The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

by Wilkes, Roger

  While the publication of Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget” created a brief flurry of interest in Mary Rogers, it must be remarked that this interest was confined largely to readers of Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion. By 1842 the Leatherheads had given up their hope of obtaining the cash reward and had reverted to their old, less complex practice of restoring stolen merchandise. By 1844 the Leatherheads had been replaced by the more efficient, better-paid Municipal Police, and High Constable Jacob Hays was in retirement. As for the press, it had turned to matters of more topical interest. With each passing month, as the Mary Rogers case receded in time, the chances for its solution became more difficult. For one thing, popular interest, always fickle, had subsided, and with it the pressure that stimulated police activity. For another, the mortality rate among the suspects had mounted in rapidity—and violence.

  On Friday, 8 October 1841, Daniel Payne followed his betrothed to an early grave. On that morning a boatman, walking down a path to the Hudson River at Weehawken, passed the much-publicized thicket. He saw a man stretched on the ground. The man was Daniel Payne. Beside him was an empty bottle of laudanum. He was alive when the boatman reached him, but lapsed unconscious and never recovered. Two days later a coroner’s jury agreed that he had committed suicide, but decided that his death might also be attributed to “congestion of the brain, brought about by irregular living, exposure, aberration of the mind”. His friends announced that from the day he learned of Mary’s death Payne had lived almost exclusively on a diet of rum, and had probably drunk himself to death.

  A month later Mrs Loss was also dead. One of her sons had been tampering with a loaded gun, when it accidentally discharged. The bullet struck her. As she lay dying, she summoned Justice Gilbert Merritt. She said she had a statement to make concerning the fate of Mary Rogers. According to the New York Tribune, Mrs Loss had the following deathbed confession:

  “On the Sunday of Miss Rogers’s disappearance she came to her house from this city in company with a young physician, who undertook to procure for her a premature delivery. While in the hands of the physician she died, and a consultation was then held as to the disposal of her body. It was finally taken at night by the son of Mrs Loss and sunk in the river… . Her clothes were first tied up in a bundle and sunk in a pond … but it was afterwards thought that they were not safe there, and they were accordingly taken and scattered through the woods as they were found.”

  After Mrs Loss’s death, her sons were closely questioned. They refused to confirm their mother’s confession. The authorities also discredited it, and it was soon forgotten.

  On April Fool’s Day 1878 Mme Restell, hounded by Anthony Comstock and fearing a jail sentence (she had once served a year on Blackwell’s Island), donned a diamond-studded nightgown and stepped into her bathtub. Minutes later she was dead by her own hand. She had cut her throat. “A bloody ending to a bloody life,” was Comstock’s epitaph. The Police Gazette only regretted that she had expired without a word about Mary Rogers.

  In the more than one hundred years that have passed since the death of Mary Rogers, every other suspect went to his grave in silence. Yet no one was permitted to rest in peace. For the mystery of Mary Rogers provided too fascinating and gruesome a game to be affected by any time limit. Though the $1,195 cash reward may have long since expired, the pursuit of a solution continued to hold rewards of its own. The reason is plain: a solved crime is a mere spectator sport, but an unsolved one remains an invitation to participate.

  “There is no more stimulating activity than that of the mind, and there is no more exciting adventure than that of the intellect,” Willard Huntington Wright once remarked. “Mankind has always received keen enjoyment from the mental gymnastics required in solving a riddle.” Few unsolved crimes, it is true, have possessed those elements of murder most foul, yet complex, with clues and suspects sufficient, yet bizarre and simple, to provide riddles of enduring quality. But there have been a handful that managed to meet all specifications. The destruction of Andrew and Abby Borden, in Fall River, Massachusetts, was such a riddle. The shooting of Joseph Bowne Elwell, the bridge expert, in his New York apartment, was another. The discovery of Starr Faithfull on a Long Island beach fulfilled the stringent requirements. And certainly the savage slaying of Julia Wallace in a Liverpool suburb while her husband, William Herbert Wallace, searched, or pretended to search, for an insurance prospect at the nonexistent Menlove Gardens East has, in a few decades, become “the perfect scientific puzzle”.

