The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  “He asked me if I knew where he could get a stiletto. I told him my brother-in-law, a police captain in Berlin, gave me one years ago. He wanted me to sell it to him.… For about three days he was at me all the time. One day he went downtown, however—I think it was in the Bowery—and bought a stiletto like mine. The stiletto had a yellow handle, and a yellow leather case.”

  A few months passed, but Thorn just couldn’t let the idea go.

  “Barbering is not my regular business,” Keehn admitted. “I was a dentist in the old country. Thorn knew that, and he was always asking me about different poisons. He wanted to know how to give chloroform. I told him there were different ways. You could put it in a sponge, saturate a towel with it and put it up to the nose.”

  He’d gotten uncomfortable, Keehn said, when Thorn started asking about other poisons and then started showing up to work with little bottles in his vest. But how could Thorn think that he had any chance with Gussie, especially after that beating?

  “Why, the man was always dreaming.” The barber laughed. He’d even talked of marrying her. “Thorn had Mondays off. He used to talk about trips he made out to Long Island with Mrs. Nack, looking for a house where she could set up a baby farm and he would run a barber shop.”

  Really?

  Mac kept a poker face. The Journal and the Detective Bureau had been sitting tight on Frank Gartner’s story about a Woodside house—a lead that hadn’t made it yet into any of the newspapers.

  “He said,” Keehn added innocently, “she had one thousand dollars in the bank and she would furnish the money for the whole business.”

  “He wanted to be a boss for himself,” another barber agreed.

  Thorn certainly had the ability to run a shop, the barbers concurred, if he just put his mind and a bit of money to it. But Detective McCauley had heard enough. He walked out into the summer evening, his face prickling painfully as theater-bound crowds swirled around him, emptying into and out of the multitude of tenements and houses of the teeming city. The detectives still hadn’t found anything over in Woodside, but all the signs pointed to someplace across the river.

  Thorn had fixed his rival, all right—but where?

  9.

  THE DISAPPEARING SHOEMAKER

  THE FARMER FROM WOODSIDE was insistent: Weren’t the police interested in the extraordinary coincidence that he’d discovered in connection with their murder case?

  “I noticed last Saturday morning,” he explained earnestly, “that several of my ducks were sick.”

  Yes, of course he had.

  The case was becoming a headache. Not only was it attracting curiosity seekers, but the newspapers were taking their circulation fight into the case itself. Journal and World reporters were tampering with witnesses, trampling crime scenes, and making wild accusations. The headline of yesterday’s World bellowed, THE IDENTIFICATION UPSET—but the only dissenting identifier was unnamed and “refused to talk any further,” the World claimed, “after being threatened by a Journal reporter.” World reporters in turn humiliated Mrs. Riger, attacking her over accepting $30 in Hearst blood money, and rattling the Astoria storekeeper with a surprise lineup to identify a confederate who had just shopped there.

  THE WORLD DESPERATE, the Journal shot back in a headline. “If Guldensuppe is dead, the World feels that it is going to be dead, too.” One of Nack’s neighbors signed an affidavit alleging overtures from the World for testimony favoring Mrs. Nack; outraged Journal reporters claimed that Pulitzer had a $10,000 slush fund dedicated to perverting the case. But it was becoming apparent along Newspaper Row that while Pulitzer and his editors were dictating hostile headlines, their crime reporters had few doubts left about the murder. The denials from up top were becoming such an embarrassment that the Journal had taken to simply reproducing its rival’s front page with the devastating caption STILL TWENTY FOUR HOURS BEHIND THE NEWS.

  On this morning, July 3, just as they were gearing up for a blowout Sunday holiday that would see half the city tipsy and shooting off fireworks, the police were having to field questions about the latest stunt by the papers. After World editors wisely decided on a new strategy, a pair of their reporters hired Mrs. Nack’s surrey and horse, promptly dubbed the Death Carriage, and galloped around asking if anyone recognized it. An impressionable young lady in Long Island said she did, and a nearby campsite offered up an old handkerchief and a few scraps of paper. This, the paper loudly announced on the front page, was surely where Guldensuppe’s clothes had been burnt. It then helpfully directed the police to a “murder den,” largely on the evidence of it being a frightful-looking old house.

