The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  The Smiths were too poor to afford any kind of marker or stone, so Plot 23 remained a bare patch of earth.

  * * *

  The mood in Asbury Park, among police, merchants, and families, was anxious and grim. It was a town on edge. Just three weeks before Marie disappeared, the area had seen another terrifying crime involving a young girl—the kidnapping of four-year-old Mamie Patillo, snatched from the front porch of her family’s home in Red Bank, just north of Asbury Park. Elwood Minugh, Tom Williams’s interrogator, was the lead detective on the Patillo case as well, but her disappearance remained unsolved for two months, until the day she mysteriously reappeared on the same porch from which she was taken, with a broken front tooth and no information about her abductors.

  In just one month, two local girls taken and no one made to pay. Townspeople locked their doors and windows for the first time. Mothers walked their children to and from school. The pressure was on the authorities to catch the killer, and an editorial in the Press sought “Swift Justice” for Marie Smith: “This case is one that calls aloud for vengeance. The honor of Asbury Park is at stake, and the public safety demands that the murderer be brought to justice.”

  The task of swiftly bringing such justice fell mainly to a team of four—Police Chief William Smith; Robert Purdy, the coroner; John S. Applegate Jr., the Monmouth County prosecutor; and the clean-cut, genial county sheriff, Clarence E. F. Hetrick.

  Hetrick grew up in Asbury Park and played right halfback on the town’s football squad. He looked sturdy and stalwart, like a sheriff should, but by nature he was a politician. He’d been elected and appointed up the career ladder, and in 1908, at the age of thirty-five, he won the office of county sheriff. Many considered him a crass opportunist. As sheriff, he was accused of plotting to charge the state thirty-five cents for every prisoner housed in city jails, rather than the customary ten cents. He escaped prosecution only because the plan fell through.

  The county prosecutor, John S. Applegate Jr., had his own scandals. His father, John Applegate Sr., had held several state and county offices, and John Jr., with his neatly trimmed dark hair, unsmiling mouth, and serious stare, looked every bit the part of his father’s political heir. Then, in 1906, on the day of an election for Red Bank assemblyman, a witness claimed to see Applegate Jr. hand a thick wad of bills to the Republican candidate, Frank J. Manson, who in turn handed it to an associate, who then handed it out to voters. Applegate Jr. survived the accusation, and two years later assumed the office of county prosecutor.

  Clarence Hetrick and John Applegate Jr. knew each other, having served together on the Red Bank Republican County Convention Committee. They were insiders, career men, and together managed law enforcement in all of Monmouth County, which covered the Jersey shore towns of Red Bank, Long Branch, and Asbury Park. Early on in the Marie Smith investigation, they both believed—as did Chief Smith—that Tom Williams was guilty. But five days into the case, newspapers began criticizing them for not having any other suspects besides Williams.

  “Police Lack Conclusive Evidence Directly Linking Williams With Crime,” read an Asbury Park Press headline, likely written by Alvin Cliver. “Facts in possession of the coroner and police are now reported to be insufficient to warrant the continued holding of the negro suspect.”

  In fact, the evidence against Tom Williams was entirely circumstantial. Williams couldn’t account for his whereabouts at the time of the crime, but neither had anyone spotted him near Third Avenue, where Marie Smith was last seen. The stains on the towel found where he was staying, and on his suspenders, had not yet been proven to be blood. There was no murder weapon, and no motive. Even Peter Smith could not bring himself to suspect Williams. Smith “had no quarrel with Williams at any time, and could conceive of no reason why he should do such a thing,” the Press reported. Even after police told Smith the murder was a crime of assault, not revenge, he didn’t believe Williams had done it.

  There were also the bloody leaves found by Peter Smith and his boss, Randolph Miller, on one of their many searches of the woods. They said they picked up a trail of bloodstained leaves leading to the murder site, and the physician and part-time coroner Joseph Ackerman confirmed the blood on the leaves was human. That opened up the possibility that Marie Smith had been murdered elsewhere and dragged into the woods.

