasoned, that the head might have been eaten off by fish? There was surely a reasonable explanation for everything the boys found. The prosecution team was rather more skeptical; fish, after all, did not know how to bundle parcels and tie knots.

  “A piece of rope was found by the oilcloth in the dock?” the DA asked.

  “Yes,” the officer replied.

  “I object!” Howe pounced. “That’s immaterial. There’s plenty of rope around the docks, isn’t there, Officer?”

  “I object,” the prosecutor snapped back.

  “Please don’t,” Howe sighed theatrically, and his audience guffawed.

  The witnesses proceeded at a brisk pace, with Herbert Meyer and his little brother, Edgar, called up to recount finding the second package in the woods by the Harlem River. One Telegram writer dryly observed that the younger child, a towheaded boy still in knickerbocker pants, possessed “a voice entirely out of proportion to his size.”

  “He is a good little boy,” Howe said, smiling indulgently at the bemused jury.

  “Was there any one else there but your brother and your father?” the prosecutor dutifully went on to ask the older brother.

  “Yes,” Edgar replied.

  The defense and prosecution alike looked up, startled; nobody had heard this before. In the youthful logic of the two Meyer children, it may simply have been that nobody had ever asked them that precise question. Martin Thorn, whose foot had been swinging impatiently under his chair, suddenly froze.

  “A man jumped out of the bushes,” Edgar prattled on diligently, “and asked me about the blackberries, saying they weren’t ripe. I told him they were raspberries, and—”

  “Do you see that man in the court?” the prosecutor interrupted.

  Edgar looked all around the room, sweeping his gaze back and forth several times as the crowd held its breath.

  “No, sir,” he said finally.

  Martin Thorn exhaled and allowed his foot to fidget again.

  Officer Collins of the Brooklyn Navy Yard stepped up to identify the legs, but the rows of newspapermen paid particular attention when a more familiar officer took to the stand: newly promoted Detective Sergeant Arthur Carey, the very first to track the oilcloth in the case. Carey was a sharp dresser: In his silk-faced Prince Albert jacket, left rakishly unbuttoned, he might have been the only witness to risk outshining Counsel Howe.

  Carey nonchalantly handled the dirty piece of oilcloth. He’d carried another swatch all over the city while looking for fabric dealers and was unfazed by the grisly evidence.

  “What did you subsequently do with the piece you retained?” the prosecutor asked.

  I matched it to the other one at the morgue, Carey explained, waving the oilcloth about. A deathly stench wafted from the bloody scrap.

  “Please, don’t move it any more than you have to,” Howe winced from the defense table. “You ought to have more consideration for our health.”

  Judge Smith agreed; the air was so bad that he adjourned for lunch. Or, at least, what lunch they still had an appetite for: Magnus Larsen, whose corner seat in the jury box was right next to the exhibit table, looked like he was about to turn green.

  ——

  THE AFTERNOON’S FIRST WITNESS was a morgue keeper named Isaac Newton—a
gaunt, severe fellow who failed to see anything funny about his name. He’d been in the job for more than a year and had handled some 7,000 bodies in that time. The DA’s office, though, was only interested in one.

  “Did you see these three portions together and take any measurements?” he was asked on the stand.

  “Yes.”

  “Did the pieces fit?”

  “I object!” Howe bellowed.

  “This would seem to be a question for an expert, and this witness is hardly qualified,” Judge Smith agreed.

  “We intend, Your Honor, to show that this is a misfit,” Howe explained, and Thorn nodded his vigorous agreement. The beaming defense counsel, his thick watch chain swinging around and his eyes alight, turned to Newton for cross-examination. “Have you these pieces of a body in your possession?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “As I understand”—Howe leaned in—“they have been pickled, or whatever the process is, and are as yet intact?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They could be brought here?” the lawyer asked with unfeigned delight.

  “Oh yes, sir,” the morgue keeper agreed, a little puzzled. “I suppose so.”

  “There!” Howe crowed. “I shall object to any evidence by this witness, or any identification of photographs, on the ground that the body itself is available and is the best possible evidence.”

