The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  Where’s the head?

  Someone had seen the World diving crew draw a slimy white mass out of the water late the afternoon before. The Herald believed the World had the scoop of the day—literally scooping William Guldensuppe’s head off the bottom of the East River—and that Pulitzer’s henchmen were now concealing the ghastly thing in their editorial offices. In a burst of righteous indignation, the Herald called in the police.

  Where is it?

  The diver had indeed brought up a white chunk of stone the size of a human head, a World staffer patiently explained; but rather than the plaster-encrusted remains of William Guldensuppe, it had proven to be nothing more than a clump of barnacles that had dislodged from the hull of some passing ship.

  “To reassure the gentlemen in charge of the Herald,” a night reporter replied tartly, “The World has not the head of Guldensuppe and would not keep it if it had.”

  Yet there was no denying the head’s importance. Old-timers in the newsroom still recalled “the Kelsey Outrage” of more than twenty years back, when Long Island poet Charles G. Kelsey unwisely wooed a very engaged woman named Julia. She’d set a candle in the window as their sign to meet, but he was seized in her yard by locals armed with tar and feathers, most likely led by Julia’s fiancé, Royal Sammis. After turning the lovelorn poet into a scalding mass of tar, they sent him screaming out into the night, never to be seen again. Julia and Royal married three months later, freed of the bothersome suitor, and everyone lived happily ever after—at least until ten months later, when fishermen pulled Kelsey’s tarred body from Huntington Bay. Or rather, they pulled out the bottom half of it; the top was gone, and his genitals had been hacked off.

  As with Guldensuppe, the facts of the Kelsey case seemed clear: The identity of the victim, the perpetrators, and the motive all appeared obvious. There was even the same shock of betrayal: The candle that lured Charles Kelsey was lit deliberately by Julia, who then allegedly watched his tarring. But without a complete body, and with stories floated by the defense of live Kelsey “sightings,” no jury had been able to convict a single person involved. The whole grisly affair was crudely preserved for decades in a popular turn of phrase—“as dead as Kelsey’s nuts”—but Royal and Julia Sammis still walked free.

  The assistant DA had been busy insisting to newspapers all day that, history aside, he didn’t particularly need Guldensuppe’s head to secure a conviction. Suspicious that the World had beaten the police to the punch, rival papers were glad to repeat the assertion that finding the final piece of Guldensuppe’s body was a mere formality. HEAD NOT NECESSARY, the next morning’s Herald headline assured readers.

  But the small fleet of hired grapplers that gathered at the riverside again that next morning hinted otherwise. Reporters could already see that not all the other evidence would hold up; Mr. Buala, for one, now claimed he couldn’t recognize Nack and Thorn as the couple who rented his Woodside house—because, detectives grumbled, he feared a conviction would keep him from being able to rent it out again. These suspicions were not exactly mollified when the annoyed wine merchant stubbornly attempted to keep the coroner from touching his precious baseboards to retrieve a spent bullet.

  The longer Guldensuppe’s head stayed missing, the more the questions would grow around the unthinkable. Could Nack and Thorn really get away with murder?

  13.

  QUEEN OF THE TOMBS

  THE CROWDS WERE ALREADY GATHERING outside of the Tombs that morning, milling below thick granite walls built to evoke the ancient Egyptian temple of Dendera but instead memorializing every form of corruption bred by modern Manhattan. There were always crowds here: bailsmen, lawyers, police, food hawkers, and fatherless urchins all lurking in and among massive columns carved to look like papyrus stalks.

  It was hardly a welcoming spot to linger. Intended for a city of 300,000, the decrepit pile now served 1.8 million New Yorkers, with three and sometimes four men crammed into cells meant for one. But it had been a cursed place from the beginning, a heap on a swamp. The massive structure had instantly begun to settle, opening fissures from the roof to the foundation, throwing the stairways akimbo, and letting sewage ooze into the ground floor. Each of its cells measured only six by eight feet, with a single footlong slit facing outside; the darkness inside was perpetual, with gaslights left blazing at all hours, even on ferociously hot July days like this one. Each cell’s narrow cot was shared by two inmates, sleeping head to foot, on sheets changed every six weeks. As prisoners lacked furniture, meals were eaten off tin plates perched on the rim of a malodorous toilet. Cold and rusty water dribbled from the single bathtub provided for each of its four floors. It was the largest jail in the country, and quite possibly the worst.

  A prison commission had condemned the place as “a disgrace to the city of New York,” which it certainly was, and recommended that “it ought to be immediately demolished”—which, to everyone’s shock, it also was. Workmen were dismantling the fortresslike walls with derricks and tackles, even while the inmates still lived inside. Just a few days earlier a block of granite had tumbled into the streets below, nearly flattening a workman and two young boys. Not content with exerting its malevolence on those within its walls, the Tombs was now threatening those outside, too.

  Inside the women’s wing of the prison, amid the infernal clattering of demolition, a murmur passed among the inmates roaming the hallways and catwalks on their morning constitutionals.

  “It’s Mrs. Nack!”

  The knots of prostitutes and shoplifters parted to gape as she passed by in a sort of regal procession. A blond-tressed inmate who had already befriended the midwife walked at her side. Carefully arranging the green ribbons atop her black hat, Mrs. Nack was led out by a side entrance and into a waiting streetcar, with reporters and citizenry in pursuit.

  Across town, another carriage left police headquarters, followed down Mott Street by a second mass of hundreds of New Yorkers; they converged at the Jefferson Market Courthouse, where Martin Thorn was the first to stand before the crowded room for his arraignment. Dressed in a black coat and a straw boater, he didn’t know quite where to put himself.

  “Come on up the bridge, Thorn,” the judge said, waving him over to the bar. “You can hear the proceedings better there.”

  The courtroom was sweltering and packed with the fan-flapping female curiosity seekers whom the case seemed to attract. With his back to the gallery as he ascended the platform, Thorn took no notice of them at all, or even of himself. The once-dapper barber now sported three days’ stubble, the result of a suicide watch that barred him from shaving.

  “Have you any counsel?” the judge asked.

  “No sir,” Thorn replied quietly.

  “Do you wish for any counsel?”

  “I don’t know anybody.”

  It wasn’t the usual response; most murder suspects had previous scrapes with the law to draw on. But Thorn was not a usual case.

  “I will send for anyone you wish.”

  Thorn didn’t know what to say. He twirled his hat on his finger and looked blankly at the floor.

  The door at the back of the courtroom swung open, and the crowd turned to look—everyone, that is, except for Thorn himself. He heard a second prisoner led up to the table next to him, but he did not dare look to see who it was.

  “We appear for Mrs. Thorn,” her lawyer started before correcting himself. “I mean Mrs. Nack.”

  The courtroom tittered, and Thorn smiled quietly while still staring fixedly ahead. The two moved close together until few in the courtroom could see or hear what happened next: a quick squeeze of their hands. It was exactly two weeks since the alleged murder, and the first time they’d seen each other in more than a week. Mrs. Nack leaned in to her lover and whispered.

  “Shweige still,” she murmured to him.

  OR PERHAPS SHE DIDN’T. A reporter for the New Yorker Staats Zeitung, a paper eminently qualified to eavesdrop on a German defendant, heard this instead: “Halt d
en Mund und Spricht nicht!” But both messages were the same: Tell them nothing.

  “Mrs. Nack and Martin Thorn refuse to talk,” Hearst mused over the proceedings. “All of which is very strange, considering that she is a woman and he is a barber.”

  They had already said plenty, of course, as had their witnesses; the mythologizing of the case had begun. Within hours of the indictment, Hearst had a team assembling Journal clippings and reporters’ notes into a 126-page illustrated book titled The Guldensuppe Mystery. The instant book hit the streets just days later, as the first title by the newly launched True Story Publishing Company. Naturally, it heaped praise on the Journal as a “great newspaper” while calling for the miscreants to be electrocuted.

