The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  Many of the city’s reporters also felt the urge to offer pointers to the police. “ASK HIM,” ran a headline in the Transcript, followed by the information that “a young man named Canter at the Journal of Commerce was a suitor of Mary C. Rogers and was in the constant habit of walking out with her. He was severely beaten about a year ago by three or four rivals in consequence of visiting her. He has not as yet been questioned about who the others were in the habit of visiting.” The advice had merit, as Canter had played a role in Mary’s disappearance from the cigar store three years earlier, and he may well have been the author of the oddly jocular account of her suicidal despair over the “gallant gay Lothario.” When summoned to police headquarters, however, the newsman could add nothing to the investigation. He claimed he had not seen her in more than two years.

  Another anonymous letter, addressed to the Tattler but reprinted in several other papers, appeared far more promising. The correspondent, who identified himself only as “T.D.W.,” explained that he had “declined coming forward through motives of a perhaps criminal prudence, and even now I dare not reveal my name, because I fear that by doing so I might become the victim of a gang, who are all powerful to revenge any injury that may be done to any members of their body.” In spite of these reservations, T.D.W. felt compelled to gather his courage in order to report an incident he had seen on the day of Mary’s disappearance. While out “sauntering” on the shores of Hoboken that evening, he had caught sight of a rowboat gliding across the Hudson from New York. As the boat neared the shore, he “perceived that there were six men and one young well-dressed female, who I felt confident from description, as also from a dim recollection of my own, was the Segar Girl. Immediately as they touched the strand, the six men and the female left the boat and proceeded towards the woods.” Almost at once, T.D.W. became suspicious. The men, he observed, were “of that class denominated ‘rowdies’—such men for instance as hang about the doors of low gaming public houses, wear flat-brimmed hats, and affect an air of vulgar devil-may-care gentility.” With mounting apprehension, he watched as the group disappeared from view. “I cannot say that the female made any opposition,” he admitted. “I rather think she did not, or I would have observed it—but at all events, she was there.”

  Uncertain of what to do, T.D.W. watched as a second boat came sweeping over the river. “This had three men in it,” he noted, “and when they landed, they jumped from the boat with great rapidity.” The new arrivals spotted two other bystanders loitering nearby and rushed over to ask the whereabouts of the earlier group and the young lady. “Did you observe if they used any violence with her?” they asked. In spite of assurances that the young lady appeared unharmed, the new arrivals seemed tremendously agitated and started off toward the woods “almost at a run.”

  “The above is all I know about this affair,” T.D.W. insisted, “but I am firmly persuaded in my own mind that the young lady brought over in the first boat was the cigar girl, who was so brutally murdered a few hours afterwards.” The editors of the Tattler concurred, and expressed a hope that “T.D.W.” would step forward to assist the police, declaring that they intended to coerce him to do so with “all the force in our office.” Apparently this force was more than adequate to the task. By the following day, T.D.W. had been revealed as William Fanshaw, a local man who had been out for the day with his brother-in-law. Although Fanshaw declared himself to be “distressed and inconvenienced” by the exposure of his identity, he remained adamant that the details of his story were correct in every particular.

  The city’s newspapers united in calling for further information about the occupants of the rowboat, with the notable exception of the Herald. “There must be some mistake in this statement,” insisted Bennett’s paper, perhaps bristling at being scooped by the Tattler. “On the Sunday evening in question there was a violent thunderstorm, which began before sundown and did not clear away until 10 o’clock.” The Herald went on to conclude that the woman in the boat could not, in any case, have been the cigar girl. “Mary Rogers’s face was well known to all ‘young men about town’ from her having been at Anderson’s store. If she had been at Hoboken that day, she would have been seen by dozens of persons that would have recognized her.”

