The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  Yet for all their plaster jokes and deep-sea divers, every newspaper seemed to come to a dead end when it came to finding Guldensuppe’s head. Nor, alas, did pinochle games lull Thorn into giving any hints. His cell mate “Horton” was none other than Perrin H. Sumner, a colorful con known in newsrooms as “the Great American Identifier.” In his three-decade career Sumner had nearly bankrupted an Indiana college, run Florida real estate swindles, fleeced would-be fiancées, passed off worthless mining stock, and—in his finest moment—descended on the Bellevue morgue to identify an unclaimed suicide as a mythical Englishman named Edgar. Sumner and two confederates buried the fellow and wept over the grave of their “friend,” while producing documents to prove they’d inherited his fabulous estate; the promised riches would presumably lure greedy women and gullible investors. Instead, the whole affair earned Sumner nothing more than his immortal nickname. Jailed for yet another con job, he’d talked the DA into putting him in Thorn’s cell to pry out the location of the head.

  That hadn’t worked either.

  The grapplers and Professor Witthaus’s lab were the two lagging investigations left; the professor spent July embarrassingly tied up in divorce proceedings, and the crews continued to toil thanklessly in the East River. Witthaus was the first to announce a result: The spots on the floorboards in Woodside were human blood, he declared, and the grisly sediment in the house’s plumbing was a mix of blood and plaster of paris. As for the grapplers, they had nothing to announce, but they still expected to get paid. That August the city was hit with a whopping dredging bill—and while the incorruptible chief of the Detective Bureau had gambled that finding the head would justify the heavy cost, he hadn’t built a network of cronies willing to overlook an expensive failure. Lacking Guldensuppe’s head, Acting Inspector Stephen O’Brien lost his own: He was relieved of his post the following week.

  “I HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED in a paper as a ‘murderess,’ ” the prisoner mused. She shot a significant look toward the World reporter visiting her cell. “Do you, young man, think that I have that appearance?”

  No, he quickly assured Augusta Nack—she didn’t look like a murderess at all.

  “It did not seem,” the reporter assured readers, “that her facial expressions were those of a fiendish woman.” To the contrary: Manhattan’s most famous prisoner had “a sparkle in her eyes,” not to mention a “finely modeled neck” and “very fine white teeth.” He complimented the low collar on her black wrap, and well he might; Augusta Nack was granting the World the first full interview since her arrest.

  “Wait a moment and I will get you a chair.” She ushered the reporter into her cell. “We can sit in this corner.”

  She’d agreed to talk, she explained as they sat down, because the World was the one paper that had treated her fairly. The rivalry between Pulitzer and Hearst was such that now they’d even taken opposing prisoners; thanks to the early doubts that World reporters had thrown on the Journal’s accusations against Mrs. Nack, they were the closest thing she had to a friend in the press. The quiet and brooding Thorn, on the other hand, was a confirmed Journal reader, and when he talked much at all, it was generally to Hearst reporters.

  “I will cheerfully tell my life story to the World,” Mrs. Nack announced. “All the others have condemned me.”

  The reporter joined in her indignation as he looked around her quarters. Mrs. Nack had settled into the Tombs over the course of the summer. True, she’d complained about the bad food in her first days there, and was shocked by the sight of women smoking—“a most degrading habit,” she complained—but then she wised up fast. She was the undisputed queen of the cell block by one simple strategy: The quarters she charged from curious visitors and female well-wishers went to buying coffee and cake for her fellow prisoners. Short of a good lawyer, a berth alongside Augusta Nack was the best luck a Tombs woman could hope for.

  She felt for these women, Nack wanted the World reporter to know—for she too had suffered a hard lot in life. She was a deeply wronged woman. Herman Nack, she claimed, was a drunkard who had abused her terribly.

  “Shortly after my baby was born he seemed to become more abusive.” She shuddered. In the few spare moments when he wasn’t ordering her around their home in Germany, she’d bettered herself by studying for a midwifery degree. “A short time after I received my diploma, we decided to come to New York.” This had only made matters worse.

  “I first made the discovery that, in addition to being cruel and neglectful, he was unfaithful to me.” She sighed. “I caught him several times in our house with strange women.” In lieu of contrition, Augusta recalled bitterly, Herman beat her and made her sleep in the cellar.

  “I made up my mind to leave him. I considered that living the life of a slave was paradise compared to living with that man.”

  And that, she pleaded, was why World readers—especially women readers—had to understand that her story was not about a murdered man, but about a wronged woman. “I ask those women who are happy and who have good, true husbands and pleasant families and happy homes, not to judge me too harshly,” she pleaded. Her concern wasn’t with the murder—there had been no murder—but with how people viewed her leaving her brutish husband. She was drawn to Guldensuppe because of his tenderness. Was that so wrong?

  “He was kind and indulgent of me in every way,” she declared passionately, “and I do not feel that I am deserving of blame that I grew to love him.”

  She did not mention Martin Thorn.

  Mrs. Nack stood up and excused herself—it was time, she explained, for her to crochet. Also, she’d have to make time for her devotions; she was a pious woman, she explained, and “never a day goes by that I do not pray to God.” But she knew those prayers would soon be answered. As long as the police and the DA couldn’t find a head for the body in the Bellevue morgue, she could insist that it didn’t belong to her boyfriend. Even if they’d argued and fallen out, Willie would surely come back to save her.

  “There is no doubt in my mind that William Guldensuppe is alive today.” She smiled. “I know he will turn up soon and clear me of this horrible suspicion.”

  The story of Augusta Nack’s life, it seemed, was not a sordid crime drama; it was a love story.

  14.

  THE HIGH ROLLER

  WHEN THE DELIVERYMAN SHAMBLED unannounced into the district attorney’s office on Centre Street, it wasn’t to drop off a package.

  I’m going to tell you everything, Herman Nack told the astounded prosecutor.

  Assistant DA Ed Mitchell hastily sent for a stenographer as he guided the gruff bakery employee into his office. Clutching his battered homburg, Herman Nack was none too pleased at spending a day off on anything besides beer or bowling, but Gussie’s World interview had been nagging at him.

  “She said lots of bad things about me,” he groused. “I wanted to tell what I knew about her just to get square.”

  Herman was a man ill used by the case: attacked in the street by Journal reporters, briefly jailed as the prime suspect, his failed marriage paraded before the nation. Now the World was calling him a vicious brute. He’d just wanted to be left alone, but after biting his tongue for two months, he could keep silent no more. Still, he insisted he didn’t want to get into any trouble.

  “If I say anything,” he hesitated, “I will be as liable as she is.”

  He would be safe, the prosecutors assured him. They were joined by Detective Samuel Price, who leaned in with keen interest; he’d staked out and arrested Augusta Nack at her apartment and harbored deeper suspicions about her.

  “There isn’t much to tell,” the deliveryman stalled. “But what I know and remember I will tell.”

  “My wife left me in 1896,” he began. “We had a scrap. I had been giving her $10 a week, and she wanted the whole business, which was the $17 that I received. I told her I would only give her five dollars a week.”

  The stenographer calmly transcribed the events of that violent evening.


  “She came at me with a knife. I seized her by the arms, and she threw the knife on the ground.… Two or three days after that she moved the furniture. She said she did not want anything to do with me but wanted to live with Guldensuppe.”

  What was galling to Herman wasn’t so much that his wife was leaving him, but that she already had money from her own sideline: abortions.

  “Do you know whether your wife attended women at your house?” Detective Price asked sharply.

  “Yes.” He nodded. She charged her customers $25 each. “She had no diploma, either. She failed her examination in Europe.”

  Not surprisingly, some of her customers hadn’t fared so well.

  “Did any of them die?” Price pressed.

  “I know two, for sure,” Herman admitted. “Another case was a girl who came from the country.”

  “Do you know if any of these women ever died in your house?”

  “No, not in my house. My wife told me that one girl died in Bellevue Hospital. This was about five years ago.”

