The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  Then—he saw it.

  It was just a bundle of something.

  “A huddled little heap of brown beneath a clump of leaf-stripped bushes,” a newspaper later described.

  Benson moved closer and the bundle took shape.

  The heap of brown was a winter coat.

  Benson saw a black shoe. A plaid skirt. The top of a face, the rest hidden by the coat.

  Blood on the back of the head.

  The florist ran from the woods. He hurried onto Third Avenue and looked for a policeman. He asked a passerby where the parents of Marie Smith lived, and after a few minutes he found the frame house on West Monroe Avenue. He knocked and went inside. Peter Smith was there, and his wife, Nora, and a police officer, William Truax. Benson swallowed hard and told them what he had come across in the Wanamassa.

  “I found the child,” he later said. “The hind parts were exposed, her skirts were pulled up, and the drawers were pulled down. I saw a wound on the back of the head.”

  Nora Smith staggered and nearly collapsed. Peter Smith ran from the house. Benson and Truax followed. After a sprint they came upon the child in the woods, just where Benson had found her. Peter Smith went to his daughter and knelt over her and pulled her dress down over her bare legs. It was a father’s gesture. He stayed over her and let out a terrible moaning sound.

  “Marie.”

  She was found on her right side, her arm pinned beneath her body, her right fist frozen in a clench. Her left hand was open, palm up, two inches off the ground. One leg was bent and her buttocks were exposed.

  The gray skating cap that she wore when she left home four days earlier was wrapped around her throat. So was her blue satin hair ribbon.

  Her skull had been caved in. She had also been sexually attacked.

  Just a few inches from the child, a white handkerchief lay open on the dirt. Placed neatly on it, as if in ritual—the cheap, red plastic bracelet Marie slipped on her wrist the morning she disappeared.

  Officer Truax called for a blanket to cover the girl. Word spread quickly, and townspeople melted into the woods and ringed the scene. Some, inexorably drawn to the morbid, tried to lift the blanket to better see the victim, but Officer Truax shooed them away. William Benson stood stiffly by and thought of his own children—one of them a daughter the same age as Marie.

  The crowd parted as someone came through—a woman, too weak to walk on her own, held up by relatives. It was the girl’s mother. Nora Smith had gone against all advice and insisted on being taken to the woods. She had to see for herself. The first thing she recognized was Marie’s winter coat, and when she saw it, the person she had been dissolved, and what was left crumpled to the ground. She was led away, weeping, hysterical.

  Not much later, Peter Smith finally got up from his daughter, and turned and walked through the ring of onlookers, slowly, as if in a trance, away from Marie and back to his wife, and whatever remained for them.

  The unthinkable had happened. The worst fear was true. The world had taken something beautiful and broken it, horribly.

  Marie Smith, the missing schoolgirl, had been murdered in the most godless way.

  CHAPTER 6 Burn Scars

  November 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  Special Officer William Truax, the first policeman at the scene, was no stranger to sin and vice in Asbury Park.

  For years he’d done the dirty work of safeguarding its streets. He’d broken up gangs engaged in sneakthievery (shoplifting); wrestled a violent, demented landlady into a vegetable cart for a trip to the asylum; piloted a motorboat through the willow-shrouded coves of Deal Lake to root out “spooners”—young couples violating James Bradley’s law against public shows of affection. William Truax trafficked along the rough underbelly of his town, and he knew it well. Still, he had never seen anything this disturbing before.

  Truax had someone from the crowd of onlookers run into town to notify the Asbury Park chief of police, William H. Smith, of the grim discovery. He called for a blanket and covered the body. He stood sentry over it, trying to preserve some dignity for it.

  At police headquarters on Mattison Avenue, one block from Main Street, Police Chief Smith called the town coroner, Robert M. Purdy, and ordered him to the woods. Smith then sped to the scene himself. He got there around the same time as Randolph Miller, Peter Smith’s boss. Several more officers arrived and helped Smith and Truax keep the gawkers away from the body.

