The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (9 page)

WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST
wheeled into action—literally.

Jumping onto a bicycle, Hearst sped up the fifty blocks from Printer’s Square to Mrs. Nack’s apartment building at Thirty-Fifth and Ninth. He marched past the peppermint-stick displays into
Werner’s Drug Store looking for the owner, and he was in luck: Franz Werner’s indispensable assistant was vacationing in Larchmont, so Werner himself was in charge.

Didn’t Mrs. Augusta Nack’s lease run out today?

Indeed it did.

The young millionaire made the landlord an offer on the spot: He’d pay handsomely to rent out Nack’s apartment—right now. Werner was delighted, and Hearst quickly conferred with the Wrecking Crew, which had finally caught up with him. Because he was such an upstanding new tenant, the publisher decided to post staff to all the entrances as complimentary doormen. Another group of Hearst reporters was sent out to the neighborhood hotels with instructions to take over every pay-phone booth. By the time Pulitzer’s men caught on to the Nack arrest and arrived, they found a cordon of Wreckers around 439 Ninth Avenue that, as it so happened, allowed only the police and fellow Hearst reporters into the building.

It was only the latest indignity for the
World
men. The morning’s triumphant Cyklam story was already being dethroned, and the kind
of grandstanding that Hearst was doing here was exactly what Joseph Pulitzer would not and
could
not do. His eyesight and his nerves shot, over
the past few years
Pulitzer had increasingly taken to isolating himself in his Fifth Avenue mansion. All the day’s papers were read to him, so that his presence remained constant and ghostly; nitpicking commands were brayed by telephone, telegraph, and memos. And with the
Journal
savagely attacking the
World
’s circulation, the messages from Pulitzer were getting harsher.

“
We must smash the interloper,” one memo commanded.

Other newspapers were looking endangered as well. The
Times
had briefly gone bust the previous year, and over at the stately
Sun
—the paper whose respectability the
Times
still only aspired to—an even more dire drama was now unfolding. It was being whispered that editor Charles A.
Dana, after having helmed the
Sun
for more than fifty years, had stopped coming to his office in the previous week. Only imminent death could be keeping the old man from his desk in the middle of the year’s biggest crime story. New York newspapers without Dana were nearly unthinkable—indeed, Pulitzer himself had trained under the
Sun
’s publisher before turning on him.

The irony was not lost on the denizens of Newspaper Row. Pulitzer had made his fortune by attacking his old colleagues at the
Sun
as dinosaurs, and he then went after James Gordon Bennett’s equally celebrated
New York Herald
by undercutting its newsstand price. Now Hearst, trained in his college years at the
World
, was doing the exact same thing.

“
When I came to New York,” one editor heard Pulitzer say with a sigh, “Mr. Bennett reduced the price of his paper and raised his advertising rates—all to my advantage. When Mr. Hearst came to New York I did the same. I wonder why, in view of my experience?”

The
World
’s unmatched circulation of more than 350,000—an audited figure it proudly advertised atop its front pages by proclaiming
CIRCULATION BOOKS OPEN TO ALL
—was now in danger of being overtaken by the
Journal
. And as the two pulled perilously close in record-setting circulations, the city’s other papers were getting shoved further aside. A future owned by yellow journalism was not one most reporters wished to contemplate. Some libraries had already barred
the
World
and the
Journal
from their precincts, with one Brooklyn librarian sniffing that they attracted “an
undesirable class of readers.” Rival papers were quick to agree, and laid into the salivating coverage of what the
World
had dubbed the Missing Head Mystery.

“
The sensational journals of the city have now become scientific and publish anatomical charts and figures, solely in the interests of science, and to supply a want which the closing of the dime museums in the Bowery creates,” mocked the
New York Commercial Advertiser
. A
Times
reporter bemoaned the sight of the yellow journals co-opting the case from a bumbling police force: “
The freak journals, those startling and irrepressible caterers to the gross and savage side of human nature, are having a particularly fine time with their new murder mystery … and putting all the celebrated detectives of fact and fiction to shame.” Worse still, he admitted, they were good at it: “Yet it seems that in an enlightened age criminals might be brought to justice in a manner less demoralizing to the whole community.”