  Bennett’s objections did not entirely discredit Fanshaw’s account. If Mary Rogers had been taken directly from a boat to the remote woods, she would hardly have been recognized by dozens of people. As to the thunderstorm, the accounts of when it began and ended varied widely from place to place, as numerous correspondents were quick to point out. Before the debate could advance any further, a girl of fifteen stepped forward and identified herself as the young woman in the first rowboat. The story of her “abduction” had been greatly exaggerated, she insisted. She had been on a picnic with her parents and a “young man of her acquaintance,” who took her on what was meant to be a romantic interlude on the river. Not far from shore they were overtaken by a boatload of gang thugs who roughed up her friend and rowed off with her. While the young man went for reinforcements, the “party of crass hooligans” carried her into the woods at Elysian Fields, where she was treated roughly and badly frightened, but not violated. After a short while, she said, the young men brought her safely back to New York in the boat.

  By rights, this should have put an end to the story, but the notion that Mary Rogers had been murdered by gang members in a rowboat would persist in various forms for weeks to come. To judge by the number of stories that accumulated throughout August, New York’s gangs were operating a vast flotilla of rowboats in their relentless assault on female virtue. These numerous and often conflicting accounts culminated a few weeks later in an “exclusive” in the pages of the Post, announcing that a man named James Finnegan, “a rowdy of confirmed rascality,” had been arrested under information “amounting nearly to certainty that he is one of the wretches who committed the outrage and murder of Mary C. Rogers.” According to the Post, Finnegan was the leader of a gang “whose atrocities in various forms are familiar in the police annals.” Two of the gang members were said to be on familiar terms with Mary Rogers. On the morning of her disappearance, it was said, they chanced to meet her on the street and were able to persuade her to accompany them on a boat ride across the river to Hoboken. Once there, the Post continued, she “was enticed, unsuspecting, to a retired part of the shore, and there, after the accomplishment of their hellish purposes, brutally murdered.”

  By this time, all reports of progress in the investigation were treated with due skepticism in the press. In this instance, however, there was one detail that appeared to set the story apart from the others. At the time of his arrest Finnegan was said to have a ring in his possession that was a “perfect match” of one worn by Mary Rogers on the day of her disappearance. Not even William Kiekuck had been linked to the crime so decisively, and the press sounded a note of cautious optimism. Perhaps, said the Post, the “veil that shrouds this dark deed may be lifted for good and all.”

  Once again, however, the reporting of the story had been allowed to get ahead of the facts. Although Finnegan had a sinister reputation and a police record, he also had an ironclad alibi: He had been in church, or, rather, driving his employer to church in a horse-drawn coach. As the Post backed away from its story, no further mention was made of a ring belonging to Mary Rogers, and Finnegan now joined Kiekuck on the list of discarded suspects. “We have plenty of hooligans,” noted one weary observer, “but precious little evidence.”

  Perhaps this explains the judicious note of caution adopted by the police and the press in mid-August, when a series of events occurred that promised at last to break the case. After two weeks of thwarted expectations, the Courier and Enquirer took an almost pleading tone:

  We are pleased to be able to state that at length a clue has beyond all doubt or cavil been discovered which will lead to the detection of the perpetrators of this dreadful outrage. All the affidavits and examinations heretofore taken have no bearing whatever on
the case, and even the mother of the unfortunate deceased has confessed that the recent discovery is the only one that can shed light upon the fate of her daughter. The reporter is not at liberty to state all that has been told to him on the subject, but he is authorized to say that officers are now in pursuit of a man who was seen at Hoboken with Miss R. on the afternoon of the 25th of July (the day she was murdered) and that he was heard quarrelling with her. The investigation has been followed up with the most scrupulous minuteness, so as to leave scarce a shade of doubt as to his guilt, by the gentleman to whom the community owes the arrest of the most notorious scoundrel that ever escaped the gallows, and he is entirely convinced that the person now sought for is the guilty party. He has the best wishes of the whole community for his success in this outrageous affair.

  The scrupulous gentleman proved to be a police constable named Hilliker, who had achieved his results through a combination of luck and dogged persistence. On Thursday, July 22, three days before Mary Rogers’s disappearance, Hilliker had been on duty at the Bowery police station when a woman named Martha Morse appeared in a state of great agitation. Mrs. Morse’s face and arms were covered with “angry purple bruises,” and she told Hilliker that she wished to swear out a complaint against her husband, Joseph.

