The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  It was fortunate that the men were nowhere near the jail that day, for the inquisitive public had turned out in battalions. Just as when children flooded Woodside on Independence Day, the enforced idleness of Thanksgiving seemed to bring out the amateur detective in New Yorkers. Hundreds milled about, hoping to gain an audience with Nack or Thorn, only to have Sheriff Doht turn them away.

  For Thorn, the day inside at first passed much like any other, with a marathon session of pinochle, albeit with the happy interruption of turkey and potatoes. His faithful dog, Bill Baker, fared well, and the jailers presented Thorn with a precious commodity indeed: a Havana cigar. As Thorn watched the smoke curl away through the bars of his cell, only a Journal correspondent managed to dampen his holiday spirits. What, the reporter asked, did he think of Adolph Luetgert’s comments on the trial?

  Luetgert? Thorn had avidly followed the Chicago sausage maker’s retrial—it had begun the same day as his own, even—but he didn’t know Luetgert had been following his retrial as well.

  A newspaper was handed to the prisoner with a headline blaring across the front page: LUETGERT PREDICTS THORN’S CONVICTION. “I believe the jury will convict them both,” the accused acid-vat killer told the press. “Nothing, I believe, can save them, unless the state has made an agreement with Mrs. Nack to let her off with imprisonment.”

  “Luetgert is guilty, I think, and ought to be hanged,” Thorn snapped back. But the comment aggravated him. Picking up the Evening Journal later that day didn’t help. After a day of reading religious books, his co-conspirator had issued a statement that a suspicious mind might read all sorts of deal making and betrayal into.

  “I can say,” Mrs. Nack announced to the press, “that I really knew what Thanksgiving is today.”

  BY FRIDAY the crowds had turned ruthless.

  “Show your passes!” the courthouse deputies barked. Forged tickets had been showing up among those trying to get in. Bickering women seized seats in the courthouse galleries, refusing to go even when caught with bad and expired papers. “Out!” one guard yelled across a row, while another collared a spectator—“He means you!”

  “It’s a disgrace to have women in attendance,” the DA complained bitterly from the courthouse floor, appalled that he’d had to present testimonies about Guldensuppe’s foreskin in front of so many women.

  Hearst, though, was unrepentant: “To show crime in its vulgarest and most revolting aspects,” he announced piously to his readers, “is to perform a service.”

  Reporters eagerly telegraphed across the river what lurid details they could: BRAZEN WOMEN AND BAD AIR, one headline announced. For the courthouse was indeed suffocating again; the malodorous atmosphere, a New York Press reporter complained, was now “more offensive than ever, if possible.” The district attorney himself was demanding an investigation into the courthouse’s ventilation, and more than a few suspected that the first judge’s malaria attack had been brought on by the evil-smelling miasma.

  And yet the crowd pressed forward into the seats, nearly bowling one another over the railings, arguing and gossiping in equal measure—then breaking into a low murmur as the suspects were led in. Nearly lost in the commotion was the strangely familiar face of a rather dapper gentleman; the guards almost hadn’t even let him in until he produced a subpoena from his soft camel-hair overcoat.

  Herman Nack?

  The subpoena was courtesy of Mr. Howe—and so, the press pool surmised, was Herman’s new wardrobe. Before calling in the delivery driver as a battering ram against Mrs. Nack, the lawyer had first bought him a good shave and a fitting at his tailor. And so here it was, then: Herman, Gussie, and Martin glowering at each other from across the courtroom floor, along with some remnants of Willie floating in an old alcohol-filled fruit jar. The four principals of the tragedy were together in one room at last.

  The bakery driver remained bewildered by it all.

  “Just a crazy barber,” Herman muttered to a reporter as he sized up Thorn. He peered over at his wife, whom he’d last seen the morning they were both arrested. “She looks pale,” he said with a hint of concern, before quickly adding, “I don’t know whether to feel sorry for her or not. She is nothing to me now.”

