The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  A grim sequence of events now came into focus. The dead girl’s arms, Cook concluded, were positioned “as if the wrists had been tied together, and as if she had raised her hands to try to tear something from off her mouth and neck, which was choking and strangling her.” Abrasions on the left wrist, along with corresponding marks on the upper side of the right wrist, confirmed that her hands had been lashed together with sturdy rope. “The hands had been tied, probably, while the body was violated,” Cook concluded, “and untied before she was thrown in the water.” Though the ropes had been removed, a loop of fine muslin—carefully torn from another of the undergarments—was found hanging loosely at the young woman’s throat. Cook reasoned that the fabric had been used as a gag. “I think this was done to smother her cries,” he said, “and that it was probably held tight around her mouth by one of her brutal ravishers.”

  Cook also found large patches of raw skin on the victim’s back and shoulder bones, which he believed to be the result of “the young girl struggling to get free, while being brutally held down on her back, to effect her violation.” Cook felt confident in stating that these marks had been made before death, because “coagulation had been found in the cellular tissues.” He concluded that “this outrage was effected while she was laid down upon some hard substance, a hard board floor, the bottom of a board, or something similar. It convinces me fully that the outrage was not effected on a bed.”

  Cook could not state with any confidence whether the murder had taken place during or after the assault, nor could he say whether or not the young woman had been conscious when the lace cord had been tightened about her throat. Following the murder, however, it was clear that the body had been dragged along the ground for some distance. A foot-wide strip of the white dress had been ripped from the hem to the waist, then wound three times around the body and tied as a “sort of hitch,” to serve as a handle by which the corpse could be pulled to the riverbank. Although several items of clothing were missing, the corpse had evidently been dressed with some care after death: “I consider that her hat was off her head at the time of the outrage,” Cook noted, “and that after her violation and murder had been completed, it was tied on.” Cook took special pains to emphasize that the hat’s ribbons had been fastened under the dead woman’s chin with “a slip knot, not a lady’s knot…a sailor’s knot.” The phrase would loom large in the later stages of the investigation.

  The coroner conducted his examination with remarkable speed, but even so it was well past eight o’clock by the time he finished. Given the lateness of the hour, it would undoubtedly have been best to postpone the official inquest. In the circumstances, however, Justice Merritt could not be certain of reassembling his witnesses the following day, so he proceeded as soon as Dr. Cook emerged from the examining room. Apart from Cook himself, only four witnesses were called—Alfred Crommelin and Archibald Padley, who had identified the remains, and John Bertram and William Walker, who had watched the drama unfold as the body was brought ashore. Strangely, the men who actually fished the corpse out of the river were not called to the stand. Henry Mallin had presented himself at the scene only to be told that he would not be required to testify.

  The testimony of Bertram and Walker left only a faint imprint on the official record, though Walker asserted with apparent pride that he had “been of some use” in securing the body to a boulder. Alfred Crommelin, by contrast, had a great deal to say, detailing how he had immediately recognized the body of the “drowned female” and had “made use of every proper means” to identify her—including tearing open her sleeve and rubbing her bare arm. By this time Crommelin had evidently decided that he would serve not only as the spokesman for the Rogers family, but also as the guardian of the dead woman’s memory. He spoke in glowing terms of her character, describing her as “the officiating member of her family” and “the main support of an infirm and aged mother—with the whole charge of conducting the boardinghouse.” Furthermore, he insisted, he had “never heard her virtue questioned in the least.”

  Archibald Padley’s testimony followed, confirming Crommelin’s sentiments in every respect, but the bulk of the proceedings were given over to Dr. Cook, who gave a detailed summary of his autopsy findings. At one stage, a wave of sentiment seems to have overwhelmed the doctor’s scientific impulses. He declared that the murdered girl had “evidently been a person of chastity and correct habits.” The conclusion, as many critics would note, seemed difficult to verify given Cook’s earlier assertion that she had been “violated by no fewer than three men.” It is probable that Cook’s gentlemanly, if unscientific, conclusions owed something to the concern Alfred Crommelin had expressed for the dead woman’s reputation. If so, Cook would regret the impulse. Though he could not have realized it at the time, his statements would draw considerable fire in the weeks to come, with accusations ranging from medical incompetence to cruel insensitivity.