  The crowd, packed into the airless courthouse, wasn’t sure whether to be delighted or horrified by this prospect—or both. And, Howe reminded them, there had been false identifications at the morgue before; indeed, just recently a woman had identified her husband at the Bellevue morgue, only to have him turn up very much alive at home the next day.

  “Many visitors have called at the morgue since you were there.… Were you there when some persons from Virginia said the body was that of Edwards, a photographer?”

  “Object!” Youngs cried.

  “Overruled.” The judge waved it off. “Proceed.”

  “I don’t remember the circumstance,” Newton replied.

  “You see Mr. Moss here?” Howe pointed to another lawyer at the defense table. “You don’t remember him coming with an order to show the body?”

  “Yes,” the morgue keeper admitted slowly.

  “I see in this photograph—I don’t know whether it is the original,” Howe muttered contemptuously as he shuffled through the gory stack on the exhibit table, “that the great toe overlaps the next. Have you seen that condition in others?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?” Howe demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Newton snapped.

  “Fifty?”

  “I never kept count.”

  “Then forty-nine? Thirty?”

  “Well, very likely.”

  And then there were, Howe mused, the other famed distinguishing characteristics of the body—five in all, including a mole and a small scar from a finger infection, or a “felon.”

  “Now it is claimed”—Howe lifted his fingers—“that on the first finger of the left hand there is a scar left by a felon. You have seen it?”

  “Yes.”

  Howe considered this for a moment. “By the way,” he said offhandedly, “have you ever had a felon?”

  “Yes,” the morgue keeper replied innocently.

  “Show it to me,” Howe commanded.

  Newton held out his hand from the witness stand, and the towering defense counsel took it in a curiously courtly gesture.

  “Now, isn’t that strange!” Howe eyed the morgue keeper’s hand and turned triumphantly to the jury. “Your felon was on the same finger of the same hand!”

  There was a gasp in the courtroom, then incredulous laughter as spectators considered their own hands. Why, some of them also had those scars on their fingers!

  “No doubt,” Howe boomed delightedly, “there are thousands of cases precisely similar.”

  The district attorney jumped up quickly to stem the courtroom’s laughter. “You have other bodies with such strange features as twisted toes, or moles in certain spots or scars in other spots, or possibly one of the five peculiarities you mention. But did you”—Youngs paused dramatically—“did you ever see a body bearing all five marks?”

  “No,” Newton said plainly.

  “That’s all.” Youngs smirked at Howe.

  “One moment!” Howe bellowed as Newton stood up. The morgue keeper sank back down dejectedly. The defense counsel leveled his gaze at the official, and took his most serious tone. “Do you remember the case of … Aimee Smith?”

  Newton recoiled slightly, as if struck. “Yes,” he said, and swallowed hard.

  It was an infamous local scandal: Back in March, a young woman had been left to die of a sudden illness in a Third Avenue hotel, but the “Mr. Everett” who signed the hotel register as her husband was nowhere to be found. After days passed, “Mrs. Everett” proved to be the pretty young Hackensack Sunday-school teacher Aimee Smith—and “Mr. Everett” was identified by a porter as her married Sunday-school headmaster, Nelson Weeks. Fearing scandal, he’d fled the hotel and left her to become a Jane Doe in the Bellevue morgue.

  “How often was she falsely identified?”

  “Not at all.” The morgue keeper bristled. “I identified her as soon as I saw her.”

  Bring back Isaac Newton tomorrow, Howe demanded as the court let out for the day. He wasn’t finished with him just yet.

  AS THE COURTHOUSE EMPTIED OUT, Journal pigeon posts fluttered past the windows—the first four pages of tonight’s issue would be devoted to the case, shoving aside every other national and international story, including a Spanish overture to President McKinley, a nearly unanimous vote by the Georgia legislature to ban the “brutal” sport of football, and word that infamous outlaw “Dynamite Dick” had been gunned down by lawmen in the wilds of the Indian Territory. With tomorrow’s witnesses slated to be a parade of doctors and professors, the capital circumstantial case was turning historic.