  With everyone finally seated, the testimony proceeded through a cross section of New York life: the newsboy who recognized Thorn at the ferry; the saloon keeper who saw Gotha and Thorn together; a pinochle player who spotted a pistol in Thorn’s vest. Detective Sullivan identified the bullets from Woodside’s walls, and an NYPD pistol instructor noted that their caliber matched Thorn’s blue nickel-plated .32. Detective O’Donnell, the former plumber, identified a vial of the foul-smelling plaster he’d found in the Woodside sink trap. Thorn watched with mild interest, occasionally narrowing his eyes at Mrs. Nack; she refused to return his glances. But the man they all awaited was John Gotha.

  As the tall and jittery witness was led in, Thorn smiled at the sight of his old friend. Gotha, though, locked his eyes on the floor. Thorn’s informant looked puffy and tired, like a man who had been gaining weight but losing sleep.

  “State your name.”

  “John Gotha.”

  The prosecutor walked him through Thorn’s affair with Nack and the fight with Guldensuppe. Thorn listened with a faintly indulgent smile, as if his hapless friend was confused yet again. But Gotha’s recollection of Thorn’s confession sounded all too precise.

  “I asked him if he done the murder, and first he denied it,” Gotha recounted steadily. “And then he said yes, he did it. Told me how he went into the house about half past nine, and while he was waiting for Mrs. Nack and Guldensuppe he took out his pistol and tried it out. He said it didn’t work at first. He snapped it several times before it discharged, and fired it off a couple times to make sure it was all right.”

  It made sense now. Thorn’s first brawl with Guldensuppe was lost by a misfire; these test shots explained why two bullets were found buried in the plaster lath of the Woodside cottage.

  Gotha made sense to Howe, too—but not quite in the same way.

  “Were you not,” the lawyer demanded, rising up, “a confirmed inebriate?”

  “No, sir,” Gotha replied indignantly.

  “Were you not taken to the Inebriates’ Home at Fort Hamilton?”

  “No,” the barber insisted.

  Howe eyed his prey for a long moment, his gold-fretted scarf glimmering under the gaslights.

  “How much money,” he rang his words out slowly, “had you in your pocket at the time of the arrest of Thorn?”

  “Well,” Gotha said, shifting uncomfortably. “I didn’t have much money.”

  “How—much—money?”

  “About twenty dollars,” Gotha admitted.

  “Where have you been since Thorn’s arrest?” Howe pressed.

  “Been up in the country.”

  “Paid your board there?”

  “I did.”

  “With what money?”

  “My wife’s money.”

  “Do you know the police paid your board there? Yes or no?”

  Gotha looked over at the prosecutor helplessly, then back at Howe.

  “Yes,” he said in a small voice.

  Howe directed the crowd’s attention to Gotha’s next residence, on West 122nd.

  “Who paid for that?” he demanded.

  “I paid for that,” Gotha insisted.

  “Where did you get the money? From Mr. Sullivan?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The district-attorney’s officer, is he not?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gotha mumbled.

  “Yes or no!” Howe bellowed.

  Gotha was perspiring freely now.

  “Yes.”

  “How much did Sullivan give you?”

  “Well,” the barber stuttered, “he gave me enough to—”

  “How much?” Howe roared. “You understand the English language?”

  “I couldn’t get no work!” Gotha blurted.

  �
�One hundred dollars?” Howe pressed mercilessly.

  “Couldn’t tell you.”

  “You mean that, do you Gotha?” Howe yelled. He was towering over the barber now, quaking with indignation.

  “If Mr. Howe wants to save time, I will put in the records of—” the prosecutor interrupted.

  “Allow me to conduct my cross-examination!” Howe belted, and turned back to his cowering witness. “Sullivan has given you the money on which you have lived?”

  “Not all,” Gotha protested.

  “Nearly all?”

  Gotha sank down farther in his seat. “Nearly all,” he replied quietly.

  “Have you earned one penny”—Howe banged his fist down—“from the time you went to the police headquarters? Yes or no?”

  “I have not earned it,” Gotha stumbled, “but I got it from my wife’s people …”

  “Haven’t done a day’s work, have you?”

  “No,” he mumbled.

  “You know”—Howe motioned at the teeming press tables—“there was one thousand dollars offered by the New York Journal for the discovery of the perpetrator of this murder, do you not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Howe turned back to him. “Is it not true that Thorn told you that it was Mrs. Nack who shot Guldensuppe?”

  “No,” Gotha insisted.

  No further questions, Howe scoffed.

  The whole thing, Howe declared, was a flimsy farrago to get a reward when the real murderer was already under arrest. With Gotha reduced to rubble, the lawyer now had Herman Nack at the ready to demolish his ex-wife’s credibility. “I’ll tear her apart,” Howe assured a reporter.

  But the district attorney had a surprise for him.

  “The people rest,” Youngs announced.

  What?

  The crowd was stunned. No Mrs. Nack? A capital case without the star witness? But they were hardly as amazed as the glimmering figure who stood before them on the courtroom floor. Howe was thunderstruck for what seemed the first time in his life, as the realization dawned on him.

  In a single instant, the prosecution had just outflanked his entire defense.

  CROWD MAY BREAK RECORDS, the headlines warned that Monday. Over the weekend Sheriff Doht’s office had been flooded with thousands of applications, including a bar association’s worth of lawyers; attorneys were making a pilgrimage to see how the Great Howe would magically free his client. But another constituency was not admitted.

  “No women,” Sheriff Doht told an uproarious crowd gathered outside. He was taking no chances; the mistake of allowing women to hear about Guldensuppe’s anatomy would not be repeated this week. Newspapers couldn’t even hint at the reason; they had to settle for informing their readers that the testimony was simply too shocking even for modern-minded ladies. Scores of women promptly laid siege to the sheriff’s office and overflowed into hallways, all hoping to glimpse either Nack or Thorn.

  But behind the courtroom’s heavy oak doors, Martin Thorn was staring too—at the jury.

  “I have been watching them pretty closely, though some think I take little interest in the trial,” Thorn confided to a Herald reporter as the room filled up. He nodded toward the ever-smiling Valentine Waits, a perpetually cheerful farmer who had become a favorite of courtroom cartoonists. He appeared particularly well fed and jolly that morning. “I notice many of them are getting rosy cheeks.”

  The rest of the jury filed into the jury box, with the out-of-season builders looking almost as crisply groomed that morning as Thorn himself.

  “Some of them have had a hair cut,” he observed quietly. “I suppose I notice that because I’m a barber.”

  Thorn’s voice, the Herald reporter mused, retained the same calm register of the barbershop—as “if he had been discussing freaks of weather with favored customers.” His lawyer, though, was more boisterous: Howe slapped his client’s back, prepared his papers, and then stood up before the quieted courthouse.

  Gentlemen—his voice rang out. For they were indeed gentlemen, save for seven or eight canny women who had gotten in under the pretense of being newspaper artists; their sketch pads sat unused on their laps. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he began impressively. “Martin Thorn is innocent of the murder of William Guldensuppe.”

  He strode up to the jury box, looking with great meaning at each man sitting in it.

  “The killing of Guldensuppe germinated in the mind of the assassin—Mrs. Nack. She is a perjurer as well as a murderess. It was she who hired the cottage for the purpose of converting it to a slaughterhouse in which to take the life of her lover. Guldensuppe had been pestering this woman and she wanted him no longer—she wanted Martin Thorn. And so this Lady Macbeth of modern times came to Woodside and hired a cottage. She bought the oilcloth, while Guldensuppe was yet alive. She took him there to have him killed. She was the murderer. This anatomist who could carve a body as well as you could carve a turkey—this Lady Macbeth and all the Borgias rolled into one—then proceeded to cut that body up. After his butchery she put his clothes in a cooking stove, gentlemen, and watched the fire do its work. That’s the creature that talks of confessing through God and her conscience.”

  Howe paused and turned pensive. His white hair glowed against the somber black of his suit, and now he spoke in a low, tremulous voice.

  “In a long career in the court, I am in—yellow leaf,” he confided. After days of vigorous bluster, Howe was turning old and kindly. “But I believe that justice will be done.”

  Summoning his strength, Howe turned to the packed house. “Martin Thorn!”

  Captain Methven loosened Thorn’s handcuffs and then led the prisoner behind the jury box, through the narrow passage, to the stand.

  “Will Your Honor pardon me if I sit down during this examination?” the old lawyer asked, turning to Judge Maddox. “Out of respect to the court I prefer to stand, very much—but I ask that I may sit down.”

  “Yes,” the judge nodded.

  The effect was curiously intimate: Howe and Thorn were two men now, sitting and talking.

  “Thorn,” Howe asked genially, “what is your proper name?”

  “Martin Thorzewsky.”

  “When did you first meet Mrs. Nack?”

  “A year and a half ago.”

  A glance around the courtroom showed that she had not been brought in by the prosecution; their feint had already succeeded. He was on his own, even if their entire defense relied on attacking her.

  “Did Mrs. Nack make love to you—or you to her?” Howe asked delicately.

  “She made love to me.”

  “And did you love her in return?”

  “I did,” he smiled.

  “Very fondly?”

  “Very,” Thorn replied quietly.

  Soon, Thorn explained earnestly, she talked of leaving Guldensuppe, so they could run off together to start a lucrative orphanage in Woodside. But on the morning of June 25, when he visited the house they’d secretly rented, he had the shock of his life.

  “I came there a little after eleven, and soon as I came up the stoop, the door came open and Mrs. Nack stood inside, a little excited. I asked her—‘What is the matter?’ She said, ‘Oh, I just left Guldensuppe upstairs.’ I said, ‘What’s he doing up there?’ She said, ‘I just shot him, and I am glad of it; I am rid of all my trouble now.’ ”

  Thorn shook his head in disbelief: The woman had immediately tried pinning it all on him. “She said, ‘We’ll have to get rid of the body now—you have to. If you don’t suspicion will fall on you because you had a fight with him, and you got the receipt in your name for the cottage.’ So we proceeded to take the body, undressed him and put him in the bath tub, and I went out and bought the plaster of paris.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Fourth Street—I don’t know, the corner.” He shrugged. “When I got back Mrs. Nack had her hat and dress off, and I got hold of the body. Mrs. Nack took a big knife and cut his throat. When she came to the back of the ne
ck she took a saw and cut it, and then she commenced to count his ribs. I said, ‘What are you doing that for?’ She said, ‘So I won’t cut the body too far down, so as not to open any of the bowels.’ ”

  The crowd squirmed a little, but the detail rang true: The fairly expert carving of the body attested to great deliberation in the cut lines, and to someone with a knowledge of anatomy.

  The courtroom was dead quiet as Howe rose and walked to the jury box. “Thorn,” he inquired gravely, “were you ever convicted of any offense?”

  “Never.”

  “Look at that jury, Thorn.” Howe swept his arm out. “Did you shoot William Guldensuppe?”

  Martin Thorn looked up from the chair: out over the courthouse, at scores of men scribbling in steno pads, at errand boys sliding telegraph dispatches under the door, at disheveled artists scrolling pictures into pigeon tubes, at hundreds of New Yorkers staring fixedly upon him from the galleries.

  Then the defendant leveled his gaze squarely at the twelve men who would decide his fate.

  “I did not,” he said.

  V.

  THE VERDICT

  (photo credit p5.1)

  21.

  MRS. NACK’S OFFICE

  NOT EVERYONE WAS TRANSFIXED by Martin Thorn’s stare. True, there were newspaper reports of his “evil eye”; Hearst even joked that its baleful power had caused that week’s unraveling of Paddy Gleason, the Long Island City mayor caught trying to use the Woodside Water Company to scoop up a $60,000 windfall for himself. But the evil-eye rumor was taken seriously enough by District Attorney Youngs’s daughter that she loaned him her lucky piece of coral; this, she told her father, was to be carried in his pocket for protection against Thorn. In his other pocket William Youngs dutifully carried a rabbit’s foot—a present from his wife. But he knew Thorn had no unearthly power now, and scarcely even earthly power; why, the man could be undone by a schoolgirl.

  “Clara Pierce,” Youngs called out into the packed courthouse.

  The prosecution, allowed a final rebuttal to Thorn’s testimony, had tantalized the press with the lure of an appearance by Mrs. Nack; but alas, they would not give Howe the satisfaction of attacking her. “The case for the people was complete without her,” one of Youngs’s team insisted. Instead, wending past the jury box and up to the stand was a slender and neatly attired girl, her eyes wide before the murmuring crowd.