  The city followed that prospect so avidly that New Yorkers even attempted trying Thorn themselves. One Lower East Side summer-school teacher found that his charges only wanted to discuss Guldensuppe, and he allowed his bookkeeping course to be turned into a mock trial. The result was covered in the Times, which noted that “the bookkeeping lessons quickly dwindled in interest and the full details of the cutting up and hiding of Guldensuppe’s body were gone over by the boys with the greatest relish.” Amid the blackboards and inkwells, “Thorn” and his “attorney”—two eleven-year-old boys—wilted under the aggressive questioning of a roomful of street urchins. Despite an impassioned half-hour-long closing argument by the diminutive attorney, his client was found guilty and sent to the electric chair—which, this being a Manhattan classroom, was simply a chair. School trustees were none too pleased when they learned of this extracurricular jurisprudence. Children were sent back to their bookkeeping texts with a stern admonition from the principal: “I shall permit no more murder trials.”

  But it was only to be expected in a city where masseurs were now slyly referred to as “Gieldensuppers” and where even local vagrants took a wild-eyed interest in the case. One unhinged man, chasing telegram messengers around William Street while shouting obscenities, was dragged off to Bellevue yelling: “That’s not Thorn the police got! I’m the only original Thorn! I sliced Guldensuppe! I’m a holy terror! All others are imitations!”

  In fact, there was an imitation Martin Thorn.

  THE MURDER OF WILLIAM GULDENSUPPE, announced signs at the Eden Musée on West Twenty-Third Street. The Eden was the most upscale—or perhaps just the least downscale—of Manhattan’s fabled dime museums. It was one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations, and its elaborate waxworks could hold its own with Madame Tussaud’s of London. Boasting the world’s largest wax tableaus, and airy recital spaces for visiting Hungarian musicians and Japanese acrobats, it maintained a top-floor workshop that could whip up a body within twenty-four hours from wax, papier-mâché, wig hair, and costumes. Just days after Gotha’s revelations, New Yorkers were lining up on Twenty-Third Street to hasten past old Ajeeb the Chess Automaton and beyond the impressive new re-creation of a Klondike gold-rush mining camp. Instead, they ventured down into the famed Chamber of Horrors. Along with its usual exhibitions of the Spanish Inquisition and a “Hindoo Woman’s Sacrifice,” it now housed the Woodside Horror; the infamous bedroom and bathroom had been painstakingly re-created, complete with Guldensuppe’s decapitated body draining into a bathtub, and a waxen Martin Thorn industriously plastering the severed head.

  Over at the Tombs, the prison matron couldn’t help noticing that Augusta Nack was becoming something of a tourist attraction herself. She received a bewildering number of admirers, some bearing bags of oranges and bunches of flowers for the woman who had done away with her beau. One man sent her a letter professing undying love: “Your face possesses a charm that entrances me,” it rhapsodized. “I wish I could make your acquaintance.… I should long to take you in my arms and give you a thousand kisses.”

  The object of his affections snorted in disgust and crumpled the note into a ball. When a group of curiosity seekers arrived begging the prison matron to see a real Mrs. Nack, one not made of wax, she became even less amused.

  “I’m no freak,” Mrs. Nack snapped at the matron. “Tell them they can’t come in here and look at me. I’m not on exhibition.”

  But then she paused to reconsider. If Eden Musée and the Journal made good money off the case, why couldn’t she? The Musée charged fifty cents admission, and surely she could beat their likenesses and their price.

  “Wait a moment,” she called to the departing matron. “Tell them they may come in and look as much as they like—if they’ll pay twenty-five cents apiece.”

  Gussie was back in business.

  MARTIN THORN PASSED the days in cells #29 and #30, a double unit he was crammed into with five other men—all petty offenders, and all chosen to watch the star inmate for suicide attempts. Deprived of that pastime, Thorn resigned himself to tutoring cell mates in pinochle, a pursuit occasionally interrupted to watch newly arrived drunks hauled down the stifling cell block. The most entertaining was Johnny Boylan, who was found collapsed on the Bowery, so weighted down with stolen silverware that he couldn’t walk; when the police collared him, dozens of pieces came crashing out of his jacket. Once Thorn tired of watching these new inmates arrive, he read the newspapers. His own story had traveled across the country and the ocean; even the Aberdeen Weekly in Scotland was carrying the headline THE HORRIBLE MURDER IN NEW YORK next to yet another announcement of INTENSE HEAT IN AMERICA. But there was other news to follow here at home: whisperings that Japan and Spain were considering an alliance to wrest Hawaii and Cuba from America, rumors of President McKinley allying with England and France to finish the Panama Canal, and reports of massive strikes by coal miners in Ohio and Indiana. It bothered Thorn that his own starring role on the front pages meant he’d miss the city elections in the fall; with the five boroughs set to consolidate for the first time under a single mayor, it looked like an entertainingly dirty race.

