The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

by Wilkes, Roger

  There are various targets: disappearing images of deer, running rabbits, or the like. All of them are sprung upon the contestants suddenly and as a complete surprise. Before one of these sportsmen—a young lad—as he lies on the ground, firing, there rises what seems to be a dark hedge cut in the middle by a white gate. And on this gate sits a raven!

  The boy tumbles over in a faint. When he comes to, he is ready to make his confession. He was in the field near the Gartree Road that July evening. He had sighted a bird of some kind on the white gate. He lay behind a sheep trough two or three hundred yards away (there is really such a trough) and fired. He killed the raven—but the bullet also killed the girl who rode by the gate at that moment.

  Far-fetched? Very likely. But it’s not unworthy of the great Sherlock!

  THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF STARR FAITHFULL

  (Starr Faithfull, 1931)

  Morris Markey

  Starr Faithfull was found dead on a deserted beach in June 1931. She was the well-to-do daughter of a Manhattan society couple, but her story is a rackety one of murder, cover-up and political intrigue. Her life and unexplained death still fascinates. Police sources were quoted as saying Faithfull—“an aspiring writer” who apparently never wrote anything—had been kidnapped from her home in Manhattan and brought to Long Beach, where she was killed and her body tossed into the surf. The papers also noted—in a way that suggested it meant something to the case—that Faithfull’s close neighbour in New York was the mayor, James J. Walker. Investigators implied that she was a drunken nymphomaniac who frequented “underworld haunts” and “revelled in the company of known killers and desperate criminals”. Police also found her diary that centred on “men, men, men—all sorts of men in all walks of life”. One source said she met her killers at a party aboard a cruise ship, the Franconia. Here, journalist Morris Markey only hints at the back story (he ignores most of Faithfull’s wild shipboard partying and Manhattan society affairs) but his treatment of the case is interesting because he is anxious to suggest a possible solution to the mystery. Puzzled by the strange manner of Starr Faithfull’s death, Markey called on the dead woman’s family and became intrigued by their reactions. His solution seems highly plausible, although no one seems to have thought of it at the time. Markey was the original Reporter At Large for the New Yorker, and many of his articles for that magazine have become classics in journalism schools.

  The heat wave was subsiding. All over the country the committee of American mayors who had been visiting in France were returning to their respective constituents, and these, except in a few churlish instances, greeted them with flags and whistles and even listened to their speeches. Mr Hoover’s offices in Washington were pleasantly devoid of news. And Mr Daniel Moriarty, up with the dawn to meet the tide, was strolling the sands of Long Beach—some twenty miles out from New York—searching for drift that he might turn to a profit. The flotsam that he came upon, finally, was of a fabulous nature indeed. It was the body of a young woman, really a beautiful young woman, clothed in a silk dress and nothing else, and quite dead. Within half a dozen hours the front pages of the country’s newspapers, on that eighth day of June, 1931, had a new name to fit into their headlines. It was a singularly poetic name. Starr Faithfull.

  It lies within the very nature of a mystery story that it must be told backward. The only possible beginning is the corpse. And then things are learned and told about the corpse and the creature that existed before it became a corpse, until at last we do not have a corpse at all, but a living and very human being to remember, with friends and enemies, with hopes and defeats, with sins, and passions, and now and again a few nobilities.

  Now be it observed that the District Attorney of Nassau County, the county in which Long Beach is situated, was a man named Elvin N. Edwards. Mr Edwards was just dusting his hands after sending a prominent thug named “Two-Gun” Crowley to the electric chair when this new sensation, this mystery with the wonderful name, came within his jurisdiction. He had discovered already that publicity was no dainty drink but wine with delight in every bubble. We are indebted to his muscular management of the events that ensued, almost as much as we are indebted to the newspapers, for the strange and fascinating story that was unfolded in the weeks to follow—weeks when nothing much was happening except heat, and an occasional thunderstorm, and President Hoover speaking peevishly to the Emperor of Japan about certain dull happenings in a place called Manchuria.

