The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  How quickly would such a jury weigh a secondhand confession to an unemployed barber and a series of circumstantial clues from friends and neighbors? Not too quickly, it seemed. As the cigars and flasks were swapped among the denizens of the galleries, the courtroom’s pendulum clock ticked slowly forward to three o’clock, and then to four. Passing by the guarded jury-room door a half hour later, reporters could make out raised voices.

  Sitting at the jury room’s table, among the picked-over remains of their lunches, one builder was demanding that the jury vote remain by secret ballot. And after six votes in a row, the foreman had opened the slips of paper, counted them, and hit the same result each time.

  Eleven to one.

  One hour later—after demanding and then poring over the intercepted jailhouse correspondence between Nack and Thorn—the twelve men filed back into the courtroom through the side door, and drowsy spectators scrambled to their feet.

  “Remove your hats!” deputies bellowed up into the galleries as Judge Maddox returned from his chambers and then as Martin Thorn was led back in. Actually, it was Thorn doing the leading: He was so nervously eager that he was nearly dragging in Captain Methven with his handcuffed arm.

  The twelve solemn men looked to the judge and waited.

  “Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?”

  “We have,” their foreman replied.

  “Defendant, rise,” the court clerk commanded Martin Thorn. “Jurors, look upon the defendant. Defendant, look upon the jurors. What say you?”

  The men locked eyes, and Thorn knew his fate.

  “We find the defendant guilty,” the foreman announced—“of murder in the first degree.”

  22.

  THE SMOKER TO SING SING

  MARTIN THORN KNEW they were out to kill him.

  “I suppose Howe will get a new trial, but it won’t do any good in this county,” he snorted to the Herald reporter waiting back at his cell. “You can’t get a jury in this county who wouldn’t hang you for stealing a loaf of bread.”

  There wasn’t much left to cheer Thorn up other than wrestling with his adopted mutt—the only creature on earth uninterested in judging him.

  So, did you do it?

  Thorn sat down and looked pensively around his cell; the room had been freshly whitewashed the day before in anticipation of the press, and it still smelled of paint.

  “I had no motive to kill Guldensuppe,” Thorn said quietly, and then eyed the Herald reporter. “He did exactly what I would have done under the circumstances. What could he have done? I never had any ill will against the man for striking me.”

  So then …

  “Mrs. Nack had a motive,” he snapped. “I didn’t.”

  But when Thorn’s sister Pauline and her husband came to visit, his defiance was to no avail: They both looked thunderstruck.

  “Martin!” his sister sobbed, and grasped his hand. “Martin!”

  The husband stood by, eyes welling up, also unable to speak. Thorn sat his sister in a corner of the tiny cell, a rather melancholy gesture toward privacy.

  “Martin!” she wept.

  “Well,” he motioned cheerfully outside. “Pretty cold out today, ain’t it?”

  She was not fooled by his nonchalance.

  “Poor fellow!” Pauline dabbed her eyes and finally composed herself a little. Her expression turned indignant. “It’s a shame that they should make a deal with Mrs. Nack. It’s a shame. She—”

  “Hush, hush.” Thorn held his hand up. “I don’t want you to say anything about her. I wouldn’t care if she were turned loose tomorrow. I don’t care what becomes of her.”

  His sister looked astounded—as did everyone else in the cell.

  “Yes, I mean it,” the prisoner insisted. “I do mean it.”

  His sister and brother-in-law left the cell as distraught as when they’d arrived, unsure whether they’d ever see him alive again.

  Do you mean it? a Herald reporter asked.

  “It doesn’t make any difference to me what they do with her.” Thorn shrugged. But he was struggling with his feelings, because it wasn’t just the jury or the State of New York that he knew was out to kill him. “I am convinced,” he said slowly, “that these letters that Mrs. Nack sent to me are part of a scheme—to commit suicide. She thought I would carry out my part of the contract, and then she’d change her mind. Then I would be out of the way, and she would have nothing to fear.”

  It’s true, one of the jailers admitted quietly—they hadn’t told the press at the time, but before the trial they found a smuggled dose of morphine in Thorn’s vest—enough for an overdose. They’d had an extra guard on him ever since.

  “You needn’t trouble yourself about me trying to commit suicide,” Thorn laughed. He wasn’t going to die for Mrs. Nack—not now. And he wouldn’t die for the people of New York, either. “I’m not going to do anything to save the county or the state the expense of killing me.”