  Joseph Morse was a well-known figure on Nassau Street, where he ran a successful engraving shop. Not yet thirty years old, he dressed in the style of a London dandy, with elaborate “muttonchop” side-whiskers, a monocle, a long double-breasted frock coat, and, in summer, a straw hat. He was proud of his success, having worked his way up from selling newspapers on the street, and he was said to enjoy a convivial reputation among the regulars at Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium. Although he had been married for several years, according to one account Morse had “not entirely ceased his addresses to the fair sex,” which led to frequent confrontations with his wife. More than once police had responded to reports of spousal violence at the Morses’s home on Greene Street, and the engraver often found himself turned out of the house and banished to the back room of his shop.

  Mrs. Morse’s formal complaint at the Bowery police station took the hostilities between the Morses to a new level. Impressed by the bruises, Officer Hilliker brought the complaint before a justice of the peace named Taylor, who issued a formal summons. Hilliker then went directly to Morse’s shop on Nassau Street, only to be told by an apprentice, Edward Bookout, that the engraver had left for the day. In fact, Morse was asleep in the back room, but Bookout was accustomed to covering for his employer, who frequently hid out in the back room to dodge unpleasant confrontations with gambling companions and jilted girlfriends.

  Taking the assistant at his word, Hilliker left a note asking Morse to call at the station house when he returned. Later, when Morse emerged, he was surprised to find that his wife had involved the police. Chastened, he returned home and attempted a rapprochement. The effort appears to have been successful, as Morse remained at home for three days, only to leave again on the morning of July 25 (the date of Mary Rogers’s disappearance) claiming to have business in Hoboken.

  Morse did not return home to Greene Street until late Monday evening. He appeared tired and more than usually short-tempered. His wife received him at the door in a state of high dudgeon, demanding to know where he had been since the previous morning. Morse replied that a sudden thunderstorm had forced him to spend Sunday night in Hoboken. Pushing his way past his wife, he announced that he was retiring for the night and went upstairs without another word. When Mrs. Morse followed a short time later, she found that her husband had changed into a fresh suit of clothes and was preparing to leave the house again. He offered no explanation, and when Mrs. Morse pressed him, she later claimed, he “hurled abuse at such volume as to be overheard by the neighbors.” Pulling on his hat and coat, Morse stormed out of the house with his wife trailing close behind, still demanding to know where he was going. He had traveled less than a block when his wife overtook him, grabbed his arm, and attempted to pull him back to the house. Morse began “screaming in a rage,” according to a neighbor’s testimony, and then “tore part of his wife’s earring out, struck her and then ran away.”

  The following morning, Mrs. Morse returned to the Bowery police station to swear out a fresh complaint. Officer Hilliker, annoyed that Morse had not responded to his earlier summons, brought her before Justice Taylor for a second time. Taylor now added a charge of abandonment to the earlier assault and battery complaint. When Hilliker returned to Morse’s shop with the new summons, he was told by Edward Bookout that Morse had left town.

  As far as Hilliker was concerned, there was nothing more he could do for the time being. Pursuing Morse out of town on a simple assault charge was out of the question; Hilliker would have had to pay his expenses out of his own pocket, and he stood to receive nothing in return apart from a small fee for serving the summons. The officer consulted with Justice Taylor, who agreed that Hilliker should simply wait. Morse would return to his wife and business soon enough.

  The following day, however, Hilliker began to suspect that Morse’s crimes were more serious than he had first supposed. While attending another of Justice Taylor’s court sessions, Hilliker listened with mounting agitation as a pair of witnesses came forward with information that they believed might shed light on the Mary Rogers investigation. The two men had been walking along the river at the Elysian Fields when they saw a young couple sitting on a bench by the water. Their attention was drawn by the fact that the two were arguing, and that the young lady appeared to be particularly upset. The woman, they said, was dark-haired and very attractive, and wore a light-colored dress and a flowered bonnet. The man had prominent black muttonchops, and wore a frock coat and a straw hat. Although the two witnesses thought little of it at the time—“Looks like a lovers’ quarrel,” one of them said—they later became convinced that the young woman had been Mary Rogers. “The description matched in every particular,” they insisted.

