The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  “Now regarding the potatoes …” He turned back to his witness. “—Is it not true that you shot Guldensuppe!”

  “No!” she cried, starting from her chair.

  “Is it not true that you cut the body in pieces?”

  “No!”

  “Didn’t somebody,” Howe thundered, “tell you to deny that you shot Guldensuppe and cut up his body?”

  “No,” Mrs. Nack laughed in disbelief.

  “Don’t laugh, Mrs. Nack,” Howe shook his finger. “This is an awful matter.”

  But Mrs. Nack could not stop laughing; her testimony was falling apart, and she was becoming hysterical.

  “Answer me!” he demanded.

  “No!” she yelled.

  Howe handed her photographs of her lover’s mutilated body. Not your handiwork, then? But he wasn’t finished—he’d also had a little talk with her ex-husband about her business as a midwife. Didn’t she also help women … avoid birth?

  “How many children did you kill?” he crowed.

  “None,” she shot back, then wavered. “So far as I know.”

  Didn’t she have a chute in her old apartment for disposing of fetuses straight from the stove grate into the sewer? No? And hadn’t she tried hiring Thorn to kill her husband?

  “No,” Mrs. Nack replied, her expression hardening. Howe narrowed his eyes back at her and tapped a table impressively.

  “This is too important a case to mince matters, and I’m going to ask some direct questions. I want you to think before you answer. Mrs. Nack, don’t you remember a place in New York in which you lived with Thorn for two entire weeks before the killing?”

  “Lived with Thorn?” she stalled.

  “You heard the question!” Howe bellowed. “Answer it.”

  “No, I did not.”

  “I call your attention now to a house on East Twenty-First Street.… Didn’t you visit Thorn again and again at this place?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you not remain in the house with Thorn at night several times?”

  “No, I was there a couple of hours.”

  “Yes, when he wanted you to be as a wife to him.”

  “No, never,” she stated primly. “I never was a wife to him. That was the reason I loved him. He was always a gentleman.”

  Howe exulted, buoyed by the rising tide of incredulity from the crowd. Now she loved Thorn, and called him a gentleman?

  “Hasn’t Thorn been as a husband to you?”

  “No,” she insisted.

  But Howe had one question prepared for her like a dagger.

  “Is this as true as any other answer you’ve given?”

  “Yes,” she declared.

  The packed courtroom erupted into laughter and whoops; her testimony ended, a Commercial Advertiser reporter marveled, in “a scene of disorder in the court room which, in all probability, has seldom if ever been equaled in this state.” DA Youngs and Manny Friend stared on miserably through the chaos as the judge gaveled the room to order; their star witness was pinned between lying to beat the rap and lying to stay respectable. Howe knew this, and he’d destroyed her on the stand with it.

  Yet one man scarcely paid attention to Howe and Nack at all; he was collapsed in a far corner of the jury box, doubled over and in pain.

  Magnus Larsen?

  Judge Wilmot Smith quickly called a halt to the proceedings, and reporters and the crowd had a sudden shock of realization: In the middle of their murder trial, another man was dying before their very eyes.

  19.

  SCYTHE AND SAW

  THE JURORS SPENT the night disconsolately gathered around the Garden City Hotel billiard table, not even bothering to pick up the cues, just aimlessly rolling the balls. They couldn’t focus while Magnus Larsen was at death’s door; he was doubled over with appendicitis by the time the train pulled up, and had to be carried to the hotel, where doctors decided to operate on the spot. Injected full of morphine, Larsen was now laid out on his bed upstairs in room 27, slipping miserably in and out of consciousness.

  At the empty courthouse the next day, disappointed crowds scoured the floors for souvenirs, and locals pointed out the chairs in which Nack and Thorn had sat. When the trial reconvened two days later, the matter of life and death was not Thorn’s but Magnus Larsen’s. A scrum of reporters ran after Howe on the way in, cutting one another off with overlapping questions: Will you—? Can you—? Have you—?

  “Yes, yes, yes—no, no, no,” Howe joked from atop the courthouse steps, then marched inside. The artists were already after him, sketching his rose-and-scarlet scarf; fastened across his chest by a weighty gold cable shone a diamond-encircled moonstone pendant. It was the size of an egg, and carved with the figure of a young maiden.

