Law & Disorder

by Bruce Chadwick

  Mayors continually talked about cleaning up Five Points. Mayor William Havemeyer called it “a nest of vipers” in 1845 and urged the Common Council to widen all the streets and add more gas lamps to light the intersections to cut down crime. The councillors did not. It was not until 1849, and the combination of the Astor Place riot and a cholera epidemic in Five Points, that the city government made any moves to sanitize the area, and even then little was accomplished.23

  Most people took long, circuitous walks to avoid it, and others, when they did walk its filthy, crime-ridden streets, made sure they carried a long, thick wooden club for their own protection. A grand jury report called Five Points “a rendezvous for thieves and prostitutes.” Journalist Foster wrote that “nearly every house and cellar was groggery below and a brothel above.” One reformer said it was “the most notorious precinct of moral leprosy in the city.”24

  The prostitutes in Five Points were raunchy in appearance, but not as bedraggled as the hookers on Water Street, near the shipping docks on the East Side. “Here the prostitutes are generally drunkards.… You see the women half exposed at the cellar doors as you pass. Their faces are flushed and pimpled,” Walt Whitman wrote of Five Points women.25

  No one in the city had any respect for the women who resided in the Five Points neighborhood. “Theresa Melionas, an ill-looking, haggard, dissipated creature, 30 years of age, one of those degraded wretches who infest the portion of the Five Points, was brought up under the following circumstances [of criminality],” wrote a police reporter from the Herald about one of them.26

  Policing of Five Points was lax. Extra policemen assigned there never showed up. One thing they did do was spread the idea that Five Points was a social quicksand, its own universe, and its inhabitants would take care of themselves better than the police ever could. The police feared not only injury but all-out wars with one or more of the street gangs that resided in, and governed, the Five Points area. The cops knew, too, that these gangs were used by Tammany Hall on Election Day to harass the Whig Party and its followers. Why anger the bosses?27

  And so Five Points, one of America’s great cauldrons of crime, rolled along, unmolested by the scared police, its own city in its own country.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Brutal Murder of the Beautiful Cigar Girl

  The apathy of the great criminal judges, sitting on their own fat for a cushion bench, and the utter inefficiency of their police, are all tending fast to reduce this large city to a savage state of society—without law—without order—and without security of any kind.

  —James Gordon Bennett on the Mary Rogers case

  The administration of justice in this city has been bringing itself into contempt every year, every week, every day.

  —James Gordon Bennett on the Helen Jewett case

  On July 25, 1841, Mary Rogers, a beautiful young woman who worked in John Anderson’s downtown cigar store, told her fiancé, Daniel Payne, that she was leaving Manhattan to visit her aunt. He never heard from her again. Three days later, Mary’s murdered body, in torn clothes with a cord tied around her neck, was found near Elysian Fields, a forested park and entertainment area in Hoboken, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. At first, authorities believed she was the victim of street gang violence. Still others said that Rogers’s murderer was her fiancé. Still more said it must have been a rival suitor for her affections.

  The editor of The New York Sun put the blame squarely on the growth of New York and the eagerness of its greedy store owners to make money off the tidal wave of people in town, especially men. He blasted the practice of hiring pretty women to lure men into tobacco shops, or any shops. Mary Rogers had “become the victim of the very passions and vices which her exposure to the public gaze for mercenary gains was so well calculated to engender and encourage,” he wrote.1

  The murder of Mary Rogers struck a chord in the hearts of New Yorkers. Her slaying came on the heels of an ever-rising crime tide and was a sign, yet again, that people could not walk the streets of the city safely anymore. She, or anyone for that matter, was an easy target. Rogers was not a woman who got herself into trouble. She was not a prostitute, did not hang out in saloons or frequent gambling halls. Mary was a typical girl who lived with her mother, harmless, and now she was dead. The homicide shook the Manhattan community to its core.

  John Anderson’s cigar store in lower Manhattan had substantial competition. Everybody smoked cigars, from refined poets to seasoned dockworkers, and there were dozens of stores that serviced their tobacco addiction. Anderson needed something special to set himself apart from the other stores. That was Mary Cecilia Rogers, a twenty-year-old girl who possessed not only a beautiful, angelic face but also a voluptuous body and, those who knew her said, a smoky sexiness that few women had.

