by Colin Evans
TWO
A QUIET HAND ON THE TILLER
Even before the dust had settled on Norris’s grave, La Guardia was trumpeting his vision of a radically enhanced OCME, much broader in scope than before, with a far stronger emphasis on teaching. In a speech delivered on September 18, the mayor said, “This office provides more material and opportunities for pathological research than can be found anywhere else in the country. It would be of great value to science and to medicine if a model, fully equipped laboratory could be provided for autopsies. Such a laboratory should be constructed like an operating theater, so that scientists could gather and watch the work being done.” On one point, La Guardia was emphatic. Finance. While fulsome in his praise for Norris’s generosity in repeatedly digging into his own pockets to bail out the ailing department, La Guardia decided to set the record straight: the expenses of a city agency were proper charges upon the city and should therefore be paid from taxes. He promised that whoever took over as CME would be in charge of a fully funded, fully functional investigative unit that would be the envy of the world.
So far so good. It was toward the end of La Guardia’s speech that things turned decidedly murky. Although the mayor paid lip service to the notion of a competitive exam for the vacant post—as stipulated in the 1915 bill—he also made absolutely no attempt to disguise the fact that he had already singled out a favored candidate. If the intent of the legislators had been to banish the bad old days of cronyism, then someone obviously forgot to tell La Guardia. Here he was, touting the office like it was his own personal gift.
No one doubted that Dr. Harrison S. Martland was superbly qualified for the job. Since being appointed the first full-time pathologist for Newark City Hospital in 1909, and later the ME for Essex County, New Jersey, he had distinguished himself in dozens of notorious criminal cases, where his expertise in the effects of bullets on the human body was unparalleled. Outside the courtroom, he was equally formidable. When the police were baffled by the mysterious deaths of several women who worked at a New Jersey watch factory, it was Martland who tracked down the cause. All the victims, he discovered, used a brush to apply luminous paint to the watch dials, bringing the brush to a fine point by applying it to the lips, ignorant of the fact that luminous paint contained radium. With every touch of the brush they poisoned themselves just a little more. Martland’s groundbreaking clinical research into radium’s lethal qualities found its way into the Journal of the American Medical Association. And it was also Martland who, in 1928, coined the term punch drunk to describe those prize fighters who were suffering from a brain injury caused by the rupture of blood vessels. In 1933 he was made professor of forensic medicine at New York University. On every level, Martland was the obvious candidate to fill Norris’s shoes, an ideal mix of the solidly practical and the academic. There was just one problem: he didn’t want the job. Not only would assuming the role of CME put a serious dent in his teaching schedule, but it also thrust him headlong into the cauldron of big city politics, with its clamoring headlines and relentless scrutiny. The cut and thrust of Essex County he could handle; he had little appetite for those heartaches across the Hudson.
Martland’s “thanks, but no thanks” knocked La Guardia sideways. Suddenly he was scratching around to fill the vacancy. To buy himself some much needed breathing space, he opted for a temporary replacement. He settled on a long-standing servant of the OCME, someone who’d joined at its formation in 1918 and who would remain there until the day he retired.
Dr. Thomas Gonzales was low key, tall, and spare, with a rather forbidding scholarly appearance in marked contrast to the flamboyant Norris. In background and upbringing, he could not have been more different from his predecessor. His father was a Cuban leaf-tobacco merchant, who had immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century and settled in New York. The family prospered in their new home country and, by the time of Thomas’s birth in 1878, were well on their way to achieving their small slice of the American dream. There was enough money for Thomas to attend Bellevue Medical School, and after graduation the young man took a position as assistant pathologist at Harlem Hospital; two years later, in 1906, he was named chief pathologist there. Over the next decade he honed his skills in a variety of fields, and in 1918 he was appointed to the position of assistant at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Like all his colleagues, he toiled in the considerable shadow of Charles Norris, but Gonzales had too much talent to stay hidden for long, and from the 1920s onward we find his name featuring ever more prominently in some of that decade’s most sensational cases. There was the curious death in 1923 of wealthy socialite Gertie Webb, where Gonzales went toe-to-toe with the infamous Dr. Otto Schultze (according to Schultze, Mrs. Webb had been poisoned with mercury; Gonzales found nothing except natural circumstances; the grand jury believed Gonzales); Paul Hilton, the “radio burglar” who shot a police officer in 1926 en route to the electric chair; and the blood-drenched 1932 gang murder of hoodlum Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll.