  The prisoner’s expression darkened.

  “I’ll make the state pay,” he said.

  HOWE WASN’T WORRIED about their case at all.

  “I am smoking a cigar in contentment,” he informed reporters the next morning. He’d file an appeal, and he expected to win it. “My mind is in a state of peace and tranquility. I shall take lunch in a dress suit and drink a quart of white.”

  “On what ground will you base your appeal?” asked a reporter for the Eagle.

  “I do not wish”—Howe smiled enigmatically—“to unmask any battery.”

  His first salvo came just one day later, and from an utterly unexpected source: the jury’s hotel bill. The Garden City Hotel dutifully filed an itemized list with Queens County’s board of supervisors: $2,049.90 for both juries. It was steep, but it was a long trial and retrial, after all, and it included hundreds in private jury streetcars and in attending physician’s bills for Magnus Larsen’s appendicitis. The supervisors were relieved: Some had feared that, along with misadventures like Detective Sullivan’s fruitless trip to Hamburg to find Guldensuppe, the entire cost of the case might balloon to $40,000 or $50,000. Instead, it was looking like everything might come in at less than $20,000.

  But they hadn’t anticipated William Howe.

  Much of the hotel bill consisted of the usual pettiness—a ten-cent charge marked “Listerine,” a twenty-five-cent charge when a juror borrowed a quarter for a poker game—and a few luxuries as well. Thorn’s trained eye had also been right about the jury’s newfound grooming; they’d run up an impressive $30 barber bill. But it was something else that caught his defense counsel’s eye. The jurors had mown down more than $80 worth of booze and cigars in a single night—and many other evenings as well. The Good Thing Club, it seemed, was a little too much of a good thing.

  Intoxication! Howe bellowed. The jury was incompetent to render a verdict, he declared, on account of their disgraceful state of inebriation. District Attorney Youngs, flabbergasted, quickly rounded up the jurors and their guards in his office and demanded affidavits.

  “I saw no wine drunk,” insisted Captain Methven. “They were allowed to have a bottle of beer or ale and cigars for dinner, but that’s all.”

  One juror allowed that maybe they did have wine—but just a single glass.

  “I saw only one glass of wine while I was there, and that was when I was sick,” a much-recovered Magnus Larsen said primly before quickly adding, “I don’t care for it anyway.” The other jurors admitted to a little more. Maybe there were some other drinks, too—a glass or two—some Bass beer, a blackberry cordial, maybe Jamaican ginger for a bad stomach. But they’d absolutely been quite sober in the courtroom.

  When Martin Thorn reported back to the courthouse on Friday, December 3, several jurors joined the crowd of reporters and spectators to hear his sentencing. It took all of eight minutes, for the county still pointedly regarded the entire matter as settled.

  “Prisoner, arise,” commanded the court clerk.

 
Judge Maddox gazed solemnly on his audience, then read slowly from his finding.

  “Thorn,” he began, “you are indicted for having deliberately designed and caused the death of William Guldensuppe. You have had a fair trial—defended most ably by an astute lawyer; by counsel, indeed, who could not have done more than they did for you.” Howe’s expression remained stoic; his fight was not over yet. “A jury found you guilty of murder in the first degree,” the judge continued. “The punishment for that crime is death.”

  Thorn’s face paled slightly, but he remained motionless.

  “Reflect upon it,” Judge Maddox instructed, his voice lowered. “Reflect upon your past. Reflect upon the death of him who you have slain.”

  From the press tables, the reporters maintained a steady whisper of pencil points against paper and telegraph forms, and the crowd held its breath as Maddox straightened himself for the final pronouncement.

  “The judgment of the court,” he announced, “is that you shall be taken to the place from whence you came, and thence to the state prison in Sing Sing. There judgment shall be executed, and you shall be put to death according to law, in the manner provided by law, in the week beginning January tenth.”

  Martin Thorn had just five weeks left to live.

  WHEN THE CONDEMNED MAN opened his eyes the next morning, it was still dark outside.

  Six o’clock.

  Thorn sat up on his jail cot, padded the short distance across the cold floor of his cell, and began smoothing out the creases in his trousers and brushing clean the only outfit he had left—a black coat, a shirt with a standing collar, and his blue polka-dotted cravat.