  Starr was not born Faithfull. She was the daughter of Frank W. Wyman, occupation unknown, and of a Boston woman who possessed what once were called good social connections. Ten years before our story opens, the mother had divorced Wyman and married Stanley E. Faithfull, a retired manufacturing chemist and occasional inventor of devices that never seemed to work. The Faithful ménage, in the spring of 1931, consisted of the mother and the stepfather—whose name had been eagerly adopted by all hands—of Starr, who was now twenty-five, and her sister Tucker, younger by two or three years.

  The first, hurried reports characterized the dead girl as an heiress, “the brown-haired, brown-eyed product of a Boston finishing school, who preferred to be alone, reading volumes on philosophy and kindred subjects.”

  But that impression did not survive the first twenty-four hours of journalistic labor. As always in such circumstances, there were friends eager to talk, and they told the tale of an elusive and difficult young woman, devoted to the proprieties and yet capable of the most bizarre escapades, racing at full throttle to escape from the role into which existence had cast her, and from herself.

  This urge to escape inevitably guided her toward the sea. She had made two trips to England. But in this, her last spring, she had no money for another voyage. So she haunted the liners at their berths, reveling with the tourists as they prepared to sail and then, with such painful reluctance as we may imagine, stepping back ashore at the last minute.

  On 29 May, ten days before her dead body was found, she had been overcome at the last moment by that reluctance. She went aboard the Cunard liner Franconia to see the ship’s surgeon, Dr George Jameson-Carr. She was madly in love with him. Her emotion was not reciprocated, and for several months Dr Jameson-Carr had been embarrassed by her eager attentions, her incessant confessions of devotion. On this day, she was pretty drunk when she went aboard the ship. Drinking was not her vice, ordinarily. Those were, of course, the bootleg days, and because he was terrified of speakeasy gin her stepfather, Faithfull, often mixed a flask of Martinis for Starr to take with her. As often as not she came home altogether sober, the flask still full. But on this day of waning May she was tight—volubly and almost boisterously tight.

  Dr Jameson-Carr sent her away from his sitting room some time before the ship’s sailing hour. But she did not go ashore. She mingled with the passengers, and the Franconia was well down the bay before her presence became known to the ship’s officers. The vessel was stopped, and she was put ashore by a tugboat after a scene in which the doctor’s embarrassment was made public property. The ship, with Jameson-Carr still aboard, of course, sailed on for England.

  The next day, 30 May, she wrote a letter to him.

  On 2 June, she wrote another one.

  On 4 June, she wrote still a third.

  These letters will appear somewhat later on in our narrative.

  June 4, a Thursday, was the day she disappeared from home. She had been, apparently, in normal spirits—which is to say, irritated by her incessant febrile depression, and trying to compensate that emotion with little bursts of gaiety and generosity. The family was low in funds Only three dollars could be spared for her purse. Nobody in the house asked where she was going or when she would be back, and she did not volunteer the information.

  This is the time for our first glimpse at the Faithfull home. (We shall, before the end, visit it again.) Nobody ever was able to find out, not even the strong-minded District Attorney, Mr Edwards, the source of the Faithfull family’s income. There were theories, beginnin
g with blackmail and ending with an international drug ring, but they were mere flights in the tabloids, and nobody ever took them seriously. There is a fairly sound assumption that we are able to make about the family finances, but that, again, belongs somewhat further on.

  However—

  The family lived in a second-floor walk-up apartment at No. 12 St Luke’s Place, in Greenwich Village, three doors away from the home of Mayor Jimmy Walker. The building itself was almost identical with the Walker home, an early New York façade with a high front stoop, not without its attraction to the passer-by. The flat cost eighty-five dollars a month to rent, and it was distinctly not roomy enough for four people. But in it there was more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of very beautiful antique furniture—Empire and Chippendale chests, a buffet by Sheraton. Such things.

