The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  * * *

  Bowers and another detective spent most of that day following Heidemann on and around 14th Street. Heidemann’s second day in the city was much like his first—saloons, restaurants, movie houses. He spent some time in a popular German restaurant named Reinken’s on Third Avenue—a likely place for a German new to the city to wander into. Someone like Frank Heidemann—or the illusory Carl Neumeister. Ray Schindler approved Reinken’s as a place to begin the roping.

  The next day, January 7, the detectives were back on watch on 14th Street. Neumeister was with them, waiting for his moment. The men spotted Heidemann leaving the rooming house at 8:30 a.m., and they followed him to Reinken’s Restaurant. They waited several minutes for Heidemann to get settled. Then Carl Neumeister walked inside alone.

  He spotted Heidemann sitting at a long table, and without hesitation sat across from him. Neumeister opened a German newspaper, the Staats Zeitung, and started reading, paying no attention to Heidemann. Schindler had one important rule for his rope—he could not be the one to make first contact. He was to sit and wait until Heidemann made the first move, even if it took several trips to Reinken’s.

  Luckily, it didn’t take long. Heidemann, speaking in German, commented on an item in the newspaper, and Neumeister answered him.

  “I engaged him in conversation,” Neumeister later reported. The two men, speaking only German, introduced themselves and had their first breakfast together.

  A connection had been made, and it was a good one. After breakfast, Frank and Carl, as they called each other, went for a walk down Third Avenue, toward the Bowery section of Manhattan—not all that far from Schindler’s headquarters. There they went into a saloon on the corner of Bleecker and Lafayette Streets. They drank together, then went for another stroll through Chinatown and Little Italy. At every stop, Frank—seemingly eager to talk—shared details about his life.

  He told Carl he’d been drafted into Dusseldorf’s Hussar Regiment of the German Army in 1904, and had been caught abandoning his post without leave. He was fined two hundred marks and deemed unfit to serve any longer. Eventually he made his way to America, and was now on two weeks’ vacation from his job as a gardener in Asbury Park. He planned to go back to his job if he failed to find a new one in the city.

  Frank also told Carl he was friends with a prostitute who worked along 14th Street, and had known her for more than a year. She was now living with him in his rooming house, he said.

  How was it that the secretive Frank Heidemann, so careful and closed off in Asbury Park, had so quickly opened up to a new friend in Manhattan? Was it loneliness? Schindler was counting on that, but even he was surprised by how quickly his rope took hold. On their first day together, Frank felt comfortable enough to show Carl a private side of himself—a side that was dark and incriminating. He could not help but share with Carl his fondness for young women.

  In Little Italy, the crowded neighborhood of some ten thousand Italian immigrants, Frank pointed out a particular store to Carl.

  “This is where one can get Italian emigrant girls, young and tender,” Frank told him. The girls were imported for that purpose, he said, and they only cost fifty cents.

  “They always treat customers right,” he added. “If you’re afraid to go, I’ll go with you one night.”

  After spending the morning together, the men agreed to meet later for drinks. That evening, Carl went to Reinken’s three different times, but saw no sign of Frank. He walked by Heidemann’s rooming house, hoping to run into him, but had no luck. He stayed in the area for nearly seven hours before quitting for the day.

  Had Frank figured it out? Had he realized it was unwise for him to trust anyone with any part of his life story?

  Carl Neumeister was back to 14th Street the next day, January 8—Frank Heidemann’s fourth day in the city. Carl returned to Reinken’s, and this time he ran into Frank on the way. There was no sign anything had changed. They had lunch together and went for a walk. Frank even brought Carl up to his rented room. He said he wanted “to see if his woman was still in bed reading the Sunday papers,” Carl reported. She wasn’t, but the men stayed in the ground-floor room and talked.

