by Colin Evans
Kear ran a few suggestions past Gettler. For instance, the couch stood in the living room—was it possible for a single horsehair to blow along the corridor, past the kitchen and library, and into the bedroom? Gettler shook his head. Too heavy. No, something—or someone—had transported that hair into the bedroom. The likeliest mechanism, Gettler reckoned, was on someone’s clothing; one of the officers, maybe. At a time when crime scene preservation was often slipshod and far less highly regarded than is nowadays the case, the possibility of innocent contamination by an investigating officer was an ever-present possibility. Despite this, Kear had doubts. Insofar as he could recall, the bedroom had been off limits to all but essential personnel; most of the activity had been in and around the bathroom. Gut instinct whispered to him that the answer lay elsewhere. A process of elimination left him with just the two furniture men. But their statements, corroborated by each other, showed that neither had entered the bedroom.
But what if one of them was lying?
Right from the outset, Kear had nursed serious misgivings about the skinny little guy who’d helped Theodore Kruger lug the sofa up to the Tittertons’ apartment. There was something spooky about him; he had a kind of vacant semi-smirk that jarred on the nerves. Kear’s suspicions were shared by everyone connected with the case, and these qualms soon hardened into something considerably more concrete when a background check showed that Kruger’s twenty-four-year-old assistant was no stranger to the law.
John Fiorenza’s problems had begun in his childhood. At age twelve—one year after his father died—the Brooklyn-born youngster had been arrested for stealing a bicycle and placed on probation. Two years later his mother married for a second time. Everyone agreed that Fiorenza’s stepfather, Ignazio Cupani, did his best, but the boy shunned him with biblical intensity, retreating into a monastic silence when at home, communicating only through a series of nods and shakes of the head. The long-suffering Cupani later recalled that in eleven years he had only ever heard Fiorenza talk six or seven times. At school, Fiorenza was equally withdrawn, impervious to kindness or cajoling alike, and dropping out in the eighth grade. In 1932 the law caught up with him a second time, when he received another probationary term for stealing a car. Judicial leniency, however well intentioned, failed to straighten out his wayward personality. Quite the reverse. Fiorenza seemed to think he’d been given a license to steal. His next crime had a Samuel Beckett–like absurdity. For some reason, he broke into a store and stole two bass drums, a trombone, and several copies of sheet music. The haul totaled two hundred dollars, but it might as well have been a handful of dirt for all the good it did the bungling Fiorenza. With no idea why he stole the cumbersome musical instruments or how to dispose of them, he soon wound up in jail. And this time, as far as the courts were concerned, he’d run out of chances. On March 15, 1933, he was shipped off to the Elmira Correctional Facility. A year behind bars at the notorious ex–Civil War prison camp was reckoned to be punishment enough, and March 1934 saw him back out on the streets as a parolee. His liberty was brief. In July 1934 this criminal mastermind decided to steal another auto—without either noticing or caring that the chauffeur happened to be perched on the running board at the time—a violation of his parole conditions that saw him returned to Elmira. Upon his release, parole officers found him a job at Theodore Kruger’s furniture store. Here, he swept floors, cleaned windows, ran errands, and paid close attention when the boss tried to teach him the skills and nuances of reupholstering furniture. From all accounts, he was a good, honest, reliable worker, even if Kruger did find Fiorenza’s permanent and unwarranted grin utterly infuriating.
After digesting all this biographical detail, Kear ticked off some mental boxes: On the one hand, Fiorenza had a criminal record, was undeniably erratic, and mentally subnormal; in the plus column, recent evidence pointed to someone who had mended his ways, was engaged to be married to a young woman in the Bronx, and was holding down a steady job.
What eventually tipped the balance in Kear’s mind was a prison psychiatric report on Fiorenza that had characterized him as “weak, emotional, given to self-pity and inadequate to meet emergency situations.” Such a person, Kear reasoned, might easily topple over the brink into violence. By the same token, such a personality could be a sucker for flattery.