But it was another observation by the
Times
, one being quietly made all down Newspaper Row that day, that contained the real sting for Pulitzer’s men.

“The
Journal
, by the way,” they wrote, “is generally doing better nowadays. The pupil is taking the master’s place now.”

It was all too true. Ned and Gus and the rest of Pulitzer’s newsmen were barred from the very crime scene that
they’d
been the first to uncover. Locked out of Nack’s building while a joyous Hearst scampered about inside, infuriated
World
reporters marched off to the neighborhood pay phones to call the newsroom and complain. But when they picked up the earpieces, nothing happened.

Hearst’s men had cut the cords.

WHILE PULITZER’S JOURNALISTS
fumed in disbelief outside, the police carefully picked through Augusta Nack’s apartment. Detectives
Price, Krauch, and O’Donohue, the three who had taken Nack in, spent the next few hours unpacking and rifling through the hastily packed boxes. It wasn’t easy. Nearly everything had been readied for storage, and by Nack’s own account, she’d been busily brushing and
sponging the apartment down before moving out. But was it to get her deposit back, or to wash away evidence?

Amid the crates of crockery and bedclothes there remained intriguing hints of life at 439 Ninth Avenue. Photographic albums immediately went into the evidence pile; so did a large number of letters, including the telegram that had arrived on Sunday, the day after the first bundle was found in the river. It was signed
Guldensuppe
, something that occasioned more than a little skeptical commentary among the detectives.

More policemen spread out onto the other floors of the building. There was, almost unnoticed in the fuss upstairs, a
small trapdoor in the ground floor of the stairwell. It led to a basement, where their torches shone upon a motley assortment of barrels and stray wooden planks; against the wall stood a large wooden display cabinet, one of its doors fallen off onto the floor, filled inside with an array of bottles. An eerie spot, perhaps, and yet there was no particular sign of any scuffle or recent activity.

Upstairs was a different matter.
Neighbors watched from the adjacent buildings to see a hatch atop Werner’s roof thrown aside. Then, climbing a ladder from the top of the stairwell, officers and reporters emerged onto the roof, blinking in the sunlight. Normally the only noteworthy attraction up there was a small Werner’s Drug Store billboard, but on this day a more humble object caught their attention: an overturned tub. It was exactly what one might need to boil a body. They grabbed it as evidence, though not before Hearst artists ran up a sketch of the suspicious tin hulk for the paper.

Looking down from the rooftop, they could see an
avenue that was turning increasingly chaotic; word had gotten out, and police were holding back more than just competing reporters now. But in the neighboring tenements and stores, resourceful newsmen from the
World
, the
Times
, and the
Herald
were all conducting their own searches—and finding plenty. An undertaker’s assistant up the block, George
Vockroth, had rented a horse and surrey to Nack on Saturday morning; she’d come by at ten a.m. to arrange it, and then a mustachioed German stopped by at three thirty p.m. to pick it up. It wasn’t Guldensuppe, though; this fellow was shorter, moodier, and darker-haired. Mrs. Nack’s other neighbors had a notion of who that might
be. They murmured that
another
boarder had lived in the apartment for while—a mysterious German barber known only as Fred, though that wasn’t thought to be his real name. Mrs. Nack had been more than friendly with
both
of her boarders, until back
in February when Guldensuppe had beaten his rival so badly that the barber was left with a black eye. He had moved out after that.

But if “Fred” was back, why was he picking up carriages on behalf of Mrs. Nack? Back inside her kitchen, the detectives had a good guess. One of them reached into the recesses of a cupboard and found that it was not empty. His hands emerged holding a butcher’s
knife, a broken saw, and then a revolver. And held up to the light, by the hammer of the pistol there appeared to be a dried spray of blood.

