The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (36 page)

Thorn suffered nothing less than a modern drawing and quartering, the surgeon charged, and another medical journal scorned the autopsy as “
the prostitution of science.” But the debate remained a quiet disagreement among colleagues. Reading the afternoon papers, one might never have guessed this most appalling irony of the case: that carried into an autopsy room and cut apart while faintly alive, Martin Thorn had met the same fate at Sing Sing that William Guldensuppe once suffered in a Woodside bathtub.

THE
EVENING JOURNAL
lavished attention that night on the execution, right down to helpful anatomical close-ups of Thorn’s “Degenerate Ear” and “Pugnacious Nose.” It was the end of an affair that had been very good to them: The Guldensuppe case had pushed Hearst’s circulation past the
World
’s. He’d capitalized on this success with
front-page attacks on crooked dealings in local trolley and gas franchises,
stoked his paper’s capacity even further with a baroquely engineered Hoe dectuple multi-color half-tone electrotype web perfecting press, and then trumpeted the serial debut of “the most startling and interesting novel of modern times”—something called
The War of the Worlds
. But it was freeing the comely Evangelina Cisneros that had shown William Randolph Hearst that
Journal
readers needed more than just Martian invaders to root against. They needed a real war.

THE WORST INSULT TO THE UNITED STATES IN ITS HISTORY
, his paper had declared after obtaining a leaked letter from a Spanish diplomat that described President McKinley as weak and easily led. “A good war,” the newspaper thundered, “might free Cuba, wipe out Spain, frighten to death the meanest tribe of money-worshipping parasites that has ever disgraced a decent nation.” But a good war needed a good excuse, and early in 1898 Hearst had gotten it: a mysterious explosion that ripped open the USS
Maine
while docked in Cuba, sending the battleship and most of its men to the bottom of Havana Harbor.

“
Have you put anything else on the front page?” Hearst demanded in a dawn phone call to his newsroom.

“Only the other big news—” his editor began.

“There is no other big news,” Hearst replied. “This means war.”

WAR! SURE! MAINE DESTROYED BY SPANISH
, the
Journal
announced. Neither war nor the culprit was a sure thing—many suspected a coal fire belowdecks had doomed the ship—but Hearst was not to be deterred.
THE WHOLE COUNTRY THRILLS WITH WAR FEVER
, his paper insisted, and he proudly coined a national rallying cry:
“
Remember the
Maine!
To hell with Spain!”
When McKinley finally declared war that spring, Hearst and his headlines left no doubts about their proud role in the matter:

William Randolph Hearst liked it very much indeed. Having already issued his Murder Squad badges to pursue Thorn, he thought nothing of the next logical step: He offered the U.S. military $500,000 to raise a
Journal
-sponsored army regiment. His offer spurned, Hearst spent the money anyway: the Wrecking Crew poured out of his Park Row offices, this time headed for the next boats to Cuba. The paper’s circulation, already the highest in the country when it had hit 300,000, now rocketed up to a dizzying half million, then a million, and then a million and a half.

It was now the greatest newspaper juggernaut the world had ever known.

Pulitzer was obliged to keep up, of course; he duly matched Hearst star Frederic Remington with his own Stephen Crane. The
World
charged that the
Journal
’s “war news was written by fools for fools.” The
Journal
jeered that the
World
was so jealous that it stole the
Journal
’s wire reports. To prove it, the
Evening Journal
ran news of the death of one Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz; the next morning’s
World
ran a similar story on the ill-fated officer. Hearst’s editors gleefully revealed that there
was
no Colonel Thenuz; reversing the colonel’s first name and middle initial, though, revealed this message inadvertently run by the
World
“in cold type—in its own columns”:

Hearst had yet another humiliating trump card, which he knew the frail and nervous Pulitzer could not match: He sent
himself
. Soon the U.S. Navy was treated to the sight of the
newspaper publisher tearing around Havana Harbor in a convoy of chartered yachts.

MUST FIND THAT FLEET!
he roared in giant front-page headlines draped in patriotic red, white, and blue bunting, while inside, his paper
offered up
summer dessert tips for homemakers that included such “warlike dainties” as Ice Cream Soldiers and Lemon Ice Cannons. (“You will swallow bullets—of chocolate,” it promised.) Hearst himself took to dodging actual bullets; after blithely ignoring press restrictions and
taking some Spanish prisoners of war, the young publisher was
spotted at the Battle of El Caney. A
Journal
correspondent, struck to the ground by a bullet to the shoulder, opened his eyes to see his own boss leaning over him, a ribboned straw hat on his head and a revolver strapped to his belt.

“I’m sorry you’re hurt,” Hearst beamed as the enemy rounds whistled past them. “But wasn’t it a splendid fight? We must beat every paper in the world.”

BACK IN NEW YORK
, the
Eden Musée was busy adding a score of patriotic new waxworks of Rough Rider charges and Manila Bay victories, and setting up pride of place for the latest in entertainment: the cinematograph. It had been scarcely a year since the first public cinema screenings in Paris and New York; not only did the Musée now have one of its own, its sign also announced the most eagerly awaited films of all:
CINEMATOGRAPH WAR SCENES
. While the war scenes were moved and spooled into place, other Musée staffers prepared a more familiar mannequin for a new scene down in its Chamber of Horrors. The Musée’s old star wax attraction would now be seated in an oak chair festooned with ominous wiring and leather restraints convincingly riveted to its frame. The exhibit bore a stark caption: “The Electrocution of Martin Thorn.”

Not many blocks away, the Empire Limited pulled in to Grand Central Depot bearing the genuine article;
its baggage car disgorged
a plain pine box, and handlers quickly moved it to a side entrance of the station, all under the watchful eye of a detective. There were
worries that freak-show promoters might try stealing the remains, but so far the arrival of Martin Thorn had passed unnoticed and unannounced.

As a carriage bore the coffin toward Christian Herrlich’s funeral parlor off Eighty-Third and First Avenue, though, word raced ahead:
He’s here
.
A thousand disappointed spectators had appeared at Herrlich Brothers’ doors the night before, only to find that Thorn hadn’t arrived yet. Even as the hearse drew quickly up the street, hundreds of onlookers were already gathering again.
A dozen policemen from the Twenty-Seventh Precinct station house labored mightily to clear a path into the funeral home.

Out of the way!
they yelled as the coffin passed through.
Move along
.

The
undertaker barred the door to the surging crowd. Inside, sitting in the cool and darkened funeral parlor, was Martin Thorn’s sister with her daughter and husband; alongside them stood three barbers from Thorn’s old shop. They’d raised the money for their coworker’s burial, and Thorn was quickly moved from his prison-issued pine box into a more respectable casket with silver handles. Beneath his dark curls,
his head still bore red electrode marks; his young niece wept at the sight, and bent over to kiss his face.

After a few minutes, the
brother-in-law leaned over for a word in the undertaker’s ear. Herrlich open the door, and a boisterous line of New Yorkers poured in to view the executed man. As much as his exposed face, though, they gawked at the massive and
luxuriant display of lilies of the valley decorating one end of the bier. It was a $45 delivery order—hardly the sort of expense the family or the barbers could have paid for. Who, then, had arranged for it to be delivered?

“
Probably a woman,” theorized a
Journal
reporter.

The undertaker just smiled, and an explanation became clear.

“Mrs. Nack?” a
Herald
reporter ventured.

“I will neither affirm,” the undertaker replied, “nor deny your question.”

And then he smiled again.

——

MRS. NACK
had been busy indeed. As
inmate #269 at Auburn Prison, she woke up each morning at seven sharp to find herself alone in a cell that was secured not with the usual iron bars but instead with
a three-inch-thick oak door with a peephole—for the building still bore some touches of its origins as a hospital for the insane. After dressing in a blue-and-white-striped uniform of coarse awning cloth, the former midwife then
spent her day in the prison’s sewing room, where she labored quietly with other prisoners on a huge government order for 6,000 haversacks. She’d been a model prisoner, and for good reason: Soon she’d be able to earn the privilege of a bedside rug on her cell floor.

Word was leaking out, though, that while Thorn in his final days hadn’t wanted to talk about his crime, he did admit one thing: Mr. Nack’s wild charges about Gussie were
true
. She really had been disposing of fetuses in a kitchen stove and then dumping remains down a chute into the sewer system.

“He added,” a reporter noted, “that it was very profitable. It was practically all profit.”

