The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  “Their methods are so hidden and their ignorance so dense that they have no conception of law to restrain them,” the World thundered against midwives. “Most can hardly sign their own names.” But another anxiety shadowed the genuine concern over their scattershot training: namely, that it was women taking business away from men. Even as the World was pursuing midwives, it was running the headline WOMEN FARM, MEN COOK—a story noting that “the New Woman” was moving into traditionally male jobs in farming and manufacturing, while more men were taking domestic employment. Hearst’s Journal, though generally sympathetic to women’s labor, still ran headlines such as SHE’S PRETTY, EVEN IF SHE IS A LAWYER.

  Yet the reporters could hardly fault their own motives in pursuing Mrs. Nack. After all, for a case initially written off as a prank, the Guldensuppe affair was now becoming an open sewer of murder, dismemberment, adultery, contract killing, false identity, gambling, illicit abortion, and medical malpractice. And as World reporters swarmed local diploma mills, all of it would have been curiously familiar to the blustery old editors of New York during the Mary Rogers case more than fifty years earlier.

  “Really,” the Herald’s publisher had mused during the throes of that scandal, “the newspapers are becoming the only efficient police, the only efficient judges that we have.”

  ACTUAL POLICE AND JUDGES, though, were now moving swiftly. With Martin Thorn and Augusta Nack in attendance at the Criminal Court on the morning of September 17, their indictment was dismissed. That wasn’t exactly a victory for the defense, because another indictment had just been handed down from Queens County.

  Guldensuppe was lured from Manhattan, murdered in Queens, and then scattered in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. The consolidation of the city’s five boroughs was just months away; had the crime happened a bit later, there wouldn’t have been any question of jurisdiction. As it was, with Inspector O’Brien off the case and with the murder scene firmly fixed in Queens, the lawyers and the DA’s office had agreed to a move. The two prisoners were handed over to Undersheriff Baker of Queens County and led to gather their meager belongings from their cells at the Tombs. Then they said their goodbyes to cell mates and slipped out the Leonard Street exit.

  One thousand New Yorkers were waiting for them outside.

  Undersheriff Baker quickly bundled Mrs. Nack and Martin Thorn into a waiting carriage. A phalanx of black cabs slowly pursued them, all filled with reporters ready to cover the pair’s every move and scrambling for hotel accommodations by the Queens courthouse. “The line of carriages looked like a funeral procession,” a Sun reporter marveled.

  The crowd surged, gawking at the prisoners as they headed toward the ferry slip by New Chambers Street. It was only as the boat finally pulled away from its moorings that, with the expanse of the East River stretching out before them, Nack and Thorn could feel some measure of solitude. Any solace in the quiet journey was brief; the undersheriff was staring quite fixedly at them, trying to read their faces. The ferry was passing the East Eleventh Street Pier, where the first gory parcel had been discovered.

  Martin and Gussie remained expressionless, watching as their adopted island of Manhattan slipped away for what might be the last time.

  Anything was a welcome change after the Tombs. The Queens County Jail was everything the Tombs was not: quiet, modern, and brightly lit. Thorn, though, was uneasy. He’d become used to the sound of pile drivers and hammers at the Tombs; in the eerie silence of the Queens jail, he could ponder the steady drip of evidence against him.

  “I rented the Woodside cottage under the name of Braun,” he finally blurted out to Journal reporter Lowe Shearon. It was a stunning admission, but Thorn insisted that it was perfectly innocent. Sure, he’d rented it under a false name—“What of it?”—but that was no capital offense. And a new claim by a clerk that he’d bought seven cents’ worth of plaster on the day of the murder left him unimpressed.

  “That is all rot. I never bought plaster of paris in my life. I never even had a pinch of it,” he insisted.

  And with that, he retreated into the darkness of his new cell.

  WHILE THORN WAS ASSIGNED to Murderers Row, Mrs. Nack had pulled an upper-floor unit with a vista of Long Island. The landscape was still pleasant and green; in a few weeks she’d be able to watch the foliage turn color. If she looked carefully, she could even make out the infamous Woodside cottage from where she stood. Gussie didn’t care; she was delighted with her new cell.

  She’d said little, though, since Herman’s disastrous retaliation for her last interview. So while the Journal worked over the sullen Thorn, the World sent to Mrs. Nack’s cell their star women’s columnist: Harriet Hubbard Ayer. Gussie instantly relented.

  “Come in if you want to see me,” she heard herself saying.

  Mrs. Ayer was startled to be welcomed; Mrs. Nack was even more startled by who she was letting in. For the first time since being jailed, she was face-to-face with a bigger celebrity than herself. Harriet Hubbard Ayer was a household name, a glamorous riches-to-rags grand dame whose cosmetics empire had fallen apart in a messy divorce. After her ex-husband schemed, successfully, to commit her to an asylum, Mrs. Ayer made a sensational comeback as a beauty-and-manners columnist. Surely she would understand the terribly wronged Mrs. Nack.

  “Must I be locked in?” Mrs. Ayer asked the jailer fearfully as she entered the cell. The memory of her own year in an asylum was never far away.

  “Don’t be afraid, you’ll get out all right,” Mrs. Nack assured her, clasping her hands in sudden sympathy. “I know just how you feel. Ach, mein Gott!”

  Mrs. Nack’s two cell mates fluttered about tidying the cell; they were so deeply in Gussie’s thrall that they did all her washing and chores for her. As they fussed over the new arrival, Mrs. Nack led Harriet to a corner of the cell, where a table was festooned with one of the many bunches of flowers sent by admirers. She was, she confided to the columnist, still angry at how newly overthrown Inspector O’Brien had interrogated her.

  “Fifty times or more already Inspector O’Brien tells me he knows just how the murder is committed. ‘Ve know, ve know. Vill you tell or not?’ ” She punched her palm as she slipped into her old accent. “I say, screaming at him: ‘Ven you know the story so well, vy in hell isn’t that enough for you?’ ”

  Mrs. Nack regained her composure and gazed intently into the columnist’s face.

  “Yes, I say just so,” she continued. “Do you think if I have murder on my soul I could be as quiet as I have been? I sleep soundly all night—ask the Warden.”

  “It’s a fact,” her jailer piped up from outside the cell.

  And, Harriet asked tenderly, had she lost her friends since being jailed?

  “Yes.” The midwife shook her head sadly. “My friends they all say, so Augusta Nack is a murderer, or if she isn’t we better not have anything to do with her.”

  “Our friends want little to do with our troubles,” Mrs. Ayer empathized.

  Instead, Mrs. Nack had her cell mates and her sewing for company. Her dresses, already a sensation at her court appearances, would be even better for the trial. And Mrs. Nack was, of course, a woman you could trust with long needles.

  “Have you seen in the papers that the Warden is afraid I am going to kill myself?” she scoffed incredulously. “Well now, I am going to show you how easily I could kill myself if I wanted to.”

  Nack crossed the room and pulled out a small basket from under the sink; it was filled with silverware. To Ayer’s amazement, she drew five sharp steel knives and laid them out on the table before the columnist.

  “You see”—the prisoner laughed—“if I want to cut my throat I have every convenience. I could take a knife in each hand and have some to spare. But I am not going to cut my throat. I am going to be acquitted.”

  Every night before she went to bed, she admitted, she spun and twirled about her cell in anticipation: “When I think of how near the trial is, I dance around.”

 
“If we had a piano,” a cell mate chirped, “it would help so very much.”

  And then the heavy iron door was unlocked to Harriet once again, just as Mrs. Nack promised. But as she emerged, the beauty columnist was haunted by what she’d seen. Mrs. Nack’s was a curious love story indeed, for the fates of Thorn and Guldensuppe had not even arisen once in the conversation.

  “Augusta Nack knows nothing whatsoever about love,” Harriet Ayer mused to her readers in the next morning’s World. “That is to say, of the love which means self-abnegation. She loves herself.” As for Martin Thorn, the columnist believed that to her he was merely a losing hand that she now wanted to fold—just as Herman Nack once was, just as William Guldensuppe had been.

  “If she thinks of Martin Thorn at all,” she wrote, “I believe she thinks of him to hate him.”

  15.

  KLONDIKE WILLIE

  BUT AUGUSTA NACK was thinking about Martin a great deal indeed. Even as Harriet prepared her article for the next day’s October 3 edition of the World, Mrs. Nack motioned an inmate over to her cell.

  Rockaway! came the summons as he strolled along the top floor of the jail. Rockaway Ed was a trusty, part of the peculiar prisoner hierarchy within Queens County Jail. Ascending to the rank of a trusty meant freedom: freedom to walk the halls and deliver messages and packages, freedom to walk the exercise yard, even the freedom to leave the prison when the sheriff wanted errands run. The trusty was second only to a “bum boss” in the underground ranking of prisoners, and when Journal men had first visited the jail, it was Ed who’d shown them around; he was considered the best guide. When, that is, he could be found there at all. He was on the last two months of a six-month sentence for pilfering some jewelry, and on a good streak he could stay clear of jail for the entire day, returning only to sleep on his hard pallet bed at night.

  Ed came up close to the cell door.

  “I believe I can trust you,” Mrs. Nack whispered. “And if you will do what I tell you it’s worth twenty-five dollars to you.”

  That sounded like escape money, and Ed’s own sentence was going to end before Christmas. “Oh, that’s all right,” he assured her. “I’m not looking for pay.”

  “Well.” Mrs. Nack hesitated. “I want to send a message to Thorn, and I want you to take it. I’ll put it in a sandwich.”

  Food was a good medium of communication; Mrs. Nack was already known for securing cell-block friendships this way, so food handed through her cell door to a trusty wouldn’t attract any notice.

  Three days later when she’d saved up enough food and paper, the parcel passed through the barred door and into Rockaway Ed’s hands. As he walked down the cell block, and then down the three flights of stairs to Murderers Row, he could see that there was more than just a sandwich in the parcel: Whether to hide the note, or simply out of a hostess’s pride, Mrs. Nack had sent a side dish of potatoes as well.

  At the bottom of the stairs, it was a straight shot through the iron cell-block door and to Thorn’s room. But Ed bided his time; he knew that sooner or later he’d be wanted by the sheriff for an outside errand, and he was right. Sent out of the jail, he still held Mrs. Nack’s parcel as he walked out through the locked doors, into the autumn sunlight, across the Court Square, and into the outpost of the New York Journal.

  Whatever Augusta Nack could pay, William Randolph Hearst could pay better—much better.

  I’ve got it, Rockaway Ed announced.

  Journal staffers pounced. He’d slipped the lead to them days ago, and they’d been waiting with writers and artists at the ready to make a copy.

  Rockaway Ed was hustled back out the door with the letter; he was to go immediately back to the jail and deliver it, they told him. If Thorn wrote a reply, they’d intercept that one, too.

  A staffer who knew German quickly translated the note into the text that would appear in the next morning’s paper:

  Dear Martin

  I send you a couple of potatoes. If you do not care to eat them, perhaps the others will. Dear child, send me a few lines how you feel. Dear child, I believe there is very little hope for us. I feel very bad this afternoon. Send me a letter by your sister or by your brother-in-law. I wish they could procure us something so that we could end our lives.

  (photo credit 15.1)

  This would be best.

  My attorney assures me the evidence against me is as strong as that against you, and that you have talked too much, which injures us, for the proofs are at hand.

  Good night.

  It was a puzzling note, because it was palpably false. The evidence was not as strong against her—she hadn’t spoken publicly against Guldensuppe before his disappearance and hadn’t unburdened herself to a friend about killing him. In fact, if it wasn’t for Thorn’s presence, it might have been difficult to mount a murder case against Mrs. Nack at all.

  It took a stunned moment to sink in: Mrs. Nack was trying to get her accomplice to kill himself.

  “WHERE IS IT?” Sheriff Doht demanded as he burst into Thorn’s gloomy cell. Jailer Jarvis barreled in behind him as Thorn grabbed for his clothing.

  “Hand me the vest!” the sheriff yelled. Thorn yanked a sheet of paper out of a pocket and frantically tore it, stuffing pieces into his mouth.

  “Don’t let him, that’s what I’m after!” the sheriff barked to the jail keeper. Jarvis closed his beefy hands around Thorn’s neck, choking and rattling him as the writhing prisoner desperately tried to swallow the scraps.

  “Give it up, Thorn!” they roared. “Open your mouth!”

  The denizens of Murderers Row eagerly lined their cell doors, watching Thorn’s eyes and face bulge; he was propelled backward over his cot until his head hung upside down, and Sheriff Doht pried his jaws open and reached into his mouth for the chewed scraps of paper. Jarvis at last released his grip on Thorn’s throat, and the prisoner gasped in long drafts of air.

  The fragments bearing Thorn’s writing were reassembled on a table in District Attorney Youngs’s office:

  (photo credit 15.2)

  Some attending Journal reporters quickly translated it:

  My dear—you wrote of self-destruction. That would be best. I had thought it over long ago and came to the conclusion that it would be best for me, but not before all is done to gain liberty. Perhaps it will be the better way, and I will, and it will be easy to accomplish it. I have a prescription for morphine that I can buy or get at any drug store. But have patience and endurance and say what I write to you. If it comes to extremes, then it is time, and I will arrange it so. It is not on account of living that I would like to get free, but to spite the people here.

  The watch on Thorn’s cell was instantly doubled, and his sister and brother-in-law were searched carefully whenever they entered the facility. As the only visitors Thorn deigned to see, they were almost certainly part of his plan for obtaining the morphine overdose.

  “I am sorry,” DA Youngs sighed. “The Journal did not give me Mrs. Nack’s original letter. No scrap of her note has been found. He either threw the letter down a sink or tore it into fragments and swallowed it.” The Hearst reporters shrugged it off; Doht’s lousy security at the jail wasn’t their problem.

  “Bring the sheriff here,” snapped the DA to a detective.

  Sheriff Doht, led into the office, stammered out an excuse: Nack’s letter was surely a fabrication by a German-speaking prisoner in the jail, or by the Journal itself.

  “I don’t blame you boys,” he leered at the reporters. “I understand how you work.”

  The Hearst men scoffed at him; Doht just wanted to cover up his own missteps, which had been piling up. He had tried to induce vomiting in both prisoners by filling their soup with grease, with the ridiculous notion that he’d extract confessions out of them while they retched; then he’d hung a picture of a man’s disembodied head over Mrs. Nack’s cot while she slept. DA Youngs was unamused, and the sheriff quickly backed down.

  Confronted at her cell, Mrs. Nack also
tried denying the note—“Oh, my God, I never write such a letter!”—before breaking apart in fury when the text was read back to her.

  “To whom did you give the letter?” she was asked.

  “Rockaway,” she spat in disgust.

  What kind of a world was it when you couldn’t trust a jewel thief?

  JOURNAL REPORTERS SWOOPED DOWN into Hell’s Kitchen and up the block of brick tenements past the corner of Forty-Second and Tenth—past Stemmerman’s grocery, past Mssr. Mauborgne’s Mattress Renovating, past a stable and the neighboring blacksmith shop—and piled into the five-story walk-up at 521 West Forty-Second.

  Where’s Guldensuppe’s head? they demanded.

  Standing in the doorway was Paul Menker, a local butcher now better known to the world as Martin Thorn’s brother-in-law. “I know nothing about this case at all,” he said flatly to reporters.

  Where’s the head?

  “Anybody who tries to drag me into it will get hurt,” he said, his voice rising.

  Come now, the reporters pressed—we have his confession.

  Menker was enraged.

  “I know nothing about the case,” the mustachioed butcher sputtered, before reaching for a rather unfortunate turn of phrase. “Bring a man that says I do, and I’ll knock his head off!”

  Excellent; the Journal reporters made sure they got that quote down. They were on a roll, for their rivals at the World had fumbled yet another a priceless lead. The same day that the Journal revealed the lovers’ suicide letters, Pulitzer’s team had landed a tantalizing story: that one Frank Clark had heard a boozy confession back in late July. While laid up in the Tombs infirmary, Clark had been prescribed bitter quinine for his malaria, along with a ration of at least three shots of whiskey to wash it down. He wasn’t a drinking man, though, and each day he gave his drams to the man in the next bed—Martin Thorn. Warmed by his first liquor in weeks, his neighbor talked about the mysterious fate of William Guldensuppe.