The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (20 page)

Martin and Gussie remained expressionless, watching as their adopted island of Manhattan slipped away for what might be the last time.

Anything was a welcome change after the Tombs. The Queens County Jail was everything the Tombs was not: quiet, modern, and brightly lit. Thorn, though, was uneasy.
He’d become used to the sound of pile drivers and hammers at the Tombs; in the eerie silence of the Queens jail, he could ponder the steady drip of evidence against him.

“
I rented the Woodside cottage under the name of Braun,” he finally
blurted out to
Journal
reporter Lowe Shearon. It was a stunning admission, but Thorn insisted that it was perfectly innocent. Sure, he’d rented it under a false name—“What of it?”—but that was no capital offense. And a new claim by a clerk that he’d bought seven cents’ worth of plaster on the day of the murder left him unimpressed.

“
That is all rot. I never bought plaster of paris in my life. I never even had a pinch of it,” he insisted.

And with that, he retreated into the darkness of his new cell.

WHILE THORN WAS ASSIGNED
to Murderers Row,
Mrs. Nack had pulled an upper-floor unit with a vista of Long Island. The landscape was still pleasant and green; in a few weeks she’d be able to watch the foliage turn color. If she looked carefully, she could even make out the infamous Woodside cottage from where she stood. Gussie didn’t care; she was delighted with her new cell.

She’d said little, though, since Herman’s disastrous retaliation for her last interview. So while the
Journal
worked over the sullen Thorn, the
World
sent to Mrs. Nack’s cell their star women’s columnist: Harriet Hubbard
Ayer. Gussie instantly relented.

“Come in if you want to see me,” she heard herself saying.

Mrs. Ayer was startled to be welcomed; Mrs. Nack was even more startled by who she was letting in. For the first time since being jailed, she was face-to-face with a bigger celebrity than herself. Harriet Hubbard Ayer was a household name, a glamorous riches-to-rags grand dame whose cosmetics empire had fallen apart in a messy divorce. After her ex-husband schemed, successfully, to commit her to an asylum, Mrs. Ayer made a sensational comeback as a beauty-and-manners columnist. Surely
she
would understand the terribly wronged Mrs. Nack.

“
Must I be locked in?” Mrs. Ayer asked the jailer fearfully as she entered the cell. The memory of her own year in an asylum was never far away.

“Don’t be afraid, you’ll get out all right,” Mrs. Nack assured her, clasping her hands in sudden sympathy. “I know just how you feel.
Ach, mein Gott!
”

Mrs. Nack’s two cell mates fluttered about tidying the cell; they were so deeply in Gussie’s thrall that they did all her washing and chores for her. As they fussed over the new arrival, Mrs. Nack led Harriet to a corner of the cell, where a table was festooned with one of the many bunches of flowers sent by admirers. She was, she
confided to the columnist, still angry at how newly overthrown Inspector O’Brien had interrogated her.

“Fifty times or more already Inspector O’Brien tells me he knows just how the murder is committed. ‘Ve know,
ve know
. Vill you tell or not?’ ” She punched her palm as she slipped into her old accent. “I say, screaming at him: ‘Ven you know the story so well, vy in hell isn’t that enough for you?’ ”

Mrs. Nack regained her composure and gazed intently into the columnist’s face.

“Yes, I say just so,” she continued. “Do you think if I have murder on my soul I could be as quiet as I have been? I sleep soundly all night—ask the Warden.”

“It’s a fact,” her jailer piped up from outside the cell.

And, Harriet asked tenderly, had she lost her friends since being jailed?

“Yes.” The midwife shook her head sadly. “My friends they all say, so Augusta Nack is a murderer, or if she isn’t we better not have anything to do with her.”

“Our friends want little to do with our troubles,” Mrs. Ayer empathized.

Instead, Mrs. Nack had her cell mates and her sewing for company. Her dresses, already a sensation at her court appearances, would be even better for the trial. And Mrs. Nack was, of course, a woman you could trust with long needles.

“Have you seen in the papers that the Warden is afraid I am going to kill myself?” she scoffed incredulously. “Well now, I am going to show you how easily I could kill myself if I wanted to.”

Nack crossed the room and pulled out a small basket from under the sink; it was filled with silverware. To Ayer’s amazement, she drew five sharp steel knives and laid them out on the table before the columnist.

“You see”—the prisoner laughed—“if I want to cut my throat I have every convenience. I could take a knife in each hand and have some to spare. But I am not going to cut my throat.
I am going to be acquitted.
”

Every night before she went to bed, she admitted, she spun and
twirled about her cell in anticipation: “When I think of how near the trial is, I dance around.”

“If we had a piano,” a cell mate chirped, “it would help so very much.”

And then the heavy iron door was unlocked to Harriet once again, just as Mrs. Nack promised. But as she emerged, the beauty columnist was haunted by what she’d seen. Mrs. Nack’s was a curious love story indeed, for the fates of Thorn and Guldensuppe had not even arisen once in the conversation.

