The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,

  And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.

  Du Bois and The Crisis would also serve as the NAACP’s fact-finders, locating and researching cases for the association to take on. There was no set protocol for how the NAACP decided to get involved in a case, except for areas of focus—cases that involved peonage, extradition, and police brutality. One such case came to the group’s attention in the fall of 1910. It involved a sharecropper named Pink Franklin, who had been arrested for killing a white constable who entered his home, then tried and sentenced to execution. Two black lawyers argued Franklin’s appeals, and the case reached all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Twice the Court upheld the conviction and sentence.

  Franklin’s case drew much media attention, and W. E. B. Du Bois mentioned it in the first issue of The Crisis, in November 1910. The NAACP got involved with the case and spent more than four hundred dollars lobbying to have Franklin set free. In the end, they did not fully succeed—Franklin’s sentence was commuted from execution to ninety-nine years on a chain gang. This was the very first legal proceeding the NAACP ever got involved in, and some saw it as a failure for the group, given that Franklin’s sentence still seemed especially cruel and unjust.

  Around the same time, the fall of 1910, the NAACP heard about a similar case, and moved to get involved. So it was that the matter of Steve Green became the second-ever legal case to interest the NAACP.

  * * *

  Alongside his coverage of Pink Franklin in the first issue of The Crisis, Du Bois also included a column about Steve Green. By the time the NAACP got involved, Ida Wells had already managed to spirit Green out of the country and into Canada. Du Bois mentioned this accomplishment, but gave the credit for it to “the colored people of Chicago” and “Steve Green’s friends.” Ida Wells was not mentioned in the item, or anywhere else in the first issue of The Crisis.

  In New York City, a newspaper article about Steve Green outraged a man named Joel Elias Spingarn, just as it had outraged Ida Wells in Chicago. Spingarn, then thirty-five, was a poet, writer, and literary critic who had recently been fired as a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University after protesting a colleague’s treatment by officials.

  A dapper dresser with short, wavy dark hair and an intense gaze, Spingarn was the son of a successful Austrian Jewish tobacco merchant, and he had the means to make his Columbia position the last paid job he would ever hold. Spingarn was also an expert gardener and a flower collector. At one point he had two hundred fifty species of clematis, making it the world’s largest private collection of the flower.

  Spingarn did not have a deep background in black civil rights, but Steve Green’s story moved him nonetheless. By one account, he had a single thought after reading about him in a newspaper—Steve Green will never be extradited to Arkansas. Spingarn dug out his checkbook and sent one hundred dollars to the office of the NAACP, so that whatever legal measures were needed could be enacted without delay. He also asked Oswald Villard to help him get information about Green’s whereabouts.

  Oswald Villard sent a telegram to Ida Wells, asking her if Green needed money for his escape. By then Green had been taken out of the state and was on his way to Canada. Green “cannot read or write, so we do not know for certain whether he has reached his destination, and we are afraid to inquire,” Wells told Villard in a return telegram. “Later on, a way will be found to communicate with him. If he needs money I will be glad to let you know.”

  Wells, who usually paid for case expenses out of her own pocket or through local collections, did not ask Villard to send her the one hundred dollars Spingarn had earmarked for the Steve Green case. She didn’t ask for reimbursement of any kind.

  Back in New York City, Oswald Villard was excited by Joel Spingarn’s interest in the case. The NAACP was still struggling for donations, and Spingarn’s gift was one of the largest made by a nonmember. But even more meaningful than the money, Villard told Spingarn, was finding “another man who is willing to stand up and be counted on the side of justice for the downtrodden race.” Villard asked Spingarn to join the NAACP, and Spingarn agreed to join the group’s executive committee.

  Spingarn would soon be named chairman of the board, and his energy and passion would play a vital role in the development of the NAACP as a powerful legal advocate for black people. Together with his brother Arthur, a gifted attorney, Spingarn helped institutionalize the legal services arm of the NAACP, for which it would be known and celebrated for many decades to come.

