The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  But an even more telling sign was tucked away in the latest ad for the Eden Musée waxworks, where the scene of Thorn cutting up Guldensuppe was no longer the main attraction. It had been replaced by a slightly different pair of deadly combatants: Augusta Nack and Martin Thorn.

  ON SUNDAY MORNING BEFORE DAWN, newsboys hauled off fat bundles of the Journal. They were going to be sure sellers. The paper had produced an alarming scenario headlined THE INVASION OF NEW YORK, complete with “a thrilling description by an expert of what would happen with the Spanish Fleet in New York Harbor.” But even that took a backseat to what they’d used to headline the entire front page: THE STORY OF MY LIFE—BY AUGUSTA NACK. Along with a sober-looking portrait of Mrs. Nack taking pen to paper in her prison cell, Hearst’s front page was given over to her melancholy and remorseful account of life before she became New York’s most notorious woman, back when she was still young Augusta Pusat. “I was born in the little village of Oskarweischen, in Posen, Germany,” she wrote, remembering the poverty of her family there. “When I was a girl I used to tend the geese and drive them down to the water in the morning.… In Germany idleness is considered not the right thing for either girls or women, and when I was tending my geese and looking after the kettles to make sure that they did not boil over, I made my lace.”

  After moving to the United States, she was soon earning more money than the rest of her family in the old country—“I had everything—and they had nothing,” she marveled—but after she begged her mother to save the family’s prayers for their own needs, she received a stern response. “My daughter,” the elder Mrs. Pusat wrote back, “you don’t know. Everything you have may be taken from you in a twinkling of an eye.”

  Mrs. Nack often thought upon that letter.

  Her confession in the case, she told Journal readers, was inspired by the visits of the Reverend Robert Miles to her cell. At first she’d spurned him and his Bible, but then one day the minister had brought his four-year-old son, little Parker Miles, and as he prattled on and jumped up into her lap, asking her to tell him a story, her steely reserve cracked. She broke down in sobs and confessed to the loving God of Reverend Miles. The Journal had a fine portrait of the clergyman too, and of his angelic son on Mrs. Nack’s lap; it was a heartwarming story for a Sunday paper, and it would fly off the stands.

  But one person wasn’t buying her story yet: the DA.

  As the newsboys fanned out into the still-darkened streets of the city, Augusta Nack was quietly let out of her cell and joined the district attorney, Detective Sullivan, and Captain Methven in a waiting carriage outside the Queens County Jail. It was a private hire, with the passenger veiled so that nobody on the street could spot her. She arranged a shawl around herself in the bitter predawn air, and they headed up Jackson Avenue.

  “Can you point out the place?” Youngs asked her again.

  “Yes,” she promised.

  “If you do,” he said significantly, “then we shall be prepared to believe what you say.”

  Youngs eyed her carefully as they made their way along the muddy avenue. His star witness had already been terribly undermined on the stand—it wasn’t for nothing that William Howe was considered the best trial lawyer in the city. Youngs still hadn’t offered her a plea deal, and before he did, he wanted more from Mrs. Nack, some solid evidence that Howe wouldn’t be able to bully and balderdash his way out of.

  Woodside, announced their driver.

  The trio of lawmen stepped out of the carriage, and as the sun rose they watched Mrs. Nack wander aimlessly in the garden of the Woodside cottage—hesitating here, stopping there. She hadn’t been back in five months, since just after the murder, and the gardens that had been lush in that dangerous time were now barren and frosted.

  Well? Youngs demanded.

  She couldn’t remember … but … perhaps she could remember. Yes, what they were looking for was surely in an entirely different place.

  Youngs snorted in disgust and sat heavily back in the carriage. He kept a peeved silence as they made their way through Flushing toward College Point, past a series of scrubby, empty lots.

  “That’s the place!” yelled Mrs. Nack.

  The carriage stopped by a crumbling stone wall on a vacant lot; it was an African American neighborhood, and the party’s presence was becoming uncomfortably conspicuous to passersby. The veiled prisoner pottered in the weeds a bit—Was it here? Perhaps it was there?—until the DA finally lost all patience. The carriage promptly left with a jolt, hauling the humiliated prisoner back to Queens County Jail.

