The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  “Then there was the Ruloff case in this state,” Howe noted, recalling an infamous linguist suspected in at least eight murders in and around New York. “The prisoner was charged with having murdered his child. The body was missing altogether, and Ruloff was liberated.”

  True, he allowed, Ruloff was executed later—but only after he’d gone out again and murdered a store clerk.

  Exasperated by such maneuvering, the police already had two hapless detectives on the next steamer to Hamburg to see whether Howe was up to his old tricks. This, after all, was the lawyer who had once scotched a murder case by secretly paying a witness to move to Japan. This was the lawyer who’d once gotten another murderer acquitted by blaming a stabbing on the man’s four-year-old daughter.

  “Well”—Howe smiled at any doubters—“when you see Guldensuppe walk into the court room at Thorn’s trial, you will all be mightily surprised.”

  IF GULDENSUPPE had walked up to the Long Island City Courthouse that Saturday, he’d have had a hard time getting noticed; the place was abuzz with activity as carpenters added extra benches to the courtroom. More than 500 attendees were expected on Monday, and amid the lumber and dust, Sheriff Doht and DA Youngs were puzzling over how to rearrange the furniture.

  Here.

  They’d spent nearly two hours shifting tables and chairs around, trying to figure out how to cram everyone into the horseshoe-shaped courtroom. There’d be 200 people in the jury pool alone, not to mention reporters from every New York paper and national wire service, and witnesses, and legal teams, and officers of the court. Somewhere among all that, they’d have to fit in the accused, too.

  No, over there.

  William Howe’s spot was a peculiar challenge; he had a table custom-built for the case, specially designed so he could be flanked by both his legal team and the mounds of evidence. At last, the sheriff and the DA had it worked out: The defense would be shoved up against the jury box, while the rest of the floor would be taken up by six tables accommodating seventy-two newsmen, including in the floor space directly in front of the judge. When the judge looked up from the bench, the first people he’d see would be the press; that would also be what he’d see when he gazed upward, as the first rows of the galleries were saved for sketch artists. The rest of the galleries would take the jury pool and a precious few spectator seats. Sheriff Doht was flooded with ticket requests—many of them, he noted, from women.

  Pick your chairs! came the call to the news reps.

  As the men scrambled for places, more sounds of construction filtered out from the courtroom’s storage chamber. It was being converted into a newsroom bristling with telegraphs and typewriters; the prosecutor’s thirty exhibits of clothing, oilcloth, and flesh that had been stored there were now instead overflowing from the desk and floors of Sheriff Doht’s office.

  There was scarcely any less commotion outside. Up and down Jackson Avenue housewives had cleared out guest rooms and hung Room for Rent signs for visiting reporters. Provision wagons were rumbling around the semicircular plaza in front of the courthouse, roasted-peanut vendors were staking out their territory, and sign painters were at hasty work: Four new saloons had opened across the street from the courthouse, including in the local butcher’s shop.

  “Preparations are being made as for a fair,” mused a Journal reporter. “Everybody expects to make money.”

  Not least, naturally, was the Journal itself. Hearst had stolen a march on the World again by getting the courtroom wired. COURT TO PRINTING PRESS IN ONE MINUTE, crowed the Journal that weekend. For the first time ever, telephone wires from the courthouse plaza would instantly relay testimony—not just to the newsroom, but directly into headsets worn by the Linotype operators. Even if the Journal’s half million readers couldn’t physically fit into the courtroom, they’d still be able to vicariously attend the trial.

  “It is as though the words as they drop from the mouths of Gotha and other witnesses were by some magic instantaneously cast into type,” the paper’s front page promised rapturously. “It is as though some wizard had swept away the seven miles of tall houses and changed the course of the East River so as to bring the Evening Journal newsroom and the Long Island City Court House side by side.” Testimony would hit the page, they boasted, before spectators could even tell their friends out on the courthouse steps.

  Sharp-eyed saloon provisioners on the square could see another curious addition being made to the side of the courthouse: small cages. These, too, were a Journal idea. Hearst had hired three U.S.-record-holding racing pigeons—Aeolus, Flyaway, and Electra—so that courtroom sketches would arrive in minutes at the receiving cage set up in a Journal window on Newspaper Row. There a motion-detection circuit would ring a bell to alert editors and pressmen that the gallant birds had arrived with the latest cylinders.

  There were, in fact, at least three other good trials scheduled for that same day: the prosecution of a recent Columbia graduate for highway robbery, the murder trial of a man who gunned down a police officer while raiding a church donation box, and the assault trial of a husband driven mad by his wife’s incessant whistling of Sousa’s “The Liberty Bell.” Only Thorn’s trial, though, would warrant the kind of attention that the Journal was paying.

  “To the Journal,” Hearst announced piously in a signed editorial, “Martin Thorn is the same as any other man brought to the bar of justice, presumably innocent until convicted. The Journal does not hound any man.”

  Observing Hearst’s enthusiastic preparations for the trial, though, one sober Times reporter was feeling rather dour. “Every day there will be some fifty different pictures of scenes in the courtroom,” he groused. “There is no lawful means of averting this disgusting visitation.”

  AS THE SUN ROSE that Monday, November 8, 1897, hundreds of potential jurors—nervous and excited, bleary-eyed and annoyed—waited on the courthouse steps, while newsboys, policemen, and journalists milled among them. The World’s fashionable Harriet Ayers was easy to spot, as was novelist Julian Hawthorne, fresh from reporting the grisly Luetgert trial for the Journal. At length a gray-haired janitor shuffled up and wrested open the courthouse doors; the great mass came coursing in, briskly shepherded by deputies into the galleries and onto the courtroom floor.

  Sitting at the new defense table was William F. Howe, resplendent in a gray double-breasted suit, a yellow chrysanthemum in his lapel. He sported a cravat embroidered with a diamond medusa and doffed a yachting cap festooned with his initials in solid-gold buttons. His bejeweled fingers glittered under the gaslights as he waved to galleries filled with Long Island farmers. The attorney looked profoundly unworried, even as a police captain read that morning’s newspaper with two-inch headlines proclaiming MURDERER over an engraving of his client.

  Good morning! he boomed in his operatic baritone, startling DA Youngs. The district attorney was balding and bespectacled, wearing an off-the-rack suit; side by side, the barrel-chested defense lawyer and the knock-kneed prosecutor resembled a vaudevillian with his straight man.

  Good morning, Youngs replied politely.

  The defense attorney instantly decided he didn’t trust the fellow.

  “I rather fear Youngs, he’s too infernally polite,” he confided to a Herald reporter.

  The courtroom quieted down as Judge Wilmot Smith took the bench, and his clerk called roll for the jury pool.

  “William Hix,” he began. There was a painful silence.

  “He’s dead,” someone yelled.

  The court briefly broke into a tumult—but the explanation, alas, was true. The clerk stolidly moved on until he’d called roll for all two hundred citizens. Present, rang male voices of every age and accent from the galleries. When the last was called, the clerk turned expectantly to the district attorney.

  “Mr. Sheriff,” Youngs ordered. “Bring up the prisoner.”

  A murmur and then a hush fell over the room. After a few minutes had ticked by, the tramp of three pairs of shoes could be heard ec
hoing through marble hallways outside. The door handle turned, and a man in a sober black suit walked in with Sheriff Doht and Undersheriff Baker by his side.

  “He’s not so bad looking,” a spectator observed.

  Doht unshackled the shiny new irons and sat Thorn down by an ebullient Howe, who beamed at his slightly bewildered client. Thorn fussed with his pomaded hair a bit—he’d swept his cowlick up into an insouciant curl—and then smiled hopefully, a little nervously, at the crowds around him. The district attorney, though, was all business.

  “We are here to open the case of The People versus Martin Thorn,” Youngs announced to the judge.

  “We are ready to go on for the defendant,” Howe thundered back.