  There were, to be sure, manifestations of eccentricity in great abundance in this family. But Stanley Faithfull, according to his lights, was a devoted father even to a bewildering girl who was not his own daughter. When Starr did not come home on the night of 4 June, he was worried. And by nine-thirty the next morning he was at Police Headquarters. There he gave a confidential report to the Missing Persons Bureau—which meant that his wish to avoid publicity would be respected. He also telephoned numerous friends and acquaintances, asking if they had seen Starr, and even wrote notes to certain of the girl’s acquaintances whom he had not met.

  The Police Department put in motion its routine confidential search. It got nowhere. The next news of Starr Faithfull was telephoned by an excited Mr Daniel Moriarty to the Long Beach police station.

  Late in the afternoon an assistant medical examiner reported upon the findings of the first autopsy (there were to be two more). Starr Faithfull had died by drowning, he reported, and her body had been in the water at least forty-eight hours. There were no traces of alcohol, but she had taken from one to two grains of veronal—possibly enough to cause unconsciousness but certainly not enough to cause death. She had also eaten a large meal. There was much sand in the lungs, suggesting that she had still been breathing as she lay in the shallow water at the edge of the beach. There were many bruises, resembling finger marks, on her upper arms. And she had been criminally assaulted. The last phrase was the euphemism of the day for rape.

  Within a very short time, however, the diagnosis of rape began to lose its validity, as other doctors insisted they could find no evidence at all to support it.

  District Attorney Edwards issued the first of his many hundreds of interviews: there was no question whatever but that the girl had been murdered, and he was hot on the trail of the villain who did it.

  Now in order to understand the theory which leaped at once to the minds of detectives and newspapermen, you must be familiar with the geography of the scene. The 130-mile-long, narrow strip of sand called Long Island lies almost due east and west, immediately off the coast of New York and Connecticut. Steamships sailing from New York pass along the length of it as they set their easterly course, and often are in plain sight from the beaches.

  An immediate investigation showed that two big liners, the Mauretania and the lle de France, had sailed for Europe in the late afternoon or early evening of 5 June (and presently we shall examine evidence tending to show rather clearly that this was the day on which Starr Faithfull died). During the late afternoon, she certainly went aboard the Mauretania. And, just as certainly, she left it well before sailing time. There were numerous witnesses to both of these facts. Certain other evidence, not nearly so convincing, indicated that she also went aboard the Ile de France, lying at her pier a short distance from the Mauretania. This could never be definitely proved. But, supposing that she did go aboard the Ile de France, there is no evidence whatever that she left it before sailing time—10 p.m.

  An immediate assumption was almost unanimously agreed upon: the girl had remained aboard one of the ships, secretly, and while the vessel was passing Long Island she had jumped or fallen overboard. The most emphatic dissent from this opinion was delivered in a muted bellow by Mr Edwards. Starr Faithfull had been murdered. No doubt about it. He was promptly joined in this position by Stanley Faithfull. It was an outrage upon the memory of his daughter, he said, to suggest that she had done away with herself. Somebody had killed her. Her death must be avenged.

  Well, naturally, the newspapers were eager to throw away their own theories and subscribe to the theory of murder—the more foul and revolting, the better. A suicide is perishable news indeed. A murder mystery is durable goods, front-page stuff for weeks.

  But even as they cast a solid vote for murder, the newspapers clung to the romance of the ocean liners. Somebody had thrown her overboard. Had Starr Faithfull ever been to Long Beach before in her life? Did she know anybody there? The answer was a reasonably accurate no.

  Meantime the past of the unhappy girl began to emerge. The first item was simple scandal. Just a year before her death she had been in trouble with the police. People heard screams coming from a room in an uptown hotel, and called a patrolman. When he entered the room he found Starr lying naked on the bed, and a vigorous-looking young man in an undershirt regarding her with angry eyes. There was a half-empty bottle of gin on a table.

  The man said he was Joseph Collins, and showed his army discharge papers to prove it. He either did not know or would not tell Starr Faithfull’s name.

  The police officer seemed more than usually dense. Despite the fact that Starr was rather seriously beaten up by fists, he told Collins to get out—make himself scarce—which he did, permanently, never being heard of again. Starr was revived and taken to Bellevue, where she spent the night. The hospital record was brief and to the point:

  “Brought to hospital by Flower Hospital ambulance. Noisy and unsteady. Acute alcoholism. Contusions face, jaw, and upper lip. Given medication. Went to sleep. Next a.m. noisy, crying. People came. Discharged.”