“Augusta Nack knows nothing whatsoever about love,” Harriet Ayer mused to her readers in the next morning’s
World
. “That is to say, of the love which means self-abnegation. She loves herself.” As for Martin Thorn, the columnist believed that to her he was merely a losing hand that she now wanted to fold—just as Herman Nack once was, just as William Guldensuppe had been.

“If she thinks of Martin Thorn at all,” she wrote, “I believe she thinks of him to hate him.”

BUT AUGUSTA NACK
was thinking about Martin a great deal indeed. Even as Harriet prepared her article for the next day’s October 3 edition of the
World
, Mrs. Nack motioned an inmate over to her cell.

Rockaway!
came the summons as he strolled along the top floor of the jail.
Rockaway Ed was a trusty, part of the peculiar prisoner hierarchy within Queens County Jail. Ascending to the rank of a trusty meant freedom: freedom to walk the halls and deliver messages and packages, freedom to walk the exercise yard, even the freedom to leave the prison when the sheriff wanted errands run. The trusty was second only to a “bum boss” in the underground ranking of prisoners, and when
Journal
men had first visited the jail, it was Ed who’d shown them around; he was considered the best guide. When, that is, he could be found there at all. He was on the last two months of a six-month sentence for pilfering some jewelry, and on a good streak he could stay clear of jail for the entire day, returning only to sleep on his hard pallet bed at night.

Ed came up close to the cell door.

“I believe I can trust you,” Mrs. Nack whispered. “And if you will do what I tell you it’s worth twenty-five dollars to you.”

That sounded like escape money, and Ed’s own sentence was going to end before Christmas. “Oh, that’s all right,” he assured her. “I’m not looking for pay.”

“Well.” Mrs. Nack hesitated. “I want to send a message to Thorn, and I want you to take it. I’ll put it in a sandwich.”

Food was a good medium of communication; Mrs. Nack was already known for securing cell-block friendships this way, so food handed through her cell door to a trusty wouldn’t attract any notice.

Three days later when she’d saved up enough food and paper, the parcel passed through the barred door and into Rockaway Ed’s hands. As he walked down the cell block, and then down the three flights of stairs to Murderers Row, he could see that there was more than just a sandwich in the parcel: Whether to hide the note, or simply out of a hostess’s pride, Mrs. Nack had sent a side dish of potatoes as well.

At the bottom of the stairs, it was a straight shot through the iron cell-block door and to Thorn’s room. But Ed bided his time; he knew that sooner or later he’d be wanted by the sheriff for an outside errand, and he was right. Sent out of the jail, he still held Mrs. Nack’s parcel as he walked out through the locked doors, into the autumn sunlight, across the Court Square, and into the outpost of the
New York Journal
.

Whatever Augusta Nack could pay, William Randolph Hearst could pay better—much better.

I’ve got it
, Rockaway Ed announced.

Journal
staffers pounced. He’d slipped the lead to them days ago, and they’d been waiting with
writers and artists at the ready to make a copy.

Rockaway Ed was hustled back out the door with the letter; he was to go immediately back to the jail and deliver it, they told him. If Thorn wrote a reply, they’d intercept that one, too.

A staffer who knew German quickly translated the note into
the text that would appear in the next morning’s paper:

It was a puzzling note, because it was palpably false. The evidence was
not
as strong against her—she hadn’t spoken publicly against Guldensuppe before his disappearance and hadn’t unburdened herself to a friend about killing him. In fact, if it wasn’t for
Thorn’s presence, it might have been difficult to mount a murder case against Mrs. Nack at all.

It took a stunned moment to sink in: Mrs. Nack was trying to get her accomplice to kill himself.

“WHERE IS IT?”
Sheriff Doht demanded as he burst into Thorn’s gloomy cell. Jailer Jarvis barreled in behind him as Thorn grabbed for his clothing.

“Hand me the vest!” the sheriff yelled. Thorn yanked a sheet of paper out of a pocket and frantically tore it, stuffing pieces into his mouth.

“Don’t let him, that’s what I’m after!” the sheriff barked to the jail keeper. Jarvis closed his beefy hands around Thorn’s neck, choking and rattling him as the writhing prisoner desperately tried to swallow the scraps.

“Give it up, Thorn!” they roared. “Open your mouth!”

The denizens of Murderers Row eagerly lined their cell doors, watching Thorn’s eyes and face bulge; he was propelled backward over his cot until his head hung upside down, and Sheriff Doht pried his jaws open and reached into his mouth for the chewed scraps of paper. Jarvis at last released his grip on Thorn’s throat, and the prisoner gasped in long drafts of air.

The fragments bearing Thorn’s writing were reassembled on a table in District Attorney Youngs’s office: