The Murder of the Century

by Paul Collins

  “Being a newspaperman gave you stature then,” the old man fondly recalled. “Everywhere except in society. It didn’t cut any ice there.”

  Ned then went on to outlive Liebling, too. In fact, he also outlived nearly every New York newspaper. After the World went under, it combined with the Evening Telegram to become the New York World-Telegram. Then it swallowed the Sun to become the New York World-Telegram and Sun. Then it was mashed together with the remnants of the Journal, the Herald, and the Tribune to become the New York World Journal Tribune. And then it died.

  But Ned Brown lived on.

  Nothing could knock Ned to the mat; the same inquisitive blue eyes that searched Mrs. Nack’s mantelpiece for a picture of Guldensuppe would go on to witness the Manson trial and Watergate. In an age of Kojak and Dirty Harry, he still recalled the days when journalists carried badges. Yet although news evolved from carrier-pigeon dispatches to satellite broadcasts, the business remained curiously familiar; when Rupert Murdoch started his chains, and Ted Turner bought his first TV stations, it was already old news to Ned Brown. He’d seen it all before. Hearst’s saturation coverage of sensational local crime—creating a suspenseful narrative out of endless news updates from every angle, whether there was anything substantive to cover or not—had already anticipated the round-the-clock cycle of broadcast news.

  When Ned Brown died in 1976, he was well into his nineties—nobody was quite sure how old he was anymore. It wasn’t long since he’d made a final bow to the public; evicted from his apartment by the Hudson River, the one possession the old man had bothered to retrieve was his tuxedo.

  “I need that suit for my social life,” he explained to a reporter.

  With him ended the living memory of Augusta Nack and Martin Thorn. Even the case files had been destroyed years earlier by the Queens County Courthouse in a fit of housekeeping. As they were on their way to the incinerator, though, one curious reporter picked out a yellowed evidence envelope and opened it up.

  It held little inside—just six duck feathers and a mystery.

  SOURCES

  (photo credit bm1.1)

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  Newspapers may be the first draft of history, but most of what they cover never gets a second draft. This book is the first on the entire Guldensuppe affair, and it’s indebted to the several thousand newspaper articles about this case that I gathered by examining each day’s reporting from more than a dozen daily newspapers:

  Brooklyn Daily Eagle (BE)

  New York Commercial Advertiser (NYCA)

  New York Evening Post (NYEP)

  New York Evening Telegram (NYET)

  New York Herald (NYH)

  New York Journal (NYJ)

  New York Evening Journal (NYEJ)

  New York Journal and Advertiser (NYJA)

  New York Mail and Express (NYME)

  New York Press (NYP)

  New York Sun (NYS)

  New York Evening Sun (NYES)

  New York Times (NYT)

  New York Tribune (NYTR)

  New York World (NYW)

  New Yorker Staats Zeitung (NYSZ)

  I’m also fortunate to have both court records and memoirs written by the journalists and detectives from the case:

  Carey, Arthur. Memoirs of a Murder Man. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1930.

  Collins, Frederick L. Homicide Squad: Adventures of a Headquarters Old Timer. New York: Putnam, 1944.

  Court of Appeals of the State of New York: People of the State of New York Respondent, Against Martin Thorn, Appellant. Jamaica, NY: Long Island Farmer Print, 1898.

  Edwarde, Charles. The Guldensuppe Mystery: The True Story of a Real Crime. New York: True Story, 1897.

  O’Neill, Joseph Alan. “Who’s the Executioner?” The Atlantic Medical Weekly, vols. 9–10 (September 17, 1898): 184–85.

  Pulitzer, Joseph. Joseph Pulitzer Papers, 1880–1924. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress.

  Van Wagner, Ernest. New York Detective. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938.

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  Brandon, Craig. The Electric Chair: An Unnatural American History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.

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  ––. The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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ngersoll, Ernest. Handy Guide to New York City. New York: Rand McNally, 1897.