  And now this fellow wanted to talk about ducks. His name was Henry Wahle, and he lived in Woodside over by Second and Anderson. There was a two-hundred-foot-long field between his place and the next house, and his ducks had crossed it—toward Mrs. DeBeuchelare’s dairy, you see, but not all the way down to the next street, where Mr. Jacobs kept that greenhouse, and …

  Yes, they said. Go on.

  “They had eaten something that they could not keep down,” he explained with alarm. And it got worse. “I knew they had been swimming and paddling about in the open drain in Second Street, across the way. I went over to investigate … right at the end of the drainpipe that comes from the house on Number 346, Second Street.”

  The cottage, Wahle said, was a vacant one. That’s why it was so strange to see that ditch full on a hot summer day. “Water was running out of the drain-pipe as if it had been left turned on in the empty house,” he mused aloud.

  Was that so? Officers took notice; maybe there was something to this. But Wahle still wanted to talk about his ducks.

  Yes, the ducks. When they came out of that ditch, something had been running off their feathers—perhaps the very thing that had made them sick. A substance that was pooling into the mud by that drainpipe.

  “Red stuff,” the lamplighter confided.

  FOUR MANHATTAN DETECTIVES marched off the New York & Queens County trolley at eleven that morning, accompanied by a sharp-eyed World reporter who’d at last gotten a jump on the Hearst men. It was hard for Woodside residents not to notice the group. They were out of their neighborhood, out of their jurisdiction, and out of the city altogether.

  Detective Price surveyed the scene before him. He’d come from searching Mrs. Nack’s place in Hell’s Kitchen to … this?

  Woodside was one of the sleepiest villages within reach of the city, a precinct of lonesome farmhouses and overgrown marshy lots, a place where churches were still the tallest buildings. A general store by the trolley stop sold hay and groceries, while up the street the local Greenpoint Avenue Hall offered wholesome rube entertainments like bowling and a shooting gallery. The city detectives swatted away insects as they strolled over to the village center, where the fire chief and a coroner were convenient neighbors. The local police captain was summoned as well—they were now in Queens County, after all, in his jurisdiction.

  Did they know the way to 346 Second Street?

  Sure, the detectives were told. We’ll walk you over there.

  Second Street held little more than a placid dairy and a flower nursery that supplied Broadway swells across the river with carnations for their lapels. Just up the street stood three cheap new wood-frame houses—two stories apiece, flat-roofed boxes with nearly windowless, unadorned sides. The eight men walking up to them hadn’t gone unnoticed; a scowling woman was waiting in the nearest one, at number 344.

  “Mrs. Hafftner,” she introduced herself.

  She was the caretaker for these three houses. The owners, the Bualas, ran a wine shop over in the city. And yes, she said, someone had been in 346 recently—a couple from the city who had wanted to rent it—a Mr. and Mrs. Frank Braun. She’d warned them that it was a little desolate out here.

  “On the contrary,” Mrs. Braun had assured her, “I like to be where it is quiet.”

  The World reporter thrust a photo forward. Is this her?

  Mrs. Ha
fftner examined the unlabeled photo of Augusta Nack. Yes, she said, that was the very image of Mrs. Braun.

  The crew eyed the block around them. It was a good place to get in and out of quickly, if you were coming from the city. It looked rural, but near one end of the block was the stop for the NY & Queens County trolley line. A couple of blocks in the other direction was Jackson Avenue, which was a straight shot down to the East River ferries.

  The couple had signed a year lease and paid the first month’s rent, Mrs. Hafftner said, but after coming to their new house a few times, they’d disappeared.

  “They promised me they were to move in yesterday or today,” the caretaker fretted. “But I haven’t seen them.”

  She unlocked the door of 346, and the detectives strode into the empty building, their footsteps echoing. It was a dreary little house, coated in cheap brown paint; its seven rooms sat vacant, the gloom unrelieved by the rays of light filtering in through the shutters. Someone had been here, it seemed, because crammed in among the ashes of a stove there lay the remains of a man’s shoe. Just the steel shank was left, the leather having been consumed into fine ash. Someone had stoked the fire as hot as they could get it. Interesting. But that could have been the previous tenants, who’d left a couple of months before.

  Detectives fanned out into the empty bedrooms upstairs, and one of the doors along the southeast side creaked open into a bathroom. There was nothing in the eight-by-ten room but a large zinc bathtub. It was spotless. Yet the pathologist, Frank Ferguson, had claimed there was some scalding on the body. Was this where it had happened?

  The bathroom didn’t look quite right, somehow. It was clean—too clean, for a place that had been vacant for nearly two months. There was no dust on the floor. Kneeling down, the detectives found a splatter of dark drips on the planking between the bath and the wall, and some hard-scrubbed sections of flooring around them; something had soaked into the wood, impervious to any effort at cleaning. They procured a carpenter’s plane and, as the property’s caretaker waited helplessly, shaved samples off the floor. Inspector’s orders: that stuff was going to NYU’s Loomis Laboratory for analysis. Another detective followed the drain line to the ditch outside and scooped up a bucket of the mud around the mouth of the drainpipe; it, too, would go the lab for testing.

  As more men dug out the cellar and probed the cesspool in vain for Guldensuppe’s head, a crowd gathered outside. Word had gotten out around the block and then back on Newspaper Row as well. Reporters were pouring over on the East River ferries, hungrily circling the local residents.

  Why, yes, neighbors said, they had heard a strange cry last Friday. Something like—“Help! Help! Murder!” One of them had even poked his head outside to investigate. But he hadn’t heard anything more, and, well, you hear all sorts of crazy things from neighbors’ homes. But a trio of local busybodies—Mrs. Buttinger, Mrs. Ruppert, and Mrs. Nunnheimer—had indeed noticed when Mrs. Braun and another fellow stopped by here a week earlier.

  “I clean my windows every Friday afternoon,” recalled Mrs. Nunnheimer, “and somewheres about three o’clock, I noticed while at this work the trolley car stop at our corner. I turned my head and saw a nicely dressed man get off. He held his hand out and received a small yellow hand bag from the lady who sat next to him, and then he gave her his hand and helped her down. What fixes it in my mind is that he was so polite and nice about it.

  “In fact,” she added chidingly to her husband, “I said to my husband that night when he came home that I was jealous of such niceness and that I wished he had such elegant ways.”

  Another neighbor said she’d seen a second dapper gentleman enter the house the previous Friday, well before the couple arrived. So two men had gone in there. Now that she thought of it, that seemed like a strange thing.

  She’d only seen one come out.

  WORLD WIDE HUNT FOR MARTIN THORN, the Evening Journal declared from the sidewalks as the detectives made their way back to the city. While they were gone, Inspector O’Brien had cabled Washington and asked the State Department to put out an alert for Thorn in all U.S. and foreign ports. Newspaper readers worldwide had been deputized into the dragnet:

  WANTED—For the murder of William Guldensuppe, Martin Thorn, whose right name is Martin Torzewski. Born in Posen, Germany; thirty-three to thirty-four years old; about 5 foot eight inches in height, weighs about 155 pounds, has blue-gray eyes, very dark hair, red cheeks, very light-brown moustache, thick, and curled at the ends; slightly stooped shoulders, small scar on the forehead, and red blotches around the lower part of the neck. He is a barber by trade. Speaks with a slight German accent. Wore, when last seen, a dark-blue suit of clothing, a dark-brown derby hat, and russet shoes; is an expert pinochle player and a first-class barber.

  Suspicious that Thorn had already fled the country, the inspector had his eye on two ships in particular.

  “Cable dispatches have been sent to Europe this afternoon,” he explained, “for authorities to intercept the arrival of passengers on the steamers City of Paris at Southampton, and the Majestic at Liverpool, in order to cause the arrest of Martin Thorn, if by any chance he should have sailed.”

  But the detectives had a different destination that night: the hulking five-story building at 410 East Twenty-Sixth Street, where NYU maintained its newly built Loomis Laboratory. True, most police only resorted to a place like this when the third degree failed; tweezers were for the evidence that a nightstick couldn’t reach. But the forensics lab represented the future. The first guide to preserving crime-scene evidence had been issued in Austria just a few years earlier, and the first book on cadaver fauna—the hatching of maggots and other bugs on a body—was issued not long afterward in Paris. New spectroscopes could find arsenic in blood, and high-powered optics could match the microscopic shells on a dead man’s muddy boot with a specific ditch. A careful practitioner might even extract the wadding from a gunshot wound—that is, the paper used in a cartridge to tamp down the powder—for if some old incriminating scrap had been reused to pack a homemade cartridge, he could read the writing on it.

