The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  Wells also recounted how the treasurer of the City Railway Company asked her to use her influence to persuade black people in Memphis to start riding the streetcars again—evidence that the exodus would have a major impact on the white economy.

  “So your own job then depends on Negro patronage?” Wells asked.

  The treasurer, according to Wells, had no good response.

  In the months and years after the lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Lee Stewart, an estimated six thousand black people fled the city of Memphis.

  Ida Wells was preparing to be one of them. She understood she could be in danger if she stayed. One line in her Free Speech editorial—that “nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that negro men rape white women”—was particularly controversial. The white-owned Memphis Daily Commercial ran its own editorial in response, decrying and even threatening Wells. “The fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern whites,” the paper declared. “But we have had enough of it… the negroes may as well understand that there is no mercy for the negro rapist, and little patience with his defenders.”

  The call for retaliation against any black person who dared challenge the lynch law system was clear and urgent. Ida Wells was not surprised. She had heard rumors that she would be lynched as soon as she returned to Memphis, and she believed them.

  “I had been warned repeatedly by my own people that something would happen,” Wells wrote. “I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers.”

  Soon after the murders in the Curve, Wells bought a pistol, and vowed “to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked.”

  Still, leaving Memphis and taking the operations of the Free Speech to another city made sense. Wells was prepared to do it, but before she could, she received another shock.

  She was away from Memphis, visiting her friend T. Thomas Fortune in Jersey City, New Jersey, when it happened. It was Fortune who broke the news to her.

  “Haven’t you seen the morning paper?” he asked her one day in May 1892, two months after the lynchings.

  Wells hadn’t. Fortune gave her a copy of the New York Sun.

  A group of white men had broken into the Beale Street office of the Free Speech, and pistol-whipped one of its managing partners, J. L. Fleming. Later, Wells would learn the same men returned to the Free Speech office and destroyed the furniture and typesetting machines. They left a note warning that anyone who tried to publish the paper again would be punished by death. The note mentioned Ida Wells by name.

  Now her newspaper was no more, and Memphis was no longer hers. Wells had no choice but to follow her own advice and leave. She had been cruelly exiled, and she chose to leave the South altogether.

  T. Thomas Fortune offered her a job writing for his paper, the New York Age, and Wells accepted. She moved one thousand miles away from Memphis and found a place to live in Brooklyn. Once before she had seen her world crumble, her foundation stripped away, destroyed by the yellow fever epidemic. Once before she had been forced into a wholesale transformation. And, as before, Wells saw her exile from Memphis as an invitation to be bolder, braver.

  Thanks to Fortune’s “splendid help,” Wells wrote, “I was given an opportunity to tell the world for the first time the true story of Negro lynchings.” This, she realized, was her calling; this was how she would answer the existential question of lynching, of the place and fate of blacks in America. With all her prodigious reading of Dickens and Shakespeare and countless other classics, Wells had not, to her sadness and frustration, read anything that reflected the reality of life for men and women of her race. “There is in literature no true type of the Negro as he is today,” she would say. “The press is in control of the whites, and the attacks upon us are colored to suit themselves.”

  Starting in 1892, Ida Wells set out to change that. She would tell the true story. She would spare no detail. She would go into the darkest places and bring the horrors to light. America needed to know.

  CHAPTER 17 A Balance of Goodness and Evil

  November 25, 1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  The hunt for Marie Smith’s killer now had its first legitimate suspect other than Tom Williams—the mysterious Frank Heidemann.

  Heidemann, twenty-seven, was fairly new to Asbury Park, and no one knew much about him. He wasn’t physically big—five foot five inches and 135 pounds, at most—but he was lean and wiry. He kept his dark black hair cut short, and he had high, sharp cheekbones that made his clean-shaven face look angular and intense, giving him a slightly feral appearance. His eyes had a tendency to widen and appear too big for his face. Even so, he was considered good looking. He was German-born, but he could have passed for Italian or Slavic. There was nothing brash or boisterous about him. Max Kruschka, his employer, called him “sober and industrious.” In Asbury Park, Heidemann hadn’t made much of an impression on anyone.