  “Interest in the case is not wholly that of a passing sensation,” a Brooklyn Eagle reporter admitted. “The legal aspects of it are scientific and important, and may be cited for precedents in many trials of the future.”

  Howe, sparkling at the defense table, was quick to assure everyone that it would also be a historic victory. “We will disprove nearly all of the prosecutor’s testimony,” he announced flatly.

  It wasn’t just bluster, either: A Herald reporter had good word that betting on Thorn now ran at roughly even odds. Sure, the evidence looked bad for him, but Howe had an impeccable reputation for beating the rap. Yet as they left the courtroom, there was another presence—up in the gallery—that was altogether more surprising.

  Maria Barberi?

  The ranks of reporters crowded around her. Barberi had been the first woman ever sentenced to die in the electric chair—and just a year ago, she’d been at the defense table herself, appealing a murder conviction. But she’d been freed by reason of insanity, since Maria slit her lover’s throat with a straight razor in what her lawyer argued was a “psychic epileptic fit”—a curiously selective fit, it must be said. The case was so sensational that it had already been turned into a Broadway play. And now Barberi was a free woman, sitting in the gallery right beside the lawyer who had saved her from the chair: none other than Manny Friend, who was now representing Mrs. Nack.

  In her round spectacles and a white floral hat tied under her chin with a wide bow, Maria looked for all the world like a schoolmistress. “I did not see the use of showing those awful pieces of cloth so many times,” she complained to the Evening Journal. It made her feel especially sorry for Thorn. “Every time they were held up my heart thumped, and I know that his did.”

  Sitting in the courtroom with Barberi was cheap advertising for Manny, and the message about Mrs. Nack’s case was clear: If I got Barberi off the hook, I can get Nack off, too. William F. Howe was less impressed as he walked over and, towering over his fellow lawyer, sized up Manny Frie
nd.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked.

  It was a good question—and when the answer came later that night, the case would be turned upside down.

  18.

  CAUGHT IN THE HEADLIGHT

  MANNY FRIEND SIMPLY HAD no time for drama that night.

  He’d tried. Shadowed on the Long Island Rail Road by reporters, Mrs. Nack’s lawyer was followed into the city and to the Harlem Opera House. As rain and wind whipped outside the theater, Mr. Friend and his pursuers strode down 125th Street, past Hurtig & Seamon’s music hall, and then disappeared under a marquee reading THE FIRST BORN.

  It was a melodrama set in Chinatown—a tragedy of honor and revenge—but as the houselights dimmed, Friend fretted about the real revenge tragedy that had just played out before him back at the jail. The reporters out in the ornate lobby were surprised to see Friend walking purposefully away, leaving before the show had even really started; his face was flushed, his movements nervous, his affect that of a man who simply couldn’t stay still.

  Is it true? they yelled as they ran after him. Has she confessed?

  Friend stopped in the lobby, stunned; but on second thought, it shouldn’t have been any surprise at all. Of course the jail staff couldn’t keep their mouths shut.

  “She has made a full confession,” Friend stammered, looking deeply ill at ease. “I shall go home, disconnect my phone, and refuse to see any one or answer any questions. She has made a full confession. That’s all I can say.”

  Within minutes on Newspaper Row, reporters from the Times, the Herald, the Journal, and the World were jumping onto streetcars to wake up everyone from Captain O’Brien to Sheriff Doht for reaction quotes. When reporters descended on William Howe’s house on Boston Avenue, though, they found it darkened and quiet; he wasn’t home.

  But the Herald knew where to find him. Howe was still in his pajamas and nightcap when the Herald arrived at the lawyer’s room in the Park Avenue Hotel. Howe had allies at the paper—including, it was said, a reporter secretly on his payroll—and they knew that during big cases he worked out of the Park Avenue. The luxury hotel off Thirty-Third was an immense cast-iron castle painted a blinding white and lit up at night—precisely where one would expect William F. Howe to hold court. The imperial-sized lawyer waved the reporters into his suite, then paused to draw out a metal flask from his luggage.