The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (13 page)

Woodside had hung out its bunting for the holiday. A blazing sun rose over the village’s preparations, promising a fine day in root beer and cider sales for the local merchants. But not, it seemed, on account of the Independence Day parade. Something strange was happening in the sleepy neighborhood of Woodside. It began slowly as the detectives walked up Second Avenue—a smirking urchin here, a girl screaming with hilarity there—and slowly gathered force. They came by ferries; they came by trolleys; they came up the roads with their flat caps and angelic curls, with penknives and cheap lockets, dusty rock candy in their pockets and blades of grass between their teeth.

The streets were filling with children.

Boys and girls, some brandishing their flags, thrashed around behind the house—the
Den of Murder, the press called it—and into
a field of cattails where cows grazed. Others went wading into the local pond, feeling for the mucky bottom. Still more beat the bushes and jabbed sticks into malarial ditches by the roadsides. A
rumor had spread of a $1,000 bounty on William Guldensuppe’s severed head, and the city’s children were hooting with delight. A thousand dollars! It was Easter in July—a delightful, appalling Easter egg hunt.

O’Connell and Boyle forced their way forward to the Bualas’ house, where a local
constable struggled to keep the masses at bay.

Where’s Mrs. Hafftner?

Nobody knew where to find the caretaker or the owner; the police didn’t have a key to the place. The throngs of children and adults alike grew behind them. Scores became hundreds, their weight pressing against the fence around the property. If they didn’t collect evidence now, they might never get it.

Let’s go
.

O’Connell and Boyle wrenched open a window and boosted themselves through. In a stroke of luck, the crowd was briefly distracted by a street show: Streuning’s infamous “death carriage” and horse came trotting up to its old Second Avenue haunt. The police had lifted a page from the
World
and returned with the surrey to jog townspeople’s memories. The duck farmer next door was one of the first to recognize it.

“
Yes, that’s the same rig those people had,” Mr. Wahle said. “I remarked at the time on the black horse and the dark painted carriage, and thought it looked like an undertaker’s rig.”

The caretaker’s husband, having belatedly arrived after the detectives, was quick to agree with his neighbor.

“
That’s the same carriage,” Mr. Hafftner confirmed. “When I saw that man and that woman come here on Saturday in a carriage I was rather astonished, because Mrs. Buala had told us he was a shoemaker. It seemed strange that a shoemaker could afford to leave his business on a Saturday and hire a horse and carriage just to drive over from Jackson Avenue.”

The house itself remained as vacant and unremarkable as ever, save for two previously unnoticed clues in an upstairs bedroom: an empty
wine bottle and a
small cardboard bullet box discarded in the
back of the closet. Detective Boyle busied himself with testing planks to find any that might have been recently pried open to hide a body. But Detective O’Connell still had his mind on that ditch outside. Before landing a job on the force,
he’d worked as a plumber, and the drainage described by the duck farmer gave him an idea.

I’m taking out the trap
, O’Connell announced as he deftly exposed and disassembled the plumbing under the upstairs bathtub. There was a pastelike sediment in the drain—not hair, not black mildew, but a sticky mush with an awful, deathly smell. Another sample for the lab, O’Connell decided.

The bathroom window now looked out over
a sea of children. More than a thousand of them were romping through the fields and ditches of Woodside, at least one for every dollar of the imagined reward. The borough was swarming with bicycling parties as well. Spurred by the fine weather and a day off,
cyclists were getting drunk and crashing wildly into the undergrowth, all looking for the ghastly prize.

“Between drinks,” a
World
reporter dryly observed, “this crowd dodged into the woods and sought for the head. Within the depths of these thickets are cat-briers that demand of each that passes through either blood or raiment. Profanity arose with the passage of each.”

O’Connell tried to ignore the hubbub and stray fireworks outside and focus on the water. The drainage outside didn’t look right. How could it have filled up like that in the middle of the summer? They called over Citizens Water Supply, a local supplier that pumped fresh
water out from a spring in Trains Meadow. The water
meter showed a whopping 40,000-gallon spike in the last month for the empty house.

