The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  A week after Thorn’s burial, the Journal pounced on a damning discovery: Augusta Nack was quietly trying to arrange from behind bars the sale of two parcels of land in Cliffside, New Jersey. It was hardly the work of a poor midwife who had claimed to have only $300 to her name.

  “Detectives have always believed that Mrs. Nack burned the bodies of babies,” Hearst’s paper charged. “Now, after Thorn’s execution, like a confirmation of his charges, comes proof that Mrs. Nack is a woman of means.” The imprisoned midwife maintained a stony silence, though not before another newspaper wittily nominated her for a Hall of Fame statue under the sardonic inscription of AUGUSTA NACK, SURGEON.

  Some, though, were studying Nack and Thorn’s methods more seriously. Mutilation murders now occurred with such alarming frequency that one medical journal declared that the Guldensuppe case had induced “Epidemic Hypnotic Criminal Suggestion.” When a sawn-off trunk bobbed up in the East River the summer after Thorn’s execution, the Times headline SECOND GULDENSUPPE CASE hardly covered it; there were also third, fourth, and fifth Guldensuppe cases. Still another trunk appeared on October 8, 1899: That morning, a woman’s leg was found carefully wrapped in recent issues of the World and the Journal and tossed into the gutter in front of 160 West Seventeenth Street. Soon her midriff bumped up against the Thirtieth Street pier, and her chest washed ashore on Staten Island, where it was discovered by a boy out gathering driftwood.

  Station houses around the city emptied out as the NYPD threw 200 detectives on the case. The discovery of coal dust on the wrappings quickly led to a house-to-house rifling of coal cellars.

  “Everybody that shows the slightest hesitancy will regret it,” one officer barked to a Sun reporter. “I will kick the door in and search every house on the block.”

  Newspapers roared to life again with offers of reward money, and Bellevue’s morgue filled with would-be relatives; newspapers ran lists of missing women, and papers leapt at the clue that one of the newspaper wrappers had borne the small pencil notation of 16c. That traced the paper to a dealer named Moses Cohen, the “C” newspaper concession on Sixteenth Street. Another witness, the captain of the barge Knickerbocker, reported a chillingly familiar sort of suspect fleeing the scene near the Thirtieth Street pier: a German male, aged about thirty-five. It was looking like the efforts of the police and the newspapers would bust open an insoluble case once again.

  “The methods are largely those which would have appealed to Sherlock Holmes,” the Brooklyn Eagle exulted. “The killers of Guldensuppe have paid the penalty for their crime and it is probable that within a few days we shall know who killed this woman.”

  The comparison was turning startlingly apt, for it looked like another German midwife might be the accomplice. The Prospect Place coal cellar of Alma Lundberg was found filled with bloody rags and quicklime, and she’d abandoned the house hurriedly after the first clues were found—perhaps running from a botched abortion. But the lead went nowhere, and other clues proved to be the usual nonsense—an overexcited servant girl, a missing beauty who turned up alive in Scranton, and an encore appearance by “the Great American Identifier,” who this time gravely informed the police that the crime had been committed by two women.

  There was also a more troubling development in the case. Examining the body, Deputy Coroner O’Hanlon determined that the cuts precisely matched those on Guldensuppe. Whoever had done this, he theorized, had been one of the many who had gawked at Guldensuppe’s body in the Bellevue morgue.

  “I believe that the persons who committed this murder saw the body of Guldensuppe more than once,” the doctor warned. “The cutting up of this body is identical. These murderers copied Mrs. Nack and Thorn in everything.”

  OTHER CURIOUS REMEMBRANCES of the crime surfaced in the years after Thorn’s execution. One of the first was a novel, Three Men and a Woman: A Story of Life in New York, by none other than the Reverend Robert Parker Miles, the minister whose young child had inspired the jail-cell confession of Augusta Nack. Along with the rushed-out Guldensuppe Mystery and the dime novel The Headless Body Murder Mystery, this became the third book on the case. Now living in Iowa, Miles restyled the crime a bit for his version; in his novel, the hard-drinking delivery driver Herman Nack became an earnest Viennese physician. But the story of a faithless wife who “plunges into a sea of gaiety” and then murder remained perfectly recognizable.