  It was then that Carl saw the first evidence of what could be called a guilty conscience. He noticed Frank pulling the drawn curtains aside and peering out to the street. “It is evident he expects to be shadowed,” Carl wrote. “I asked him why he was looking around so much and he replied, ‘I think I am being followed.’ ”

  This was good news for Schindler and his team. Frank was suspicious—but he did not suspect Carl Neumeister. He did not realize his pursuers were as close to him as they were.

  By then Carl had found a way to deepen his target’s trust in him. It had to do with how often Frank spoke about young women. Frank freely shared that he was drawn to little girls “with well-developed legs,” Carl reported. He would point them out on the street and make remarks in German “such as, ‘That one would be a nice fuck,’ and ‘Look at the fat legs of that one; I’d like to get her in bed, wouldn’t you?’ ”

  Carl played along. Eventually he began to establish his own dark side as a way to further gain Heidemann’s trust. He made up a story about a crime from his past that had now come back to haunt him, a crime involving an abortion.

  “A midwife who performed a criminal operation on a girl has been arrested,” Carl told Heidemann. “I am in trouble in consequence of it.”

  At that moment, perhaps, Frank Heidemann saw in his new friend someone who might understand the harsh cruelty of misfortune.

  “Gee,” he said, “then you’re in a fix, too.”

  CHAPTER 29 Immoral Thoughts and Expressions

  January 10, 1911

  Union Square, New York City

  Frank Heidemann didn’t elaborate on the kind of fix he was in, and Carl didn’t ask. It wasn’t time yet. He’d only known Frank for two days. Asking too many questions too early could scare him off. And the roping, he understood, had started well. Some measure of trust and friendship had already been established. Frank freely shared stories about his life, and in particular about his prowess with women. He bragged to Carl about the brothels he visited on the Heiligengeiststrasse in the German city of Essen. He told him about a Manhattan prostitute who was, in his words, “dead gone on me.” He called her “my woman.” He claimed she liked him so much, she paid him not to sleep with other women.

  Frank also let on that he disliked Manhattan. “This New York is not quite enough to suit me,” he said. “I would rather go South or far West. I like Texas.” The desire to escape to a distant place became a theme in their conversations. It didn’t take much to get Frank pining for a new beginning someplace else, far away from his past.

  “I would walk out to Kentucky tomorrow if I knew what’s what,” Heidemann once said. “Say, Carl, let’s go there. I’m ready if you care to come along. I wish someone would lend me enough money to get out West. You would if you knew me longer. I would repay you and thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  Ray Schindler had guessed Frank Heidemann did not have much money with him, and he was right. The German was running out of funds. It was an opening, and Schindler exploited it. He had Carl offer to pay for many of Frank’s expenses—ten cents for a cigar, a dollar for supper, fifty cents for drinks at a saloon.

  Frank, who believed Carl was receiving seventy-five dollars a week from the estate of a relative, accepted the money every time, and soon came to expect his friend to sponsor their days of eating and drinking. It was a way for Carl to gain more of his target’s trust, but also to make him financially dependent. And that dependence would make him vulnerable.

  Meanwhile, Carl continued presenting himself to Frank as a ruthless and cunning criminal—someone who could understand his predicament. Carl had mentioned the illegal abortion that was troublesome for him, and now he told Frank about a friend in Chicago who was helping him get out from under it. He would stay in New York City to wait fo
r his inheritance, Carl explained, as long as his friend from Chicago assured him the police weren’t closing in on him.

  “In case my friend warns me the police are looking for me, I may not even wait for you to skip out in a hurry,” Carl said. “I would leave you some cash at Holberg’s so you could meet me in some other town.”

  The news panicked Frank.

  “No, Carl, don’t leave without me,” he pleaded. “Wait at Holberg’s for me or come to the room. I have not got anyone to rely on. Do that for me, will you? You don’t know what it means to me.”

  Then Frank looked at Carl and confessed to how desperate his situation really was.

  “If the river was not so damn cold, I would jump in and leave this rotten world,” he said. “What is life anyway? I am tired of it.”