  All that was really known about Heidemann was that he worked for Max Kruschka in his flower business, and that he lived in a small, second-floor bedroom in Kruschka’s home on the corner of Whitesville Road and West Asbury Avenue—the exact spot where Marie Smith was last seen before she disappeared. Heidemann’s offer of candy to Grace Foster happened in the front yard of Kruschka’s property, which was right against the sidewalk that Marie Smith used to get to school and back.

  In New York City, Investigator Raymond Schindler spoke with Charles Scholl and agreed that Grace’s story about Heidemann made him their leading suspect. It was more circumstantial evidence, but it was compelling.

  What was frustrating was that both Asbury Park investigators and the first set of detectives hired by Sheriff Hetrick had questioned Heidemann, and quickly discounted him as a suspect. Schindler learned the Greater New York Agency detectives had even allowed Heidemann to wash the clothes he wore the day Marie vanished, after merely inspecting them, rather than having them tested. The spotlight had never been fixed on Heidemann, and in the nearly three weeks since Marie’s body had been found, he would have been free to lose or destroy all kinds of evidence. Schindler and his men had a lot of catching up to do.

  The day after Thanksgiving, November 25, 1910, Schindler took the train back to Asbury Park, and Charles Scholl met him at the station on Main Street at 1:19 p.m. Schindler brought along Charles Severance, another Burns Agency detective assigned to the case. Schindler and Scholl went to the Sea Coast Bank building on Mattison Avenue and met with Sheriff Hetrick in his office. They shared the details of Scholl’s interview with Grace Foster, and named Frank Heidemann their new top suspect. The talk turned to how they could get a confession out of Heidemann.

  Schindler had an idea: he wanted to run a phony news article about the Marie Smith case. The story would announce an incredible break—the appearance of clear fingerprints on Marie’s body, extracted by a fingerprint specialist using new technology. This fresh evidence, the story would say, meant new suspects and more interviews. “It is expected that someone will flinch upon reading this shortly before their summons,” Charles Severance wrote in his report that day, “and this will aid in establishing their guilt.” The intended “someone” was Frank Heidemann.

  Schindler and Hetrick agreed to run the article on Monday, November 28—and to bring Heidemann in for an interrogation that same day, once he’d had the chance to digest the morning news.

  After the meeting in Hetrick’s office, Scholl returned to the Marlborough Hotel, where he was staying, to rent a horse and buggy. He steered it back to Main Street and picked up Schindler and Severance, waiting for him outside the Sea Coast Building. Scholl led the buggy to Asbury Avenue, where Max Kruschka and Heidemann lived, and through the surrounding streets, so the men could figure out where to best place detectives to keep an eye on and, if needed, arrest Frank Heidemann, should he try to flee Asbury Park.

  After the tour of the are
a around the crime scene, Scholl brought the buggy back to Main Street so Schindler and Severance could board a 4:00 p.m. train back to New York City. Schindler would return on a date closer to the Heidemann interrogation.

  That evening, Charles Scholl went to his room at the Marlborough and called Sheriff Hetrick around 6:00 p.m. Hetrick didn’t answer, but just a few minutes later, the sheriff returned the call, and he had bad news. He’d been speaking with Coroner Purdy, and Purdy told him Frank Heidemann had left town earlier that day, headed for New York City. From what Purdy heard, it was doubtful Heidemann was ever coming back to Asbury Park.

  * * *

  Scholl quickly called Schindler with the news, and later that night Schindler and two operatives took the 8:50 p.m. train to Asbury Park. They arrived at Sheriff Hetrick’s office a little after 10:00 p.m. Hetrick had been trying to confirm if Heidemann had returned from New York City, but hadn’t been able to do so. No one could say for sure where Heidemann was, and it was possible he was gone for good. Schindler decided to give Heidemann a little more time to return, but if he didn’t, they would need to get into Max Kruschka’s home to confirm that he was gone.

