by Colin Evans
By 1919 what had always been a shaky marriage was teetering on the abyss. In August of that year Becker was hired to drive a party of day-trippers out to Coney Island. Among the passengers was a twenty-year-old woman, with blond, fashionably bobbed hair and gullible eyes that blinked fast behind thick, tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles. Her name was Anna Elias, and while her co-passengers squealed with delight on the various rides and amusements, the curvaceous Anna sat spellbound beside the driver. Becker, amusing and handsome in a coarse sort of way, tossed compliments around like confetti, and was, by his own admission, single and unattached. When he asked to see her again, she jumped at the chance. Pretty soon Anna realized she was hopelessly in love. As summer mellowed into fall and their relationship ripened into promises of a January wedding, Becker even applied for a marriage license in the names of A. Beck and Anna Elias. What should have been the happiest day of Anna’s life came to an abrupt conclusion when her sister, Carrie Rosenweig—who hated and distrusted Becker—burst into the ceremony, grabbed hold of the startled bride-to-be, hauled her outside, and dragged her away. Anna was nothing if not resilient. Laying this disaster to one side, she sneaked meetings with Becker throughout 1920 and that same year took the life-changing step of running off with him to Cleveland, where they set up home as man and wife. With this course of action, Anna knew she had crossed the moral Rubicon, at least so far as her family was concerned. Henceforth, she was a pariah to them, hated and reviled for the “shame” she had brought on their name.
So Cleveland it was. And this was where Anna’s world crashed in flames. Somehow—it was never made clear how—she got wind that Becker had a wife and four children back in New York. Heartbroken, she listened as the man she loved finally admitted his deception. Not that she got the full story—far from it. Even now, Becker ducked and dived, insisting that he and Jennie had never legally married. Maybe this is why, when Anna and Becker returned to New York after just three months, she continued to sleep with him. But more trouble was brewing. Jennie had found out where Anna lived and one day turned up unannounced, catching her husband in flagrante delicto with his young mistress. Once again the punches started to fly.
Anna had reached the end of her tether. Brutalized and humiliated, she would have severed all contact with Becker at this stage, except for one thing; she was now pregnant. In early 1921 she gave birth to a little girl. Each week the occasional father stopped by to pay Anna five dollars toward the upkeep of their daughter, Marie, and to beg her to continue the relationship. As Anna’s will wavered, her parents stepped up their campaign against the two-timing Becker, insisting that she dump this jerk who had ruined her life. The soul-searching was long and deep, but in the end Anna yielded to their advice, upping sticks and moving to Staten Island.
Becker was furious. Like most egocentrics he was unable to stomach any hint of rejection. New York might have been bulging with seven million citizens, but it didn’t take Becker long to track down his missing lover. Once the initial anger wore off, he showered her with protestations of undying love. But Anna would have nothing to do with him, not even when he asserted that he would “get rid of” his wife and marry her. The emptiness of this promise was soon apparent, for it was about now that Jennie finally made good on her oft-repeated threat to leave him. Given the opportunity at last to square what had become a hellish love triangle, Becker flinched. He wasn’t about to swallow another dose of rejection, unpalatable and bitter. No surprises, then, that it wasn’t Anna, but Jennie, whom he ran after, begging his long-suffering wife to return.
As reunions go it was limp and lackluster, certainly not happy. All through 1921 the tension festered; Becker was stealing assignations with Anna whenever he could, still fighting nonstop whenever he was in Jennie’s company. His notoriously short temper was shrinking by the day. And then, in the spring of 1922, a sudden and wholly unexpected thaw warmed Becker’s glacial home life. Friends were astonished to see that instead of hitting each other, the couple were now hitting it off. There was a newfound gaiety in the Becker household, so much so that when they attended a friend’s party on the night of Friday, April 6, 1922, the hostess was delighted to see the Beckers acting more like love-struck teenagers than grizzled veterans of the matrimonial wars. Jennie Linder clucked around the Beckers all night long like a mother hen, ensuring that their plates were never empty for long. The conveyor belt of food—fruit and canapés—continued unabated until Jennie Becker was forced to laughingly hold up her hand and cry, “Enough.” Abe, too, seemed to be enjoying himself. As midnight neared and the party drew to a close, Mrs. Linder waved good-bye to the Beckers and watched as their Dodge sedan disappeared into the chilly spring night, heading north toward the Willis Avenue Bridge.
She never saw Jennie Becker alive again.
The next day Abe went to the police with a curious tale. He’d gone off to work that morning, he said, and left Jennie at their apartment; when he’d returned at noon his wife had vanished. He could offer no explanation for the mysterious disappearance. The description he provided ran as follows: “Mrs. Becker was born in England twenty-five years ago and lived up until the time of her disappearance at 819 East 150th Street…She had blue eyes, blonde hair and good teeth.” He went on to describe the outfit she had worn to the party. “A dark gray overcoat, a white waist [blouse], brown skirt, black lace shoes and black silk stockings and…a dark brown cloth hat. She wore a wedding ring, but no other jewelry, and carried twelve dollars in her purse.” The desk sergeant wearily noted the details, before mentally filing them in the “Forget It” file. Spouses went missing all the time. No big deal. Mostly they came home, and if they didn’t, well, good luck to them. Experience told him that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the disappearance would be of no interest to the authorities.
For someone who’d just been elbowed unceremoniously into the single-parent column with four youngsters to care for, Becker took the dislocation with enviable equanimity. Indeed, those who knew him well couldn’t recall him looking so upbeat. On April 10, he called on Mrs. Linder and let her in on a secret—Jennie had actually run off with a lover. “He said he didn’t care, that his wife was no good anyhow,” was how she recalled it later. At a subsequent meeting he did affect more concern, telling Mrs. Linder that he was still searching for his wife, this time “in the cabarets,” a clear implication that she was hitting the nightspots and living the high life. Mrs. Linder frowned: that didn’t sound like Jennie at all.
With Jennie apparently out of his hair, Becker set out to reclaim Anna. But when he showed up at her house in Staten Island, he received a body blow—she’d started walking out with a new man. Barely able to contain his fury, Becker produced what he said was a telegram from Jennie in England, stating that she’d left America for good. He thrust the telegram into Anna’s face and delivered an ultimatum: him or the other guy. She chose Becker.
So notorious was Becker’s reputation as a womanizer, that few in the neighborhood expressed any open surprise when he moved Anna into the apartment on 150th Street. But behind his back the whispers had begun. Word got around that Becker knew a whole lot more about Jennie’s disappearance than he was letting on. Significantly, most of this gossip was sparked off by Becker’s reckless boasting when drunk. His vanity was boundless and so was his tongue. Insulated from all this gossip—most neighbors shunned her—Anna just got on with her life, thankful that her fortune had turned at last. Once his divorce came through, Becker promised, they would get married. First, though, he needed to straighten out a few details.
One week after Jennie’s disappearance, out of the blue, he sold the Dodge for three hundred dollars and bought a cheaper Studebaker. The hundred-dollar balance, so he would later claim, was earmarked for something else. As the days passed and Becker went about reconstructing his life, the clamor about Jennie’s disappearance kept mounting. The story just wouldn’t die down. Desperate to sweep the gossip under the carpet, he told Anna’s sister, Carrie Rosenweig, who lived ju
st a few blocks away, that Jennie had returned to England and that he intended to get a divorce. She called him a liar, told him to get the hell out of it, and slammed the door in his face.
Others were equally skeptical. Leading the charge was Mrs. Linder. Toward the end of April she confronted Becker with the rumors. He countered by producing a letter, ostensibly written by Jennie and mailed in Philadelphia. It read: “Dear Husband Abe—A few lines to inform you am leaving with another man to whom I was married before I married. [sic] He threatened that unless I do this he will have me arrested. I hope you will be a better father to the children than I have been mother. Your ungrateful wife, Jennie.”
Mrs. Linder, who had known the missing woman for a good many years, studied the letter closely. To her untrained and admittedly jaundiced eye, the handwriting bore no resemblance to that of her friend’s. Nor could she reconcile the sentiments expressed in the letter with the loving mother she had known. Becker? Now he was a different kettle of fish altogether; she could believe anything of that putz—hence her lack of surprise when the amorous truck driver first farmed out his four kids onto some friends, then shooed them into various orphanages.
With his children out of sight, Becker really let down his guard. A few drinks was all it took to loosen his tongue to suicidal levels. Not that he’d ever been circumspect; it wasn’t in his nature. As early as April 7, the day of Jennie’s disappearance, he’d lurched drunkenly up to a friend, Harry Simonwitz, proffered his hand, and smirked, “Congratulate me. I have got rid of my wife.” Simonwitz, nonplussed, had scurried away. On another occasion, when Becker was touting around for someone to adopt his children and a friend, Yetta Weinberg, mentioned knowing a woman who was prepared to adopt one, but was put off by fear of the birth mother’s coming back and claiming them, Becker had leered triumphantly. “Tell the lady to take the child,” he gloated. “I’ll guarantee that the mother will never come back.”
Such intemperance did little to staunch the flow of gossip—which by now had reached flood level—linking Becker to the disappearance of his wife. The stories varied, but some were remarkably detailed, with one version claiming that Jennie had been murdered in a taxicab crossing the Willis Avenue Bridge and then buried somewhere in the Bronx. Viewed from a distance of time, it beggars belief that such rampant gossip did not somehow filter through to the authorities but early immigrant neighborhoods were homogeneous, close communities, deeply distrustful of any outside interference. Many of Becker’s neighbors had grown up in the shadow of the tsar’s terrifying secret police, the Ochrana, and for such people the thought of taking any problem, no matter how grave, to the authorities was unthinkable. This was the dilemma that confronted Mrs. Linder. All summer she twisted and turned, but by mid-November she could bottle up her suspicions no longer. Accompanied by a friend, she went to the police and unburdened herself. Coincidentally, just days later, staff at the Hebrew Orphans’ Asylum decided that little Harry Becker’s persistence deserved at least a token airing, and they too called at the nearest precinct station…
When detectives had completed their initial inquiries into the disappearance of Jennie Becker, they submitted a report to the district attorney’s office. On November 24, 1922, the assistant DA, Albert Cohn, decided that enough evidence existed to question Becker and he was taken into custody. Once behind bars, and denied the damaging impact of liquor on his tongue, Becker clammed up tight. His reticence forced investigators to widen their search. As they delved deeper into Becker’s background, one anomaly leaped out at them almost immediately. According to the employment records of the Empire Fireproof Door Company, where Becker worked, on April 7—the day of Jennie’s disappearance—Becker had not showed up at work, contrary to what he’d told the police at the time of filing his missing persons report. Clearly, he was a liar; but did this make him a killer?
Desperate to answer this question, detectives now switched tactics. In the course of their inquiries, one name had cropped up repeatedly, that of Harry Monstein, a close friend of Becker. Monstein was pulled in for questioning and given one of those old-fashioned “interviews,” the kind that last well into the night, unencumbered by the stultifying presence of any defense lawyer. It worked. By morning Monstein was spilling his guts. He revealed that on April 22—two weeks after Jennie’s disappearance—Becker had begged him to write a letter, making it appear to be from his missing wife, on the pretext that he needed such a document to speed up the institutionalization process for his children. Monstein agreed. To add a flourish of verisimilitude, Monstein acceded to Becker’s suggestion that he travel to Philadelphia, where he duly mailed the letter and topped it off with a telegram, also designed to convey the impression that Jennie had decamped to the City of Brotherly Love. For this little bit of evidence tampering, Becker paid Monstein just ten dollars.
By June, Becker’s confidence had swollen to bursting point. That month, over a shared bottle of booze, he decided to confide in Monstein. Jennie hadn’t run off at all, he slurred. Two men had killed her and buried her body “in the woods.” Monstein’s befuddled brain registered this admission with neither shock nor abhorrence; he, too, had heard the neighborhood scuttlebutt and part of him wondered if this wasn’t another helping of Becker’s braggadocio. Even so, he wasn’t prepared to take any chances: priority number one was self-preservation, and that meant keeping his mouth shut. Until now.