  Her father had died in a steamship explosion, and she and her mother left Connecticut and moved to New York, where they opened a small boardinghouse at 126 Nassau Street, just blocks from the hub of the newspaper district and City Hall. Boarders loved her, young men who met her lusted after her, and John Anderson saw a fortune in her. He hired her as his assistant, promising her mother that she would never be left alone in the store and that he would walk her home each evening to provide protection. Men who met her in his store were so smitten they wrote poems about her and lingered in the store talking to her as long as possible, always buying something, and Anderson’s business profited.2

  And then Mary Rogers vanished, in October of 1838 when she was seventeen. A suicide note was found in her room. Her mother went to the press for help, and several newspapers wrote about the disappearance. Some supplied reasons, such as the Sun. “The cause of the wayward freak of this young woman is supposed by her friends to be a disappointed love—she having recently received the addresses of a certain widower who, it is said, has deserted her,” a Sun reporter wrote, adding that the failed love caused her to kill herself. All were certain that she was dead. Then, just a day later, she reappeared, a big smile on her face, and told her mother she had gone to visit a friend in Brooklyn and simply forgot to tell her.3

  Three years later, in the summer of 1841, she was gone again, this time for good. Mary left her Manhattan boardinghouse home on Sunday, July 25. She wore a white dress, a black shawl, a blue scarf, a leghorn hat, and light-colored shoes and carried a light-colored parasol.4

  Two days later, fishermen found her body floating in shallow water just off Castle Point, a peninsula north of Hoboken. Dr. Richard Cook performed an autopsy and said she had been gagged, beaten, and raped by three different men and strangled with a torn-off piece of her own dress.

  One of her former boarders, said to have been infatuated with her, now a sailor on a ship in the harbor, was grilled on two separate occasions but released by the police. Her fiancé had an alibi and was released by the police, although newspapers suspicious of him would keep his name in the headlines. The newspapers, eager for an arrest, then started to question Dr. Cook’s autopsy. He had ruled that she was not pregnant, but pregnancy would fit in with the spurned-suitor theory, and the papers began to suggest it. They also said, and many people agreed, that the autopsy was not thorough and that Cook’s suggestion that she was raped and beaten might have been wrong.5

  There were several reasons why the death of Mary Rogers became one of the most famous murders in United States history, even bigger than the prolonged 1839 trial of Ezra White, finally convicted of stabbing four men to death at a New York party.6 First, she was beautiful, and slain beautiful women always draw oversized headlines. Second, the death of someone who worked right next door to City Hall, and the police headquarters, drew attention. Third, the girl was not a prostitute, like Helen Jewett, but a simple country girl who lived with her mother and worked to help her meet expenses. Fourth, and most important, numerous journalists, such as Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving, whose newspapers were near her cigar store, visited her frequently, as much to see her as to bu
y cigars. The writers liked her and wanted to avenge her death by getting the constables to arrest someone. These people, who could make a story big, all knew her, probably secretly loved her, and were outraged by her murder.

  Then the newspapers also decided that she was noteworthy because she seemed like an ordinary woman who met a horrible fate because of the rising crime tide, from which the city’s police offered no protection. She was the classic “girl next door” slain in the dangerous nighttime sordidness of the “big city.” News coverage, every single day, became massive, and the story became a national topic of discussion.7

  The shore area near Elysian Fields where her body was found was jammed with oglers. People picnicked on the spot where she died. Male and female religious zealots brought caravans of people to the spot and gave religious sermons to them all, warning them that if they were not God-fearing they would be killed, too. One of those visitors was reformer Child, who saw Rogers as yet another victim of the crime-infested city. She wrote of how lovely the scene was and what a majestic view anyone there had of Manhattan across the river. “Remembrances of the city haunted me like evil spirits,” she said as she surveyed the scene, along with many, many others.8

  James Gordon Bennett immediately decided who the killers were—the gangs of dandyish ruffians who polluted the neighborhoods of his beloved Manhattan. “The girl was taken by a gang of scraplocks and gamblers,” he charged in the Herald.

  It was the Herald that began the mudslinging against the police over the Rogers case. “Nothing tending to elucidate the mystery hanging over the murder of poor Mary has yet transpired at the police office,” snickered one of the paper’s reporters.

  A few days later, Bennett launched a scathing attack on the city’s constables and judges for not immediately solving the case. “The apathy of the criminal judges, sitting on their own fat for a cushion bench, and the utter inefficiency of their police, are all tending fast to reduce this large city to a savage state of society—without law—without order—and without security of any kind,” he wrote. “The administration of justice in this city has been bringing itself into contempt every year, every week, every day.”9

  Rumors flew through the streets of New York: Mary did not go to see her aunt when she first disappeared; she was seeing a man other than her fiancé, Daniel Payne. She was seen in the theater district on the arm of yet a third man just before she was killed. One rumor had it that a very well known fourth man had fled the city right after her body was found, a sure sign that he had killed her.10

  Editors, especially those in the penny press, saw the crime not just as a grisly murder of a beautiful woman but as a symbol of the collapse of the entire world’s civilization. The murder coverage was so dominated by the press that witnesses walked into newspaper offices to tell their story rather than going to the police.

