The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  “Perhaps at the end of 1898 Queen Victoria will have passed away,” editors helpfully suggested on the front page. “The problem of aerial navigation may have been solved, America may have annexed Cuba, a great war may have begun between European nations.”

  When the boxes were opened in a year’s time, the best prediction would win $1,000. Yet there would surely be no prize for guessing the likely fate of Martin Thorn.

  “Poor Martin,” Gussie sighed. She could not help him now; and the paper flowers and lace heaped upon her cell’s table would be of no comfort to the man.

  Suddenly, her face brightened with an idea: “I cannot wish him a merry Christmas, but I can wish him a happy Christmas.” She quickly jotted down a note on a sheet of paper, then puzzled over a second notion. “And I would like to send him a basket of fruit. Do you think they’ll let me send it? … How will he get it?”

  “I will see that he gets it,” the Journal reporter assured her. “Then, if there is any answer I’ll bring it back to you—”

  “There won’t be,” Mrs. Nack cut her off.

  “There may be.”

  Mrs. Nack shook her head slowly.

  “I know him better than you,” she said.

  The Journal reporter picked up a basket of apples, bananas, and grapes from a fruiterer’s near Grand Central, then promptly boarded the next train to Sing Sing. When she arrived, the warden reluctantly allowed her onto the cell block—but insisted on handing over the note and the basket himself.

  “Martin,” he called into the cell. “Here is a message from Mrs. Nack. A Christmas greeting.”

  He held out the envelope, and the prisoner emerged into the doorway to take it. He was not wearing the striped uniform of ordinary convicts; instead he wore the solid black outfit of a condemned man. The reporter watched as he ran his eyes over the words:

  Dear Martin:

  It is Christmas time. I send you greeting to your lonely cell at Sing Sing. I have found great peace with my own heart since I put my whole case in the Lord’s hands. Let me say this to you, Martin, that I can send you no better gift than that you seek the Lord while he has given you time. Martin, it is determined by law that you must die …

  His hands began to tear the sheet apart.

  … Find peace before you go—then, you are not afraid what man can do.

  AUGUSTA NACK

  Thorn tossed the shredded pieces onto the floor.

  The warden, unfazed, extended his other arm.

  “And some fruit from her, too,” he added.

  The prisoner hesitated for a moment, and then, with a philosophical shrug, he took the basket.

  “Any answer?” the reporter called from the hallway.

  For a moment Thorn opened his mouth, as if to respond. But then, without a word, he shook his head and withdrew into his cell.

  23.

  A JOB FOR SMITH AND JONES

  THE FRUIT FROM MRS. NACK was the only splash of color in Martin’s cell. He had windowless walls on three sides, a fourth of iron bars, and the constant glare of electric bulbs. To be here, one inmate mused, was “like living, eating, sleeping, and bathing in a search-light.” It illuminated the barest of existences: a steel cot, a lumpy straw mattress with a single pillow and a blanket, a tin cup, a basin, and a bucket.

  Guards, soundless on their crêpe-soled shoes, constantly patrolled the Death Row hallway, so that the only escape was to be found in books from the prison library. Thorn had already devoured The Old Curiosity Shop and then more Dickens volumes, day after day. He had to—because he didn’t have a table or pinochle cards, didn’t even have a cell mate. But he was not alone. Though they couldn’t see one another, by talking between the cells, Martin knew he was sharing Murderers Row with just two other men.

  Hadley, said one.

  Fritz, halloed the other.

  Hadley Sutherland was a West Indian in for shooting his wife in their Brooklyn home; Fritz Meyer had gunned down a patrolman while robbing a church poor box on East Third Street. Hadley and Thorn were both scheduled to die in the electric chair on January 10. There were no clocks here, but the bananas in the fruit basket had scarcely ripened when the warden stopped by with a message from Howe. It was New Year’s Eve, he told Thorn, and he had a holiday present of sorts.

  Your execution is delayed on appeal.

  Hadley was not as fortunate. On what had been their appointed day, Thorn awoke to a thick curtain being pulled over his cell door, and then the sound of a manacled man shuffling past. The execution chamber was so close that it shared a wall with Martin’s cell. A few minutes later, there was the distant hum of three electrical dynamos suddenly building up speed, then slowing back down into ominous silence.

  Fritz? he called out.

  Martin? the other answered.

  But now there was no third.

  Soon Mrs. Nack’s basket would be gone, along with the torn note: “I have found great peace with my own heart since I put my whole case in the Lord’s hands.” But he didn’t want to talk about the case, didn’t want to think about her, didn’t want to consider what her betrayal had probably bought—not even when the warden stopped by later that day with more news for him.

  Manslaughter, he told the condemned man.

  Thorn could see into the hallway behind the warden, where the keepers were clearing out Hadley’s cell.

  Fifteen years, the warden reported. With good behavior, she’ll be out in nine.

  Gussie had made her deal.

  “I NEVER COULD EAT off that table,” one woman in the crowd declared.

  “I never could look at that clock,” another added.

  “Look at them!” cried the auctioneer, sweeping his arm over a table heaped with laces. “All elegantly knit by Mrs. Nack!”

  The house was packed that Saturday morning. Scarcely three blocks from the Harlem drugstore where Thorn had been arrested, hundreds of women pressed into the ground-floor premises of the Standard Auction House. It had been given over that day to the property of one Augusta P. Nack, with the ground-floor salesrooms on 125th Street magically transformed, fitted up to precisely resemble her newly vacated apartment on 439 Ninth Avenue. Here in the reconstituted parlor was a suite of red velvet furniture and a zither and a music box; there in the kitchen, cabinets clattered with the glassware from which Mrs. Nack and her lovers had once drunk. In her bedroom stood her white-and-gold-painted bedstead, and beside that a dressmaker’s dummy attired in a rather garish gown with a crêpe waist of “crushed strawberry.”

  The sign in front of it read:

  COSTUME

  WORN BY

  MRS. NACK

  ON THE DAY OF THE

  MURDER

  Her outfit for dismembering her lover possessed, reporters dryly noted, “a low cut.”

  The second bedroom was occupied by the plain and melancholy wooden bed of Guldensuppe; and although his estate was supposed to have been sent on to his relatives in Philadelphia, the masseur’s suspenders had gotten mixed up in the lot. So had one of his green neckties.

  “The famous necktie!” an auctioneer bellowed. Nobody was sure why that item was famous, until one woman ventured that surely Mrs. Nack had thought of strangling him with it.

  Circulating among the crowd were dime-museum managers, the sort of fellows immediately identifiable by loud suits and cigars. It was dime-museum men in Chicago who, a few weeks earlier, had very nearly gotten hold of Luetgert’s sausage vat for display. New York promoters would not be so easily shaken off, and they were taking auction-house officials aside.

  Five hundred dollars for everything, one offered.

  The auctioneer shook his head. Go higher. Why, the Journal itself had already said it all in a headline: MURDER DEN A KLONDIKE. It was gold! The kitchen alone contained the stove—THE FAMOUS STOVE, they’d placarded it—where Mrs. Nack had burned her lover’s bloody clothes.

  “A message from Mrs. Nack, ladies and gentlemen!” yelled a staffer, waving a scrap of paper to the crowd
as it surged forward. “A real message from Mrs. Nack, currently in Queens County Jail!”

  This proved to be an old draft of a mail order for more corsets. But the crowd was happy and garrulous, clutching the favors that everyone had been handed at the entrance—business cards addressed from the apartment over Werner’s Drug Store and inscribed with words that everybody now knew by heart: AUGUSTA NACK, LICENSED MIDWIFE.

  THAT SAME WEEKEND, the owner of those cards was preparing for her departure from Queens County Jail. The cards, she insisted, had been for a respectable business.

  “Those are terrible things my husband told about me. I want to ask you—” she demanded of a reporter, “how is it possible I had only three hundred dollars to draw from the bank at the time of the murder? Do you think if I had burned one baby’s body, not to speak of more, I should not have been well paid? Go to the neighborhood and ask whether I could have done such things! The children all knew me—I was ‘Nanty Nack’—the fairy who brought the last baby to their house. Go, ask their parents.”

  She shook her head at the injustice of it, and passed out the last of her paper flowers and lacework to her fellow prisoners. The humble earnings of her honest labor, she explained, was also what Thorn was after on the day of the murder. In fact, her entire conduct in the case had been an elaborate way to save herself from certain death at Thorn’s hands.

  “Explain to me why”—she jabbed a finger into the air—“when Thorn distinctly told me to go over to New York to buy the oilcloth, I went to the nearest store and talked with the people, so that there was no doubt of identifying me?”

  The reporter hid his amazement: Did she mean to say that this fiendishly complicated trail of circumstantial evidence was actually a distress call to detectives? That she meant to get arrested?

  “I would have surely died but for one thing,” she continued. “I had not brought money with me. You see, he had told me to draw the money from the bank and always carry it in my bosom. He thought I had done this, but I had not. He led me up stairs and when we reached there he told me to sit on the edge of the tub.” She allowed the image of the headless Guldensuppe already draped into the tub to sink in with her listener. “I could only sit and sob until he suddenly said, Did you bring money with you? When I told him it was not drawn from the bank he was furious. That saved my life.”

  And that, she said, was when she managed to get the crime traced back to her.

  “He said, Very well, take the ferry over to New York and get some oilcloth, but don’t go to any store on this side. You know the remainder of the story.”

  The reporters did indeed know it. And they also knew that Mrs. Riger’s sales register in Astoria showed that Augusta Nack bought the oilcloth on June 23—two days before the murder.

  EIGHT MONTHS PASSED at Sing Sing. Winter turned to spring, with appeals piled up like dirty snow. They’d melted away in the summer until there was nothing left behind but a condemned man in a sweltering cell. Governor Black had refused to stay the execution.

  “This is good news,” Thorn said through the bars of his cell. “It’s the best news I’ve had for months.”

  The warden was taken aback: This wasn’t how most prisoners reacted to the governor turning them down.

  “I want to die,” Thorn explained with a shrug.

  They’d tried every ploy already. Howe was known, after all, for disrupting courtrooms and wearing opponents out, and even the fetid air had seemed to conspire with him during the trial. So perhaps it was not entirely a surprise in May that a renovation crew opening the courtroom’s ventilation ducts found one hundred dead rats crammed inside.

  Howe didn’t have much to say about that.

  The rats hadn’t worked. Neither had the intoxication claim. And the jury’s visit to the Woodside cottage that Thorn had so nonchalantly neglected to join? Howe had claimed a mistrial, because the defendant was not present during a presentation of evidence. That argument had tied up the execution for months, though at length the superior-court judges didn’t buy it; in fact, they didn’t buy Howe, either. His $427 legal bill was cruelly knocked down to $127 by the state. Howe talked grandly to the press of taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but with final appeals exhausted in the broiling heat—one year since the first mysterious parcels were found in the East River—a date of August 1 was now set for Thorn’s execution.

  And now Martin Thorn had one day left to live.

  The day began with some measure of inconvenience. As soon as he finished his breakfast, his keepers called him out of his cell.

  “Take all your clothes off, Martin,” one of them directed.

  It was a standard precaution, the same they’d used on Hadley on his last day. After Thorn stripped, they led him down to his final home, cell #1. It was slightly larger than the other cells, and arranged on the bed were black execution trousers and a new shirt. For once, the shirt wasn’t also black. Thorn had always dressed well, and his pleas to the warden had been heard: Folded neatly atop the trousers was a crisp dress oxford—white, with light pink stripes. Thorn was delighted with it.

  “My last clean shirt!” he yelled in mock triumph to the other inmates.

  There were five condemned prisoners on the cell block now. Among them was Adrian Braun, a paranoid cigar maker whose domestic-assault charge turned capital after he stabbed his wife to death in the Sing Sing visitors’ room. In Braun’s lucid moments, Thorn found him fine company.

  Thorn’s neighbors weren’t quite sure how to answer, though.

  “Good luck!” Braun finally blurted.

  Turning his attention to the rest of his new cell, Thorn also noticed what was missing.

  “I want my books,” he pleaded to a guard through the bars. It was the first time that morning that he’d actually sounded upset, and his relief was palpable when the guards moved the pile to his new cell.

  “They are my friends,” Thorn said as he hefted his books. He’d developed a fierce love of reading while on Death Row and even had managed to snare a coveted title from the prison library: “There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing as he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows.”

  Well, if Sherlock Holmes wasn’t quite a comfort on this day, at least he was entertaining. Thorn paused occasionally to chat across the cell walls with the other prisoners. One was reciting Heine poems, another chimed in with a dirty story, and a third started talking politics—namely, anarchy and socialism.

  “I don’t believe in it,” Thorn shook his head. “Let a man keep what he earns.”

  “And what a man doesn’t earn, let him steal,” cracked Braun from his cell, before turning more serious. “Have you seen your mouse yet, Thorn?”

  “No,” Thorn called back. He’d caught one earlier in the summer and tamed it with portions of his prison ration. When the pet went missing earlier that week, it had nearly brought him to tears. “Smart little fellow, too—he’d eat out of my hand and all that.”

  But now Thorn was alone again in his cell.

  “Rats desert a sinking ship,” he added dryly to Braun and said a salutary set of prayers—for while religion had come slowly to him, he was covering his bets now. At six there arrived a final meal of roast beef, turnips, rye bread, and pudding—the foods of Thorn’s youth in Prussia—and as the night finally fell outside, Thorn turned talkative with the priest dispatched to his cell as spiritual counsel. One of the keepers brewed a pot of coffee at the guard station, and cups were passed between the keepers, the priest, and Thorn. The prisoner didn’t want to talk about his case; instead, he mused upon his childhood in his hometown of Posen. Those were happy days. Why dwell on the present?

  I still remember, he said as midnight closed in. I remember the sound of my father’s hammer as he worked on shoes.

  “You must get some sleep, Martin,” the priest said gently.

  Thorn clasped his hand, then hun
g his clothes for the morning and settled into his cot. Soon he was so soundly asleep that the guards were startled when he suddenly sat up bolt upright at 4:30 a.m.

  Fritz? he called out. Adrian?

  The other inmates were still asleep.

  “What are you doing, Thorn?” a keeper asked.

  “Thinking about Posen,” the prisoner mumbled—and then collapsed back into his slumbers.

  THE NEXT MORNING, the curtains were drawn across the other inmates’ cells. Warden Sage was bustling around his office, making preparations and welcoming his guests: the visiting physicians, electricians, and newspaper artists clutching thick pads of paper. All wore black for the occasion, and they mingled with nervous solemnity. More than two thousand applications had poured into the warden’s office in the last week, but state law dictated that only twenty-eight observers were allowed at the death chamber. These men were the elite of the New York press and medical establishment. The old-timers could spot the yellow-press men by the sheer flash of their presence: They’ve sent Smith and Jones.