  However, the mystery of Mary Rogers, more than most, has stood the test of time as a mental exercise because it offers a challenge provided by only a few other unsolved murders. While it had the standard ingredients—the beautiful victim known to celebrities, the provocative clues from sailor’s knot to the arrangement of apparel at Weehawken, the colourful collection of suspects ranging from lovers to abortionists—it also had the genius of Edgar Allan Poe. Thus, when we transport ourselves in time back to that sweltering July morning in 1841 and begin the game and the hunt, we not only compete with the police and press of the period, but we challenge the analysis and deduction of the world’s first great detective-story writer. In short, we have the added excitement of pitting ourselves against Poe.

  Ever since Poe’s death in 1849, armchair amateurs at detection have begun the game by attempting to discredit the master’s theories before proceeding with their own. Will M. Clemens, who visited Sybil’s Cave and the Weehawken thicket in 1904 for Era Magazine, decided that “the confessions mentioned by Poe are of doubtful authenticity”. Edmund Pearson after studying contemporary accounts, concluded that “Poe, in writing fiction about the case, was in the position of being able to depart from fact when he liked, and adhere to it when it suited his purpose; that he was first and last a romancer, and a devotee of the hoax; and that the theory that he actually solved the mystery of the death of the real Mary Rogers is not proven, and is very doubtful.” Russel Crouse, after pondering “The Mystery of Marie Roget”, stated: “As an actual aid in the solution of the crime it is of no more use than the less literary contributions of the stupid and bungling police of the day. For Poe’s ratiocination stems from untrustworthy and highly controvertible rumour rather than from fact.”

  Several other commentators on crime have been less harsh with Poe. They have seen some merit in his deductions, and allowed for the possibility of his being proved right in the future. A quarter of a century ago Winthrop D. Lane reopened the case for Collier’s magazine. He announced that if Mrs Loss’s deathbed confession was correct, it vindicated Poe completely. “He absolved Payne and Crommelin of complicity,” said Lane. “He said no gang did the murder. He advanced the idea of a fatal accident under Mrs Loss’s roof (though he had no idea of the nature of the accident)—and here he made an extraordinarily shrewd guess. He thought the articles of clothing might have been placed in the thicket to divert attention from the real scene—and here he was exactly and uncannily correct.”

  William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr, after his own probings into the case, doubted that it would ever be solved. But he had no doubt that if new evidence were uncovered, it would be evidence generally in support of Poe’s theories. “We shall know the truth only if it was somewhat as Poe and Ingram say, if there was a confession by a man of influential family, if this was known as an inside story, and if someone on the inside wrote the secret down in a document which survives and is to come to light.” If this document revealed the murderer as a naval officer, possibly the son of a Secretary of War, then Poe would have triumphed entirely over his critics. “For all his idle argument about bodies in the water,” wrote Wimsatt, “his laboured inconsistency about the thicket and the gang, for all his borrowing of newspaper ideas, or (where it suited him) indifference to newspaper evidence, despite the fact that he was so largely wrong and had to change his mind, he did fasten on the naval officer.”

  But if not Poe’s naval officer, then who else?

  As early as 1869 a mystic
and lecturer, Andrew Jackson Davis, who had been acquainted with Poe, presented his own solution to the Mary Rogers case in the form of a novel called Tale of a Physician. Davis thought Mary had become pregnant by a wealthy lover, who then took her to a New York City abortionist, probably Mme Restell. When Mary died on the table, the lover paid off and fled to Texas.

  In 1904 Will M. Clemens still had the opportunity to interview several of Mary’s contemporaries about Hoboken. Most of these elders felt that Mary and her “swarthy” escort had both been murdered inside Mrs Loss’s inn by her three unrestrained sons, for purposes of either rape or robbery. In 1927 Allan Nevins thought that the responsibility for the death of Mary Rogers “was not the work of Payne but of another lover”. Nevins believed that Mary had been seduced, and had died of an illegal operation. In 1930 Winthrop D. Lane discovered the original records of Mary Rogers’s inquest in the dusty basement of the Hudson County Courthouse. After reading these and pursuing other evidence, Lane pointed the finger of guilt at Mrs Loss. He regarded her dying confession of the crime as the truth.

  “Mrs Loss’s confession,” wrote Lane, “has had a curious history. It seems to have failed to get itself accepted as the truthful explanation of the affair … And yet it is the most likely explanation. Why should she make such a confession if it were not true? She was on her deathbed—and had nothing to gain unless it was a clear conscience. A mother is not likely to implicate her son in so serious an affair unless there is some powerful reason. It is less likely that she lied than that the others, for reasons entirely unknown to us, failed to make use of the confession.”

  The reason, perhaps, that the confession was not fully acted upon was that its existence was of doubtful authenticity. After the New York Tribune reported Mrs Loss’s dying statement to Justice Merritt, the Justice promptly wrote an open letter to the Courier and Enquirer denying the confession and stating that the Tribune’s story was “entirely incorrect, as no such examination took place, nor could it, from the deranged state of Mrs Loss’s mind”. The Tribune replied that it had obtained its story from two of Justice Merritt’s magistrates. The Herald challenged the Tribune to print the names of the magistrates. The Tribune retreated into hurt silence.

  Like all the others who have studied the facts of the case, I, too, have played the game. Among the major suspects, my choice for the most suspicious is Alfred Crommelin. I believe that Mary Rogers was his mistress at the time she was engaged to marry Payne. Why, then, the rose in his keyhole? Because she wished to tell him, before aborting his child, that she still loved him. And how, then, his fortuitous arrival at Sybil’s Cave? Because he knew where her body had been disposed of by the abortionist, and he knew where it might be found, and wished to be immediately on hand to identify it and see that it received Christian burial. But how, then, did Crommelin have an alibi for the Sunday? Quite logically because he was not present when Mary died, but with friends, who established his alibi.

  To my mind, the most stimulating aspect of the Mary Rogers affair is the broad scope of possible suspicion. A damaging indictment can be constructed against almost anyone remotely connected with Mary Rogers. There is no limit to the boundaries of one’s fancy or surmise. Consider the oft-overlooked John Anderson, tobacconist, who was Mary’s employer. He was beside her for long hours each day. He walked her home. He had, surely, an eye for a well-turned ankle. It was thought, on newspaper row, that he had encouraged her first disappearance. Had he perhaps encouraged her second also?

  In 1887 the New York Tribune reported that John Anderson had hired Edgar Allan Poe, whom he had long known as a customer, to write “The Mystery of Marie Roget” in order to divert suspicion from himself. While this titbit opens up delightful possibilities, its veracity is certainly to be questioned. It appears that Anderson lived on to a senile old age. After his death in 1881, his will was contested on the grounds of legal insanity. The fight was still in the New York courts during 1901, when Mary Rogers made a ghostly appearance before the bar. In the tug-of-war involving Appleton v. New York Life Insurance Company, it was revealed that old Anderson had claimed he knew who killed Mary Rogers. He knew, he told relatives, because she told him. She had often appeared before him as a nightly apparition, and during one such nocturnal tête-à-tête she had revealed the name of her murderer. Unfortunately, Anderson kept the name “a spiritual secret”.

  Among other peripheral suspects, in a category with the Broadway tobacconist, I would be inclined to include the seemingly harassed Mrs Rogers, proprietress of the historic rooming house on Nassau Street. An impoverished old woman, to be sure, and ailing, of course. Yet how did she manage to maintain her house? The boarders seem to have been so very few and far between. Certainly there must have been another steady source of income. The son in South America? Possibly. Or Mary?

  Does it strike a blow at motherhood and country to suggest that Mrs Rogers, out of fear of bankruptcy, employed the beautiful cigar girl for the pleasure of her guests—and of visitors to her vacant rooms? Assuming this premise, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Mary was trapped in pregnancy, and that her mother took her to an abortionist, under whose instruments Mary expired. Then it would have been Mrs Rogers, grief-stricken, who disposed of the body with the aid of Crommelin or another.

  Or was the secret murderer of Mary Cecilia Rogers one of the most illustrious names in literature? Was the murderer Edgar Allan Poe himself?

  Poe knew Mary Rogers when he dwelt in New York City, and in the half-year before her death he frequently travelled from Philadelphia to New York. Might he not have seen her again? Not at the boarding-house, not he, a married man. But at cafés or hotels—or on outings to New Jersey. She was beautiful and gay, and would have served as a welcome escape from the neuter Virginia and the dominating Maria Clemm and the hounding Graham. And of course he would have attracted her. He had some social station; he was published; he was brooding and brilliant.

  Might not Poe have been the “swarthy” gentleman who accompanied Mary to Weehawken? And there, in the thicket, in one ofhis drunken, narcotic rages, might he not impotently haveattempted rape, or even actually raped her, and then been forced to silence her forever? His record of alcoholic rage with women is well known. It is a fact that in July 1842, bleary with drink, he took a ferry to New Jersey to see his old Baltimore sweetheart, Mary Devereaux, who was then a married woman. Poe, his eyes bloodshot, his stock under his ear, was already in Mary Devereaux’s house, waiting, when she returned from a shopping-trip with her sister—most fortunately with her sister. Poe fell upon her, screaming: “So you have married that cursed————! Do you love him truly! Did you marry him for love?”

  Mary Devereaux held firm. “That’s nobody’s business; that is between my husband and myself.”

  But Poe pressed after her. “You don’t love him. You do love me. You know you do.”

  While, on this occasion, Poe was finally pacified and sent packing, he may not have left Mary Rogers so easily.

  But all of this, I confess, is speculation. As to actual evidence that Edgar Allan Poe murdered Mary Rogers? I can only repeat once more that we are playing a game …

  After Mary Cecilia Rogers was removed from the Dead House in mid-August of 1841, she was buried in the New York City metropolitan area. No one knows today the exact position of her final resting-place—except that she may be found still in the pages of “The Mystery of Marie Roget”.

  CHECKMATE

  (Julia Wallace, 1931)

  F. Tennyson Jesse

  The Wallace case of 1931 is regarded as the classic English whodunnit, a labyrinth of clues and false trails leading everywhere except, it seems, to the identity of the murderer. It remains, in many ways, a nightmare of a case: every shred of evidence seems to invite equal and opposite meaning, and critics have praised its chess-like qualities. The setting is wintrily provincial, the milieu lower middle-class, the style threadbare domestic. J B Priestley’s fog-filled Liverpool remembrance of “trams goin
g whining down long sad roads” is the quintessence of it. Events turn tantalizingly on finical questions of time and distance; knuckle-headed police jostle with whistling street urchins for star billing, while at the centre of the drama stands the scrawny, inscrutable figure of the accused man, William Herbert Wallace, the Man From The Pru. Wallace’s wife Julia has been found murdered on her front parlour rug, and the killer has made a mysterious telephone call, but was it Wallace himself fashioning an alibi or an unknown man in the shadows?

  F(ryniwyd) Tennyson Jesse (1888–1958), great niece of Tennyson, the Victorian Poet Laureate, was a novelist and criminologist who edited six volumes of Notable British Trials. Her best-known novel, A Pin To See The Peepshow (1934), is based on the Thompson–Bywaters murder case of 1922. Miss Jesse’s short essay on the Wallace case, written in 1953, appears here for the first time.

  William Herbert Wallace was an insurance agent employed by the Prudential Insurance Company and he lived alone with his wife Julia in a small modest street of grey two-storey houses at Anfield, Liverpool. He was a quiet and studious man of rather frail appearance and he customarily wore steel-rimmed spectacles. He may have taken undue pride in his fine bushy mustache but that we shall never know. He was fond of intellectual pursuits and his behaviour was gentle, considerate and sweet-tempered. Julia was a delicate fluttery little woman of his own age—they were both fifty-two—who painted graceful water-colours and appears to have shared her husband’s intellectual pretensions. She took no part in the local activities, such as they may have been, but was content to listen to her husband’s views on the new atomic science and on his stoic philosophy, and pleased to give an accomplished if somewhat rusty accompaniment on the piano to her husband’s earnest efforts on the violin. He, on the other hand, was a chess-player of no mean order and several evenings a week he would set out for his Club at the City Café to join his fellow addicts. Monday was competition night so, whatever mutual arrangements he might make with Julia on other nights for music practice or reading aloud, on Mondays he invariably went to his Chess Club. For eighteen years he and his wife had lived amicably, even affectionately, together, with never a harsh word, and for the last sixteen years they had shared this humdrum routine under the humdrum roof of No. 29 Wolverton Street. They were childless but whether from choice or cruel chance is not known. No other man, no other woman, seems to have disturbed emotionally the domestic peace of this fond couple.