Killer Colt (15 page)

•   •   •

In the weeks following the murder, the police focused their attentions on one suspect after another. Daniel Payne, Mary’s fiancé at the time of her death, was rumored to have killed her in a jealous rage when she abruptly
broke off their engagement. A young sailor named William Kiekuck—a former boarder at the Rogerses’ lodging house—fell under suspicion because (according to the coroner’s report) her bonnet had come undone during the murder, then was retied beneath her chin with a “sailor’s knot.” A neighbor named Joseph Morse—a philandering, wife-beating cad and a regular at Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium—was arrested in Worcester, Massachusetts, after fleeing New York in the wake of the crime. Another of Mary’s male acquaintances, one Archibald Padley, was taken to the city prison and subjected to a prolonged interrogation on evidence so slight as to be virtually nonexistent.
²⁰

In rapid succession, each of these suspects was cleared and released from custody. By the end of August—despite a one-thousand-dollar reward raised by private citizens and the promise of a pardon by Governor William Seward for any accomplice who would come forward and identify the killer—the police were no closer to a solution.

It was not until the middle of September that the public learned of a sensational development in the case. At its center was a widow named Frederica Loss, proprietor of a popular roadhouse not far from where Mary’s body had been discovered. Several weeks earlier, while out collecting sassafras bark, Mrs. Loss’s two sons, twelve and sixteen years of age, had reportedly come upon some articles of Mary Rogers’s apparel—including a silk scarf, petticoat, and handkerchief monogrammed with her initials—within a dense thicket of beech trees and briar shrubs. The little hollow within the thicket “was stamped about, and the branches were broken, and the roots bruised and mashed, all betokening that it had been the scene of a very violent struggle.”
²¹

Mrs. Loss immediately reported the discovery to the police, though it didn’t hit the papers until Friday, September 17, when James Gordon Bennett devoted an entire page to the story, complete with a woodcut engraving of Mrs. Loss’s inn under the headline “The House Where Mary Rogers Was Last Seen Alive.” According to Bennett, the evidence at the scene confirmed his own pet theory that Mary had been murdered by a gang of “miscreants.” Giving free rein to his most lurid speculations, he declared, “It appeared … as if the unfortunate girl had been placed upon the middle of a broad stone, her head held forcibly back, and then and there horribly violated by several rowdies and ultimately strangled.”
²²

As it happened, on the very day that New Yorkers were poring over this harrowing story, another “awful atrocity” was taking place in their midst. Before long, it would supplant the Mary Rogers case from the papers. It would also provide Edgar Allan Poe with the raw material for another classic work of fiction—this one not a tale of mystery and detection but of sheer grotesque horror.

D
espite his distinguished name, Samuel Adams was sufficiently obscure that virtually no records exist of his sadly abbreviated life. The few surviving documents show that he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1811 and, as a boy, apprenticed in the printing establishment of Smith & Parmenter at no. 9 Market Street.

Along with such weighty tomes as the
History of the General or Six Principle Baptists, in Europe and America
, Smith & Parmenter published both the popular newspaper the
Literary Cadet and Rhode-Island Statesman
and the weekly quarto the
Toilet, or, Ladies’ Cabinet of Literature
. Like other publishers of the time, they also worked as job printers, offering “to execute any business in the printing line,” including “books, show-bills, cards, shop bills, lottery tickets, and blanks of every description, at the shortest notice, and in the first style.”
¹

In 1826 the senior partner of the firm, Samuel Jenks Smith, wed a popular poet named Sarah Louisa Hickman, author of a frequently anthologized verse, “White Roses” (“They were gathered for a bridal! / And now, now they are dying, / And young Love at the altar / Of broken faith is sighing”). Three years later, Smith and his wife left Rhode Island for Cincinnati. Sometime around 1832—the exact date is unclear—they moved to New York City, where Smith founded a weekly periodical, the
Sunday Morning News.
²
Whether Smith was instrumental in bringing his former apprentice to New York City is also unclear, though it is certain that, by 1836, Samuel Adams was residing in Manhattan and running his own
printing business at no. 38 Gold Street with an older partner, Frederic Scatcherd.

Though they began modestly enough by producing such works as M. Purvis’s catchily titled pamphlet
On the Use of Lime as Manure
, Scatcherd and Adams were soon turning out a range of handsomely made books, including editions of James Boswell’s
Life of Samuel Johnson
, Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America
, Joseph Rodman Drake’s
The Culprit Fay, and Other Poems
, and
The Gospel Good News to Sinners
by Henry James, Sr. Within two years of its founding, the firm had gained such a high reputation among the literati of New York that, upon the announcement of the forthcoming publication of William L. Stone’s
Life of Joseph Brant
, the critic for
American Monthly Magazine
could confidently assert that “as it is to be issued from the elegant press of Messrs. Scatcherd and Adams, the public may expect a beautifully printed book.”
³

In 1839, however, the firm suffered a severe blow when Frederic Scatcherd died of consumption. By then Adams was wed to the former Miss Emeline Lane and was residing at no. 23 Catherine Street, a short walk from his printing shop. With the loss of his more experienced partner—and with the country in the throes of the worst financial crisis since the Panic of 1819—Adams fell on difficult times. By the summer of 1841, he was behind in his mortgage payments, owed money to his workers, and was being threatened with a lawsuit by a creditor.
⁴

Feeling increasingly besieged, he began to take a belligerent tone with customers behind on their payments. One of these was a young merchant named Lyman Ransom. During the preceding two years, Ransom had hired Adams to do roughly $1,500 worth of jobbing work—advertising circulars, handbills, and so on. Though Ransom had never failed to pay his debts, he had fallen a bit behind and owed the printer $110 on a note due August 31, 1841. A week before then, he showed up at the Gold Street office to ask for an extension.

