The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  Hearst had deployed Langdon Smith, one of the Evening Journal’s top correspondents, and a man once famed as the country’s fastest telegrapher. Standing by him was rival Haydon Jones, the World’s own speed artist. Barely out of art school, he’d been scooped up by Pulitzer’s crew from the Mail and Express when it became clear that he was the best quick draw in town.

  Follow me, the warden motioned the crowd. Smith and Jones tagged behind them, observing the location. The artist readied his favorite Blaisdell pencil and rakishly square Steinbach pad for the World litho crew, while Smith took notes for the Journal even as they crossed Sing Sing’s grounds: “The procession, black-clad and quiet, followed the Warden across the prison yard, where the dumb convicts were working: through the engine-room, where three noiseless dynamos were running, and on to the death chamber. An empty, high-ceilinged room, with broad glazed glass windows, a room without the softening effect of curtains or pictures, a room bare and spartan-like and well-fitted for the rigors of death.”

  To the World’s man, the room was reminiscent of a small chapel—its only ornamentation a subtle Grecian meander painted around the walls, like a funeral urn, its totality bathed in the glare of sunlight. A few colored panes had been placed in the high skylights, giving the walls a ghostly green tint. As they sat down on the room’s perimeter of hard pine benches, the crowd was already beginning to perspire under the rays of an August morning.

  “Gentlemen”—the warden stood before them as the revving dynamos became faintly audible—“you will oblige me if you will not leave your places until after the physicians have declared the execution complete.”

  Before them, at the center of the far end of the room, stood the instrument of that execution: a heavy, plain-hewn oak chair with leather straps dangling idly from its sides. Above it spread black cables—“the tentacles of an electrical octopus,” one awed reporter wrote—that snaked down and around the front legs, before creeping up to the screw cap at the back of the empty chair. Nearby, the state’s electrician pointed to a board with a stark arrangement of three rows of six naked lightbulbs.

  “By these lamps,” the electrician explained, “we will test the current and see that we have the necessary power.”

  He tapped five bells to the dynamo room, then threw the switch. The lights rose in a row, each in succession, their filaments turning from a cherry-red glow to a blinding white radiance; the empty chair was coursing with electricity, the room ablaze with incandescent light. 1,750 volts at ten amperes, he read from his gauge. When the power was cut, it took nearly thirty seconds for the angry glow of the test lights to finally die away.

  The electric chair was ready.

  Warden Sage opened the iron cell-block door and stepped out of the room with a guard. Reporters could hear the squeal of an iron door in the adjoining hallway and the low mutter of voices.

  “The hour has come,” the warden said.

  “All right,” they heard Thorn answer. “I want to thank you for your kindness.”

  The men appeared in the doorway: the warden, the guards, Father Hanselman, and the prisoner, who greeted his old newspaper acquaintances with a quick half smile. Thorn’s gratitude to the warden showed on his sleeve, for Warden Sage had allowed a concession to the man’s vanity: Thorn was wearing his best frock jacket and a white cambric tie. He sat down in the chair without any prompting, as if he were taking breakfast on an ordinary Monday morning.

  “Dear God, this will be the birthday of a new life,” intoned Father Hanselman. “Christ have mercy.”

  “Christ have mercy,” Thorn dutifully repeated as his feet were lashed to the chair legs.

  His eyes followed the guards as they placed sponges soaked in salt water against his calves and then against the base of his neck, the better to increase conductivity; over these they firmly buckled the cable fittings and the headpiece. A long black rubber sash was stretched across his face and around the back of the chair to hold his head in place; only his mouth was visible through a slit. Scarcely two minutes since he’d been led out of his cell, Thorn was now immobile and blindfolded.

  “Christ, Mary, Mother of God,” the priest chanted as he slid a small wooden crucifix into Thorn’s right hand. “Christ have mercy.”

  The warden silently nodded to the electrician.

  “Chri—” The prisoner’s lips moved.

  He never finished the word. Thorn’s body was thrown into the straps by a massive shock. For ten seconds, then another twenty, then thirty more, his limbs convulsed and his neck swelled as the powerful current coursed into him, the amperage needle nearly twisting out of its gauge. A thin curl of smoke rose from his right calf, and when the electrician pushed the lever back up, Thorn’s body slumped. White foam dripped from the slit of the faceless rubber mask.