As an assistant medical examiner, Gonzales echoed Norris’s loathing of the old coroner system. New York City might have banished this medieval relic to the scrap heap, but other regions of the United States were not so enlightened. In a 1934 address to the Science Forum of the New York Electrical Society, Gonzales snorted his contempt: “The appalling ignorance of most of our coroners is responsible for sending many innocent men to jail, while keeping many criminals out of prison…Accurate medical knowledge in the determination of the exact cause of death is one of our greatest needs toward curbing crime.”
In almost every respect, Gonzales was Norris’s true disciple. His outstanding ability, allied to a tenacious work ethic, saw him steadily work his way up through the system, until, at the time of his mentor’s death, he was deputy CME in charge of Manhattan and the Bronx. For many—certainly those who worked alongside him—Gonzales was the natural successor to Norris. But La Guardia could be an awkward cuss at times. When he’d appointed Gonzales acting CME on September 18, 1935, he had done so in the expectation that it would be a purely holding position, a stopgap until Martland’s coronation. Now that he’d been thwarted in that ambition, La Guardia was in no rush to make the position permanent. For more than a year he kept Gonzales dangling in limbo. All the acting CME could do was knuckle down, grit his teeth, and do the job. Which was just as well, really, because during this interregnum one of the most sensational murders to hit New York City in decades took place, one destined to become a forensic classic. If Gonzales could get this one right, then his chances of nailing down the permanent job would be almost guaranteed. Get it wrong, and the scrap heap beckoned.
CASE FILE:
John Fiorenza (1936)
When the report came through, Assistant Chief Inspector John A. Lyons must have shuddered. Jeez, not again! After all, murders in swanky Midtown apartment buildings were scarcer than January heat waves. But on Friday, April 10, 1936, for the second time in a matter of months, New York’s premier detective found himself having to quarterback yet another high-profile Manhattan homicide. Just one week earlier Lyons had looked on in utter disbelief as Vera Stretz, twenty-three years old by her own reckoning—you can add at least a decade on to that, sneered most who knew her—ash blond and gorgeous, had walked free from General Sessions Court after having been acquitted of murdering her wealthy German lover, Dr. Fritz Gebhardt.
Lyons had been crestfallen. Like just about everyone connected with the case, he had assumed that Vera’s conviction was a slam dunk. The spectacularly sordid details of the case had kept New Yorkers salivating for months on end. Although Gebhardt had a wife and two daughters back home in Karlsruhe, these domestic encumbrances had not prevented him from installing Vera, his part-time bookkeeper and full-time mistress, in luxury rooms at Beekman Towers, a ritzy hotel that stood on Mitchell Place, near Forty-ninth Street. Gebhardt also stayed at the Beekman, but mindful of the need to maintain at least a thin veneer of respectability his
own quarters were two floors up. For the times, their relationship was steamy in the extreme. But it was also twelve months old. And in those twelve months, according to rumor, Gebhardt had begun to tire of the persistent Vera. She would later deny any such thing. Hence her concern when, on the night of November 11, 1935, Gebhardt had summoned her to his room, complaining of feeling unwell. Throwing a coat over her dressing gown, Vera hastened upstairs. Her arrival seemingly triggered a miraculous recovery. According to Vera, far from feeling ill, Gebhardt was like a rutting stag. When she refused his advances, he had gone berserk, throwing her down on the bed, tearing at her clothes, and forcing himself on her. As a final indignity, he then yanked up his nightshirt and demanded that she fellate him. So appalled was she by this suggestion that she shot him.
Or so she said.
Those hard-bitten detectives who were first on the scene took the view that the coolly possessed—and still fully dressed—Vera was no demure daffodil who’d gallantly defended her honor but rather a jealous killer who’d burst into her lover’s room and shot him because he was about to dump her. Considering that, when arrested, she was carrying a handbag that contained a .32-caliber pistol and a box with forty-six cartridges, this was a not unreasonable assumption. When the autopsy showed that Gebhardt had been shot four times—twice in the back—things looked black indeed for Miss Stretz. Faced by the prospect of an appointment with Sing Sing’s least inviting item of furniture, Vera did the smartest thing possible: she hired a lawyer. Not just any old lawyer, mind you, but arguably America’s greatest defense attorney of the midwar period.
Samuel L. Leibowitz might have lacked Clarence Darrow’s campaigning zeal against the wrongs of society, and some picky souls might have grumbled that his client list was a tad top heavy with gangland luminaries, but when it came to getting people acquitted against the odds, the feisty New Yorker was unbeatable. He knew better than anyone that most trial verdicts were won in the heart, not the head. Pity the poor prosecutor who came armed with mere facts when Leibowitz was on the brief. For years he had buried his opponents under an avalanche of emotion and obfuscation. His strong suit was nailing that “unique selling point,” something to feed the jury’s prejudices, and it didn’t take him long to work out where Vera’s best chances of survival lay. Just recently, dark reports of Hitler’s anti-Semitic ravings had begun to figure prominently in the American press. These gave Leibowitz his opening. In court, by the time the little Jewish lawyer had finished his closing address, Gebhardt had been transformed from wealthy German financier into Aryan monster, a closet Nazi, someone so perverted by sexual excess that shooting was too good for him. The jury swallowed every overwrought word, and Vera walked free. Outside the court, mobbed by reporters, a triumphant Leibowitz tallied up the score: by his reckoning, Vera Stretz was the 116th defendant he had saved from the electric chair.
Now, one week later, as Inspector Lyons leafed through the details of this most recent murder, he was haunted by the Stretz fiasco. The call had come through at 4:30 P.M. A body had been found at 22 Beekman Place, just one block north of the Gebhardt shooting. And this time the victim was not some shadowy financier from a deeply unpopular foreign country but rather a demure young woman with strong connections to Manhattan’s exclusive inner circle.
The last day of Nancy Titterton’s life had begun just like most of the others. After breakfast, her husband, Lewis, had kissed her good-bye and taken off for his job at NBC, where he headed the literary rights department. (In his spare time, he doubled up as a noted book critic, whose reviews featured in several newspapers, most notably The New York Times.) Shortly after arriving at work, at 9:00 A.M., he had phoned Nancy at home. She had seemed happy enough, with no hint of distress in her voice. At age thirty-four, life had assumed a comfortable course for the quietly spoken woman from Dayton, Ohio. She had met Lewis while working in the book department of Lord & Taylor and after a whirlwind courtship the couple had married on October 5, 1929, just three weeks before Wall Street went south. They had survived the crash better than most. Lewis’s job as a radio executive meant there was plenty of money to ride out the slump, with enough left over to fund an opulent lifestyle in one of Midtown’s most desirable addresses. Their candlelit dinners frequently hosted Lewis’s friends from the media glitterati, who dished up the kind of sparkling conversation that Nancy was able to work into her own fiction. Like her husband, she also wrote literary reviews, but her dream was to pen her own novel, and most days were spent striving to turn that dream into reality. A great lifestyle, a great husband, and a promising future, yes, everything on life’s horizon glowed beacon bright for Nancy Titterton.
Until the morning of April 10, 1936.
From what the police were able to piece together, the last person to speak to Nancy that morning was a close friend named Georgia Mansbridge, who had phoned sometime between 10:30 and 11:00 to set a dinner date for the following evening. She confirmed that Nancy had seemed perfectly normal, not at all agitated, quite cheerful, in fact.
At 11:30 A.M., Wiley Staughn, a seventeen-year-old courier for the London Valet Company, arrived to deliver a dress for Nancy. From down on the sidewalk he rang the bell to the Tittertons’ fourth-floor apartment. Then again. And again. One final ring was no more successful than the previous three. Only then did he notice that the vestibule door was slightly ajar. Rather than traipse up the four floors on foot—the building had no elevator—he took refuge in the fact that, on a previous visit, Mrs. Titterton had instructed that if there was no answer on the bell, then he should not leave anything outside her apartment door. Making a mental note to return later, Staughn left to continue his deliveries.