  Breakfast, his jailer announced, and slid in his tray.

  Thorn didn’t much feel like eating; he dangled the morsels above his dog, and watched as Bill Baker snapped and pranced at them. When Captain Methven and Sheriff Doht arrived at the cell at seven-fifteen, Thorn was ready. He pulled on his thin summer coat, asked for his fedora—they couldn’t find it, and gave him an old battered alpine hat instead—and then he turned to his dog. Bill Baker paused from pouncing repeatedly at a steam grate and tilted his head quizzically as his master was led away from the cell. “Good-bye, Bake,” the man called back.

  It was the only farewell Thorn made that morning.

  There were two inches of slush and snow on the ground outside, and as the trio walked out to the Jackson Avenue streetcar in the darkness, Thorn slid on the ice; only Methven’s beefy hand, manacled to his, kept him from hitting the sidewalk. He hadn’t been outside much in the previous five months, and he had no winter clothes. When they reached the Thirty-Fourth Street ferry, he was shivering. The cabin of the boat was warmer but no more welcoming: The morning commuters immediately recognized the chained passenger, and once they reached the other side of the river a growing crowd was following him.

  It’s him, word shot across Grand Central Depot. The vast space—the marble colonnades, the luggage wagons being loaded for the Waldorf Astoria, the morning shoppers clutching Charles & Company praline bags—it all seemed to contract around the three men. The crowd was pressing on Thorn and his two jailers and into the scrum of World, Journal, and Telegram reporters that already surrounded them. You must intervene, they beseeched the station police, who then pushed the mob back into the onrush of commuters. But as Methven and Doht picked up smoking-car tickets for the next train—three for the 8:05 smoker—the masses cascaded wildly into adjacent lines, buying ticket after ticket to Sing Sing.

  “They all want to see you,” a World reporter marveled aloud. Thorn allowed himself a small smile as he was yanked by a manacled hand toward the train platform.

  Inside the smoking carriage, the seats were crammed with onlookers, and there was nothing the conductor could do about it; they had bought tickets, after all. Even more were pressing their faces up against the glass where Thorn took a window seat on the left side of the carriage; it took another sweep of patrolmen to clear the un-ticketed gawkers off the platform. Thorn stared down, his hat pulled nearly over his eyes.

  Cigar? Captain Methven offered.

  Thorn shook his head; he wasn’t interested. The train pulled forward with a jerk as the couplings tightened, and the last of the pursuing crowd pulled away; here, among the smaller crowd of gawkers who had bought their smoker tickets, Thorn at last looked up and watched as the landscape of the Hudson Valley slid by.

  The reporters and sketch artists, sitting across from Thorn and his jailers, tried drawing him out: What were his thoughts on Mrs. Nack? But the prisoner wouldn’t respond. Another tried a more clever opening: What did he think of the city elections a few weeks earlier?

  “I wish that Tammany won,” Thorn admitted. “I’d have voted for that ticket.”

  The thought seemed to depress his spirits further as he stared back out the train window. Captain Methven made a gruff attempt to cheer him up.

  “Say, Martin.” Methven nudged his prisoner. “Wouldn’t you like to have your dog up here? He’ll be lonely in jail.”

  “Yes.” Thorn brightened a little. “If you will send him.”

  A World reporter quietly shook his head; maybe Methven and his prisoner didn’t know Sing Sing well, but he’d accompanied condemned men there before, and he knew they’d never let Bill Baker into that place.

  The train pulled up to Ossining station, where a second crowd had gathered. Thorn was hustled into a waiting hackney cab and past the onlookers, through the outskirts of the small town, and to the great stone gate that marked the entrance of Sing Sing. On the road in, crews of convicts in striped outfits worked in the freezing cold, breaking rocks and raking gravel under the gaze of men holding Winchester rifles.

  His journey was almost over.

  THERE WERE HUNDREDS of them out in the cold the next morning in Manhattan—and then thousands. They’d all read the newspaper accounts of Thorn’s trip to Sing Sing, and then caught the notice beneath: William Guldensuppe’s viewing to-day, 115 East Third Street.

