The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  “Yes, I’ve heard the news,” he sighed. “We got the message from Friend. I was in bed and asleep—dreaming of the ultimate acquittal of Thorn—when I was awakened by a boy pounding on the door. There is no doubt about it. Look at this.” He passed a Herald reporter a note sent up by the hotel’s phone operator: Mrs. Nack has confessed and will be a witness for the state.

  Another knock came at the door—this time it was a World reporter, scarcely seconds behind his rivals. Stirred by his growing audience, Howe passed around the flask, lit a cigar, and soliloquized to the reporters.

  “I had the most perfect case that was ever worked up for a jury. Only today I had Dr. Huebner, a medical expert, go to the Woodside cottage and take the measurements of that bathtub. The doctor found that the tub was only two-thirds as long as the body of the murdered man—if he was murdered. Had he been placed there, only an expert in anatomy could have cut up the body.”

  And there was his coup de grâce: Howe had quietly been serving, it just so happened, as counsel … for Nelson Weeks. The disgraced Sunday-school supervisor was up on a manslaughter charge, and Howe happened to know that morgue keeper Isaac Newton was a friend of Weeks’s. The body in the Aimee Smith case had not been quickly identified by Newton; it was identified by two detectives based on a notebook in the body’s possession. It was assumed to be stolen until they visited Smith’s family, found the daughter absent, and matched the family’s photos to the unclaimed body at Bellevue. So when the morgue keeper said that he immediately identified Aimee Smith—his fugitive friend’s dead mistress—Howe knew the man was lying under oath. And if he could discredit Newton, then Howe could discredit all the physical evidence in the morgue keeper’s possession, for he had cannily established during cross-examination that Newton was in direct charge of the Thorn case’s body parts.

  Tomorrow, at one swipe, he’d have knocked the legs right out from under the prosecution—if only Manny Friend had been patient.

  “I cannot understand one thing.” Howe shook his head, after a long pause. “And that is how a lawyer who has a client with so little against her could permit his client to make a confession.”

  “Were you surprised when you received the news?” a Herald reporter asked.

  “I had a suspicion she might tell a pack of lies to save her own neck,” Howe replied grimly.

  There was a stir at the door, and in staggered Howe’s assistant, Frank Moss, disheveled from a nighttime sprint to the hotel; he’d been bowling down on Seventeenth Street when he got the news. A glance at the reporters in the room told him everything.

  “Well,” Moss panted, “I suppose you have heard.”

  “Yes.” Howe regarded his cigar thoughtfully. “What are we going to do?”

  But it seemed a mere formality to even ask. Even as the sounds of the night ebbed away outside, the old lawyer was already working out his next move.

  HOWE AND HIS TEAM arrived at the courthouse the next morning amid a mad rush for seats; the confession was all over the papers. The wire services had picked it up, so that Californians and even Londoners woke that morning to the news about Mrs. Nack. Spectators were pressing to get in, and when the doors were finally thrown open, the men in the crowd sprinted for the best seats, in the Right Gallery; fashionably attired women, slowed by their long skirts, took the Left Gallery. Reporters and artists gawked at these “specimens of womanhood”—many of them being, a reporter noted dryly, “young … and not ill-looking.” Some had brought their opera glasses, and one beaming pair of beauties wore identical plaid frocks for the occasion. Their gallery bloomed with so many fancy hats that a World reporter dubbed it the Flower Garden.

  Whispers flew around the women’s gallery that a heartbroken Thorn had committed suicide overnight, but this romantic rumor was dashed when the young barber was led in. Only Martin Thorn, in all the courtroom, had not yet heard the news; as he sat down at the defense table, Howe wordlessly handed him the World, opened to that morning’s front-page headline:

  MRS. NACK HAS CONFESSED THE MURDER

  Thorn went pale and stiffly passed the newspaper back.

  “Augusta Nack,” announced the court clerk.

  A roar rose over the courtroom as the side door opened.

