The Open Curtain (6 page)
Authors: Brian Evenson
His Lawyer Will Ask Further Delay—
Prosecution Blames Mormon
Friends and Relatives
Jesus,
he thought. He had managed three out of the four categories, purely by hazard. He was a believer now, but in what he did not know. Research, maybe. Or blind chance. He began to read:
William Hooper Young, grandson of Brigham Young, will go on trial this morning before Justice D. Cady Herrick, in the Criminal Branch of the Supreme Court, on the charge of having murdered Mrs. Anna Nilsen Pulitzer last November. The trial may not proceed, however, for W. F. S. Hart, Young’s counsel, will ask for delay on a number of grounds, one of them being that his client is physically unable to withstand the strain of trial.
Assistant District Attorney Studin reiterated yesterday his statement regarding the disappearance of several witnesses, but said that nevertheless Young would be convicted. While Mr. Studin did not lay the disappearance of these witnesses directly at the door of the Mormon Church, he declared emphatically that the Mormon friends and relatives of the defendant were putting forth efforts to defeat the case of the prosecution. Mr. Studin pointed to an article which appeared over Young’s name in the October number of
The Crusader,
the magazine edited in Hoboken by the prisoner and his friend Dixie Anzer. The article was headed “Sunrise in Hell,” and in it, Mr. Studin said, there appeared more or less vague references to the “blood atonement” doctrine.
It was learned yesterday that, while the prosecution would not assume this doctrine had any direct relation to the motive for the murder, it might be used to throw additional light on the tragedy. The “blood atonement” doctrine teaches that the soul of any Mormon who has gone back on his or her faith may be saved by the shedding of the blood of such a person as was the woman, and that the blessing thus conferred would reflect credit in the other world on the person who commits the deed.
Damon Philips was punching him between the shoulderblades, calling him punkass, telling Rudd he had to have the microfilm machine.
“Just a minute,” Rudd said. “I’ve found something.”
“What happened to your hair, punkass?”
“Mind your own business,” said Rudd.
“Man, what’s wrong with you? You’re not usually like this.”
“Like what?”
“Usually you’re normal.”
“What do you mean, normal?”
Damon shrugged. “You know, normal.”
He didn’t know what to say.
I never know what to say,
he told himself. Getting up, he surrendered the machine.
He stood leaning against the microfiche cabinets. The
Crusader,
he thought.
Sunrise in Hell.
Hardly building blocks from the
common sector.
Looking through the card catalog, he found no mention of a magazine called the
Crusader.
He went back to leaning.
“Well, Rudd,” said Mrs. Madison. “Did you find anything?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Congratulations,” she said. “I guess that old glass was half-full after all.”
His father’s books were in a small slope-ceilinged demi-room halfway up the stairs to the attic. They were in stacks against the walls, empty boxes scattering the space between.
He began to look through them, sorting the church books out of the stacks, brushing the dust off of them, stacking them near the door. As he worked, dust spun slowly in the air. When he licked his lips, he tasted dust.
Carrying some books down to his bedroom, he spread them on his bed.
Mormon Doctrine,
one was called, a dictionary of sorts. He opened it, leafed through the A’s to the B’s, stopped at a section called “Blood Atonement Doctrine.”
(See Atonement of Christ, Calling and Election Sure, Christ, Flesh and Blood.)
From the days of Joseph Smith to the present, wickedly and evilly-disposed persons have fabricated false and slanderous stories to the effect that the Church, in the early days of this dispensation, engaged in a practice of blood atonement whereunder the blood of apostates and others was shed by the Church as an atonement
for their sins. These claims are false and were known by their originators to be false. There is not one historical instance of so-called blood atonement in this dispensation, nor has there been one event or occurrence whatever, of any nature, from which the slightest inference arises that any such practice either existed or was taught.
Next to the passage someone—probably his father—had written
Untenable, c.f.
Confessions of John D. Lee
or even the practice of swearing, upon pain of death, not to reveal the ceremonies of the Mormon temple.