  * * *

  “What is life anyway?” Heidemann’s question might as well have been a rephrasing of Hamlet’s famous query: “To be or not to be?” Ray Schindler knew Hamlet well. He’d read all of William Shakespeare’s plays. He saw Shakespeare as a master at revealing the psychological desires, fears, and motives of his characters through dramatic speech and action. The characters in Hamlet, for instance, are haunted by crimes and guilt—by the terrible understanding that balance in nature can be restored only through retribution for sins. Even ceasing to live—ceasing “to be”—offers no escape from the anguish of guilt and remorse. Our mortal sins, if unconfessed and unpunished, will follow us into the afterlife.

  In formulating his plan to wring a confession out of Heidemann, Schindler turned for inspiration to William Shakespeare—specifically, to Hamlet’s Act III. In the play, Hamlet’s father, the King of Denmark, has been murdered. A ghost tells Hamlet that his uncle Claudius is the killer. But how can Hamlet be sure? He commissions a play that depicts the poisoning of a king, and arranges for Claudius to see it. He plans to measure Claudius’s guilt by his reaction to the murder scene. When Claudius flees the theater, Hamlet has the evidence he needs.

  “Murder has no tongue,” Hamlet explains, “but miraculously it still finds a way to speak.”

  Ray Schindler needed to make murder speak. So he lifted Hamlet’s scheme and moved it to Manhattan. “A detective must write his own play as he goes along,” Schindler later told his biographer, “and act it with whatever actors may make their exits and entrances.”

  * * *

  Schindler recruited the manager of a movie theater near 14th Street and paid him eighty dollars to show a particular film on a specific night. The film Schindler picked was known as a “two-reeler”—a cheaply made, sensationally gory foreign horror movie. Two-reelers were popular with American audiences, despite growing criticism of their immorality.

  Schindler selected an Italian crime movie. It featured a scene in which a Mexican man strangles a young girl with strands of her own hair.

  On January 10, Carl Neumeister persuaded Frank to see the movie with him. They went to an afternoon showing. Schindler sent in several shadows to fill the seats around Frank and watch for his reaction. The lights went down and the movie flickered on-screen, and halfway through, the crucial scene arrived. Frank watched in the dark as the villain bound the girl’s hands and feet with rope and pushed her down a steep hill to her death. The film showed the girl’s battered body lying on the ground.

  During the scene, Carl heard Frank begin to breathe heavily. He asked him a question, and Frank “answered me in only monosyllables for about an hour afterwards,” Carl reported. “At the end of the program he regained some good humor, but afterward and until I left him, he sighed very frequently and would say ‘Gott Jah,’ ” over and over again.

  The German phrase translated into “God, yes.”

  That evening, Frank paced in his small ground-floor room. “He was very dejected and nervous,” Carl noted. “He said, ‘I wonder if the police inquire about me back in Germany.’ ”

  Carl asked him why he was so worried about the police. Frank wouldn’t say. Instead he offered his usual lament.

  “I would rather go West as far as I can and start life anew. We could easily change our names, and everything would be all right.”

  There was no further confession. No discussion of Frank’s past. If the goal of Schindler’s movie ruse had been to unnerve Frank to such a degree that he blurted out his guilt, the ruse had failed. But, as usual, Schindler didn’t see it that way. He would later say the scheme was designed to tighten the pressure on Frank Heidemann—to chip away a little more at his fragile psyche.

  * * *

  The roping continued. Frank, aware that his fellow German had a steady stream of income, complained to Carl that his money had all but run out. Soon he wouldn’t be able to afford even his weekly rent at the rooming house. Schindler had Carl offer to pay for a room where they could both stay. Frank quickly agreed. On January 11, the two men walked to a boardinghouse at 129 West 15th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Carl spoke to the landlady, Mrs. Freeman, and paid her five dollars for a second-floor room in the back of the four-story brownstone. Frank gave his name as “Frank Hallman.”

