The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (30 page)

As the tall and jittery witness was led in, Thorn smiled at the sight of his old friend. Gotha, though, locked his eyes on the floor. Thorn’s informant looked puffy and tired, like a man who had been gaining weight but losing sleep.

“State your name.”

“John Gotha.”

The prosecutor walked him through
Thorn’s affair with Nack and the fight with Guldensuppe. Thorn listened with a faintly indulgent smile, as if his hapless friend was confused yet again. But Gotha’s recollection of Thorn’s confession sounded all too precise.

“
I asked him if he done the murder, and first he denied it,” Gotha recounted steadily. “And then he said yes, he did it. Told me how he went into the house about half past nine, and while he was waiting for Mrs. Nack and Guldensuppe he took out his pistol and tried it out. He said it didn’t work at first. He snapped it several times before it discharged, and fired it off a couple times to make sure it was all right.”

It made sense now. Thorn’s first brawl with Guldensuppe was lost by a misfire; these test shots explained why two bullets were found buried in the plaster lath of the Woodside cottage.

Gotha made sense to Howe, too—but not quite in the same way.

“Were you not,” the lawyer demanded, rising up, “a confirmed inebriate?”

“No, sir,” Gotha replied indignantly.

“Were you not taken to the Inebriates’ Home at Fort Hamilton?”

“No,” the barber insisted.

Howe eyed his prey for a long moment, his gold-fretted scarf glimmering under the gaslights.

“How much
money,
” he rang his words out slowly, “had you in your pocket at the time of the arrest of Thorn?”

“Well,” Gotha said, shifting uncomfortably. “I didn’t have much money.”

“How—much
—money
?”

“About twenty dollars,” Gotha admitted.

“Where have you been since Thorn’s arrest?” Howe pressed.

“Been up in the country.”

“Paid your board there?”

“I did.”

“With what money?”

“My wife’s money.”

“Do you know the
police
paid your board there? Yes or no?”

Gotha looked over at the prosecutor helplessly, then back at Howe.

“Yes,” he said in a small voice.

Howe directed the crowd’s attention to Gotha’s next residence, on West 122nd.

“Who paid for
that
?” he demanded.

“I paid for that,” Gotha insisted.

“Where did you get the money? From Mr. Sullivan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The district-attorney’s officer, is he not?”

“Yes, sir,” Gotha mumbled.

“Yes or no!” Howe bellowed.

Gotha was perspiring freely now.

“Yes.”

“How much did Sullivan give you?”

“Well,” the barber stuttered, “he gave me enough to—”

“How much?”
Howe roared.
“You understand the English language?”

“I couldn’t get no work!” Gotha blurted.

“One hundred dollars?” Howe pressed mercilessly.

“Couldn’t tell you.”

“You mean that, do you Gotha?”
Howe yelled. He was towering over the barber now, quaking with indignation.

“If Mr. Howe wants to save time, I will put in the records of—” the prosecutor interrupted.

“Allow me to conduct my cross-examination!” Howe belted, and turned back to his cowering witness. “Sullivan has given you the money on which you have lived?”

“Not
all
,” Gotha protested.

“Nearly all?”

Gotha sank down farther in his seat. “Nearly all,” he replied quietly.

“Have you earned
one penny
”—Howe banged his fist down—“from the time you went to the police headquarters? Yes or no?”

“I have not
earned
it,” Gotha stumbled, “but I got it from my wife’s people …”

“Haven’t done a day’s work, have you?”

“No,” he mumbled.

“You know”—Howe motioned at the teeming press tables—“there
was one thousand dollars offered by the
New York Journal
for the discovery of the perpetrator of this murder, do you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

Howe turned back to him. “Is it not true that Thorn told you that it was
Mrs. Nack
who shot Guldensuppe?”

“No,” Gotha insisted.

No further questions
, Howe scoffed.

The whole thing, Howe declared, was a flimsy farrago to get a reward when the real murderer was already under arrest. With Gotha reduced to rubble, the lawyer now had Herman Nack at the ready to demolish his ex-wife’s credibility. “I’ll tear her apart,” Howe assured a reporter.

But the district attorney had a surprise for him.

“The people rest,” Youngs announced.

What?

The crowd was stunned. No Mrs. Nack? A capital case without the star witness? But they were hardly as amazed as the glimmering figure who stood before them on the courtroom floor.
Howe was thunderstruck for what seemed the first time in his life, as the realization dawned on him.

In a single instant, the prosecution had just outflanked his entire defense.

CROWD MAY BREAK RECORDS
, the headlines warned that Monday. Over the weekend Sheriff Doht’s office had been flooded with thousands of applications, including a bar association’s worth of lawyers;
attorneys were making a pilgrimage to see how the Great Howe would magically free his client. But another constituency was not admitted.

“
No women,” Sheriff Doht told an uproarious crowd gathered outside. He was taking no chances; the mistake of allowing women to hear about Guldensuppe’s anatomy would not be repeated this week. Newspapers couldn’t even hint at the reason; they had to settle for informing their readers that the testimony was simply too shocking even for modern-minded ladies.
Scores of women promptly laid siege to the sheriff’s office and overflowed into hallways, all hoping to glimpse either Nack or Thorn.

But behind the courtroom’s heavy oak doors, Martin Thorn was staring too—at the jury.