  In fact, weighed against the standards of the day and the unusually rapid deterioration of the corpse, Cook’s autopsy was remarkably thorough. As he told Justice Merritt and the other jurors, the conclusion was inescapable: Mary Rogers had been savagely beaten, tied down, and “horribly violated by more than two or three persons.” Either during or after the assault she had been partially choked by one of her attackers, and finally strangled to death with a makeshift garrote torn from her own clothing. Her body was then dragged some distance over hard ground and dumped into the Hudson River, apparently in the hope that it would never be found. Without question, Cook stated, this was the most “bestial” crime of his experience.

  The jurors deliberated briefly before returning a verdict that the death had been caused by “violence committed by some person or persons unknown.” The inquest adjourned shortly before nine o’clock. Due to the late hour and “in consequence to the great heat,” Justice Merritt and Dr. Cook oversaw a hasty burial of the body in a crude double coffin, under only two feet of earth. In this manner, as they would later explain, they preserved the possibility of a second examination at a later time.

  Even now, the coroner apparently felt some reservations over the identification of the body, in spite of Alfred Crommelin’s certainty in the matter. Accordingly, Cook provided Crommelin with an assortment of personal effects to carry back to Phoebe Rogers. Although Crommelin viewed them as simple keepsakes intended to comfort a bereaved mother, the broad range of items—including various swatches of clothing, the flowers from the straw hat, a garter, a shoe, and a lock of hair—indicate that Cook was seeking a second confirmation of the victim’s identity.

  With these items wrapped in brown paper and tucked under his arm, Crommelin set out for the Hoboken ferry landing. He reached the pier shortly before eleven o’clock, only to find that the last ferry had already gone. He made his way to a second ferry landing in Jersey City, but the boats there had also stopped running. With no other means of getting back to his rooming house in New York, Crommelin put up in the Jersey City Hotel for the night.

  Earlier, Crommelin had sent Archibald Padley back to the city to convey the sad news to Mrs. Rogers. By the time Padley reached the boardinghouse, however, he found that Mrs. Rogers had already been notified. Henry Mallin and his friends—the group that had pulled the body from the river—had returned to New York several hours earlier, upon learning that they would not be called to testify at the inquest. One of the men, H. G. Luther, presented himself on Nassau Street to deliver the unhappy news.

  Luther arrived at seven o’clock that evening and found a grim-looking Phoebe Rogers seated in her drawing room, with Daniel Payne hovering protectively at her side. Taking his hat in his hands, Luther steeled himself to say what he had come to say. Neither Mrs. Rogers nor Payne had ever met Luther before. Mary had been missing for three days at this stage, and it was perhaps natural that her mother and fiancé would have braced themselves for bad news. Even so, Luther found the pair’s reaction inexplicable. He would later report that they had received the news with a curio
us lack of emotion, amounting almost to polite indifference. Stranger still, Payne took no action that evening. The hour was still early enough that he could have gone to Hoboken if he had wished. It would have been natural enough in the circumstances to hope that a mistake had been made, and that the body pulled from the river had not been Mary’s after all. Even if he had learned of Crommelin’s presence at the scene, and accepted his rival’s identification of the body, it seemed peculiar that he should not have hurried to the side of his dead fiancée, if only to see to the disposition of her remains. Instead, he remained at Nassau Street, and left it to others to bury the woman he loved.

  Luther, for his part, would never forget the strangely bloodless response to his devastating news. “Neither of them seemed much distressed by it,” he would later recall. “I distinctly felt that the news was not unexpected.”

  VI

  The Dead House

  DRESSED IN BLACK, and with a dark wool shawl wrapped tightly around her head, Phoebe Rogers stepped onto the front stoop of her boardinghouse and stood blinking in the hot sun. Leaning heavily on the arm of Daniel Payne, her late daughter’s fiancé, Mrs. Rogers appeared far older than her sixty-three years. “It was impossible to trace the lineaments of the daughter’s beauty and vivacity in the features of the sorrowing mother,” wrote one observer. The lined face, stooped shoulders, and faltering step gave Mrs. Rogers “the air of an inexpressible burden,” as though her recent loss had “extinguished any will toward life.”

  With Payne at her side, Mrs. Rogers walked slowly up Nassau Street toward City Hall. Passing to the rear of the building, she made her way to the so-called Dead House, a small wooden building that served as a makeshift examining room. As the grieving woman approached, a stir passed through the small knot of reporters and other bystanders gathered outside. As Mrs. Rogers mounted the steps, the men straightened and removed their hats.

  Robert Morris, the recently elected mayor of New York, was absent from the city in the days following Mary Rogers’s murder. Morris, an outspoken advocate of police reform, had been supervising a fire crew’s response to a burning building when gang members commandeered a pumper wagon and turned its hoses on him. Although he was not injured, Morris felt it wise to remove himself to a distant and presumably drier locale for a fortnight. In his absence, it fell to Elijah Purdy, his lieutenant, to respond to growing disquiet over the death of the beautiful cigar girl.

  Purdy’s actions were unusually decisive, and calculated to show that City Hall had taken charge. On August 11, 1841, at Purdy’s request, a trio of gravediggers exhumed the body of Mary Rogers from its shallow grave in Hoboken. The remains were then handed over to officials of the New York Coroner’s Office and carried back across the river for a more rigorous examination. As a further signal of City Hall’s resolve, Phoebe Rogers was summoned to make a positive identification.

  Purdy’s request marked the end of nearly two weeks of apparent indifference toward the fate of Mary Rogers. “A fortnight has now elapsed since the perpetration of one of the most daring and murderous outrages ever perpetrated in a community calling itself civilized,” wrote the Herald. “Yet we hear of no clue arrived at, and but very little exertion made for the discovery and punishment of the brutal ravishers and murderers.” To a large degree, this inertia stemmed from a simple border dispute between New York and New Jersey. In the view of New York’s officials, Mary Rogers’s murder had occurred in Hoboken, and was therefore the responsibility of New Jersey. In Hoboken, meanwhile, the New Jersey police were quick to absolve themselves of the burden on the grounds that Mary Rogers was a resident of New York. To bolster their position, New Jersey authorities put forward a theory that the young woman had been murdered in New York and set adrift in the Hudson, only to have the remains float across jurisdictional boundaries into New Jersey. The dispute soon escalated, and within a few days the two cities began arguing over river currents: “It is well known that at the time the body was first discovered, there was, and had been a prevalence of north and north-easterly winds for almost a week previous,” declared a New Jersey partisan. “In all such cases a very powerful current is produced. Now then, had the murder, as alleged, been committed in Hoboken, the body could not possibly have left the shore such a distance, while so strong a current was setting against it. For proof it is only necessary to point you to the numerous instances in which decomposed substances thrown from the docks in the upper part of the city are found lying upon the opposite shores.”

  Below the surface, the clash had more to do with money than shifting currents. Both jurisdictions were well aware, but unwilling to admit, that there could be little hope of progress in the Mary Rogers case without the offer of a generous reward. “It is well known,” complained a writer in the Sun, “that in the present inefficiently organized state of our Police Department, little will be done towards detecting the authors or perpetrators of this awful crime without the promise of a cash bounty.” Gilbert Merritt, the New Jersey justice of the peace, was well aware of the problem. The day after he presided over the coroner’s inquest, Merritt wrote to the governor of New Jersey to request that a large sum be earmarked for the capture of the murderers. He was flatly refused. In New York, Elijah Purdy also declined to put up city funds, insisting that he did not “deem it necessary.” Both sides clung to the belief that the responsibility, financial and otherwise, lay on the opposite side of the Hudson.

  The stalemate pointed up the dismal state of New York’s law enforcement, which had not progressed much beyond the seventeenth-century “rattle watch,” the brigade of uniformed men who patrolled the streets with noisemakers, calling out the hour and the latest weather report. At the time of the Mary Rogers murder, New York did not have a centralized, full-time professional police force. Instead, a pair of constables was assigned to each neighborhood, together with roundsmen and marshals who cobbled together a living out of court fees and private rewards. Their efforts were supplemented by a patchwork corps of watchmen, made up of moonlighting day laborers and retired servicemen, who patrolled the streets and stood guard outside sentry boxes. “They were known as ‘Leatherheads,’ a nickname which arose from the fact that they wore leather helmets, something like an old-fashioned fireman’s helmet, with a broad brim behind,” wrote George Walling, who joined the force in 1847. “Twice a year these hats received a thick coat of varnish, and after a time they became almost as hard and heavy as iron. The only insignia of office which these old fellows had, besides the leather helmet, was a big cloak and a club; at night they also carried a lantern.”

  To the city’s gang members, the leatherheads were little more than a source of amusement. “Youthful and exuberant New Yorkers considered that an evening out was not spent in the Orthodox manner unless they played some rough practical jokes on the poor, old, inoffensive Leatherheads,” Walling recalled. “It is recorded of such a staid young man as Washington Irving, even, that he was in the habit of upsetting watch-boxes if he caught a ‘Leatherhead’ asleep inside; and on one occasion, so it is said, he lassoed the box with a stout rope, and with the aid of companions dragged it down Broadway, while the watchman inside yelled loudly for help.”

  Adding to this sense of ignominy were the meager fees offered for serving warrants and summoning juries, which left many on the force looking for alternative sources of income. It was not uncommon to find large rewards offered to constables for the return of stolen property, which in turn led to charges of collusion between criminals and police over the spoils. The Herald charged that New York’s police were “mere loafers on the public—selling their duties to the highest bidder—and only suppressing crime or catching rogues when private individuals come forward to offer money for the performance of public duties.”

  Against this backdrop of political infighting and police inefficiency, the Mary Rogers investigation stagnated until pressure from the New York press forced City Hall to take action. By that time, however, Mary Rogers’s remains had festered for eleven d
ays in a coffin of rough pine, rendering a second coroner’s examination largely meaningless. Even so, the New York inquest went forward as planned, if largely for the sake of appearances.

  “Difficult it would be for the most imaginative mind to conceive a spectacle more horrible or humiliating to humanity,” observed the New York Journal of Commerce. “There lay, what was but a few days back, the image of its Creator, the loveliest of his works, and the tenement of an immortal soul, now a blackened and decomposed mass of putrefaction, painfully disgusting to sight and smell. Her skin, which had been unusually fair, was now black as that of a negro. Her eyes so sunk in her swollen face as to have the appearance of being violently forced beyond the sockets, and her mouth, which ‘no friendly hand had closed in death’ was distended as wide as the ligaments of the jaw would admit, and wore the appearance of a person who had died from suffocation or strangulation. The remainder of her person was alike one mass of putrefaction and corruption on which the worms were reveling at their will.”

  Mercifully, Phoebe Rogers was spared this spectacle, as the advanced state of decomposition was thought too horrific for the aged woman to bear. Daniel Payne, however, was judged to be of sterner stuff. While Mrs. Rogers waited in an antechamber, the young man was led away to the examining room. The Times and Commercial Intelligencer described the scene in language usually reserved for the “yellow-back” novels of the day: “And as if nothing should be wanting to send the moral home to men’s hearts, and render it more painfully impressive, the young man who was to have been, in a few days, married to her, now stood beside the rough box in which all that remained of her he loved was lying. Her whom but a few days back, he had seen ‘exulting in her youth,’ filled with life, hope and animation, whom he so ardently wished to make his wedded wife, to fold to his bosom, to press to his ‘heart of hearts,’ now lay before him an inanimate mass of matter, so hideous, horrible and offensive that the bare idea of coming into contact with it was almost sufficient to make the gorge rise.”