  “The gallery was nearly full of Long Island folks,” one Times reporter smirked, “who, as this blazing, scintillating apparition flashed up, leaned forward and gasped and gazed.”

  Thorn soon followed him in, looking rather reinvigorated himself. Howe jokingly shook a fist under his client’s nose: Bah, look at all the trouble you’ve caused this week! The prosecutor and Judge Smith, though, had a more pressing concern to attend to: When, exactly, could their missing twelfth juror report back to the courthouse?

  “Larsen had a very narrow escape,” an attending physician explained. Upon opening the juror’s abdominal cavity, they’d discovered that it was already filling with pus. “We found a perforation of the appendix. It is certain that he will be unable to leave his bed for three weeks, and I am not prepared to say that he will recover—though the indications are that he will.”

  Continuing without Larsen was mulled, but to Howe it was out of the question.

  “No!” he said sharply. “Such a proceeding would be against all legal precedent.” In the Cancini case of 1857, he noted, a man accused of killing a policeman had agreed under similar conditions to continuing on with a jury of eleven. After he was sentenced to the gallows, though, his conviction was thrown out: Even Cancini himself hadn’t the right to waive his guarantee under the state constitution to trial by a jury of twelve peers.

  “The judge would censure me if I consented to any such arrangement and I would deserve to be censured,” Howe added stiffly. “The court would very properly ask me if I had ever read the law.” Restarting the trial from the beginning, but with the eleven remaining jurors and one newly selected one, was a slightly less shaky idea—but only slightly.

  Prepare for a brand-new trial, Judge Smith decided, in ten days’ time, on Monday, November 22. Journal reporters dashed for their telephones and their pigeons; and on his way out of the courthouse, Howe suddenly cut in as Manny Friend chatted with a cluster of men from the World and the Times.

  “You! You insignificant little imp!” Howe roared at Mrs. Nack’s counsel on the courthouse stairs. “You insect! I ought not to notice you! You are not worthy of being considered a respectable rival of Howe & Hummel!”

  It was more, perhaps, than just his usual grandstanding. The master of legal escapes, William F. Howe knew there was one final rap that he couldn’t beat—and that at seventy-one, his career was already longer than his famed appetites augured. Falling quiet as he walked away, he turned suddenly to a Times reporter.

  “This,” Howe said plainly, “is the case of my life.”

  HOWE ARRIVED at his office on Centre Street to cheers and congratulations from his staff, with a coterie of reporters following as he settled back into his lair. The usual huddle of gangsters and madams awaited appointments, but Thorn was still on Howe’s mind. The lawyer had instantly—without the least discomfort—abandoned his theory about Guldensuppe being alive and was now instead pouring all his effort into pinning the murder on Mrs. Nack. The black-clad femme fatale, Howe added, was “a damnable spider” sinking her fangs into the love-struck Martin Thorn.

  “From my first interview I found him saturated with chivalry,” he rhapsodized, “ready, if necessary, to yield his life to this Delilah who has placed
him in this present position.”

  Yes, Thorn was chivalrous—“too chivalrous for his own good,” the lawyer lamented. For William F. Howe himself was the city’s great defender of virtue; he and Abe Hummel ran a million-dollar operation in breach-of-promise cases, where comely showgirls settled with wealthy men who’d wooed them without intent of marriage. A private communication from Howe & Hummel was all that was needed for the firm and the showgirl to evenly split five or ten thousand in hush money. It was extraordinarily lucrative, and extraordinarily moral, and just about the only man it hadn’t worked on was the actor John Barrymore, because he didn’t give a damn about his reputation. But Martin Thorn was no Broadway rake, Howe insisted. The humble immigrant barber was the victim of “this modern Borgia” and her venomous lawyer.

  “She is the biggest liar unhung,” Howe snapped. “And I want to say, for publication, that the conduct of Mr. Friend is the dirtiest piece of unprofessional work I have heard of in all my experience.”

  All that dirt would stick to her, Howe promised—for his firm had dug up plenty more. They now had the names, he declared, of the two women she’d killed with botched abortions—and he’d have Herman Nack himself on the witness stand to back it all up.

  “Mrs. Nack admitted that she herself had cremated Guldensuppe’s clothes—she must have been skilled at the art of cremation,” Howe mused aloud. “Apropos of all this cremating, it is just possible—mind you, I say possible—that Guldensuppe’s head was cremated instead of having been dropped overboard.”

  And if that wasn’t damning enough, sitting in Howe’s office was a brand-new witness: a stern, bespectacled Bronx landlady named Ida Ziegler. A full three months before Mrs. Nack claimed the plot had begun, Ziegler had received a curious response to her home-rental ad for 1671 Eastburn Avenue.

  “On one Sunday,” she began, “I believe it was prior to the fifteenth of March, a woman in the company of a man called upon me and wanted to see the room that I was advertising. The gentleman, after examining the rooms, said they were all very comfortable, and suited him just fine; but to the lady they were not at all suitable.” Mrs. Ziegler, a little wounded, enumerated all the alleged faults of her lovely home. “Because there was not any sewer conduit leading from the house; the neighborhood was too lively; the house was somewhat conspicuous; because the bathtub was too small, although an average man could bathe himself with ease. She also became displeased with the rooms upon learning that I was not in the habit of going out during the day.”

  The prospective tenant, the landlady recalled, also had a very peculiar question. “We had a garden in the back of the house. She asked me whether I would strike water if I were to dig three feet down.”

  The woman, she said, was a midwife who had given her name as Mrs. Braun. Ziegler was shown a photograph of Augusta Nack.

  That’s her, she said.

  THORN READ THE NEWSPAPERS that Howe sent him, played pinochle, and tried to lose himself in a volume of Emerson’s essays left in the jail. He was not feeling very high-minded, though: For days the accused barber had been left unshaven, much to his professional disgust. When his jailers finally deigned to break out his shaving cup, the undersheriff and a barber showed up at Thorn’s cell with manacles.

  “What are you going to do with those things?” the prisoner asked.

  “Just put them on, that’s all,” the undersheriff replied.

  “I never put handcuffs on a customer when I shaved him,” Thorn shot back.

  “Look here, Martin,” his jailer said, pulling Thorn’s arms behind the chair back and slapping the cuffs shut, “we are going to run no chances.”

  Thorn fumed as he was shaved—they kept missing the stubble over his lip. It only took a look in the mirror after he was unshackled to see why. DA Youngs had directed the jail to bring back Thorn’s mustache for the trial—to grow it in, inexorably, against his will—so that soon he would look precisely like the man their witnesses had seen entering the Woodside cottage.

  And yet his days were not without some strange rewards. As Thorn sulked over his treatment at the jail, a Howe associate led a short impresario and a willowy actress through the heavy clanging door to the Flats, up to the bars of Martin’s cell. Florenz Ziegfeld, Broadway’s showgirl master, was not particularly used to visiting jails. But even stranger was the presence of his star talent and personal mistress, newly acquired from the Folies of Paris—Miss Anna Held, whose famed dark eyes stared out from promotional posters all over town.

  Thorn greeted Howe’s assistant warmly, while eyeing the actress with caution. He’d seen her soak up publicity by sitting in on some of the trial, but she was strangely out of place here on Murderers Row. Still, the sympathy of a famous starlet was not a bad thing for an accused man to have, especially with World reporters watching nearby.

  What do you think of Mrs. Nack’s confession? she asked breathlessly.

  “She lies!” He shrugged. “All lies.”

  Anna watched as Martin Thorn sat in his cell, nuzzling the stray dog he’d adopted; a brindle-and-black bulldog-pug mix, it had recently wandered into the jail and unaccountably attached itself to him, refusing to leaving his side. Thorn cheekily dubbed it “Bill Baker,” after the jailer who’d shackled him. The mutt, he mused aloud, was his only real friend anymore—since Mrs. Nack certainly wasn’t.

  “Would you have died for her?” the actress asked.

  “Yes, I would,” he replied evenly. “But she has killed my faith in all women. She killed Guldensuppe herself. I have loved that woman, and she has ruined me.”

  Miss Anna Held leaned dramatically against the cell door; she felt so dreadfully sorry for him. New York World artists frantically sketched her mooning through the cold bars of the prison cell.

  “Were you … happy with her?” She lowered her voice.

  “Yes,” he paused. “I was, once.”

  The World artist tore off his sheet; it was a minor publicity coup for Howe and a fine morning front-pager, with the glamorous starlet providing an appropriately dramatic quote to accompany it: “Thorn is a man of impulse, a man of passionate temper,” she explained to readers, “and such men are but easy prey in the hands of women they love.” It was good copy, and—taking a page from the Journal’s favorite strategy for humiliating them—World editors even put together an accompanying montage of competitor’s pages, to show how the World had been the first to discover that Mrs. Nack was about to make her treacherous confession on the stand.

  But the World had already blown the scoop.

  Blurted out in Thorn’s conversation with Held were four startling words about Mrs. Nack—“She killed Guldensuppe herself”—his first public acknowledgment that there was a murder, and that it was of Guldensuppe. Not one of Pulitzer’s editors recognized its importance, but Hearst’s men did. As the World fussed over its showgirl-in-prison illustrations for the next morning, the Evening Journal trumped them with a late-edition headline: THORN CONFESSES HIS PART IN THE MURDER.

  The World just couldn’t get it quite right. It still managed innovations, such as running women’s fashion plates with actual photographed faces superimposed on the pen-and-ink dress drawings; the result looked comical, but reproducing an entire photo in the newspaper was quite difficult. Still, it hinted at the future. Soon all nineteenth-century news would be distinguishable from that of the looming twentieth century at a glance: The old was monochromatic and engraved, the new, color and photographic. And while Hearst hadn’t sprung his attack with photography yet, he was busy opening up a widening lead on color printing. Pulitzer anxiously telegraphed from Maine about the headlines he was seeing in Hearst’s paper: not about Nack and Thorn, but about the Journal itself—or, as he called it in a coded cablegram, “Geranium”:

  I AM EXTREMELY INTERESTED TO KNOW WHETHER THAT STORY ABOUT GERANIUM ORDERING TWO MORE COLOR SEXTUPLES IS TRUE—ABSOLUTELY TRUE.

  It was. Hearst had ordered up more color presses, and his Evening Journal was punishing other comp
etitors so badly that for one precarious night, until it got its finances in order, the Evening Telegram ceased publication altogether. The New York Times, itself barely recovered from bankruptcy, was trying to beat back at the tide of yellow journalism by running a pointed new motto on its front page: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” But other papers were inexorably drifting with Hearst’s powerful current. On the same day that the Evening Journal boasted such edifying stories as COCAINE PHANTOMS HAUNT HIM and HYPNOTISM NEARLY KILLS, one could also find all these headlines on a single page of the more respectable New York Herald:

  ABSINTHE HIS BANE

  ITALIAN FATALLY STABBED

  INQUIRY ABOUT POISON GAS

  FEROCIOUS DOG MANGLES A BOY

  SINGER ENDS LIFE

  THEY TRIED TO DIE TOGETHER

  New York papers now ran far more column inches on crime and accidents than other cities did, and the Journal ran so much “bleed” copy in combination with women’s-interest stories and comics that business, labor, and religion were nearly crowded out altogether.

  Hearst knew his readers, and he knew what they liked.

  “The two stories of Nack and Thorn have reached an equilibrium of contradiction,” he announced to readers in a column. The real question, his paper now asked, was Which one’s more guilty? They tallied some 1,147 letters from readers: 713 found Augusta Nack the guiltier party, 329 blamed both equally, and just 105 laid the blame on Thorn.

  “He is no more guilty of the murder of Guldensuppe than a babe,” a hypnotist wrote in. “Mrs. Nack forced him to do it by the power she exerted over him.” Another reader begged to differ, offering up the novel theory that Thorn and Guldensuppe were the real conspirators: “It was a plot of Guldensuppe and Thorn to convict Mrs. Nack of murder,” he wrote. “Guldensuppe got out of the way, and Thorn cut up a body that he palmed off on Mrs. Nack as Guldensuppe’s.” Nine-year-old Helen Weiss of Princeton, on the other hand, was ready to wholeheartedly condemn Nack and Thorn alike: “I think they are both guilty.”