He skipped down a few lines:
… the true doctrine of blood atonement is simply this:
1. Jesus Christ worked out the infinite and eternal atonement by the shedding of his own blood. He came into the world for the purpose of dying on the cross for the sins of the world. By virtue of that atoning sacrifice immortality came as a free gift to all men, and all who would believe and obey his laws would in addition be cleansed from sin through his blood….
2. But under certain circumstances there are some serious sins for which the cleansing of Christ does not operate, and the law of God is that men must then have their own blood shed to atone for their sins. Murder, for instance, is one of these sins; hence we find the Lord commanding capital punishment. Thus, also, if a person has so progressed in righteousness that his calling and election has been made sure, if he has come to that position where he knows “by revelation and the spirit of prophecy, through the power of the Holy Priesthood” that he is sealed up unto eternal life (D. & C. 131:19-5.), then if he gains forgiveness for certain grievous sins, he must “be destroyed in the flesh,” and “delivered unto the buffetings of Satan unto the day of redemption, saith the Lord God.” (D. & C. 132:19-27.)
President Joseph Fielding Smith has written: “Man may commit certain grievous sins—according to his light and knowledge—that will place him beyond the reach of the atoning blood of Christ. If then he would be saved, he must make sacrifice of his own life to atone—so far as in his power lies—for that sin, for the blood of Christ alone
under certain circumstances will not avail…. Joseph Smith taught that there were certain sins so grievous that man may commit, that they will place the transgressors beyond the power of the atonement of Christ. If these offenses are committed, then the blood of Christ will not cleanse them from their sins even though they repent. Therefore their only hope is to have their own blood shed to atone, as far as possible, in their behalf.”
Next to the last sentence, his father had marked an asterisk.
He heard noise from the hallway, turned the book face down. It was his mother. When she saw the books spread around him, she smiled.
“You’re finding your faith at last,” she said, moving forward to embrace him. “You’ve returned to the fold.”
It was all he and Lael spoke of the next time they met, Lael at first feigning lack of interest then gradually coming around. He had not heard of Hooper Young, he admitted, but he did know something of blood sacrifice. He told Rudd about the Laffertys. Two brothers, a few years earlier, one a bishop or a former bishop, he couldn’t remember which, who sacrificed one of their wives and her child at a makeshift altar and slit her throat so the blood would run out over the altar to baptize it, and the words
blood sacrifice
were used, but there had been nothing as flagrant as writing about it in advance. “Sunrise in Hell,” was it?
“There are a lot of fucked up people in the world,” said Lael, and then leaned forward. “What else do you know about him?”
“Not much,” he said.
“Isn’t there more?”
“I didn’t have time to check.”
“And by the way,” said Lael. “What happened to your hair?”
He reached up to feel his hair, his bangs still uneven though he had tried to cut them straight. It surprised him that Lael had noticed his hair at all. Perhaps Lael was paying more attention than he had realized. He was mulling this over when Lael stood and climbed onto the scooter, and before Rudd knew it they were on their way down from the canyon and back to the library, Lael taking the curves and slopes quickly as Rudd slid on the seat, trying to hang on.
There was a lot to it, more than Rudd had first guessed. The
Times,
Lael found through a guide the reference librarian recommended, had reported
copiously on the crime, on Hooper Young’s identification and capture and then, almost five months later, the trial.
He sat cranking the records up one by one, reading the articles as Lael peered over his shoulder. Only months later was he able to think it into coherent form. At first glance it all washed over him without really sinking in, and he left the library with names and places churning through his mind. But eventually, though he never articulated it as clearly as he wanted, it all came together:
On September 19, 1902, a woman’s body was found in a mud ditch between New York and Jersey City, nude and lying in slime. A leather strap was wound about her waist, knotted at the back, and affixed to a twenty-pound hitch weight, of a peculiar make. The woman’s skull had been fractured in two places—once just above the right eye, again a few inches above the left temple. A smoothly cut gash, about six inches long, extended diagonally downward from her left side through her belly.
Autopsy reports indicated that it was this gash that killed her, despite there being no interior hemorrhage, nor any punctured or slit internal organs. “The incision was made either by a knife with blunt and ragged edge or by a knife in the hand of a nervous person.” The blows to the head, because of the absence of cerebral hemorrhaging, were thought to “have been dealt by a man of no extraordinary strength, and might have been caused by a fist or a sand bag, but not by any blunt or hard weapon.”
Though at high tide the ditch was full and the body thus covered, at low tide the ditch drained to about six inches of water. The murderer was apparently either unfamiliar with the area or was in such hurry to dispose of the body that he was imprudent. The body was seen at one in the afternoon by the motorman of a passing trolley car, who notified the inspector at a nearby drawbridge, who in turn notified the police.
According to that first report, it was “beyond a doubt that two men were concerned with the disposition of the body, if not in the murder itself.” A bridgeman spoke of a closed cab passing at eleven p.m. on the night before the discovery of the body—a quite uncommon occurrence—driven by two “rather young and well-dressed men” who kept their heads averted when the bridgeman stopped them and held up his lantern. The cab’s curtains were tightly drawn. The vehicle went through the bridge and along the road that paralleled the ditch in which the body was discovered, but no other bridgeman could recall it coming out.
The corpse was Mrs. Anna Pulitzer, wife of tailor Joseph Pulitzer. Her husband, reading of the body’s discovery in the morning papers, called police and
asked to see the body, which he immediately identified as his wife of five years. A civil-minded citizen, Pulitzer had worked as an election captain on the day the murder was thought to have occurred, arriving home shortly before eleven p.m. “His wife, who had not gone to bed at that hour, said she wanted to buy some fruit, and started out to buy some. She took off all her rings except her wedding ring, and left them at the house. Then she went out, and was never seen again by him alive.” She was last seen in a bakery at 11:40 at night, where she bought some rolls. When Pulitzer identified the body, he was immediately locked up until his story was investigated and, to the degree it could be, corroborated.
By the next day, the paper announced,
Slayer of Mrs. Anna Pulitzer Is Known.
It identified him as “William Hooper Young, grandson of Mormon leader Brigham Young.” Young was described as “extremely dark, with a sallow complexion, a slender figure, and bushy eyebrows that stand out conspicuously over small black eyes.” He was between thirty and thirty-five years old, weighed 130 pounds. He had worked for newspapers on both coasts, was known as “a reckless character and a debauchee.” He was described as “half-adventurer, half-newspaperman.” He was the son of John W. Young, a financier. One of Young’s coworkers on the
Weekly Crusader,
a fellow named Anzer, had heard Young speak of returning a borrowed horse and rig to a particular stable. Anzer, having read of the murder, felt the fact worth mentioning to police. Police approached the liveryman, who positively identified Young as the man who had taken the rig and returned it without either weight or leather strap. When they went to Young’s father’s apartments, where Young had been staying while his father was in Europe, “Evidences of a most repulsive murder were discovered”:
In the first bedroom of the apartment were bloody sheets, pools of blood in a closet, and a large knife. Capt. Schmittberger said he believed the murderers gave the woman knockout drops and lured her to the place, intending at first to cut up the body and get rid of the pieces. From the blood stains under the kitchen sink and in the bedroom closet it is inferred that the body might have been concealed in either one of those places.
Two days earlier, Young had left the house with a steamer trunk, which the bellboy had helped him load into the rented rig. The following day the trunk had been brought back to the house, then had been shipped, according to the bellboy, to Chicago.
Yet, despite declaring Young guilty, the
Times
in the same article pointed to other details that seemed to implicate another man, an unidentified gentleman described as “very stout” who called upon Mrs. Pulitzer the afternoon of her disappearance, rushing upstairs saying “She expects me.” He was described as “a clean-shaven man, very heavy, dark, and rather Jewish or German in appearance,” with a “heavy gold watch chain and a gold cigar cutter hanging to his vest.”
On Sunday, September 21, Young’s “arrest is expected hourly”—the police believed he had not yet been apprehended because he was being protected by Mormons, for according to the New York police captain:
