by Andrew Hunt
So Miriam Tanner remained shielded from the ugly truth—for now, at least.
* * *
On a breezy, overcast morning in May, I parked beside a curb in Federal Heights, a few houses down from the Tanner place. I opened a brown bag of taffy, ripped wax paper off of a piece, and chewed the candy—lemon—as I watched movers carefully load the Tanners’ furniture into a long moving van. Miriam Tanner, in a wide-brimmed hat and willowy green dress, watched from the lawn with a stoic expression. Behind her stood Hans and Anna Pfalzgraf, and they’d occasionally talk to her or offer her a supportive rub on the shoulder while the movers did their work. It began to sprinkle lightly as the men in overalls carried the last of the furniture into the truck, closed the twin rear doors, and sealed them with a sliding bar. Miriam Tanner embraced Anna, then Dr. Pfalzgraf, and then climbed into a maroon Nash, started the engine, and drove away. Later, I found out she moved into a modest bungalow in Provo, to be closer to her sisters.
Dr. Pfalzgraf contacted me a few days later. He asked if we could meet in a secluded spot, far from the city. We agreed to the Bonneville Salt Flats, about as remote a location as you could get. We set up the meeting for a Saturday, so I wouldn’t have to ask for a night off. It was a hot day in the West Desert, and I parked my car about fifteen miles from the foothills of the Silver Island Mountains. Here, in this vast salt pan, the horizon where sky and earth touch create the illusion of blue meeting white. This flat, uninhabitable land was once part of a mighty saltwater lake that would’ve given the Great Lakes a run for their money. Thousands of years later, the Great Salt Lake to the north was the only water that was left of that lake. Down here, these salt flats were all that remained, named after Benjamin Bonneville, a French-born U.S. Army officer and fur trapper who explored the Great Basin in 1833.
I popped open my timepiece and took a glance: 9:02 A.M. He was two minutes late. Not like him to show up late for an appointment, I thought, especially one as important as this. Ten minutes passed before a black speck appeared on the horizon, stirring a dust cloud behind it. As the car drew closer, I stepped out onto the crystal earth and walked a ways, my shoes scraping salty ground with each step.
The fancy car, a two-toned black and tan Pierce-Arrow, came to a halt about a hundred feet away. Dr. Pfalzgraf’s security guard got out of the car, dressed in the same type of outfit once worn by Floyd Samuelson, and opened the back driver’s side door. Pfalzgraf stepped onto the running board, wearing a burgundy homburg on his head, a navy blue suit, and a tie almost as white as his shirt, which was almost as white as the bleached earth below our feet. Sunlight bounced off his spectacles, making it difficult to see his beady eyes. His white mustache had the softness of a shaving brush, and it was long enough that you couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or frowning. There was no missing the sadness imprinted on his face. It could be found in his sagging jowls, the bags under his eyes, and his perpetual frown. Here was a man who had lost so much and, unlike Miriam Tanner, had not been shielded from the bitter realities of betrayal. I had a hard time imagining the anguish he must’ve been feeling as he walked toward me, carrying a briefcase, and stopped a few feet away.
Before saying a single word, he unbuckled the briefcase and showed me the contents. Stacks of money, held together by paper bands. He’d said he’d give me the money—a hundred thousand dollars—in exchange for his films that C. W. Alexander stole from him. I stepped up and lifted a stack and flipped through twenties with my thumb. Tempting offer. I formed a catalog in my mind of all the things I could buy with that money: New house. New car. Start a college fund for the kids. Tickets for a South Seas cruise for the whole family …
I tossed the stack back into the briefcase and said no thanks. Those films were my security, I told him, and I’d return them to him when I felt safe again. I figured there were better ways, more honest ways, of making money than giving Dr. Pfalzgraf something that already belonged to him, and taking a hundred thousand in exchange for it. I assured him the films would be safe in my hands, that I’d never in a million years use them the way C. W. Alexander did. He believed me, buckled his briefcase closed, and climbed back into his car. For a long while, I watched Pfalzgraf’s speeding car heading north toward the highway, sending clouds of dust blowing across the flats.
* * *
The July 24 fireworks ended around half past ten with an unforgettable grand finale that set off a multicolored fire in the skies above Salt Lake City and rattled windows and shook fence posts for miles. Once it was all over, people hurried to their cars and created traffic jams in all directions. The congestion reached a virtual standstill on nearby 700 East, with endless lines of headlamps and taillights going north and south. We stayed put as the park emptied, and Sarah Jane gave me a “July 24 present” in an oval-shaped white box, topped with a red bow. I removed the lid, tore aside the tissue paper, and lifted a brand-new white Stetson out of the box. It was a joyous moment, full of laughter and smiles, and even Roscoe was chuckling and telling me not to lose this one. I removed that loose-fitting police cap and tossed it in the backseat of the squad car. Wearing my new Stetson tipped far back, I wrapped an arm around my children and pulled them close to me and told them I loved them. Before we parted ways, I kissed Clara good night, and she whispered in my ear, “Be safe. I’ll see you in the morning.”
The night crept slowly. We spent our entire shift warning drunken revelers to calm down and issuing noise ordinance tickets. Right before dawn, we took a break from it all, and I drove up steep L Street to the top of the high hill on the northern end of the valley, parking on a dry, weed-choked plateau that real estate developers hadn’t reached yet. From here, you could see the entire Salt Lake Valley, with tiny lights twinkling like stars. A warm wind from the west fanned grasses around me and dried sweat beads on my forehead. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine this place back before the temple and the tall buildings were built, before autos and streetcars filled asphalt streets, before people owned telephones and radios and washing machines. Back when there weren’t any houses standing, and pioneers had to clear the land and build crude dwellings out of whatever they could find around here.
I wondered what those pioneers would think if they arrived at this place, in this day and age, with its electricity and modern conveniences. Would they think we men and women of today had gotten too soft? Or that we’ve lost our pioneer spirit? Would they feel sorrow when they saw what had become of their City of Saints, their Zion in the Desert? Salt Lake City had turned into just another modern metropolis, filled with as much crime and corruption as any other American city. What would those vanguard settlers of 1847 say if they found out about Helen Pfalzgraf and C. W. Alexander, Seymour Considine, Parley Tanner, and Floyd Samuelson? Would they forgive us for what we’d done to the haven they created, the place where they could escape mob violence and persecution in the Midwest?
“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” said Roscoe, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground and grinding it under his heel. “Not like we’re getting any radio alerts.”
Over breakfast at the Liberty Luncheonette on Third South, Roscoe lifted my spirits by joking about the unsavory characters we’d encountered in the middle of the night. Roscoe was that rare kind of friend who could cheer me up with a few well-timed quips. When I laughed, he laughed, and we kept feeding into each other, until we were both red-faced and barely able to finish what was left on our breakfast plates. In that booth in the back of the Liberty, I forgot all about the pioneers and the trials they faced in their times, and I turned my attention to the here and now, to the good things in life, the simple moments, when a laugh between friends made all the difference in the world.
* * *
At the end of my shift, I noticed the small parcel sitting in my locker, wrapped in brown paper, tied closed with twine. It had been in there for weeks, on the upper shelf, collecting dust. I pulled it out. It was addressed to “Mrs. Vera Higginbotham, 722 2nd Ave N., Twin Falls, Idaho.” Helen P
falzgraf’s mother, that wispy phantom of a woman I saw when I visited Twin Falls. Despite our briefest of encounters, her face had been branded into my mind, and I knew I’d remember her until the day I die. Maybe it’s time to mail this, I thought, as I read my own writing on the package.
I left the Public Safety Building about quarter past eight and walked two blocks south to the post office, parcel in hand. I entered a building with cathedral ceilings. My footsteps echoed against marble floors, and I was pleased to see there weren’t any lines that early in the morning. I wound through the velvet-rope maze, approached the counter, and slipped my parcel underneath the wrought-iron bars. The postman put it on a scale and told me I owed twenty cents to send it first class.
I fished coins out of my pocket and dropped a pair of dimes in front of him. He slipped a receipt across the counter. I watched him take the package and walk it over to a bin at the end of a long table and drop it in.
It was out of my hands now.
The parcel contained the First National Pictures audition film that Helen Pfalzgraf appeared in before her death. It was accompanied by a slip of paper with my writing on it: Your Helen. That canister of footage was one of the few remnants to show that Helen Pfalzgraf had once lived and breathed and walked on this earth.
And dreamed.
Maybe Mrs. Higginbotham would be at home to receive the package when the postman delivered it in a few days. Maybe there’d come a time when she could figure out a way to smuggle the film out of the house while her brute of a husband was off at work or out like a light.
Maybe she could find a projectionist willing to show her the movie. Then she’d see what I saw: Helen had talent. The woman could act. She might’ve gone places, if only she’d been allowed to live.
Maybe, for a few short, bittersweet minutes, Mrs. Higginbotham would feel like she was being reunited with her daughter one last time, like being in a dream one never wants to end.
Maybe she would find some peace then.
Maybe.
A Note on the History Behind the Novel
The explanatory note that follows contains spoilers about this novel and should only be read after you are finished with the book. That is why I have placed it at the end. City of Saints is a heavily fictionalized version of an actual unsolved homicide case in Utah, the murder of socialite Dorothy Dexter Moormeister on February 21, 1930. The Moormeister homicide was one of the most famous cases of the day and generated a mountain of publicity. For a good two years after it happened, newspapers across the country—especially the local press—reported extensively on developments in the investigation. Interestingly, the case is now largely forgotten, even in Utah.
I lived in Salt Lake City from the time I moved there with my family at age ten in 1978 until I took a position teaching history at the University of Waterloo in 1997 (I was also away for one year at graduate school in Wisconsin). During that period, and in all the times I went back to the state to visit my family, I had never once heard of this case. It had been consigned to an obscure spot in the annals of Utah history. I stumbled across it quite by accident a few years ago while going through some digitized old newspapers. I became obsessed with the case and continued to dig up everything I could find. In more recent years, a handful of articles on the Moormeister affair have appeared in local Utah publications—most notably, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Deseret News, and Salt Lake magazine—but these proved to be little more than fleeting footnotes to an otherwise forgotten case. This is puzzling, because the Moormeister story is packed with drama and twists.
Before writing City of Saints, I researched the Moormeister case and even considered writing a “true crime” history of the murder. Unfortunately, court documents and extensive press coverage are all that remains of the affair, and writing a solid history demands more than that. Any historian will tell you that a variety of sources are needed to reconstruct a vivid panorama of the past. These include memoirs, diaries, correspondence, personal papers, police files, and, ideally, oral histories. Regrettably, much of this type of information is unavailable. All of the participants in the case are dead, and they did not leave behind any useful accounts about it. So I opted for a fictionalized version of these events, with a satisfactory resolution to the murder at the end of the novel—a basic requirement of all mysteries.
If you have read City of Saints, you will notice right away that certain fragments of the real history have been preserved, such as the date of Helen Kent Pfalzgraf’s murder, which falls on February 21, 1930—the same date Dorothy Dexter Moormeister was killed (her body was found the next day). Like Helen, Dorothy was murdered in a rural and largely isolated part of Salt Lake Valley called the Pole Line Road, now in Granger. Today, Granger has been absorbed into West Valley City, and those once uninhabited parts of the valley have now been filled up with suburbs, big-box stores, strip malls, restaurants, and convenience marts.
There are other similarities between the novel and actual events. Dr. Frank Moormeister, Dorothy’s husband and the inspiration behind Dr. Hans Pfalzgraf, was a respected physician who inherited a substantial sum of money from a deceased German uncle and lived a double life as an abortionist. By all accounts, he was a safe and high-priced practitioner and sometimes traveled across the country to ply his trade. Dr. Moormeister was so dismayed by the inept official investigation of his wife’s murder that he hired a high-priced sleuth, University of California professor and pioneering criminologist Dr. E. O. Heinrich, to come to Salt Lake City to find the murderer. Heinrich failed at the task, but he was still paid handsomely. The investigation of the Moormeister homicide, conducted largely by the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office with some participation by the Salt Lake City Police Department, was heavily criticized at the time as a textbook bumbling effort. To make matters worse, the Moormeister murder came at the heels of a string of unsolved homicides in Salt Lake City, including the murder of twelve-year-old June Nelson (the inspiration for Hazel Hamilton) on either December 31, 1928, or January 1, 1929. These unsolved cases ultimately undermined Sheriff Clifford Patten, who was blasted over and over again in the press for his alleged mishandling of the investigation. Voters booted him out of office in the fall of 1930.
Like Helen in City of Saints, Dorothy was on the verge of leaving her relatively brief marriage, and had she lived, she most likely would have lit out for Los Angeles. She befriended actor Walter Pidgeon, frequently went back and forth between Salt Lake City and L.A., and had a circle of acquaintances in the City of Angels. At the time of her murder, the press hinted heavily that she was having an affair with Pidgeon. Dorothy appears to have been a serial adulteress, carrying on affairs with various men at once, including so-called “mining man” Charles Peter (the inspiration for C. W. Alexander) and Prince Farid XI of Persia, whom she met in Europe. Her relationship with Farid is shrouded in mystery. We know more about her involvement with Peter, who called himself a “mining engineer” but was actually a sketchy promoter of sorts. In the mid-1920s, he tried to con Dr. Moormeister out of a substantial sum of money, and, not surprisingly, he became a prime suspect in Dorothy’s murder. He swore he had nothing to do with killing her, although it came out in the coroner’s inquest that he and Dorothy were having a stormy affair. The sheriff’s office eventually scratched Peter off the list of suspects, due to a lack of evidence.
In another parallel between the book and real life, Dr. Moormeister had a daughter, Peggy, by his previous marriage to a woman killed in an auto accident in 1917. Peggy, the inspiration for Anna in City of Saints, was quite close to Dorothy. The two were more like sisters than stepmother and stepdaughter, and Dorothy’s death left Peggy devastated.
In an age that predated television, DVDs, and the Internet, the Moormeister affair (as it was then known) became a soap opera of sorts. New developments kept the investigation in the newspapers for a couple of years. There were several men who took credit for the murder, most of them mentally unstable convicts doing time in prisons for lesser cri
mes. These wannabes had too much time on their hands, overactive imaginations, and access to newspapers, crime magazines, and gossip rags. Committing a brutal murder such as this would enhance their credibility among their fellow inmates. Thus, the bogus confessions kept the headlines coming.
Adding another layer to the mystery was a series of break-ins at Dr. Moormeister’s Salt Lake office, in which files and other odds and ends were stolen. These culminated with a bizarre event that happened on February 5, 1931. Someone telephoned Moormeister to set up a nighttime appointment. The doctor showed up at the agreed-upon time, only to have a harrowing encounter with a masked gunman, whom Moormeister managed to force out into the hallway. The assailant threatened to shoot the doctor, but Moormeister said he would summon the police. The gunman fled. Moormeister told the police he had no idea what the gunman wanted.
Another queer turn involved Frank Snyder, a thirty-eight-year-old Salt Lake City department store employee and widower who knew Dorothy Moormeister. Snyder, subject of an investigation by sheriff’s deputies for his involvement in the case, took part in a night of heavy drinking with several friends at taverns and in his hotel room on the night of May 4, 1931, and into the wee hours of May 5. An unknown individual—or individuals—lured him to a secluded stretch of highway out near the airport and the Great Salt Lake and shot him to death. Eyewitnesses spoke of seeing Synder with a blond woman, and police found numerous empty liquor bottles in a hotel room where Snyder and some friends were partying. Sheriff’s deputies remained vague about Snyder’s involvement in the Moormeister slaying, although it came out in the press that he allegedly knew someone who had information about jewels stolen from Dorothy’s body at the time of her murder. The Snyder killing, like the Moormeister homicide, was never solved.
Other unusual events transpired, too many to list here.
By 1932, the case had gone as cold as the snow where Dorothy’s broken corpse was found. The Lindbergh kidnapping bumped it out of the newspapers. Salt Lakers moved on. The public forgot. Every now and then, an article would appear stating the obvious: We still don’t know who killed Dorothy Dexter Moormeister. At the time Dr. Moormeister died of a heart attack at age sixty-two on January 13, 1941, police still listed his wife’s murder as unsolved.
