The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  “He often boasted,” Clark recalled, “that he was impossible to convict without the head.”

  And Thorn kept talking, lulled by the seeming nonchalance of his new friend. Clark was a talented forger—he could draw an exact replica of a dollar bill with nothing but a green pencil—but the man was no killer. What Thorn confessed next preyed on Clark’s mind for months until he finally gave a 3,500-word affidavit to the district attorney.

  “He told me that after he placed Guldensuppe’s head in the plaster of paris, he threw it in a patch of woods,” he testified. “He told me Gotha had erred when he said the head had been thrown into the East River. Thorn said he told Gotha it was his intention to so dispose of the head, but he was frightened off.”

  The attention being paid to the ferries and riverside in the days after the murder was discovered, not to mention the Journal hiring grapplers out on the river, simply made it too perilous for Thorn to come out of hiding to finish the job. Arrested with the head still on dry land, though, he’d found an even better solution.

  “Two weeks after Thorn’s arrest a man came to the Tombs to see him,” Clark continued. “This was on July nineteenth.”

  It was on that visit, Clark said, that Thorn told his visitor exactly where to find the head. His accomplice promptly located it, packed the heavy chunk inside a tackle basket, and that very afternoon boarded a fishing excursion vessel, the J. B. Schuyler. With his rod and tackle, he didn’t stand out from the other leisure fishermen on the side-wheel steamer. As the Schuyler floated among the fishing banks miles offshore, Thorn’s accomplice simply tipped his basket’s parcel into the water. Two days later, he returned to the Tombs to report the good news. “Thorn was very happy,” Clark reported.

  A visit to the ailing forger by the district attorney left prosecutors convinced of his story—but they refused to give the World the identity of Thorn’s accomplice. And there things sat for the next six days, without much follow-up by Pulitzer’s reporters—until the Journal came piling into Menker’s hallway.

  Is it true? Did you really do it?

  Mrs. Menker, Thorn’s sister, tried to fend off the reporters. Her husband was a good, hardworking man, she explained, and didn’t know anything about the case.

  Doesn’t the prison record show he visited Thorn on the nineteenth and the twenty-first?

  Paul Menker was a decent man, the wife insisted—and, she added, he will throw you down the stairs if you don’t leave us alone. The Journal reporters quickly retreated, leaving the butcher quaking with anger.

  “I tell you that Guldensuppe is alive!” he roared after them. “That Thorn is innocent! That Guldensuppe will be found!”

  IN FACT, one official was wondering whether he just might be right. A letter had arrived in Coroner Hoeber’s office back in early August, from a woman claiming to be the wife of an attendant at the Murray Hill Baths:

  My dear sir:

  I cannot any longer keep quiet. Guldensuppe lives and keeps silent simply out of revenge against Thorn, of whom he is insanely jealous. He will only appear after Thorn has been sentenced to death. If the police would only look around Harlem they could easily find Guldensuppe. More I dare not say.

  Respectfully,

  MRS. JOSEPHINE EMMA

  Hoeber’s staff was marveling over the newly arrived letter when they looked up to see an unannounced visitor peering at it: Mrs. Nack’s lawyer, Manny Friend.

  “I intended not”—the angry coroner slipped into his native German syntax—“that you should see that letter!”

  They were old enemies, and Friend instantly accused the coroner of holding out evidence on him. Hoeber, the lawyer yelled, was “a dirty, insignificant little whelp.” The two scuffled, and Hoeber’s staff dragged them apart. Maybe the coroner wrote the letter himself to get attention from reporters, the lawyer yelled. “I believe,” he jeered, “that he has resorted to this method to gain a little more advertisement for himself.”

  If so, then Hoeber was going through a lot of ink. A cascade of mysterious and often unsigned confidential letters now arrived at his office. One claimed that it was Guldensuppe who’d been hiding in the closet waiting to attack Thorn—and that he’d been killed in self-defense. At least two more claimed that Guldensuppe was alive and well, and seeking out his fortune prospecting in the Klondike.

  The accused himself insisted that he’d be vindicated.

  “I have always believed that he had gone to Europe,” Thorn assured a World reporter about yet another Guldensuppe sighting in Syracuse, New York. “I am sure he will turn up in time to clear me of the charge of murdering him.” Perhaps it was just as well that the reporter did not note that his own paper attributed the latest sighting to a Mr. “O. Christ.”

  Soon enough, another letter insisted that everyone else was wrong:

  Kindly do not believe any of the cards being sent to you saying that Guldensuppe lives yet, as he does not. He was murdered at Woodside, L.I. and the head you can receive by looking sharp at the Astoria Ferry pier about near the point of the Ninety-first street dock.… Will let you know more. The party that killed him does not know that I saw this.

  Yet another missive, sent by Mrs. Lenora Merrifield of 106th Street, claimed that Guldensuppe was working under an alias in a Harlem barbershop. When confronted by detectives, a puzzled Mrs. Merrifield didn’t even recognize the letter; her teenaged son, however, showed a peculiar interest in the commotion it created.

  But the most haunting notes were the anonymous ones penned in German and sent to Coroner Hoeber: Guldensuppe is alive, and taking revenge on Thorn by setting him up to die. No stock could really be put in these wild and unsigned allegations. But if William Guldensuppe was plotting retribution, it seemed he was about to get it: Thorn’s trial was now set for October 18.

  “THE POLICE DO NOT EXPECT to see Guldensuppe in this world,” William Randolph Hearst joked. “In fact, they would be content to see his head.”

  It had been a splendid season for news. Along with this swell murder here in the north, Hearst also had a huge promotion to send a team of Journal cyclists eastward to Italy, an exciting gold rush out west, and from the south a bubbling Cuban rebellion against the dastardly Spanish. The latter had acquired a fine new angle over the summer: Evangelina Cisneros, the pretty eighteen-year-old daughter of a revolutionary, had been imprisoned for … well, depending on whom you asked, either for trying to break her father out of jail or for fending off the advances of a diabolical Spanish military governor. Hearst preferred the latter explanation.

  Even as he sent reporters to run the gauntlet of Paul Menker’s stairs, he’d sent another Journal operative—the hotshot reporter Karl Decker—to Cuba, to bribe a jailer, break into the prison with a ladder and a hacksaw, and chop out the iron bars of the damsel’s jail cell. Disguised with a sailor’s outfit and a cigar, “the Cuban Joan of Arc” was whisked away on a steamer bound for America. EVANGELINA CISNEROS RESCUED BY THE JOURNAL, his newspaper trumpeted the next day.

  The rescue was not exactly legal. But Hearst was always pushing for more: Why just cover news when you could make it?

  A NEW IDEA IN JOURNALISM, the Journal blared across a full-page illustration of a knight slaying octopus-like beasts: WHILE OTHERS TALK, THE JOURNAL ACTS. The paper was already launching city offensives against a gas trust and crooked paving contractors; now it would also shake the columns of national policy. Hearst lined up testimonials from the mayors of cities from San Francisco to Boston lauding his juggernaut, and even Secretary of State John Sherman delicately acknowledged the paper’s rather tactless achievement. “Every one will sympathize with the Journal’s enterprise in releasing Miss Cisneros,” he admitted. “She is a woman.”

  The prime minister of Spain was more direct.

  “The newspapers of your country seem to be more powerful than your government,” he snapped.

  Hearst was inclined to agree: The Guldensuppe case had paved the way for his paper to take it upon itself to shove asid
e any government, local or national, that moved too slowly to satisfy a pressroom deadline. The Cisneros rescue simply confirmed what he’d been claiming all summer.

  “It is epochal,” he announced from his office overlooking the city. “It represents the final stage in the evolution of the modern newspaper. Action—that is the distinguishing mark of the new journalism. When the East River murder seemed an insoluble mystery to the police, the Journal organized a detective force of its own. A newspaper’s duty is not confined to exhortation, but that when things are going wrong it should set them right if possible.”

  He could afford to feel expansive in his powers, for his powers were expanding. The old order was literally falling away: Sun publisher Charles Anderson Dana was now on his deathbed, and Pulitzer’s World was getting clobbered in the Guldensuppe case and in Cuba coverage. Journal sales were rocketing; a reader snapping it open to the latest revelations from Woodside or Havana would find them alongside a fine profusion of ads for everything from the Bonwit Teller department store to Seven Sutherland Sisters Scalp-Cleaner, or perhaps the Lady Push Ball Players—lasses in short garments who fought gamely over a giant medicine ball.

  All this was laced with Hearst’s own grand promotions. Just a day after raiding Thorn’s brother-in-law’s premises, Hearst was issuing new marching orders: Pull out all the stops for the arrival of Evangelina Cisneros.

  “Organize a great open-air reception in Madison Square. Have the two best military bands,” he barked to his managing editor. “Secure orators, have a procession, arrange for plenty of fireworks and search-lights. We must have 100,000 people together that night.” Rooms were hired at the Waldorf, reservations made at Delmonico’s, and launches arranged to greet the bewildered ingénue as she arrived in New York Harbor. The story would then be splashed across the October 18, 1897, Journal—on the very day, in fact, that Martin Thorn’s jury selection would begin. The New York Journal would yet again own the biggest local, national, and international stories for that day.

  The World, one industry newsletter marveled, was now simply “scooped every day of its existence.”

  The paper wasn’t just getting scooped, it was also getting hollowed out. Its star editor, Arthur Brisbane, was nettled by ceaselessly hectoring telegrams that Pulitzer sent from health retreats. In one the publisher cabled, THE PAPER SUFFERS AN EXCESSIVE STATESMANSHIP, yet in another he demanded the firing of a reporter for using the word “pregnant.” He was stingy about the expenses for art—MAKE SALARIED ARTISTS EARN THEIR SALARIES, he warned—yet he kept constant tabs on the editorial page, perhaps the least commercial section of the paper. Just about the only relief the absentee owner’s daily cables offered was this one: I REALLY DON’T EXPECT TO BE IN NEW YORK AT ALL THIS FALL. In fact, the World was perfectly capable of running without Pulitzer; instead, it would have to run without Brisbane, who jumped ship for the Journal. All it had taken, as usual, was a wave of Hearst’s checkbook.

  But amid these triumphs, just three days ahead of Thorn’s jury selection, it was the Brooklyn Eagle—not the Journal—that carried the first word of a curious development in Germany. The call for jurors, it seemed, would have to wait: Carl and Julius Peterson, two “reputable merchants of Hamburg,” were departing for New York via the ocean steamer Fürst Bismarck to personally testify about an unexpected old acquaintance they’d just recently run into.

  The Eagle headline said it all:

  GULDENSUPPE ALIVE?

  IV.

  THE TRIAL

  (photo credit p4.1)

  16.

  CORPUS DELICTI

  A THICK FOG BLANKETED the Hudson, the cold seeping into the coats of the journalists huddling expectantly around the frigid Hamburg-American pier.

  “The Fürst Bismarck has been sighted off Fire Island,” confirmed a Journal reporter.

  It wouldn’t be long now; the Bismarck had broken transatlantic records more than once in its runs from Hamburg to New York. The November 5 arrival would boast the usual kingmakers and captains of industry, of course; Republican boss Hamilton Fish was on board for this voyage, as was a Pabst brewery scion. But that wasn’t who the reporters were waiting for.

  From the mist, the towering form of the Bismarck materialized on the river. It augured an entirely new identification in the case. Throughout the summer the coroner’s office had turned away an array of disconcerting characters who wanted to view the body for no apparent good reason. The visitors who did have a reason were scarcely any better; one Josephine Vanderhoff had turned up, dressed in black and yelling at the top of her lungs that the body inside must be her husband, Marcus, a missing painter. It wasn’t.

  No, contended another helpful citizen. The body was surely the missing Virginia photographer William Edwards. When Edwards’s minister visited to view the pickled body, he turned it into a family outing; reporters watched in undisguised fascination as the minister, his wife, and his thirteen-year-old daughter examined the hacked-up body and other clues. Remarkably, they immediately identified the abandoned valise found in the early days of the case; it had indeed belonged to Edwards. That made sense, as the clothes in it had been the wrong size for Guldensuppe. The minister could even explain the enigmatically marked-up slates found inside: Edwards was a spirit medium, and they were used for ghost writing. So perhaps he’d found a more direct line of communication with the dead—by joining them. But the minister’s daughter examined the corpse’s hands and shook her head; it wasn’t him.