  Coming up from the town of Manasquan, seven miles south, Robert Purdy made it to the scene around 2:00 p.m., two hours after Marie was found. The coroner knelt on the dirt, opened his satchel, and performed a quick examination of the body. It took only a few minutes. When he was done he signaled that he was ready to remove the body to the parlors of Fred E. Farry, the town funeral director, who worked out of an inelegant two-story building at 806 Main Street.

  Within an hour, Marie’s small body was laid on the cold cast-iron surface of Farry’s long embalming table, above the big circular gears that managed the metal vacuum pumps.

  * * *

  At 4:00 p.m. two Asbury Park physicians, Joseph Ackerman and Earl Wagner—who offered coroner services for anywhere from fifteen to thirty-five dollars an exam—joined Purdy at Farry’s parlor for the autopsy. Their task was to catalog the wounds and determine a cause of death. Forensically, it would not be complicated. They had seen all kinds of carnage. But this was a child on the table, still in school clothes. They might not want to see what had become of her, but it was their job to look. They had to know the next few minutes would change them.

  The men got to work. They found a compound fracture at the back of the head roughly where the parietal and occipital bones articulate, slightly above the neck. The wound was three inches across and almost three inches deep, allowing blood and brain tissue to spill out. It suggested blunt force.

  Marie “had been struck on the head probably with some heavy object,” Ackerman later testified—possibly an ax or hatchet.

  The forehead bulged above the left eye where blood had rushed and gathered while the body was on the ground.

  Purdy had found a small pool of blood next to the body in the woods, an indication she had been murdered there. The child had bled, but she had not bled out. There were no injuries to her torso or limbs, beyond some scratches on the palms and wrists. The cause of death was apparent but not certain, in that there were two possible causes: the crushed skull, and the blue satin hair ribbon tied tightly around the neck—“tight enough,” Ackerman said, “to cause strangulation.”

  Which came first, the blow or the strangling? The doctors couldn’t say. The best they could do was conclude that the blow happened “just before or immediately after” strangulation. Both assaults were sufficient to have caused death. Ackerman would offer an opinion that Marie had died from strangulation. But he couldn’t be certain.

  The worst part of the autopsy remained. The doctors determined that the vagina was, in Ackerman’s words, “standing open.” On the embalming table, the doctors cut across Marie’s stomach and opened the abdomen to look for a tear in the uterus or any other damage. They found none. They chose not to conduct a microscopic examination, because they didn’t deem it necessary. That left a pressing question—what was the extent of the assault on Marie? Had she been raped?

  “I wouldn’t like to state that the girl had been raped,” Ackerman later testified, “but the vagina had been entered.”

  A rape, the doctors concluded, would have caused more obvious damage. But there was no question that a sexual assault had occurred.

  There was one small mercy, the doctors agreed. The sexual assault most likely took place after Marie was dead.

  The examination also revealed two mysterious injuries—a dark discoloration on the bridge of Marie’s nose, and another similar, smaller mark on the top of her left ear. The nearly black marks couldn’t be removed or washed off. These, the doctors said, were burn scars.

  Could they h
ave been abrasions caused by dragging the child through the woods facedown? No, the doctors said. Friction alone wouldn’t explain them. The scars were caused, Ackerman said, by “coming into contact with heat, direct heat.” Not a flame, which would have singed the face and hair—some other heated body. What it was, they couldn’t say.

  The autopsy lasted thirty minutes. Ackerman and Wagner left the body to be sewn and dressed. At 4:30 p.m., Fred Farry arrived and took over for an assistant who had been reconstructing the skull. The assistant’s work was sloppy, and Farry worked into the night preparing the corpse for her family.

  CHAPTER 7 19½ Atkins Avenue

  November 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  Tom Williams fell under suspicion almost from the start. Not by police, who had been on the case for only a few hours, but by a young reporter who got the jump on them: Alvin B. Cliver.

  It happened that Cliver and his wife, Belva, lived across the street from the Bradley School, in a home at 1203 Third Avenue that Cliver built himself. Early on Thursday, November 10, Belva looked out her window and saw a desperate Nora Smith searching the faces of children in front of the school. Later that morning, she asked Nora to come in for hot coffee, and she listened to the story of Marie’s disappearance. Alvin Cliver heard it, too, and set out to investigate.

  Most of his life, Cliver had been more than he seemed. He was small and slender, just five feet and 115 pounds, yet he had strength and speed. Nicknamed “the Bantam,” he ran for two touchdowns against a team of U.S. Marines playing his Oreo Athletic Club. He was good at basketball and tennis, too. As a cub reporter at the Asbury Park Press in 1901, covering the arrival of notables at hotels and summer homes, he became the first reporter in the paper’s history to turn in typewritten copy, using a new, open-faced Munson typewriter with nickel-plated parts and a rubber striker that belonged to the publisher, J. Lyle Kinmonth, and that scared off the older beat writers.

  That Thursday morning, after hearing Nora’s story, Cliver walked the streets and roads of Asbury Park, asking people if they had seen the girl. One of the first men he talked to, at 8:30 a.m., was Tom Williams. He found him chopping wood at the house of Delia Jackson, Marie Smith’s aunt.

  Where were you yesterday morning? Cliver asked him.

  Williams, according to Cliver, did not seem anxious to talk. But he gave his whereabouts anyway: he had been at the barroom at Griffin’s in the morning, before leaving to finish painting a house in nearby Oakhurst. After that, he walked to Delia Jackson’s Asbury Avenue home to resume chopping up a tree for her.

  When did you get to Delia Jackson’s house? Cliver asked.

  Williams said he got there at quarter to noon.

  What about the rest of the day?

  Williams said he spent most of the day sitting on the front porch of Jackson’s next-door neighbor, Mollie Williams, talking politics, and chopping the tree next door.

  Cliver didn’t believe him. Something about Black Diamond’s story didn’t seem right. He set out to do more digging.

  * * *

  Tom Williams knew the Smith family, and he knew Marie Smith.

  After the Smiths were evicted from a home in Whitesville for not paying rent, they temporarily moved in with Delia Jackson in her home on Asbury Avenue. At that time, Tom Williams and another contractor, James Wright, were doing repair work on Jackson’s home. Most days, Delia and Nora’s children ran and frolicked outside the house as Williams did his work. “Marie was running around all the time, the same as my children were,” Delia would say. This is how Williams came to know her.

  Marie’s mother, Nora, confirmed that her family was acquainted with Williams. “I would know him when he came into the yard,” she said. “He would say, ‘Good morning,’ and I would answer back.” Her three children came to be familiar with Williams, too. “They were friendly,” Nora said. “Marie knew him.”

  In fact, Nora Smith was friendly enough with Williams to ask him to buy beer for her, which, apparently, he did. When Peter Smith found out about it, he sternly let Williams know not to do it again. That, in the eyes of some, amounted to a history between Williams and the Smiths. And the fact that Marie knew Williams suggested he could have more easily coaxed her to go with him than a stranger could have. Alvin Cliver had learned of this connection, and his suspicions about Williams were growing.

  Yet Marie’s parents had no reason to believe Williams was involved. On Friday, November 11—with Marie missing for two days now—Peter Smith ran into Williams on the street and asked for his help searching a dumping ground off Springwood Avenue that evening. Williams agreed to go. Just a few hours later, Peter Smith got a tip that Marie had been spotted near the lake not far from Griffin’s barroom. He found Williams and changed their plan.

  “Diamond, I ain’t going with you, can you go alone?” he said.

  “All right,” Williams said, “I’ll go alone.”

  The Ayers tip turned out to be nothing. The next morning, Friday November 11, Peter Smith went looking for Williams to learn about his search of the dumping ground. He couldn’t find him. Neither could Alvin Cliver, who had more questions for him. Cliver went to the police with his suspicions, and Chief Smith put an officer on Williams’s trail. The officer couldn’t find him, either. Police asked Peter Smith if he knew where Williams lived. He said he didn’t. No one did. Williams just came and went, and it hadn’t matter to anyone where he went when he left.

  Now, it mattered.

  While the search for Marie Smith continued, nearly three full days after she vanished, a new search, for Tom Williams, began.

  That no one could find him only increased suspicions about him. Word spread that he was missing, and that brought out two new witnesses. They were John C. Conover and William Taylor, who told police they were sitting on an embankment on Ridge Avenue the morning of November 9. They remembered seeing Tom Williams leave Griffin’s barroom at about 10:30 a.m., and head in a direction that could have taken him to the very street corner where Marie Smith was spotted by Emma Davison, the last known person to see Marie alive.

  Conover and Taylor put Williams in the area of Marie’s disappearance, at precisely the time she disappeared.

  Now it was imperative for police to find him. Friday, November 11, passed with no sighting of Williams, and the next day was no different. Black Diamond hadn’t been seen in more than two days.

  One day later, on Sunday, William Benson made his awful discovery in the woods.

  That same evening, it was Alvin Cliver who finally tracked down Williams.

  Cliver didn’t reveal how he found him; instead, he decided to bring Williams in himself. The reporter in him wouldn’t allow for turning the tip over to police and losing the scoop. Cliver telephoned a detective he knew, David Hankinson, and Hankinson called Randolph Miller, who owned the Flavel rendering plant where Marie’s father, Peter, worked. Miller agreed to drive them to the location.

  Randolph Miller was playing a large role in the Marie Smith case. Fit and trim and tireless, he was one of the most influential businessmen in town. Besides owning the Flavel plant, he was a director of the Seacoast National Bank, the most important financial institution in Asbury Park. When Marie disappeared, Miller immediately gave Peter Smith time off with pay, and spent countless hours personally searching for her and making phone calls to neighboring police departments, asking for reinforcements and search dogs.

  “I have a little girl of my own, about the same age as little Marie,” he later explained. “I am eager to bring the guilty man to justice.”

  With Cliver’s tip, here was his chance.

  * * *

  On Sunday night, Cliver and Hankinson climbed into Miller’s sleek gray Packard. They picked up Peter Smith, who insisted on going along. The four men drove into the part of town known as “the colored colony,” on the western outskirts of Asbury Park. Cliver steered them to an address—a boardinghouse at 19½ Atkins Avenue. Miller pulled the Packard in front of a hous
e that looked to be coming apart at the hinges. Peter Smith waited by the car while the other men headed into the home.

  Inside, it was dark. There was no one in the front, no sign anyone was there at all. In a back room, they saw a man—a black man. When he stood up, they could tell it wasn’t Tom Williams. His name was William Wynn, and he was much older than Williams. The old man pointed down the hall, toward the rear of the home. The men made their way into the deepest part of the house.

  Finally, they came to another small room. A man lay on an old couch in the dark, half dressed, half asleep. He saw the men and grumbled about the pain in his back. Here was Tom Williams.

  The detective got him up, handcuffed him, and marched him out of the house. When Williams spotted Peter Smith out front, he said, incongruously, “Hey, Pete, how’s your health?”

  “Hello, Diamond,” Smith said. “What are you doing here?”

  Before they took Williams to police headquarters, the men searched the dilapidated house. Inside a barrel, near where they got Williams, they found a shirt, underdrawers, and a pair of overalls.

  The shirt had stains on it that looked like blood.

  They also found a towel and a blanket stuffed inside the barrel. These items, too, appeared to be stained with blood.

  Evidence.

  Then the short drive across town to the police station on Mattison Avenue, Tom Williams in his handcuffs, Peter Smith still numb with shock, Alvin Cliver already crafting a dispatch in his head, and the rough wheels turning, the process of justice begun.

  CHAPTER 8 Came the Men