  Newspapers held nothing back in reporting the dreadful appearance of the beautiful girl’s body after a week of decomposition. It was, wrote a reporter for the New York Journal of Commerce, “a blackened and decomposed mass of putrefaction, painfully disgusting to sight and smell. Her skin, which had been unusually fair, was now black.… Her eyes so sunk into her swollen face as to have the appearance of being violently forced beyond the sockets, and her mouth, which ‘no friendly hand had closed in death,’ was distended as wide as the ligaments of the jaw.”11

  The gang murder theory, advanced by the coroner and reporters, especially those at the Herald, lasted for a few weeks. Then another theory arose. Could Mary have been killed during an abortion at the hands of Madame Marie Restell or one of her many surgeons? The Police Gazette wrote later that Restell owned a chain of abortion parlors, and one was in Hoboken, where Mary died. It charged that she had killed numerous young women in operations and hinted that Mary was one of them (hounded all of her life by antiabortion zealots, Restell finally slit her own throat in her bathtub years later). “It is well known that females die in healthy childbirth. How many, then, who enter her halls of death may be said to expire under her execrable butchery? Females are daily, no, hourly, missing from our midst who never return.”12

  Others said she had been accidentally murdered by a man who worked for Restell, a well-known New York abortionist who by the winter of 1840–41 had already been indicted sixteen times without any convictions. Each of Restell’s appearances in court generated hundreds of news stories, especially in the penny sheets, ever hopeful that she would be incarcerated. Restell had good lawyers who could get indictments quashed; she also had many friends in city government, including the police, to whom she gave valuable gifts at Christmas and at other times of the year. They, in turn, protected her. The abortionist would not be put in prison until the late 1840s, and her sentence then would only be one year.13

  Restell sold several brands of birth control pills and powders through her establishments, ran ads for them in New York newspapers, and even wrote stories about their powers that were published as “advertorials” in several papers.14

  Edgar Allan Poe laid the blame for the murder and the failure to solve the case directly at the doorstep of the New York police. “The police seemed blown about, in all directions, by every varying puff of the most ill-considered newspaper opinions. The truth, as an end, appeared to be lost sight of altogether. The magistracy suffered the murderer to escape while they amused themselves by playing court and chopping the technicalities of jurisprudence,” he wrote in a letter to the Columbia Spy newspaper.15

  What really angered the newspaper editors and reporters, and all New York, was the refusal of most police to investigate the case unless they were given substantial rewards to do so. The police in New York had always operated that way and saw no reason to change their tactics in the Rogers case. The press let everybody know about the fee insistence, too. If the investigation was to be solved and the murderer arrested, dozens of police, perhaps hundreds, had to be paid off with extra fees. “It is well known that in the present, inefficiently organized state of our police department, little will be done towards detecting the authors or perpetrators of this awful crime without the promise of a cash bounty,” wrote a reporter in The New York Sun. “All parties, however much they may differ in other matters, are determined on the reorganization of the police,” added the editor of the Star.16

  Officials in Hoboken, and in the entire state of New Jersey, refused to pay any fees and told their police it was their job to investigate the murder. In New York, police, hands out, palms up, wanted extra money. James Gordon Bennett organized a special committee to raise money for them. It collected $1,350 (Mary’s boss, Anderson, put in $50), and the city came up with an additional $500, all of which went to the police. The constables, the Herald said, were “mere loafers on the public—selling their duties to the highest bidder, and only suppressing crime or catching rogues when private individuals came forward to offer money for the performance of public duties.”17

  A disconsolate Bennett wrote that New York “had been disgraced and dishonored in the eyes of the Christian and civilized world” not only by the crime but also by the high-handed demeanor of the police.18

  Some police did play small roles in the investigation of the murder, but most insisted on, and were given, extra fees. Then the police made a mess out of the Mary Rogers investigation, from start to finish. Police said at first that she had been killed in New York City and her body tossed into the Hudson. Later, they changed their mind and said she was, or might have been, slain in a thicket of trees in Hoboken. Evidence that turned up later in a forest in Hoboken led all to believe that she was killed there, but the police could not find any suspects. Potential killers that they did find turned out to be completely innocent. Her fiancé, an early target, committed suicide without telling anyone if he had a role in the murder.19

  The Mary Rogers case was never solved. People did not remember much about how poor Mary met her end, but they did remember the audacity of paid constables to demand, and receive, extra rewards for working on
the investigation. And then, after all of that money was paid to them, they botched the case and never arrested anyone. They were a well-paid and poorly performing police force.

  Another reason the case became so famous, and angered so many people, was Poe’s tale about it, “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” Poe, who reportedly knew Mary, had invented detective fiction as a literary genre with his thriller “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published the previous year. He created a detective, Auguste Dupin, and had him solve a brutal Paris slaying.

  Poe, thirty-two at the time, loved crime writing. He had befriended a reporter in Philadelphia, where he used to live, and the newsman gave him insider information on crime stories he wrote. After Poe moved to New York, he befriended police officers there. They also gave him behind-the-scenes details. The author then took these true stories, changed them a bit, added suspense and intrigue, added or fleshed out characters, and published them as fiction tales. “The Black Cat” was an example of that.

  Poe did the same thing with his Roget story. He set it in Paris, brought in detective Dupin, and told the tale as a suspense story. Everyone knew, of course, that it was the Rogers case and that a large amount of the information in his story was taken directly from events in the Rogers investigation. Poe, too, was critical of the police, writing early on that his detective was disgusted with the “extreme remissness” of the local police, who had no idea of what they were doing.20