  The prison’s physician stepped forward, stripped open Thorn’s shirt, and lay the cold medallion of his stethoscope against the condemned man’s chest. The only sound in the room was a pencil making quick slashing and cross-hatching across a sketch pad—for of all the newspaper artists there, only Haydon Jones had the presence of mind to catch Thorn in the moment before the lever was pulled. The others sat stunned and breathing in air that, a Herald writer noted, smelled “like an overheated flatiron on a handkerchief.”

  The doctor turned to the witnesses.

  “The man is dead,” he said.

  24.

  A STORY OF LIFE IN NEW YORK

  SMITH AND JONES hustled to get their stories and pictures out, and the other reporters followed hard on their heels. While the Evening Telegram announced MARTIN THORN GOES CALMLY TO HIS DEATH, and the New York Sun chimed in with THORN MET DEATH CALMLY, Herald readers were treated to a different execution altogether: MARTIN THORN DIES IN ABJECT TERROR. The World, always solicitous of its female readership, declared WOMAN MEDIUM COMMUNES WITH THORN JUST AS HIS SPIRIT WINGS ITS FLIGHT.

  “It was all for thy sake, Augusta,” they reported him calling out from the astral plane, “but I have forgiven and I died happy.”

  One man, though, was not so sure of that. As the reporters quickly exited the stifling death chamber, a different sort of witness pressed past them to the front of the room. Dr. Joseph Alan O’Neill was a surgeon with the New York School of Clinical Medicine, and he looked keenly at the lifeless body still slumped in the chair. It smelled of singed flesh, for one of the saltwater sponges had dried out, causing a burn hole nearly an inch deep under the electrode on Thorn’s right calf. The body was still warm from the departed electrical current.

  O’Neill opened his medical bag, revealing syringes and a ready supply of restoratives: nitroglycerin, strychnine, and brandy.

  Shall I administer them? Dr. O’Neill asked the warden.

  No, the prison official shot back. You may not. The law, the warden insisted, did not allow for resuscitation measures, but if Dr. O’Neill insisted on ascertaining that the patient was indeed dead, there was no language in the statute against that.

  Then I will, Dr. O’Neill replied, and produced a stethoscope from his bag.

  It was a tense moment. O’Neill was raising a delicate matter that few of the doctors still lingering in the room wished to acknowledge: that nobody was quite sure whether the electric chair actually worked. It had been introduced with great fanfare by the State of New York just eight years earlier, promising a new era of humane and instantaneous execution. But on the chair’s first use, condemned prisoner William Kemmler had been left still breathing, with brown froth pouring from his mouth; some said he’d also caught fire. The nine-minute ordeal left witnesses so shaken that one deputy sheriff emerged in tears. Thorn, only the twenty-seventh man to go to Sing Sing’s chair, faced a procedure that had hardly been perfected yet.

  O’Neill bent over and rested the stethoscope on Thorn’s skin. There was a motion underneath—a faint thrill in the carotid artery. That, he suspected, might just be blood draining from the head down to the trunk. But there were other disturbing signs. With swift and pr
acticed movements, the doctor examined the cremasteric reflex, which retracted or loosened the testes; it was still working. O’Neill then lit his ophthalmoscope and pulled back Thorn’s left eyelid; the pupil contracted beneath the blaze of light.

  “If required, I should be very reluctant to sign his death certificate,” the surgeon announced.

  It was an admission many physicians made in utmost privacy after these executions—but not in front of the public. The prison doctor pointedly ignored O’Neill and directed two attendants to carry the body to an autopsy room. Thorn’s skull and chest were quickly opened to reveal little of note.

  Aghast, Dr. O’Neill fired off a dispatch titled “Who’s the Executioner?” to the Atlantic Medical Weekly. “The law requires post-mortem mutilation,” he noted. “It is, in fact, part of the penalty; for, as it reveals no cause of death and teaches nothing of interest to science, it is evident that its purpose is to complete the killing.”

  Thorn suffered nothing less than a modern drawing and quartering, the surgeon charged, and another medical journal scorned the autopsy as “the prostitution of science.” But the debate remained a quiet disagreement among colleagues. Reading the afternoon papers, one might never have guessed this most appalling irony of the case: that carried into an autopsy room and cut apart while faintly alive, Martin Thorn had met the same fate at Sing Sing that William Guldensuppe once suffered in a Woodside bathtub.

  THE EVENING JOURNAL lavished attention that night on the execution, right down to helpful anatomical close-ups of Thorn’s “Degenerate Ear” and “Pugnacious Nose.” It was the end of an affair that had been very good to them: The Guldensuppe case had pushed Hearst’s circulation past the World’s. He’d capitalized on this success with front-page attacks on crooked dealings in local trolley and gas franchises, stoked his paper’s capacity even further with a baroquely engineered Hoe dectuple multi-color half-tone electrotype web perfecting press, and then trumpeted the serial debut of “the most startling and interesting novel of modern times”—something called The War of the Worlds. But it was freeing the comely Evangelina Cisneros that had shown William Randolph Hearst that Journal readers needed more than just Martian invaders to root against. They needed a real war.

  THE WORST INSULT TO THE UNITED STATES IN ITS HISTORY, his paper had declared after obtaining a leaked letter from a Spanish diplomat that described President McKinley as weak and easily led. “A good war,” the newspaper thundered, “might free Cuba, wipe out Spain, frighten to death the meanest tribe of money-worshipping parasites that has ever disgraced a decent nation.” But a good war needed a good excuse, and early in 1898 Hearst had gotten it: a mysterious explosion that ripped open the USS Maine while docked in Cuba, sending the battleship and most of its men to the bottom of Havana Harbor.

  “Have you put anything else on the front page?” Hearst demanded in a dawn phone call to his newsroom.

  “Only the other big news—” his editor began.

  “There is no other big news,” Hearst replied. “This means war.”

  WAR! SURE! MAINE DESTROYED BY SPANISH, the Journal announced. Neither war nor the culprit was a sure thing—many suspected a coal fire belowdecks had doomed the ship—but Hearst was not to be deterred. THE WHOLE COUNTRY THRILLS WITH WAR FEVER, his paper insisted, and he proudly coined a national rallying cry: “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” When McKinley finally declared war that spring, Hearst and his headlines left no doubts about their proud role in the matter:

  HOW DO YOU LIKE THE JOURNAL’S WAR?

  William Randolph Hearst liked it very much indeed. Having already issued his Murder Squad badges to pursue Thorn, he thought nothing of the next logical step: He offered the U.S. military $500,000 to raise a Journal-sponsored army regiment. His offer spurned, Hearst spent the money anyway: the Wrecking Crew poured out of his Park Row offices, this time headed for the next boats to Cuba. The paper’s circulation, already the highest in the country when it had hit 300,000, now rocketed up to a dizzying half million, then a million, and then a million and a half.

  It was now the greatest newspaper juggernaut the world had ever known.

  Pulitzer was obliged to keep up, of course; he duly matched Hearst star Frederic Remington with his own Stephen Crane. The World charged that the Journal’s “war news was written by fools for fools.” The Journal jeered that the World was so jealous that it stole the Journal’s wire reports. To prove it, the Evening Journal ran news of the death of one Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz; the next morning’s World ran a similar story on the ill-fated officer. Hearst’s editors gleefully revealed that there was no Colonel Thenuz; reversing the colonel’s first name and middle initial, though, revealed this message inadvertently run by the World “in cold type—in its own columns”:

  We Pilfer the News

  Hearst had yet another humiliating trump card, which he knew the frail and nervous Pulitzer could not match: He sent himself. Soon the U.S. Navy was treated to the sight of the newspaper publisher tearing around Havana Harbor in a convoy of chartered yachts.

  MUST FIND THAT FLEET! he roared in giant front-page headlines draped in patriotic red, white, and blue bunting, while inside, his paper offered up summer dessert tips for homemakers that included such “warlike dainties” as Ice Cream Soldiers and Lemon Ice Cannons. (“You will swallow bullets—of chocolate,” it promised.) Hearst himself took to dodging actual bullets; after blithely ignoring press restrictions and taking some Spanish prisoners of war, the young publisher was spotted at the Battle of El Caney. A Journal correspondent, struck to the ground by a bullet to the shoulder, opened his eyes to see his own boss leaning over him, a ribboned straw hat on his head and a revolver strapped to his belt.

  “I’m sorry you’re hurt,” Hearst beamed as the enemy rounds whistled past them. “But wasn’t it a splendid fight? We must beat every paper in the world.”

  BACK IN NEW YORK, the Eden Musée was busy adding a score of patriotic new waxworks of Rough Rider charges and Manila Bay victories, and setting up pride of place for the latest in entertainment: the cinematograph. It had been scarcely a year since the first public cinema screenings in Paris and New York; not only did the Musée now have one of its own, its sign also announced the most eagerly awaited films of all: CINEMATOGRAPH WAR SCENES. While the war scenes were moved and spooled into place, other Musée staffers prepared a more familiar mannequin for a new scene down in its Chamber of Horrors. The Musée’s old star wax attraction would now be seated in an oak chair festooned with ominous wiring and leather restraints convincingly riveted to its frame. The exhibit bore a stark caption: “The Electrocution of Martin Thorn.”

  Not many blocks away, the Empire Limited pulled in to Grand Central Depot bearing the genuine article; its baggage car disgorged a plain pine box, and handlers quickly moved it to a side entrance of the station, all under the watchful eye of a detective. There were worries that freak-show promoters might try stealing the remains, but so far the arrival of Martin Thorn had passed unnoticed and unannounced.

  As a carriage bore the coffin toward Christian Herrlich’s funeral parlor off Eighty-Third and First Avenue, though, word raced ahead: He’s here. A thousand disappointed spectators had appeared at Herrlich Brothers’ doors the night before, only to find that Thorn hadn’t arrived yet. Even as the hearse drew quickly up the street, hundreds of onlookers were already gathering again. A dozen policemen from the Twenty-Seventh Precinct station house labored mightily to clear a path into the funeral home.

  Out of the way! they yelled as the coffin passed through. Move along.

  The undertaker barred the door to the surging crowd. Inside, sitting in the cool and darkened funeral parlor, was Martin Thorn’s sister with her daughter and husband; alongside them stood three barbers from Thorn’s old shop. They’d raised the money for their coworker’s burial, and Thorn was quickly moved from his prison-issued pine box into a more respectable casket with silver handles. Beneath his dark curls, his head still bore red electrode mar
ks; his young niece wept at the sight, and bent over to kiss his face.

  After a few minutes, the brother-in-law leaned over for a word in the undertaker’s ear. Herrlich open the door, and a boisterous line of New Yorkers poured in to view the executed man. As much as his exposed face, though, they gawked at the massive and luxuriant display of lilies of the valley decorating one end of the bier. It was a $45 delivery order—hardly the sort of expense the family or the barbers could have paid for. Who, then, had arranged for it to be delivered?

  “Probably a woman,” theorized a Journal reporter.

  The undertaker just smiled, and an explanation became clear.

  “Mrs. Nack?” a Herald reporter ventured.

  “I will neither affirm,” the undertaker replied, “nor deny your question.”

  And then he smiled again.

  ——

  MRS. NACK had been busy indeed. As inmate #269 at Auburn Prison, she woke up each morning at seven sharp to find herself alone in a cell that was secured not with the usual iron bars but instead with a three-inch-thick oak door with a peephole—for the building still bore some touches of its origins as a hospital for the insane. After dressing in a blue-and-white-striped uniform of coarse awning cloth, the former midwife then spent her day in the prison’s sewing room, where she labored quietly with other prisoners on a huge government order for 6,000 haversacks. She’d been a model prisoner, and for good reason: Soon she’d be able to earn the privilege of a bedside rug on her cell floor.

  Word was leaking out, though, that while Thorn in his final days hadn’t wanted to talk about his crime, he did admit one thing: Mr. Nack’s wild charges about Gussie were true. She really had been disposing of fetuses in a kitchen stove and then dumping remains down a chute into the sewer system.

  “He added,” a reporter noted, “that it was very profitable. It was practically all profit.”