  In 1910, Spingarn also allowed his one-hundred-dollar donation to the NAACP to stand, even though it did not go toward the Steve Green case. Instead, it was applied to the association’s coffers, and put toward what would become the third legal case ever handled by the NAACP.

  That third legal case involved a black worker arrested on suspicion of killing a ten-year-old schoolgirl in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

  CHAPTER 34 Still He Lay in Jail

  December 9, 1910

  New Brunswick, New Jersey

  Winter on the New Jersey shore was a sad thing, the ocean unswimmable at forty-eight degrees, the boardwalk swept clean of people by the westerlies, a day’s fifteen hours of sunlight down to a meager nine, overcast skies and empty promenades. In Asbury Park, it was only at Palace Amusements, the Victorian pavilion on Kingsley Street, that a familiar sound of summer could be heard—the swirling jangle of a Wurlitzer organ serenading the camels and goats and horses on Ernest Schnitzler’s grand, gilded, year-round Carousel. But in winter, these sounds were a teasing echo of the true joy of summer music.

  On such a dreary day in December 1910, two white men, Charles Brooks Ames and Walter Lester Glenny, both attorneys, entered the New Brunswick chambers of Willard P. Voorhees, a justice on New Jersey’s seven-member Supreme Court.

  Brooks and Glenny presented a writ of habeas corpus for Thomas Williams. Technically, Williams had not been charged with murder, and was being held as a material witness in the Marie Smith case. But that was just a technicality. Most understood that to the Monmouth County prosecutor, John S. Applegate Jr., Williams was his primary suspect.

  The writ of habeas corpus called on Williams’s jailers to justify his incarceration, or set him free. Justice Voorhees granted the writ and called for a hearing two days later to enact it. Then he reached out to the Monmouth County prosecutor, John S. Applegate Jr., to inform him of the writ and give him time to prepare for the hearing.

  When he got the news about the writ of habeas corpus, Prosecutor Applegate—who had not yet heard that Frank Heidemann had admitted to the crime—was angry and defiant. A new grand jury was to be impaneled for the Williams case that January, and Applegate was adamant about holding Williams until the jury was in place, despite not having charged him with anything.

  “Those who are working together to get Williams out of jail on a writ of habeas corpus are wasting their time,” Applegate announced to reporters. “We have enough evidence to warrant keeping him in jail until an investigation has been made.”

  To keep the pressure on Applegate, the editors of the Asbury Park Press—steered by the anti-Williams reporter Alvin Cliver—ran a vaguely threatening editorial that warned against Applegate going soft on the lawyers. “The public prosecutor of Monmouth County has a strange conception of his duty if he does not have Thomas Williams, accused of the murder of little Marie Smith, held for the January term of the grand jury, and seek by every means in his power to have the man indicted and brought to trial,” the Press declared. “If lynch law is to be held in check, our citizens must know that due process of law will mean trial in open court and not merely the opinion of some court officer.”

  Who were these white lawyers who marched into a judge’s chamber and spoke up for a poor black prisoner? Such a display of legal strength on behalf of an itinerant black man accused of murder was simply unheard-of at the time�
�so where did these two come from? What was happening? Some newspapers struggled to identify the mysterious attorneys, reporting only that they represented “a colored association.”

  The Asbury Park Press, however, got it right.

  C. Brooks Ames and W. Lester Glenny had been sent to New Brunswick by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, then too new to be known by just initials.

  * * *

  Brooks was a graduate of Princeton, class of 1905. He was the brother of a famous poet, Van Wyck Brooks, and enjoyed writing poetry himself. Glenny attended Columbia University, class of 1902. He was a champion amateur golfer. Both men came from prominent families in Plainfield, New Jersey, and both worked as lawyers in New York City. Glenny was counsel for the New York Evening Post, the newspaper owned by Oswald Garrison Villard.

