The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (21 page)

(photo credit 15.2)

Some attending
Journal
reporters quickly translated it:

The watch on Thorn’s cell was instantly doubled, and his sister and brother-in-law were searched carefully whenever they entered the facility. As the only visitors Thorn deigned to see, they were almost certainly part of his plan for obtaining the morphine overdose.

“
I am sorry,” DA Youngs sighed. “The
Journal
did not give me Mrs. Nack’s original letter. No scrap of her note has been found. He either threw the letter down a sink or tore it into fragments and swallowed it.” The Hearst reporters shrugged it off; Doht’s lousy security at the jail wasn’t their problem.

“Bring the sheriff here,” snapped the DA to a detective.

Sheriff Doht, led into the office, stammered out an excuse: Nack’s letter was surely a fabrication by a German-speaking prisoner in the jail, or by the
Journal
itself.

“I don’t blame you boys,” he leered at the reporters. “I understand how you work.”

The Hearst men scoffed at him; Doht just wanted to cover up his own missteps, which had been piling up.
He had tried to induce vomiting in both prisoners by filling their soup with grease, with the ridiculous notion that he’d extract confessions out of them while they retched; then he’d hung a picture of a man’s disembodied head over Mrs. Nack’s cot while she slept. DA Youngs was unamused, and the sheriff quickly backed down.

Confronted at her cell,
Mrs. Nack also tried denying the note—“Oh,
my God, I never write such a letter!”—before breaking apart in fury when the text was read back to her.

“To whom did you give the letter?” she was asked.

“Rockaway,” she spat in disgust.

What kind of a world was it when you couldn’t trust a jewel thief?

JOURNAL
REPORTERS SWOOPED DOWN
into Hell’s Kitchen and up
the block of brick tenements past the corner of Forty-Second and Tenth—past Stemmerman’s grocery, past
Mssr. Mauborgne’s Mattress Renovating, past a stable and the neighboring blacksmith shop—and piled into the five-story walk-up at 521 West Forty-Second.

Where’s Guldensuppe’s head?
they demanded.

Standing in the doorway was Paul Menker, a local butcher now better known to the world as Martin Thorn’s brother-in-law. “I know nothing about this case at all,” he said flatly to reporters.

Where’s the head?

“Anybody who tries to drag me into it will get hurt,” he said, his voice rising.

Come now
, the reporters pressed—
we have his confession
.

Menker was enraged.

“I know nothing about the case,” the mustachioed butcher sputtered, before reaching for a rather unfortunate turn of phrase. “Bring a man that says I do, and I’ll knock his head off!”

Excellent; the
Journal
reporters made sure they got that quote down. They were on a roll, for their rivals at the
World
had fumbled yet another a priceless lead. The same day that the
Journal
revealed the lovers’ suicide letters, Pulitzer’s team had landed a
tantalizing story: that one Frank Clark had heard a boozy confession back in late July. While laid up in the Tombs infirmary, Clark had been prescribed bitter quinine for his malaria, along with a ration of at least three shots of whiskey to wash it down. He wasn’t a drinking man, though, and each day he gave his drams to the man in the next bed—Martin Thorn. Warmed by his first liquor in weeks, his neighbor talked about the mysterious fate of William Guldensuppe.

“
He often boasted,” Clark recalled, “that he was impossible to convict without the head.”

And Thorn kept talking, lulled by the seeming nonchalance of his new friend. Clark was a talented forger—he could draw an exact replica of a dollar bill with nothing but a green pencil—but the man was no killer. What Thorn confessed next preyed on Clark’s mind for months until he finally gave a 3,500-word affidavit to the district attorney.

“He told me that after he placed Guldensuppe’s head in the plaster of paris, he threw it in a patch of woods,” he testified. “He told me Gotha had erred when he said the head had been thrown into the East River. Thorn said he told Gotha it was his
intention
to so dispose of the head, but he was frightened off.”

The attention being paid to the ferries and riverside in the days after the murder was discovered, not to mention the
Journal
hiring grapplers out on the river, simply made it too perilous for Thorn to come out of hiding to finish the job. Arrested with the head still on dry land, though, he’d found an even better solution.

“Two weeks after Thorn’s arrest a man came to the Tombs to see him,” Clark continued. “This was on July nineteenth.”

It was on that visit, Clark said, that Thorn told his visitor exactly where to find the head. His accomplice promptly located it, packed the heavy chunk inside a tackle basket, and that very afternoon boarded a fishing excursion vessel, the
J. B. Schuyler
. With his rod and tackle, he didn’t stand out from the other leisure fishermen on the side-wheel steamer. As the
Schuyler
floated among the fishing banks miles offshore, Thorn’s accomplice simply tipped his basket’s parcel into the water. Two days later, he returned to the Tombs to report the good news. “Thorn was very happy,” Clark reported.

A visit to the ailing forger by the district attorney left prosecutors convinced of his story—but they refused to give the
World
the identity of Thorn’s accomplice. And there things sat for the next six days, without much follow-up by Pulitzer’s reporters—until the
Journal
came piling into Menker’s hallway.

Is it true? Did you really do it?

Mrs. Menker, Thorn’s sister, tried to fend off the reporters. Her husband was a good, hardworking man, she explained, and didn’t know anything about the case.

Doesn’t the prison record show he
visited Thorn on the nineteenth and the twenty-first?

Paul Menker was a decent man, the wife insisted—and, she added, he will throw you down the stairs if you don’t leave us alone. The
Journal
reporters quickly retreated, leaving the butcher quaking with anger.