  Hilliker felt certain that Joseph Morse, with his muttonchop whiskers and dandyish mode of dress, was the man seen with Mary Rogers. After the mistakes made in the pursuit of William Kiekuck, however, he felt a need to proceed cautiously. Hoping to build a more convincing case, he set out to question anyone who might provide independent confirmation of his suspicions. From Mrs. Morse he learned that the engraver had been in Hoboken at the time of the murder. From a neighbor he heard additional examples of Morse’s violent behavior. A local shopkeeper told him that Morse’s luggage had been shipped out of town, suggesting that the engraver intended to lie low for some time. On further inquiry, Hilliker learned that the bags had been sent to Boston. Hilliker speculated that the luggage might have been forwarded on to the home of Morse’s mother in nearby Nantucket.

  At the Rogers boardinghouse, Hilliker took down a more complete description of the murdered girl from her cousin, Mrs. Hayes, noting that it matched every detail of the account of the girl seen at Hoboken. Convinced now, Hilliker went to the Dead House for a sample of fabric from the dress Mary Rogers had been wearing at the time of her death, which he then showed to one of the witnesses who had appeared before Justice Taylor earlier in the day. The witness recognized the fabric at once: The girl he had seen at Elysian Fields, he said, had been wearing a dress made of the same material.

  For Hilliker, this completed the chain of evidence. Returning to the police station, he laid out his findings for Justice Taylor, along with some conclusions he had drawn. As a native of Nantucket, a prominent whaling town, Morse had spent time at sea as a young man, and would have been familiar with sailor’s knots of the type found during the postmortem examination. Moreover, Morse would have had any number of opportunities to strike up an acquaintance with the murdered girl. His shop on Nassau Street was just a few doors down from the Rogers boardinghouse, and his home on Greene Street was only a few steps farther away. Morse was also known to have been a patron of Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium. Although neighbors had heard him declare h
is intention of going to Hoboken on the fatal Sunday, no one could account for his whereabouts that evening. In Hilliker’s mind there was no room for doubt: Joseph Morse was the prime suspect in the Mary Rogers murder.

  Justice Taylor immediately issued a warrant for Morse’s arrest. In light of this new information, Taylor no longer felt content to wait for Morse to return to New York of his own accord. If at all possible, he said, Hilliker should go to Boston and bring the suspect back in chains. Hilliker shrugged his shoulders. He literally could not afford to chase Morse to Boston, and the police force had no budget to allow for such contingencies. Taylor considered the problem. He had confidence in Hilliker, and had been stung by the relentless criticism of the “stagnant judiciary” coming from Bennett’s Herald. Taylor decided to take the matter into his own hands. Reaching into his pocket, the justice pulled out his purse and handed over eighty dollars of his own money. “Bring me Mary Rogers’s killer,” he said. Hilliker nodded and tucked the money into his shirt.

  Leaving the judicial chambers, Hilliker went straight to Nassau Street. Taylor’s show of confidence had charged him with a grim sense of purpose. His instincts told him that Morse was probably lying low at his boyhood home in Nantucket. Determined not to waste Taylor’s money, Hilliker resolved to confirm his suspicions with an interrogation of Edward Bookout, Morse’s apprentice, before making the long trip. He hauled Bookout back to the police station and subjected him to a harsh interrogation, telling him that Morse was now a suspect in the Mary Rogers murder. Bookout appeared genuinely shocked and told Hilliker all he knew. Morse had originally planned to go to Nantucket but then thought better of it, the apprentice said. Instead, he went to Worcester and left instructions for Bookout to send word when it was safe to return to New York.