Killer Colt (16 page)

To a great extent, Colt held Samuel Adams to blame for his financial predicament. Earnings from his textbook largely depended on the business he was able to transact at the big trade sales held periodically in New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Boston. Strictly limited to members of the industry, these were major auctions where publishers could dispose of their merchandise with maximum efficiency, and booksellers from around the country could acquire their stock at bargain prices.
⁷

Because of production delays with the new edition of his book, Colt had already missed a recent trade sale conducted in New York City by the auction house of Bangs, Richards & Platt. That lost opportunity made it all the more urgent for him to have his books ready for an upcoming event in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, there had been problems with the binding of the book. For the previous three years, Colt had employed a binder named Ballou. Adams, however, had a business arrangement with a different binder, a fellow named Charles Wells. Though Colt was perfectly satisfied with Ballou, regarding him as “one of the finest men in the world,” he had agreed—at Adams’s urging and from “the purest feelings of charity” toward the financially strapped printer—to give the job to Wells.
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As of Thursday, September 16, however, the books—which had to be shipped off to Philadelphia at once if they were going to be part of the impending trade sale—were still not back from the bindery. Colt was determined to visit Charles Wells first thing in the morning and demand that the work be completed immediately. In the meantime, he was in a dark mood. Earlier that day, preparing to construct new shipping crates for his books, he had borrowed a handsaw from Mercy Octon, wife of the building’s superintendent. When another tenant, a picture framer named Charles Walker, knocked on his door a few hours later and asked to use the saw, Colt (as Walker later testified) “came to the door, opened it but a very little way … and told me to go to hell.”
⁹

O
n Friday, September 17—the day that James Gordon Bennett broke the news about the discovery of Mary Rogers’s belongings in the thicket in Weehawken, New Jersey—John Colt paid an early morning visit to Charles Wells’s bindery at no. 56 Gold Street. Colt was relieved to learn that four hundred copies of his accounting text would be ready in time for the upcoming Philadelphia trade sale.

In the course of their conversation, Wells—whose financial affairs were closely tied to Samuel Adams’s—inquired about Colt’s outstanding printing bill. Colt assured him that the money would be forthcoming just as soon as he received the proceeds from the Philadelphia sales. After discussing a few other trivial matters, Colt departed.
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•   •   •

Several hours later, around noontime, Samuel Adams rose from the table where he had been dining with his wife, Emeline, and made ready to leave their home. He was dressed in a black coat and vest, a white cotton shirt, a black, high-collar neck band known as a stock—a standard item of men’s fashion during that period—and gambroon pantaloons. On the little finger of his left hand he wore a gold ring, and in his vest pocket he carried the engraved gold watch he had taken as collateral from his delinquent customer, Lyman Ransom.

His wife, as she later stated, did “not know where he intended to go when he left home.”
²

Not long afterward, Mr. Adams appeared at his office, where he attended to various business matters. At some point, a clerk named John Johnson, employed at City Hall, dropped by to pick up a batch of documents that had been printed for his employer and exchanged a few words with Mr. Adams before taking his leave.

An hour or so after his departure, the shop foreman, Hugh Monahan, brought Mr. Adams the proof sheets for the October issue of the
Missionary Herald
. After checking them over, Adams left to deliver them to the office of the Board of Foreign Missions at the Brick Church on Beekman Street. As it happened, the City Hall clerk John Johnson, also a member of the church, was at the office too, having stopped by on a small errand. He would later identify the time of Adams’s arrival as approximately 2:00 p.m.
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•   •   •

Adams remained at the headquarters of the Board of Foreign Missions for less than fifteen minutes. He then proceeded to Charles Wells’s bookbinding shop, where he learned about John Colt’s earlier visit. Colt, said Wells, was “very anxious to the get books off to Philadelphia as soon as possible.”

“Go ahead and ship them,” Adams replied. “I am to get the proceeds.”

Wells did not conceal his surprise. “There must be a misunderstanding between you,” he said, explaining that Colt also “expected to receive the proceeds.”

Upon hearing this news, Adams became visibly agitated—“vexed and excited,” as Wells later described it. Exclaiming that he would “go see Colt” at once, he hurried from the office.

The time, Wells subsequently testified, was “about three o’clock.”
⁴

•   •   •

Situated in the northeast corner of City Hall Park was a circular brick building called the Rotunda. It had been erected in 1817 by the artist John Vanderlyn upon his return from Paris, where—thanks to financial support from his patron, Aaron Burr—he had gone to study in the atelier of the neoclassicist François Antoine Vincent. During the first years of its existence,
Vanderlyn’s imposing New York City gallery housed a number of his panoramic paintings, including
Panoramic View of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles
and
The Battle of Waterloo
, as well as his depictions of Adam and Eve in a state of semi-undress. Though the scandal created by the public display of these partially nude figures drew the predictable crowds of gawkers, Vanderlyn’s enterprise—often considered the city’s first art museum—proved a “complete financial failure.” The “unfortunate artist was forced to surrender his property to the city,” which employed it “successively as the home of the Court of Sessions, the Naturalization Office, and the Post Office.”
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Shortly after 3:00 p.m. on September 17, the City Hall clerk John Johnson, having completed an errand at the Rotunda, was emerging from the building when he spotted Samuel Adams walking briskly up Centre Street toward Broadway. Johnson had already seen and spoken to the printer twice that day, first at Adams’s shop, then at the Board of Foreign Missions office. This time Adams “took no notice” of the clerk. A look of grim determination on his face, the printer strode toward the corner of Broadway and Chambers.

“I turned and looked after him,” Johnson later said, describing the last time he ever set eyes on Samuel Adams. “He kept on.”
⁶

A
lmost certainly, the noise that Asa Wheeler and his pupil heard from the neighboring room did not sound precisely as they later described it: “like the clashing of foils, as if persons were fencing.”
¹
Though a lethal weapon was involved, the noise was generated by the impact of blade against bone, not metal on metal.

There are good reasons why the two men might have been mistaken. Immersed in their lesson, they were not paying close attention to the goings-on next door. The intervening wall would also have distorted the sound. And though it was a cold and drizzly day, the Broadway-facing windows of Wheeler’s office had been raised, filling the room with the ceaseless clamor of the great thoroughfare and obscuring any noise from next door.

Still, while it might not have sounded exactly like the striking of swords, the sound was sufficiently jarring to startle them from their work.

“What was that?” said Wheeler, looking up from the sheet of ruled paper on which he had been inscribing a basic bookkeeping exercise for his student.

Seated beside him on the bench, Wheeler’s student—a sixteen-year-old named Arzac Seignette, who was there for his first day of lessons—replied that he had no idea.

Rising from the bench, Wheeler crossed his room and stepped into the hallway, Seignette following close behind. The time was around 3:15 p.m., Friday, September 17.

With his ear pressed to Colt’s door, Wheeler listened intently. Silence. Kneeling, he put his eye to the keyhole, but the drop was down on the inside
of the door. In his right hand, he still clutched the steel pen he had been using when he and Seignette were interrupted by the strange noise. Inserting the tip of the pen into the keyhole, he slid the drop aside and peered into Colt’s room.

From his highly restricted viewpoint, he could make out “a man with his coat off bent over a person who was lying on the floor.” According to his later accounts, he watched for a full ten minutes, until the stooping figure straightened up and moved to a table “on which there were two men’s hats.”
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Quickly, Wheeler rose and—instructing Seignette to keep a close eye on Colt’s door—hurried up to the top floor, where he knocked on the door of the landlord, Charles Wood. Receiving no response, Wheeler tried the doors of several other occupants, but no one was in, “it being the dinner hour.”

As he was descending the stairs, he encountered Law Octon. An elderly African-American fellow who resided on the third floor with his wife, Mercy, Octon worked as the building superintendent and served as a deacon in the Zion Baptist Church.
³
At Wheeler’s urging, Octon accompanied him to Colt’s office and—using the pen to open the drop—looked through the keyhole. Octon, however, could see nothing and, after a few fruitless minutes of peeping, returned to his apartment.

Convinced that Colt was inside, Wheeler tiptoed down the flight of stairs, then returned with a heavy tromp and rapped sharply on Colt’s door—a ploy, as he subsequently explained, “to make Colt think he had a caller and open the door.” The stratagem did not work. No one answered.

By then several more of Wheeler’s students had shown up, along with John Delnous, a twenty-six-year-old bookkeeper who was interested in renting Wheeler’s second room at the end of Colt’s tenancy. Wheeler immediately explained what had happened. At first, Delnous laughed off his suspicions. True, there had evidently been a strange commotion in Colt’s room, followed by a peculiar, prolonged silence. Still, there might be an innocent explanation. Wheeler was so convinced that something was seriously amiss, however, that when he asked Delnous to go find a police officer, the younger man agreed.

He returned to say that the “officers were all presently engaged but one of them, named Bowyer, promised to come within a half hour.”
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In those days, before the creation of a professional police department, the city was “inadequately protected” by an “archaic system” that had barely
evolved since colonial times. Thirty-one constables and a hundred city marshals made up the bulk of the daytime force. At night, the policing of the city fell to a “patchwork corps” of watchmen, made up of moonlighting day laborers—stevedores, mechanics, teamsters, and the like. These part-time defenders of the public order—who patrolled the streets after dark and stood guard in sentry boxes—wore no uniforms. Besides a thirty-three-inch wooden club, their only badge of office was a distinctive leather helmet resembling a fireman’s old-fashioned headgear and varnished to the hardness of iron. While not precisely laughingstocks, these amateur lawmen were, as one early historian puts it, not held “in especial reverence or dread” by the city’s criminal element, who derisively referred to them as “Leatherheads” and made them the butt of assorted pranks. A favorite was “upsetting a watch-box with a snoring Leatherhead inside it or lassoing the sentry-box with a stout rope and dragging it along with the imprisoned occupant inside it.”
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Along with Delnous and a pair of students named Riley and Wood, Wheeler waited in his office for Bowyer’s arrival. Given the dismal state of law enforcement at that period, however, it is no surprise that Officer Bowyer never showed up.

When dusk fell, Wheeler tried again, sending the two students out into the streets in search of a policeman. They returned a short time later with a message from the neighborhood officers, who explained that they had no authority to enter Colt’s room and suggested that Wheeler continue to keep watch. Soon after, Riley and Wood left for the night. Delnous went out to refresh himself with a cup of tea, returning at around 7:30 p.m.