  “Augusta Nack!” the clerk yelled over the commotion, and the star witness was guided through the packed room’s maze of chairs and tables. Mrs. Nack swept by Thorn without a glance, smoothing her skirt as she sat down in the witness chair. She was clad in black—black dress, black lace, black straw hat, black ostrich feather—with sleek apple-green banding and silk gloves. Her appearance, the Times sniffed, was “cheap and tawdry”—and yet, it confessed, “strong and sensual.”

  “State your name,” the prosecutor began.

  “My name is Augusta Nack,” she said in accented English, and verified that she was a German immigrant married to one Herman Nack.

  “Were you living with Herman Nack in June?”

  “No.” Mrs. Nack flushed slightly.

  “With whom?”

  Thorn stared at her from the defense table, his gaze as fixed as hers was averted.

  “With William Guldensuppe,” she answered.

  “When did you become acquainted with Martin Thorn?”

  “I advertised a furnished room, and he came and took it in June 1896—I think until January of this year.”

  It had ended badly, of course; Guldensuppe had landed Thorn in the hospital for four days. Then, she said, Thorn began visiting when Guldensuppe was away at work.

  “What passed between you and Thorn?”

  A hint of a smile began to cross Martin Thorn’s face, but Mrs. Nack continued looking away from him.

  “He always told me to leave Guldensuppe and live with him. I refused.”

  “Why?”

  “I told him from the first night I was a married woman,” Mrs. Nack replied earnestly. There were titters in the courtroom, and she added, “He said, ‘It is not so. I know your husband lives in Astoria.’ ”

  The prosecutor quickly stepped in. “Now in March, what did Mr. Thorn say to you about Guldensuppe?”

  “I told Thorn I couldn’t live with him, and I gave him twenty dollars. A couple of days later he wanted more, but I said I could not give it to him. Then …” She paused, and her words echoed out over the horrified crowd. “He said—I don’t want money. I want Guldensuppe’s head.”

  There was a commotion in the gallery; a transfixed spectator leaned so far past the railing that she nearly toppled over. The courtroom fell silent again as the prosecutor led Mrs. Nack’s recollections forward.

  “Wanted his head?”

  “He wanted his head,” Nack nodded. She was becoming animated; the ostrich feather atop her hat bobbed with each motion. “I got scared. Then he says he will kill Guldensuppe and put his body in a trunk and lock it, and I should send it express to where he is going to hire a room. I say—I won’t do it.”

  “Go on.”

  “I said, Kill me. He said, That will give me no satisfaction.”

  Her face darkened as she kept it turned away from Thorn.

  “He came one evening in my house, and said Do you love me? And I said, I told you I can’t love nobody, and he took me on my neck, here,” she pointed at her throat. “He strangled me till I was half dead and the blood come out of my mouth.”

  By Nack’s telling, her role was curiously passive: She had been the victim, too.

  “I want to say that I always did what the man wanted me to because I was afraid,” she added. “When the house was hired, Thorn told me that I should bring Guldensuppe over and he will kill him. I had to do everything that man told me.”

  “What did you say to William Guldensuppe?”

  “I told Guldensuppe that he should come with me, I got the house where I am going to open a baby farm.”

  As if to protest this very notion, an infant briefly squalled from the women’s gallery.

  “A baby farm?”

  “Well, he
always told me I should do something,” she shrugged.

  At about nine on Friday morning, June 25, they took the Thirty-Fourth Street ferry and then a streetcar out to the cottage.

  “I had the key, and I went inside and I was so excited I went out into the back yard,” Mrs. Nack told the courtroom. There was not another sound in the room save for the furious scritch scritch of reporters’ pencils. “Guldensuppe went upstairs, and when I was in the yard I heard a shot. After a while Thorn came out and called me. He said—I shot Guldensuppe. He’s dead.”

  She’d never hurt Guldensuppe, she explained, never even saw his body; she left for the afternoon, and when she returned, Thorn had wrapped him up in parcels.

