The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  Instead, she was busy seeking lodging; the very next place she’d gone to after the Hotel Rand also rejected her. Visiting the towering World Building to hawk her story again that day, she looked out over the sprawling city that spurned her. Augusta Nack no longer knew New York, but New Yorkers still knew her.

  “This,” she muttered, “is worse than prison.”

  ONE YEAR LATER, a call came upstairs to the head matron of the Tombs; there was, one of the jail staff informed her, “a lady wearing diamonds” waiting for her on a bench in the lobby. The matron puzzled over who it might be as she walked down to the entrance of the jail.

  “How do you do, my dear?” her visitor called out as she rose. “Oh, it is so good to see you again!”

  The head matron stood back, mystified. Her visitor was a respectable-looking middle-aged woman, finely adorned with a gold watch and a diamond brooch, and utterly unfamiliar to her.

  “Who are you?” she finally asked.

  Her visitor looked about a little conspiratorially, then leaned in. “I am Mrs. Nack.”

  The matron was startled, and quickly led her former star prisoner into her office. It had been some eleven years since she’d last seen her—so long, in fact, that the entire jail had been rebuilt since she left.

  “I have just returned from Germany, where I went to see my old mother,” Mrs. Nack explained as they sat down. “I had a good time in the old home, but I wanted to come back to America. I wouldn’t live in Europe if you paid me. This is the place to make money.”

  Mrs. Nack had seen the takings at the Tombs and at Auburn Prison; the first was almost mythically corrupt, and a state audit later found Auburn a “brutal” place of “wanton waste and extravagance.” Mrs. Nack had already been on the receiving end of that cruelty and graft. “You do not have enough to eat,” she recalled of Auburn. “When I was in solitary confinement I received one slice of bread and two ounces of water a day. I thought I would commit suicide, and I tried to open a vein in my arm with a pin. I sucked out the blood and it moistened my lips, and I did not die.”

  But as long as you were the one standing outside the cell, it was clearly a good business to get into.

  “I would like to get a place as a matron or a head keeper in a prison,” Mrs. Nack earnestly explained to the flabbergasted jailer. “I know something about the business. Such a place would just suit me.”

  The matron, a reporter dryly noted, “made no offer to help.”

  For others, though, the Guldensuppe case launched new careers. Both Judge Smith and Judge Maddox went on to state supreme court appointments soon afterward. For District Attorney William Youngs, the case was followed by a plum promotion: He became Teddy Roosevelt’s private secretary, and later the U.S. attorney in New York. After retiring, he even tried the other side of the reporter’s notebook and ran a newspaper himself. He drew upon his experience in the first Thorn mistrial to urge the adoption of an alternate-juror rule. The state government in Albany being what it was, it only took another thirty-three years for his sensible proposal to become law.

  The chemist whose forensic evidence was spurned for Thorn’s trial, Professor Rudolph Witthaus, also went on to great success. Witthaus was brilliant, disturbing, and arrogant to the end, testifying in major murder cases over the next two decades, including such star-studded scandals as the shooting of Stanford White. It was his expertise in poisons, though, that made his fame. He could view stomach membrane under a microscope and pick out the dazzling crystals of arsenic poisoning—or “inheritance powder,” as it was dubbed. That same flesh could be minced and boiled and mixed with lye and benzene; if the slurry fluoresced under an ultraviolet light, that was chloroform poisoning. Blasted with the rotten-egg stink of hydrogen sulfide, it would also turn yellow for mercury poisoning. Witthaus’s skills were in such demand that in one 1900 case he charged the city a dizzying $18,550 for his services. He could have used some of that consulting himself, as his heirs would later claim that a paramour had kept the dying professor in a chemical haze while filing three conflicting wills. Witthaus, it turned out, died leaving a poisoning case probably only he could have solved: his own.

  At least one vital advance was already being made for his successors, though. For all of Witthaus’s tools, he had often been frustrated by the evidence ruined by drunk and incompetent coroners, who were still appointed out of political patronage. Emil Hoeber had been one such appointee—and a man not opposed to being bribed with, say, a nice gold watch. The office proved so hopelessly corrupt that in 1915, the year of Witthaus’s death, the coroner’s job was abolished altogether and replaced by a trained medical examiner. With that, New York City forensics had finally stepped—a little belatedly—into the modern era. Were a Guldensuppe case to come to trial again, no DA would need to feel embarrassed to call forth a coroner or a chemistry professor to testify.

