The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (29 page)

“It is a woman’s case, a story of a woman’s troubles,” another agreed.

“It’s a wonderful murder,” Tessie enthused. “Oh, but Mrs. Nack is an awful creature.”

“I came here just to see Mrs. Nack,” a neighbor chimed in.

“So did I,” another offered. “I’d have given my last $5 and gone without breakfast to see that woman.”

But on this day Mrs. Nack was nowhere to be seen; there were only platoons of journalists, newly installed justice Samuel
Maddox on the bench—the last judge having excused himself on account of malaria—and, at the center of it all, the famed defense table. Howe was dressed in his usual splendiferous manner, and Thorn presented a fine sight, with his mustache now grown to full luxuriousness. One woman in the gallery admitted that she’d actually
sung
to him.

“
I go to the Tombs to sing to the prisoners,” she explained. “It was there that I became interested in Thorn and Mrs. Nack. I go to nearly
all
of the big trials.”

And this one promised to be the biggest yet. A swift jury selection—
LOOK MORE INTELLIGENT THAN THE FORMER LOT
, ran one headline—drew together a group made up of
two farmers, a florist, a property agent, an oyster dealer, and fully seven builders, for the November frost had left construction crews free to fill the jury box.

After quickly recalling the children and police witnesses of the first trial, they soon came to the first of the new witnesses: Mrs.
Clara Nunnheimer, a Woodside neighbor. A fresh-faced and beaming young woman, she seemed to brighten the gaslit room as she took the stand.

“
Do you recall the 25th of June?” the prosecutor asked her.

“Yes, sir.” She nodded cheerily. Fridays, she explained, were her day for chopping wood. At around eleven she’d seen Mrs. Nack and
a man in a light suit step out of a trolley car, then go inside the house next door. She never saw him come back out—but she did soon see a different man in an upstairs window—one in blue shirtsleeves.

“The fellow between the two officers there?” the prosecutor asked, pointing at a poker-faced Martin Thorn.

“Yes, sir.”

Howe wasn’t having any of it. “From where you were standing chopping wood in your back yard, you could see the features of a man who got off the trolley car?”

Mrs. Nunnheimer broke into a dazzling smile.

“Well,” the Woodside neighbor explained, “I
watched
them.”

The courtroom broke into laughter, and no amount of interrogation by Howe could dim the woman’s sunny disposition.
Nor could he rattle a thirteen-year-old girl who’d seen Thorn buying plaster at the local shop, the undertaker who’d rented out the carriage, or the neighbor who explained that he lived “
kind of diagonally across from Mr. Buala’s property.”

“Are you the man who owned the ducks?” Howe asked dubiously.

“Yes, sir,” Henry Wahle nodded from the stand.

“That ditch was a little slimy—that which you call blood, you say you saw it on top of the slime?”

“I suppose if I had a quart can I could have filled it up,” Wahle said.

Howe looked triumphantly out at the crowd. “How can you say that the drainpipe from
that
cottage drained into
that
ditch?”

“Because,” the witness said, instantly deflating him, “I was there when the plumbing was put in.”

But Wahle wasn’t the only one privy to a hidden clue. And as the women in the galleries focused their opera glasses on the stand, the truth of how the case was cracked—one that no newspaper had dared to reveal—now came to light.

THE DA HAD
the same question for each of the victim’s colleagues: “
Did you ever see William Guldensuppe naked?” he demanded.

“I have,” masseur Philip Krantz answered warily.

“Frequently?”

“Yes, sir.” They’d worked in the Murray Hill Baths, after all.

“Did you notice any particular distinguishing marks upon the body of William Guldensuppe during his lifetime?”

Why, yes, Krantz replied—a tattoo of a girl on his chest, a mole on his right arm …

“Any
other
mark?” Youngs pressed.

“The scar on the left finger?” the coworker ventured.

“Anything else?”

Philip Krantz shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

“There was his …” And then he mumbled something.

“What?” Youngs called out.

Krantz mumbled again and looked down.

“Speak so the jury can hear,” Youngs demanded, as courtroom spectators leaned forward.

“His penis,”
Krantz said.

Guldensuppe, it seemed, was a memorable fellow.

“
He had very
peculiar
privates,” another coworker, Herman Specht, struggled to explain.