  “Did you find the saw?” Detective Sullivan was asked as he returned from the jaunt.

  “No,” he snapped. “We didn’t.”

  The rest of Augusta Nack’s story wasn’t holding up much better. Within hours after she and Manny Friend paraded her newfound piety to the papers, a familiar figure turned up at the World’s editorial offices: Herman Nack. The bakery driver was upset—deeply upset. He’d already lost his job at the Astoria Model Bakery from the bad publicity, couldn’t sleep at night from the worry it had caused. He appeared, one reporter remarked, like nothing so much as a sleepwalker.

  “I can only think of her,” he sighed.

  With the Journal getting Augusta’s childhood, the World ventured into Herman’s.

  “Where did you first meet Mrs. Nack?” the paper asked.

  “In Kiel, in Germany. She was a servant girl then. The family she worked for was a very fine family. I was working in a pottery. I loved her, and that’s all.” He paused, then admitted thoughtfully: “By and by Guldensuppe, he loved her. He was not a bad man either. I always liked him, but he loved her—that was the matter with him.”

  “What do you think of the strange course the trial has taken?”

  “What do I think about it?” he mused, and fell silent. “I think so much that I do not know what to think. It is with me think, think, all the time. Maybe she killed that fellow, maybe Thorn did. I do not know. If she did, I hope they will”—he stumbled over the language, and then over the emotion—“how do you call it? Put her in the chair of electricity.”

  He was growing animated. There was something else, he said, that had truly made him upset: her confession.

  “I am sure of one thing: it was not from religion or fear of God that she tells about the death of Guldensuppe. She was not religious. She was not good. Sometimes she used to go with one of her customers to church—but when she comes home she laughs at such things.” Herman Nack’s expression was becoming anguished. “I want to tell you, sir, that woman will not go to heaven. She is bad—she is bad.”

  And a bad liar as well, by the look of it. The newspapers gloated after word of her failed carriage trip leaked out. But two days later, as laborers worked with scythes to clear a salt-hay field in College Point, a call came in to the DA’s office. Just by the spot Mrs. Nack had pointed out, they’d discovered a rusting eighteen-inch surgeon’s saw—a Richardson & Sons model for slicing through bone. It was found jammed blade first into the ground, as if someone had tried to murder the dirt itself.

  20.

  A WONDERFUL MURDER

  MALWINE BRANDEL CLUTCHED a bouquet of red roses. Barely eighteen years old, with lustrous blond hair and blue eyes highlighted by her most stylish high-collared velvet jacket, she was begging Sheriff Doht to let her inside to that morning’s retrial. I want to give these to Martin Thorn, she pleaded.

  The sheriff regarded her with sheer disbelief. “No, I can’t do that,” he finally managed. “As long as I am in charge of these proceedings, Thorn will never receive any flowers in the courthouse.”

  But I must, she begged. Mrs. Brandel had recently lost her husband, and already had her heart stolen by the newspaper pictures of Thorn.

  “Thorn is a fearfully interesting fellow,” she said breathlessly. “I cannot believe him guilty of such a fiendish crime. The more I look at him and his honest eyes, the more I like him.”

  The sheriff shook his head. />
  “Don’t you know,” he mocked gently, “that you are subject to imprisonment if you send flowers to Thorn? He might poison himself with them.”

  “Then I’ll give them to Mr. Howe,” she insisted. “He’ll give them to Thorn.”

  Sheriff Doht held out his hand; if she was going inside, she’d have to give up the roses. The heartsick young widow reluctantly parted with the bouquet, and he tossed it aside as she pressed past.

  “I wish women with these sort of ideas would stay in New York,” he muttered.

  But they wouldn’t. The ferries and streetcars coming over from Manhattan that morning were crowded with wave after wave of spectators. Women poured into the galleries, chatting and carrying the de rigueur accessory of the trial—opera glasses. “I came here out of curiosity—woman’s curiosity, if you want to call it that,” one devotee explained. Her name was Tessie, and she’d come up from Greenpoint early that morning to get the best front-row gallery seat. “I think that every woman that has heard of this case is interested in it.”

  “It is a woman’s case, a story of a woman’s troubles,” another agreed.

  “It’s a wonderful murder,” Tessie enthused. “Oh, but Mrs. Nack is an awful creature.”

  “I came here just to see Mrs. Nack,” a neighbor chimed in.

  “So did I,” another offered. “I’d have given my last $5 and gone without breakfast to see that woman.”

  But on this day Mrs. Nack was nowhere to be seen; there were only platoons of journalists, newly installed justice Samuel Maddox on the bench—the last judge having excused himself on account of malaria—and, at the center of it all, the famed defense table. Howe was dressed in his usual splendiferous manner, and Thorn presented a fine sight, with his mustache now grown to full luxuriousness. One woman in the gallery admitted that she’d actually sung to him.

  “I go to the Tombs to sing to the prisoners,” she explained. “It was there that I became interested in Thorn and Mrs. Nack. I go to nearly all of the big trials.”

  And this one promised to be the biggest yet. A swift jury selection—LOOK MORE INTELLIGENT THAN THE FORMER LOT, ran one headline—drew together a group made up of two farmers, a florist, a property agent, an oyster dealer, and fully seven builders, for the November frost had left construction crews free to fill the jury box.

  After quickly recalling the children and police witnesses of the first trial, they soon came to the first of the new witnesses: Mrs. Clara Nunnheimer, a Woodside neighbor. A fresh-faced and beaming young woman, she seemed to brighten the gaslit room as she took the stand.

  “Do you recall the 25th of June?” the prosecutor asked her.

  “Yes, sir.” She nodded cheerily. Fridays, she explained, were her day for chopping wood. At around eleven she’d seen Mrs. Nack and a man in a light suit step out of a trolley car, then go inside the house next door. She never saw him come back out—but she did soon see a different man in an upstairs window—one in blue shirtsleeves.

  “The fellow between the two officers there?” the prosecutor asked, pointing at a poker-faced Martin Thorn.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Howe wasn’t having any of it. “From where you were standing chopping wood in your back yard, you could see the features of a man who got off the trolley car?”

  Mrs. Nunnheimer broke into a dazzling smile.

  “Well,” the Woodside neighbor explained, “I watched them.”

  The courtroom broke into laughter, and no amount of interrogation by Howe could dim the woman’s sunny disposition. Nor could he rattle a thirteen-year-old girl who’d seen Thorn buying plaster at the local shop, the undertaker who’d rented out the carriage, or the neighbor who explained that he lived “kind of diagonally across from Mr. Buala’s property.”

  “Are you the man who owned the ducks?” Howe asked dubiously.

  “Yes, sir,” Henry Wahle nodded from the stand.

  “That ditch was a little slimy—that which you call blood, you say you saw it on top of the slime?”

  “I suppose if I had a quart can I could have filled it up,” Wahle said.

  Howe looked triumphantly out at the crowd. “How can you say that the drainpipe from that cottage drained into that ditch?”

  “Because,” the witness said, instantly deflating him, “I was there when the plumbing was put in.”

  But Wahle wasn’t the only one privy to a hidden clue. And as the women in the galleries focused their opera glasses on the stand, the truth of how the case was cracked—one that no newspaper had dared to reveal—now came to light.

  THE DA HAD the same question for each of the victim’s colleagues: “Did you ever see William Guldensuppe naked?” he demanded.

  “I have,” masseur Philip Krantz answered warily.

  “Frequently?”

  “Yes, sir.” They’d worked in the Murray Hill Baths, after all.

  “Did you notice any particular distinguishing marks upon the body of William Guldensuppe during his lifetime?”

  Why, yes, Krantz replied—a tattoo of a girl on his chest, a mole on his right arm …

  “Any other mark?” Youngs pressed.

  “The scar on the left finger?” the coworker ventured.

  “Anything else?”

  Philip Krantz shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

  “There was his …” And then he mumbled something.

  “What?” Youngs called out.

  Krantz mumbled again and looked down.

  “Speak so the jury can hear,” Youngs demanded, as courtroom spectators leaned forward.

  “His penis,” Krantz said.

  Guldensuppe, it seemed, was a memorable fellow.

  “He had very peculiar privates,” another coworker, Herman Specht, struggled to explain.

  “This peculiarity of the penis,” the DA went on, turning to the crowd and then back to the masseur, “was that so noticeable as to attract the attention of the other bath rubbers?”

  “Yes,” Specht admitted. “Many times.”

  “What can you say”—here Youngs drew out one of the morgue photographs—“as to the penis of Exhibit Number Five?”

  That’s the one, he replied.

  “The most peculiar thing was his penis,” a third coworker reminisced. “Like where he was circumcised on the head of the penis, underneath from the head he had a lump of skin hanging. Which he could stretch.”

  Ladies in the gallery gasped, but the masseur had only just started.

  “I saw him stretch it at least two and a half inches,” he added brightly.

  All this was just too much for the defense attorney’s dignity.

  “Yes, a circumcision,” Howe scoffed dismissively, and tried steering the testimony back to the mole and the tattoo.

  “Mr. Howe dropped the subject of the penis very quickly,” the district attorney jeered. But he wasn’t about to let go so easily. As Coroner Tuthill took the stand and held forth on the mole—“a warty growth under the right arm, just at the lower border of the axilla”—the prosecutor cut in impatiently.

  “Did you notice the penis?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” the coroner sighed. “I am coming to that. A very peculiar penis. The peculiarity consisted in the fact that the upper portion of the foreskin was absolutely denuded down to the body of the organ, leaving no foreskin on top, but a long pendulous foreskin beneath it.” He produced a drawing that he’d made and held it out. “I have a piece of paper here to illustrate that with—”

  “I object!” bellowed Howe.

  The galleries burst out into laughter, and Judge Maddox gaveled the crowd to order; he’d expel them all from the courthouse if he had to. Put the penis schematic away, he told the coroner.

  “Describe it,” the judge said wearily.

  “The under portion of the foreskin,” Tuthill replied, a little hurt, “extended down very long, an inch and three-quarters in length.”

  “Now, what was done with this body after your examination?”

  “I
t was placed in formalin to preserve it,” Tuthill said, indicating a container on the exhibit table. It was a small one-quart fruit jar, sealed with red wax; inside an alcohol solution suspended, one Times reporter recounted, “something looking much like small sections of tripe.”

  “Has that changed its appearance?”

  “Very much so.” Tuthill nodded. “The action of formalin is to harden and practically tan the skin. The penis has practically shrunken up and is as hard as a bone now.”

  Reporters were almost snapping their pencils. They couldn’t print this. What the courtroom ladies now knew—and what the rest of the world would not hear a word of—was that back in July, the papers fibbed about how Murray Hill Baths employees so conclusively identified Guldensuppe. The papers claimed, rather metaphorically, that it was by his peculiar finger. But bathhouse attendants and morgue staff alike, when asked, agreed that of the thousands of naked men they’d seen, this one was special.

  The judge wisely called a recess.

  ——

  “CHURCH—OR GOLF?” demanded the jury foreman over breakfast the next morning. They’d all been sequestered from their families for the Thanksgiving holiday in the Garden City Hotel; when Judge Maddox had broken the news back at the courthouse, the crowd visibly pitied the twelve crestfallen men.

  But perhaps Thanksgiving at the hotel wouldn’t be so bad: the Garden City had been designed by Stanford White, and it was the most luxurious hotel for miles around. They came downstairs that morning to find preparations already being made for an impressive spread of turkey and roast duck. One juror promptly hit the breakfast table and stuffed buckwheat pancakes into his pockets.

  “I wish there were more murders in this county,” another cracked between mouthfuls.

  But, alas, they were already a hung jury. Church, a stout minority of five argued. Golf, responded the other seven, noting that as they were sequestered, and many sermons of late referred to the Thorn case, it was their civic duty to stay far from baleful public influences. Such isolation could only be guaranteed by standing in the middle of an open field … with a caddy.