  The block of Third Street between First Avenue and Avenue A had never lacked for strange stories: At one end, a piano maker’s wife had thrown herself from the top of a building; at the other was the home of a man recently arrested for assisting a high diver’s illegal leap from the Brooklyn Bridge. The diver, as it happened, had not fared any better than the piano maker’s wife. Conveniently, in the middle of this block sat the obliging funeral home of Herr Franz Odendhal. True, even this establishment had a bit of local infamy—an employee had once run off with the florist’s wife, which made for some rather awkward moments in ordering memorial bouquets. But this Saturday morning they had a fine display ready for their latest casket.

  At 10 a.m., Franz threw the doors open and the mourners poured inside. Facing them was a burnished oak coffin, and leaning against it, a photograph from life of the handsome, mustachioed masseur whom everyone in the city now recognized. At the back of the coffin rose a four-foot-high floral arrangement, ordered by his eight coworkers from the night shift at Murray Hill Baths, its blossoms spelling out a single word: COMRADE.

  By now there were so many waiting outside that each was given about one second to view the body—they had to walk through the parlor briskly. It was just enough time to glance at the flowers, the photograph, and the brass plate at one end of the coffin. It bore the full name that the man himself had never used:

  Christian W. Guldensuppe.

  Died June 25, 1897.

  Age, Forty-two Years.

  As each New Yorker walked up, the glass top that Franz had placed over the coffin revealed the contents: a cleansed and carefully dressed man, wearing a suit and with his right hand laid upon his breast—protecting, it seemed, his stilled heart.

  The body had no head.

  Some ten thousand New Yorkers had filed past by two o’clock, and hundreds more lingered to follow a carriage procession to a ferry at the foot of Houston Street. The waiting boat soon slipped away from its mooring, its cargo bound for the Lutheran Cemetery
across the river. And there, so long after that phone call to the bathhouse one warm June evening, Willie Guldensuppe finally got the Long Island home that Mrs. Nack had promised him.

  THE ALLEGATIONS were terribly unfair, Mrs. Nack insisted to the Journal women’s page reporter who visited her on Christmas Day. Having turned State’s evidence in the first trial, she was still waiting for what she hoped would be a reduced sentence. In the meantime, she wanted the world to know that the crime wasn’t her fault at all—it was the fault of her husband.

  “Then Herman Nack was cruel?” the reporter pressed.

  Mrs. Nack looked up and burst into tears.

  “If he had not been, I would not be here now,” she sobbed. “I would still be with him, for I loved him. If I did not, I would not have married, for my people didn’t like him. But he said we need not mind that—we could be in this new country, and he would earn good wages, and I could learn a new business, and we would get rich.

  “We both worked, but we didn’t get rich.” She dabbed her eyes. “We only got poorer.”

  And now, she sighed, she was here. Weeks had passed since Thorn was sent to Sing Sing, and on this day—Christmas Day—she was still in Queens County Jail, still assailed in the newspapers. Though the common wisdom among legal experts was that Mrs. Nack’s confession meant that she’d escape the chair, the Eagle still pronounced her the “head devil” of the case, and Howe’s office had been even blunter to the Journal.

  “They should place her in the electric chair with Thorn,” one of Howe’s team snapped, before quickly adding, “if Thorn is to be placed there.”

  But for Mrs. Nack, passing her hours in jail making handcrafts, every page of the newspaper was trying reading. It wasn’t just the cartoon in the Evening Telegram that showed the Woodside ducks proclaiming: “Once again the town is ours!” It was that the world outside was passing her by, what with the holiday and the coming of the New Year. One Christmas ad in the World rode the craze for Professor Röntgen’s new discovery—“Imagine Santa Throwing an X-Ray,” it announced—with an illustration of the jolly old man irradiating the Third Avenue façade of Bloomingdale’s to reveal the bounty of toys within. Beyond the Herald’s usual headlines of FIRE IN A MATCH FACTORY, the future beckoned with a proposal to put bike racks on trolley cars, and a promise that an eccentric British scientist had developed a photographic brain scanner: THOUGHTS PICTURED, it announced. The Journal had kept its headline circus running, too: Microscopic shrimp in the water supply inspired the headline FISH CHOWDER POURS FROM THE FAUCETS OF BROOKLYN HOUSES. But for the holiday season Hearst’s men topped themselves with a new contest—the Prophecy Prize, which had readers stopping by the office to drop their predictions for 1898 into giant ironbound boxes in the lobby.