  From the two hundred men called, Howe and Youngs would have to settle on twelve; they’d excuse some by mutual agreement and could peremptively challenge others on their own. There was careful strategy involved in that maneuver, though; each side only got thirty peremptory dismissals. As the clerk filled a lottery wheel with slips of paper bearing jury-pool names, nobody was sure which side would have to come out swinging first.

  The clerk drew a name.

  “L. E. Blomquist, of Woodside.”

  Woodside?

  THE SPECTATORS WERE EXCHANGING significant looks when a rather alarmed-looking man shambled in. A deputy grabbed him and immediately began leading him toward the witness box, much to the fellow’s consternation.

  “Hold on,” Judge Smith said to the erring court officer. “That is not Mr. Blomquist.”

  It was a reporter running late, and he quickly fled into the amused press corps. After some confusion and jostling of chairs in the crowded room, a slightly wild-haired and bearded man made his way up to the witness stand instead. It was Mr. Blomquist, and he confirmed that he was a citizen, though a native of France.

  “How long have you lived in this country?” Youngs asked him.

  “Since 1870,” he answered. Recently he’d been working as a housepainter—and yes, in Woodside.

  “Do you know Martin Thorn?”

  The painter turned a stony gaze onto Thorn.

  “I think I do.”

  There was a rustle from the crowd as people leaned forward.

  “When did you meet Thorn?”

  “I think I have seen him in Woodside.”

  A murmur rose up. Reporters nudged one another in recognition—they had interviewed Blomquist. He really was one of the neighbors, though he hadn’t talked all that much.

  “Have you an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused?”

  “I have,” Blomquist said evenly.

  “Have you any special scruples against capital punishment?”

  “No.” His eyes bored into the defendant. “Not in this case.”

  “What’s that?” Howe asked sharply. “When was it you saw him in Woodside?”

  “June twenty-sixth,” the painter responded.

  Good Lord, what were the odds? Blomquist had just gone from the jury pool to a possible witness. Howe had to use his first peremptory dismissal already; the man was quickly excused. So were the next two jurors, who stated bluntly that they believed Thorn had done the deed. “I think he’s guilty,” one of them blurted to guffaws. A fourth—an elderly Swede—didn’t understand English, or indeed why he was there. A fifth sounded perfect until, as he was being sworn in, he made a confession.

  “I think I ought to say this, just here,” he stammered. “I’m rather of too nervous a disposition to serve on this case. I’ve got nervous trouble. I’ve got vertigo—dizzy spells.”

  “I won’t make you dizzy,” Howe promised in a kindly tone, but it was not to be. Another two men confessed that they were over seventy years old, which was an instant disqualification. So was being a firefighter.

  The air in the packed courtroom grew rank, even pestilent, so bad that the judge had to empty the room out twice. When at last a bell rang out lunchtime from the courthouse’s downstairs canteen, the judge and staff rushed from the stifling room with alacrity. The rest of the crowd poured into the street; all the local establishments were out of food within minutes, before many patrons could make it to the counter.

  Back at the courthouse, Howe dined in peace; he’d done enough celebrity trials to know the value of packing his own sandwiches. The peremptory challenges, he admitted to reporters, were following a pattern: Youngs knocked out jurors opposed to capital punishment and circumstantial evidence, while Howe knocked out anyone from the pool—known as talesmen, in court parlance—who were already convinced of Thorn’s guilt.

  “I’m going at every talesman with extreme care to see whether he has formed an opinion—whether he has read anything of the scores of hats, the hundreds of coats, and the tons of plaster of paris,” he mused. Howe wouldn’t bother asking them if they’d already discussed the case, of course. Finding a man in New York who hadn’t was impossible. Even so, demanding a change in venue was never Howe’s style; his firm’s reputation in the city was so fearsome that it was like a baseball team playing to a hometown crowd.

  After lunch the courtroom filled again. As the afternoon passed, the jury numbers finally crawled upward. The first approved juror was a retired oysterman named Jacob Bumstead; the next was a farmer; and the third bore an uncanny resemblance to Uncle Sam.

  “Do you know the duties of a juror?” he was asked.

  “I had ought to,” he replied, beaming through his patriotic whiskers.

  Amid all this sat Thorn, who could be observed twiddling his thumbs between his knees, then leaning back to stare up at the ceiling; he appeared to be counting the gaslights. With each change in position and each new juror, artists leaning against the gallery railing whipped out new sheets of paper; Journal men could occasionally be observed slipping out to run them to the pigeon cages. Meanwhile, the World’s beauty columnist took stock of the defendant’s features.

  “Thorn is a very average specimen of the type known as the degenerate,” she warned readers. “He is not well made. His arms are too long for his legs. Thorn has no back to his head. A pair of deceitful, grayish eyes—the ears of epileptics and mental incompetents—a square chin.”

  But that chin, she admitted, was rather fetching.

  “Cheap Don Juans, third-rate actors of melodramas, and Martin Thorns are frequently found with these highly attractive chins,” she wrote.

  By five o’clock, Thorn had the peers who would hear his case. They had run through sixty-four candidates to select a jury of twelve. Journal artists could be seen dashing out again—a New York Press journalist had wickedly spread the rumor that one of the paper’s champion racing birds had fried itself on a power line—and William F. Howe strolled out onto the courthouse steps. He pronounced himself delighted with his case and with the jury.

  “This,” Howe bellowed expansively, “is magnificent.”

  17.

  COVERED IN BLOOD

  THE MEN WHO STEPPED OFF the Long Island Rail Road’s special jury car the next morning held ordinary jobs; there were three farmers, three oystermen, a grocer, a saloon keeper, a janitor, a street contractor, a real estate agent, and a floor waxer. They weren’t used to this sort of fuss, or to the courthouse crowds that parted before them and their escort of deputies. The twelve men trudged down a long marble hallway punctuated by a warning sign from the sheriff:

  LOUD TALKING IN THESE HALLS

  IS FORBIDDEN

  While Court Is in Session

  by order

  HENRY DOHT, Sheriff

  Led by their genially rotund foreman, Jacob Bumstead, the jurors were dutifully silent, if still a bit groggy. The farmers had stayed up until midnight talking crop forecasts and fretting over their livestock—“I’m afraid something’ll happen to the brindle cow while I’m away,” one said with a sigh. “Best milker for miles around, that cow.” The others had warded off thoughts of the case by playing cards over cigars and cider, then puzzling over the newfangled electrical switches in their hotel rooms.


  But now it was time.

  The deputies pushed open the door, and twelve men filed into their jury box, their footsteps echoing in the nearly empty room. Bumstead settled in heavily against one front corner of the box; Magnus Larsen, a rather pained-looking road builder from Norway, took the other. The silence around them did not last for long: A janitor was still sweeping out clouds of dust when the first spectators poured through the gallery doors, clutching precious white slips that read “PASS ONE.” The upper galleries filled with men and women talking excitedly, while down in the arena entered DA Youngs and Counsel Howe, along with their scores of accompanying journalists. Youngs was still looking a bit uncomfortable in his skin—he’d only just gotten over a neck rash—but Howe, in his yachting cap, helmed his custom-built table as if he were setting sail for the West Indies. The reporters duly noted the flower in Howe’s lapel that day—a pink rose—and sat, as if at a county fair, guessing at the volume of gems on his person. “About a half-pint of diamonds,” one Times reporter hazarded.

  There was other guesswork going on, too: A Herald man was keeping track of the betting pools on whether or not Thorn would get the chair. But Howe wasn’t having any of it. “Just you watch. Martin Thorn will be a free man,” he grandly assured reporters, slapping his client on the shoulder. He wasn’t worried at all, not even by an anonymous note that warned: The yellow journals have a plant on the jury. Well, just looking at the jury box quickly dismissed that theory. These were not exactly men of the world: One of them dealt with courtroom drafts by sitting with a handkerchief atop his bald head.

  “Hear ye! Hear ye!” cried the court clerk. The old-fashioned formalities, it seemed, were still used in Queens. Howe and Youngs shook hands, and the DA promptly began his attack.

  “This is one of the most remarkable crimes of the century,” Youngs announced to the hushed room. “One of the most widely advertised in the world.”