  Her own statement to the hospital people reads: “I was drinking gin as far as I know. This is the first time I have had anything to drink for six months. I don’t know how many I had. I don’t remember. I suppose somebody knocked me around a bit.”

  But the first hint of something darker and more appalling than mere scandal came now with a series of rumors and half hints. It was learned that Starr had been under the care of one or more psychoanalysts. It was also learned that there was something unusual in her approach to the problems of sex. Could it be that Mr Joseph Collins had been deliberately employed to take her to the hotel, not to beat her up, to be sure, but to give her, if possible, a normal sexual experience? And had her reluctance so infuriated him that he completely lost his temper? No proof of that, at any time. Because nobody ever heard of Mr Collins again.

  Now her diary, which she called her “Mem Book,” was picked up by a policeman prowling among the hundreds of books in the little flat (good books they were, too—solid and thoughtful works for the most part). It was written in a sort of shorthand—no names of anybody, only initials—but even its fragmentary nature told clearly enough of a bitter, and frustrated, and indeed a ruined life. Its most interesting feature, to the tabloids, was that it contained passages of eroticism which even they did not feel disposed to print. But a set of initials cropped up persistently: AJP. Sometimes she hated AJP and sometimes she was affectionate in her references, but always she was frightened sick of him. “Spent night AJP Providence. Oh, Horror, Horror, Horror!!!”

  It became news, for a day, that when she was nineteen she spent nine days under mental observation in a Boston sanitarium, and the record showed upon her release that she was “much improved.”

  And there were some revealing dispatches from London. On one of her recent trips there she had been accompanied by her mother and her sister, Tucker. They had lived in cheap lodgings while Starr cut a swath in the town, wearing beautiful clothes, sharing the champagne and jollities of the giddier fringes of aristocracy. On her second trip, alone, she tried to commit suicide. She swallowed twenty-four gr
ains of allonal, but somebody found her and she was revived.

  Even the most cynical of the horde of men and women prying and picking into the brief twenty-five years of her existence knew, by now, that Starr Faithfull was not just another tramp. She was not just another by-blow of the speakeasies, nor a demimondaine like the celebrated Dot King and Louise Lawson who, also, had gone down to violent and early death in those treacherous times. Something about her was pitiful rather than sordid—perhaps even tragic. But what was it?

  At this juncture of the affair I went calling one night on the Faithfulls. Thirty-five or forty reporters and photographers were gathered about the stoop, and I asked how one went about getting upstairs to the flat.

  The only answer was, “You can walk, can’t you? But it’s hot as hell up there.”

  Mr Faithfull was standing thoughtfully in the doorway of his living room, a big pipe in one hand and a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the other.

  “Come in,” he said. “I was just trying to determine the normal weight of the human liver. There are some things about that last autopsy report I don’t like, and I’d like to satisfy myself. Do you know how to translate grams into pounds and ounces?”

  A very large photograph of Starr stood in a leather frame on a table, with a vase of peonies drooping over it. On the table, too, were several volumes on criminology and one on anatomy, and a pad of yellow foolscap with much writing upon its top sheet.

  “The answer to everything lies in that veronal,” said Faithfull. “We’ve got to know exactly how much was given her.”

  “You think she did not take it herself?”

  “Nonsense!” He wrote more figures on his pad.

  Mrs Faithfull came in—a thin woman with what we used to call the touch of good breeding upon her, wearing a nervous smile and offering hospitality in words that tumbled over each other.

  “I’m quite relieved it is just you,” she said. “We thought it might be the police to take Tucker away. One of the reporters told us an hour ago that they were coming to arrest her. We thought he was just saying that to see what reaction he would get, but we were a little upset anyway. That man Edwards out there is likely to do anything to keep his name in the papers. So Tucker went back and got into bed. She was going to say she was too ill to move.”