Officers leaned in close over the perspiring Monstein. Long experience told them that the critical psychological moment had been reached. The threats were stark: cooperate or else face a charge of accessory to murder—maybe worse. Monstein, greasy with sweat and scared witless by the thought of a possible appointment with “Old Sparky,” jumped at their offer of immunity if he would turn stool pigeon. On November 27 he was thrown into the Bronx County Jail, and locked in a cell opposite Becker. Monstein’s was the first familiar face Becker had seen in three days. His relief was palpable, and, being Becker, he began blabbing. Although the two men talked in hushed whispers, decibel levels were still high enough for them to be overheard by a detective and a police stenographer who had been stationed in adjacent cells. Monstein stuck to the prepared script, telling Becker that he’d been arrested on suspicion of complicity in Jennie’s disappearance, and that searchers were looking in the dumps all over the city for her body. “They’ll never find it,” scoffed Becker. “It’s not in the dumps.”
Monstein didn’t press. Instead, he mentioned that the police had dug up a woman’s body in the North Bronx. Becker seemed to find this amusing, in light of the fact, he chuckled, that Jennie was buried in the South Bronx. Furthermore, her body was covered with lime and therefore unrecognizable.
Every word entered the stenographer’s notebook, and listening ears really perked up when Becker’s tongue finally severed all contact with his brain and he bragged that someone named Norkin had killed Jennie and buried her “so deep they couldn’t find the body in 100 years.” Just a hundred bucks it had cost him, Becker crowed, best deal he’d ever made.
He’d barely finished talking before he was hauled back into the interview room. For the next twenty-four hours, he was “questioned vigorously,” according to the DA; Becker saw it rather differently, later claiming that he’d been beaten like a rug for hours on end. Whatever the means employed, the information obtained proved decisive.
That same day, Reuben Norkin, aged thirty-one, who owned an auto repair shop at 140th Street and Southern Boulevard, close to where Becker worked, was arrested on suspicion of murder. When told of Becker’s accusation, Norkin erupted like a volcano, swearing it was all a crock and he’d done nothing wrong. But a night in the police cells in 1920s New York could have a wondrously liberating effect on the memory, and by morning, looking considerably the worse for wear, Norkin was a changed man. Determined—or so he said—to set the record straight, he led officers to his shop and began pointing out various spots in the ground. Detectives grabbed shovels and started digging. But each spot came up bl
ank.
Eventually, Norkin tired of the parrying and directed officers to an adjacent two-acre vacant lot, once a junkyard and now surrounded by billboards and hedges. Neatly sidestepping the scraps of iron, twisted axles, and broken wheels, he led detectives to a slightly raised area of earth. A tentative prod with a stick released a distinctive odor. At 5 P.M. on November 29, the search for Jennie Becker came to an end.
Exhumation of the remains was overseen by the assistant medical examiner for the Bronx, Dr. Karl Kennard. Since gaining his medical degree in 1899 at the University of Kentucky, Kennard had worked mainly in the New York area and had taught pathology at the Fordham Medical College until financial difficulties had forced that institution’s closure on June 16, 1921. He watched keenly as diggers uncovered a disused pit that had three walls made of brick and the fourth of soil. Judging from the amount of ash, it had once been a boiler vault. At a depth of four feet, shovels struck into some mattress ticking, beneath which lay a sack. Inside this sack were human remains. Lime had been liberally scattered on the corpse, though not enough to complete decomposition or mask the foul smell. The body was dressed in a coat, sweater, and dress, all falling to pieces. Once Kennard had completed his preliminary examination, the body was removed and taken to the Fordham Hospital morgue, where the OCME maintained its Bronx headquarters. There, Kennard conducted an autopsy.
He began by stripping away the rotted fabric of the garments. As he did so a clay-encrusted object fell to the floor. He bent to pick up what looked like a wedding ring. Careful washing revealed an inscription on the inside of the ring, but even under a magnifying glass the lettering was too worn to be deciphered. There was little to be gleaned from the clothing: a brown knee-length overcoat, a light dress of blue and white check, and a sweater worn over the dress. The only other items were a pocketbook that contained $1.18 and some keys.