by Brad Ricca
Since coming to Washington, Grace had been working for twenty-four hours straight. She was trying to absorb the particulars of the case before all the fiends ran and hid in the dark. Grace noticed that the house itself had many blind spots, leading her to believe that Lottie had been in the kitchen when the murderer approached her from behind. Grace guessed that the assailant entered while Lottie was washing dishes, partially choked her, dragged her into the other room, threw her onto the bed, and afterward hit her on the forehead. Grace also noticed something on the photographs of the body. There were small, crescent-shaped marks on Lottie’s neck. Grace thought these might be fingerprint marks, possibly of a woman assailant.
On the same day of Grace’s first article, Lottie May Brandon was laid to rest in her hometown of Baltimore. Her husband accompanied her body on the train. In her article two days later, Grace recommended that Lottie’s body be exhumed so that a more scientific, methodical study could be done of the marks on her neck. Grace knew this was a bombshell request, but there was so little physical evidence at the site—none, really—and the eyewitnesses were faulty at best, so she felt as if she had no other choice. “Let us work from the beginning and in a scientific manner,” Grace wrote in her column. “We cannot have fallen premises from which to work.”
As Grace continued her investigation, the Annapolis, Washington, and Baltimore police were busy picking up threads from all sorts of directions. Everyone had a theory. Church sermons titled “A Mysterious Murder or Who Killed Lottie Brandon?” were delivered to bursting congregations. The police, under the direction of Marshal Carter, thought they had identified a primary suspect. On the day Lottie was killed, “two colored girls” saw a man wearing a pink shirt escape the Brandon home, but they were deathly afraid to come forward. The girls consulted their mother, then a minister, before going to the authorities. The man they saw was a worker at the ice plant of Parlett and Parlett, they said. When Lottie died, the police found a half block of ice melting on the Brandon front steps.
When Val Brandon left his wife that fateful morning, he gave her a one-dollar bill that he left on the buffet. That afternoon, the suspect was seen at Martin’s Bar, watching people play pool and drinking beer, where he changed a dollar bill for drinks. The suspect claimed he had won it playing craps. An inveterate drinker and gambler, “Scoop” (his nickname) lived with a woman just around the back of the Brandon home. The police tracked him down and arrested him. His face was badly scratched. They brought him into the sheriff’s office. They locked the door and slowly circled the suspect, who sat chained to a chair. His name was John Snowden, age thirty-four. He was “unusually black,” according to the papers.
At the sheriff’s, Snowden’s chair was up right close to the table. Marshal Carter and his men presented all of this evidence to his face. One of the men then hit Snowden in the head. Carter took out his gun. It hovered at Snowden’s temple. Carter threatened to shoot him. A bottle of whiskey was brought in. Carter ordered Snowden to drink it all. The pistol was still there. Snowden choked down the brown liquid. Carter then told the prisoner to take his clothes off. The men pulled the chair back. Marshal Carter asked him if he had killed Mrs. Brandon.
“No sir, no sir,” said Snowden.
Carter nodded and his men pulled back John Snowden’s arms and tipped the chair back farther. Carter turned the gun around in his hand and brought it down hard, crushing John Snowden’s balls down to nothing. Snowden’s eyes went blank and he vomited. Then he screamed.
He did not confess.
Carter and his men knew that all of their evidence, no matter how many papers it sold, was circumstantial. So the various offices and factions finally listened to Grace, and on a rainy night, they set aside the withered garland and dug up the casket of Lottie May Brandon. Val was kept away from the gravesite, but they let him walk outside Emergency Hospital, where they conducted their exam. He walked around and around.
During this second autopsy, the fingernail marks on her neck were found to be inconclusive. But the chief doctor, Dr. Walton Hopkins, looked under Lottie’s own fingernails and found what he proclaimed was black skin. Dr. Hopkins also said that someone had assaulted her. When they finished, the men took her back to the Sardo funeral home, then back to Glenwood cemetery. When they placed Lottie May back in the earth, they replaced the flowers as carefully as possible. Val did not stay to attend this second ceremony. One was enough.
Ella Rush Murray was married to the pastor whose advice the two girl witnesses had sought. A local columnist, she had read Grace’s reports and was profoundly affected by them, especially by the exhumation of Lottie’s body. Murray wrote in the Washington Times:
Only a woman knows just how precious to her is her own body. Only a woman knows that to a woman the chief horror of a violent death is the fact that autopsies are involved; that all the care a woman has exercised to keep her body sacred and inviolate is forgotten, and the alien hands of everyone investigating the case are privileged to examine.
And today when they lay her away for this second and last time; when Mrs. Lottie Brandon as a tangible thing passes out for all time from this murder investigation, may it not be possible that the mental image of Lottie Brandon as he last saw her, smiling up into his face, kissing him good-by, with the light in her eyes telling of the great hope that she was cherishing—may it not be that that image will so persist that Val Brandon will never rest.
Grace had been right again. Her suspicion to reexamine Lottie’s body had resulted in new evidence, though in a slightly different direction. Grace wasn’t sure about that. There were other new theories now, including Lottie’s having sudden-onset eclampsia, which had killed her cold in her bed. But that skin under her nails, and this man who lived outside the backyard, were questions that couldn’t be dismissed. One of Lottie’s shoes was in the living room, not the bedroom. And her underclothes had been taken off. These were only pieces of a still-incomplete puzzle, but Grace had helped find them. The Baltimore police, who had still failed to get a confession out of Snowden, weren’t as pleased. Detective Dougherty of the Baltimore police said that Grace was only an “amateur detective” who was in D.C. representing the New York Police Department. She was a carpetbagger.
“I am a lawyer, and investigator,” responded Grace. “And as such am trying to solve the mystery of the murder of Mrs. Brandon. As to the ‘amateur detective,’ it seems to me that Dougherty and some of his associates of the Baltimore police have played this part to perfection.”
She added, “They failed to rope off the premises where the murdered woman was found—didn’t interview Mrs. King, and so forth.”
The next day, Grace was with Detective Dougherty and his men as they were going to question the wife of John Snowden. As the police car rolled to the curb, Grace began to step in.
“You cannot get into this machine, madam,” said Dougherty. Grace didn’t understand. There was plenty of room on the seat.
“Why not?” she said. “I am a member of the New York Police Department.” She flashed her shiny new badge.
“I don’t care whom you represent, madam, you cannot go in this machine,” Dougherty said firmly. “I know that you are a newspaper reporter and that you are writing articles for a newspaper about this case under your own name.” He shut the door.
“You’re not giving that Negro a fair show,” said Grace, quickly. “I’ll get a lawyer for him.”
“That’s your privilege,” Dougherty said. “You can do what you please. If you wish, you may follow me in another machine.”
“I won’t follow you!” Grace said.
“Well, I shan’t be sorry if you don’t,” he replied.
Grace knew that Dougherty and his men had given Snowden the third degree in Baltimore. She knew they had done terrible things to him. But she also knew that the man had scratches on his cheeks and that Lottie’s fingernails had skin under them. There was also the matter of the ice on the doorstep. Grace couldn’t deny that. But she still
felt as if he was being railroaded.
The whole town was shaken by the case. Alissa Franc summed up the shock: “We have learned that a woman can be murdered in a little row of houses with friendly neighbors surrounding her on every side, watching her movements, as such neighbors do.
“And we pause to think,” she said.
John Snowden was charged and remanded over for trial. Grace quietly visited him once before she left. She remembered all the other prisoners she had talked to over the years, all staring at her from locked rooms. She left for New York City. The evidence had run its course and she was hailed in the papers for having solved the case of Lottie May Brandon.
18
Her Last Bow
Glasses clinked together as people looked toward the podium in the Café Boulevard on Second Avenue. The ballroom was filled with women in dresses, the “Vere de Veres of the East Side,” all with an eye toward the empty podium in front. The occasion that night, on November 15, 1917, was the annual banquet of the Women Lawyers Association. The keynote speaker was none other than Mrs. Grace Humiston herself, fresh off her latest victory in Baltimore. The specialty of that night’s festivities was further heightened by the recent vote to allow suffrage in New York. Celebrating that moment with rousing speeches were Katherine Devereux Blake and New York Supreme Court Justice Charles L. Guy, among others. They, of course, saved Grace for last. When she finally arrived, the women at the tables pointed with their gloved hands. They greeted her with warm, thankful applause as she was introduced as the hero of the Ruth Cruger case. Dressed in black, Grace seemed to take in the light of the room itself as the clapping grew before finally settling down.
The year had been long for the woman in black. There in that room, layered with white tablecloths and champagne glasses, it was the perfect time for Grace to tell her oft-repeated story of starting out as a nighttime lawyer and of her work founding the People’s Law Firm. She talked about the muggy southern turpentine camps and of Sunny Side, and of the innocent men and women she had worked to set free. When Grace talked, it was always more about the cases than it was about herself. When she spoke of the Cruger case, it seemed like a shadow was crossing her face.
For the association to invite her to speak was a great honor. This was her year, after all. Not only had she solved the Cruger case, but she had been given her own independent bureau within the New York City Police Department for the sole purpose of finding missing girls. She had spawned a deep investigation into police corruption and the madman Cocchi was about to be tried in Italy. Grace talked about the importance of her work with the police department—as the first consulting woman detective in New York—and the ongoing work she was doing in that role. She had just begun writing a series of syndicated newspaper articles about white slavery, wayward girls, and immigration that included case details and advice for parents. Grace was being asked to consult on cases all over the country. In this room of lady lawyers, she was not only one of them, she was the best of them. The applause was strong.
It was a wonderful speech, the ladies agreed, as they smiled at each other over their own clapping hands. Grace motioned to them all. She was not done talking. Not yet.
Grace mentioned Camp Upton, the brand-new army training camp on Long Island near Yaphank. It had been built as the primary staging ground for New York’s brave draftees for the Seventy-seventh Army Division before they left for France and Germany. The camp had just opened in September and was still a busy hive of soldiers, workers, and personnel. Many in the crowd had a brother, friend, lover, or husband who had gone, or feared going, to Camp Upton. They all knew what the camp really was—a jumping point to the trenches of the war.
“At Camp Upton,” Grace said, to the quieted room of lady lawyers before her, “there are six hundred girls who are about to become mothers—who have no husbands.
“It has been reported to me,” Grace continued, over the sudden silence of the crowd, “that seven of these little mothers are dead. I have proved the facts of this in the case of two of them and am going down tomorrow to get the facts in regard to the others.”
The large room with the white tablecloths and crystal glasses became quiet. But there was a familiar anger underneath it all. In a corner of the room, a reporter wrote furiously, checking with others to make sure he had heard that number correctly.
Six hundred girls.
The next day, the commanding general of Camp Upton was in his office, a wooden house on a small hill in the center of the camp’s skinny parade ground. General J. Franklin Bell stood at his window and watched his camp at full life. Because the camp had very low buildings, you could see the house from almost anywhere you stood. Carved out of the marshlands in a remarkable space of four hell-bent months, Upton was built upon sixteen thousand acres of cleared Long Island brush five miles around. Its goal was to house and train 44,000 men, give or take, all under Bell’s iron command.
Once the camp finally opened on September 5, 1917, New Yorkers made up the first 30 percent of its tenants, who took five days to get there by the Long Island Railroad. When six hundred men left Carlton Avenue in Brooklyn on the same day, there was semi-rioting. Five women fainted right there on the street. There were girls kissing every man who was leaving. This first wave was of single men; the army didn’t want sons or fathers. Not until later. Once they arrived at Upton, the boys were given sixteen weeks of intensive instruction in theoretical and practical warfare. Like the song, it was “Goodbye Broadway, Hello France.”
Bell was a two-star general. His white hair was parted down the middle with the sides clipped up high. His wool, button-down army uniform framed his serious face. He wore a tank watch and round glasses. The camp police stood watch in a tower across from his office, looking down at the cars and men. Bell knew the reporters were on the way. And perhaps others. Perhaps even her.
In front of him, on a desk that held troop assignments and maps of France, was a copy of the Washington Post, which contained the story of Grace’s allegations. Bell sat down at his desk and wrote an official response. There was music playing in the background. With Bell, there was always music in the background. Bell took pride in practical instruction, but his other goal was to create soldiers who could not only fight but also sing. He purchased musical instruments and mass quantities of copies of popular songs to create what he termed the greatest chorus in the world. At Camp Upton, Long Island, “A singing man is a fighting man,” General Bell said.
“It is not possible that even one girl could have died at Camp Upton much less seven,” Bell wrote. “Since references in the morning papers to Mrs. Humiston’s address were called to my attention early this morning, I have been diligently investigating every possible source of accurate knowledge or information. These efforts were begun nearly ten hours ago, and thus far I have been unable to locate any one who has heard of anything furnishing the slightest foundation for Mrs. Humiston’s allegations.”
“I cannot conceive of any such condition existing here,” wrote Bell, “and I don’t believe it does exist. I don’t see how such conditions could exist without my hearing of them, and I have heard of no such conditions.”
“I have been expecting a call from her all day,” the general said. “It is now 6 P.M., but I have not heard of Mrs. Humiston being at Camp Upton. I shall continue this investigation, and if I ever succeed in finding any foundation whatever for Mrs. Humiston’s allegation I shall frankly disclose what I learned to the press.” Bell signed the letter sharply and had it sent off to the New York Times. He looked back out onto his camp, now darker and slower, and wondered if Grace Humiston was already here without his knowing it, hiding somewhere in the shadows in her black hat.
Behind the scenes, Camp Upton began taking immediate precautionary measures. All the outlying saloons were closed and higher security measures were imposed, including the frisking of all visitors, even women. In addition, federal deputies patrolled not only the camp but also the locality around it. Bell reiterated the g
rand standing order that “No women are permitted to be in company barracks after retreat in the late afternoon. And at no time are they permitted to go about the camp unescorted.”
After Bell’s statement ran in the newspaper, another reporter asked him if there would be any special precautions this Sunday, which was always visitor’s day at Upton. Bell finally flashed some anger.
“Look here,” he glowered, with an old whisper of a Kentucky cadence. “If you think Mrs. Humiston, or any others person, can think of any measures we are not already using I shall be glad to put them into effect.” But Grace Humiston couldn’t be reached or found anywhere. To the public, Upton was full of wholly American, New York boys. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran accounts of their individual exploits like they were one-reel comedies. Newly arrived Private James F. O’Brien calmly halted an important second lieutenant on the company street and borrowed a match. Charlie Holmes said, “It makes me sick to hear that mess call. I have to wash about a million pots and pans in the kitchen every day.” John A. Beyer said he would “give a whole lot of money for twenty minutes in Brooklyn.” Major Morris, who commanded “the Negro troops, caught a bootlegger in camp today, and confiscated three quart bottles of gin.” While a score of the men watched, he poured the liquor on the ground in front of his tent. One of the sentries, with a grin from ear to ear, saluted and said, “Please sir, I would like to sleep with ma nose on that spot tonight, if you don’t mind.”