“The amount of water,” the utility’s superintendent said incredulously, “is
three times
the amount that an ordinary family would use in a year.”

There were no leaks in or around the premises, either; the water meter hadn’t budged since they’d arrived that morning. As evening descended and the disappointed children and boozy holiday cyclists gently wended their way homeward, the inconspicuous device bore a mute testimony that no grisly find in the fields could have given.

“The only way I can account for it,” the water representative said with a shrug, “is that all the faucets were open continually. For days.”

BRING OUT THE BODY
,
came the order to the night-shift morgue keeper. Even after the tumult of Independence Day, a steady stream of identifiers still came to the morgue each day to view
Guldensuppe’s remains. As Bellevue’s superintendent stood nearby, the latest visitor’s credentials were checked and an assistant sent to fetch the remains.

The staffer came back to the morgue’s front desk, disbelief written over his face.

“
The legs …,” he stammered to the superintendent, “are not in the morgue. The arms and trunk are, but … I don’t know where the legs are.”

The superintendent nearly fainted.

Morgue staff threw open paupers’ coffins, while reporters took frantic notes. How could they just vanish?

“Guldensuppe has gained more fame by his death than he could gain by living a million years,” one
Herald
writer reported drolly. “But for a pair of legs, detached and supposed on expert testimony to be dead, to make a clean escape from the Morgue—that was a mystery.”

Maybe they were just out for a walk, one wag suggested.

“
One of the theories,” a reporter mused, “was that they had gone to help Acting Inspector O’Brien find Thorn.”

In fact, the inspector’s search was already going quite well. He’d even taken to praising the newspapers for the fine work they’d done. “
I desire,” he announced grandly, “to thank the newspaper men who during the past week have aided me so in bringing about the conclusions which I have reached.”

It wasn’t often that the Detective Bureau even grudgingly allowed that kind of praise, but it was true: The papers had outdone themselves. Hearst was already boldfacing praise from the coroner, police commissioners, and Mayor William Strong across his pages—“The
Journal
deserves credit” the latter admitted—and just that night
announced the recipients of his $1,000 reward for identifying the body.

The case had been solved by many people at once, really, but half went to a Murray Hill Baths customer who’d overheard some attendants discussing Guldensuppe’s absence; the fellow sent in what proved to be the first correct wild guess. The other half of the reward was split between Guldensuppe’s coworkers, who had been key in the actual discovery. None, of course, would go to Ned Brown—or anyone else at the
World
.

But Pulitzer’s paper was now basking in some fine publicity itself. After a week of humiliations by the Murder Squad, it had begun to regain its footing. The
World
was the first paper on the scene at Woodside, and lavished its first three pages on the case for the July 4 issue. And the next day the
World
once again had the best scoop—literally. They’d surreptitiously
gouged a stain out of the floor in Woodside and rushed it to an analytical chemist ahead of the police.

BLOOD IN THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY
, crowed its front page.

Their chemist, Dr. E. E. Smith of Frazer & Company, had cannily used the
Teichmann test, one of the few ways to analyze a sample like this one. It was a tricky procedure: He dissolved the stain in an ammonia solution, then precipitated some brown crystals with common salt, acetic acid, and evaporation. Under the microscope, the rhomboid crystals revealed their telltale identity: hydrochloride of haematin.

“They are absolutely characteristic of blood,” Dr. Smith announced.

Under the hammering of discoveries by both O’Brien’s detectives and Hearst and Pulitzer reporters,
Mrs. Nack was beginning to waver. She denied any murder—denied that Guldensuppe was even dead—but was now hesitantly admitting to O’Brien that, well, she
had
hired that surrey … and that she
had
been involved with Martin Thorn … and that she
had
seen him the week before. In fact, the two had been spotted at a saloon just before her arrest. Thorn had been spied reading about the case in a newspaper—purely as a disinterested party, you understand—and Mrs. Nack admitted that, yes, they had discussed Ferguson’s theory on the then-unidentified victim’s legs being boiled.

So Thorn was still in town, and in the habit of reading newspaper
coverage of the case. Being friendly to reporters now made perfect sense: They were O’Brien’s key to luring Thorn in
to the open. After flattering the journalists, the inspector fed them a steady stream of misinformation for the next two days.
Thorn, he assured the
Journal
and the
Tribune
, had surely left the country on a steamship—probably,
he added to the
Press
and the
Brooklyn Eagle
, escaping via Canada. To the
Mail and Express
, he was “positive” that Thorn had already fled.

Finding the murderer would still be harder than, say, finding Guldensuppe’s legs.
Those
had
turned up later that evening in the morgue’s pickling vat; the afternoon shift had forgotten to mention that they were there to their hapless colleagues. The reporters had a fine wheeze over the incident, unaware that O’Brien was quietly laying out his bait in the columns of their newspapers. The inspector was lulling Martin Thorn into a false sense of safety; now all his fugitive had to do was make a mistake.

MY HUSBAND’S SEEN HIM
,
said a nervous woman the next day in the Central Office. Perhaps the beads of sweat on her brow were just due to the heat. It was getting past one in the afternoon, and with the hottest July 6 on record, the police were
logging one sunstroke case after another: the ironworks owner who’d left his home that morning crying, “The heat! The heat!” who was later found raving in a cab for a ride “to the gates of heaven”; the fellow who went berserk on Broadway, hallucinating that he had turned into a cable car; the ladies who simply removed their flowered hats and crumpled out in the sun.

He’s seen him
, she insisted.

Of course he had. Thorn was everywhere and nowhere, a heat mirage. Two suspicious look-alikes had already been swept up from city streets, and they were indeed criminals, it turned out—a fugitive
Louisville embezzler and a Brooklyn con man named Sleeping Jake—but, alas, neither was Thorn.
A suicide found in a Jersey City cemetery, who’d swallowed acid and died in agony over a grave, surely
that
was Thorn. And what about the
body that veteran stage actor George Beane found in the water while yachting off Staten
Island, its face blown off at close range? Headlines wanted to know:
IS THIS MARTIN THORN?

Why should someone walking in off the street know any better? The suspect’s own kin couldn’t even be sure.

“I don’t suppose I would know him if I saw him now,” Thorn’s younger sister
Pauline told a
Journal
reporter who had tracked her down to an apartment on Forty-Second Street. The last time she’d seen Martin, she explained, was on July 4 … nine years earlier. “I have never heard from him to this day,” she added. “He was at that time suffering nervous troubles, and he wrote to a doctor in Boston about it two or three times.”

Not to be outdone,
World
reporters located Thorn’s older brother John in Jersey City. Not only hadn’t he heard from his brother Martin lately, he hadn’t even heard from the police.

“I can only hope that the police are mistaken in their belief that Martin is implicated in it.” He sighed. “But about that I have my misgivings. The description fits him.”

He’d always despaired of his brother, he said.

“There are four boys and two girls in our family,” the older brother explained. “Martin is the black sheep of the flock. As long as fifteen years ago I had trouble with him. I gave him money so that he could learn the trade of barber, but he did not appreciate my efforts to make a man of him. He preferred to loaf.… When I got married I forbade him from my house.”

No, he didn’t know where Martin was now. But his last encounter with him, after years of silence, made him fear the worst.

“I did not see him again until a year ago. He came into my store under the influence of liquor and I ordered him out. He had a revolver on him and he showed it to me.

“ 
‘See that,’
he said.
‘Well, some day you will hear of me using this on someone.’
 ”

The accounts in the paper that day made detectives look at one another significantly: Pauline had been married to one Ludwig Braun. And the shop that John Torzewski ran? It was a shoe repair. Pressed for a false identity, Martin Thorn had grabbed the closest materials at
hand—his brother’s profession and his brother-in-law’s surname. And the disguise had worked well. The
last confirmed sighting of Thorn was by a moving company that he’d tried to hire exactly one week earlier—the previous Wednesday, in the hours before Mrs. Nack’s arrest. As soon as news of her arrest hit the streets, he’d vanished.