“This peculiarity of the penis,” the DA went on, turning to the crowd and then back to the masseur, “was that so noticeable as to attract the attention of the other bath rubbers?”

“Yes,” Specht admitted. “
Many
times.”

“What can you say”—here Youngs drew out one of the morgue photographs—“as to the penis of Exhibit Number Five?”

That’s the one
, he replied.

“
The most peculiar thing
was
his penis,” a third coworker reminisced. “Like where he was circumcised on the head of the penis, underneath from the head he had a lump of skin hanging. Which he could
stretch
.”

Ladies in the gallery gasped, but the masseur had only just started.

“I saw him stretch it at least
two and a half inches
,” he added brightly.

All this was just too much for the defense attorney’s dignity.

“Yes, a circumcision,” Howe scoffed dismissively, and tried steering the testimony back to the mole and the tattoo.

“Mr. Howe dropped the subject of the penis very quickly,” the district attorney jeered. But he wasn’t about to let go so easily. As
Coroner Tuthill took the stand and held forth on the mole—“a warty growth under the right arm, just at the lower border of the axilla”—the prosecutor cut in impatiently.

“Did you notice the penis?” he demanded.

“Yes,” the coroner sighed. “I am coming to that. A
very
peculiar penis. The peculiarity consisted in the fact that the upper portion of the foreskin was absolutely denuded down to the body of the organ, leaving no foreskin on top, but a long pendulous foreskin beneath it.” He produced a drawing that he’d made and held it out. “I have a piece of paper here to illustrate that with—”

“I object!” bellowed Howe.

The galleries burst out into laughter, and Judge Maddox gaveled the crowd to order; he’d expel them
all
from the courthouse if he had to. Put the penis schematic away, he told the coroner.

“
Describe
it,” the judge said wearily.

“The under portion of the foreskin,” Tuthill replied, a little hurt, “extended down very long, an inch and three-quarters in length.”

“Now, what was done with this body after your examination?”

“It was placed in formalin to preserve it,” Tuthill said, indicating a container on the exhibit table. It was a small one-quart
fruit jar, sealed with red wax; inside an alcohol solution suspended, one
Times
reporter recounted, “
something looking much like small sections of tripe.”

“
Has that changed its appearance?”

“Very much so.” Tuthill nodded. “The action of formalin is to harden and practically tan the skin. The penis has practically shrunken up and is as hard as a bone now.”

Reporters were almost snapping their pencils. They couldn’t print
this
. What the courtroom ladies now knew—and what the rest of the world would not hear a word of—was that back in July, the papers fibbed about how Murray Hill Baths employees so conclusively identified Guldensuppe. The papers claimed, rather metaphorically, that it was by his peculiar finger. But bathhouse attendants and morgue staff alike, when asked, agreed that of the thousands of naked men they’d seen, this one was
special
.

The judge wisely called a recess.

——

“
CHURCH—OR GOLF?”
demanded the jury foreman over breakfast the next morning. They’d all been sequestered from their families for the Thanksgiving holiday in
the Garden City Hotel; when Judge Maddox had broken the news back at the courthouse, the crowd visibly pitied the twelve crestfallen men.

But perhaps Thanksgiving at the hotel wouldn’t be so bad: the Garden City had been designed by Stanford White, and it was the most luxurious hotel for miles around. They came downstairs that morning to find preparations already being made for an impressive spread of turkey and roast duck.
One juror promptly hit the breakfast table and stuffed buckwheat pancakes into his pockets.

“I wish there were
more
murders in this county,” another cracked between mouthfuls.

But, alas, they were already a hung jury.
Church
,
a stout minority of five argued.
Golf
, responded the other seven, noting that as they were sequestered, and many sermons of late referred to the Thorn case, it was their civic duty to stay far from baleful public influences. Such isolation could only be guaranteed by standing in the middle of an open field … with a caddy.

It was fortunate that the men were nowhere near the jail that day, for the inquisitive public had turned out in battalions. Just as when children flooded Woodside on Independence Day, the enforced idleness of Thanksgiving seemed to bring out the amateur detective in New Yorkers.
Hundreds milled about, hoping to gain an audience with Nack or Thorn, only to have Sheriff Doht turn them away.