  Among police officers, the old “river mystery” remained legendary: Whenever a head was found buried in a basement or a vacant lot, it was promptly dubbed “Guldensuppe’s head.” Those who really had searched for his head, though, went on to upstanding careers. The first officer to interrogate Mrs. Nack, Captain Samuel Price, rose to become one of the most recognizable detectives in the city and eventually the head of the Detective Bureau in the Bronx. Another key officer at the Harlem find, George Aloncle, became one of the city’s top safecracking experts. And even Captain Stephen O’Brien—who lost his Detective Bureau post after triumphantly wrapping up the case—went on to address the bewildering rise of automobiles by founding the city’s Traffic Squad. Fittingly enough for the man famed as “the honest cop,” after first observing traffic squads in London, Paris, and Berlin, O’Brien submitted a travel-expense report so scrupulously penny-pinching that he was ribbed about it on the force for years afterward.

  But the man most marked by the Guldensuppe case was Arthur Carey, the demoted police officer who’d opened the package found in the bushes near the Harlem River. His pursuit of the oilcloth provided a key break in solving the case; his star rose again, and he was made the first head of the NYPD’s newly formed Homicide Bureau. For three decades he was New York City’s “Murder Man,” famed for being so relentless that he once questioned a suspect in the middle of the funeral of the man’s murdered wife. In one Chinatown murder case, he interrogated a suspect for thirty hours, until they both nearly broke down. Carey became a city institution, teaching the homicide course in the NYPD’s detective academy. Along with training in weapons and crowd control, the police academy also imparted to recruits a new lesson: Never run roughshod over a crime scene. Spurred by the meticulous new methodologies developed in Austria, police were now exhorted to leave them untouched, and to neatly number and photograph each piece of physical evidence wherever it had fallen. They weren’t to touch anything if they could help it; though fingerprints were still ignored in New York City back in 1897, by the time of Mrs. Nack’s release, dusting for them had become a standard procedure. The identification of Guldensuppe’s body and the murder scene—once so precarious that Howe had nearly used them to overturn the whole case—would in this new era have been clinched by Carey through fingerprints from the body and at Woodside.

  By the time Carey retired, he’d personally overseen more murder investigations than possibly any police officer before or since—more than ten thousand, by a Times estimate. But it was the Guldensuppe case that stayed with him. Carey always recalled what his first big case and its “hundred different sources” taught him.

  “In a murder case there is no one obvious clue,” Carey mused, “but all clues are good.”

  And it was just one such murder case, as it turned out, that would bring Augusta Nack into the news again.

  IT WAS A WARM JUNE EVENING in 1909 when a man—a European immigrant, perhaps thirty-five years old—approached a young boy not far from the newsrooms of the Journal and the World.

  “Do you want to make five cents?” the man asked.

  The boy was to guard t
wo large parcels wrapped in black oilcloth, then wait for the man to come back to pick them up. Minutes ticked by, then an hour; there was no sign of the man or the nickel. Just as the boy was losing hope, a passing dog caught a scent and began frantically trying to tear at the packages.

  Inside them, sliced cleanly in two, was a freshly murdered man with no head.

  As Officer Carey hurried over from his newly formed Homicide Bureau, newspaper reporters dashed out of their offices and onto the scene unfolding just down the street. Written in blood on the inside of the oilcloth were the words Black Hand; but this, it was surmised, was a murderer’s ruse to fool the police into blaming an Italian gang. Before a day had passed, the head was discovered under the Brooklyn Bridge, and newspapers had their real victim: a Russian housepainter named Samuel Bersin.

  VICTIM CARVED UP LIKE GULDENSUPPE, one paper announced, while the Evening Journal declared CASE MOST PUZZLING SINCE GULDENSUPPE. This time the police were ready. Scores of detectives tracked the distinctive oilcloth pattern and piled into pawnshops, where they soon found Bersin’s missing jewelry. Reporters followed in hot pursuit, pouncing on the latest theories: Sammy was murdered by a jealous husband; Sammy was robbed for his diamond rings; Sammy was a Russian Jewish anarchist caught in a political squabble. But the most palpable clue was also the most alluring one: Everyone who knew Sammy knew that he had romantic rivals for the hand of a comely Russian émigré named Jennie Siegel.

