by Brad Ricca
Grace’s point, as always, was simple and practical, but it still sounded radical. “Just because girls bob their hair, wear short skirts, dance crazy dances and look a little more sophisticated than girls of the last two generations looked, does not indicate with absolute certainty—as many of our public figures have announced in bold print—that the younger generation is on the road to ruin,” she said.
Grace fought many battles in her career, both as a lawyer and as a detective. But her approach never varied when it came to rallying others to the cause at hand. Years earlier, while testifying before Congress on immigration, she said, “This grave question can not be boiled down to mere statistics … It is not a question of how much of this you will tolerate before you pass laws which will wipe out the evil. It is a question as to whether you will tolerate it at all.”
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the FBI investigated 466,949 cases of missing children in 2014. The NCMEC tip line on reported sexual exploitation of children and young adults received 1.1 million reports in 2014. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 100,000–300,000 children are at risk for entering the U.S. commercial sex trade. According to the U.S. State Department, 600,000–800,000 people are trafficked across international borders every year, of which 80 percent are female and half are children. I wanted to reprint all the people gone missing in the last year here, at the end, but it would not have been “cost effective,” they told me, even in the smallest type. So think of one name for me. Maybe it is someone you know. Or someone you saw on a show or a flier once. Or maybe it is your name, or a name you once had. Whoever it is, write that name here: ____________________________. If you don’t know anyone, put the name of someone you can’t imagine losing. They are the same name.
On May 6, 2013, as I was working on this book, I heard over the radio that three young women in Cleveland, where I live, had been miraculously found alive after being missing for over a decade. Michelle Knight, Gina DeJesus, and Amanda Berry escaped imprisonment in an ordinary-looking house through a combination of self-preservation, quick thinking, and the wild kindness of a stranger named Charles Ramsey, who refused to look the other way. All three women had been considered lost causes by local police and the FBI. All three are alive today.
As I finish this book, the latest name of a young woman that crosses my screen—unsearched, unbidden—is that of Tiffany Sayre, who went missing on May 11, 2015. The search for this mother of two toddlers lasted more than a month, until her body was found, wrapped in a sheet, in a wooded area on June 20. They found her on Father’s Day.
“Makes me mad, makes me hurt,” Thomas Kuhn, her father, told the local television station. “All I know is we are going to catch you, whoever you are.
“We are coming for you,” he said.
Author’s Note
I wonder if it won’t be the same with the children as it has been with us. No matter how long each one of them lives, won’t their lives feel to them unfinished like ours, only just beginning? I wonder how far they will go. And then their children will grow up and it will be the same with them. Unfinished lives. Oh, dearie, what children all of us are.
—Ernest Poole, His Family (1917)
On one appropriately hot Tuesday in July 1924, Oscar Zinn burned the collective crimes of New York City all the way down to ashes. During his tenure as the property clerk of the police department, Zinn had checked almost everything imaginable into the evidence lockers at Central. He had handled heavy guns, dirty money, and bloodied knives—so many knives—along with heroin, cocaine, costumes, and even axes and saws. One time, a few years earlier, he even checked in a bar of chocolate that had been turned in by a particularly honest member of the Junior Police Boys. Zinn had inspected all of these things and written them down in his ledger. He then placed them on their shelves to await trial or auction. When they were needed, Zinn would send them back up again and note it in his files. They usually came back. But sometimes things just disappeared. But when they were here, in the evidence room, he knew what was where. But for all the purse guns and stilettos, most of what he had was clothing. There were stacks and stacks of it, left over from crimes and investigations. Dark and brittle with blood, he handled them carefully.
Which made today, July 8, 1924, all the more satisfying. On this day, Oscar Zinn arrived at work early and looked at the tower of material in front of him. One by one, Zinn lifted each bundle and threw it into the central incinerator. Most of it would go up almost instantly. Some of it had been in storage for twenty years. Over the course of the day, Zinn oversaw the burning of twenty-five years of old criminal evidence. In total, five hundred bundles of clothing were consigned to the basement fire.
There was infamous material here. There were the clothes worn by Barnett Baff, the so-called Poultry King who was murdered on Thanksgiving Eve in 1914. There were the clothes of Harry Thaw’s victim, shot to death on the roof of Madison Square Garden. There were the terrible pillowcases that Hans Schmidt stuffed the body of Anna Aumuller into, which provided the evidence that sent him to the chair. There were the already-black clothes of Ruth Wheeler, who had been killed and placed in a fireplace by Albert Wolter when she answered his ad for a stenographer. And the little clothes of five-year-old Guiseppe Varota, who had been drowned by kidnappers. All of these real-life cases, all of these true-life people, had ended a long time ago.
And somewhere in the stacks of bound bundles that lifted light and burned fast were the bloodstained clothes found on Ruth Cruger’s body. Oscar Zinn tossed the clothes in. All that remained of the case were the records in a file, somewhere upstairs.