“
I have been watching them pretty closely, though some think I take little interest in the trial,” Thorn confided to a
Herald
reporter as the room filled up. He nodded toward the ever-smiling Valentine Waits, a perpetually cheerful farmer who had become a favorite of courtroom cartoonists. He appeared particularly well fed and jolly that morning. “I notice many of them are getting rosy cheeks.”

The rest of the jury filed into the jury box, with the out-of-season builders looking almost as crisply groomed that morning as Thorn himself.

“Some of them have had a hair cut,” he observed quietly. “I suppose I notice that because I’m a barber.”

Thorn’s voice, the
Herald
reporter mused, retained the same calm register of the barbershop—as “if he had been discussing freaks of weather with favored customers.” His lawyer, though, was more boisterous: Howe slapped his client’s back, prepared his papers, and then stood up before the quieted courthouse.

Gentlemen
—his voice rang out. For they were indeed gentlemen, save for seven or eight canny
women who had gotten in under the pretense of being newspaper artists; their sketch pads sat unused on their laps. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he began impressively.
“Martin Thorn is innocent of the murder of William Guldensuppe.”

He strode up to the jury box, looking with great meaning at each man sitting in it.

“
The killing of Guldensuppe germinated in the mind of the assassin—Mrs. Nack. She is a perjurer as well as a murderess. It was
she
who hired the cottage for the purpose of converting it to a slaughterhouse in which to take the life of her lover. Guldensuppe had been pestering this woman and she wanted him no longer—she wanted Martin Thorn. And so this Lady Macbeth of modern times came to Woodside and hired a cottage.
She
bought the oilcloth, while Guldensuppe was yet alive.
She
took him there to have him killed.
She
was the murderer. This anatomist who could carve a body as well as you could carve a turkey—this Lady Macbeth and all the Borgias rolled into one—then proceeded to cut that body up. After his butchery
she
put his clothes in
a cooking stove, gentlemen, and watched the fire do its work. That’s the creature that talks of confessing through God and her conscience.”

Howe paused and turned pensive. His white hair glowed against the somber black of his suit, and now he spoke in a low, tremulous voice.

“
In a long career in the court, I am in—
yellow
leaf,” he confided. After days of vigorous bluster, Howe was turning old and kindly. “But I believe that justice will be done.”

Summoning his strength, Howe turned to the packed house. “Martin Thorn!”

Captain Methven loosened Thorn’s handcuffs and then led the prisoner behind the jury box, through the narrow passage, to the stand.

“
Will Your Honor pardon me if I sit down during this examination?” the old lawyer asked, turning to Judge Maddox. “Out of respect to the court I prefer to stand, very much—but I ask that I may sit down.”

“Yes,” the judge nodded.

The effect was curiously intimate: Howe and Thorn were two men now, sitting and talking.

“Thorn,” Howe asked genially, “what is your proper name?”

“Martin Thorzewsky.”

“When did you first meet Mrs. Nack?”

“A year and a half ago.”

A glance around the courtroom showed that she had not been brought in by the prosecution; their feint had already succeeded. He was on his own, even if their entire defense relied on attacking her.

“Did Mrs. Nack make love to you—or you to her?” Howe asked delicately.

“She made love to me.”

“And did you love her in return?”

“I did,” he smiled.

“Very fondly?”

“Very,” Thorn replied quietly.

Soon, Thorn explained earnestly, she talked of leaving Guldensuppe, so they could run off together to start a lucrative orphanage in Woodside. But on the morning of June 25, when he visited the house they’d secretly rented, he had the shock of his life.

“I came there a little after eleven, and soon as I came up the
stoop, the door came open and Mrs. Nack stood inside, a little excited. I asked her—‘What is the matter?’ She said, ‘Oh, I just left Guldensuppe upstairs.’ I said, ‘What’s he doing up there?’ She said, ‘I just shot him, and I am glad of it; I am rid of all my trouble now.’ ”

Thorn shook his head in disbelief: The woman had immediately tried pinning it all on
him
. “She said, ‘We’ll have to get rid of the body now
—you
have to. If you don’t suspicion will fall on you because you had a fight with him, and you got the receipt in your name for the cottage.’ So we proceeded to take the body, undressed him and put him in the bath tub, and I went out and bought the plaster of paris.”

“Where did you go?”

“Fourth Street—I don’t know, the corner.” He shrugged. “When I got back Mrs. Nack had her hat and dress off, and I got hold of the body. Mrs. Nack took a big knife and cut his throat. When she came to the back of the neck she took a saw and cut it, and then she commenced to count his ribs. I said, ‘What are you doing that for?’ She said, ‘So I won’t cut the body too far down, so as not to open any of the bowels.’ ”

The crowd squirmed a little, but the detail rang true: The fairly expert carving of the body attested to great deliberation in the cut lines, and to someone with a knowledge of anatomy.

The courtroom was dead quiet as
Howe rose and walked to the jury box. “Thorn,” he inquired gravely, “were you ever convicted of any offense?”

“Never.”

“Look at that jury, Thorn.” Howe swept his arm out.
“Did you shoot William Guldensuppe?”

Martin Thorn looked up from the chair: out over the courthouse, at scores of men scribbling in steno pads, at errand boys sliding telegraph dispatches under the door, at disheveled artists scrolling pictures into pigeon tubes, at hundreds of New Yorkers staring fixedly upon him from the galleries.

Then the defendant leveled his gaze squarely at the twelve men who would decide his fate.

“I did not,” he said.

THE VERDICT