WORLD
REPORTERS WERE TAUNTED
all the way to Mulberry Street by Augusta Nack’s visage staring out from below
that evening’s
Journal
headline:

Crowds of commuters swarmed the pint-sized newsboys to grab precious copies of the
Evening Journal
. The paper, ginning up the publicity, ostentatiously
sent out beefy guards to tamp down any riots by customers. To complement four full pages breaking open the case and the sensational find of the legs that afternoon, Hearst also whipped up portraits of everyone from Augusta and Herman Nack to William Guldensuppe and the oilcloth seller Mrs. Riger. That night he’d outdone the police, he’d outdone the
World
, and he’d very nearly outdone himself.

“
When patting oneself on the back for a recent achievement, it is a reprehensible thing to boast,” the tycoon began modestly. “But in an instance like an overwhelming victory over its rivals in the Guldensuppe murder case, the
Journal
comes to the front, sweeps the curtain away from the mass of doubt connected with the case, and exposes almost every detail of the crime.” If his neighbors on
Newspaper Row still didn’t get the message, Hearst was happy to elucidate: “All this was done, of course, with the main purpose of exhibiting the
Journal
’s superiority over its rivals.”

Inside police headquarters, evidence kept piling up. The telegram in Mrs. Nack’s apartment, dated from the day after the murder, was
signed Guldensuppe, which was what
other
people called him—and not Gieldsensuppe, which was how the victim himself spelled it. Detectives poring over Mrs. Nack’s bank account and purse
couldn’t find missing money she claimed to have given Guldensuppe just a couple of days earlier—it was all still on her, for
a jail matron found it hidden in her corset.

The alibi literally didn’t add up.

The matron also noticed bruises along Mrs. Nack’s upper arm—signs of a struggle, perhaps—and called in a doctor to have a look. From their faded color, they were judged to be about five or six days old. Mrs. Nack couldn’t account for those, either. Captain O’Brien made a great show of
having her fingernails pared and scraped out—if there was any foreign blood or tissue there from a fight, he assured her, they’d find it.

Sitting in his office later that night with a crowd of reporters, O’Brien was pleased indeed. He had the putative murder weapons laid out on his desk, nearly a dozen identifications on the body in the morgue, and the prime suspect in a jail cell upstairs.

“Do you believe that Mrs. Nack killed the man whose body is now in the morgue?” one reporter asked.

“
If that body belonged to William Guldensuppe, I believe she did, or is implicated.”

It was a dramatic turnaround in just one day. That morning he’d had only two people in custody in connection with the case, and both were clearly useless.
One was a Bowery waiter who’d seen two men carrying awkward packages on a streetcar—as if that were newsworthy in New York City—and the other was a babbling metal-polish peddler who’d led the police on a wild-goose chase after claiming to spot an eyeless and toothless severed head in a vacant lot. The “head” was nothing but an old hat. The peddler was booked purely out of pique, and returned the favor by giving a
home address that proved to be a lumberyard.

“
He is a freak,” O’Brien had to explain earlier that day to an inquiring
World
reporter.

But now the chief of the Detective Bureau had a real suspect. And maybe, he mused contentedly, she was the only one he’d need.

“She has a temper—an awful temper, I believe,” O’Brien said, though he hesitated to give specifics on her capacity for vengeance. He didn’t need to: A
Herald
writer heard Herman Nack claim that his ex-wife had indeed once threatened to kill him.

“She is strong enough?” a
New York Press
reporter asked.

“Oh my, yes,” O’Brien joked. “She has arms larger and more muscular than mine.”

BUT MRS. NACK
was not without friends.

Late that day, one of the city’s top defense attorneys, Emanuel
Friend, had marched into the Mulberry Street HQ. Manny was fond of asking awkward questions, and this case had plenty. Where was the victim’s head, and how could they make a positive identification without it? Since none of Mrs. Nack’s neighbors had heard or seen any struggle at all the week before, just where was the scene of this so-called crime? And what was her motive, exactly? Why hadn’t they found this “Fred,” who
did
have a motive?

In fact, it wasn’t quite clear what
Manny’s
motive was. Was he even Mrs. Nack’s counsel, and who had hired him? He wouldn’t say, but Murder Squad writers harbored their own suspicions about who might want to undermine the
Journal
’s case against their prime suspect. Badly burned by their bet on the Cyklam theory, the
World
editors were doubling down late that night with the next morning’s headline: