The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  Who is that? the whisper ran.

  “Where do you live?” Youngs asked her after she was sworn in.

  “439 Ninth Avenue.”

  “Do you go to school?”

  “Yes, sir.” Clara nodded earnestly.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  Her manner was a curious contrast to Thorn’s or indeed nearly every adult who had taken the stand—her voice small and precise, free of artifice.

  “Do you remember”—Youngs measured his words carefully—“Friday, the twenty-fifth of June?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I got home at two o’clock.”

  “How do you know it was Friday?”

  “Because I got home early.”

  “Friday is the only day you get home early?”

  “Yes, sir,” she explained, adding that it was her time to visit Mrs. Stewart, a neighbor in the building, to babysit the woman’s infant.

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I was bringing it down in its carriage.”

  “Did you take it to see Mrs. Nack?”

  “Yes,” the girl said plainly.

  “You know Mrs. Nack?”

  “I didn’t just know her,” the schoolgirl smiled. “She lived in 439 Ninth Avenue.”

  “Did you see her that day?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Yes—between half past two and three o’clock.”

  “What was Mrs. Nack doing at that time?” he asked significantly.

  “Trimming her hat,” Clara replied.

  A murmur arose in the courtroom. The girl was with Mrs. Nack—at a sewing table, calmly banding ribbons around a brown hat—at the precise moment Thorn claimed she was miles away cutting up a body.

  No further questions, Youngs said as he walked back past Howe. It was a child on an East River pier who had begun the case one balmy June day; now, five months later and in the winter darkness of a courtroom, another child had ended it.

  “IS THAT ALL YOUR EVIDENCE?” Howe scoffed.

  “I believe it is,” Youngs replied with a slight bow.

  Pacing before the bench the next morning, the defense counsel had one last request for Judge Maddox.

  “I ask”—Howe leaned forward—“that the jury be permitted to view the bath tub in which it is claimed the body was cut up—with a view to showing that no one person alone could have put that body in the bathtub without indentation of the tin.”

  “These premises are now in the same condition that they were at or about the twenty-fifth of June?” Judge Maddox asked.

  “Practically the same,” the DA cut in. “There are certain marks on the walls and things of that kind, but the premises are practically in the same condition.”

  “The district attorney cut out little pieces to have it analyzed with respect to the blood,” Howe added. “Our point is that the bath tub should be viewed.”

  The judge did not look entirely convinced. “What say you, Mr. Youngs?”

  “We have nothing to conceal at all,” the DA shrugged. “The key is in the custody of Detective Sullivan.”

  “How long will it take to go from here to the cottage?”

  “About twenty minutes.”

  After nearly thinking better of it, the judge decided to let them go ahead; Martin Thorn, not surprisingly, wasn’t interested in joining them.

  “Gentlemen of the jury”—Judge Maddox turned to the twelve men—“you will be conducted to this house.”

  With that, he sent them to fetch their hats and overcoats. Captain Methven and the rest of their police escort cut a path through the crowd as the jurors filed out into the cold air of the courthouse steps and down to the streetcar stop. While a private trolley was requisitioned for the jurors, reporters jockeyed to hire their own. An Evening Journal artist stood nearby and hurriedly sketched the scene in pen and ink.

  It won’t fit, a colleague informed him. One bird can’t carry a sheet that size. The chagrined artist, realizing his mistake, promptly sliced the drawing down the middle. The two halves were sent across the river by different pigeons.

  The jurors themselves wouldn’t see the drawings; Captain Methven made sure of that. He hadn’t allowed his charges to read anything in their off-hours—“nothing but hotel menu cards,” he declared. But the twelve men climbing aboard the trolley had taken it all good-naturedly, and had even amused themselves the day before by forming a fraternity. After considering calling it the Thorny Club, they settled upon the Good Thing Club—good things, of course, coming to those who wait. They’d passed around cigars to make it official, made an appointment for a group photograph, and genially hazed their police escort by loading his rifle with blanks on the hotel’s trap-shooting range. Same time next year, the jurors promised the officers after dissolving into hilarity. We’ll treat you to dinner.

  But now, it was all business.

  The procession—the jurors and police sequestered in their one drafty streetcar, and a parade of reporters and spectators following them—rolled at a stately pace, beyond the saloons selling hot rum, past cart horses shaking off the cold, by greenhouses fogged with winter. When the convoy reached the sleepy corner of Second Street, a crowd was already gathered around the house that locals jovially referred to as Mrs. Nack’s Office.

  “All off here for Woodside cottage!” the conductor called back to his passengers, and the twelve men stepped out of their streetcar and into the scene of the crime.

  THE PLACE had hardly changed at all.

  The trees were bare now, the grass in the backyard high and unmown, but otherwise it remained recognizable from last summer’s front pages. The house’s windows slumbered under closed wooden shutters, heedless of the men treading through the mud and ice up to the creaking wooden front porch. There the jurors paused while Detective Sullivan fished out a key and slid it into the lock.

  Back, back, they could hear the police yelling behind them, shooing gawkers to a perimeter around the property line.

  The door groaned awake on its hinges, and they quietly filed into the darkened parlor. The air in the unheated house was frigid, leaving their breath visible in white clouds; with the power long shut off, Detective Sullivan busily threw open the shutters to let in the subdued light of the winter morning. This way, he motioned them downstairs. He’d been one of the first in the house back in the summer, and he knew it well. Down in the cellar lay the smashed remains of a chimney, a hole still gaping where detectives in search of Guldensuppe’s head had attacked the brickwork with sledgehammers. A peek inside the hole revealed why that search had failed: The aperture inside was scarcely four inches wide.

  Back upstairs and through the parlor, they paused in the kitchen to peer into the black iron stove that had held the ashes of the dead man’s shoes, then trod up the steep flight of stairs to the house’s second story. Their footsteps echoed loud and hollow through the hallways. It was a modest home, cheaply made and of small proportions, with just two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The jurors barely fit into the front bedroom. Its walls still bore neatly penciled forensics notations and small scars down to the wooden lathing—specimens pried away by detectives extracting the two bullets that Gotha said Thorn had test-fired from his revolver.

  At the next room, the men paused.

  The second bedroom remained as it had been—without a hint of trouble, save for subtle shavings planed off sections of the floorboards for blood analysis. The closet was empty, its door ajar, waiting. With a rug over the nicked-up floor, one could imagine a tidy little boarder’s room being made of such a space. Yet the murder had been perpetrated in one of these two bedrooms, for according to Nack and Gotha, Thorn had fired from this very closet, while Thorn contended that Mrs. Nack had done the deed herself in the front room.

  The bathroom’s back here. Sullivan waved them along.

  The jurors inspected the metal bathtub, leaning down one by one to examine its surface. As Howe had promised, there was neither a dent nor a saw mark to be
found. It would indeed have been difficult for one person to do the dismembering alone. But if both hands had grasped that terrible saw, which one had leveled the revolver or grasped the dagger—and in which bedroom?

  Walking back downstairs, Foreman Morse led his jury into the weedy backyard, the ground furrowed with the diggings of detectives and treasure hunters. Then they strolled out front to the roadside ditch, where ducks cavorted in half-frozen water. It was the same flock that had turned pink with Guldensuppe’s draining blood, and the jurors watched the ducks waddle past them and across the yard of the emptied house.

  In a few hours, the jurors would have to decide just what had happened inside that cottage.

  JUDGE MADDOX HADN’T YET finished his cigar when the jurors returned; the justice was gazing out over the packed room with a thoughtful look. It was too bad they hadn’t taken a bit longer; cigars were just about the only way to make the room’s air fit to breathe.

  Quiet! He gaveled the tumultuous crowd, and he motioned for Howe to come up. The defense had elected to give the first closing argument, and it was time for him to make his last stand. The old lawyer tugged down on his pin-striped vest—a favorite gesture of his—and then turned to the hushed room with great seriousness.

  “May it please Your Honor and gentlemen of the jury,” Howe began quietly. “I firmly believe that the woman with a pistol taken from her apartment and brought here into this court is the one who shot William Guldensuppe. Mrs. Nack, the vile thing that left her husband, tells Thorn that she loves him dearly: ‘I love Thorn and would die for him.’ Instead she made another man die—Guldensuppe.”

  Howe’s voice climbed in indignation as he paced before the jury box.

  “Yet you’re asked to place the blame on this man! He was no more the murderer of Guldensuppe than you were. The District Attorney was too astute to have dared a second ordeal of that woman on the stand. He was afraid to have her confronted. He feared she would go to pieces on the rack of truth, and you would see into the recesses of her murderous heart. Thorn is on trial for what she did—and I say, God forbid that murderess should go free, and Thorn pay the penalty.”

  Howe paused before one juror and then the next—hovering, one reporter mused, like an immense bee before each blossom in a flower box.

  “Gotha is the only one who testified that Thorn confessed. Gotha. Judas was a saint compared to this Gotha.”

  Howe turned and swung out his arm.

  “Who is Gotha?” he barked. “Thorn was a hard-working barber until he fell in with this vile creature, this harridan. Gotha left his wife and lived alone. And then he came here, with blood money in his pocket, to swear away the life of this man.”

  The courtroom was electric with silence, the crowd almost holding its breath.

  “He had read about the one thousand dollar reward. He had Detective Price’s one hundred dollars. But we don’t stop with Sam Price’s one hundred dollars. We have him going to the New York District Attorney’s office. This barber, who from his looks couldn’t earn ten dollars a week by shaving, gets one hundred dollars in a lump and then lies to you. He was acting a lie from the time he put on the handcuffs until he went on the stand.”

  Howe glanced between the jury box and the prosecution team.

  “Suppose the evidence of Gotha were out of the case. What evidence is there that Thorn fired the shot or did any killing? Can they find anything besides that? No—and I can’t conceive of your believing Gotha.”

  As for the innocent schoolgirl from Mrs. Nack’s building, well—surely she told the truth, Howe admitted, but she or Thorn merely had their times confused. No, he declared, the schoolgirl’s testimony made the case against Nack even worse.

  “Trimming a ha-aat!” He banged down his fist. “Trimming a hat, just after she trimmed her lover’s body!” Howe’s voice, marveled a reporter, roared so loud that the chandeliers jangled. In the startled silence that followed, he stopped and mopped the perspiration from his brow.

  “Now, as to your visit to the cottage just now—you didn’t find a single indentation in that tub, did you? The body could not have been cut unless two people had helped with it. Under this indictment it is perfectly reasonable that you could find a verdict of murder in the second degree—punishment worse than death itself. Imprisonment for life in a tomb of stone! Never leaving that tomb until the dead body is carried out. Some of you”—he motioned to the jurors—“may have been sick in your comfortable houses, and the very paper on the wall begins to punish you with weariness. But picture twenty years in a cell.”

  His voice dropped low, and he pulled up close to the jury-box railing.

  “To take the life which God has given—unjustly—is an awful thing. Remember that the scenes of this day will never, ever leave you. They will follow you to your farm”—he eyed Valentine Waits, and then the builders—“to your carpenter’s shop. These scenes will sleep by you on your pillow. If it should transpire that this man is innocent after you have judged him guilty, this man will haunt you through your lives. If you find him guilty, at the final accounting that man’s spirit will rise to condemn you before the judgment seat of God.”

  Youngs’s summation was plodding and methodical: Thorn had the weapons, had the motive, had been placed at the scene, and confessed to a friend. They had unprecedented circumstantial evidence, and testimony by detectives and a firearms expert allowed the jury to draw its own conclusion. “Put these things together in a mosaic, gentlemen,” he invited. “And see the picture they form.”

  The defense, Youngs noted tartly, changed its story with each passing day—first it was Guldensuppe’s body, then it wasn’t; Thorn hadn’t been at the scene, then he had.

  “Gentlemen of the jury”—the district attorney smiled faintly—“the eloquence of Mr. Howe is world-wide in its reputation, standing as he does at the head of the criminal bar of the city of New York. The eloquence you have listened to today has been thrilling. And”—he glanced at Howe—“through its exertion, no doubt more than one guilty man has escaped.”

  Thorn stared ahead stonily, while Howe glared back in fine indignation.

  “We lay no claim to any greatness of oratory,” Youngs continued. Balding and bespectacled, the very diminutiveness of the DA now turned against the defense counsel. “He has given you that, but we have given you something stronger than oratory, more powerful than eloquence: evidence.”

  The district attorney paused before the jury box. He wanted them to also consider their solemn duty as Long Islanders—as the bulwark that honest tradesmen like them kept up against the depredations of the big city across the river.

  “Gentlemen of the jury, he has appealed to your heart, your passions. I appeal to your common sense, to your heads. Don’t let it go out that men and women can come over here from neighboring cities and conspire to commit crimes.”

  The crowd of reporters rolled their eyes; they’d be going back to that great corrupting city tonight—and be glad of it, too. But it was not the reporters that Youngs had turned toward.

  “I know,” the DA concluded as he gazed earnestly at the carpenters and farmers, “that I can leave the matter in your hands.”

  THE COURTROOM WAS RAVENOUS; closing arguments had taken so long that it was 2:25 p.m. by the time the twelve men left for the jury room. Judge Maddox had lunch sent in to the jurors, while the courtroom itself broke out sandwiches and bottles of ginger ale in a flurry of wax paper and napkins; the spectators, not wanting to lose their seats, had packed their own lunches. It was a masculine affair, with women still hopelessly crowded out on the courthouse steps and in hallways. Their only representative inside was a single black-veiled woman nearly hidden behind one of the spectator gallery pillars. It’s Thorn’s sister, the murmur went.

  Thorn himself was led downstairs to a holding cell for lunch, while at his defense table Howe assumed a philosophical look. He was delighted with their case, he declared, but then his expression darkened. He’d torn down every major witnes
s on the stand as an inebriate, a busybody, or an outright criminal—all of them, that is, except one.

  “The one thing is the testimony of little Clara Pierce,” he confided quietly to his associates. The schoolgirl’s placement of Mrs. Nack in the city could undermine Thorn’s entire alibi. “It may turn the jury against us.”

  Howe’s sheer oratory, reporters and spectators agreed, had expertly maneuvered around the prosecution. “So long as Mr. Howe kept in a sphere above the actual evidence, he soared triumphant,” the crime novelist Julian Hawthorne telegraphed from his post at the Journal table. Along the way, Howe had deftly rolled back his defense from brashly denying Guldensuppe’s death to admitting that someone had caused the fellow to never be seen reemerging from that Woodside cottage.

  But who?

  “It is not believed that he cut himself up,” a Brooklyn Eagle reporter wrote tartly. “It is not supposed that he took a saw with him into the cottage for the purpose of separating himself from his arms and his legs and incidentally his head.”

  And yet many clues to who had done the deed were not used. Gotha’s testimony was a necessary gamble, but every other marginal witness had been ruthlessly excluded. Youngs saw in the first trial that Howe’s specialty was in demolishing any witness with an ulterior motive or the least vulnerability in character. Mrs. Nack’s testimony was left out, of course; but so was Mrs. Riger’s account of the oilcloth purchase. It was said that the poor woman had suffered a breakdown over all the publicity. Frank Clark’s old allegation from the Tombs of an infirmary confession was also left untouched; Youngs had planned to use it in the first trial, but now a con like Clark was clearly easy prey to Howe. But so, remarkably, was the analysis of blood spots on the floors. With poisoning charges and money troubles now hanging over Professor Witthaus’s divorce, the forensics expert’s character would have been mauled by the defense—and in any case, while forensics evidence might have worked in Manhattan, Long Island farmers and carpenters had no truck with chemistry professors.