For Thorn, the day inside at first passed much like any other, with a marathon session of pinochle, albeit with the happy interruption of turkey and potatoes. His faithful dog, Bill Baker, fared well, and the jailers presented Thorn with a precious commodity indeed: a Havana cigar. As Thorn watched the smoke curl away through the bars of his cell, only a
Journal
correspondent managed to dampen his holiday spirits. What, the reporter asked, did he think of Adolph Luetgert’s comments on the trial?

Luetgert?
Thorn had avidly followed the Chicago sausage maker’s
retrial—it had begun the same day as his own, even—but he didn’t know Luetgert had been following
his
retrial as well.

A newspaper was handed to the prisoner with a headline blaring across the front page:
LUETGERT PREDICTS THORN’S CONVICTION
. “I believe the jury will convict them both,” the accused acid-vat killer told the press. “Nothing, I believe, can save them, unless the state has made an agreement with Mrs. Nack to let her off with imprisonment.”

“Luetgert is guilty,
I
think, and ought to be hanged,” Thorn snapped back. But the comment aggravated him. Picking up the
Evening Journal
later that day didn’t help. After a day of reading religious books, his co-conspirator had issued a statement that a suspicious mind might read all sorts of deal making and betrayal into.

“
I can say,” Mrs. Nack announced to the press, “that I really knew what Thanksgiving is today.”

BY FRIDAY
the crowds had turned ruthless.

“
Show your passes!” the courthouse deputies barked. Forged tickets had been showing up among those trying to get in. Bickering women seized seats in the courthouse galleries, refusing to go even when caught with bad and expired papers. “Out!” one guard yelled across a row, while another collared a spectator—
“He means you!
”

“
It’s a disgrace to have women in attendance,” the DA complained bitterly from the courthouse floor, appalled that he’d had to present testimonies about Guldensuppe’s foreskin in front of so many women.

Hearst, though, was unrepentant: “
To show crime in its vulgarest and most revolting aspects,” he announced piously to his readers, “is to perform a service.”

Reporters eagerly telegraphed across the river what lurid details they could:
BRAZEN WOMEN AND BAD AIR
, one headline announced. For the courthouse was indeed suffocating again; the malodorous atmosphere, a
New York Press
reporter complained, was now “
more offensive than ever, if possible.” The district attorney himself was demanding an investigation into the courthouse’s ventilation, and more than a few suspected that the first judge’s malaria attack had been brought on by the evil-smelling miasma.

And yet the crowd pressed forward into the seats, nearly bowling one another over the railings, arguing and gossiping in equal measure—then breaking into a low murmur as the suspects were led in. Nearly lost in the commotion was the strangely familiar face of a rather dapper gentleman; the guards almost hadn’t even let him in until he produced a subpoena from his soft camel-hair overcoat.

Herman Nack?

The subpoena was courtesy of Mr. Howe—
and so, the press pool surmised, was Herman’s new wardrobe. Before calling in the delivery driver as a battering ram against Mrs. Nack, the lawyer had first bought him a good shave and a fitting at his tailor. And so here it was, then: Herman, Gussie, and Martin glowering at each other from across the courtroom floor, along with some remnants of Willie floating in an old alcohol-filled fruit jar. The four principals of the tragedy were together in one room at last.

The bakery driver remained bewildered by it all.

“
Just a crazy barber,” Herman muttered to a reporter as he sized up Thorn. He peered over at his wife, whom he’d last seen the morning they were both arrested. “She looks pale,” he said with a hint of concern, before quickly adding, “I don’t know whether to feel sorry for her or not. She is nothing to me now.”

With everyone finally seated, the testimony proceeded through a cross section of New York life: the newsboy who recognized Thorn at the ferry; the saloon keeper who saw Gotha and Thorn together; a pinochle player who spotted a pistol in Thorn’s vest.
Detective
Sullivan identified the bullets from Woodside’s walls, and an
NYPD pistol instructor noted that their caliber matched Thorn’s blue nickel-plated .32. Detective O’Donnell, the former plumber, identified a vial of the foul-smelling plaster he’d found in the Woodside sink trap. Thorn watched with mild interest, occasionally narrowing his eyes at Mrs. Nack; she refused to return his glances. But the man they all awaited was John Gotha.