  The real Herman Nack, though, was suffering even more than his fictional counterpart. “The death of Guldensuppe preyed upon his mind,” one reporter noted; he found it hard to hold down delivery jobs whenever his name was recognized. In 1903, almost six years to the day after Guldensuppe’s murder, Nack calmly abandoned his delivery wagon at the foot of Canal Street and drowned himself in the Hudson River.

  The Woodside cottage proved nearly as ill starred. The modest home at 346 Second Street sat vacant for years after the last visit of the jury during Thorn’s trial, for the building’s reputation was so fearsome that the hapless Bualas were unable to rent it to anyone. The old bedroom upstairs where Guldensuppe was shot never quite recovered from the crime, either, for the district attorney had carelessly thrown the Bualas’ baseboards into a bonfire during a fit of evidence-room housecleaning—though not before saving the two extracted bullets for himself and turning them into a jaunty pair of scarf pins.

  At least one other man was determined to remain unfazed by the house.

  “We have already put one haunted house out of business,” Bill Offerman boasted to a Tribune reporter. As the president of the Brooklyn Society for the Extermination of Ghosts and Dispelling of Haunted House Illusions, Offerman and his fellow members—“thirty young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three”—had already rented and then camped out in a vacant Brooklyn home where a butcher had committed suicide. Armed with revolvers and lanterns, the Society held a weeklong stakeout to prove to fearful locals that the butcher did not, in fact, return each night to slit his own throat. Toward the end of the vigil, the bored debunkers amused themselves by testing out some new recruits.

  “A skeleton in the dark hall, rigged up on wires, with electric lights for eyes, was enough to demonstrate that one young man was unfit for membership,” Offerman noted drolly.

  Now, he declared, his tried and tested group was ready to take on the infamous Woodside cottage. Their efforts did not rid the house of its reputation for bad luck: A few years later, a new tenant set up a pet shop in the house, only to die of rabies from a dog bite. A wine seller named Peter Piernot had fared little better after preserving the bathroom upstairs “as it was on the day of the murder” for curious customers. In the dead of a November night, Piernot ran half-naked and screaming from the premises and leaped aboard the next train out of Woodside. Before being placed in an insane asylum, Piernot babbled in horror to the police.

  He was running, he told them, from the ghost of William Guldensuppe.

  25.

  CARRY OUT YOUR OWN DEAD

  “WHAT DO YOU WANT?” the frightened train passenger demanded. “I am not this woman you are looking for.”

  She was in the last seat of the third carriage on the Metropolitan Express—an unassuming country matron in a simple dress with white lace and a sensible black hat trimmed with fresh violets. But the crowd of reporters who boarded at Poughkeepsie wouldn’t leave her alone. A tall, long-haired artist ostentatiously pulled out his sketch pad and drew on it rapidly.

  “Why does he draw my picture?” she snapped. “I am the wife of a farmer named Ross, of Buffalo. Is my face of interest to any one? I hate newspapers, and I shall not say anything to them.”

  A glance at the latest New York Journal for July 19, 1907, explained everything. The papers had their usual horrors that day—CUT HIS THROAT BY ACCIDENT and SHE HEARD VOICES; LEAPED TO DEATH—and reporters were scrambling on the story of a Civil War vet in Central Park who threw hundreds of coins into the air; as they rained down on delighted children, the man pulled out a revolver an
d blew his head off. There was even another heat wave to report on. But there was no question at the Journal about the day’s biggest story. A single gigantic headline roared out over the top half of their front page:

  MRS. NACK

  SET FREE

  “Oh, Mrs. Nack,” the farmer’s wife said distantly. “What did she do? I never heard of Mrs. Nack.”

  “There are some here,” a reporter in the train carriage answered tartly, “who remember you very well.”

  “Oh, you do? Well, I am not the same woman. I tell you I am not Mrs. Nack at all.”

  She arranged herself primly in her seat, hands folded across her purse, looking away from her tormentors. But it was no use; a train crewman stopped in the middle of his rounds, startled, and spoke volubly to her in German. His passenger was thinner now, with a few streaks of gray in her hair, but he’d recognized her immediately—because he’d been a spectator at Thorn’s trial ten years earlier.

  Mrs. Nack slumped back into her seat, defeated.