  Once they’d settled into their new room, the men resumed their routine. They ate breakfast in nearby restaurants and drank Manhattans in different cafes. They went to a toy store on Broadway near Tenth Street and brought a chess set, and took up the game. It was a good way for them to pass their idle days, and they played for hours. When he could, Carl snuck away and called Schindler from street corner pay phones, to update him on Frank’s mood and condition.

  The days passed. Carl was now surely his target’s closest friend, his only true intimate. They spent hours together every day, talking and swapping stories about their lives and desires. Carl could not know how much of what Frank told him was true, and how much was boastful invention. But one thing was undeniable—Frank Heidemann had a very dark side. He was obsessed with young girls. Frank could hardly pass a young girl in the street without winking or whistling or making crude comments. The behavior was so pervasive that Carl kept a log of all the remarks Heidemann made after passing women in the street.

  “This one I would like to have naked in bed.”

  “Look at the plump legs and breasts of that one.”

  “Hasn’t this one a nice behind and pretty legs? A sweet girlie.”

  Heidemann called women over twenty “alte hures”—old whores. He was only interested in girls.

  “He is a moral degenerate of the lowest type,” Carl wrote of Heidemann in a report. “He is a dangerous criminal in immoral thoughts and expressions, and his mind dwells almost constantly on the shape and innocence of girls up to the age of about 15 years.”

  As the days passed, Carl noticed something else about Frank—the pressure of his situation was getting to him.

  “Subject is losing weight since last week and appears to be worrying a good deal,” he reported. “He sighs very frequently and has bad dreams, as I can tell from the moaning in his sleep.”

  Frank’s angular face was now gaunt. His cheeks were sunken. He was a light sleeper and he paced constantly in his room, or he left to walk the streets for hours. Two women staying in the room next to theirs tried to strike up a conversation with Frank, “but the subject refuses to have anything to do with them,” Carl noted. Instead, “he peeps at them through the keyhole” and “puts in much time looking through a drill hole in the door between our closet and our neighbor Minnie’s room.”

  The weaker Frank became, the more Carl tried to shore up his fake persona—that of a hardened criminal. He told Frank he’d served five years in prison for highway robbery in Canon City, Colorado. “I have no scruples whatever when I need money,” he said. He suggested he was responsible for an explosion at a train depot that killed fourteen men, and for the dynamiting of a mine shaft that caused two deaths.

  “I have three notches in my .38-40 Colt,” he bragged to Frank, “and that was before coming up to Cripple Creek and burning a farmhouse for revenge while heading East.”


  The act was convincing. “He thinks I am a villain of the deepest dye,” Carl reported. “He says he would go to the limit with me in any crooked deal, and is anxious to have me leave New York with him.”

  And yet—Carl could not get Frank to talk about his own past.

  In the moments when Frank revealed his true self, whether he was winking and whistling at young girls or pacing miserably in his room, Carl looked for his opening. He was waiting for just the right time to ask what he called “the final crucial question.” Sometimes Carl would say nothing, sensing Frank was too closed off. Other times, he would try to steer Frank back to discussing his past, to whatever hidden crime was now causing him such torment.

  But Frank would not be baited. If asked, he would share some small detail about his time in Asbury Park, but only reluctantly, and he never spoke of any women he knew there. Carl even dropped hints that he understood Frank’s feelings about women. “I made him think I am love-sick, and have catered to such women by giving them candy”—a deliberate reference to Frank’s offer of candy to young Grace Foster in Asbury Park. But that, too, failed to draw him out.

  Carl stayed ready to pounce even in the middle of the night, in Frank’s most unguarded moments, the times when his darkest demons ran rampant through his dreams. One night, Frank grunted in his sleep so loudly that Carl woke him up. Frank described an awful dream—he was holding a revolver and running away from a group of policemen and soldiers frantically chasing after him. Carl asked him what he was running from. Frank said he couldn’t remember.

  Frank was a clever man, Carl concluded, smarter than most, and he was sharp enough mentally to recover quickly should he let something damaging slip. He wasn’t going to give his pursuers any easy openings. He would fight off, as long as he could, Carl’s final, crucial question: