The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  John Schindler’s work as a minister for the Universalist Church took him to Ohio, then Iowa, then Stillwater, Minnesota. In 1880 he married Isabella Campbell, and they had six children. Raymond, born in the upstate New York town of Mexico, was their second child and eldest son. From his father, Raymond learned to be moral, patient, and serious. But it was his kind, giving mother, Belle, who first exposed Raymond to the criminal element.

  Belle Schindler volunteered at the Minnesota State Prison in Stillwater. Since it opened in 1853, it was known as a truly bleak place. Among its inmates when Belle worked there were the infamous Younger Boys, a trio of brothers who robbed banks with Jesse James and finally got caught after a botched bank job in 1876, and sentenced to twenty-five years. Many new prisoners at Stillwater—called “fresh fish” by inmates—“had been known to break down completely after spending their first night in a cell, with its iron bed, whitewashed walls, scant furnishings, iron floor and the dimensions of only five by seven feet.”

  Inmates had exactly nineteen temporary possessions—a Bible, two cups, a small mirror, a cuspidor, one spoon, one face towel, one dish towel, one piece of soap, one comb, one blanket, one sheet, one pillowcase, a mattress, a bedstead, a wooden chair, an earthen water jar with cover, an electric light, and one small shelf. Belle Schindler saw to it that they had one more privilege—a library catalog.

  Belle founded the prison library and worked there without pay, dispensing thousands of books to inmates who for the first time had something to read besides the Bible. The library was hugely popular and endured for the life of the prison. Belle also held Sunday school classes for the inmates, and it was through her efforts that Ray Schindler “acquired his first realization that criminals are human, the prey of their own natures and environments,” the biographer Rupert Hughes wrote. Both of Ray’s parents, then, encouraged him to see the humanity behind the horror, to reach for that part of every man, even the crooked and the seemingly lost, that still yearned to be honest and upright.

  In 1895 Raymond’s father left the ministry and hired on as a sales agent for the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company in Milwaukee. He brought Raymond into the business with him. By then Raymond had shown a solid work ethic, starting as a boy delivering newspapers for twenty-five cents a day, then as a theater usher who dabbled in acting, and also as a nighttime hotel clerk. When Ray was eighteen, his father sent him out to sign his first insurance client, a music store in Alliance, Ohio. Ray sold them a policy and earned an eighteen-dollar commission. But he was so taken with the solicitation part of the business—making contacts, sizing people up, getting along with different types—that he spent most of his time helping his music store clients hold contests, sign bands, and increase sales. He never signed a second client, and his father ended Ray’s insurance career right then.

  Next, John Schindler steered his son toward a job selling typewriters. After two years, Ray managed to save $2,400 in commissions. That was enough to launch him on his next adventure—an investment in a gold-mining property in Sierra County in northern California. The property was called “Sky High.” A half century after the Gold Rush, Ray and a friend set out on their own quest for fortune, buying cheap tickets for the long train ride out west. Their money ran out before they reached Colorado. For five dollars, a brakeman let them ride in the refrigerator car of a freight train, as long as they stayed out of view by crouching high on the crossbeams. Unluckily, there was a blizzard that dropped temperatures well below freezing, which, coupled with the great blocks of ice in the train car, nearly ended their adventure, and their lives.

  They survived the trip, and for the last leg of the train journey they bribed another brakeman to smuggle them onto the platform between the first baggage car and the billowing engine, a bit of transport known as “riding blind baggage.” After a few hours they were covered in soot and frozen snow, and choked by heavy smoke. A train staffer saved them from possible death by bringing them inside and finding a way for them to warm up—shoveling coal into the engine boiler for the next ten hours.

  Ray finally arrived in California in a winter storm, and reached his mountain property atop a horse outfitted with snowshoes. He stayed in a home he could leave and enter only through a second-floor window, so high were the snowdrifts. He helped excavators with the backbreaking work of tunneling into the mountain, working ninety hours a week.

  But by springtime, the funds ran out and the mine was abandoned.

  Instead of crippling him, the dismal failure only “trebled the young man’s enthusiasm,” Alva Johnston wrote in a New Yorker profile of Schindler many years later. “He became a gold-fever Typhoid Mary, infecting his father and friends with the craze, [and together] they raised $80,000 for a hydraulic-mining venture” on a mountain near Scales, California. Between 1854 and 1884, hydraulic mining had unearthed more than $100 million in gold, and this time, with an army of three hundred Chinese workers, the outlook for Ray seemed much more promising. Until the federal government banned all hydraulic mining, and the Schindler mine was shuttered.

  Ray Schindler was twenty-four and broke. But he was not defeated. Something was waiting for him somewhere, this he knew. He left Scales with no money and no plan, and he made his way nearly two hundred miles south to the booming, modern city of San Francisco.

  * * *

  The G. Franklin McMackin Society wasn’t a society at all. McMackin was a person—a detective from New York City. He’d been hired by insurance companies to evaluate the damage in San Francisco with an eye toward lightening the companies’ enormous financial liabilities. The 1906 earthquake was, for the insurance industry, a near apocalypse. The destruction of thousands of buildings—including the city’s famed, gilded playhouses, the Majestic, the Columbia, the Orpheum, the Grand Operahouse—would eventually total $235 million in losses, or, in modern dollars, more than $6 billion. At least twelve insurance companies in the United States went out of business because of the earthquake. Many insurers offered claimants “six-bit” coverage (a small percentage of what policyholders were owed) or simply denied them any payment at all.

  The soundest loophole for insurers was that most policies at the time included a falling-building clause, but no coverage for earthquake damage. Earthquakes were an act of God. But in San Francisco, only an estimated 2 percent of the ruined buildings were destroyed by the quake. The other 98 percent were destroyed by fire. Thus, insurers were desperate for proof that a building had already been destroyed before it ever caught fire. In one case, an insurer paid fifteen thousand dollars for a photograph of a collapsed building that only later burned to the ground.

  McMackin was hired to survey damaged buildings and find proof the earthquake had wrecked them. He brought in forty-two men, including Ray Schindler, and told them they were historians documenting the catastrophe. As historians, they could question homeowners and expect more candor than an insurance agent could ever hope to get. This subterfuge was key to their success. In effect, they were going undercover to glean information that would ultimately hurt the people they extracted it from.

  Ray Schindler did not catch on right away. The work appealed to him for the same reasons he enjoyed his brief time as an actual insurance agent—he found he was good at earning people’s trust and getting them to share important details about themselves. That he was producing the information for good, historical reasons also appealed to him.

  Two weeks in, though, Schindler realized there was nothing scholarly about his job. He was, he discovered, working for a detective, and thus essentially a detective himself. There were no actual requirements to become a detective—no test to pass or license to earn. Ray was a detective because he was doing a detective’s work, and he was doing it well. Without knowing it, he had stumbled into his destiny.

  Schindler kept working for McMackin for several weeks, until he felt confident enough to continue as a freelancer. He would assess a damaged building top to bottom—reports, photographs, affidavits—for four hundr
ed dollars. His thoroughness, and his patient pursuit of a sound conclusion, stood out among McMackin’s forty-two hirees. When McMackin was called back to New York City for another job, he recommended that Schindler take his place. Schindler stayed on the job in San Francisco for eighteen months.

  Yet even his skills at reconnaissance and documentation proved useless to the insurance industry. In the end, state judges found in case after case that insurers were responsible for the fire damage that destroyed hundreds of buildings after the earthquake. In 1907, Schindler quit the McMackin Society and took a job with a San Francisco lawyer, Hiram Johnson, who knew of his work and hired him to do research on a small blackmail case. This was Schindler’s first real case as a detective.

  When the case was done, Johnson asked Schindler to submit a bill. Schindler turned in an invoice for fifty dollars. Johnson wasn’t happy, but not because Schindler asked for too much. He had watched Schindler charge another man just ten dollars for services Johnson believed deserved ten times as much. Now Schindler was undercharging again.

  Johnson taught his protégé a good lesson by giving him a check for five hundred dollars and a warning to stop undervaluing himself.

  Johnson wasn’t done with Schindler. He saw a role for him in the ongoing legal battle against the notoriously corrupt political system in San Francisco—which, after the earthquake, became only more corrupt. In 1907, the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, sent an assistant U.S. district attorney, Francis J. Heney, and one of his Secret Service officers, William J. Burns, to San Francisco to prosecute the city’s corrupt element. Hiram Johnson, then highly prominent in legal circles, recommended Ray Schindler for a spot on the investigative team assembled by Heney and Burns.

  Schindler spent the next three years caught up in the thicket of San Francisco politics. It was hard, painstaking work. The city was under the control of a brazen operative named Abe Ruef, a lawyer who arranged for a naïve musician, Eugene Schmitz, to be elected San Francisco mayor, allowing Ruef—known as Curly Boss for his stylish mustache—to collect illegal fees from nearly every important transaction in the city. President Roosevelt sent Heney and Burns to take down the powerful Ruef and his puppet Schmitz in court. Burns assembled a team of investigators led by Schindler, who hired sixteen of his former McMackin “historians.”

  Schindler’s task was to assemble thorough histories of the principals in the case, and to profile the hundreds of men being considered as jurors for the trial. The prosecutor’s biggest fear was that Ruef would somehow flip a man or men on the jury, and throw it in his favor. Burns charged Schindler with identifying those prospective jurors most likely to be vulnerable to Ruef’s advances. To get the intimate information he needed, Schindler had to work undercover, this time willingly posing as a historian researching the corruption case for posterity. He got many prospective jurors and their families to tell their life stories by describing how their histories and opinions would one day be immortalized in books found in libraries around the globe.

  Schindler’s work nearly came to nothing when a Ruef-Schmitz operative paid William Burns’s secretary fifteen hundred dollars for copies of Schindler’s precious biographies. Schindler investigated the theft and learned the president of a streetcar company had the files in his office safe. Schindler got a search warrant and hired a safecracker. But before he could leave the president’s office with his files, dozens of men charged in and cornered him. He was going to lose the files a second time.

  So Schindler ran to a window, flung it open, and threw the documents in the air. He was arrested for burglary, but not before one of his fellow detectives on the street below scooped up the stolen files.

  The clean jury that Schindler helped assemble led Abe Ruef to cut a deal that earned him a fourteen-year sentence in San Quentin. The jury also found Mayor Eugene Schmitz guilty of corruption, and had him removed from office and sent to jail.

  * * *

  The case was Ray Schindler’s initiation into the world of big-time law enforcement, and of all the colorful figures he had met, he was most taken with the Secret Service agent, William John Burns.

  Burns, a Maryland native, was handsome and brash, and he owned “a nasturtium-colored mustache, which he did up nightly in curlpapers,” a New Yorker profile reported. He wore a deerstalker cap like the great fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Schindler was impressed with Burns’s creativity and devotion to detail, which he saw firsthand in the San Francisco corruption case. At one point, Burns set up a phony oil company, with one of his operatives posing as the head of the company. The operative, Schindler learned, was known as a “roper”—someone used to rope in unsuspecting criminals. Burns’s deceptions and setups were elaborate and complex, and they were risky. His oil company roper embedded himself in San Francisco’s corrupt waterfront, and eventually cut a deal with the head of the Board of Supervisors, Big Jim Gallagher, to illegally smuggle his oil through the docks. Gallagher’s price was $150,000. Burns’s men were so convincing they earned invitations into the homes of the supervisors and left no doubt in Gallagher’s mind that they were, like him, criminals.

  Instead, after getting Gallagher to accept a down payment of fifteen thousand dollars in bills marked by tiny needle punctures, Burns’s detectives arrested Gallagher, and Burns himself sweated a thirty-six-hour confession out of him. So thorough was Burns’s demolishment of the powerful Gallagher that several other corrupt operatives quickly lined up to make their own confessions and cut their own hopefully lenient deals.

  The Gallagher trap, to Schindler, was a marvel of cunning and engineering. Its many moving parts, its meticulous attention to detail, its demand for sureness and bravery in action, all struck Schindler as a new and daring type of detective work. It required an ability to psychologically assess targets and, in effect, get them to incriminate themselves.

  Just as impressive was Burns’s marathon interrogation of Jim Gallagher, whose nearly uninterrupted confession amounted to an epic exorcising of his criminal self. For Schindler, it had echoes of his father’s teachings—that even the most incorrigible sinners have a need to unburden themselves of their transgressions, either by bathing in the redemption of God’s loving embrace, or, in the case of Big Jim Gallagher, by accepting the salvation offered him by his own omniscient adjudicator, Williams J. Burns.

  Thanks to Burns, Ray Schindler had found his calling.

  “He had imagination,” Schindler would say of his mentor. “It was his training, particularly in the art of setting up a pretext that was foolproof, that caused me to make this my life’s work. The challenge to outsmart, to analyze the workings of a guilty mind and cause that person to assist you in obtaining evidence against him, is fascinating.”

  After his success in the San Francisco case, William J. Burns left the Secret Service and started his own detective agency. In 1909, he went to New York City to open a headquarters there, in the twenty-nine-story, granite and limestone Park Row Building in lower Manhattan—one of the world’s first skyscrapers. Burns brought Ray Schindler with him as his first hire, and named him office manager and lead detective.

  The following year, in November 1910, Burns got a call from a County sheriff in New Jersey, Clarence Hetrick, who asked for help with a disturbing and puzzling murder case. Burns opened a file—Investigation No. 149—and handed the assignment to his new top man, Ray Schindler.

  CHAPTER 14 Grace Foster

  November 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  Ray Schindler dressed formally and did not carry a gun. He could have passed for a buttoned-up accountant or lawyer. He was five foot nine with dark hair cut short and swept in a neat line across his forehead. He had a long face with a rounded chin, bushy eyebrows, and a wide mouth set in a natural half smile. He favored three-piece suits with a lapel pin and a pocket square, and white dress shirts with club collars, and decorative tie tacks just above his tightly buttoned vest. In the summers he’d wear white suits with bow ties and s
porty boater hats, but for the most part he dressed in black, topped off by a slick fedora.

  The most striking thing about him was his eyes.

  Deep-set and blue-gray, they were uncommonly round and wide, like owl eyes, and they made him seem perpetually alert, or extremely curious. His gaze was hard and fixed, and if it fell on you, you knew you were being observed. Schindler’s eyes gave him the eerie intensity of a magician, and it was not hard to imagine that he wasn’t simply looking at you but somehow into you.

  At 9:30 a.m. on November 19, 1910, Ray Schindler had a visitor in his office at the Park Row Building in lower Manhattan. It was Robert Purdy, the Asbury Park coroner who was technically in charge of the inquest into the cause of Marie Smith’s death, and who had come to New York to escort Schindler back to New Jersey.

  In Schindler’s office, Purdy laid out the details of the case, starting with Marie’s disappearance and ending with the arrest and interrogation of Thomas Williams. Schindler asked if there were any photographs of the wounds on Marie’s body. Purdy told him no. What about fingerprint impressions on the body? Those had not been searched for, Purdy said. The technology was too new. Around 10:30 a.m., the men left Schindler’s office to make the 11:00 a.m. train to Asbury Park. They arrived at the shore at 1:19 p.m. and went straight to Sheriff Hetrick’s office in the Seacoast Bank Building on the corner of Mattison Avenue. Randolph Miller, Peter Smith’s boss, was there, too.

  Hetrick explained that, besides Tom Williams, his men had made no headway on other suspects. The investigation was at a standstill. Hetrick told Schindler “the community at large were greatly worked up over the conditions and feel that it is not safe to have children at large until the perpetrator of the crime is apprehended,” Schindler later wrote in his daily report. “There is a great deal of feeling on the matter and it is obvious that some results must be obtained.”