The next noteworthy incident at Beekman Place came around midday. A maid, working in an apartment one floor below the Tittertons’, heard a woman’s voice shout, “Dudley! Dudley! Dudley!” Since calls for Dudley Mings, the building janitor, were an everyday occurrence, she had thought no more of it. Besides, instinct told her that the cry had come not from upstairs but rather the garden.
For the next few hours Beekman Place remained quiet, with no apparent visitors. When a local tradesman named Theodore Kruger arrived in the late afternoon, he found the vestibule door still ajar. Kruger ran a furniture upholsterer’s store, and the previous day had collected a sofa that required repadding from the Tittertons. It had been a daylong job. Finally, at four o’clock, he and his assistant had loaded the couch into a truck at Kruger’s place of business at 386 Third Avenue, for the short drive to the Tittertons’ residence. They reached the five-story brownstone at 4:15 P.M. Like Staughn before him, Kruger received no answer when he rang the bell. Rather than make a return journey the following day, he told his assistant that they were going to heft the couch up the carpeted stairs to the fourth-floor apartment anyhow.
Perspiring and out of breath, they finally reached the Tittertons’ flat. Kruger frowned. This door was also ajar. He knocked and got no answer. Hesitantly, calling out Mrs. Titterton’s name, he edged into the apartment. This was the third time that Kruger had called on Mrs. Titterton and he was familiar with the apartment’s traditional shotgun-style layout. There was a small kitchen abutting the living room, next came a library, then the only bedroom. The last door along the corridor led into the bathroom. Kruger, calling out all the while, worked his way along the corridor until he reached the bedroom. This was the only room that showed some untidiness in the otherwise immaculate flat. Both beds were made, but the one nearest the bathroom was rumpled and strewn with clothing. By now convinced the place was empty, Kruger decided to leave the couch in the living room.
After positioning the sofa, Kruger suddenly had an idea: if he took a note of Mrs. Titterton’s telephone number, he could call and let her know that the bill had come to $7.50. Maybe she could mail him a check? The phone was along the hallway. To reach it, Kruger had to pass the bathroom. The door was open, the light was on, and he glanced inside. What he saw next jolted him to a standstill.
Sticking out of the bathtub was a human leg.
Senses reeling, Kruger swayed in the doorway, struggling to absorb the horrific scene. Nancy Titterton lay facedown in the tub. Her slightly built body—she weighed only one hundred pounds—was nude apart from a torn white silk slip and rolled-down stockings. Some kind of material had been knotted tightly around her neck.
Protectively, Kruger shepherded his young assistant away from the hideous view, and gasped, “Something has happened to the missus.” Without another word the two men ran downstairs where they breathlessly enlisted the help of Dudley Mings. He in turn contacted the janitor of a nearby building, Swan Fredericksen, and all four men returned to the apartment, from where they phoned the emergency service.
Within minutes the building was swarming with police. The officer in charge, Inspector Francis J. Kear, was a veteran cop with almost thirty years of service. While technicians and other detectives bustled about him, Kear stood back and coolly surveyed the scene, trying to gain some sense of how this crime had unfolded. The bed nearest to the bathroom was covered with torn and disheveled clothing, a torn gray skirt, a garter belt, and, incongruously, a fountain pen. Hooks and eyes from the underwear were scattered across the bed and the floor, presumably the result of the attacker tearing the clothes off his victim. Because there was no sign of disorder anywhere else in the apartment, Kear reasoned that the attack had been confined to the bedroom. Probably the unsuspecting Nancy had been jumped in this room, thrown down on the bed, and strangled. That attacker had then dragged her—alive or dead, Kear didn’t know—the four feet or so to the bathroom and dumped her body in the bathtub, presumably in an attempt to drown her. Although the bathroom window was open, the shade had been pulled down, and while this would have prevented any inquisitive eyes, it meant that had Nancy screamed in the bathroom, she would probably have been overheard. A check of other residents had already confirmed that apart from the probably unconnected cry of “Dudley! Dudley! Dudley!” mentioned earlier, no one had heard anything out of the ordinary.
