The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  In visiting the scene of the crime, Dupin explains, he managed to observe much that had been overlooked. Although the windows of the murder chamber appeared to be locked and even nailed shut from inside, Dupin noticed that one of the nails had broken in two. He reasoned that the killer might have escaped by climbing through this window, only to have the sash fall closed behind him and held fast by a concealed spring. Because the sash appeared securely fastened—and the police had not noticed the broken nail—they had naturally assumed that the window had not been disturbed.

  “The next question is that of the mode of descent,” Dupin continues. This posed a considerable challenge, as the window looks out on a four-story drop. Dupin reveals that during his examination of the alley beside the house he noticed a slender lightning rod running near the window in question. He describes how it might have been possible, by means of the window’s swinging shutters, to bridge the gap between the window and the lightning rod. Dupin admits that only a remarkably courageous and agile person could have done so.

  A peculiar and seemingly self-contradictory portrait of the killer emerges. He possesses incredible strength, surpassing agility, and inhuman savagery. The murder is apparently unmotivated by greed, as evidenced by the fortune in gold francs left untouched. The sheer barbarity of the crime, with one victim’s head severed and the other’s corpse shoved up the chimney, strikes Dupin as “excessively outré” and perhaps literally inhuman. Having found a “most unusual” hair clutched in the hand of one of the victims, Dupin forms a theory that the killer is not, in fact, a human being at all—a conclusion seemingly borne out by the strangely conflicting reports of the “shrill” and animal-like voice heard within the locked chamber. In addition, Dupin has noted an unusual pattern of bruises on the throat of Mlle. L’Espanaye—“the mark of no human hand”—leading him to suspect a gigantic and immensely ferocious beast: “the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands.”

  While his companion struggles to come to grips with this information, Dupin outlines the steps he has taken to prove his conclusions. The previous day, he explains, he called in at a newspaper office to place a notice to the effect that he had captured “a very large tawny Ourang-Outang of the Bornese species.” The notice went on to say that the owner could reclaim the creature by applying at Dupin’s address.

  No sooner has Dupin described his actions than a “stout and muscular-looking” sailor appears at the door. When confronted about the crime in the Rue Morgue, the sailor breaks down and confesses all, confirming Dupin’s remarkable hypothesis. The sailor explains that he brought the ourang-outang back from a long voyage in hopes of selling it, only to have it escape into the streets of Paris, brandishing the sailor’s own razor. He followed the creature to the Rue Morgue and watched helplessly—his shouts of alarm mingling with the shrill screams of the animal—as it clambered through the window and attacked the two women inside. In shock, the sailor withdrew and left the ourang-outang to its fate. Although Dupin’s newspaper notice had rekindled his hopes of profiting from the animal, the sailor now resolves to place the matter before the police: “I will make a clean breast if I die for it.”

  On Dupin’s evidence the falsely accused bank clerk is immediately released, but the prefect of police is irritated at having been shown up, and indulges in “a sarcasm or two about the propriety of every person minding his own business.” Dupin is unfazed. “Let him talk,” he declares. “I am satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle.”

  “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” appeared in the April 1841 issue of Graham’s. The story drew a great deal of favorable notice, with more than one critic praising the author as “a man of genius.” Significantly, Poe appears to have drawn the name of his detective from a fleeting reference in a memoir entitled “Unpublished Passages in the Life of Vidocq, the French Minister of Police,” portions of which had been reprinted in Burton’s. A legendary figure, Vidocq was a one-time criminal who turned his talents to law enforcement, helping to create the Sureté, the detective bureau of the French police. The Frenchman is credited with bringing scientific rigor to the detection of crime, introducing such innovations as rudimentary ballistics, plaster-of-Paris molds of footprints, and a centralized criminal database. At the time of Poe’s story Vidocq was still active in Paris, and would serve as inspiration for the character of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Vidocq’s memoirs, though largely fanciful, had been a publishing phenomenon and would have provided a natural source of inspiration for Poe. In “Rue Morgue,” Dupin would acknowledge the debt, describing Vidocq as a “good guesser and a persevering man.” With characteristic arrogance, however, Dupin believed himself to be superior, arguing that Vidocq “erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close.”

  For all of Dupin’s bluster, Poe had a keen sense of his character’s limitations. A handful of reviewers pointed out that there could be no great skill in presenting a solution to a mystery of the author’s own devising. Poe himself was well aware that the effect of the story, however ingenious, had much to do with having been “written backwards,” with the solution worked out in advance. A real-life detective such as Vidocq had no preordained solution to guide his investigations. “Where is the ingenuity,” Poe would write, “of unraveling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unraveling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.”

  The problem nagged at Poe. For several years he had cultivated an interest in real-life problems and ciphers, however abstruse, ranging from the open challenge of his cryptography series to his step-by-step elucidation of the chess-playing Turk. Now, he began to wonder if his newly defined science of ratiocination, as personified by Dupin, might be applied to some more concrete problem or mystery, perhaps even in an actual police investigation.

  It was at that moment, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, that the body of Mary Rogers came ashore.

  VIII

  The Committee of Concerned Citizens

  FROM THE BEGINNING, the Mary Rogers saga appeared bound up in the fortunes of James Gordon Bennett’s Herald. Barely one year after cranking out his first issue from Wall Street, Bennett moved his operations to a new building on Nassau Street, a few hundred yards from the Rogers boardinghouse. Each day as Mary Rogers left the house, she would have felt the thunder of Bennett’s double-cylinder steam presses churning out the latest edition, and seen the editor’s name painted in tall block letters across the brick facade of his building.

  Random chance had placed one of Bennett’s reporters at Elysian Fields when Mary Rogers’s body was dragged ashore, enabling the paper to provide a chilling firsthand account of the dead woman’s “battered and butchered” features. “It almost made our heart sick,” the reporter declared. In the days following, when city officials on both sides of the Hudson appeared to be doing nothing, the unsolved crime provided Bennett with a bludgeon to wield in the name of police and judicial reform. With Helen Jewett, Bennett had been obliged to strike an awkward balance between fatherly compassion and moral condemnation: The young woman had been “deserving of our sympathy and regard” but also “far gone in the ways of wickedness.” No such ambiguities clouded the Mary Rogers case. This time, the dead woman was a “model of maidenly virtue” whose death stood as a “bitter rebuke” to all right-thinking New Yorkers.

  On August 3, 1841, under the heading of “The Late Murder of a Young Girl at Hoboken,” Bennett launched his first salvo. “It is now well ascertained that the unfortunate young girl, named Mary Rogers, (who three years ago lived with Anderson, the cigarman) has been cruelly murdered at Hoboken. Nothing of so horrible and brutal a nature has occurred since the murder of Miss Sands, which murder formed the basis of the story of Norman Leslie.” This reference to the popular novel by Theodore Fay—which had drawn such a cutting review from Poe—would have given
Bennett’s readers an emotional benchmark. Fay had drawn inspiration from the saga of Levi Weeks, whose highly publicized trial for the murder of Gulielma Sands in 1800 saw him defended by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. The Mary Rogers case, Bennett was suggesting, would be no less momentous. He finished with a pointed call for action: “It now remains for the mayors of New York and Jersey cities to do their duties.”

  By the following day Bennett had fastened his impatience onto Gilbert Merritt, the Hoboken justice of the peace, whom he initially mistook for Richard Cook, the coroner. “The excitement which prevails in this city and in Hoboken relative to the bloody and mysterious murder of Mary Rogers—the crowds daily hurrying to the Sybil’s Cave, to look on the scene of the deed, and the shore where her body was first discovered—are beginning to rouse the attention of the public authorities of this foul outrage upon a civilized community. The coroner at Hoboken is even waked up, and has published the following curious note:

  In consequence of the great, though just excitement prevailing in this community, relative to the mysterious and desperate murder of Mary C. Rogers, at Hoboken, and in answer, once and for all, to the many inquiries addressed to me, concerning this most wretched tragedy, I must say, that it is far from my duty as a magistrate to give information, or to answer questions of idle curiosity. On the other hand, I deem it the duty of every individual that has the least regard for the well being of society, possessing any knowledge in the matter, to furnish me with all the facts (however remote they may be) relative to her absence and her murder.

  In the meantime, I will assure anyone, giving me information, that their communications shall be held sacred and confidential, until after an interview, or until restriction is withdrawn.

  With respect, sir, yours.

  Gilbert Merritt of Hoboken”

  Merritt’s call for restraint would have struck most readers as perfectly reasonable, but Bennett was spoiling for a fight. “How utterly ridiculous is all this?” he asked. “It is now nearly a week since the dead body of this beautiful and unfortunate girl has been discovered, and yet no other steps have been taken by the judicial authorities, than a brief and inefficient inquest by Gilbert Merritt. One of the most heartless and atrocious murders that was ever perpetrated in New York, is allowed to sleep the sleep of death—to be buried in the deep bosom of the Hudson.”

  Bennett railed against Merritt and Cook for several days, blasting Merritt as an unfeeling bureaucrat and Cook as a bungling fool. By the time Mary Rogers’s body was brought to New York for its second postmortem examination, Bennett had cast such a taint on Cook’s work that the New York authorities felt a need to distance themselves from the earlier findings. There is little doubt that Cook’s original finding of death by strangulation was correct, but Dr. Archer, the New York coroner, recorded a verdict of death by drowning, in hopes of escaping the scorn of the press. “Dr. Archer states the fact that every dead body found in the rivers adjacent to this city appears, at first sight, to have died from violence,” reported the Atlas. “He thinks that the post mortem examination at Hoboken was not minute or critical enough to decide the point.” One can only wonder what Dr. Cook made of his colleague’s observations, given the fact that his conclusions were based in large part on the strip of lace cord he had discovered wrapped around Mary Rogers’s throat. It is doubtful that every dead body found in the Hudson shared this particular mark of violence.

  This detail and many others were overlooked in a sudden if belated rush of coverage. Having learned their lesson from the Helen Jewett affair, New York’s editors were careful not to yield the Mary Rogers story to Bennett and the Herald. By early August, after almost a week of silence in the press, Mary Rogers had become a newspaper sensation, and the city buzzed with outlandish and often contradictory speculation. The New Era, an advocate of moral rectitude, offered the peculiar hypothesis that Mary Rogers had been a suicide, driven to this extreme by the “troubling consequences” of having fallen into the ways of sin. As with the story in the Atlas, the fact that she had been found with a lace cord wrapped tightly around her neck—a condition rarely found in suicides—went unmentioned in the paper’s columns.

  Not surprisingly, the Herald was quick to shoot down any views that did not correspond with those of its editor. The suicide theory drew particular scorn as a “ludicrous piece of tomfoolery.” Bennett’s own presumption was that Mary had been assaulted by “blacklegs and ruffians,” a reference to the city gangs which, he said, were “free to rob, rape and pillage with wild abandon, confident that authority presents no possible challenge.” Bennett was not alone in laying the blame on the notorious gangs of New York. “We have surrendered our freedoms to these animals for far too long,” declared the Sun. “It is now incumbent on right-thinking citizens to take action.”

  The murder had taken place at a pivotal moment in the evolution of New York’s storied gang culture. As the city’s economic slump, along with a growing influx of Irish immigrants, created an increasingly volatile climate, allegiances were forged according to neighborhood, nationality, and trade, and battles were fought on much the same lines. Gangs with colorful and distinctive names such as the Hudson Dusters and the Chichesters were reaching out to form political alliances, often serving to intimidate voters and stuff ballot boxes, and providing muscle to warring crews of volunteer firefighters, who battled each other for the rewards and spoils of their calling. “The city is infested by gangs of hardened wretches,” wrote Philip Hone, the diarist and former mayor of New York. They “patrol the streets making the night hideous and insulting all who are not strong enough to defend themselves.”