  So the identification by the rubbers at Murray Hill Baths remained. But the problem of the missing head—the faint possibility that Guldensuppe was hiding abroad—remained a vexing one. And every journalist on the pier had another recent case in mind: Luetgert.

  Just two weeks earlier, days after the Peterson brothers announced they’d be coming, a Chicago trial had concluded for the infamous sausage-maker Adolph Luetgert. Nobody had seen him kill his wife and throw her body into his factory’s acid-rendering vat, and nothing but five bone fragments—some as little as a toe joint and a broken tooth—had been found in the vat, along with two incriminating gold rings. The defense claimed the police had planted the rings, though, and that the bone fragments were from pigs.

  The jurors simply didn’t know what to think.

  The Luetgert trial ended in a hung jury, and Thorn eagerly read the wire reports that covered it. It was not hard to guess at the reason for his interest. And with the testimony of the Petersons—why, he might not even have to go to trial at all.

  Slowly, carefully, the mighty S.S. Fürst Bismarck eased into its berth and the gangway was lowered. One by one, top-hatted gents and wives swathed in furs against the cold descended; reporters waited at the bottom, notebooks at the ready, and checked the manifest for the famous witnesses.

  No Carl and Julius Peterson were listed.

  SO SORRY, Thorn’s lawyer explained. We just received a cable, and it turns out the Petersons will be on the next transatlantic steamer. It was an extraordinarily shameless excuse; but this was no ordinary case, and William F. Howe was no ordinary lawyer.

  The office of Howe & Hummel was the best known in the city. Open twenty-four hours a day across the street from the Tombs, it was a cash-up-front operation that served as counsel for the Whyo Gang, the Sheeny Mob, the Valentine Gang, and every safecracker and pickpocket syndicate in Manhattan. When seventy-eight brothel madams were arrested in a one-night sweep, every one named William Howe as her attorney. He was a 300-pound whirlwind of indignation, a crusader in an endless array of loud green and violet waistcoats, checked pants, and diamond rings on every finger. In four decades Howe had personally defended 650 murder and manslaughter cases—and he was accustomed to winning.

  “You cannot prove a corpus delicti by patchwork,” he’d roar to anyone who listened. “And I shall prove that the body in the Morgue is not that of William Guldensuppe.”

  Publicly the DA’s office laughed Howe off, but in private they feared their diamond-fingered foe. The Latin for
“body of crime” meant the proof that a crime had actually occurred. The notion had originated with Lord Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale, who pointed out that confessions alone were not trustworthy. It was powerfully revived in America in 1819 after the Boorn brothers case in Vermont, when a “victim” turned up alive shortly before a scheduled execution. But Howe was invoking a deliberate misreading—that a murder charge needed a complete body.

  “They have not got the head,” the lawyer needled. “And what is more, they can never find it.”

  Howe was enjoying the attention immensely. Reporters could come in and marvel at his Tombs office, a roughhouse operation where Howe cheekily kept the combination safe filled with coal for the furnace—actual money was hidden very quickly, and well away from the building—and where his staff amused themselves by serving one another with fake subpoenas. Beyond those, there was scarcely a scrap of incriminating paper in the place. Once, when his law offices were raided by police, they’d found nothing in the desks: no account books, no memoranda, no nothing. Howe and Hummel were the perfect gangsters’ counsel, acting on nothing but their wits and a handshake.

  Blessed with such a memory, Howe could reel off precedents for his defense of Thorn. “I cannot see how the District Attorney can get around the identification of the body,” he insisted.

  Take the case of the Danish preacher Soren Qvist, who smacked an insolent gardener with a spade and drove the fellow off his property—or so he said, until the man was found buried in his garden. At least, someone was found there, as the face was impossible to identify. The preacher professed amazement, but confessed after concluding that he must be guilty. It wasn’t until two decades after his execution that a very alive vagrant was identified as the “victim”; the whole thing had been a revenge plot, he admitted, using a disinterred body seeded with suitably damning personal effects.