The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (22 page)

“Organize a great open-air reception in Madison Square. Have the two best military bands,” he barked to his managing editor. “Secure orators, have a procession, arrange for plenty of fireworks and search-lights.
We must have 100,000 people together that night.
”
Rooms were hired at the Waldorf, reservations made at Delmonico’s, and launches
arranged to greet the bewildered ingénue as she arrived in New York Harbor. The story would then be splashed across the October 18, 1897,
Journal
—on the very day, in fact, that Martin Thorn’s jury selection would begin. The
New York Journal
would yet again own the biggest local, national, and international stories for that day.

The
World
, one industry newsletter marveled, was now simply “
scooped
every day of its existence.”

The paper wasn’t just getting scooped, it was also getting hollowed out. Its star editor, Arthur
Brisbane, was nettled by ceaselessly hectoring telegrams that Pulitzer sent from health retreats. In one the publisher cabled,
THE PAPER SUFFERS AN EXCESSIVE STATESMANSHIP
, yet in another he demanded the
firing of a reporter for using the word “pregnant.” He was stingy about the expenses for art—
MAKE SALARIED ARTISTS EARN THEIR SALARIES
, he warned—yet he kept constant tabs on the editorial page, perhaps the least commercial section of the paper. Just about the only relief the absentee owner’s daily cables offered was this one:
I REALLY DON’T EXPECT TO BE IN NEW YORK AT ALL THIS FALL
. In fact, the
World
was perfectly capable of running without Pulitzer; instead, it would have to run without Brisbane, who jumped ship for the
Journal
. All it had taken, as usual, was a wave of Hearst’s checkbook.

But amid these triumphs, just three days ahead of Thorn’s jury selection, it was the
Brooklyn Eagle
—not the
Journal
—that carried the first word of a curious development in Germany. The call for jurors, it seemed, would have to wait: Carl and Julius Peterson, two “
reputable merchants of Hamburg,” were departing for New York via the ocean steamer
Fürst Bismarck
to personally testify about an unexpected old acquaintance they’d just recently run into.

The
Eagle
headline said it all:

THE TRIAL

(photo credit p4.1)

A THICK FOG BLANKETED
the Hudson, the cold seeping into the coats of the journalists huddling expectantly around the frigid Hamburg-American pier.

“The
Fürst Bismarck
has been sighted off Fire Island,” confirmed a
Journal
reporter.

It wouldn’t be long now; the
Bismarck
had broken transatlantic records more than once in its runs from Hamburg to New York. The November 5 arrival would boast the usual kingmakers and captains of industry, of course; Republican boss
Hamilton Fish was on board for this voyage, as was a Pabst brewery scion. But that wasn’t who the reporters were waiting for.

From the mist, the towering form of the
Bismarck
materialized on the river. It augured an entirely new identification in the case. Throughout the summer the coroner’s office had turned away an array of disconcerting characters who wanted to view the body for no apparent good reason. The visitors who did have a reason were scarcely any better;
one Josephine Vanderhoff had turned up, dressed in black and yelling at the top of her lungs that the body inside must be her husband, Marcus, a missing painter. It wasn’t.

No, contended another helpful citizen. The body was surely the missing Virginia photographer William Edwards. When
Edwards’s minister visited to view the pickled body, he turned it into a family outing; reporters watched in undisguised fascination as the minister, his wife, and his thirteen-year-old daughter examined the hacked-up
body and o
ther clues. Remarkably,
they immediately identified the abandoned valise found in the early days of the case; it had indeed belonged to Edwards. That made sense, as the clothes in it had been the wrong size for Guldensuppe. The minister could even
explain the enigmatically marked-up slates found inside: Edwards was a spirit medium, and they were used for ghost writing. So perhaps he’d found a more direct line of communication with the dead—by joining them. But the minister’s
daughter examined the corpse’s hands and shook her head; it wasn’t him.

So the identification by the rubbers at Murray Hill Baths remained. But the problem of the missing head—the faint possibility that Guldensuppe was hiding abroad—remained a vexing one. And every journalist on the pier had another recent case in mind: Luetgert.

Just two weeks earlier, days after the Peterson brothers announced they’d be coming, a
Chicago trial had concluded for the infamous sausage-maker Adolph Luetgert. Nobody had
seen
him kill his wife and throw her body into his factory’s acid-rendering vat, and nothing but five bone fragments—some as little as a toe joint and a broken tooth—had been found in the vat, along with two incriminating gold rings. The defense claimed the police had planted the rings, though, and that the bone fragments were from pigs.

The jurors simply didn’t know what to think.

The Luetgert trial ended in a hung jury, and
Thorn eagerly read the wire reports that covered it. It was not hard to guess at the reason for his interest. And with the testimony of the Petersons—why, he might not even have to go to trial at all.

Slowly, carefully, the mighty S.S.
Fürst Bismarck
eased into its berth and the gangway was lowered. One by one, top-hatted gents and wives swathed in furs against the cold descended; reporters waited at the bottom, notebooks at the ready, and checked the manifest for the famous witnesses.

No Carl and Julius Peterson were listed.

SO SORRY
,
Thorn’s lawyer explained.
We just received a cable, and it turns out the Petersons will be on the next transatlantic steamer
. It was an
extraordinarily shameless excuse; but this was no ordinary case, and William F. Howe was no ordinary lawyer.

The office of Howe & Hummel was the best known in the city.
Open twenty-four hours a day across the street from the Tombs, it was a cash-up-front operation that served as counsel for the Whyo Gang, the Sheeny Mob, the Valentine Gang, and every safecracker and pickpocket syndicate in Manhattan.
When seventy-eight brothel madams were arrested in a one-night sweep, every one named William Howe as her attorney. He was a 300-pound whirlwind of indignation, a crusader in an endless array of
loud green and violet waistcoats, checked pants, and diamond rings on every finger. In four decades Howe had personally
defended 650 murder and manslaughter cases—and he was accustomed to winning.

“You cannot prove a
corpus delicti
by patchwork,” he’d roar to anyone who listened. “And I shall prove that the body in the Morgue is
not
that of William Guldensuppe.”

Publicly the
DA’s office laughed Howe off, but in private they feared their diamond-fingered foe. The Latin for “body of crime” meant the proof that a crime had actually occurred.
The notion had originated with Lord Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale, who pointed out that confessions alone were not trustworthy. It was powerfully
revived in America in 1819 after the Boorn brothers case in Vermont, when a “victim” turned up alive shortly before a scheduled execution. But Howe was invoking a deliberate misreading—that a murder charge needed a
complete body
.

“They have not got the head,” the lawyer needled. “And what is more, they can never find it.”

Howe was enjoying the attention immensely. Reporters could come in and marvel at his Tombs office, a roughhouse operation where Howe cheekily kept the
combination safe filled with coal for the furnace—actual money was hidden very quickly, and well away from the building—and where his
staff amused themselves by serving one another with fake subpoenas. Beyond those, there was scarcely a scrap of incriminating paper in the place. Once, when his law offices were raided by police,
they’d found
nothing in the desks: no account books, no memoranda, no nothing. Howe and Hummel
were the perfect gangsters’ counsel, acting on nothing but their wits and a handshake.

Blessed with such a memory, Howe could reel off precedents for his defense of Thorn. “
I cannot see how the District Attorney can get around the identification of the body,” he insisted.

Take the case of the
Danish preacher Soren Qvist, who smacked an insolent gardener with a spade and drove the fellow off his property—or so he said, until the man was found buried in his garden. At least,
someone
was found there, as the face was impossible to identify. The preacher professed amazement, but confessed after concluding that he must be guilty. It wasn’t until two decades after his execution that a very alive vagrant was identified as the “victim”; the whole thing had been a revenge plot, he admitted, using a disinterred body seeded with suitably damning personal effects.

“
Then there was the Ruloff case in this state,” Howe noted, recalling an infamous linguist suspected in at least eight murders in and around New York. “The prisoner was charged with having murdered his child. The body was missing altogether, and Ruloff was liberated.”

True, he allowed, Ruloff was executed later—but only
after
he’d gone out again and murdered a store clerk.

Exasperated by such maneuvering, the police already had
two hapless detectives on the next steamer to Hamburg to see whether Howe was up to his old tricks. This, after all, was the lawyer who had once scotched a murder case by
secretly paying a witness to move to Japan. This was the lawyer who’d once gotten another murderer acquitted by
blaming a stabbing on the man’s four-year-old daughter.

“
Well”—Howe smiled at any doubters—“when
you see Guldensuppe walk into the court room at Thorn’s trial, you will all be mightily surprised.”

IF GULDENSUPPE
had
walked up to the Long Island City Courthouse that Saturday, he’d have had a hard time getting noticed; the place was abuzz with activity as
carpenters added extra benches to the
courtroom. More than 500 attendees were expected on Monday, and amid the lumber and dust,
Sheriff Doht and DA Youngs were puzzling over how to rearrange the furniture.

Here
.

They’d spent nearly two hours shifting tables and chairs around, trying to figure out how to cram everyone into the horseshoe-shaped courtroom. There’d be 200 people in the jury pool alone, not to mention reporters from every New York paper and national wire service, and witnesses, and legal teams, and officers of the court. Somewhere among all that, they’d have to fit in the accused, too.

No, over there
.

William Howe’s spot was a peculiar challenge;
he had a table custom-built for the case, specially designed so he could be flanked by both his legal team and the mounds of evidence. At last, the sheriff and the DA had it worked out: The defense would be shoved up against the jury box, while the rest of the floor would be taken up by six tables accommodating seventy-two newsmen, including in the floor space directly in front of the judge. When the judge looked up from the bench, the first people he’d see would be the press; that would also be what he’d see when he gazed upward, as the first rows of the
galleries were saved for sketch artists. The rest of the galleries would take the jury pool and a precious few spectator seats. Sheriff Doht was flooded with ticket requests—many of them, he noted, from women.