Crime solving can take many forms and now the investigation embarked on a radical step. Each afternoon, Lyons, Kear, and other high-ranking officers would convene and trade the latest developments with Gettler and Swartz. In these discussions, Fiorenza’s name figured prominently, with everyone agreeing that he looked like the strongest suspect. It was decided that the best way to flush out Fiorenza—if he indeed was the killer—was through a subtle campaign of psychological warfare designed to target his vanity. Red herrings were deliberately planted in the press, professing that baffled investigators had never known a case plagued with so many blind alleys. One particularly cruel, though necessary device involved playing up the “secret lover” angle. Right from early on in the investigation Nancy Titterton’s fidelity had never been in question, but Kear wanted Fiorenza to assume that investigators were actively pursuing some mystery paramour. Each day careworn detectives would call at Kruger’s shop, to shoot the breeze with Fiorenza, tell him how stymied they were, and ask his opinion of the case.
All his life, the sallow-faced little man with the bony, scarred jaw had been a nobody. Suddenly he was the focus of attention. At first he was circumspect, suspicious even, but the unremitting flattery soon hit the mark, loosening his tongue and boosting his ego, sweeping him along on a tidal wave of suicidal overconfidence. The detectives played him like a hooked fish. In between comments about the weather and wisecracks about the Dodgers—wouldn’t you know it, manager Casey Stengel was already downbeat about the Bums’ chances in the upcoming season—they encouraged Fiorenza to theorize about the murder. Primed by the sensational newspaper reports, he jumped on the secret lover theory. The detectives dutifully logged his suggestions, all the while praising Fiorenza for his sharpness and inventiveness, contrasting it with their own stupidity. Then one would hotfoot it right away, ostensibly to follow up his brilliant lead. The next day the detectives would be back, glumly announcing another dead end, only to find Fiorenza ready for them. This time the surreal wasteland of his imagination had conjured up a mythical pots and pans salesman. Strong chance someone like that was the culprit, offered Fiorenza cockily. More awed expressions would follow as the officers berated themselves for being so dumb. “We’ll be sure to look into that, Johnny,” was their unvarying response. With his ego bloated like a football, and by now utterly convinced that the police had eliminated him from any list of potential suspects, Fiorenza grew sloppy. Unwittingly he let his guard slip, revealing details of the crime that the police were certain hadn’t made it into the public domain.
And then there was that strange business about the phone call.
It was the emergency call made from the apartment just after the discovery of the body. When questioned, Theodore Kruger recalled that it was Fiorenza who’d phoned the police, and during the call he’d cried out, “There is a woman tied up in the bathroom.” And yet, as far as Kruger knew, Fiorenza had never even looked in the bathroom, and he, sure as hell, hadn’t told him that Nancy Titterton was tied up in the tub. So how had the young man known?
This inconsistency hadn’t struck Kruger until the police quizzed him at length about the order of events on that fateful day. Even then, Kruger refused to buy in to the investigators’ suspicions. Sure, he’d known all about Fiorenza’s background when he’d hired him two years previously, but he was prepared to give the kid a chance. And in that time Fiorenza had not once let him down. “I trusted him with money,” Kruger told the police. “He was good-natured and a hard worker. Sometimes he gave money to poor people.”
In the meantime, while this war of nerves was being fought out in a Manhattan upholsterers, Gettler temporarily abandoned his laboratory at Bellevu
e and moved to a specially appointed laboratory at New York University, where the facilities were more sophisticated. By April 17, he had established that the rope contained istle, a brush fiber made from the Agave lechuguilla plant, commonly found in Mexico. Now it was a question of canvasing twenty-five rope manufacturers across three states and asking them to check their stocks to see if they had supplied the rope that figured in the death of Nancy Titterton. Responsibility for this time-consuming task was delegated to Detectives James F. Hayden and Frank T. Waldron.
Gettler’s more advanced analysis of the rope paid off. Responding to a police circular, an executive of the Hanover Cordage Company of York, Pennsylvania, contacted the NYPD to say that his firm made rope using istle. Would it be possible to examine the actual sample? A detective immediately set off on the 185-mile journey to York, carrying with him that all-important length of swollen cord. As soon as technicians at the sprawling Hanover factory on North Street and Broadway saw the rope, they had no doubt that it had rolled off their machinery. Moreover, a check of their order book showed that several rolls had been delivered to a New York City wholesaler. When Hayden and Waldron called on this wholesaler and asked to examine company records they struck pay dirt: A single roll of this twine had been shipped to Theodore Kruger’s Manhattan store just one day before the murder.
There was now enough evidence to take Fiorenza into custody. Suddenly, all those officers who had been so buddy-buddy before were now snapping around him like hungry jackals. The transformation totally unhinged him. Adding to his discomfiture was the fact that even before this latest development his boss had been questioned far more intensely about Fiorenza’s whereabouts on the morning of April 10. And what Kruger had to say punched huge holes in Fiorenza’s claimed alibi. Kruger recalled that Fiorenza had showed up for work late. He had called at 9 A.M. to say that he had to see his probation officer that morning and would be delayed getting to work. Kruger, a refreshingly enlightened employer for the time, said that he understood. He heard nothing more until around 11 A.M., when Fiorenza again phoned, to say that he was running late. Another hour or more passed before Fiorenza finally strolled into work. He was his usual vacuous self, the perma-grin unaffected by the blistering that Kruger gave him. But Kruger was a kindly soul, not the type to bear a grudge, and before long the two had applied themselves to the task of reupholstering the Titterton couch. That took until 4 P.M., at which time they loaded it into the truck and drove to Beekman Place.
When confronted by Kruger’s statement, Fiorenza simply shrugged and stuck to his story: he had left home at 1601 Sixty-fifth Street, Brooklyn, and gone to his probation officer, after stopping off to see a couple of friends on the way. When he’d arrived at the probation office, he found it closed. To kill some time, he’d next tried to get into Judge John J. Freschi’s court in the General Sessions Court Buildings, only to be turned away because the public gallery was too crowded. He’d hung around the lobby for a while, then called Kruger.
Immediately, the interviewing officers pounced—April 10 had been Good Friday, and this meant the General Sessions was closed.
Fiorenza’s already shaky alibi was now in tatters and he knew it. “I was lying,” he muttered after a long silence. “I was up around Forty-second Street and Times Square.” At this point one of the interviewing detectives tossed the length of twine onto the table in front of Fiorenza and told how it had been traced to his place of work. Another surly silence followed. But after a long night in the cells, punctuated by several exhausting interviews, John Fiorenza finally ran out of lies.
He told how he and Kruger had picked up the couch on April 9, and during this visit he had somehow formed the extraordinary impression that Mrs. Titterton found him sexually desirable. All that night he had lain in bed, fantasizing about an assignation with the slimly attractive authoress in her upmarket apartment. By breakfast time his fevered imagination was close to bursting. He phoned Kruger and used the excuse of having to visit the probation office to explain his absence from work; then, after stuffing a fifty-two-inch length of the twine into his pocket, he had headed for Beekman Place.
He had arrived at Nancy’s apartment some time after 10:30 A.M. She had been surprised to see him, because Kruger had suggested that the sofa wouldn’t be finished until that afternoon. Despite her shock, she admitted Fiorenza anyway. Burbling some nonsense about finding an alternative site for the couch, Fiorenza maneuvered his way through the apartment. Nancy followed a pace or two behind, clutching some flimsy garment in her hand. When they reached the bedroom he suddenly whirled around, grabbed the garment from Nancy’s hand and shoved it into her mouth, stifling any cry for help.
She struggled frantically and for a brief moment dislodged the gag just long enough to plead hysterically, “Please don’t hurt me!” Fiorenza’s response was to hurl her onto the bed, face against the counterpane, wrench the cord from his pocket and bind her wrists. In a blind sexual frenzy he tore at her clothing with such force that hooks and eyes were scattered like confetti on the bed and floor. Then he raped her.
Afterward, Nancy lay whimpering on the bed. In the next instant, Fiorenza made the irrevocable transition from rapist to sex killer. Grabbing the pajama top and dressing jacket that lay on the bed, he twisted them into a double-knotted noose around her slim neck. Then he began to pull tighter and tighter. At first his victim struggled feebly, then she fell limp.
He dragged her inert form—naked except for rolled-down stockings and a slip—into the bathroom and threw her facedown in the tub. His delirium fueled the ludicrous notion that he could somehow stage the scene to make it appear as if Nancy had drowned accidentally in the tub. Except he couldn’t find the bath plug. He searched frantically. Every second only added to his panic. Eventually, he ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, ran back to the bathroom, and sliced the twine in two or three places, gathering up the pieces as he went. But in his rush he overlooked the telltale strand of twine that lay hidden beneath Nancy Titterton’s violated body.
Aware that he and Kruger would be calling back at the apartment later that afternoon, he had deliberately left the door ajar as he left, driven by the misguided belief that if he were one of the people who’d found the body, it would help exclude him as a suspect.
After leaving the apartment, he had sauntered along Fiftieth Street until he passed an ash barrel. Here he ditched the pieces of twine used to tie Nancy. He stopped at a candy store on First Avenue to phone Kruger. This was at 11:00 A.M. Then he’d taken a languid stroll to work, arriving over an hour later, smiling like always, unconcerned and unruffled. When he and Kruger returned to the apartment that afternoon with the sofa, Fiorenza made sure it was his boss who found the body.
On April 21, ten days after the killing, Fiorenza was manhandled unceremoniously and very publicly back to Beekman Place, where, with the aid of a small detective who played the part of Nancy Titterton, he reenacted the strangling. With a police photographer snapping shots at every turn, Fiorenza walked everyone through the precise sequence of events that had led to Nancy’s death, although he now claimed she was still breathing when he left.
When Fiorenza was formally charged with the murder of Nancy Titterton, Police Commissioner Lewis H. Valentine was generous with the credit. He hailed Gettler as the “the greatest toxicologist in the world.” Assistant District Attorney William F. O’Rourke joined the chorus of praise, holding up the twine in front of reporters and saying, “This little piece of rope upset the supposed perfect crime.” His boss, William C. Dodge, added the only cautious note, saying his department was holding back a few details, because “we don’t want a repetition of the Vera Stretz case. We want a few tricks up our own sleeves that will surprise the defendant.”
Jury selection for Fiorenza’s trial began on May 19. His defense was two pronged; initially it hinged on the claim that Nancy had been the victim of the mysterious prowler who had terrorized the neighborhood recently, but when defense lawyers were unable to locate a sin
gle witness who had seen this probably apocryphal prowler, all hopes were then pinned on a plea of insanity.
This was always going to be a tough sell. For close to a century New York, like most states, had adhered to the M’Naghten Rule as its yardstick of mental competence. Based on an 1843 British murder trial in which the defendant was acquitted by virtue of insanity, the M’Naghten Rule held that someone could not be legally culpable for a crime if they were so deranged as to be unaware that what they were doing was wrong.* While no one disputed that Fiorenza was, in the words of his own counsel, “never quite normal”—even O’Rourke described him as “wacky”—he was clearly someone who fell outside the M’Naghten framework. By his own admission he had gone to the apartment determined to have sex with Nancy, and he had gone carrying a length of cord in case he needed to subdue her. When he left the apartment, all his subsequent actions were consistent with someone consciously trying to cover his tracks, fully aware of the illegality of his actions.
Throughout the trial Fiorenza remained cloaked in his invariable silence. Gonzales was the first witness and there wasn’t a flicker of emotion from the defendant as New York’s chief medical examiner identified the knotted pajama top as the instrument of death. Extremely graphic photographs of the body in the tub and the various torn garments in the bedroom and bathroom prompted a similar torpor from the prisoner. Only when the piece of twine was produced did Fiorenza flinch, moistening his lips ever so slightly. He was smart enough to realize that this was the critical piece of evidence. Defense counsel Henry Klauber did his best, attacking Gonzales in a long convoluted cross-examination and drawing the witness into admitting that certain blood clots found in the body were technically consistent with causes other than strangulation. But it was a short-lived victory. When Dodge stood up on redirect, he didn’t waste words. “But the discoloration in this case, Doctor, was caused by strangulation?” he asked Gonzales. “Exactly,” was the emphatic reply.