The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (38 page)

The entire crime from start to finish, she continued, had been his doing. In fact, she hadn’t even known Thorn was upstairs in the Woodside cottage.

“I heard a shot, an exclamation of pain, and a fall. Then it flashed over me in an instant that Thorn had killed the man I loved. He slowly came down the stairs and towards me. I shut my eyes because I thought he was going to kill me. He thought I had fainted and went to get me a glass of water. When he came with the water he said:
Gussie, darling, I did it for you.
”

Her tale sounded curiously theatrical—which indeed it was.

“A theatrical company has made me an offer to go on stage,” she admitted, “but I don’t think I shall accept. I am going to write a book of my life, and when people read that they will see.”

But first she’d have to find a place to live, a place where she could be left alone—“anywhere—everywhere—just so I can lose my identity,” she explained. Maybe, she wondered aloud, she’d have to pull together enough
money to move back to Germany. The $300 the
police seized when arresting her was presumably still in a bank somewhere, but with her lawyer long dead,
she wasn’t sure where to start looking.

Instead, she was busy seeking lodging; the very next place she’d gone to after the Hotel Rand also rejected her. Visiting the towering World Building to hawk her story again that day, she looked out over the sprawling city that spurned her. Augusta Nack no longer knew New York, but New Yorkers still knew her.

“
This,” she muttered, “is worse than prison.”

ONE YEAR LATER
, a call came upstairs to the head matron of the Tombs; there was, one of the jail staff informed her, “a lady wearing diamonds” waiting for her on a bench in the lobby. The matron puzzled over who it might be as she walked down to the entrance of the jail.

“How do you do, my dear?” her visitor called out as she rose. “Oh, it is so good to see you again!”

The head matron stood back, mystified. Her visitor was a respectable-looking middle-aged woman, finely adorned with a gold watch and a diamond brooch, and utterly unfamiliar to her.

“Who are you?” she finally asked.

Her visitor looked about a little conspiratorially, then leaned in. “I am Mrs. Nack.”

The matron was startled, and quickly led her former star prisoner into her office. It had been some eleven years since she’d last seen her—so long, in fact, that the entire jail had been rebuilt since she left.

“I have just returned from Germany, where I went to see my old mother,” Mrs. Nack explained as they sat down. “I had a good time in the old home, but I wanted to come back to America. I wouldn’t live in Europe if you paid me. This is the place to make money.”

Mrs. Nack had seen the takings at the Tombs and at Auburn Prison; the first was almost mythically corrupt, and a state audit later found Auburn a “
brutal” place of “wanton waste and extravagance.” Mrs. Nack had already been on the receiving end of that cruelty and graft. “
You do not have enough to eat,” she recalled of Auburn.
“When I was in solitary confinement I received one slice of bread and two ounces of water a day. I thought I would commit suicide, and I tried to open a vein in my arm with a pin. I sucked out the blood and it moistened my lips, and I did not die.”

But as long as you were the one standing outside the cell, it was clearly a good business to get into.

“
I would like to get a place as a matron or a head keeper in a prison,” Mrs. Nack earnestly explained to the flabbergasted jailer. “I know something about the business. Such a place would just suit me.”

The matron, a reporter dryly noted, “made no offer to help.”

For others, though, the Guldensuppe case launched new careers. Both Judge Smith and
Judge Maddox went on to state supreme court appointments soon afterward. For District Attorney William
Youngs, the case was followed by a plum promotion: He became Teddy Roosevelt’s private secretary, and later the U.S. attorney in New York. After retiring, he even tried the other side of the reporter’s notebook and ran a newspaper himself. He drew upon his experience in the first Thorn mistrial to
urge the adoption of an alternate-juror rule. The state government in Albany being what it was, it
only took another thirty-three years for his sensible proposal to become law.

The chemist whose forensic evidence was spurned for Thorn’s trial, Professor Rudolph Witthaus, also went on to great success. Witthaus was brilliant, disturbing, and arrogant to the end,
testifying in major murder cases over the next two decades, including such star-studded scandals as the shooting of Stanford White. It was his expertise in poisons, though, that made his fame. He could
view stomach membrane under a microscope and pick out the dazzling crystals of arsenic poisoning—or “
inheritance powder,” as it was dubbed. That same flesh could be minced and boiled and mixed with lye and benzene; if the slurry fluoresced
under an ultraviolet light, that was chloroform poisoning. Blasted with the rotten-egg stink of hydrogen sulfide,
it would also turn yellow for mercury poisoning. Witthaus’s skills were in such demand that in one 1900 case he
charged the city a dizzying $18,550 for his services. He could have used some of that consulting himself, as
his heirs would later claim that a paramour had kept the dying professor in a chemical haze while filing three
conflicting wills. Witthaus, it turned out, died leaving a poisoning case probably only he could have solved: his own.