  Among those swept up in the dragnet around the case was one unexpected bystander: Augusta Nack. With memories of the Guldensuppe case revived, reporters discovered the infamous Mrs. Nack hiding in plain sight just blocks from her old apartment.

  “Mrs. Nack has taken the name of Augusta Huber,” a wire-service article revealed, “and now manages and owns a small fancy goods store at No. 357 Ninth Avenue.” Within hours, Mrs. Nack’s new identity had been exposed to both her neighbors and to newspaper readers across the country; within a month of the Bersin murder, she was in bankruptcy court, her business in ruins. And with that, Augusta Nack vanished from public view again—this time, it seemed, for good.

  But for old-timers on the force, the memory of Gussie Nack was not so easily lost. Still working the streets of New York decades later, they’d recognize her face with a start, then pass quietly onward. Even so, Chief Inspector Ernest Van Wagner admitted that there’d never been any question among these detectives that it was Nack herself “who actually designed and planned” the murder of William Guldensuppe.

  But had she also carried it out?

  It is worth considering why the detectives in the case remained insistent on Mrs. Nack’s equal guilt, even decades later. Neither Thorn’s explanation nor hers fit the evidence. The medical examiner, in examining Guldensuppe’s body, found signs of a desperate fight: a deep stab wound from a knife plunged straight down, wounds to the hand from where he’d grabbed at a blade, and additional glancing or angled stab wounds. These wounds were clean of any fibers, indicating that he’d been attacked while naked. And upon Mrs. Nack’s arrest, the jail matron had discovered bruises on her arm that corresponded in age to the day of the crime. Finally, there was one last humble piece of physical evidence left unaccounted for in the Woodside bedroom. It was the only thing there, in fact, other than the two bullets and a discarded cartridge box: an empty cabernet bottle.

  None of these clues were explained in the trial, in Thorn’s story to Gotha, or in either murderer’s testimony on the stand. But it is possible to conceive of one explanation of what happened that afternoon—one that accounts for all of the evidence. Guldensuppe was stabbed while naked, and stabbed from above when he least expected it. Only one person could have led Guldensuppe to the bedroom of a vacant house, offered him wine, stripped him naked, straddled atop him—and then plunged a knife straight down into his chest.

  That person was not Martin Thorn.

  Guldensuppe would have reached out and grabbed at his assailant’s arm and hand, leaving bruises—and was stabbed across the palm and clumsily in the chest. That is when Martin Thorn would have stepped out from a closet to finish his rival off with a gunshot to the head.

  Neither Mrs. Nack nor Thorn could admit to this. Thorn’s story to John Gotha—the hapless friend who admired his way with cards and women—would quietly omit that he’d triumphed over Guldensuppe by watching him tryst with Gussie. And once Thorn and Mrs. Nack went to trial, each was determined to establish that only the other had been upstairs to commit the murder. If they’d acted in concert, neither could breathe a word of the actual plot. And if DA Youngs suspected the truth, there was nothing to be gained by airing it; he lacked hard evidence against Mrs. Nack. As it was, the prosecution managed to keep the salacious details of Guldensuppe’s anatomy away from the public. The appalling way he was killed would also remain safely distant from Victorian eyes and ears.

  Those who knew better couldn’t quite shake off the chill of seeing Mrs. Nack walk free. She had never really left her old streets—the place where she’d considered herself to be the beloved “Nanty Nack” of young mothers and their families alike. There, Chief Inspector Van Wagner wrote in 1938, she could still be found, covered under the cloak of passing decades.

  “I last saw her a few years ago,” the old detective wrote, “smilingly selling cheap candy in her little store to the unsuspecting and innocent children of her neighborhood.”

  EPILOGUE: THE LAST MAN STANDING

  REPORTERS RECALLED the Nack and Thorn case for years to come, but by the time Walter Winchell hailed it in 1948 as “the first of the great newspaper trials,” he was already speaking of events from his own infancy. The star reporters were long gone: George Arnold, who traced the famed red-and-gold oilcloth for the Journal, had one of the more peaceful retirements by capping off his long newspaper career with a venture into writing novelty songs. The World’s crack reporter, Ike White, went on to expose dozens of Wall Street fraud operations, and courthouse correspondent Julian Hawthorne landed in prison himself for promoting a nonexistent silver mine.

  The yellow-journalism era had taken a toll, though, on Joseph Pulitzer. At the end of the mighty battles over Guldensuppe and Cuba, his advisors estimated that the Journal had burned through about $4 million in Hearst’s family coffers—but that another $5 million was left. That was more than enough to throw knockout blows at the World. The blind and ailing Pulitzer wavered, and finally emerged from the soundproofed mansion where he had ruled by the dictates of a telegraph. He and Hearst met quietly—their one face-to-face meeting—and negotiated a deal. What if they split up the market? The Journal could become the carnivalesque one-cent paper of the masses, and the World would return to being a more respectable two-cent paper, bent once again on bloodying the Sun and the Herald. Just as important, the two papers would band together to fight labor unrest in their ranks.

  The World and the Journal, famed for their crusades against cartels, were now secretly plotting one of their own.

  After a year of delicate maneuvering, their resulting agreement went unsigned. Ultimately, though, the World inched away from sensationalism of its own accord. Joseph Pulitzer never was very happy playing against Hearst’s one-upmanship; in his final years, he quietly came to admire the sober reliability of the New York Times. After Pulitzer’s death in 1911, the World’s proprietor was rehabilitated in historical memory; the yellow-journalism wars faded away, replaced by the rosy glow of bequests to Columbia University and to the writing awards that still bear his name.

  Hearst, though, remained unrepentant. He had always delighted in the blockbuster Sunday editions that the yellow revolution fostered—“a Coney Island of ink and wood pulp,” as one contemporary put it—and he relished the sensational headlines that made them sell. But just as he challenged his spiritual godfather in Pulitzer, and Pulitzer had turned on James Bennett, so too was Hearst attacked. Now it was by Joseph Patterson, a young Chicagoan that Hearst had once hired as a China correspondent. Patterson’s founding in 1919 of th
e New York Daily News upped the stakes in newspaper journalism once again; printed in a bold tabloid format, the paper made its fame by sneaking a shoe-mounted camera into the electrocution of murderess Ruth Snyder and snapping a picture at the moment the switch was thrown. And like Pulitzer and Bennett before him, Hearst seemed rather appalled by his own journalistic progeny. He tried buying out Patterson, and when that didn’t work, he launched his own version—the New York Daily Mirror. The tabloid war long fomented by Hearst had now truly begun, with square front pages and fist-high headlines socking New Yorkers as they stepped out of the subway.

  William Randolph Hearst had always cut a bigger figure than just his newspapers, though. Yet even after parlaying his populism and grandstanding into runs for mayor, then governor, and inevitably for president—he finally settled for a couple of terms in Congress—he never quite recaptured the youthful excitement of his Murder Squad. As the media baron’s holdings expanded into dozens of newspapers, and his persona grew to the mythical proportions immortalized in Citizen Kane, one contemporary mused that the Guldensuppe case remained “a lark and a triumph which he enjoyed more keenly” than any party nomination.

  “Ah well, we were young,” he later reminisced. “It was an adventure.”

  IT SEEMED AS IF that final word on the Guldensuppe case might remain with Hearst himself. But when the media baron died in 1951, there was still another man who hadn’t forgotten about the case—one man still standing. That man was Ned Brown.

  The cub reporter who first found Mrs. Nack’s apartment rose in time to write the World’s “Pardon My Glove” boxing column. He outlasted the newspaper itself; Ned worked in its newsroom until its final hours in 1931, then graduated to a long career handling publicity for Jack Dempsey and editing Boxing magazine. But he never stopped filing ringside newspaper reports, and when his fellow boxing writer A. J. Liebling profiled him in 1955, it was as much in admiration of an era as of a man: Ned was the last Victorian holdout in the New York sports pens.