The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  Heidemann could not comply. He didn’t have the strength. It took him some time to finally pull himself to his feet, his face contorted in anguish. He kept his head bowed, never looking up as Justice Voorhees pronounced sentence on him.

  “You have been found guilty of murder in the first degree for murdering Marie Smith. The punishment provided by law for a conviction of that crime is that you shall suffer death. The sentence of the law is, therefore, and the judgment of the court is that you do suffer death at the time and in the place and in the manner prescribed by law.”

  The execution, Voorhees said, would be carried out the week beginning on May 22. Frank Heidemann had five weeks to live.

  * * *

  Heidemann spent that time in the state prison in Trenton, New Jersey’s capital, forty-six miles due west of Asbury Park. It was the oldest prison in New Jersey, and it was a grim, medieval place. Its main compound—high stone walls anchored by turreted block towers—was called the Fortress Penitentiary. Only four years earlier, in 1907, a state appropriations bill set aside ten thousand dollars for the construction of a “death building”—an addition to the Fortress that featured six death row cells and an execution chamber, a starkly bare room with painted brick walls and a wood-planked floor. The chamber housed an electric chair.

  Prior to 1906, New Jersey officials carried out executions by hanging. But the advent of electricity and alternating current systems in the late nineteenth century produced, in the minds of most, a more humane method. An electrical engineer, Carl F. Adams, won the contract to build an electric chair for the Trenton State Prison, and delivered a ghastly thing made of wood and steel and rubber—an adjustable seat with leather straps and high-tension lead cables connected to two double-throw switches. The chair cost roughly three thousand dollars, and was capable of pushing 2,400 volts of electricity through a person’s body—more than fifty times the minimum lethal amount.

  In his small, square death row cell just a few paces from the execution chamber, Frank Heidemann handled his final affairs.

  He took care to distribute his few remaining possessions, giving Constable Hulce a silver drinking cup he picked up on a trip back from Germany, and gifting the warden, Edward Cashion, his black overcoat and Ingersoll gold watch and chain. He asked that Max Kruschka be given his gardening shears and a gold seal ring inscribed with the initials “G.L.”

  Heidemann explained the initials stood for “good luck.”

  Toward the end of his time on death row, Heidemann asked that a message be sent to Raymond Schindler. He wanted Schindler to come see him in his cell in Trenton.

  In New York City, Schindler was surprised by the request. Why would a condemned man ask to see the very person who secured his death sentence? Still, there was no question he would make the trip to Trenton. His curiosity alone was enough to get him there.

  At the state prison, Schindler was taken to a meeting room where Frank Heidemann was waiting. He greeted Schindler politely and complimented his investigative skills.

  “It was all in a day’s work,” Heidemann told him. “But I would give anything if I could get my hands around the neck of Carl Neumeister before I die.”

  Heidemann explained that he needed Schindler’s help. He hadn’t returned to his native Germany in several years, and he’d lost touch with his family. As far as he knew, they weren’t aware of his conviction for murder, and Heidemann wanted to keep it that way. He did not want his mother or sister to learn what he’d done. But he had to somehow explain his disappearance from their lives. That’s what he needed Schindler for.

  He asked Schindler to write a letter to his mother, posing as an acquaintance. The letter would say that Heidemann had met an accidental death. If, by some chance, his family already knew about Marie Smith, Heidemann asked Schindler to send them another letter laying out some of the details of the murder without making it seem so hideous.

  Schindler agreed to help, and that was all Heidemann needed from him. Schindler got up to go. He would see Heidemann again, at the execution, but it was the last time they would ever get the chance to speak. Schindler found there was nothing more to say except good-bye, which he did. Then he was gone. His time with, and attention to, Frank Heidemann was nearly done.

  Why had Heidemann asked Schindler for help in these personal matters? He could have asked the warden in Freehold, Edward Cashion, who had been kind to him, or someone else at the prison in Trenton. One of his lawyers, William Hoffman, suffered a stroke and died just a few hours after the guilty verdict, but Heidemann could have asked his assistant counsel for help. Max Kruschka, who had promised to pay for Heidemann’s burial, surely would have done him the favor.

  Instead, he asked for his capturer, Raymond Schindler.

  Did he see some special humanity in the detective, despite how mercilessly he’d been hounded by him? Or did it have to do with Schindler’s theories about the relationship between a criminal and his pursuer? Had Schindler taken on, as he hoped he would, the role of Heidemann’s spiritual savior—the man who helped him right the awful imbalance in his soul? Had he been the one to bring Heidemann back into the fold, to the side of the good? Was that why Heidemann trusted him with one of his final earthly requests?

  It was impossible to say. Nor did Schindler claim any kind of redemptive victory. He did not boast of having saved Heidemann’s soul. Whatever understanding passed between them would remain unknown.

  But Ray Schindler’s view of Heidemann did not change after the capture, or after the trial, or after the meeting in death row. He believed what he believed, and it would guide him through the rest of his career, as he pursued those who had given in to the evil side of themselves.

  “We are all potential criminals, all of us,” Schindler believed. “We all have criminal instincts to a certain degree. What counts is how we control them.”

  * * *

  The execution was set for the night of May 23, 1911.

  That day, Heidemann spoke easily with his guards. He told one he had fully forgiven both Ray Schindler and Carl Neumeister. What was the point in staying angry at them? He sat and wrote a letter to Prison Supervisor Samuel W. Kirkbride and four other death row officers, thanking them for their kindness toward him. He asked one prison deputy to reach out to Alvin Cliver at the Asbury Park Press with an answer to the one question Cliver and so many others seemed haunted by—why did Heidemann do what he did? Why did he kill Marie Smith?

  The answer he sent Cliver was the same answer he gave Ray Schindler—I don’t know.

  Heidemann had one final request—he wanted the prison deputy to contact Peter and Nora Smith and beg their forgiveness for him.

  Ray Schindler traveled from New York City to Trenton, and at 8:15 p.m. gathered with other witnesses in the prison warden’s office. Edward Cashion, the warden from Freehold, was there, and so was Ed Handley, the Burns operative who had taken Heidemann’s confession in Atlantic City. There were three doctors and six reporters. At 8:25 p.m., a guard led the witnesses to their seats in the execution chamber.

  At 8:27, a door to the chamber opened. In walked the prison chaplain, Aloysius Fish, and Raphael Huber, a local reverend. They were chanting and praying for Heidemann’s soul.

  Heidemann was right behind them, his lips moving as he silently prayed as well. He appeared calm and steady. Without prompting or help, he sat down in the electric chair, as if taking his place at a dinner table. It took guards less than a minute to tie leather straps around his arms, legs, and chest, and fix a steel cap to his head. Off to the side, an operator stood on a quarter-inch corrugated rubber mat.

  Heidemann kept praying until the very last moment.

  At 8:34 p.m., the operator sent a charge through Heidemann’s skull—1,840 volts at 10 amperes. The charge lasted for a full minute. There was a pause of a few seconds, then the operator sent a second charge—1,890 volts at 10 amperes. After a minute, the electric chair was switched off.

  At 8:37 p.m., county physician F. G. Scanne
ll walked up to the chair and placed his stethoscope on Heidemann’s chest. He pronounced Heidemann dead. A second doctor, R. S. Bennet, did the same. Then a third, Edwin Fields. Heidemann’s body was taken to an examination room, and the witnesses were allowed to observe the body.

  Then it was over. The entire procedure, start to finish, had taken less than ten minutes.

  The prison chaplain, Aloysius Fish, asked a reporter who was present to contact Max Kruschka in Asbury Park. He needed to discuss Heidemann’s burial. The next day, the reporter got word to Fish that Kruschka had changed his mind. He would not be paying for Heidemann’s burial after all.

  So the chaplain did what he could, and saw to it that Frank Heidemann was given a burial in a Catholic cemetery in Trenton.

  In Asbury Park, state authorities reimbursed Sheriff Clarence Hetrick and Randolph Miller all the fees they paid to the Burns Detective Agency. City Solicitor James D. Carton agreed to release $1,100 in reward money in the Marie Smith case. The bulk of it, one thousand dollars, was split between Ray Schindler and Emma Davison. The remaining one hundred dollars went to William Benson, the florist who found Marie’s body in the dark Wanamassa woods, exactly 775 feet from Max Kruschka’s home.

  In Freehold, the lawyers C. Brooks Ames and Walter L. Glenny stayed involved in Tom Williams’s case. The NAACP spent $266 on defending Williams against the likelihood of a questionable murder charge. When Frank Heidemann confessed, Williams was officially exonerated, and relieved by authorities—and reporters—of any connection whatsoever to the Marie Smith case. No one recorded his reaction to hearing that Heidemann had confessed.

  Yet Williams did not get his freedom right away. He was sentenced to two years in prison for being a “repeater”—voting twice in the 1910 election—and he served his time.

  Once he was let out of prison, Tom Williams disappeared from the public record. There is no evidence he returned to Asbury Park, or moved elsewhere, or did anything at all. He had spent his time in the public eye, and it was his right to live the rest of his life out of it. It appears that’s what Black Diamond did. He went back to being a figure of no public consequence, but of some quiet dignity, a man who lived and mattered.

  CHAPTER 39 The Lord Has Willed It So

  March 25, 1931

  Chicago, Illinois

  For Ida Wells, the battle of her life was against forces far too sweeping and entrenched for any one individual to defeat—slavery, patriarchy, racism, economic suppression. Yet Wells waged that war with both hands, one reaching up to pull down immoral institutions, the other reaching down to lift up the persecuted. She challenged the vast, systemic prejudices of white American society—but she also made the phone calls and collected the dollar bills that saved the life of Steve Green.

  Her brave, bold actions, big and small, had rippling consequences.

  What if Wells hadn’t succeeded in ousting Cairo sheriff Frank Davis? Would there have been anyone to pull Steve Green off the train leading him to his death? Would Joel Spingarn have found the cause that ignited his moral fervor and steered him to the NAACP? Would Spingarn have donated the one hundred dollars that paid for two lawyers to defend Tom Williams, and would the NAACP have made the leap to real, effective legal power that it did after Spingarn came aboard?

  Wells never stopped fighting for her beliefs, but after her clash with the NAACP, she became less active. So many years of strife and heartbreak, and constant criticism from her contemporaries, had left her weary. In 1920 she was hospitalized and underwent gallbladder surgery. The operation was tricky, and she was kept in the hospital for five weeks. Many feared she wouldn’t survive. When she was brought home, she suffered a relapse, and spent another eight weeks in bed.

  “It took me a year to recover,” Wells wrote, “and during that year I did more serious thinking from a personal point of view than ever before in my life.” Her contemplation led her to a painful discovery.

  “All at once,” she wrote, “the realization came to me that I had nothing to show for all those years of toil and labor.”

  This was not true, not by any stretch—but it was how Ida Wells felt. Yet even then, she kept going. She continued to write hard-edged articles calling for action against injustice—enough articles for the U.S. government to classify her “a dangerous race agitator.” She covered a race riot in East St. Louis in 1917 and another in Arkansas in 1922. She kept up her work with clubs and reform organizations in Chicago, and she served as the director of the Cook County League of Women’s Clubs. She worked with the National Equal Rights League, marched for suffrage, and helped block the segregation of Chicago schools.

  In 1930 she even ran for election to the Illinois state legislature. She lost to a white man, but she became one of the very first black women to run for political office in the United States.

  This was her deepest belief, and perhaps her greatest disappointment—that the efforts of individuals like her would be the only way to create meaningful change, the only hope for real progress.

  “In this work, all may aid,” Wells once said in a speech. “Individuals, organizations, press and pulpit should unite in vigorous denunciation of all forms of lawlessness. Nay, more than this, there must spring up in all sections of the country vigorous, aggressive defenders of the Constitution of our beloved land.”

  And yet, to her sadness, she did not always see this necessary level of urgency in others. “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” she wrote in her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, “and it does seem to me that, notwithstanding all these social agencies and activities, there is not that vigilance which should be exercised in the preservation of our rights.”

  * * *

  In the eternal struggle between the darkness and the light, the darkness is mutable. The horrors of slavery gave way to the horrors of lynching and Jim Crow. By one estimate, more than four thousand black Americans were lynched in the United States between 1877 and 1950, the staggering bloodshed forever to be the shame of America. And while the number of lynchings began to drop around 1910, that is when a new practice, known as “legal lynching,” emerged—black men given rushed sham trials and sent to die in brand-new electric chairs.

  In the same way, Raymond Schindler’s desire to wrench confessions from wayward men did not, and could never, curtail the darker aspects of all human nature. The mysterious sinister force that drove Frank Heidemann to kill Marie Smith was as uncontainable and impassively constant as the endless tides in the Atlantic. A quarter century after Heidemann met his end, another German immigrant, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was convicted of murdering the young son of Charles Lindbergh and sentenced to execution. He, too, was led to Carl Adams’s electrified creation in Trenton’s Fortress Penitentiary, and died in the very same wooden chair that took Frank Heidemann.

  Ray Schindler left the Burns Agency in 1912 and opened his own New York City shop—the Schindler Bureau of Investigation. His father, John, the former minister, joined his sons Ray and Walter there. Schindler cleared an innocent man of murder in the infamous Sir Harry Oakes case in 1943, and cracked several other high-profile crimes.

  But he always referred to his first murder case—the Marie Smith case—as the most challenging work of his career.

  Schindler also indulged his fascination with crime-fighting machinery, and helped pioneer the use of the dictograph—a telephonic box that could be hidden in a room to pick up sounds and conversations. He collaborated with Walter G. Summers and Leonarde Keeler, the two men who separately birthed the modern lie detector. Schindler used the new device in several cases; in one, he caught the private maid who stole fifteenth-century paintings from her wealthy employer.

  Schindler became famous. He loved to dance and he loved the New York City nightlife. He cofounded the Court of Last Resort—a precursor to the modern Innocence Project—and he was the president of the Adventurers Club of New York. He was called the most brilliant and charismatic investigator of his time. Yet he never once used a gun, and neve
r even carried one. He worked in the dangerous underworlds of society, but he was otherwise a peaceful and optimistic man. When he was held up by an armed robber in Los Angeles, “my knees shook violently and I stammered, ‘Oh, no,’ ” Schindler recalled. “I was plenty scared.” He got out of it by handing the robber eighty dollars.

  Schindler was married five times and had a son, Raymond Jr., and two daughters, Dorothy and Ruth. Later in his life, he took a job as supervisor of security for Ann Gould, daughter of the railroad magnate Jay Gould. She allowed Schindler and his fifth wife, Janice, to stay in the beautiful Spratt mansion, overlooking the Hudson in Tarrytown, New York, and across the way from Gould’s own mansion. Schindler lived there until his death from a heart ailment at the age of seventy.

  The one murder case he would never have wanted to work happened eleven years after his passing.

  In a ghastly echo of the Marie Smith murder, in January 1970, Schindler’s widow, Janice, was found savagely beaten to death, her nightgown pulled up, in the Tarrytown rooming house where she lived. Another boarder was arrested for the crime. One of her obituaries carried a photo of her and her beloved husband, Ray, wearing tropical shirts and smiling brightly on a cruise across the Atlantic.

  * * *

  After its early struggles, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People went on to become the most enduring and far-reaching civil rights organization in U.S. history.

  After the Tom Williams case, it found more solid footing, opening branches in several cities and growing its membership. By 1919, the NAACP had ninety thousand members and three hundred branches. According to its website, Joel Spingarn, who served as its president for ten years, “formulated much of the strategy that fostered the organization’s growth.”

  The range of matters the NAACP brought under its wing—police brutality, political lobbying, civic engagement, educational equality, criminal justice, health and social issues—is remarkable. Its greatest impact, however, may have happened in courtrooms. The NAACP’s lawyers prevailed in a long string of critical legal victories, none bigger than 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court by NAACP chief counsel Thurgood Marshall. The unanimous nine–zero decision established that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Marshall, the grandson of a slave, became the first African American to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.