At least one vital advance was already being made for his successors, though. For all of Witthaus’s tools, he had often been frustrated by the
evidence ruined by drunk and incompetent coroners, who were still appointed out of political patronage. Emil Hoeber had been one such appointee—and a man not opposed to being
bribed with, say, a nice gold watch. The office proved so hopelessly corrupt that in 1915, the year of Witthaus’s death,
the coroner’s job was abolished altogether and replaced by a trained medical examiner. With that, New York City forensics had finally stepped—a little belatedly—into the modern era. Were a Guldensuppe case to come to trial again, no DA would need to feel embarrassed to call forth a coroner or a chemistry professor to testify.

Among police officers, the old “river mystery” remained legendary: Whenever a head was found buried in a basement or a vacant lot, it was
promptly dubbed “Guldensuppe’s head.” Those who really had searched for his head, though, went on to upstanding careers. The first officer to interrogate Mrs. Nack, Captain Samuel
Price, rose to become one of the most recognizable detectives in the city and eventually the head of the Detective Bureau in the Bronx. Another key officer at the Harlem find, George Aloncle, became one of the city’s top safecracking experts. And even Captain Stephen
O’Brien—who lost his Detective Bureau post after triumphantly wrapping up the case—went on to address the bewildering rise of automobiles by founding the city’s Traffic Squad. Fittingly enough for the man famed as “the honest cop,” after first observing traffic squads in London, Paris, and Berlin, O’Brien submitted a travel-expense report so scrupulously penny-pinching that he was ribbed about it on the force for years afterward.

But the man most marked by the Guldensuppe case was Arthur Carey, the demoted police officer who’d opened the package found in the bushes near the Harlem River. His pursuit of the oilcloth provided a key break in solving the case; his star rose again, and he was made the
first head of the NYPD’s newly formed Homicide Bureau.
For three decades he was New York City’s “Murder Man,” famed for being so relentless that he once questioned a suspect in the middle of the funeral of the man’s murdered wife. In one Chinatown murder case, he interrogated a suspect for thirty hours, until they both nearly broke down. Carey became a city institution,
teaching the homicide course in the NYPD’s detective academy. Along with training in weapons and crowd control, the police academy also imparted to recruits a new lesson: Never run roughshod over a crime scene. Spurred by the meticulous new methodologies developed in Austria, police were now exhorted to leave them untouched, and to neatly number and photograph each piece of physical evidence wherever it had fallen. They weren’t to touch anything if they could help it; though fingerprints were still ignored in New York City back in 1897, by the time of Mrs. Nack’s release, dusting for them
had become a standard procedure. The identification of Guldensuppe’s body and the murder scene—once so precarious that Howe had nearly used them to overturn the whole case—would in this new era have been clinched by Carey through fingerprints from the body and at Woodside.

By the time Carey retired, he’d personally overseen more murder investigations than possibly any police officer before or since—more than ten thousand, by a
Times
estimate. But it was the Guldensuppe case that stayed with him. Carey always recalled what his first big case and its “hundred different sources” taught him.

“In a murder case there is no one obvious clue,” Carey mused, “but all clues are good.”

And it was just one such murder case, as it turned out, that would bring Augusta Nack into the news again.

IT WAS A WARM JUNE EVENING
in 1909 when a man—a European immigrant, perhaps thirty-five years old—approached a young boy not far from the newsrooms of the
Journal
and the
World
.

“Do you want to make five cents?” the man asked.

The boy was to guard two large parcels wrapped in black oilcloth, then wait for the man to come back to pick them up. Minutes ticked
by, then an hour; there was no sign of the man or the nickel. Just as the boy was losing hope, a passing dog caught a scent and began frantically trying to tear at the packages.

Inside them, sliced cleanly in two, was a freshly
murdered man with no head.

As Officer Carey hurried over from his newly formed Homicide Bureau, newspaper reporters dashed out of their offices and onto the scene unfolding just down the street. Written in blood on the inside of the oilcloth were the words
Black Hand;
but this, it was surmised, was a murderer’s ruse to fool the police into blaming an Italian gang. Before a day had passed, the
head was discovered under the Brooklyn Bridge, and newspapers had their real victim: a Russian housepainter named Samuel Bersin.

VICTIM CARVED UP LIKE GULDENSUPPE
, one paper announced, while the
Evening Journal
declared
CASE MOST PUZZLING SINCE GULDENSUPPE
. This time the police were ready.
Scores of detectives tracked the distinctive oilcloth pattern and piled into pawnshops, where they soon found Bersin’s missing jewelry. Reporters followed in hot pursuit, pouncing on the latest theories:
Sammy was murdered by a jealous husband; Sammy was robbed for his diamond rings; Sammy was a Russian Jewish anarchist caught in a political squabble. But the most palpable clue was also the most alluring one: Everyone who knew Sammy knew that he had romantic rivals for the hand of a comely Russian émigré named Jennie Siegel.

Among those swept up in the dragnet around the case was one unexpected bystander: Augusta Nack. With memories of the Guldensuppe case revived, reporters discovered the infamous Mrs. Nack hiding in plain sight just blocks from her old apartment.

“Mrs. Nack has taken the name of Augusta Huber,” a wire-service article revealed, “and now manages and owns a small fancy goods store at No. 357 Ninth Avenue.” Within hours, Mrs. Nack’s new identity had been exposed to both her neighbors and to newspaper readers across the country; within a month of the Bersin murder,
she was in bankruptcy court, her business in ruins. And with that, Augusta Nack vanished from public view again—this time, it seemed, for good.

But for old-timers on the force, the memory of Gussie Nack was not so easily lost. Still working the streets of New York decades later, they’d recognize her face with a start, then pass quietly onward. Even so, Chief Inspector Ernest Van Wagner admitted that there’d never been any question among these detectives that it was Nack herself “who actually designed and planned” the murder of William Guldensuppe.

But had she also carried it out?

It is worth considering why the detectives in the case remained insistent on
Mrs. Nack’s equal guilt, even decades later.
Neither Thorn’s explanation nor hers fit the evidence
. The medical examiner, in examining Guldensuppe’s body, found signs of a desperate fight: a deep stab wound from a knife plunged straight down, wounds to the hand from where he’d grabbed at a blade, and additional glancing or angled stab wounds. These wounds were clean of any fibers, indicating that he’d been attacked while naked. And upon Mrs. Nack’s arrest, the jail matron had discovered bruises on her arm that corresponded in age to the day of the crime. Finally, there was one last humble piece of physical evidence left unaccounted for in the Woodside bedroom. It was the only thing there, in fact, other than the two bullets and a discarded cartridge box: an
empty cabernet bottle.

None of these clues were explained in the trial, in Thorn’s story to Gotha, or in either murderer’s testimony on the stand. But it
is
possible to conceive of one explanation of what happened that afternoon—one that accounts for all of the evidence. Guldensuppe was
stabbed while naked, and stabbed from above when he least expected it. Only one person could have led Guldensuppe to the bedroom of a vacant house, offered him wine, stripped him naked, straddled atop him—and then plunged a knife straight down into his chest.

That person was not Martin Thorn.

Guldensuppe would have reached out and grabbed at his assailant’s arm and hand, leaving bruises—and was stabbed across the palm and clumsily in the chest. That is when Martin Thorn would have stepped out from a closet to finish his rival off with a gunshot to the head.

Neither Mrs. Nack nor Thorn could admit to this. Thorn’s story to John Gotha—the hapless friend who admired his way with cards and women—would quietly omit that he’d triumphed over Guldensuppe by watching him tryst with Gussie. And once Thorn and Mrs. Nack went to trial, each was determined to establish that
only the other had been upstairs to commit the murder
. If they’d acted in concert, neither could breathe a word of the actual plot. And if DA Youngs suspected the truth, there was nothing to be gained by airing it; he lacked hard evidence against Mrs. Nack. As it was, the prosecution managed to keep the salacious details of Guldensuppe’s anatomy away from the public. The appalling way he was killed would also remain safely distant from Victorian eyes and ears.