  “I am glad to be out,” she finally said. “I spent a long time in that awful prison. I have served my time, and I guess that pays my debt to the state.”

  So where was she going now?

  “New York,” she shrugged. “Because it is the only place I know. I do not quite know what I shall do. Maybe get a place as a seamstress or a housekeeper.”

  She considered what awaited her. The three men she had loved were all gone: one murdered, another executed, and the third a suicide.

  “I have no family now,” she said plainly. “My children are dead too.”

  When reporters asked about the murder, though, she pursed her lips into a tight frown and stared back out the train window. As the Metropolitan Express slid into Grand Central Terminal some ten minutes late, the platform boiled over with hundreds of people jostling in the July heat for a better look.

  “Mrs. Nack!” reporters outside yelled. “Mrs. Nack!”

  It was chaos. Mrs. Nack clutched her bags as she pressed forward into the crowd, swarmed by reporters and gawking New Yorkers. Mrs. Nack! they yelled, jockeying for position. As the crowd pressed her up against an iron railing, she grew terrified.

  “Go away!” she yelled. “I am not this Nack woman that you say I am! Go away!”

  A lithe women’s-page reporter scrambled to the front of the crowd and tried to whisper in her ear.

  “Get away from me!” Mrs. Nack recoiled. “I know you all. You are bad, bad, bad.… Shall I scream? Police!”

  A station policeman shoved through the crowd, clearing a path for her across the terminal. Near the entrance, a trio of women accosted her.

  “We are friends of yours,” they began. “You must remember—”

  “I have no friends,” she cut them off, then rushed away.

  Outside was even worse: Ranks of tripod cameras lying in wait on Lexington Avenue went off all at once like lightning in her face. She began to run. “Reporters by the score,” marveled a Sun reporter, “pestiferous kodakers, idlers, curiosity seekers, and fifty varieties of rubbernecks chased a pale faced, frightened woman in black in and among the trolleys, trucks and hansom cabs.”

  In front of the Grand Union Hotel, the frantic woman spotted an empty horse-drawn carriage.

  “Keb?” the driver asked in a clipped accent.

  “Yes!” cried Mrs. Nack as she clambered aboard. “Drive away from here quick!”

  The cab jerked away with a snap of the driver’s whip, followed by ten more reporter-filled carriages in hot pursuit.

  “Go away!” she could be heard yelling from her carriage. “Get away!”

  THE WORLD her cab galloped into was not the one she’d left ten years earlier. The Victorian era had ended, and a new century had begun. Humans had learned to fly. The police station where she’d been interrogated was gone; the courthouse and the jury’s hotel were both burnt out. Along the stretches where she and Thorn had hurried in a horse-drawn funeral carriage, the streets of New York were now giving way to gleaming automobiles, and they rushed to a new entertainment called cinema.

  The reporters didn’t have autos, but it wasn’t easy to get rid of them; she’d had to pay the driver six dollars to urge him on. Their cab rattled down to Thirty-Second Street, threw a hard right to Fifth Avenue, cut back up to Thirty-Eighth, then to Broadway, and then toward Hell’s Kitchen. As her pursuers got lost in the traffic, Mrs. Nack relaxed a little and asked to see her old neighborhood.

  “I suppose I shall find things a great deal different than they were when I was free in New York before,” she had mused earlier to the Herald.

  Many of the blocks by her old home were already gone, demolished to make way for Penn Station. There was little familiar left for her, just mocking echoes. Even the lawyer who had defended her, Manny Friend, had been gone for three years now. He died on the very afternoon he’d sent his premium check over to his life insurance company, after jovially instructing his clerk, “You’d better take it over now, as I might drop dead this afternoon.”

  Her legal tormentor was gone, too, for William Howe had passed away in 1902. In fact, he and Mrs. Nack had rather more in common than anyone realized. Before his career as America’s top attorney, Howe had spent a stretch in the penitentiary himself. Recalled in obituaries as the son of an American minister, he was in fact the English child of a brothel keeper. Howe’s first appearance before a judge had been not as a lawyer but as a defendant. In 1848 he was hauled before the bar as a young law-office clerk in London, accused of forging admission tickets to the Lyceum Theater. He narrowly escaped the charge by claiming it had been a practical joke, but he was less lucky the next time around. While employed as a clerk in Blackfriars, he was convicted in 1854 of impersonating a lawyer. Tossed into prison for eighteen months with hard labor, Howe emerged to reinvent himself across the ocean as the person he’d once only pretended to be: not just a real attorney, but one of the greatest in the country.

  But for Mrs. Nack, starting over would not be so easy.

  Her cab pulled up to the Forty-Second Street entrance to the Hotel Markwell, where the manager recognized her. She wasn’t welcome there. A few blocks and one alias later, the Hotel Rand was hardly an improvement: Its proprietor was Wilson Mizner, a colorful character whose lobby sign read CARRY OUT YOUR OWN DEAD. Mizner had a fighter’s battered knuckles—“I got those knocking down dames in the Klondike,” he claimed—but the quiet woman who signed in as “Mrs. A. Ross, Buffalo” was too much even for him. As reporters descended on his hotel late that night, Mizner ordered “Mrs. Ross” to leave first thing next morning. I don’t want your money, he told her. Just get out.

  “I have had enough misery for one woman,” she sobbed, and collapsed in the hallway with her bags. “What interest can anyone have in the past? Are they not satisfied?”

  But by the next day, Augusta Nack was beginning to see the value of the past.

  “I am selling this story,” she informed the New York Times as she marched into its offices. “What arrangements is your paper making to pay me?”

  To her chagrin, she was told that this was not how the Times operated. It was, however, how the Journal did. Some things hadn’t changed. Even so, Hearst’s paper had become almost unrecognizable to Mrs. Nack in her decade away. Along with the downright futuristic sight of newspaper photographs, the Journal now carried such inconceivable captions as “Remarkable Photograph Showing Fatal Crash Between Autos Going 50 Miles Per Hour.” Life outside prison, it seemed, had gotten faster while she was gone—and louder. Hearst’s paper was now more squat and squarish in shape, and some already believed an outright tabloid format would be “the 20th Century newspaper.” Pulitzer’s World had already tested out an issue in this potent new form; tabloids were cheap to print, after all, and easier to read on the crowded new subways. Hearst hadn’t quite made the shift yet, but he was halfway there: His paper already looked coarser, its front-page headlines a Klaxon call of massive type, sometimes in crude wooden-type letters that w
ere seven inches tall. In the Journal’s early days, only the beginning of a war could summon up crude and gargantuan typesetting; but in this new century every day was a conflict, every day a panic. BUILDING FALLS; 40 KILLED, blared one copy from that week. WOMAN KILLS MAN IN UNION SQUARE, roared another.

  There were far more subtly disturbing stories out that day, too—such as word that Kaiser Wilhelm was becoming fascinated by the notion of sending armed zeppelins across the English Channel. (“The young German Emperor gets peevish sometimes,” the paper mused.) But after Mrs. Nack’s visit, she had booming type of her own on the Evening Journal’s front page:

  MRS. NACK CONFESSES!

  Readers looking inside the paper discovered that indeed she had confessed … to her love for William Guldensuppe.

  “Guldensuppe and I were happy until Martin Thorn came,” she insisted. “He was younger and extremely good looking, but I had no love for him. I told him I could never love him. God knows I did not dream of what was going to happen. I should have given him over to the police as a dangerous man. But I did not think of it.”

  The entire crime from start to finish, she continued, had been his doing. In fact, she hadn’t even known Thorn was upstairs in the Woodside cottage.

  “I heard a shot, an exclamation of pain, and a fall. Then it flashed over me in an instant that Thorn had killed the man I loved. He slowly came down the stairs and towards me. I shut my eyes because I thought he was going to kill me. He thought I had fainted and went to get me a glass of water. When he came with the water he said: Gussie, darling, I did it for you.”

  Her tale sounded curiously theatrical—which indeed it was.

  “A theatrical company has made me an offer to go on stage,” she admitted, “but I don’t think I shall accept. I am going to write a book of my life, and when people read that they will see.”

  But first she’d have to find a place to live, a place where she could be left alone—“anywhere—everywhere—just so I can lose my identity,” she explained. Maybe, she wondered aloud, she’d have to pull together enough money to move back to Germany. The $300 the police seized when arresting her was presumably still in a bank somewhere, but with her lawyer long dead, she wasn’t sure where to start looking.