Justice Gilbert Merritt hurried to the tavern as soon as he heard of the accident. More than a year had passed since the revelation of the murder thicket and the death of Daniel Payne, and in that time Merritt had never entirely let go of his suspicions of Mrs. Loss. Her story of the discovery of Mary Rogers’s effects sounded improbable and incomplete to the magistrate’s ears, as was her confused and inconsistent account of the screams she heard on the fatal evening. Merritt’s suspicions deepened during Mrs. Loss’s unconvincing testimony at the inquest after Payne’s death. Now, with Mrs. Loss on her deathbed, Merritt hoped that she would feel compelled to unburden her conscience.
Dr. Gautier had already attempted to question Mrs. Loss about the Mary Rogers mystery, though his methods left much to be desired. Finding his patient deep in the throes of her delirium, the doctor leaned in close and shouted the name of the murdered woman “suddenly and loudly” into her ear. When “no effect was elicited,” Dr. Gautier concluded that Mrs. Loss knew no more of the unhappy affair than she had revealed in court.
Justice Merritt was not content to let the matter rest there. He spent several hours at the dying woman’s bedside, hoping that she would shake off the effects of her fever, and he held a series of pointed interviews with her sons. When he emerged from the sickroom, Merritt would say little of his findings, but rumors circulated that, at long last, a solution to the Mary Rogers mystery was close at hand.
On November 10, Mrs. Loss died of her injury. The following day, Justice Merritt held an inquest that promptly returned a verdict of accidental death. The brevity of the proceeding and the spare language of the court record gave no hint of Merritt’s suspicions. Behind the scenes, however, the magistrate was in close contact with the mayors of New York and New Jersey, preparing to put his conclusions before the public.
Under the headline of “Murder of Mary C. Rogers,” the Morning Courier gave a hint of coming revelations: “Reports have been in circulation for some days past that discoveries have been made as to the manner in which this unfortunate female came to her death.” The paper went on to say that prior to her death Mrs. Loss “charged her two sons to make known the circumstances attending the death of Mary Rogers, which she had before concealed.”
Three days after the death of Mrs. Loss, Gilbert Merritt filed an affidavit accusing her and her sons of complicity in the death of Mary Rogers. For the first time, Merritt made an open declaration of what he had long suspected. He charged that:
in the month of July 1841, he (this deponent) as a magistrate held an inquest on the body of Mary C. Rogers, at Hoboken, in said County of Hudson, who this deponent believes was murdered; and this deponent further saith that from information he has obtained and facts in his possession, he verily believes that the murder of the said Mary C. Rogers was perpetrated in a house at Weehawken, called ‘The Nick Moore House,’ then kept by one Frederica Loss, alias Kellenbarack (now deceased) and her three sons, to wit: Oscar Kellenbarack, Charles Kellenbarack, and Ossian Kellenbarack, all three of whom the deponent has reason to believe are profligate and worthless characters; and this deponent further saith, that he has just reason to believe that the said sons and their mother kept one of the most depraved and debauched houses in New Jersey, and that all of them had a knowledge of and were accessory to, and became participators in the murder of said Mary C. Rogers, and the concealment of her body.
Merritt’s language was uncommonly blunt for a legal document of the time, but he stopped short of stating what he believed to have been the exact cause of Mary Rogers’s death. That information, he believed, was far too explicit for the public record. Frederica Loss, in Merritt’s opinion, had been a notorious abortionist. Mary Rogers, he believed, had died while undergoing an abortion under Mrs. Loss’s roof.
In a sense, it was a notion that had been in plain view throughout the entire drama. Virtually every issue of the Herald and many other newspapers of the day carried a large advertisement on its back page for the services of Madame Restell, a “female physician and professor of midwifery,” whose long career as an abortionist had earned her a reputation as “the wickedest woman in New York.” Madame Restell, whose real name was Ann Trow Lohman, had come to New York from England in 1831 and set off on a professional path that would earn her an estimated one million dollars and a lavish Fifth Avenue brownstone known as “The Mansion Built on Baby Skulls.”
At the time of Mary Rogers’s death, Madame Restell was very much in the public eye. In July of 1841—just a few days before Mary Rogers’s body was discovered—Madame Restell was tried in New York’s Court of Special Sessions for administering “certain noxious medicine” and procuring a miscarriage “by the use of instruments, the same not being necessary” for the preservation of life. Although abortion was held to be a misdemeanor offense at the time, a recent provision stated that if the procedure was performed after the quickening of the fetus—the point at which movement could be detected—the act would be prosecuted as manslaughter. Since the case for which Madame Restell was being tried had resulted in the death of the patient, the charge against her was elevated to murder. In spite of the severity of the charge, the proceeding was widely viewed as a show trial; a sop to the city’s clerics and moral reformers who were outraged by the manner in which the police turned a blind eye to Madame Restell’s practices. Although “Madame Killer” was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison, she never served the term.
At the time Madame Restell ran her business from a house on Chambers Street, not far from Phoebe Rogers’s boardinghouse and within view of City Hall. The fashionable address allowed her to draw customers from all walks of life, and her services were tailored accordingly. “In the heart of this Metropolis she holds her bloody empire,” observed the Police Gazette. “Her patients are of three classes, and her treatment has an equal scope.” In an early pamphlet detailing Restell’s “Life and Horrible Practice,” these three categories of treatment were described in detail: “First, there were her powders as a preventative; if these failed, as without the greatest care they might, there were the monthly pills to overcome obstructions; and if these were unsuccessful there, as a last resort, was an asylum in the house of Madame Restell.” There, the account continued, the patient would be subjected to “powerful drugs to produce an abortion, or the use of mechanical means to bring about a premature delivery.”
In addition to her establishment on Chambers Street, Madame Restell also ran a network of abortion parlors that stretched across the river to Hoboken. “It is well known that Madame Restell keeps a large number of apartments…for the accommodation of females in accouchement,” the Police Gazette continued,
and the number that avail themselves of such facilities in a city where licentiousness stalks abroad at midday may be guessed at, but not counted. It is well known that females frequently die in ordinary childbirth. How many, then, who enter her halls of death may be supposed to expire under her execrable butchery? Females are daily, nay, hourly, missing from our midst who never return. Where do they go? What becomes of them? Does funeral bell ever peal a note for their passage? Does funeral train ever leave her door? Do friends ever gather round the melancholy grave? No! An obscure hole in the earth; a consignment to the savage sill of the dissecting knife, or a splash in the cold wave, with the scream of the night blast for a requiem, is the only death service bestowed upon her victims. Witness this, ye shores of Hudson! Witness this, Hoboken beach!
With this reference to the alarming number of bodies washing up on the banks of New York’s rivers—and the pointed mention of the spot where Mary Rogers’s corpse came ashore—the Police Gazette sought to draw a link between the abortionist and the cigar girl. Given the fact that the trial of Madame Restell occurred at the very moment of Mary Rogers’s death, it is not surprising that there should have been an attempt to make a connection, even before the discoveries in Weehawken came to light. Many of the key figures in the Restell trial were also involved in the Mary Rogers drama, most no
tably Judge Mordecai Noah, who presided over the Restell proceedings, and Justice Gilbert Merritt, who took the initial affidavits. James Gordon Bennett, who was served with three counts of libel by Judge Noah during the Restell trial, hinted at the possibility of a “wicked disgrace” while theorizing that Mary Rogers had been imprisoned in a house of assignation. “These dens of iniquity form a society among themselves—governed by their own rules, and marauding upon all decency and respectability,” the Herald charged. “They are even protected by the police—and who ever heard those abominable haunts made the subject of a charge by their Honors of the Sessions?”
The Police Gazette was far less circumspect. “We speak of the unfortunate Mary Rogers,” the journal declared. “Experience and futile effort have proved that we have heretofore followed a wrong trail.”
With Merritt’s accusation of Mrs. Loss, the rumors and suppositions quickly assumed the tone of established fact. Although no official connection between Madame Restell and Frederica Loss could be established, it was assumed that Nick Moore’s Tavern was one of Restell’s outposts, or that Mrs. Loss was one of dozens of enterprising “widow ladies” who had followed in Restell’s footsteps. Some accused Mrs. Loss of having performed the procedure personally, while others assumed that she simply provided facilities for an anonymous roster of physicians. Despite the lack of evidence connecting Madame Restell to the Nick Moore House, she continued to be vilified as the personification of abortion, preying on young women who presumably would otherwise have chosen a more righteous path. One magazine would portray her as a grim-faced harpy, cradling a bat-winged monster with a dead infant in its jaws.
Horace Greeley’s Tribune was the first to go on record with the claim that Mary Rogers had died as a result of an abortion. On November 18, one week after the death of Mrs. Loss, the paper ran a story claiming that the dying woman had sent for Justice Merritt so that she might confess her sins. According to the Tribune account, Mrs. Loss revealed that Mary Rogers had come to her establishment “in company with a young physician who undertook to procure for her a premature delivery.” This procedure, risky enough under the best of circumstances, went disastrously wrong. “While in the hands of her physician she died,” the Tribune continued, “and a consultation was then held as to the disposal of her body. It was finally taken at night by the son of Mrs. Loss and sunk in the river where it was found.”
The Tribune also attempted to explain why the dead woman’s effects were later discovered at the murder thicket. “Her clothes were first tied up in a bundle and sunk in a pond,” the paper reported, “but it was afterwards thought they were not safe there, and they were accordingly taken and scattered through the woods as they were found.” The Tribune did not elaborate on why this course of action would have been thought safer than leaving the clothes in a pond.
On the strength of these new developments, the two elder sons of Mrs. Loss were placed under arrest. As they awaited a formal hearing, Merritt worked to build his case against them. According to the Tribune, Mrs. Loss’s confession left no doubt that her sons had been willing participants in the crime. That being the case, Merritt intended to prosecute them as accessories to murder. “No doubt we can apprehend can be entertained of the truth of this confession,” insisted the Tribune. “Thus has this fearful mystery, which has struck fear and terror to so many hearts, been at last explained away by circumstances in which no one can fail to perceive a Providential agency.” Although the identity of the so-called Swarthy Man—now thought to be Mary Rogers’s physician, rather than her escort—remained unknown, Merritt expressed confidence that he would soon be identified and arrested.
These shocking revelations promised to set off a fresh wave of outrage in the newspapers. Before Greeley’s rivals could fire up their presses, however, Gilbert Merritt stepped forward to smother the new disclosures. The Tribune, he insisted, had gone too far in its reporting. In an attempt to contain the growing speculation about the case, he sent a carefully worded retraction to James Watson Webb, the editor of the rival Courier: “I noticed a statement in the Tribune of this morning relative to a confession said to have been made before me by the late Mrs. Loss, which is entirely incorrect, as no such examination took place, nor could it, from the deranged state of Mrs. Loss’ mind.”
The Tribune refused to back down. Although Greeley now admitted that he had erred in stating that a confession had been made directly to Merritt, he continued to insist that a confession had been made. “We gave the facts as they were told to us by two Magistrates of this City,” the paper proclaimed, “and as we understood them on the authority of a statement made by Mr. Merritt himself to Mayor Morris.” Privately, it was assumed that Merritt’s denial had been made to avoid charges of impropriety in his proceedings against the Kellenbarack boys.
James Gordon Bennett and the staff of the Herald were overjoyed to think that Horace Greeley’s Tribune had botched the story. To underscore his competitor’s gaffe, Bennett reprinted the Tribune’s original story alongside Merritt’s letter of denial. Greeley, whom Bennett had compared unfavorably to a “galvanized squash,” lost no time in striking back: “Our envious neighbors who cannot endure the knowledge that we gave the first development of the Mary Rogers mystery may as well forbear their snarling. They only set the public laughing at their ludicrous misery.” When Greeley repeated his claim that two magistrates had corroborated the story, Bennett demanded their names. The Tribune declined to respond.
Justice Merritt, meanwhile, did his best to stay above the fray. In spite of the denials of his letter to the Courier, he firmly believed that events had transpired exactly as the Tribune had reported, and that the Kellenbarack boys were guilty accomplices. According to some accounts, he had even gone so far as to scour a blueprint of the tavern, seeking to discover a secret chamber in which he believed the abortion had been performed.
If Merritt’s theory was correct, a great many unexplained details of the Mary Rogers saga would now fall into place. One of the more troubling aspects of the investigation had been the frequently reported “apathy” of Phoebe Rogers and Daniel Payne when they were informed of Mary’s death. Mrs. Rogers, in particular, had been visibly distraught on the Sunday of the disappearance, but by Wednesday she appeared stoic to the point of indifference. H. G. Luther, the man who conveyed the unhappy news from Hoboken, was reported to have said, “I distinctly felt that the news was not unexpected.” If, in fact, Payne and Mrs. Rogers had been aware that Mary intended to undergo a risky abortion, their response may be better understood. If the news had come not as a shock but as a confirmation of their worst fears, following several days of anxious worry, they might well have registered a sense of grim resignation rather than the surprise Luther had expected. It would also have been possible that Payne and Mrs. Rogers had already learned of the death through other channels, so that Luther’s report of the recovery of the body came not as news but only as a sad corroboration. In either case, the visitor might well have mistaken their response for an inappropriate lack of emotion.
By the same token, Mrs. Rogers’s anxiety in the early hours of her daughter’s disappearance is more readily understood as concern over a dangerous medical procedure. Several newspapers reported Phoebe Rogers as saying, shortly after her daughter left home on the fatal Sunday, that “in all probability” she would “never see Mary alive again.” At the time, this statement seemed wildly overwrought, as Mary was believed to have gone no farther than Jane Street to visit her aunt, a journey not thought to be especially perilous. Though Mary had not returned in the evening as expected, this was readily explained as the consequence of a heavy thunderstorm. If Phoebe Rogers had genuinely believed that her daughter was simply passing the night with her relative, she would have had no reason for alarm. If, however, she knew that her daughter had gone to an abortionist, she would have had good reason to fear for Mary’s life.
The actions of Alfred Crommelin, too, take on a different shading if considered in this light.
Mary’s two visits to Crommelin’s office just before her disappearance, and the rose she placed through the keyhole of his door, had formed an especially puzzling element of the drama. When Crommelin quarreled with Daniel Payne and made his dramatic exit from the Nassau Street boardinghouse, he pledged to Mary that he would always stand by her in times of need. Very likely her visits to his office indicate that she wished to take him up on the offer. It had been reported in some quarters that Mary went to Crommelin to try to sell him a due bill in the amount of fifty-two dollars, so that she would have the use of the money while Crommelin took on the job of collecting the debt. If Mary intended to undergo an abortion, her need for this money becomes clear: The fee at that time ranged widely between twenty and one hundred dollars. At the same time, Crommelin’s apparent sense of guilt over his failure to act takes on a new significance, as does his rather vehement insistence on acting as the guardian of Mary’s reputation. At the Hoboken inquest, Crommelin maintained that he had “never heard her virtue questioned in the least” and that she had “borne an irreproachable character for chastity and veracity.” The fact that Crommelin felt obliged to offer such assurances might be seen as an example of a man protesting too much. If he was aware that an abortion took place, he may have hoped to shield Mary’s reputation by attesting to her sterling character. If so, his display of chivalry, however well-intentioned, had serious consequences. At one stage Crommelin took it upon himself to discourage the Rogers family from speaking directly with the police or the press, claiming that it would be best if he alone served as the family’s representative. This might have helped to safeguard Mary’s good name, but it could only have impeded the investigation. It is also possible that Crommelin’s agitation on this point had an influence on Dr. Cook, the coroner, when he pronounced that the dead woman had “evidently been a person of chastity and correct habits.” The statement did no favors for Cook’s reputation, and may have discouraged investigators from pursuing a more useful line of inquiry.
The Beautiful Cigar Girl Page 24
