The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (8 page)

The
Journal
happily stole their thunder.

Incredibly, within hours three newspapers had all independently converged on the same victim. But
Hearst alone made a personal visit to the Murray Hill Baths, and Hearst alone commanded a Murder
Squad to trail Herman Nack’s morning delivery route. The
World
and the
Herald
had bobbled and dropped the lead of the year. Not only had Hearst’s
Journal
nabbed the story, they’d nabbed the
man
.

THE DRIVER REMAINED ADAMANT
. What did they want with him? He was just an honest immigrant delivering bread.

Nack was booked at the Twentieth Precinct station house and then quickly sent downtown with his
Journal
entourage to a building that was, as one police commissioner mused, “
that antique and shabby palace, that sepulcher of reputations, that tomb of character, that morgue of political ambition, that cavern of intrigue and dissimulation—the Police Headquarters on Mulberry Street.”

The
Journal
men had to be discreet going inside. The headquarters rose up four stories in a lopsided and grimy old marble hulk from Little Italy’s labyrinth of cobbled alleys, tenements, and street vendors, and it was
under constant watch by the competition. The
World
kept an apartment across the street, where reporters and photographers played cards to pass the hours between cases. One
World
reporter was always posted to the window to watch for colorfully agitated incoming suspects—or, better still, even more colorfully agitated police commissioners. That always meant a good story. Next door the
Tribune
kept an office that also spied through HQ’s windows; so did most of the big papers, for that matter.

Their suspect was quietly hustled inside and through a lobby and dingy anterooms crowded with men in blue uniforms. Mulberry Street was a bewildering place, the nerve center for
more than 100,000 arrests a year and uniformed officers issuing curt commands from the telegraph offices in the basement all the way up to the Lost Children Department on the top floors. The exterior of the building bristled with wires to every precinct house, firehouse, and hospital in the city; the interior was a constant flow of sour and sharp-looking hard cases—bunco men, badger schemers, wife stabbers. Shuffling newcomers were startled by the yells of “Mug him!” This, they would discover, meant they were to be photographed for the police files.

But today was different. Nack was not bound for the usual
fine-grinding wheels of mugs and glowering sergeants. He and the
Journal
reporters were led to the private office of Captain Stephen O’Brien, chief of the Detective Bureau.

O’BRIEN SAT PATIENTLY
, letting his man sweat. The
chief had more than 250 detectives serving under him, but a case this infamous required intervention from the top. O’Brien was the successor to chop-busting Inspector Byrnes himself—as famed for his honesty as Byrnes was for graft, and newly appointed by Teddy Roosevelt just before that reform-minded police commissioner left for a promising political career. The move had been so sudden that the paperwork for his
new rank hadn’t even gone through yet; he was a captain ordering other captains around, a downright comical situation to old-timers. And so the former inspector’s presence lingered; the very
walls and floors of the office had been carefully muffled on the old man’s orders, the better to cuff prisoners around while interrogating with “the third degree”—a term the old inspector had coined himself. Captain O’Brien was more subtle than his predecessor but no less ruthless. He’d been on the force for more than twenty years, many of them spent breaking up waterfront gangs. A surly bakery driver was no match for what he’d dealt with.

Wasn’t he married to Augusta Nack, of 439 Ninth Avenue?

Yes, the driver admitted, he had been—or rather, he still was on paper. They never divorced, but they’d lived apart ever since the last of their three children had died two years ago. She lived on Ninth Avenue, but he lived over in Astoria now—and he hadn’t spoken to her since.

Did he know a Mr. William Guldensuppe?

Nack certainly did. Bill had been their boarder, back when he and Gussie lived together, just as things were falling apart, and she ran off with him. The
Journal
reporters wrote quickly and eagerly; a sketch artist busily drew Nack’s sullen face and bushy blond eyebrows. The real question now hung pregnant in the air.

Where was he last Friday?

“
I went to work at two o’clock on Friday morning,” Nack said
sullenly. “I got my load of bread and left the bakery at four o’clock. My work was finished by two thirty in the afternoon.”

And then?

“I don’t know where I went after that.”

O’Brien was unimpressed.

“I guess I was drunk,” Nack sneered—and his alibi for the next day was not much different.

“
I get up at about 1 or 2 and go over the ferry to the bakery. I hitch up and then start to deliver bread. I get through about 4 p.m. Then I go on a spree.”

“A spree?”

“Oh, I go to Strack’s and I bowl with the boys and drink beer. I get back to my room in Eighty-Second Street about 10 o’clock. I had a good load on when I went to bed Saturday night. Haw! Haw!”

And the next day?

“
I was so drunk that I had to stay in bed nearly all of Sunday.”

“When did you last see the murdered man?”

“I don’t remember exactly, but I guess it was three or four months ago. I saw him on the street at Ninth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth.”

Captain O’Brien puzzled over the man before him. A brute, a drunk—yes, yes—a spurned husband with a perfect motive. But Nack didn’t give a damn about his ex-wife, and bachelorhood seemed to suit him just fine.

“
What the deuce do I care?” The suspect shrugged.

And it checked out: Word came in that not only could Astoria Model
Bakery’s owner vouch for Nack’s working and drinking schedule but that on the fateful Friday night the bakery foreman and Nack had actually led Strack’s saloon in belting out an entire set of drinking songs.
He’s not it
, O’Brien quietly decided. Herman Nack’s story just didn’t fit the case.

But someone else’s did.

AUGUSTA NACK WAS READY
for the next steamer to Hamburg. She’d spent the previous afternoon with four hired men rolling rugs, packing furniture and bedclothes, and washing the curtains for the next
tenant in her six-room flat over Werner’s Drug Store. This was the last day on her
$20 monthly lease; she’d given notice to Mr. Werner two days earlier, and with all the quarreling that had gone on in the place, the short notice didn’t seem to trouble him. She’d even had to sleep in the apartment of her upstairs neighbor overnight, as nearly everything short of her portmanteau was packed.

The visit from the
detective now sitting on her sofa was most inconveniently timed.

“Do you know William Guldensuppe?” he asked.

Mrs. Nack looked keenly at Detective
Krauch, and then at the chair—which should have been readied for storage but was instead seating another detective. Then she shifted her gaze over to the doorway, where yet another detective stood with his back to the door, keeping any movers from coming in and Mrs. Nack from going out.

She hesitated. “Yes, I know him. He is my man. At least he
was
until Friday morning, when he came from the bath and made me give him fifty dollars. Then we quarreled over a woman, and he went away.”

Detective Krauch watched her carefully as she spoke. She was not exactly a Gibson girl anymore, but she had dark eyes and the presence to fluster one observer into describing her “
pleasing, yet repellant, appearance.” Her man, she claimed, had been wooed away by the wanton widow of a grocer. She’d caught them in the parlor mirror the week before when they thought her back was turned. Why, just that very day that grocery hussy had come by to collect more of his worthless possessions.

“
I gave her a bit of my mind,” she snapped, “and told her she had stolen William from me.” So now she was putting her own goods in storage and heading back to Germany and her mother, and—couldn’t she just leave now?

No, they informed her, she could not.

For the detectives knew two things that Mrs. Nack didn’t. First, that Detective Krauch had been watching her apartment, and neither the mistress nor anyone else had come up her stairs that morning. And now they also knew that she wasn’t going to be making it to her Hamburg steamer that day.

——

SITTING IN CAPTAIN O’BRIEN’S OFFICE
at the Mulberry Street headquarters, the midwife looked more like a wronged woman than a suspect in a murder case. Her chair was moved over to the window, suffusing sunlight over the
fashionable tulle-trimmed hat that she’d quickly donned when detectives hustled her from the apartment over Werner’s Drug Store.

“
My name is Augusta Nack,” she stated carefully for the record. “I am thirty-eight years of age. I have been living with William Guldensuppe for sixteen months.”

She was, by her account and by her accent, a German immigrant. She’d married Herman Nack in 1883 in Lauenburg, on the Elbe. They’d moved here in 1886, whereupon Herman had squandered a series of jobs—in a pottery works, as a bologna-store proprietor, and finally as a grocer—all on account of his drinking. He was gone, their children were dead, and now she worked as a midwife and kept the occasional boarder, one of whom had been Guldensuppe.

What, O’Brien wanted to know, had happened to Guldensuppe after their argument the previous Friday, when he’d demanded money from her?

“The last time he was in the house Friday was about two p.m. He did not come home that night. Saturday morning between six and seven he came into the house.” Mrs. Nack continued her account steadily, carefully choosing her words. “ ‘Where did you come from?’ I asked. ‘None of your business,’ he told me. ‘Have you got that money?’ … I then went to the Franklin Savings Bank at Forty-Second and Eighth Avenue and drew fifty dollars. This was about eleven o’clock Saturday morning. From the bank—”

Speak louder
.

“
From the bank
I went to a confectionery store on Eighth Avenue and had some ice cream soda water. From there I went to the dry goods store of McPartland & Flaherty, and reached home about noon. I stayed until Willie came in, which was between three and four o’clock. The first thing he did was ask for the money. ‘Here it
is’ I replied, throwing it on the kitchen table. Willie picked it up and went out, and I have not seen him since.”

O’Brien and his detectives listened and took notes carefully. Home on Saturday afternoon; that was several hours after the first find in the East River. The implication was that Guldensuppe was still alive. Which, of course, he might be; after all, the body still didn’t have a head or legs, and the morgue had filled again that day with people identifying the pieces as belonging to any number of other men.

So, can we talk with him?

Well, she explained, that’s just it. Willie hadn’t been back home since then. He’d sent notes asking for more money, though. Just yesterday, come to think of it. Probably spending it all on a woman somewhere.

“Monday afternoon I was convinced that Willie would not come back to me, and made up my mind to go to Europe—”

Louder
.

“
Go to Europe
and see my mother, who was sick. Willie had asked me to draw my money from the bank and give it to him, saying he would accompany me to Europe, but this I had refused to do.”

The last she’d heard from him, she said, was the day before—on Tuesday.

“About ten o’clock,” she continued, “a man came to the house with a note from Willie asking for his clothes. I wrote on the back of the note, in German,
No; if you want your clothes come and get them yourself
. About two o’clock in the afternoon two other men, who were dirty and disreputable looking, and spoke English, came and said Willie wanted his clothes.… I put them in a brown valise and gave them to the men. That was the last I heard of him.”

The room lapsed into an unnerving silence. O’Brien motioned to a woman he had hidden just outside his office door. It was
Pauline Riger, dry-goods proprietress of Astoria, and she had been listening all along.

“This is the woman who bought the oilcloth,” Riger said as she eyed Mrs. Nack. The proprietress had a hawklike countenance, and her face was sharp and pinched in concentration. “I am sure of her.”

“You haven’t the slightest doubt?” a
Journal
reporter pressed.

“No! It is the lady. I know it.… I remember her well because she was a fine looking lady, and better dressed than most people who come to my store.”

Captain O’Brien maintained his disquieting gaze at Mrs. Nack. “This woman has identified you as having purchased oilcloth from her,” he said evenly. “Which would seem to connect you to the murder of William Guldensuppe.”

“That is impossible,” the midwife shot back. Guldensuppe, she maintained, was still alive.

She didn’t know where Willie was now, she didn’t know this Mrs. Riger, she didn’t even know any stores in Astoria. But as she spoke, word passed among the detectives that a new piece of evidence had arrived at headquarters; it had just been fished out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard after it came
bumping up against the USS
Vermont
. And as they stood up to leave, Captain O’Brien coolly swung open the door for Mrs. Nack.

There,
in the middle of his hallway, were two severed human legs—sawn halfway through, then snapped off.

“Do you know those?”
he gloated.

They were hideous objects—rotted from five days in the river, and still nestled in an opened bundle of oilcloth. O’Brien waited for Mrs. Nack to faint, to shriek, to break down. But the midwife merely turned to him with a look to freeze the marrow.

“How should I know?” she asked coolly.