The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (7 page)

In the center of the apartment door was a brass nameplate:

That was rich: New York didn’t license midwives.

He knocked and heard a faint commotion inside; the door opened to reveal the midwife herself, a dark-haired woman in her late thirties with a curiously sensual presence and the glow of an afternoon of exertions. Ned went into his spiel—wondrously soft, satisfaction guaranteed!—but she didn’t wait to hear out his sales pitch.

“Give me the soap now,” she demanded.

Well, it’s a funny thing, Brown said—turned out he had used up all his cakes. But for
her
he did have two left, because he did need a testimonial for their next ad … “If you could give the soap a trial now, while I wait,” he added, “I’d be glad to let you have one.”

She regarded the bars; their fragrance brought release from the disorder of the apartment around her, which appeared to be halfway packed for a move; rugs lay rolled up on the floor.

“All right.” She motioned him over to a black leather chair. “Give me the soap.”

As Ned heard the water running in the next room, he continued his sales patter—“Let your hands soak in it! You will feel each finger separately caressed …”—and looked hungrily around the room. An object, any incriminating object, anything to set up as a chalk engraving and run in the next edition of the
World
. On a small side table, he spotted it: a portrait of a muscular beau, blond with a turned-up mustache. He quickly snatched the photo and thrust it into his jacket just before she reentered the room.

She liked the soap, she said, but she didn’t want to be quoted for his ad.

Quite all right, quite all—

“Now you give me the other soap also,” she demanded. “Here is a dime.”

She hadn’t noticed anything missing.

It was, perhaps, the sweetest single coin he had ever earned. He pocketed the dime, passed an angry-looking fellow on his way back downstairs—not the man in the picture—and noted the address:
439 Ninth Avenue
.

“IT WAS A GOOD DAY’S WORK
, kiddo,” Roeder admitted when young Ned returned to the World Building. “Thanks.”

He’d gotten his first big scoop.

As he made his way to the El station that Tuesday evening, bound for home in Flatbush and a well-earned rest, the streets around Ned were strangely dotted with blotches of red—hundreds of them,
thousands
of them.
It was the new issue of the
Evening Journal
.
THE REAL CLEW TO THE MURDER MYSTERY
, the front page proclaimed. “Facsimile in Colors of the Oilcloth Which Will Aid in Getting the $1,000 REWARD.”

It was stunning—not
the clue, but the
printing
. Hearst had outdone himself again:
For the first time ever, color was being used on a breaking news story.

And yet everything else about the competition revealed them as safely clueless. Papers still fixated on Max Weineke, noting that his wife had insurance on him, and that she was a bad mother to boot: “
I learned from some neighbors,” a
Telegram
reporter huffed, “that Mrs. Weineke had gone out and left her babies alone many times.” Rather inconveniently, though,
a slender
Times
reporter attempted to try on one of Max’s suits and couldn’t struggle into it, so it certainly wouldn’t fit the body in the morgue.

Ah, the
Times
theorized, that’s because the secret of the crime was that two escapees from the state lunatic asylum had turned on each other—that “Mutilation Maniac” Olaf Weir had murdered his fellow maniac William O’Neill. Weir had been a carpenter with a suspicious talent for sawing. It was a fine theory, save for one problem: O’Neill’s family didn’t recall him having any markings on his chest or fingers.

As for the police, an afternoon’s rummaging uptown in butchers’ basements and along roadsides had netted but a single find. An abandoned bag—without, alas, a head inside—was scooped up, emptied out for clues, and proclaimed
THE DEAD MAN’S VALISE
in the newspapers. The
Evening Journal
lavished a dozen illustrations on its mysterious contents: writing slates, clothes, a thimbleful of tacks, a rolled-up newspaper. All terribly interesting, but none of it was Guldensuppe. The closest anyone had gotten was a chance comment to the
Journal
by William Pinkerton, musing that the use of dismemberment hinted at the killer’s nationality: “
The German seems to regard that as the best means of disposing of a body.” If that was the best they could do, then Ned felt reassured; his find on Ninth Avenue belonged to just him and tomorrow’s
World
.

THE COMPETITION’S COLOR PAGE
was no gimmick at all.

Like Detective Carey, the head of Hearst’s Murder Squad thought the oilcloth really
was
the clue to the mystery. “
The solution of the
whole m
atter hangs upon the oilcloth,” the paper declared. Innumerable New Yorkers might lay claim to the body—and without a head, who was to disprove them?—but only one or two could claim that oilcloth. The body was one of two million New Yorkers, part of a constant and fluid population; the oilcloth was tangible, unequivocal, traceable: two sheets from just 6,000 yards manufactured upstate by A. F. Buchanan & Sons between June and December 1896. George Arnold knew Detective
Carey had covered Manhattan and Brooklyn but hadn’t made it to Queens or Long Island yet. So
Journal
men had swamped Newspaper Row saloons, hiring unemployed reporters on the spot as day labor,
throwing
thirty men
into tracking the oilcloth. Thirty reporters—now armed with three hundred thousand color copies of the oilcloth.

They flooded across the boroughs as Ned Brown took his train home in innocent contentment. And before the sun set, a
Journal
team at the dry-goods store of one Max Riger had found an oilcloth purchase of Diamond B-3220. The name in the customer-accounts book pointed to just one address.

439 Ninth Avenue
.

THE SUSPECTS

(photo credit p2.1)

BY LATE MORNING
Ninth Avenue was already getting hot and dusty, the first grim signs of
another heat wave. A wagon from the Astoria Model Bakery threaded through the ice deliveries and brewers’ trucks, its horses clip-clopping along the daily rounds to grocers with graham loaves, doughnuts, and raisin bread. The driver was an
unshaven and tough-looking fellow, with a flat cap yanked low on his head, sweating as he guided his wagon team around a busy streetcar line and past the drunks staggering out of saloons. He was in the worst stretch of Hell’s Kitchen, a couple of blocks from the hideout of
gangster Mallet Murphy—so named after his favorite implement for braining victims. When
two men clambered aboard at the corner of Fortieth and Ninth, Herman Nack knew it wasn’t to buy pumpernickel.

One of them pulled himself up to the driver’s seat. “
Mr. Nack?” he inquired.

“What do you want?” the driver replied brusquely.

“Captain O’Brien wants to see you.”

Nack gave him a violent shove, sending the man sprawling off the running board, then took off down Ninth Avenue. The loaded bakery wagon swerved wildly onto Thirty-Ninth, and then onto Tenth Avenue, loaf trays clattering as the driver looked back and swore. The two men were in hot pursuit on bicycles.

Stop! Stop!
they demanded.

The mad trio flew past tenements and ash barrels, past the Salvation Army crowds on Thirty-Sixth Street, and straight toward the
Garfield Drug Company on Thirty-Fourth, where regulars were already congregating for sodas to escape the heat. A patrol cop by the drugstore took chase after them, and in another block one of the pursuing cyclists leapt aboard.

You’re under …

Nack slashed him with his horse whip, and the second cyclist vaulted on, trying to wrest control of the vehicle.

 … arrest
.

The cop came crashing in from the other side of the carriage, and the delivery driver roared and struggled desperately until the three men forced him down onto the ground. There the patrolman made his collar—not of
carriage-jackers Oscar Piper and Walter McDevitt, who were Hearst reporters attempting a citizen’s arrest—but of delivery driver Herman Nack, on suspicion of murder.

HE
TRIED ESCAPING
twice during the five-block ride to the precinct house.

“I have absolutely no idea why I have been arrested!” the driver yelled from the back of his own bakery carriage.

Walt and Oscar thought otherwise, and the officer wasn’t buying it either. The night before,
nine coworkers from the Murray Hill Baths—some brought on the sly by the
World
, the rest sneaked in equally secretively by the
Journal
—had identified the body as William Guldensuppe’s. Why, all Nack had to do was look at one of that morning’s papers:
VICTIM THOUGHT TO BE THEODORE CYKLAM
, declared the
World
.

Well, perhaps not at
that
paper.

Ned Brown’s breakthrough piece for the
World
had been
elbowed aside by Pulitzer’s ace reporter Ike White, a man famous for once identifying a suicide bomber by a single charred button off the man’s suit.
Ike’s pet theory this time centered on cabinetmaker Theodore Cyklam; he’d been missing from his job in Long Island since the
previous Thursday. Cyklam owned a valise like the one found in the woods the day before, and the contents checked out. He’d owned two writing slates for charting shifts at his factory, and the can of tacks was common to cabinetmakers. And the injured index finger? A banged nail holder, the universal ailment of woodworkers. What was more, Ike tracked down one Diamond B-3220 oilcloth to a Mr. Cunningham, a peddler who also sold the same kind of cord used to tie the parcels. He worked a circuit near Cyklam—and, the
World
noted darkly, lived just a block from where little Susie Martin’s body had been found three years earlier.

It was a splendid theory; everything fit perfectly. Except … except that it had no
motive
. And no witness. And no crime scene. And no time line to put Cunningham and Cyklam in the exact right place at the right time. Ike’s story was beautiful—and useless.

Ned Brown’s big scoop had been shoved into just a couple of inches of space at the bottom of page 2 under the deeply unremarkable headline
ANOTHER IDENTIFICATION
. Another indeed; in fact, there had already been a
Herald
reporter on this exact story. It was
not unknown for reporters to tail detectives, for detectives to tail reporters, and for competing reporters and detectives alike to tail one another—anything for a good lead.

But this was different.
The
Herald
, it seemed, had boozily stumbled into the Guldensuppe story all on its own. Several Murray Hill Baths coworkers had been drinking after work at a Third Avenue saloon,
also
idly wondering whether Willie Guldensuppe might be the guy in the morgue. They were
overheard by reporter Joe Gavan, who dutifully reported the theory to the police, and in that morning’s
Herald:
“Suspicion pointed to a jealous husband as the instigator of the crime. It was said that the man was a shampooer in an uptown Turkish bath.… This man, it is said, had been living with a baker’s wife.” But Gavan couldn’t identify any of them; police detectives had immediately demanded secrecy to pursue the lead.