Adams immediately flew into a rage. After enduring several minutes of verbal abuse—during which Adams alternated between bitter accusations that “everybody was trying to cheat him” and pitiable laments that he was desperate for money “and could not pay his hands”—Ransom offered his gold watch as partial payment. A handsome piece engraved on the back
with an image of the U.S. Capitol Building, it was worth $100, according to Ransom. Adams agreed to take it at a value of $85, with the balance of the unpaid bill due in cash. Several days later, the beleaguered printer attempted to sell the watch to a neighbor named Nicholas Conklin for $95.
⁵

With his business in trouble, Adams clung to the work thrown his way by the various organizations he belonged to. Thanks to his membership in the Brick Church on Beekman Street, for example—where he and Emeline also sang in the choir—he was hired to print the
Missionary Herald
, the monthly publication of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church.
⁶
By joining the Apollo Association for the Promotion of Fine Arts in the United States—an organization dedicated to nurturing American artists and fostering an appreciation of their work among the general public—he was able to secure the job of printing its biannual exhibition catalogues.
⁷

Precisely how he became acquainted with John C. Colt is another of the many mysteries surrounding Samuel Adams’s life. What we do know is that they met sometime around 1838 and that, by the summer of 1841, Colt had contracted with Adams to produce the ninth edition of
The Science of Double Entry Book-Keeping.
⁸

O
n the northwest corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, across from City Hall Park and less than a block away from Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium, stood an imposing edifice called, for self-explanatory reasons, the Granite Building. A full four stories high, it would later be converted into a popular hotel named the Irving House before being occupied by Delmonico’s restaurant in the decade leading up to the Civil War.

In the fall of 1841, it housed a variety of tenants, many connected to the arts. On the top floor was the gallery of the Apollo Association, where, from nine in the morning until nine at night, visitors could view works by some of the nation’s most prominent artists, among them William Dunlap, Rembrandt Peale, Asher Durand, and Thomas Sully. The sculptor Harris Kneeland kept a studio in the building, as did Edward Augustus Brackett, whose statuary display
The Binding of Satan
opened for public exhibition in the spring of that year. Several early daguerreotypists, including John Johnson, Alexander Simon Woolcott, and Augustus Morand, rented space in the building, as did assorted picture-frame makers and dealers in artists’ materials.

Other tenants were engaged in more prosaic pursuits. A number of stores, including a pharmacy, a bookseller, and a “fancy goods” shop, occupied the ground floor, while a phrenologist named Dr. E. Newberry conducted his quackery upstairs on the third. On the second floor was the office of a gentleman named Asa H. Wheeler, a teacher of bookkeeping and penmanship who tutored private students in his rooms.
¹

Wheeler, as he would later testify, had known John Colt for three years.
Indeed, along with other respected figures in the field, he had supplied a written testimonial for Colt’s accounting text that was prominently featured in advertisements for the book (“I would recommend this work to such as wish to gain a knowledge of the principles of Book-keeping, and as a book of reference for the experienced”).
²
In early August, Colt had come to the Granite Building to ask Wheeler about renting the smaller of his two adjoining rooms for six weeks. Wheeler was amenable to the arrangement, and the two agreed that Colt was “to pay … ten dollars at the end of four weeks, and five more at the end of six—making fifteen dollars in all.”
³

Colt’s room, its lone window facing Chambers Street, was a dreary place—a solitary “uncarpeted office … of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance,” as Herman Melville later pictured it.
⁴
Its sole furnishings were a few comfortless chairs, a plain table, a trunk, and a wooden box measuring roughly three feet long and two feet in height and width. The latter had been constructed by Colt himself, who assembled all the shipping crates for his books. A combination hatchet-hammer, the tool he employed for that purpose, lay on one corner of his table.

Though he would later deny it, Colt, like Samuel Adams, was under intense financial pressure in the fall of 1841. Proud and prickly under the best of circumstances, he had become increasingly surly in his dealings with demanding creditors. In early September, for example, a clerk named George F. Spencer arrived at Colt’s office to collect an overdue payment on behalf of his employer, a bookseller named Homer Franklin. Colt responded by hurling profanities at Spencer and threatening to “pitch him out of the window.” Around the same time, when a hotel keeper named Howard demanded settlement of an unpaid bill, Colt reportedly flaunted a scar on his arm. “Take care what you say,” he had warned, darkly intimating that he had gotten the scar “from killing a man who had once dunned him for money.”
⁵

Asa Wheeler himself was involved in a nasty run-in with Colt over money. When Wheeler approached his tenant at the start of September and asked, in a perfectly civil tone, for his fifteen-dollar rent, Colt had exploded into such a violent temper that Wheeler was taken aback. Mild tempered by nature, Wheeler let the matter drop, feeling that “it was not worth getting wrathy about.” Once Colt had calmed down, he offered Wheeler a number of his textbooks in payment, and the two “were on familiar terms again.”
⁶