A week after Thorn’s burial, the
Journal
pounced on a damning discovery: Augusta Nack was quietly trying to arrange from behind bars the sale of two parcels of land in Cliffside, New Jersey. It was hardly the work of a poor midwife who had claimed to have only $300 to her name.

“Detectives have always believed that Mrs. Nack burned the bodies of babies,” Hearst’s paper charged. “Now, after Thorn’s execution, like a confirmation of his charges, comes proof that Mrs. Nack is a woman of means.” The imprisoned midwife maintained a stony silence, though not before another newspaper wittily nominated her for a Hall of Fame statue under the
sardonic inscription of
AUGUSTA NACK, SURGEON
.

Some, though, were studying Nack and Thorn’s methods more seriously. Mutilation murders now occurred with such alarming frequency that one medical journal declared that the Guldensuppe case had induced “
Epidemic Hypnotic Criminal Suggestion.” When
a sawn-off trunk bobbed up in the East River the summer after Thorn’s execution, the
Times
headline
SECOND GULDENSUPPE CASE
hardly covered it; there were also third,
fourth, and
fifth Guldensuppe cases. Still another trunk appeared on October 8, 1899: That morning,
a woman’s leg was found carefully wrapped in recent issues of the
World
and the
Journal
and tossed into the gutter in front of 160 West Seventeenth Street. Soon her midriff bumped up against the Thirtieth Street pier, and
her chest washed ashore on Staten Island, where it was discovered by a boy out gathering driftwood.

Station houses around the city emptied out as the
NYPD threw 200 detectives on the case. The discovery of coal dust on the wrappings quickly led to a house-to-house rifling of coal cellars.

“Everybody that shows the slightest hesitancy will regret it,” one officer barked to a
Sun
reporter. “I will kick the door in and search every house on the block.”

Newspapers roared to life again with offers of reward money, and Bellevue’s morgue filled with
would-be relatives; newspapers ran lists of missing women, and papers leapt at the clue that one of the newspaper wrappers had borne the small pencil notation of
16c
. That traced the paper to a dealer named
Moses Cohen, the “C” newspaper concession on Sixteenth Street. Another witness, the
captain of the barge
Knickerbocker
, reported a chillingly familiar sort of suspect fleeing the scene near the Thirtieth Street pier: a German male, aged about thirty-five. It was looking like the efforts of the police and the newspapers would bust open an insoluble case once again.

“The methods are largely those which would have appealed to Sherlock Holmes,” the
Brooklyn Eagle
exulted. “The killers of Guldensuppe have paid the penalty for their crime and it is probable that within a few days we shall know who killed this woman.”

The comparison was turning startlingly apt, for it looked like another German midwife might be the accomplice. The
Prospect Place coal cellar of Alma Lundberg was found filled with bloody rags and quicklime, and she’d abandoned the house hurriedly after the first clues were found—perhaps running from a botched abortion. But the lead went nowhere, and
other clues proved to be the usual nonsense—an overexcited servant girl, a missing beauty who turned
up alive in Scranton, and an encore appearance by “
the Great American Identifier,” who this time gravely informed the police that the crime had been committed by two women.

There was also a more troubling development in the case. Examining the body, Deputy Coroner O’Hanlon determined that the
cuts precisely matched those on Guldensuppe. Whoever had done this, he theorized, had been one of the many who had gawked at Guldensuppe’s body in the Bellevue morgue.

“I believe that the persons who committed this murder saw the body of Guldensuppe more than once,” the doctor warned. “The cutting up of this body is identical. These murderers copied Mrs. Nack and Thorn in everything.”

OTHER CURIOUS REMEMBRANCES
of the crime surfaced in the years after Thorn’s execution. One of the first was
a novel,
Three Men and a Woman: A Story of Life in New York
, by none other than the Reverend Robert Parker Miles, the minister whose young child had inspired the jail-cell confession of Augusta Nack. Along with the rushed-out
Guldensuppe Mystery
and the dime novel
The Headless Body Murder Mystery
, this became the
third book on the case. Now living in Iowa, Miles restyled the crime a bit for his version; in his novel, the hard-drinking delivery driver Herman Nack became an earnest Viennese physician. But the story of a faithless wife who “plunges into a sea of gaiety” and then murder remained perfectly recognizable.