The Blackest Bird (6 page)

Hays accepted the change in charge with accustomed grace. He dispatched Sergeant McArdel, who quickly secured a police rowboat and six oarsmen. On board with Hays was Acting Mayor Purdy (exclusively at his own insistence) and the New York medical examiner, Dr. Archibald Archer.

Dr. Cook and Hudson County justice of the peace Gilbert Merritt awaited Hays and the New York contingent at the Hoboken Bull’s Head Ferry dock. From there they proceeded to the location where Mary’s body had been sepulchred three feet deep in a double-lined lead coffin. The heavy tomb was unearthed and then transported by flatbed wagon back to the rowboat, propelled across river, not without considerable effort (a terrific thunderstorm erupted, with howling winds and driving rain), to be deposited on scrubbed pine boards at the Dead House behind City Hall.

Phebe Rogers was sent for from her home to make final determining identification. The old lady staggered into the cavernous Dead House, supported under either arm by the two ex-roomers, Arthur Crommelin and Archibald Padley, but, despite Acting Mayor Purdy’s insistence, was unable to bring herself to gaze upon the body. Decomposition had already taken place to such an extent that no trace of the once-beautiful girl could be recognized in the black and swollen features, and Hays reiterated to the acting mayor for the third time his conviction that it was unwise to insist the old woman perform this hellacious duty.

Instead, through an anguished veil of tears, the grieving mother, with Hays at her side, eventually identified her daughter’s body by articles of clothing stripped from the corpse.

That evening when Hays returned home from the Tombs, Olga already had dinner laid out on the table. She also had a newspaper tucked underneath her arm. “Annie Lynch brought this to my attention,” she explained, referring to her dear friend from the Brooklyn Female Academy. “It is an admonishing tract from the
New York
Advocate of Moral Reform
. Papa, the editors have taken this opportunity
to voice their moral repugnance with the state of affairs in our society,” she snorted. “Mightn’t I read you what they opine?”

“Most assuredly, my dear, if you don’t mind me having a seat first.” At this late hour, after a day such as this, it was comfort he sought.

She began:

L
ater that night, having returned to his office at the Tombs, High Constable Jacob Hays officially registered the death of Mary Cecilia Rogers as murder, whereupon New York coroner Dr. Archibald Archer confirmed in the Dead House the results of the autopsy performed by Hoboken medical examiner Cook, with the exception of listing cause of death as “drowned,” whereas Coroner Cook had it listed as “strangulation.”

Hays fumed. Over the years, the more he had grown to depend on them in his investigations, the more skeptical he had grown of doctors, their acuity and theory. He had asked this specific question of Dr. Cook: Had Mary Rogers been drowned? To which said medical man had responded unequivocally that she had
not
been drowned, citing the absence of frothy blood in her mouth as proof.

“Dr. Archer,” Hays now pressed the New York man, “according to your colleague Dr. Cook, Mary Cecilia Rogers was dead before she went into the water. How say you to this?”

Archer relented without a fight. He said it might indeed be so. “Consider Dr. Cook kerrect,” he said. To which Hays knew he could rely on neither of these men, but would have to pick and choose what was valuable and what would prove less than gospel.

In spite of the hour, Hays trekked back across Chambers Street and up Centre to his office to consider the facts he had at hand. Once seated in his hard chair, two or three of the prison’s ubiquitous mousers began to gather about him with their annoying mewing and pestering.

Hays was no pussyite. He made no bones about that. He could not stand the felines. Yet, perversely, the prison cats seemed to take particular delight in him. Hays took that as testament to their misconceived character.

He considered the possibilities of the crime as they presented themselves to him:

1. Mary Rogers died at the hands of a gang of ruffians.
   
2. Mary Rogers died at the hands of a beau, or ex-beau, in the murderer’s misplaced estimation, somehow wronged by her.
   
3. Mary Rogers died at the hands of a stranger: until the day of her death, someone she did not know.
   
4. Mary Rogers died by her own hand. (Unlikely, considering the manner in which she was found trussed.)
   
5. Mary Rogers had not died. She was in hiding, and the body was not the body of Mary at all, but of another, as yet unidentified.
   

The first possibility struck him as the strongest. Mary’s death was related to some band of local riffraff. Both coroners seemed to corroborate the facts. Mary Rogers’ body had been violated by several men, perhaps as many as three, perhaps more. On any given summer Sunday afternoon numbers of hooligans were about, rowing over from Manhattan or taking the steam ferry.

Once again Hays went over the facts. On the Sunday, the last day Mrs. Rogers was to see her daughter alive, Mary left the Nassau Street address at 10 a.m. Church was out, and at that hour many people were on the street. She was a beautiful young woman, well known from her employ at Anderson’s. Hays judged tens if not hundreds of people must know her by sight.

Someone must have noticed her.

He called Sergeant McArdel into his office and ordered him to dispatch a constable each to the
Evening Signal
and
New York Mercury
to wrest the names of those individuals mentioned in the newsprints’ columns who claimed to have observed Mary.

As a result, an umbrella maker from Rose Street was questioned who said he had seen a girl who may have been Mary shortly after ten that Sunday morning in Theatre Alley, a short lane off Ann Street, leading to the stage door of the Park Theatre. There, he said, the girl ran into the arms of a waiting gentleman, greeting him as one might a lover, and then repairing with him up the alley in a northerly direction to an ultimate destination, the witness swore, he knew not where, nor, when pressed, could hope to know.

An accounts clerk at the New York Bank, out for an early Sunday morning promenade, was also ferreted out and detained. He said he saw Mary, or a girl meeting Mary’s description, on Barclay Street. She was heading in the direction, he remembered, of the Hoboken ferry, whose station was at the extreme west end of that street.