  For reporters and cops alike, the Loomis Lab was an intoxicating blend of theoretical science and visceral practice. It was the kind of place that, crammed with the latest instruments of pathology and detection, also featured asphalt floors for easy hosing down after especially bloody cases. And for the expert on those cases, the detectives knew just where to take their evidence: the second-floor office of Dr. Rudolph Witthaus, professor of chemistry and toxicology.

  With his round spectacles and an immense white mustache that drooped like tusks, he embodied one World reporter’s judgment of him: “Witthaus looks like a sea-lion.” But the man was a real-life Sherlock Holmes, and a Sorbonne scholar. Witthaus could discourse on book collecting while detecting cyanide hidden in some mail-order patent-medicine stomach salts, or a fatal dose of arsenic and antimony in the moldering exhumed remains of a dead husband. The author of the standard text Medical Jurisprudence, Witthaus had quite literally written the book on science and crime. And yet he owed much to his fictional counterpart; it was the immense popularity over the previous decade of Holmes and Watson, after all, that had nudged the public into expecting some scientific acumen in modern policing.

  A trip to Witthaus was as good as a new Conan Doyle story, though, and detectives already knew his work well. Long before tracking down the oilcloth used to bundle Guldensuppe, Detective Carey had collared a physician suspected of poisoning his wealthy wife to feed his brothel-and-gambling habit. It was Professor Witthaus who’d gotten the goods on that one. He’d deduced that the wily doctor had poisoned his wife with morphine, and then applied atropine to her eyes to cover up the telltale dilation of her pupils.

  But the professor was also, well … peculiar.

  An ardent art and book collector, he was well known for possessing such gems as the original handwritten manuscript of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The story might
well have been his own. Witthaus, it was whispered, could be a bit of a Mr. Hyde himself. Even as the detectives delivered their Woodside samples to the professor, Witthaus was battling an allegation of attempted murder. His wife was demanding a divorce because, she claimed, he’d been poisoning her. A bottle of malaria medicine he’d prepared for her was the damning proof: Under analysis, it had been found to contain a massively toxic concentration of quinine—a poison, as it happened, on which Professor Witthaus was the world’s greatest authority.

  But he was the best expert in the art of murder they had, even if he was a little too expert. They’d already brought him some suspected murder weapons the day before, and for starters, he could tell them that O’Brien had been going at it all wrong with his interrogations.

  This is not blood.

  The pistol, saw, and knife found at Mrs. Nack’s flat on Ninth Avenue? There wasn’t a speck of blood on them, he determined. The saw and knife weren’t even the right fit for the cuts made on the body. It was no wonder that she had been so unimpressed when O’Brien made her sit in a room with the “evidence”: He’d laid out the wrong weapons. He might as well have tried to frighten her with tea cozies.

  The scrapings taken from under Mrs. Nack’s fingernails might prove useful, though; that strategy had secured a conviction six years earlier in the East River Hotel disembowelment of Carrie Brown, a Bard-quoting prostitute nicknamed “Shakespeare.” The case remained controversial. Inspector Byrnes had publicly dared Jack the Ripper to set foot in his precincts, and some suspected that the fellow had crossed the Atlantic to take up his challenge. With his career on the line, Byrnes roped in a hapless Algerian sailor nicknamed “Frenchy” and had his scrapings and clothing analyzed. They revealed the telltale viscera of dismemberment—bile from the small intestine, tyrosol from the liver—plus roundworm eggs, blood, and stomach matter resembling the corned beef and cabbage that the victim had eaten earlier in a hotel bar. Frenchy was sent to Sing Sing for life, though more than a few observers had been left unconvinced by Byrnes’s ulterior motives in using this strange new form of evidence. This time, though, there was less doubt; nobody was blaming the new inspector for this murder, and along with the mud and wood shavings from the Woodside house, such evidence might look convincing indeed.