“I tell you that Guldensuppe is alive!” he roared after them. “That Thorn is innocent!
That Guldensuppe will be found!
”

IN FACT
, one official was wondering whether he just might be right. A
letter had arrived in Coroner Hoeber’s office back in early August, from a woman claiming to be the wife of an attendant at the Murray Hill Baths:

Hoeber’s staff was marveling over the newly arrived letter when they looked up to see an unannounced visitor peering at it: Mrs. Nack’s lawyer, Manny Friend.

“I intended not”—the angry coroner slipped into his native German syntax—“that you should see that letter!”

They were old enemies, and Friend instantly accused the coroner of holding out evidence on him. Hoeber, the lawyer yelled, was “a dirty, insignificant little whelp.” The two scuffled, and Hoeber’s staff
dragged them apart. Maybe the coroner wrote the letter
himself
to get attention from reporters, the lawyer yelled. “I believe,” he jeered, “that he has resorted to this method to gain a little more advertisement for himself.”

If so, then Hoeber was going through a lot of ink. A cascade of mysterious and often unsigned confidential letters now arrived at his office.
One claimed that it was
Guldensuppe
who’d been hiding in the closet waiting to attack Thorn—and that he’d been killed in self-defense.
At least two more claimed that Guldensuppe was alive and well, and seeking out his fortune prospecting in the Klondike.

The accused himself insisted that he’d be vindicated.

“
I have always believed that he had gone to Europe,” Thorn assured a
World
reporter about yet another Guldensuppe sighting in Syracuse, New York. “I am sure he will turn up in time to clear me of the charge of murdering him.” Perhaps it was just as well that the reporter did not note that his own paper attributed the latest sighting to a Mr. “O. Christ.”

Soon enough, another letter insisted that everyone else was wrong:

Yet another missive, sent by Mrs. Lenora Merrifield of 106th Street, claimed that Guldensuppe was working under an alias in a Harlem barbershop. When confronted by detectives, a puzzled Mrs. Merrifield didn’t even recognize the letter; her teenaged son, however, showed a peculiar interest in the commotion it created.

But the most haunting notes were the anonymous ones penned in German and sent to Coroner Hoeber:
Guldensuppe is alive, and taking revenge on Thorn by setting him up to die
. No stock could really be put in these wild and unsigned allegations. But if William Guldensuppe was
plotting retribution, it seemed he was about to get it: Thorn’s trial was now set for Octo
ber 18.

“THE POLICE DO NOT EXPECT
to see Guldensuppe in this world,” William Randolph Hearst joked. “In fact, they would be content to see his head.”

It had been a splendid season for news. Along with this swell murder here in the north, Hearst also had a huge promotion to send a team of
Journal
cyclists eastward to Italy, an exciting gold rush out west, and from the south a bubbling Cuban rebellion against the dastardly Spanish. The latter had acquired a fine new angle over the summer: Evangelina Cisneros, the pretty eighteen-year-old daughter of a revolutionary, had been imprisoned for … well, depending on whom you asked, either for trying to break her father out of jail or for fending off the advances of a diabolical Spanish military governor. Hearst preferred the latter explanation.

Even as he sent reporters to run the gauntlet of Paul Menker’s stairs, he’d sent
another
Journal
operative—the hotshot reporter Karl Decker—to Cuba, to bribe a jailer, break into the prison with a ladder and a hacksaw, and chop out the iron bars of the damsel’s jail cell.
Disguised with a sailor’s outfit and a cigar, “the Cuban Joan of Arc” was whisked away on a steamer bound for America.
EVANGELINA CISNEROS RESCUED BY THE JOURNAL
, his newspaper trumpeted the next day.

The rescue was not exactly
legal
. But Hearst was always pushing for more: Why just cover news when you could make it?

A NEW IDEA IN JOURNALISM
, the
Journal
blared across a full-page illustration of a knight slaying octopus-like beasts:
WHILE OTHERS TALK, THE JOURNAL ACTS
. The paper was already launching city
offensives against a gas trust and crooked paving contractors; now it would also shake the columns of national policy. Hearst lined up testimonials from the mayors of cities from San Francisco to Boston lauding his juggernaut, and even Secretary of State John Sherman delicately acknowledged the paper’s rather tactless achievement.
“Every one will sympathize with the
Journal
’s enterprise in releasing Miss Cisneros,” he admitted. “She is a woman.”

The prime minister of Spain was more direct.

“
The newspapers of your country seem to be more powerful than your government,” he snapped.

Hearst was inclined to agree: The Guldensuppe case had paved the way for his paper to take it upon itself to shove aside any government, local or national, that moved too slowly to satisfy a pressroom deadline. The Cisneros rescue simply confirmed what he’d been claiming all summer.

“
It is epochal,” he announced from his office overlooking the city. “It represents the final stage in the evolution of the modern newspaper. Action
—that
is the distinguishing mark of the new journalism. When the East River murder seemed an insoluble mystery to
the police, the
Journal
organized a detective force of its own. A newspaper’s duty is not confined to exhortation, but that when things are going wrong it should set them right if possible.”

He could afford to feel expansive in his powers, for his powers
were
expanding. The old order was literally falling away:
Sun
publisher Charles Anderson Dana was now on his deathbed, and Pulitzer’s
World
was getting clobbered in the Guldensuppe case and in Cuba coverage.
Journal
sales were rocketing; a reader snapping it open to the latest revelations from Woodside or Havana would find them alongside
a fine profusion of ads for everything from the Bonwit Teller department store to Seven Sutherland Sisters Scalp-Cleaner, or perhaps the Lady Push Ball Players—lasses in short garments who fought gamely over a giant medicine ball.

All this was laced with Hearst’s own grand promotions. Just a day after raiding Thorn’s brother-in-law’s premises, Hearst was issuing new marching orders: Pull out all the stops for the arrival of
Evangelina Cisneros.