  “Was there anything bought for the purpose of wrapping up parcels?”

  “I bought oilcloth.”

  “Look at that.” The prosecutor held up a foul swatch of the red-and-gold cloth.

  “Yes.” Mrs. Nack nodded. “That is it.”

  They’d thrown the plaster-encased head off the ferry on the way back, and she disembarked with another package under her arm—Guldensuppe’s clothes—and burnt them that night in her apartment’s stove. The next day they hired the undertaker’s carriage to dispose of the larger parcels.

  “Now, state what happened on Saturday the twenty-sixth, when you went over there with the wagon.”

  “He had a bottle of ammonia,” she explained, the better to clean the blood spots. “I cleaned the bathtub. There was some white stuff in it, I suppose.”

  “Don’t suppose,” Howe snapped from the defense table.

  “It was the plaster of paris,” Nack added apologetically. After dumping the parcels and meeting again Monday night, she said, they parted until their arraignment.

  “Here is a photograph.” The prosecutor held up a portrait. “Who does it represent?”

  “William Guldensuppe,” her voice trembled.

  “Here is another photograph—do you recognize it?”

  “Yes,” Nack said quietly. “It is the cottage in Woodside.”

  The prosecutor paused thoughtfully, then leaned in. “Mrs. Nack,” he asked softly. “Why do you make this confession?”

  Her eyes began to well up.

  “I make it to make my peace with the people.” She began to sob and reached for her handkerchief. “And with God.”

  Augusta Nack burst into tears, and for a moment everyone in the courthouse was speechless—everyone, that is, but the counsel sitting by Martin Thorn.

  “God?” Howe’s incredulous voice rang out in disbelief.

  THE DEFENSE COUNSEL drew himself up to his full height and towered before the witness box. Across William F. Howe’s chest hung his favorite diamond pendant, a massive creation known among court reporters as “the Headlight”—and Mrs. Nack began blinking nervously, as if blinded by its rays. But then, Howe’s sartorial splendor was always more than mere vanity: It was a warning, a proof of enemies bested before.

  “Mrs. Nack,” he said gravely. “You have told us that on June twenty-fifth, after Guldensuppe was killed, you took his clothes to your home. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the clothing was saturated with blood?” Howe asked.

  “Y-yes.”

  “This was the day you say Guldensuppe was killed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew it?”

  “Yes, I knew.” Her voice grew quieter.

  Howe lowered his own voice to a stage whisper. “Did you cry, Mrs. Nack? When you burned Guldensuppe’s clothes?”

  “No.” She appeared confused. “I didn’t.”

  “You cried today, didn’t you?” Howe asked in mock surprise.

  “I have often cried …,” she began.

  “Today! In the court room!” Howe yelled. “Yes or no?”

  “Yes?”

  “You bought the oilcloth?” Howe continued briskly.

  “Yes.”

  “And you bought it for purposes of wrapping his body in it, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Augusta blinked nervously.

  “Did you cry then?”

  “No.”

  “Did you cry when you heard the shot that killed him?”

  Mrs. Nack was catching on.

  “Yes,” she now replied.

  Howe looked at her queerly, his face a mask of puzzlement. “You knew perfectly well that Guldensuppe was taken to Woodside to be killed, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she stammered.

  The lawyer mused on this, looking at the jury to share his confusion.

  “Did you love Guldensuppe?” he finally asked.

  “No,” she insisted stoutly. “I didn’t love anybody but my husband.”

  The silence was broken by a bitter laugh of disbelief—Thorn’s. It was nearly his first utterance of the trial.

  “You still loved your husband while you lived with Guldensuppe?”

  “I stopped loving my husband then and began to love Guldensuppe,” she stammered.

  Howe smiled; he’d caught the witness in her first contradiction.

  “You plotted to kill the man you loved?”

  “No,” she shot back. “I did not.”

  “But you paid the money for the rent?”

  “Yes.”

  “And bought the oilcloth?”

  “Yes,” she snapped.

  “And the house was rented for the purpose of killing Guldensuppe?”

  “Yes.” Mrs. Nack’s eyes teared up again. “You must excuse me.”

  “No, I won’t!” Howe roared, and leaned into the witness box as the crowd laughed nervously. “When did you begin to love Thorn?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long before the killing?”

  “I never loved him until he choked me. Then I had to.”

  “He choked you into loving him?” Howe asked incredulously.

  “Yes,” she insisted. “I was afraid of him.”

  “How long did this frightful love continue?”

  “Always.” Nack reached quickly for an explanation. “Thorn told me if I didn’t leave Guldensuppe, he’d buy some stuff and a syringe and squirt it into Guldensuppe’s eyes and into my eyes—and that then we wouldn’t be able to see each other. And that then I could have Guldensuppe.”

  Acid attacks were not unknown among jilted lovers, yet Howe looked puzzled.

  “It was fear of this syringe,” he intoned, “that made you buy oilcloth before this man was dead, and fear of this syringe after he was dead made you burn his clothes?”

  “Yes,” she insisted.

  “Why, Mrs. Nack, did you go back to the house again?”

  “Thorn told me so.”

  “Ah—fear of the syringe again?”

  “Yes,” she nodded earnestly.

  The courthouse was stifling; more spectators had crept in past the guards, and they were now spilling out into the aisles and sitting on the steps.

  “You prepared to go to Europe, didn’t you?” he asked after a long pause.

  “No,” she said loudly. “I did not.”

  “Did you not intend to go to Europe?”

  “I did not know what to do,” she said blandly.

  Howe smiled broadly, amiably.

  “No, of course you did not know what to do. I know that. I understand that very well.” Howe spun around and roared: “Did you not intend to go to Europe?”

  “Well, er—yes.”

  “Were you going away or were you not?”

  “No,” she now said. She was reversing herself on one question after another, and Manny Friend watched helplessly as the rival lawyer enmeshed his client.

  “What do you mean by saying that you did not know what to do?” Howe demanded.

  “I did not want to remain,” Nack said, struggling to explain her testimony. “I could not pay the rent.”

  “Didn’t you have $300 in your corset when you were arrested?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you couldn’t pay your
rent?”

  “Well …” Mrs. Nack hesitated and decided to try a new story. “Thorn told me I should skip,” she began brightly, and added piously, “I said no. Truth is truth and—”

  “Mrs. Nack,” Howe interrupted to guffaws, “we don’t want any homilies on truth from you.”

  The defense counsel paused to have his team search for an old copy of the New York Journal, then turned back to his witness. “Mrs. Nack, when you were before Judge Newberger in New York, did you say to Thorn, ‘Hold your mouth, keep quiet’?”

  “No,” she insisted. Now it was the reporters’ turn to look astonished: They had heard her. “Nothing of the sort.”

  An old copy of the Journal was passed forward, bearing the facsimile of her intercepted jailhouse letter to Thorn. Howe read the English translation out loud: “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 …”

  He then passed the newspaper to her.

  “That your writing?”

  “Yes.”

  “You call him ‘Dear child’ and ‘Dear Martin.’ What do you mean by that?”

  “I never loved him,” she sputtered. “But I did … show him I loved him. Since he choked me.”

  “You only pretended to love him?” Howe gasped in understanding. “Make believe?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that letter was only a make-believe letter?”

  “Yes,” she insisted as laughter bubbled from the courtroom.

  “Did your fear continue while you were in jail?” Howe pressed.

  “No.”

  “Then why did you write the letter?”

  Nack kept her eyes averted from Thorn, even as he broke into a quiet grin.

  “Because I thought he was hungry?” she ventured.

  “Then it was for sweet charity’s sake?” Howe swept his arms grandly.

  “Yes,” she eagerly agreed, to a new blast of laughter from the court. Howe beamed at the crowd, the gems glittering from his fingers.