  Schindler and Hetrick sent lookouts to the Asbury Park and North Asbury train stations. The lookouts waited until the black traction engine and dark steel cars of the 1:45 a.m. locomotive pulled out of each station, on its way farther south. Heidemann was nowhere to be seen.

  Next, Schindler and his men drove to a spot about one thousand yards across Asbury Avenue from Max Kruschka’s house. They parked behind some trees so they could not be so easily seen. They needed to get into Kruschka’s home, but without revealing that Heidemann was their surveillance target. They needed another ruse.

  The plan was this—the coroner, Robert Purdy, would knock on Kruschka’s front door under the pretense of questioning him about a piece of evidence. The fake evidence, they decided, would be a cheap hand ax. The oddness of rousing Kruschka from sleep to show him evidence in the middle of the night was unavoidable, and Schindler decided they wouldn’t even try to explain it away. They would simply find out if Heidemann was there, and, if he wasn’t, find out where he was.

  Sometime around 2:00 a.m., with Schindler and Scholl watching from their car, Purdy walked across Asbury Avenue and through Max Kruschka’s front yard. He knocked on the door and waited with the cheap ax in his hand. After a while, the front door opened. Max Kruschka, sleepy and unhappy, stood and stared at his visitors in disbelief.

  Behind him—Frank Heidemann.

  So he had returned after all. Purdy went through with the ruse, apologizing to Kruschka for the late hour and asking him about the ax. The interview lasted just minutes. Purdy returned to the cars across Asbury Avenue, and Schindler instructed two operatives to watch Kruschka’s house overnight. He and Scholl, now certain Heidemann was in their sights, went to the Marlborough for a few hours’ sleep.

  The next morning, the ruse to locate Heidemann had somehow become front-page news in the Asbury Park Press, under the blaring headline “New Arrest Likely in Murder Mystery.” Alvin Cliver had learned about Purdy’s late-night visit to Kruschka, and used it to announce a new development in the investigation—the imminent arrest of a “young white man believed to know more than he has yet told.” The Press didn’t name the mystery man, but the same article quickly pivoted to Purdy’s visit to Kruschka, drawing a clear inference that the man was Frank Heidemann. That was certainly the conclusion an angry Kruschka came to, according to his many complaints to the Press.

  “Why don’t the police arrest others who know anything about the case and hold them as witnesses instead of sneaking around and standing on my corner?” Kruschka was quoted as saying. “I have done everything in my power to help the police in their search for the murderer. I have fed those detectives, allowed them to use my phone and thrown my place open to searchers. They didn’t find a thing and yet they will get me out of bed after midnight and ask me all kinds of questions about an axe they found. I have given my time and my business has suffered.”

  Kruschka also distanced himself from the man he assumed was the target of all the attention—his boarder, Frank Heidemann. “If the police have any suspicion of him, why don’t they arrest him?” Kruschka asked. “Tonight, I will pay him off. I am through with him if the police believe he is implicated in any way. If they want him, they should take him.”

  There it was. Not only had Kruschka essentially disclosed Heidemann to be the new suspect, but he’d also vowed to turn him loose. Heidemann now had a valid reason to leave town. Schindler had to act faster than he’d planned, so he moved his interrogation up one day, from Monday to Sunday. The phony article about fingerprints would also run a day earlier. That gave Schindler just one day, Saturday, to prepare for his formal questioning of Heidemann. He knew it would likely be his best chance to knock Heidemann off balance and, if he was indeed guilty of the crime, squeeze a confession out of him. Schindler had no evidence linking Heidemann to Marie’s murder, and nothing to confront him with. It would come down to the incisiveness of his interrogation.

  What the men who hired Ray Schindler did not know was that Frank Heidemann would be the first murder suspect Schindler had ever confronted face-to-face.

  * * *

  Schindler was fairly new to the business of murder and criminal concealment, but he had already come to believe one thing—that men wore their lies as surely as they wore their hats and shoes.

  An uttered lie, Schindler believed, was not necessarily an ephemeral, uncapturable thing. It could be seized and dissected by the trained mind. The thoughts and emotions behind deception were measurable. Humans betrayed their lies because they simply couldn’t help themselves. To Schindler, this wasn’t speculation, it was science. A new science known as emotional inscription.

  Earlier in 1910, Schindler began reading the works of Hugo Münsterberg, a German-American, Harvard-educated psychologist pioneering the controversial discipline of applied psychology. Formal and narrow-eyed, with a jutting jaw, bald head, and sprouting mustache beneath a prominent nose, Münsterberg believed that physiological changes such as a spike in blood pressure or a simple muscle contraction correlated to mental and emotional states like anger, relief, fear, and guilt.

  Just as letters could be inscribed on a block of granite, emotions were inscribed on our minds and bodies.

  “The physician needs his magnifier to find out whether there are tubercles in the sputum,” Münsterberg wrote in one of his many papers on the topic. “The legal psychologist may, in the future, use his mental microscope to find out whether there are lies in the mind of a suspect.”

  Some of these emotional inscriptions, Münsterberg believed, were so subtle they could be detected only with the use of machinery.

  Münsterberg loved his machines. He worked with a primitive chronoscope—a device for measuring very brief intervals of time—to evaluate a subject’s reactions to provocative words and images. He used an early version of a sphygmomanometer—a clunky metal contraption mounted on the wrist like a medieval torture device—to measure changes in blood pressure. He had a pneumograph that recorded interruptions in respiration, and an automatograph that charted muscle contractions.

  Münsterberg believed so firmly in mechanized lie detection that he pushed hard in essays and speeches for the integration of science and psychology—and he took plenty of ridicule for it. When he was hired to help create mental testing booths for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, his laboratories filled with bizarre instruments and mental testing devices were likened to carnival sideshows—“a Münsterbergian circus,” as one critic put it. Lawyers and judges were particularly dismissive of his work, to his great frustration.

  “The psychology of the witness is treated in no way exhaustively,” Münsterberg lamented in a 1908 study. “My only purpose is to turn the attention of serious men to an absurdly neglected field.”

  Ray Schindler was fascinated by Münsterberg’s machines, but he was particularly
intrigued by the intuitive dimension of his work—the idea that investigators could be trained to reliably detect deception without instruments. Like Münsterberg, Schindler was a fan of literature, and both were particular fans of Shakespeare, whose characters constantly spoke and acted in ways that revealed underlying states of mind. Long before applied psychology caught on, dramatists were the true pioneers of uncovering the hidden scaffolding of human behavior.

  Why, Schindler wondered, couldn’t detectives be at least as adept as playwrights at understanding and documenting deception?

  There was something else in Münsterberg’s thinking that deeply impressed Schindler—a notion that echoed his mother’s compassionate conviction that the inmates who came through her prison library were not monsters, but rather broken men.

  Münsterberg argued that criminals were, on a human level, no different from law-abiders. The villain, same as the fine citizen, had a balance of goodness and evil intent within him, and had simply encountered “the cruelty of misfortune, which once in a hasty hour destroyed that balance,” Münsterberg wrote. A wise investigator would recognize this and approach his suspect as a man, not a demon, because “to make them feel that they are recognized as equals is to win them back over to decency.” The most powerful expression of this thinking, Münsterberg believed, was the confession.

  An investigator’s true goal was to elicit a full confession from his suspect, not through violence or oppression, but rather through psychological trickery. The thinking was that criminals want—need—to confess. “The man who confesses puts himself again on an equal ground with the honest majority,” Münsterberg stated. “He gives up his identity with the criminal and eliminates the crime like a foreign body from his life. A true confession wins the bedrock of life again.”