  He’d settled into his routine for a few days when a new cell mate appeared, a smoothly polished businessman named Horton. It was said that he had been a lawyer, or perhaps an estate agent—nobody was quite sure. In any case, the genial old gent wanted in on the pinochle game.

  After a few rounds, Horton looked squarely at Thorn. “Where’s the head?” he asked affably.

  Thorn continued regarding his flushes and his next bid. “What head?” he answered coolly.

  Another minute passed, and more cards were exchanged.

  “Where’s the head?” Horton cheerfully repeated.

  The accused murderer gave his opponent a withering look. “What head?”

  Another minute of card play crawled by. Then: “Where’s the head?”

  This continued all day long.

  And it was, to be fair, a very good question. Captain Schultz’s crews were doggedly working their way up the East River from Tenth to Ninety-Second Street in the largest dredging search operation the city had ever mounted. “The new industry of finding William Guldensuppe’s head,” a Herald reporter cracked, “is developing rapidly.” Readers in the daily papers lobbed suggestions for locating it—floating mystically body-homing loaves of black bread with a candle inside, for instance—but the river workers remained as busy and as empty-handed as ever.

  A steady stream of bewildering leads poured in throughout the summer. Children proved especially fond of claiming severed head sightings. A boy found a plaster-caked head in Branchport, New Jersey, panicked, and threw it into a local stream. Despite a welter of news stories about “little Tommy Cooper” and his ghastly find, the police couldn’t turn it up again. It took an intrepid Herald reporter to discover why.

  “The main fault with the Branchport discovery,” the reporter ventured, “is that there is no such person as Tommy Cooper.”

  Three more boys spotted a head floating by the 117th Street Boat-house, but to no avail. Yet another “decomposed mass” frightened passing ferry passengers and was indeed found to be a head—but of “a large fish.” A grisly find made in an Upper West Side boardinghouse by a janitor�
��he ran into the local precinct station screaming, “A head! A head! My god, the head!”—proved to be a med school’s well-polished learning skull. But when a seven-year-old girl from Woodside found an actual chunk of plaster from a local ditch, matters began to look more promising. The police wasted no time in busting the plaster chunk open.

  And it really did contain a head—of cabbage.

  Another Woodside child promptly discovered a brown derby hat with a bullet hole in it—evidence curiously unnoticed by the one thousand other children who had thrashed Woodside’s undergrowth on July 4. Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s men both immediately fell under suspicion of manufacturing the relics.

  “Woodside is undergoing a boom in the agricultural line. They plant plaster casts with cabbage in them, blood-stained clothing, and bullet-perforated hats, and within a day or two they raise a crop of fakes,” jeered the New York Sun. “There is more money grubbing for plaster in Woodside than for gold in the Klondike nowadays.”

  Another bonanza of plaster fragments found at the scene only made matters worse.

  “It is impossible to dig anywhere in Woodside, if one is to take as evidence the results of recent excavations, without striking this product,” the Sun continued. “All the town needs to do in order to get good roads is to clear away the upper surface, and there, only two feet or so below, will be found a complete Plaster of Paris pavement.”

  Allegations emerged that someone—and only two good guesses were needed as to who—had paid a couple of local utility workers a dollar an hour to salt the neighborhood with bogus evidence. It was a brilliantly unscrupulous investment. By the end of August, Evening Journal coverage of the case helped vault Hearst’s newly debuted paper to more than half a million in circulation. It was more than every other evening newspaper combined in New York, and nearly double its circulation from before the first parcel had been hauled onto the Eleventh Street pier.