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  Wyeth, John Allan. With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1914.

  NOTES

  1. THE MYSTERY OF THE RIVER

  1 “OH! YES, IT IS HOT ENOUGH!” NYET, June 25, 1897.

  2 riverside refreshment stalls … the new 700-foot-long promenade pier “Large Public Pier Opened,” NYET, June 26, 1897.

  3 a confection of whitewashed wrought iron “New Public Pier,” NYW, June 27, 1897.

  4 tenements on Avenue C Edwarde, Guldensuppe Mystery, 9.

  5 flat caps and straw boaters “River Gives Up a Murder Mystery,” NYH, June 27, 1897.

  6 a mysterious ironclad in the shape of a giant sturgeon “Flyer for the Sea Afloat,” NYH, June 26, 1897.

  7 Jack McGuire spotted it first Edwarde, Guldensuppe Mystery, 10.

  8 The police knew just whom to blame “River Gives Up A Murder Mystery,” NYH, June 27, 1897.

  9 five schools that were allowed to use cadavers “Boy’s Ghastly Find,” NYW, June 27, 1897.

  10 The city had yet to buy its first horseless carriages Lardner and Reppetto, NYPD, 152.

  11 morgue keeper had been arrested See New York Times coverage of March 23, 1896, January 10, 1897, and April 2, 1897.

  12 tobacco would get a reporter the run Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 492.

  13 resident tomcat “Bellevue Cat a Prisoner,” NYT, January 15, 1900.

  14 “That horrible place” Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 492.

  15 obligatory seventy-two hours.… Each day a dead-boat pulled up King, King’s Handbook, 461.

  16 the coffin room, where another attendant hammered Wyeth, With Sabre and Scalpel, 362.

  17 Brady forcibly checked his mother “Wealthy Woman Committed,” NYT, June 27, 1897; and “Rich Woman Insane,” NYEJ, June 26, 1897.

  18 “There is a mystery here” NYW, June 27, 1897.

  2. A DETECTIVE READS THE PAPER

  1 his Harlem tenement on 127th Street “Fr
agments of a Body Make a Mystery,” NYW, June 28, 1897.

  2 “let’s go cherrying!” Ibid.

  3 Just one house was visible … twelve-foot drop “Strange Murder Mystery Deepens” NYH, June 28, 1897.

  4 Sedgwick and 170th NYH, June 28, 1897.

  5 he called out NYW, June 28, 1897.

  6 “I was walking a post” Carey, Memoirs, 49.

  7 everyone in the department called it: Goatsville Lardner and Reppetto, NYPD, 63.

  8 Carey had been in Goatsville ever since “Detectives in New Jobs,” NYT, July 20, 1895.

  9 easily a hundred pounds.… They’d needed a stretcher and towing ropes “River Mystery Grows in Horror,” NYP, June 28, 1897.

  10 captain was another Byrnes appointee.… renting out on-duty police “The Killilea Fiasco,” NYT, May 17, 1896.

  11 the annual police parade was canceled Lardner and Reppetto, NYPD, 112.

  12 in that morning’s New York Herald NYH, June 28, 1897.

  13 It was a sort druggists used NYW, June 28, 1897. NB: This World report was the only one to specifically note the use of druggist’s seine twine, a telling minor detail that others—including their own reporters—then overlooked or forgot.

  14 adhered another piece of brown paper Carey, Memoirs, 49. NB: The piece of paper bearing the stamp of Kugler & Wollens is noted in Carey’s account, and it is only in his account. The stamped paper is not cited in any newspaper, or indeed in the trial. Given the insatiable hunger newspapers had for reproducing illustrations of any clue in the case, the reasonable supposition is that they never saw this one. The exiled Carey was clearly hungry for a real case, and he was by far the earliest to make a good guess—startlingly so—at where the crime had been committed and how the body had been disposed of. I can’t help but wonder whether, rather like the newspaper reporters, Carey wasn’t above pocketing a hot lead for himself.