  Villard asked the men to take on the Williams case. The NAACP had no paid attorneys on staff, and Villard did not hesitate to borrow his Post counsel. The NAACP’s National Legal Committee—to be overseen by Joel Spingarn, whose interest in the Steve Green case had just brought him on board—was not yet fully in place. The defense of Tom Williams would be paid for with money from the association’s general coffers, which included Spingarn’s recent one-hundred-dollar donation.

  The NAACP announced its role in the case through a story in the third issue of The Crisis, published in January 1911.

  “A little innocent schoolgirl is brutally murdered,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. “A Negro vagabond is arrested. Immediately, the news is heralded from east to west, from north to south, from Europe to Asia, of the crime of this black murderer. Immediately a frenzied, hysterical mob gathers and attempts to lynch the poor wretch. He is spirited away and the public is almost sorry he has escaped summary judgment. What proof was there against this man? He was lazy, he had been in jail for alleged theft from gypsies, he was good-natured and he drank whiskey. That was all. Yet he stayed in jail under no charge and under universal censure. The coroner’s jury found no evidence to indict him. Still he lay in jail.”

  On the morning of December 9, 1910, after Black Diamond had been imprisoned for twenty-seven days, Ames and Glenny arrived at Justice Voorhees’s chambers in New Brunswick for the 11:00 a.m. habeas corpus hearing. Tom Williams was not taken from his cell to attend the hearing—Ames told Justice Voorhees they didn’t need him there.

  Representing Monmouth County—Prosecutor Applegate and County Sheriff Clarence Hetrick. Applegate told Voorhees they had enough evidence of Williams’s guilt to justify keeping him in jail until he could undergo a thorough grand jury investigation.

  Brooks, who took the lead, argued that no charges had been filed against Williams, nor was he plausibly a material witness. After all, he had not been called to testify at the coroner’s inquest just weeks earlier. Williams hadn’t even been deposed about his whereabouts on the day Marie Smith disappeared. There was no evidence whatsoever that showed Williams knew anything about the crime at all. Describing him as a witness, Brooks argued, was a ruse to keep him locked up.

  Justice Voorhees asked Applegate for the evidence against Tom Williams. Applegate said he could not reveal it because it hadn’t yet been presented to the grand jury. Voorhees had heard enough testimony, and delivered his verdict. He concluded Tom Williams had not been properly committed to jail as either a suspect or a witness.

  Therefore, he ordered Williams released from the custody of the sheriff’s office immediately.

  With that, Tom Williams—who had never been an official suspect in the murder of Marie Smith—ceased to have any legal connection to the crime, save for the suspicions of many in Asbury Park who continued to believe Williams was indeed guilty of the savagery.

  The judge’s ruling meant Williams was free to go.

  But, in truth, he wasn’t. John Applegate had made sure of that.

  * * *

  Applegate had a surprise for the New York City lawyers. He produced an affidavit from Edward Cashion, the keeper of the Monmouth County Jail in Freehold. In the affidavit, Cashion testified that Williams confessed to voting twice in the gubernatorial election held on November 8, one day before the murder of Marie Smith.

  According to Cashion, Williams admitted he was not eligible to vote because he’d served eighteen months in jail for a prior felony. Nevertheless, on November 8 he voted twice—once in the second district of the first ward in Asbury Park, and again in Oakhurst, a town four miles north—under the pseudonym Thomas E. Morris. Applegate also produced voting records that proved Williams had voted twice. This was clearly a crime, and Applegate had already prepared an arrest warrant, and he served it on Tom Williams in his jail cell two days earlier.

  The NAACP lawyers were knocked off balance. Ames and Glenny did not challenge the new charge against Williams, but they did ask Justice Voorhees to set bail for their client. Voorhees had to get a sentencing book and look up the maximum penalty for voting after having lost the right of franchise. He found it was punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine of five hundred dollars. The penalty for voting twice was three years in prison and a fine of one thousand dollars. Voorhees totaled the monetary penalties and set Williams’s bail at two thousand dollars.

  The hearing was over. Justice Voorhees congratulated Ames and Glenny for their work on Williams’s behalf but said he could do no more for their client. There was no way Williams could raise his bail money, which meant he would stay in jail. And as long as Williams remained in jail—and couldn’t leave town, as Steve Green had done—Applegate had a chance to try him for the murder of Marie Smith. Despite the lack of a good case against him, it was not hard to imagine such a trial happening.

  As one local newspaper put it, “It is admitted that the evidence against Williams is purely circumstantial—but many a man has been convicted on less.”

  CHAPTER 35 What Was Her Name?

  March 11, 1911

  Atlantic City, New Jersey

  Carl Neumeister brushed off Frank Heidemann’s confession, as if Frank’s words—“I killed the girl”—weren’t the very ones he’d been waiting two months to hear.

  “Hell, anybody can say that,” Carl answered dismissively. “Joe will simply think you say that to get us to take you with us.”

  “No, Carl, it is the truth,” Frank insisted. “I did it. I could not help myself. I had to do it. There were no women around the house that I knew, and I had to have a woman. Under the circumstances, any girl, no matter how small, had to do.”

  Carl said nothing. He wanted his silence to convey skepticism. Frank kept talking, filling in his story with details, terrible details.

  “I took her inside and played and monkeyed with her. She was perfectly willing to be loved, but I could not get it into her. She was too small.” Then, Frank explained, things took a tragic turn. He said that as he was assaulting Marie, he began shaking from nerves, and his nervousness frightened the girl.

  “So before we left the greenhouse, I decided to kill her.”

  Frank said he picked up Max Kruschka’s hammer and took Marie into the woods, where “it suddenly came over me and I could not resist it, and I had to hit her on the head. I killed her.”

  The only thing that worried him, Frank said, was the fact that Emma Davison had seen him with Marie. But he felt her testimony would not be believed. “They have no evidence against me, and I will be free as long as I can keep my damn mouth shut,” he said. “They have got that nigger now for the killing and they will probably hang him for it.”

  Even so, Frank boasted, if he had to kill again, he would do it, without hesitation: “I will do it two or three or a dozen times if I have to. It would not worry me a bit anymore. I will kill if I have to.”

  With that, Frank stretched out his hand and waited for Carl to take it. The men shook hands. Carl did not push for more details. He didn’t want to seem overzealous. He would need Frank to repeat his confession in front of Joe Springenberg. There was no sense spooking him now.

  T
hat night, Carl snuck away from Frank long enough to send a telegram to Ray Schindler in New York City.

  Confession obtained. Killed her with a hammer.

  * * *

  It was the news Schindler had been waiting so anxiously and so patiently to hear, and it had not come a moment too soon.

  Around the time Carl was roping Frank into a confession, Schindler—according to his recollection of the case—was in Asbury Park meeting with Randolph Miller, Sheriff Clarence Hetrick, and the prosecutor, John Applegate Jr., the men financing his investigation.

  They met to discuss the future of the case, and whether or not Schindler’s unusual methods were working. The original estimate of Schindler’s costs had been three thousand dollars, but now, his expenses had risen to more than six thousand. Applegate, in particular, had had enough. He still believed Tom Williams was guilty of the crime, and he wanted to get on with his prosecution. He wanted to cut Schindler loose.

  Schindler asked for more time. He provided an update of events in the pursuit of the target, including the fake newspaper, the set-up movie, and the mock murder—techniques that couldn’t be found in any kind of police manual. Applegate had heard enough, and exploded.

  “Get out of my office!” Applegate yelled.

  Schindler jumped to his feet and made a move toward the prosecutor, but Hetrick got between them. Applegate begged the sheriff to swear out a warrant for Schindler’s arrest on the spot, on the charge of fraudulently bilking the county of money for his own enrichment.

  “I’ll arrest him myself right now,” Applegate said.

  Instead, Sheriff Hetrick played peacemaker, and the meeting ended without any blows or arrests. Even so, Schindler would later write, “we practically agreed that afternoon to drop the case.”