The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (12 page)

The bathroom didn’t look quite right, somehow. It was clean
—too
clean, for a place that had been vacant for nearly two months. There was no dust on the floor. Kneeling down, the detectives found a splatter of dark drips on the planking between the bath and the wall, and some hard-scrubbed sections of flooring around them; something had soaked into the wood, impervious to any effort at cleaning. They procured a carpenter’s plane and, as the property’s caretaker waited helplessly, shaved samples off the floor. Inspector’s orders: that stuff was going to NYU’s Loomis Laboratory for analysis. Another detective followed the drain line to the ditch outside and
scooped up a bucket of the mud around the mouth of the drainpipe; it, too, would go the lab for testing.

As more men dug out the cellar and probed the cesspool in vain for Guldensuppe’s head, a crowd gathered outside. Word had gotten out around the block and then back on Newspaper Row as well.
Reporters were pouring over on the East River ferries, hungrily circling the local residents.

Why, yes, neighbors said, they
had
heard a strange cry last Friday.
Something like—
“Help! Help! Murder!”
One of them had even poked his head outside to investigate. But he hadn’t heard anything more, and, well, you hear all sorts of crazy things from neighbors’ homes. But a trio of local busybodies—Mrs. Buttinger, Mrs. Ruppert, and Mrs. Nunnheimer—had indeed noticed when Mrs. Braun and another fellow stopped by here a week earlier.

“
I clean my windows every Friday afternoon,” recalled Mrs. Nunnheimer, “and somewheres about three o’clock, I noticed while at this work the trolley car stop at our corner. I turned my head and saw a nicely dressed man get off. He held his hand out and received a small yellow hand bag from the lady who sat next to him, and then he gave her his hand and helped her down. What fixes it in my mind is that he was so polite and nice about it.

“In
fact,
” she added chidingly to her husband, “I said to my
husband
that night when he came home that I was jealous of such niceness and that I wished he had such
elegant
ways.”

Another neighbor said she’d seen a second dapper gentleman enter the house the previous Friday, well before the couple arrived.
So
two
men had gone in there. Now that she thought of it, that seemed like a strange thing.

She’d only seen one come out.

WORLD WIDE HUNT FOR MARTIN THORN
, the
Evening Journal
declared from the sidewalks as the detectives made their way back to the city. While they were gone, Inspector O’Brien had cabled Washington and asked the State Department to put out an alert for Thorn in all U.S. and foreign ports. Newspaper readers worldwide had been deputized into the dragnet:

Suspicious that Thorn had already fled the country, the inspector had his eye on two ships in particular.

“Cable dispatches have been sent to Europe this afternoon,” he explained, “for authorities to intercept the arrival of passengers on the steamers
City of Paris
at Southampton, and the
Majestic
at Liverpool, in order to cause the arrest of Martin Thorn, if by any chance he should have sailed.”

But the detectives had a different destination that night: the hulking five-story building at 410 East Twenty-Sixth Street, where
NYU maintained its newly built Loomis Laboratory. True, most police only resorted to a place like this when the third degree failed; tweezers were for the evidence that a nightstick couldn’t reach. But
the forensics lab represented the future. The
first guide to preserving crime-scene evidence had been issued in Austria just a few years earlier, and
the first book on cadaver fauna—the hatching of maggots and other bugs on a body—was issued not long afterward in Paris. New spectroscopes could find arsenic in blood, and high-powered optics could
match the microscopic shells on a dead man’s muddy boot with a specific ditch.
A careful practitioner might even extract the wadding from a gunshot wound—that is, the paper used in a cartridge to tamp down the powder—for if some old incriminating scrap had been reused to pack a homemade cartridge, he could read the writing on it.

For reporters and cops alike, the Loomis Lab was an intoxicating blend of theoretical science and visceral practice. It was the kind of place that, crammed with the latest instruments of pathology and detection, also
featured asphalt floors for easy hosing down after especially bloody cases. And for the expert on those cases, the detectives knew just where to take their evidence: the second-floor office of Dr. Rudolph Witthaus, professor of chemistry and toxicology.

With his round spectacles and an immense white mustache that drooped like tusks, he embodied one
World
reporter’s judgment of him: “
Witthaus looks like a sea-lion.” But the man was a real-life Sherlock Holmes, and a Sorbonne scholar. Witthaus could discourse on book collecting while detecting cyanide hidden in some mail-order patent-medicine stomach salts, or a fatal dose of arsenic and antimony in the moldering exhumed remains of a dead husband. The author of the standard text
Medical Jurisprudence
, Witthaus had quite literally written the book on science and crime. And yet he owed much to his fictional counterpart; it was the immense popularity over the previous decade of Holmes and Watson, after all, that had nudged the public into expecting some scientific acumen in modern policing.

A trip to Witthaus was as good as a new Conan Doyle story, though, and detectives already knew his work well. Long before tracking down the oilcloth used to bundle Guldensuppe, Detective
Carey had collared a physician suspected of poisoning his wealthy wife to feed his brothel-and-gambling habit. It was Professor Witthaus who’d gotten the goods on that one. He’d deduced that the wily doctor had
poisoned his wife with morphine, and then applied atropine to her eyes to cover up the telltale dilation of her pupils.

But the professor was also, well … peculiar.

An ardent art and book collector, he was well known for possessing such gems as the
original handwritten manuscript of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. The story might well have been his own.
Witthaus, it was whispered, could be a bit of a Mr. Hyde himself. Even as the detectives delivered their Woodside samples to the professor, Witthaus was battling an allegation of attempted murder. His wife was demanding a divorce because, she claimed, he’d been poisoning her. A bottle of malaria medicine he’d prepared for her was the damning proof: Under analysis, it had been found to contain a massively toxic concentration of quinine—a poison, as it happened, on which Professor Witthaus was the world’s greatest authority.

But he was the best expert in the art of murder they had, even if he was a little
too
expert. They’d already brought him some suspected murder weapons the day before, and for starters, he could tell them that O’Brien had been going at it all wrong with his interrogations.

This is not blood
.

The pistol, saw, and knife found at Mrs. Nack’s flat on Ninth Avenue?
There wasn’t a speck of blood on them, he determined. The
saw and knife weren’t even the right fit for the cuts made on the body. It was no wonder that she had been so unimpressed when O’Brien made her sit in a room with the “evidence”: He’d laid out the wrong weapons. He might as well have tried to frighten her with tea cozies.

The scrapings taken from under Mrs. Nack’s fingernails might prove useful, though; that
strategy had secured a conviction six years earlier in the East River Hotel disembowelment of Carrie Brown, a Bard-quoting prostitute nicknamed “Shakespeare.” The case remained controversial. Inspector
Byrnes had publicly dared Jack the Ripper to set foot in his precincts, and some suspected that the fellow had crossed the Atlantic to take up his challenge. With his career on the line, Byrnes roped in a hapless Algerian sailor nicknamed “Frenchy” and had his scrapings and clothing analyzed.
They revealed the
telltale viscera of dismemberment—bile from the small intestine, tyrosol from the liver—plus roundworm eggs, blood, and stomach matter resembling the corned beef and cabbage that the victim had eaten earlier in a hotel bar. Frenchy was sent to Sing Sing for life, though more than a few observers had been left unconvinced by Byrnes’s ulterior motives in using this strange new form of evidence. This time, though, there was less doubt; nobody was blaming the new inspector for this murder, and along with the mud and wood shavings from the Woodside house, such evidence might look convincing indeed.

Still, they’d have to wait for results, and the warm summer air and firecrackers outside hinted at why: An entire city was about to knock off work for July 4.

HOW COULD THEY BE ASKING
these questions at a time like
this
?

Charles
Buala was bustling around his wine shop on West Twenty-Sixth Street; it was where Parisian expatriates could still find an old-fashioned
cabaret
, the kind of place with sawdust floors and rickety tables, where you could split a bottle of cheap Spanish red with a neighbor and play dominoes into the hot summer evenings. But this was a Saturday, the busiest night of the week, and the eve of one of the busiest holidays of the year. New Yorkers stocking up for the next day’s picnics and parades streamed in for bottles of champagne, sauterne, and sweet muscat; some were already well sauced.

Charles Buala didn’t have time to talk, not about their new tenants or anything else. Mrs. Buala, though, was a kinder sort; her beauty and ready smile were not the least of the store’s charms for its habitués.

“
I do not remember these people very well. I thought they were German Hebrews,” she said in her French accent. That’s why the German caretaker, Mrs. Hafftner, had done so much of the talking with them. “The woman was fleshy, but I cannot remember more. If she was light or dark I do not know.”

Talking in English was still a bit difficult for Mrs. Buala. Her thirteen-year-old niece was eager to help.

“Auntie says she couldn’t even tell how the woman was dressed,” the niece piped in.

“The woman was about thirty-five or thirty-six. The man the same. He was good-looking.” Mrs. Buala smiled. “With alight-colored moustache, but I do not remember if it was straight or curly. He was a good-looking man, though—I remember that.”

The trolley bells rang from the lines at either end of the block, and more customers piled in. Mr. Braun, she remembered, said he was a shoemaker in the next town over, on Jackson Avenue.

“They wanted a house to live in. The rent is fifteen dollars a month. They said they would take it.… They were nice looking people, and I thought it was all right. They said they might move in last Tuesday, if not, then Thursday.”

She was still puzzled by the whole affair. “It is very strange,” she added. “They said they would move in. Why did they not?”

But Mr. Buala had a pretty good idea why. Breaking away from his rush of shoppers, he dug out a letter and passed it over to the detectives. He’d received it that morning:

The handwriting was immediately recognizable to the detectives—it was the
same as in the “Fred” letters to Mrs. Nack—the very ones they now knew to be Thorn’s. And this one from “Frank Braun”?
It had been postmarked only yesterday at the West Thirty-Second Street post office, six blocks from where they now stood.

Martin Thorn was still in the city.

THE FOURTH OF JULY
wasn’t much of a holiday for
Detective J. J. O’Connell. While his colleagues across the river were taking the Sunday off, going to church, or settling in for parade duty and fireworks accidents, he and his partner, Detective Boyle, were arriving in Queens for another search of the crime scene. Newsboys hawked thick Sunday editions the whole way over.

MURDER TRACED IN DUCK TRACKS
, roared the
Herald
.

THE HOUSE OF DEATH!
declared the
World
.

HAIR PULLING MATCH!
added the
Press
. Well, some local news staples didn’t change much.