The Beautiful Cigar Girl

by Daniel Stashower

  In 1851, a cheaply produced pamphlet appeared entitled Confession of the Awful and Bloody Transactions of Charles Wallace. The cover identified Wallace as “the fiend-like murderer of Miss Mary Rogers, the beautiful cigar girl of Broadway, New York, whose fate has for several years been wrapt in the most profound mystery.” An obvious hoax, the phony confession fit into a tradition of lurid and sensational pamphlets of the time, describing the murder in terms calculated to shock its readers:

  I kept tightening the cord until her cheeks assumed a purple hue. The blood began to ooze from her nostrils and ears, and at last she fell back on the grass, her hands tightly grasped around my left arm. Hell was swelling in my bosom, and revenge seemed sweeter at that instant than life itself. I felt even if she were to live, she would hate me for this still more than previously. With this thought running in my head, I grew frantic, and kept gradually drawing the ends of the string, and when I came to my senses, I found she was dead. I unwound the fatal rope with a smile upon my countenance.

  The drama was presented in an even more graphic light in Andrew Jackson Davis’s Tale of a Physician: or the Fruits and Seeds of Crime, published in 1869. A popular novelist, Davis was also known as the “Poughkeepsie seer” for his interest in spiritualism—a growing belief in the possibility of communication with the dead—and he claimed to have brought psychic knowledge to his interpretation of the cigar girl’s fate. Davis’s retelling centers on a “celebrated beauty” named Molly Ruciel who is a “selling clerk in a popular down-town store.” Having left her home on a Sunday morning, after leaving word that she intends to spend the day with her aunt, Molly goes instead to a “foeticidal” establishment run by a Madame La Stelle. There, as she prepares to receive treatment from a physician, she pens a heartfelt letter to her mother: “I cannot tell you in language how deeply I have been wronged…Oh! Do not ask who has deceived me. I believed him sincere in all his promises. I relied upon his word. I drank until my senses were lost; then my fears and all my resolutions left me forever!” Sensing that she will not survive the ministrations of her doctor, the subtly named Doctor Morte, Molly adds a poignant conclusion. “I am glad that death is so near,” she insists. “My pride and my hope, my self-respect and ambition, are all gone, dearest mother; and I do not want to outlive the fruit of my temptation and transgression…farewell! Forever farewell!”

  Moments later, as the beautiful patient lies dead before him, Dr. Morte offers a callous epitaph. “Damn bad luck, this hitch!” he declares. “Fact is, the girl was in a devilish bad temper.”

  Whatever the merits of Davis’s claim to psychic insight, he signaled his debt to Poe by quoting from the poem “The Conqueror Worm” at the start of the fatal chapter:

  Out, out are the lights—out all!

  And over her quivering form

  The curtain, a funeral pall,

  Comes down with the rush of a storm.

  Davis’s novel appeared at a time when Poe’s reputation was on the brink of rehabilitation. Poe’s friends had eloquently defended his work and character in the years following Poe’s death, but the effects of Rufus Griswold’s bitter attack continued to stain his reputation. “His heart was as rotten as his conduct was infamous,” wrote one critic in 1854. “Poe was a habitual drunkard, licentious, false, treacherous, and capable of everything that was mean, base, and malignant.” But in Europe, a robust revival had already begun, with the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire taking a leading role. Baudelaire’s lyrical translations would have a profound influence on French literature and helped to inspire the symbolist movement. Where other critics attacked Poe’s “debased” lifestyle, Baudelaire embraced “le pauvre Eddie” as a thumb in the eye of America’s repressive and overly moralistic society. In Germany, Nietzsche and Rilke would find their way to Poe in their turn, joining in the celebration of an artistic martyr, as would Kafka in Prague. “Poe was ill,” wrote Kafka. “He was a poor drunk devil who had no defenses against the world. So he fled into drunkenness. Imagination only served him as a crutch.…Imagination has fewer pitfalls than reality has.”

  In Britain, Poe’s admirers included Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Oscar Wilde praised him as “this marvelous lord of rhythmic expression,” while Swinburne wrote of his “strong and delicate genius, so sure of aim and faultless of touch in all the better and finer part of work he has left us.” America’s literary establishment, meanwhile, remained slow to give ground. Although Hawthorne praised the “force and originality” of Poe’s work, Emerson would dismiss the poet as a “jingle man.”

  John Henry Ingram produced the first significant study of Poe’s life and work in English in 1874, which he expanded to two volumes in 1880. An enthusiastic defender of Poe’s reputation, Ingram also edited a four-volume edition of Poe’s work and corresponded with numerous people who had known the author. Ingram’s work opened the door to further efforts at rehabilitation. The critic George Woodberry published an impressive two-volume biography in 1885, which attempted to give a balanced portrait of Poe while erasing many of Rufus Griswold’s fabrications.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, numerous editions of Poe’s work had appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, with almost all of them reprinting “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” alongside “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” These three “tales of ratiocination,” often grouped together with “The Gold-Bug,” would serve as both the inspiration and the template for the new and wildly popular field of detective fiction. In “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin had exercised his ingenuity to recover an incriminating letter on behalf of a royal personage. It was no accident that “A Scandal in Bohemia,” one of the first stories featuring an “amateur reasoner” named Sherlock Holmes, centered on the recovery of an incriminating letter on behalf of a royal personage. Over the span of some forty years, Poe’s influence would be felt over and over again in the sitting room of Baker Street. In “Rue Morgue,” Dupin had offered a telling comment on the manner in which the police had discarded a theory that seemed to be impossible: “It is not our part, as reasoners, to reject it on account of apparent impossibilities. It is only left for us to prove that these apparent ‘impossibilities’ are, in reality, not such.” Sherlock Holmes would offer numerous variations on this theme over the course of his career. “How often have I said to you,” he tells Watson in The Sign of the Four, “that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  “Poe is the master of all,” wrote Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. “Poe is, to my mind, the supreme original short story writer of all time. His brain was like a seed-pod full of seeds which flew carelessly around, and from which have sprung nearly all our modern types of story. Just think of what he did in his offhand, prodigal fashion, seldom troubling to repeat a success, but pushing on to some new achievement. To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection of crime.…If every man who receives a cheque for a story which owes its springs to Poe were to pay a tithe to a monument for the master, he would have a pyramid as big as that of Cheops.”

  Within the “monstrous progeny” of crime writers, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” exerted a singular fascination. Conan Doyle was just one of many authors who took a special interest in the interplay between crime fiction and factual crimes, even going so far as to apply his fictional detective’s “science of deduction” to a pair of real-life crimes. In The Story of Mr. George Edalji, Conan Doyle offered an eloquent defense of a young lawyer accused in a series of gruesome cattle mutilations, and with The Case of Oscar Slater the author was instrumental in winning the release of a man wrongly imprisoned for murder. Over the years countless other writers would find inspiration in true crime stories to create works of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction, ranging from Browning, Hawthorne, and Melville to Dreiser, Capote, and Mailer.

  Mary Rogers, meanwhile, had been all but forgotten. As Poe’s
reputation and influence flowered, the details of the cigar girl saga slowly faded from public memory. Though she remained lodged in the lore of New York City, and her name was often mentioned alongside other prominent murder victims such as Helen Jewett and Stanford White, the particulars of the crime grew hazy with the passage of years. Over time, as “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” became detached from the saga of the cigar girl, Poe’s interpretation of the murder came to be the accepted view. Anchored between the twin monuments of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” the story made an unlikely progress from the Ladies’ Companion to literary immortality. Although Poe’s facts had been gleaned from incomplete newspaper accounts, and hastily tweaked to accommodate late-breaking developments, the story rose above the chaos that had attended its composition and took on the mantle of established fact. Later critics would marvel over the manner in which Poe had not only solved a crime that baffled the police but also demonstrated the power of ratiocination. As early as 1874, John Ingram felt obliged to remind his readers that Mary Rogers had, in fact, been a real person: “Latterly it has been the fashion (especially by foreigners) to disbelieve that Marie Rogêt’s mystery had any real existence, and that the whole recital was the coinage of the poet’s brain.”

  Poe himself had done a great deal to blur the line between Mary Rogers and Marie Rogêt. In the years following the publication of Tales, he had received inquiries about the case from interested readers. In January of 1848, Poe answered a letter from George Eveleth, an admirer from Maine, in which he responded to a published criticism of the story. “Nothing was omitted in ‘Marie Rogêt’ but what I omitted myself,” Poe declared. “The ‘naval officer’ who committed the murder (or rather the accidental death arising from an attempt at abortion) confessed it; and the whole matter is now well understood—but, for the sake of relatives, this is a topic on which I must not speak further.” This extraordinary and audacious statement, suggesting once again that Poe knew more than he could tell, added a strange and baffling coda to the affair.

  Given the stresses and heavy drinking of the final years of Poe’s life, it is difficult to know how much weight to give to this deceptively offhand remark. The tone echoes the self-congratulatory assertion in “Marie Rogêt” that “all the chief hypothetical details” had been confirmed, and that the identity of Mary Rogers’s killer was an open secret among the New York cognoscenti. Beneath this bland and confident air, however, a number of significant new details struggle to the surface, marking a considerable change of emphasis from the story’s initial publication. Poe’s statement that nothing had been omitted from the story apart from what he omitted himself may well refer to the clumsy editorial intervention at the conclusion of the story—“we have taken the liberty of here omitting, from the MSS. placed in our hands…”—which invited the reader to believe that Poe had initially named the killer, but that cooler heads had moved to suppress the information. If so, it is a clear admission that Poe never intended to name the killer, but for purposes of storytelling naturally wished to make it appear that Dupin had done so.

  More significantly, in his letter to George Eveleth, Poe referred to the swarthy naval officer, whose occupation he had so painstakingly deduced, in quotation marks, as if to qualify or disavow the designation. Possibly Poe meant to suggest that circumstances had forced him to employ this vague title in place of a more specific description, which might have more readily identified the killer. The quotation marks have the effect, however, of implying that the naval officer was perhaps not a naval officer at all. After all of his previous mental gymnastics in establishing the point—the companionship with a “gay but not an abject” young woman; the “well-written and urgent communications” to the newspapers—Poe’s apparent hedging on this point must be seen as a major reversal.

  More remarkable still is his reference to an “accidental death arising from an attempt at abortion.” This is the first and only time that Poe is known to have used that term in connection with the case. Previously he had employed vague euphemisms such as “certain concealments” or “a fatal accident.” The fact that he now mentions the procedure directly suggests that he had come to accept it as the likely cause of death. Even now, however, he preserves his characteristic ambiguity. The offhand manner in which he raises the possibility of an “attempt at abortion,” in a set of parentheses, allows him to vacillate between an “accidental death” and outright murder. But an accidental death while under the care of an inept abortionist is a very different thing from strangulation at the hands of an enraged lover. In “Marie Rogêt,” Poe devoted considerable attention to the aftermath of the murder: “He is alone with the ghost of the departed. He is appalled by what lies motionless before him. The fury of his passion is over, and there is abundant room in his heart for the natural awe of the deed.” This is not a scene that would have attended a botched medical procedure, no matter how tragic.

  All of these reversals pale next to Poe’s unambiguous assertion that the villain, naval officer or otherwise, had confessed to the crime, only to have the matter hushed up in deference to a presumably influential family. The statement echoes Poe’s claim in “Marie Rogêt” that a second person had admitted guilt, in addition to the confession attributed to Mrs. Loss. Poe’s repeated insistence on this confession, one of the few points on which he remained consistent, is extremely provocative. While it is entirely possible that his dogged persistence is simply another example of poetic license, akin to the embellishments of the “Balloon Hoax,” one is forced to consider the possibility that at some stage he may have gained inside knowledge of the case. On his return to New York in 1844, Poe’s work at the Evening Mirror placed him almost literally on the doorstep of the Rogers boardinghouse. In his work at the Mirror, the Broadway Journal, and elsewhere, he would have come into close contact with newsmen who had covered the case and been instrumental in the investigation. (Although it is not known whether he ever worked at the Police Gazette, he could easily have come into contact with the paper’s reporters.) Poe came to know Horace Greeley of the Tribune well enough to ask him for a fifty-dollar loan. Justice Mordecai Noah, who had recently returned to the world of journalism as the editor of the Sunday Times and Messenger, was one of the three witnesses who spoke in Poe’s defense during his libel suit against Thomas Dunn English. It is natural that these men, upon meeting the author of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” should have spoken of their involvement with the Mary Rogers case. If there was gossip about the case, or some form of open secret concerning a hushed-up confession, it is natural that Poe should have learned about it. Possibly the promise of immunity offered by Governor Seward had brought forth information that remained protected under the terms of confidentiality. At the very least, Poe would have been party to a great deal of speculation as to what had actually occurred. Poe would naturally have tried to assimilate whatever knowledge or insight he gained into his previous view of the affair.

  John Ingram, Poe’s early biographer, would add to the confusion about the mysterious naval officer. Writing of “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” in 1874, Ingram insisted that “the narrative was founded on fact, although the incidents of the tragedy differed widely from those recounted in the tale. The naval officer implicated was named Spencer.” Ingram offered no elaboration and gave no source for this identification, though it may have been suggested to him in a letter from Sarah Helen Whitman, the young widow who had enjoyed Poe’s attentions in his last years. Subsequent scholars would track this fleeting reference to a prominent seagoing family headed by a Captain William Spencer. At first glance, Captain Spencer appeared to be a promising suspect. He was known to have been in New York both in 1838 and 1841, and his family was sufficiently influential to hush up even the gravest of scandals—his brother, John Canfield Spencer, was President Tyler’s secretary of war. On closer examination, however, the fact that Captain Spencer would have been forty-eight years old at the time of the murder tends to cut against Poe�
��s portrait of a “young Lothario.”

  Captain Spencer’s nephew, a young midshipman named Philip Spencer, also makes an intriguing suspect. In 1842, the year after Mary Rogers’s murder, the younger Spencer was hanged at sea after attempting to stage a mutiny, in an incident that helped to inspire Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. But Poe’s “swarthy naval officer” theory relied upon the villain’s complicity in Mary Rogers’s earlier disappearance in 1838, three years prior to the murder. At that time, Philip Spencer was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy at an academy in Schenectady. It is unlikely that he could have courted and seduced a young woman who lived in New York City, some one hundred and fifty miles away.

  Whatever the merits of the two Spencers as suspects in the crime, it is possible that the subsequent nationwide attention surrounding the Philip Spencer drama sparked Poe’s imagination and caused him to fasten onto the name. In regaling Sarah Helen Whitman with the story of Marie Rogêt’s inspiration, Poe may have indulged his poetic fancies. A mention of the notorious young Spencer—who, like Poe’s naval officer, was noted for his debaucheries—would have offered a tidy and sensational resolution.

  In the absence of more concrete evidence against the Spencer family, one is tempted to seek the guilty party closer to home. In the decades following Mary Rogers’s death, even as the notion of her death in an abortion parlor gained acceptance, there remained an insistent thread of speculation over the exact chain of events that had led to the tragedy. If, indeed, Mary Rogers died during a failed abortion, many questions remained unanswered. The body had been found covered with bruises and scrapes. Her arms were tied together at the wrists by a heavy rope. The signs of manual strangulation (fingermark bruises) were plainly seen on her throat, along with a lace garrote buried deep in her flesh. Clearly this had been no ordinary medical mishap. In all the many attempts to understand the cigar girl’s fate, these troubling inconsistencies remained. How and why had this violence occurred and, above all, who was responsible?