  In Hone’s view, Mary Rogers had “no doubt fallen victim to the brutal lust of some of the gang of banditti that walk unscathed and violate the laws with impunity in this moral and religious city.” The Herald concurred, insisting that “the girl was taken by a gang of soaplocks and gamblers.” In describing Mary’s assailants as “soaplocks,” a reference to the greased curls and long sideburns affected by some of the more dandyish thugs, Bennett was pointing his finger at gangs of men of the “Frank Rivers” type—sometimes known as “young sports”—who worked as clerks and journeymen by day and prowled the streets by night, and were known to congregate in a particular saloon on Broadway. These men, the Herald believed, “may perhaps have had the deed in contemplation for weeks or months. From her connection with Anderson’s cigar store and the proximity of that establishment to that resort of gamblers, blacklegs, soaplocks and loafers known as ‘Head Quarters,’ it is highly probable that the crime was perpetrated by some of that lawless fraternity.”

  This marked a considerable contrast to the Herald’s stance during the Helen Jewett investigation, when Bennett defended the suspect Richard Robinson as a model of youthful probity. As always, a private agenda lay behind Bennett’s public pronouncements. For years Bennett had been pressing for judicial reform and condemning the lawlessness of both New York and New Jersey. The Mary Rogers case presented him with an ideal platform on which to renew his campaign. It also offered an opportunity to settle old scores against two of his most bitter political enemies, Justice Henry Lynch and, especially, Justice Mordecai Noah.

  A celebrated patriot, Major Mordecai Manuel Noah had enjoyed a colorful public career as a diplomat, playwright, and one-time high sheriff of New York. Over the course of his lifetime he would serve as editor of six newspapers, and had been at the helm of the New York Enquirer when Bennett rose to prominence as a Washington correspondent. The cordial relations between the two men faded when Bennett left the paper, and grew more strained when Bennett launched the Herald in direct competition. Noah had lined up against Bennett in the “Moral War,” and was said to have instigated the charges of extortion against Bennett during the Helen Jewett affair.

  In May of 1840, political maneuvering at City Hall created two new associate judgeships on the New York Court of Special Sessions. These were patronage appointments, and Lynch and Noah, as faithful s
upporters of the Whig party, suddenly found themselves elevated to the bench. A furious Bennett ridiculed the qualifications of both men and filled his paper with accounts of Noah’s ineptitude. The new judge, Bennett claimed, concerned himself only with petty offenses such as the theft of pigs, so that he could collect his judicial fees more readily, while turning a blind eye to more serious offenses. “If a petty theft is effected,” Bennett wrote, “the indignation of the Court of Sessions is aroused, and should it be a piece of pork or some clothes that are stolen, the poor hungry half-starved mortal is brought up to the Special Sessions, and sent to dig stone—but if a human being is suddenly and ruthlessly severed from the thread of existence, we see the ministers of Justice stand with their arms folded, waiting for a price to be bid for their exertions ere they will start on the trail of the murderers. Such a system offers an impunity to the rich ruffian, it holds a shield over the violator of female virtue, and in but too many cases, acts as a stimulant to outrages at which humanity shudders.”

  Noah, for his part, took his revenge from the bench, scouring Bennett’s accounts of court proceedings for any factual error or discrepancy, so that he could slap him with trumped-up libel charges, bringing fines as high as five hundred dollars. On one occasion, Bennett paid a stiff penalty for misreporting a man’s name: He had been off by one letter.

  The Mary Rogers case appeared to offer a chance for Bennett to settle the score. When the story broke, the police and judiciary were widely seen to be mired in bureaucracy. The Herald launched a blistering attack: