Hilliker listened attentively. How, he asked, was Bookout supposed to get word to Morse? A post office box had been rented for this purpose. Had there been any communication thus far? Bookout winced. Yes, he admitted, he had just sent a letter telling Morse that the police were tracking his luggage. Furthermore, he had suggested that if his employer wished to escape detection he would have to change his appearance, perhaps by switching to more somber clothing and shaving off his distinctive muttonchops.
Hilliker left the police station with a growing sense of urgency. Although Bookout’s letter had made no mention of the Mary Rogers investigation, Hilliker believed that he was now racing the clock: He could not afford to let the apprentice’s information put Morse on guard. So long as Morse assumed that he was simply dodging spousal assault charges, he would probably remain where he was in hopes that the matter would blow over. If he realized that the police were actively pursuing him—and tracking his luggage—he would likely conclude that they suspected him of the more serious crime. In that case, he might well flee before Hilliker could reach Worcester. If Morse managed to slip out of the country, it was unlikely that he would ever be brought to justice.
Hilliker boarded the first available boat for Boston, determined to intercept Bookout’s letter before Morse could collect it. His next priority would be to make a positive identification of Morse. Toward that end he had arranged to bring along the witness who had not only seen Mary Rogers arguing with the well-dressed man at Elysian Fields but also recognized the strip of fabric from Mary’s dress. If the witness could identify Joseph Morse as the man he had seen with Mary Rogers, Hilliker’s case would be made.
Traveling by carriage from Boston, the two men arrived in Worcester at three o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, August 14. Hilliker went straight to the town post office and found to his relief that no mail had yet arrived for Joseph Morse. The constable and his witness began making the rounds of the local taverns, eventually tracing Morse to a small rooming house in the town of Holden, some seven miles away.
In Holden, Hilliker left his witness to wait in a nearby saloon while he took up a vigil outside the rooming house. At nine-thirty that evening, a man with black muttonchop whiskers wearing a frock coat emerged from the house. Assuming the man to be Morse, Hilliker fell into step beside him and asked if he would care to join him for a drink, explaining that he was a stranger in town. The man readily assented, giving no sign of suspicion or alarm. At the saloon, Hilliker took a seat near the table where he had left his witness. After buying a round of drinks, Hilliker gave his witness time to study the suspect’s face and listen to the sound of his voice. After a few moments, the witness gave a nod.
Hilliker was satisfied. He cleared his throat: “Your name, sir, is Joseph Morse, I believe, and you are under arrest.”
As Hilliker later recounted the scene, Morse half-rose from the table and demanded to know the charges against him. “On the complaint of your wife,” answered Hilliker. At this, Morse appeared “strangely satisfied” and took his seat again. “Oh,” he said. “Is that all?”
Hilliker glanced again at his witness seated at the next table. “Yes,” he said, “and for the murder of Mary Rogers.”
X
The Lost Hour
FOR SEVERAL MOMENTS Hilliker’s accusation hung in the air as Morse wavered between outrage and disbelief. Hilliker calmly repeated the charge, and formally served Morse with Justice Taylor’s arrest warrant. Growing indignant, Morse attempted to argue his way out of the situation, claiming that a mistake had been made. Finally, when Hilliker threatened him with extradition, Morse bowed to the inevitable and allowed himself to be placed under arrest.
The following day, a steamship carrying Hilliker and his prisoner arrived in New York, along with Hilliker’s obliging witness. Morse was taken to the Tombs, where the second of the two witnesses—who had not accompanied Hilliker to Massachusetts—easily picked Morse out of a group of a dozen men. In Hilliker’s view, the noose was tightening around Morse’s neck.
Justice Taylor was summoned to take charge of the situation and a lengthy round of interrogations began. As the gravity of the situation sank in, Morse began to plead his innocence in terms that only served to bolster the case against him. He insisted that he had not been at Hoboken on the day in question; he had gone to Staten Island instead. When Justice Taylor produced the testimony of several friends and neighbors, all of whom recalled hearing Morse declare his intention of going to Hoboken, the suspect allowed as how he had spent the day in “solitary reflection,” during which he lost track of his whereabouts. In response to this, Taylor confronted Morse with the statements of witnesses who had seen him in the company of a young woman. Morse admitted that he may have exchanged a pleasantry or two, but he could not recall any particulars.
As Morse’s evasions and contradictory statements accumulated, Justice Taylor grew even more convinced of his guilt. The newspapers, too, quickly set aside their earlier caution and declared that the murderer of Mary Rogers had at last been captured. While the Herald noted that “all examinations of the suspect were strictly private, and the Mayor has forbidden any publication of what transpired on the subject,” the paper nonetheless felt comfortable in stating that the evidence gathered tended to “foster guilt upon Morse.” The other papers were less circumspect. “The guilty party is at last in custody,” wrote the Courier and Enquirer, while the Sun declared that “Morse will surely pay the penalty for his crime.”
Apparently there were some in New York who were not willing to await the verdict of the criminal justice system. On the night of August 17, according to one account, a lynch mob formed outside the Tombs calling for Morse’s blood. While the story does not appear in any firsthand news account, it might, if true, help to explain why Morse decided on the following day that he was now prepared to tell Justice Taylor the “full truth” of the matter.
Morse’s statement, later reprinted in many of the daily newspapers, acknowledged that he had, in fact, enjoyed the company of a young woman on the Sunday in question. “I met a young lady about noon,” he testified. “I had met her before, and persuaded her to go with me to Staten Island. We went there, to the Pavilion, and had some refreshments and I kept her mind employed till after the last boat departed.” The method by which Morse kept his companion’s mind employed would require some elaboration. It later emerged that Morse contrived to miss the ferry by the “devious expedient” of setting the hands of his pocket watch back by one hour, so that the young lady would not realize that they were in danger of becoming stranded. With no other means of getting back to New York, he and the young lady were then obliged to check into a rooming house. There, Morse admitted, “I tried to have connexion with her but did not succeed.” After the young lady had spent the remainder of the night repelling his advances, Morse said, he brought her back to New York and “left her in good friendship” at the corner of Greenwich and Barclay streets.
Apparently such episodes were not unusual for Morse, as he could not recall the name of the young lady in this particular instance. Only later, when he heard about the murder of Mary Rogers, did it occur to him that his unwilling companion might have been the cigar girl. “If it was,” he insisted, “I had no hand in murdering her, as I left her in good feeling.” His flight from New York, he explained, had nothing to do with what occurred on Staten Island; he simply wished to withdraw to a safe distance while his wife recovered her better nature after the unpleasantness of Monday evening. Had he remained in town, he feared she might have had him arrested.
If the young woman with whom he passed the night in Staten Island had indeed been Mary Rogers, Morse maintained, he could offer no clue as to her final fate. In Massachusetts, when he read the newspaper accounts of her death, he wondered if perhaps she had done away with herself in despair over the damage that their dalliance might do to her reputation. Later, he claimed, when it became clear that she had been murdered, he reproached himself “most earnestly
” for allowing her to fall victim to a gang. It seemed to him now, however, that his companion could not have been Mary Rogers, as the girl he took to Staten Island had been wearing a black dress, and the cigar girl was known to have worn white.
If Justice Taylor hoped to find clarity in Morse’s statement, he came away more bewildered than ever. Even before the suspect had finished speaking, Taylor began chipping away at various elements that did not ring true. If, as Morse claimed, he took the young lady to Staten Island, why had he been seen arguing with her in Hoboken? Was it truly plausible that a man could spend an entire night attempting to seduce an unwilling young woman and fail to learn her name? Why, if Morse was innocent of her murder, had he not immediately given a full and candid statement to the police, even after two days of incarceration?
Through it all, Morse remained consistent on one point: his companion, whoever she was, had been alive and well when he left her. After all of the suspect’s previous vacillations, however, Taylor felt little inclination to believe this or any other detail of the account. As Morse’s story churned through the press, the entire city seemed to come to an agreement on the matter of his guilt. It was felt that any man who would set his watch back in the hope of seducing a young woman might well resort to murder when his advances were spurned. Not even Morse’s wife could be persuaded to speak in his defense.
From his cell on the interior quadrangle of the Tombs, Morse would have been able to see the rough planks of the gallows platform in the center courtyard. The looming presence of the scaffold and gibbet was meant to instill fear, and Morse had more reason than most to shudder at the sight. In all likelihood, he would be next in line. Morse’s execution, the newspapers agreed, would be a proud moment for the city of New York.
Then, astonishingly, salvation arrived from an unexpected quarter. On August 20, as Justice Taylor prepared to file a formal murder indictment, a group of four men came forward to testify that they had seen Morse on Sunday, July 25, in the company of a young woman dressed in black. The four men, who were acquaintances of the engraver, had read his statement in the previous day’s newspapers and recalled meeting him on the street that morning. If this sudden revelation seemed suspicious or overly convenient, it would not remain so for long. Unlike Morse himself, this new group of witnesses was able to supply the name of the girl in black. She was Mary Haviland, the daughter of a “highly respectable widow lady” living on Morton Street. Incredulous, Justice Taylor dispatched Officer Hilliker to bring Miss Haviland to the police station. He returned within the hour escorting the young woman, who was said to be “a rather handsome girl, not yet seventeen years of age, who appeared terribly effected in giving her statement.”
Miss Haviland’s testimony, elicited amid “frequent sobs and expressions of despair,” confirmed Morse’s story to the last detail. She had traveled with him to Staten Island on the Sunday afternoon in question, she said, where he “kept my attention off the time until the last boat started for New York.” After trying unsuccessfully to hire a rowboat, the young woman resigned herself to the situation and agreed to pass the night in a hotel, but only after extracting a “solemn promise” from Morse that they would occupy separate rooms, and that a “female of the house” would remain with her to insure the propriety of the arrangements. Arriving at the hotel, Miss Haviland found that no female chaperone was available, so she attempted to keep Morse out by wedging a chair and her parasol against the door. These safeguards proved ineffective; no sooner had she retired for the evening than Morse managed to push his way into the room.
Justice Taylor listened to this account with sympathetic concern, and asked if Morse had taken any liberties. Miss Haviland responded that he “kissed me and hugged me a good deal, and he tried to persuade me to yield to his wishes, but I resisted all night.” Taylor then asked if Morse had used force or violence. “I can’t say that he tried to use force,” she responded. Unconvinced, Taylor asked a second time if Morse had resorted to violence. Miss Haviland admitted that Morse’s threats frightened her to such an extent that she agreed to lie down on the bed and partially undress, whereupon he “tried to persuade me to consent to his wishes in every way, but I refused.” A later account would claim that he attempted to get his way “by dint of threats that he would expose and hold her name up to odium, and by other means such as might be expected from a man like himself.”
At length, Miss Haviland managed to cool Morse’s ardor by threatening to raise a shout of “murder” at the window. She then passed the remainder of the night seated in a chair with a sheet wrapped tightly about her. In the morning, Morse brought her back to the city. If their parting had not been quite in the spirit of “good friendship” that Morse had claimed, at least he left her alive and well.
Even now, Justice Taylor could not bring himself to take the story at face value. He ordered that Morse be returned to his cell, then he took the unusual step of traveling to Staten Island personally, where he interviewed several employees of the hotel where Morse and Miss Haviland passed their restive night. The hotel staff readily confirmed every detail. Incredulous, Taylor boarded the ferry back to New York and called a meeting of his colleagues. There could be no doubt, he told them: Morse was innocent.
Officer Hilliker, in particular, was devastated by this news. For several days he had been exhilarated in the belief that he had cracked the case single-handedly, and would likely be rewarded with fame and promotion. Instead, he now learned that he had succeeded only in tracking down a fugitive wife-beater—a crime which, at the time, was held to be on a par with pig-stealing.
As word of Morse’s eleventh-hour reprieve spread through the city, the Herald captured the public’s sense of incredulity. “This is one of the most extraordinary cases that ever came before a criminal court in any country. At the very moment that some scoundrels were ravishing and murdering Mary Rogers at Hoboken or New York, Morse was trying to seduce a girl at the Pavilion at Staten Island. All our readers remember the statement we gave yesterday, from Morse’s own lips, as to where he was on the fatal Sunday. Every word he said, and we published, was true. As there is an abundance of evidence to show that he was with this girl on Sunday 25th July, of course the accusation as to having participated in the murder of Miss Rogers falls to the ground. He will undoubtedly, however, have to stand a trial for the attempt to commit a rape upon this girl.”
Even this prediction failed to come to pass. Although the press initially withheld her name, Miss Haviland’s identity was easily discerned from the many other details supplied—including her address—and the unwelcome notoriety kept her “half deluged in tears” for many weeks. Fearful of prolonging the ordeal, she declined to press charges, and grew so distraught over her public humiliation that she was reported to be suicidal.
Although Miss Haviland’s testimony had resolved the matter of Morse’s guilt, several perplexing questions remained. “One thing we should like to know,” wrote the Herald, “who are the two men who swore at the police office that they saw Morse sitting with Mary Rogers at Hoboken on the fatal evening? Who are they? Ought they not to be examined at once before they attempt to swear away the life of another man?” It was a fair question; the testimony of the two men, and their subsequent positive identification of Morse, had very nearly seen the engraver tried for the murder of Mary Rogers. The curious precision and unwavering conviction of their testimony—even going so far as to identify a strip of fabric from the dead woman’s dress—suggests a misguided eagerness on the part of the two men, or perhaps a line of leading questions from an overenthusiastic Officer Hilliker. Whatever the case, the names of the two witnesses never appeared in the newspapers or court records, and their puzzling testimony had no further impact on the investigation.
Morse remained in jail for another day on the original charges of assault and abandonment until his lawyer could arrange for bail. Morse’s wife, in the meantime, had acquired a lawyer of her own, with whom she had initiated divorce proceedings. Upon his
release from jail, however, Morse went straight home to Greene Street, where he somehow persuaded his wife to forgive his trespasses. In days to come, the newspapers would be filled with letters from his friends attesting to his unblemished character and the excellence of his work as an engraver. Even the most innocuous of the charges against him—that he used tobacco and had been a patron of Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium—were hotly denied. “Morse has a reputation for industriousness and is a fine artist,” declared the Sun, “and we leave him with those kind words which our Savior spoke to fallen man—Go, and sin no more.”
The Herald was far more pointed: “We regret to state that the outrage upon this unfortunate girl remains as much a mystery as ever, evidence having been yesterday adduced, proving unquestionably that Morse had no hand in the murder of Miss Rogers, although it was satisfactorily proved that he is a most consummate scoundrel. Morse is to keep clear of Staten Island, and of young ladies in black especially, for the future. Thus ends that nine days wonder.”
XI
Crackpots and Gossipists
WITHIN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS of Joseph Morse’s release from the Tombs, New Yorkers were greeted with the surprising news that Mary Rogers was alive and well and living in Pittsburgh. According to a letter published in the New York Planet, the body pulled from the water at Elysian Fields had been that of some other unfortunate young woman. The “much discussed young seegar vendor,” the letter continued, had fled New York after a vicious quarrel with her mother. Mrs. Rogers, it seems, had insisted that her daughter honor her pledge to marry Daniel Payne, the cork cutter, but Mary refused on the grounds that her “heart was possessed by another.” Unwilling to submit, the distraught young woman was said to have written a note filled with “bitter reproaches” and quit her home forever, hastening instead to Pittsburgh, where her true love awaited her.
The Beautiful Cigar Girl Page 17