  As a theory, this made more sense than the accepted thinking that Marie was killed where she was found, considering that teams of police officers and schoolboys had scoured that very spot more than once before the body was discovered. And if Marie had been killed elsewhere, that meant she had to have been hidden away for three full days, most likely in a house or barn or shed. If that were true, then Tom Williams, known to be itinerant, was less likely to be the murderer.

  Finally, there was the suspect himself, who in several harsh interrogations had never wavered in declaring his innocence.

  “His repeated assertions and the way he has borne up strengthen the conviction that he is guiltless,” the New York Tribune declared. The Camden Courier-Post wrote “Williams has told his story over and over again and been contradicted only on one material point”—whether he left Griffin’s bar at noon, as he insisted, or closer to 10:30 a.m., as two witnesses claimed. “Everything else he told us,” Police Chief Smith was quoted as saying, “has been substantiated.”

  While there were no other official suspects, there were other leads and theories and people worth looking at. Some suspected Henry Litman, who owned the home in Whitesville where the Smith family had lived before he put them out for not paying rent. Witnesses had seen Litman and Peter Smith quarreling more than once, suggesting some kind of feud, but police learned Litman had a good alibi—he was carting ashes from the Hotel Ormond in Ocean Grove at the time Marie went missing.

  Two other possible suspects were Max Kruschka and Frank Heidemann, who lived in the house at the corner of Third and Asbury Avenues—the spot where Marie Smith was last seen. Kruschka was a florist who had several greenhouses on his property, and Heidemann was the young assistant he hired just a month before Marie disappeared.

  The men, both German-born, had different reasons for falling under suspicion. Heidemann lived on the second floor of Kruschka’s house, and had been on the property at the time of Marie’s disappearance. And Kruschka, fifty-one, was a known drinker with a history of violence. In 1904 he was jailed for chasing his wife from her bedroom while she was “in scant attire and barefooted at the point of a revolver,” reported the Asbury Park Press. The day after his arrest, Kruschka’s twenty-year-old daughter, Adelaide, told police her father had tried to rape her.

  Police questioned both men and accepted that neither knew anything of the crime.

  The biggest problem for Hetrick and Applegate was the lack of physical evidence implicating anyone. They needed to start over and re-canvass Asbury Park. Somewhere, something was waiting to be found. But Police Chief Smith simply lacked the manpower to conduct a more thorough investigation. Like most small-town police forces, Smith’s handful of officers was already overburdened by other crimes and duties. They often received help from county detectives like Elwood Minugh, but now, under increasing pressure, they would need even more help.

  Five days after Marie was found, the team agreed that the prosecutor’s office would hire two detectives from outside the county. Applegate turned to the Greater New York Detective Agency, headquartered in Greenwich Village in downtown New York City.

  The field of detective work was roughly one hundred years old, dating back to a French ex-convict, Eugène Vidocq, who started the first detective agency, the Brigade de la Sûreté, in Paris in 1811. The Greater New York Detective Agency, founded in 1900 by a secretive figure named John E. McKenna, was one of only fifteen detective agencies licensed by the state of New York. One classified ad described their services this way: “Reliable, daily habits of suspected persons ascertained; private matters confidentially conducted; operatives sent to all points; terms reasonable.” The
agency also offered bodyguards, and ran ads looking for “Big Men.”

  Most famously, the coal and railroad baron Harry Thaw, who suspected his chorus girl wife, Evelyn Nesbit, of having an affair with the famed architect Stanford White, hired the agency to provide twenty-four-hour surveillance of White for more than two years. White figured out he was being tailed and spent $6,000 to hire detectives of his own to follow the detectives hounding him. In the end, McKenna’s operatives found nothing to implicate White—which didn’t stop Thaw from shooting and killing White in the Madison Square Roof Garden restaurant in 1906.

  Prosecutor John Applegate Jr. arranged for two Greater New York detectives—B. F. Johnson and George W. Cunningham—to come to Asbury Park at an eventual cost to the county of $1,289.48. The men arrived in town at 2:20 p.m. on Tuesday, November 15, six days after Marie disappeared. They met with Police Chief Smith and Detective Minugh for a briefing, then visited the woods where Marie’s body was found, and later the boardinghouse where Tom Williams was arrested. They reinterviewed Max Kruschka and Frank Heidemann but found nothing new. Kruschka had an alibi: he was away in New York City the morning Marie disappeared. As for Heidemann, one paper said, the detectives “have failed to pick any flaws in his story.”

  Johnson and Cunningham also interrogated Tom Williams in his cell, waking him at 2:00 a.m. and lying that someone had implicated him. Williams told them what he told Police Chief Smith and his men.

  “I swear by all my hope for the future that I did not kill this poor little girl,” Williams pleaded in his cell. “I knew her and liked her. I am only a poor black man that earned my living by chopping wood and doing odd work. My past record don’t show that I could be guilty of this crime.”

  The detectives didn’t buy it. Just a few days into their stay in Asbury Park, one of them made it clear who he believed killed Marie. “Just so positive am I that the negro Thomas Williams is the murderer of Marie Smith,” he told a reporter, “that if he declared in the gallows that he was innocent of this crime, I would still believe him guilty.”

  The detectives devoted the bulk of their time to searching the woods and the area around Griffin’s roadhouse, looking for the one thing they felt they needed to pin the crime on Williams—the murder weapon. “We have enough circumstantial evidence against the negro ‘D.W,’ ” they wrote in a report, “but must get some weapon, or someone who actually saw him in company with the girl.”

  Were the detectives merely parroting the suspicions of the men who hired them—in effect, working backward from the assumption that Williams was guilty? There is no evidence they developed any other serious suspect in their time in Asbury Park. This focus on Williams did not sit well with at least one prominent person in Asbury Park.

  Randolph Miller, owner of the rendering plant where Marie’s father, Peter, worked, had thrown himself into finding Marie’s killer as heartily as anyone else on the case. He spent hours personally searching the woods, and, after Marie’s body was found, hours going over all the evidence. He’d given Peter Smith time off with pay, and provided other comforts to the family. What bothered Miller most was that—despite some pushback in the press about police having no other suspects—the case against Williams continued to fall neatly into place. It all seemed too easy, too pat. Was he to accept that Williams was the killer simply because, as Police Chief Smith put it, Marie’s murder was “a Negro’s crime,” or because Williams had a bad reputation?

  One bit of evidence, in particular, gnawed away at Miller—the mysterious burn marks on Marie’s nose and left ear.

  What had caused them? Who had caused them? Could they simply be ignored as evidence? After studying the scars, the coroner, Robert Purdy, described “corrugation marks on the burn on the left ear, faint as the threads in a bank note. These marks correspond to the tracery on asbestos materials covering boilers and pipes.”

  This convinced Miller that the burn marks on Marie’s nose and ear were a key piece of evidence. “It seems to me that these corrugation marks on the ear indicate that the body was placed for a time at least near a boiler or steam heating apparatus,” Miller told the Camden Courier-Post. “This would make it appear that the body was kept for a time in the basement of a factory or in a private house.”

  It was more than a hunch, but less than a lead. Even so, Miller was determined to follow it. To do that, he knew he couldn’t rely on just Police Chief Smith and his men, or even on the two detectives from New York City. He had to bring in someone new.

  Miller asked for a meeting with Smith, Purdy, and Hetrick. The prosecutor, John Applegate—who among all the men on the case was most convinced of Tom Williams’s guilt—was kept out of the meeting.

  Miller made his case and said he would put up three thousand dollars of his own money to hire another detective. But, he insisted, this detective had to be independent. He had to be free to follow the evidence without any guidance from interested parties. Miller was persuasive. Under pressure to solve the case, Smith, Purdy, and Hetrick accepted Miller’s offer, and Hetrick even promised to contribute funds of his own. They agreed to keep the plan secret, both from the press and the prosecutor. No one but them would know about the new investigator.

  Two days later, a slender, well-dressed detective named Raymond Schindler arrived in Asbury Park. He was twenty-eight, and he had never worked a murder case before.

  CHAPTER 13 A Guilty Mind

  April 18, 1906

  San Francisco, California

  Raymond Schindler arrived in the modern city of San Francisco one day after the earth cracked open.

  Starting out at the northern edge of the city, he walked into a surreal shower of white ash. He saw, in the distance, horrific thick looming pillars of black smoke. He felt heat, deep heat, like a wall. He smelled fire and death. This was, as sure as any place could be, hell itself.

  Still, Schindler slipped through the safety lines sealing off the city, skirted the fleeing survivors, and walked headlong into the worst of it.

  The day before, miles and miles of tectonic plates along the northern part of the San Andreas Fault on the California coastline began to shift and rupture at 5:12 a.m., causing a massive shuddering that lasted one minute. San Francisco, then the ninth-largest city in the United States, lay in the doomed heart of the shuddering, and endured a primary tremor rated at a 7.9 magnitude, and more than twenty-five lesser tremors that same day. In the city, cobblestone streets were broken in two, and jagged, mile-long cracks exposed subterranean streams, bottomless chasms, the planet itself. In the aftermath, on the buckled streets, there were five-foot piles of clothing, salvaged, then abandoned; large black rats, alive and dead, by the thousands; shocked, shuffling people in nightgowns and bare feet lugging family portraits, ironing boards, birds in cages. Enormous brick buildings toppled, shorn in half, leaning at drunken angles; whole houses sunk violently into their basements. The great James Flood Mansion atop Nob Hill, reduced to a single standing wall.

  When the earthquake hit, most people were asleep. More than half the city’s four hundred thousand residents lost their homes. Twenty thousand survivors had to be rescued by the USS Chicago in one of the largest sea evacuations in history. As many as three thousand perished.

  The earthquake caused significant damage, but the voracious, city-wide fire that followed, fed by broken gas lines and shattered water mains that made containment impossible, raged for four days and flattened hundreds and hundreds of city blocks. Everywhere, there was despair. “Mothers searching madly for their children who strayed, little ones wailing for their protectors,” one witness recalled. “Strong men bellowing like babies in their furor.” Said another: “The city is ablaze. We will all be burned. This must be the end of this wicked world.”

  For a long time, the calamity would be called the Fire. Only later would it be known as the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

  Ray Schindler came from elsewhere and randomly chose San Francisco as his destination. He was twenty-four, a hi
gh school graduate who skipped college, and he was at the tail end of a long, westward journey to discover his destiny. Seeing the smoldering bones of the stricken city, he could have, probably should have, fled to somewhere safer, somewhere more opportune. Instead, he decided to stay.

  Quickly, he found a job wheeling a small refreshment stand into the ruins of Market Street and selling water to emergency workers and stranded survivors. It was the latest of several odd jobs he’d held. In his life, he had tried to be many things, but none had worked out. Something was waiting for him somewhere, this he knew, but he couldn’t have hoped to find it there, in the ashes of cataclysm. And yet…

  There were no operating newspapers in San Francisco, and the news arrived in scattered leaflets. One day, while on duty at his stand, Schindler picked up a leaflet printed with the latest updates on the fires.

  He read through the wanted advertisements. There was an ad placed by the G. Franklin McMackin Society seeking “historians” to help “record the greatest catastrophe that ever occurred on this continent.” The ad said college graduates only, but Schindler ignored that part. He figured he could talk his way around it. The ad also said “Good Salary.” That was all the motivation Schindler needed. Happy for the chance at a new adventure, he applied for the position, and he was hired.

  What he didn’t yet know was that the McMackin Society did not have the slightest interest in hiring a historian.

  What the society desperately needed was a detective.

  * * *

  Investigative work was not a calling for Raymond Campbell Schindler. If anything, he was raised to be a preacher. His father, John Franklin Schindler—born in the same log cabin in Ohio his own father was born in—attended the Theological School at St. Lawrence University in Canton, Ohio, and studied subjects like Hagenbach’s History of Doctrines and Ware’s Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching. His Christianity was stern but redemptive. “When people sincerely believe in a benevolent God,” he wrote, “they try to act honestly and uprightly.” Young Raymond grew up hearing of punishment and salvation.