A few years later, a young woman looked at those very same files. There were handwritten notes, canvass reports, and even photographs. Her name was Isabel Stephen, and she wanted to be a writer since before you were born. Growing up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, she had a short story published in the Boston Post. After that, she began to think it might be possible. She didn’t want to be a nurse or teacher. Her story, “Caught by a Human Cat,” was a scary tale of mesmerism and a nighttime train ride. She saw her name in print and looked away before looking back again. Within ten years, Isabel was writing newspaper stories for all manner of papers up and down the East Coast. She specialized in women’s portraits: the popular small biographies of ladies of society, actresses, or general women of stature (or mischief).
Soon, Isabel was working for the McClure Syndicate and writing for real magazines. She had an office with a typewriter. She also wrote for United Press. Her name was appearing under stories all across the country. She specialized in writing about women. But Isabel also wrote secret things. There was a new type of magazine on the stands these days. Featuring lush painted covers and lots of indiscriminate type, these magazines had covers of wide-eyed women with bright flesh and bared knives. They had names like Clue, Mystery, and True Detective.
Isabel wrote for the McFadden mags that were long, in-depth summaries of crimes bolstered by photographs, diagrams, and drama. McFadden paid by the word. That was part of their value now. To find stories, Isabel scoured old newspapers. There were stories she remembered, too. Then she would go down to the police station and look at the old records. Then she would try to track down the arresting officer or detective. McFadden insisted on it. This was not fiction. But it was never wholly the truth, either. These were mysteries, after all.
So by the time Isabel Stephen sat in Grace Humiston’s apartment, it was with some awe. She knew what this woman had accomplished. Isabel looked down at her notes that all of a sudden had become messy. As Grace spoke, her eye glittering, Isabel was already seeing it come together in her head. She had to start with the facts she could get and try to reconcile them with what the newspapers had said. Isabel could see the basement as she started to think it back into the world. She looked at one of the photos. “A single electric bulb” might work. But Isabel knew her readers wanted justice and vengeance and atmosphere, too. And murder. Mayb
e that was part of the problem. But Grace’s eyes were kind, Isabel thought. Sad, but kind. Isabel then realized that the woman in front of her had actually seen this and lived it. That was a big, impossible difference. Isabel knew she could not capture that eye, but she was still going to try.
Grace told Isabel to look up a man named Julius Kron since he might have some stories for her. The detectives—the great ones—sold their stories, or at least the germ of them, to magazine writers, who would add a little flair to them. Not only to sell magazines, but to add a level of drama that had long since passed from the story itself. Good stories, like people, grew after they ended. Isabel was seeing another reason for that kind of storytelling, too. People needed to listen.
Isabel wrote up this story—“as told to”—for True Detective Mysteries. This was a cooperative effort to at least get closer to the truth. And to tell a good story. Or the parody of one. And to sell some mystery magazines. That’s what got the story read at all. So Isabel kept writing, using evidence to detect presences and support connections. She wrote a few stories on the exploits of Grace and Kron. Readers ate them up. Then she moved on.
Lois Weber’s 1916 film about Charlie Stielow allegedly featured a female detective. But only three reels are known to survive. In 1939, the syndicated newspaper feature “Lessons from Historic Crimes,” by Captain Eugene de Beck and Dr. Carleton Simon, featured the Ruth Cruger mystery. Grace was mentioned, but only briefly. The writers gave the moment of the case’s solution to Solan. In 1956, a very short syndicated newspaper story titled “The Case of the Frightened Eyes” details the Cruger case but does not mention Grace at all, though it mentions a male detective in passing.
On December 8, 1962, there was no news in New York City. There were births, deaths, sports scores, crimes, and murders, but none of it went reported by the usually endless roll of city newspapers. After weeks of posturing, the International Typographical Union, Local No. 6, ordered all of its members to strike. They were mostly Italian or Irish, second-generation New Yorkers, faced with the onset of new printing technology that they feared would render their workers’ skills with a Linotype machine obsolete.
When the strike was finally settled 114 days later, they had reached an agreement, but it only led the way to greater debt. The strike killed papers in a town that in the 1920s had nineteen dailies. By 1970, there was only the Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post. Writers scattered to literary outlets and television. The records of the old papers ended up in libraries and archives, commonly called morgues.
In 1973, the New York Police Department officially closed their central headquarters on 240 Centre Street, moving its operations to the monolithic 1 Police Plaza. Instead of relocating their past records to the new location, the department instead filed fifty years’ worth of police records—full of the names of the guilty, the innocent, the lost, and the victimized—directly into the East River. The heavier files sank while the smaller ones fluttered on the surface as they smeared out and floated into nothingness. The old headquarters was later converted into a luxury apartment building.
A book of 1978 student essays designed to use crime to teach the research paper had an entry called “Grace Humiston: The First Woman Detective,” by Tim McCarl. There are some great academic articles on Sunny Side by Randolph Boehm and others that have appeared in history publications. Grace’s story appeared in an article by Karen Abbott on the Web site for Smithsonian Magazine and in a novel, Grace Humiston and the Vanishing, by Charles Kelly. I found her by chance when I stumbled onto her 1917 interview in the New York Sun while researching the Black Hand.
After an exhaustive search of New York libraries, law schools, and private archives, no concentrated gravity of Grace Humiston’s personal papers seems to have survived. Some very early financial records of the People’s Law Firm are held at the New York Public Library, and the odd letter or two can be found in archives here and there. Everything else is scattered among stories told by others in newspaper articles, magazines, court records, congressional testimony, and the circular lines of history. There is plenty of dialogue from all of these sources; it is quoted here as it was originally published, left alone in its original state. The reader must, as those of the time had to, consider each individual source. That is part of the story, too. And while the larger events here have been investigated and presented as truth, there are still connections that had to be imagined—small gestures, moments, and emotions—that are laid over an infrastructure of facts. This is a story about real people, not just their vital statistics.
Grace’s files might have been taken by the Bureau of Missing Persons (and later destroyed) when she was fired by Woods. Or perhaps she simply had nowhere to store them once her practice was shuttered. Or maybe she had just had enough. Very surprisingly for a lawyer, she also died without a will. Her very small savings was claimed by her sister Jessie. Most of the court records of Alfredo Cocchi’s trial in Italy were destroyed in a fire. All that remains is a brief summary of his final trial in a heavy, handwritten book on a dusty shelf in Bologna.
Grace’s files as an employee of the U.S. government, as well as those of J. J. Kron, may have also been destroyed in a fire on June 23, 1972. Or they may still exist, though under seal by the Espionage Act of 1917, signed by Woodrow Wilson in order to protect the sensitive work of government agents.
This is the path of evidence that led to this book. The story thus remains, like any story about murder, incomplete in that, although we may hope to understand at least some of the facts and conditions of Ruth’s death, we can never completely understand the inconceivability of the very act itself. The only absolute of this story is that Ruth Cruger was murdered. The actions of all the people in this book may then be understood as a collective attempt to reanimate her last days—to communicate with her—in order to find answers, justice, and a hoped-for peace. Or just to say good-bye. Although this is her story, there are an unimaginable number of other cases just as factual as Ruth Cruger’s. That is the only truth of crime.
Earlier in her career, when Grace was juggling dozens of immigration cases, she said that “I could go into these cases very fully and show you the sadness which attached to each individual story.” That was always her methodology: to find the story of a case in order to evoke a response from others. Though Poe introduced the full character of the detective in fiction, the word first appears in Dickens’s Bleak House to describe a Scotland Yard inspector. The new word, created to fit a singular character, was an extension of the word “detect,” or “to discover or identify the presence or existence of something.” Something behind a veil. Or something we don’t understand. Or someone we have lost—and hope to see again.
NOTES
The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
The sources of this story extend across newspaper articles, court documents, magazine exposés, government reports, muckraking stories, gossip, deduction, and the connections among them. In the absence of primary sources from Grace Humiston, I have endeavored to tell the story around that space to show how culture and media shape our understanding of her life. It is perhaps not a usual way of telling a story. She was not a usual person.
Sources are documented using unnumbered endnotes organized by chapter. Notes are keyed to the text using signal phrases or descriptions of the topic covered. When a note documents dialogue, the last few words quoted appear in the note as a key, and the reader can assume the citation includes all preceding quotations. Quotations are unaltered unless indicated with square brackets. Dialogue is presented as is from its various sources. In the very few instances where I use imagined dialogue to advance the narrative, it appears without quotes.
In my attempt to convey visual details and turns of phrase that re-create progressive-era New York, I relied on primary sources, including pho
tographs from the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress, rather than secondary accounts of the era.
Newspapers are a major source of this story’s power. In most cases, I veer toward the “reputable” New York papers, but at times I use less-well-regarded papers to show how the story spread. Sometimes, I use a wire story in a nonregional paper because it was a better, easier-to-read reproduction. Smaller-market papers were often my source for testimony because they could more easily print the full transcripts. Where discrepancies in coverage of cases exist, I note it so that readers can decide for themselves.
That being said, this is a story about the past. Everyone in this story, save one person, is gone. The center of this story is a still space that cannot be wholly filled. It can only be approached. It can only be told from the perspective of others trying to reach it themselves.
PROLOGUE
The main sources for Doyle’s visit to New York are William R. Hunt, Front-Page Detective, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1990, 201; “Will Be Lynched,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 27, 1914, 3; Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, New York: Thomas Dunne, 2008.
“from general knowledge” (p. 2): “No Mystery in Crime,” Houston Post, December 22, 1912, 29.
“sight of New York” (p. 2): “Conan Doyle Fears,” New York Times, May 31, 1914, 44.
“thunder on their own heads” (p. 3): “Conan Doyle in Gotham,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 27, 1914, 10.
“arrived in New York” (p. 3): “Sir A. Conan Doyle,” New York Times, June 1, 1914, 25.
“football at the age of forty-two” (p. 4): Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “A Woman Can Never Get Anything,” New York Evening World, May 28, 1914, 3.