  Augusta was afraid of getting found out. Dr. Weiss of Tenth Avenue, as well as her current landlord and pharmacist, F. W. Werner, quietly assisted in taking care of the women after their botched abortions.

  “How would she dispose of the bodies of the infants?”

  “Any child would be buried by an undertaker—Alois Palm.”

  Mitchell and Detective Price sat amazed. They knew that some doctors and undertakers treated botch jobs and buried fetuses with no questions asked, but Nack wasn’t just making wild allegations now. He was naming names. Palm still ran a thriving undertaking business, just down the street from Mrs. Nack.

  In fact, Herman admitted, not all the children were buried.

  “My wife placed dead children in jars containing spirits,” he recalled with some distaste—because she’d stored them in his bedroom.

  “How many dead children did you see in your room?” an astonished Price asked.

  “About a dozen,” Nack shrugged.

  “Did you ever see her cut up any of the bodies?” the detective asked pointedly.

  “She told me”—he paused to think back—“that she had burned some of them in the stove.”

  The sounds of Centre Street filtered in from outside; the Criminal Courts Building stood just across the street from the Tombs, and they could almost see Augusta Nack’s cell window. As the stenographer scratched away, Price finally broke the silence.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “A whole lot,” the deliveryman ventured. “She burned them for eight or ten years, two or three a month.”

  Assistant DA Mitchell quietly did the math in his head: two, maybe three hundred infants had been cremated in the kitchen of Mrs. Nack’s apartment on Ninth Avenue. Herman Nack sensed he’d already revealed too much. Maybe he wasn’t going to tell quite everything—such as, say, just why his wife had to leave the old country back in 1886.

  “There is something at the back of that,” the burly driver hinted darkly. “If she says anything more about me, maybe I’ll say something else. She knows what I could say.”

  “IT’S A LIE!” Mrs. Nack roared from her cell. “It’s a lie, every word of it!”

  The Evening Journal for September 2 had landed the story, but the World was the first to get a reporter to Augusta Nack’s cell. She spun away from the Pulitzer reporter and raged at her ex-husband from inside her cell.

  “Fool!” she spat. “Fool!”

  Her lawyer was quick to show up and ward off the reporters.

  “I am not going to let Mrs. Nack see anyone about her husband’s charges,” he insisted, though the story had already slipped from his grasp. On the way over to the jail he’d been confronted by World front pages with the damning headline:

  SAYS THE ACCUSED MURDERESS OUT-HERODED HEROD

  “It is only natural,” chimed in the Evening Journal, “that Mrs. Nack, in view of her record of baby killing, should place so little value on human life.”

  The papers had already been seizing on any death they could pin to the case. When a Woodside neighbor died in July, it was said to be from shock over the crime; so was the death of John Gotha’s ninety-five-year-old father-in-law that same month, though a better theory was that the man had died at the shock of being ninety-five years old. But now there was the dizzying prospect of hundreds of deaths connected to the case. The Tenth Avenue doctors and undertakers named by Herman Nack found their shops invaded by reporters. Dr. Weiss claimed to have no idea what Herman was talking about; nor did Mrs. Nack’s landlord, F. G. Werner.

  “I do not think that Nack means me,” the pharmacist demurred. “Surely I never aided Mrs. Nack in any way.”

  Alois Palm tried rather unsportingly to pin it all on his own brother, a fellow undertaker. But for all the perfunctory denials, none of them threatened to take Herman Nack to court. For those familiar with the city’s thriving abortion business, it wasn’t hard to guess why they didn’t relish the prospect of testifying under oath.

  Discussing the case with reporters, Assistant DA Mitchell found that Herman’s charges made a great deal of sense indeed. Even Mrs. Nack’s friends faulted her as avaricious, and there certainly was quick money to be made in illicit abortions. What was more, she needed quick money.

  “We have found out,” Mitchell announced, “that she was a high roller.”

  “What was her object,” asked a puzzled Journal reporter, “in preserving the bodies of infants in jars?”

  “Why, to sell them,” the assistant DA answered. “Medical colleges and students pay well for good specimens of the kind.”

  Herman’s charges also explained one of the oddest testimonies from the early days of the investigation: that of Werner, Mrs. Nack’s landlord and the proprietor of the pharmacy on the first floor of her building. When the World was still trying to undermine the Guldensuppe identification, Werner had been one of the few to claim that he didn’t see a resemblance in the body. Now that peculiar denial had a motive. A pharmacist could make good money providing abortifacients on the sly; perhaps Werner was desperately trying to steer attention away from his shop.

  More important, Herman’s accusation gave Mrs. Nack a motive. Martin Thorn’s motive for the murder—revenge—had been clear all along, and vehemently voiced in front of fellow barbers and pinochle partners. But what of Mrs. Nack? Why hadn’t she just left William Guldensuppe and moved in with Thorn? The logical answer was: she couldn’t. Mitchell believed that Guldensuppe had kept Gussie from leaving with his damning knowledge of her abortion operations—and of the mothers who had died at her hands.

  “Guldensuppe knew this,” the World reported, “and threatened to tell.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time, either. Herman’s charges unearthed still another bombshell. Right after Augusta left him, he’d paid some angry visits to her—and, perhaps, made a few unwise threats about what he knew. So, Mitchell revealed, Mrs. Nack had gone to one Ernest Moring—the brother of her friend Mrs. Miller, who ran Buck’s Hotel—and tried to hire him to kill her ex-husband.

  He’d turned her down, and nothing had come of Herman Nack’s threat anyway. But when she was ready to leave her next beau, Mitchell reasoned, Mrs. Nack was threatened with exposure once again. This time she found the right man for the job: a jealous lover with enough anger to do the deed, and to do it for free. And that was how she kept Guldensuppe from talking—forever.

  ——

  THE WORLD REPORTER ascended the rickety stairs of a Grand Street tenement, wandered down a dark hallway, and passed through a doorway into a modest ten-by-twelve room. Before him sat Dr. Giuseppe Lapenta, director, president, secretary, and treasurer of the Italian School of Midwifery. Its entire campus consisted of this modest room.

  How much do your degrees cost? the reporter demanded from the startled gentleman.

  It was the oldest and surest of headline grabbers. Within a day of Herman Nack’s revelations, Coroner Tuthill announced that he would lobby fo
r new legislation to restrain midwives. The World promptly pursued local midwives with gusto. Reporters pounced on nursing schools for poor immigrant women, where degrees could be had in fifteen days for $50, and marched out with indignant headlines like A SCHOOL FOR BARBARITY and DIPLOMA MILL FOR MIDWIVES.

  “Out of 55,000 live births last year, 25,000 and over were reportedly attended by women of this class,” the newspaper warned. “No one knows how many midwives there are in New York City.”

  That, alas, was due to the previous midwife murder scandal: the death of Mary Rogers, the beautiful shopgirl whom Edgar Allan Poe barely fictionalized in his “Mystery of Marie Roget.” After her body was found in the Hudson River in July 1841, Mary’s despondent fiancé committed suicide, and suspicions ran strong that “Madame Restell,” the city’s wealthiest abortionist, had dumped her body after a procedure gone awry. She promptly became the designated villainess both for moralizing Herald journalists and for the American Medical Association, who cast midwives as a meddling and undertrained menace. The state criminalized abortion soon afterward, and a later wave of obscenity laws made it illegal to even discuss the procedure.

  This, naturally, merely ceded the procedure to opportunists and criminals. Unregulated midwives still readily pierced the amniotic sac and then induced contractions with abortifacients such as pennyroyal, tansy, and black hellebore. The better practitioners were often immigrants from Bohemia, where stringent training was still available; the worse ones included anybody walking in from Grand Street with $50 to hand over to Dr. Lapenta. But for those with plenty of nerve and few scruples, there was money to be made. And it was a consensual crime that no woman—from chambermaid to heiress—was eager to volunteer information about.