Additionally, a contingent from the Day Watch dispatched to canvass the ferry quay found a young man who concurred with earlier testimony, saying he, too, saw Mary, or, again, a girl who looked like Mary, boarding the ferry with a “dark-complexioned man.” Other passengers vouched similarly, attesting they remembered the fellow. Two among them, daily riders, agreed he may have been a military man, a naval or army officer.

On Old Hays’ orders a force was sent across the river to Hoboken, tramping the bank south to Jersey City and north to Weehawken.

A German woman, Mrs. Frederika Kallenbarack Loss, proprietress of Nick Moore’s House, an inn near to where the body had been found, reported the presence that Sunday of a group of some fifteen ruffians who had rowed over from the city in two small boats, and had proceeded to cause havoc all afternoon long. Mrs. Loss also revealed that same afternoon a young woman of Mary’s description had patronized her establishment.

Word was immediately sent to Hays of Mrs. Loss’s recollection. Balboa drove the high constable to the ferry wharf, and he was on the next boat over, standing the journey at the rail, gazing north at the wide scope and magnificence of the Hudson. Upon landing at Hoboken, Hays was immediately taken by stage north to the Nick Moore House.

Hays found Mrs. Loss to be an immigrant woman, although not a recent immigrant, he thought, from the traces of her accent. She was decidedly big-boned and strong-featured, her hair a yellow color, streaked by almost imperceptible strands of gray and pulled back in a loose bun. Her eyes were unsettling and icily blue.

Mrs. Loss recounted to Hays (smiling almost coquettishly) the fateful day of what was presumed to be Mary’s murder:

A girl had come into the inn on the arm of a gentleman. Once more agreeing with other witnesses, the man was again described as dark-complexioned.

“Could he have been a navy man?” Hays asked.

She was not sure. She did not think so.

“An army man?”

Again, she was not sure. “He might very well have had a military bearing,” she conceded, “but he remains unfortunately dim in my mind.”

But what Mrs. Loss did recall was that “the child” seemed “a very nice girl” with fine manners and airs. She ordered a glass of lemonade and bowed smartly upon taking her leave.

Mrs. Loss remembered her particularly because she had on a dress similar to one that had belonged to Mrs. Loss’s sister-in-law, recently deceased. Looking back, Mrs. Loss now presumed this girl to have been Mary Rogers.

There was more.

Later that night, Mrs. Loss told Hays, she recalled having heard screams. At first she thought it to be her middle son, Ossian, whom she had sent to drive a bull to a neighboring farm. Fearing he had
been gored, she took to the road, following the track all the way to the neighbor’s barn. There she found her boy none the worse for wear, and thinking nothing more about the screams, so many people having come across the river and enjoyed themselves that day due to the heat wave, she took him firmly by the arm and returned to the roadhouse.

During Hays’ interview with Mrs. Loss, Adam Wall, the local stagecoach driver who had picked Hays up at the wharf and brought him to the inn, came into the roadhouse for some warranted refreshment, the day being as hot as it was, ninety-three degrees.

Overhearing the conversation, Mr. Wall intruded, eagerly offering that he had viewed the corpse of the dead girl the Wednesday of her discovery on the riverbank. He told Hays he had recognized her straightaway as a young woman he had picked up at the Bull’s Head Ferry and brought to Mrs. Loss’s roadhouse only a few days before, on Sunday. He remembered upon dropping her off that there had indeed been packs of hoodlums roaming the woods and enclaves that afternoon particularly. He especially remembered one gang who had invaded the little mud shanty next to Mrs. Loss’s, seized all the cakes, and ate them, refusing to pay anything and threatening anyone who dared interfere.

According to Mr. Wall, the gang remained about the shoreline until dark, when they departed in a hurry by rowboat, but not before dragging the daughter of a family, over for a day’s outing, out of their boat and having their way with her despite the protestations of her father.

Mr. Wall told Hays he had not personally witnessed the abduction of the daughter, but this is what he had heard, although from whom he could not remember. Hays, noting the slow manner in which Mr. Wall’s eyes rose to meet Mrs. Loss’s eyes, immediately knew the source of this tidbit of gossip to be her.

A
week later, in the tepid middle days of September, word reached Hays that Mrs. Loss had come forward to Bennett at the
Herald
with a remarkable revelation.

Her two younger sons, she recounted, Oscar and Ossian, aged nine and twelve respectively (Charlie was the eldest at fifteen), had been playing in the woods near her home, north of the old Weehawken ferry dock. In a clearing they had come across a variety of discarded clothes, gloves, handkerchief, and parasol, the lot of it inhabited by crawling bugs of the type that fester in wet discarded articles.

These found articles themselves were much mildewed and moldy, trampled down, she said, in a thicket near a cove in the woods. The parasol and handkerchief had the initials
MCR
embroidered on them, leaving no doubt to whom they belonged.

Hays traveled immediately to Mrs. Loss. The clothing, the parasol, the gloves, alleging to be Mary Rogers’, were all laid out in the downstairs bar at Nick Moore’s House.

“Why, my good woman, were these articles not left in place?” Hays demanded upon viewing them exhibited in this manner.

Mrs. Loss shrank back from his anger, and said in her defense she was fearful someone not connected to the case would find them and remove them.

“Not likely, considering they have remained undisturbed and unnoticed for such a period, and only now have been found,” Hays fumed, gauging the woman and her intent. Was it stupidity or slyness? “Madam, the placement of the articles in the clearing might have given me clues to how the murder was committed,” he explained slowly.

Mrs. Loss apologized profusely. “I did not realize the severity of my action, and the actions of my boys. I can only hope and pray our thoughtlessness will not impede your investigation further, High Constable. If it would be any help at all, I would not mind in the least to help you reconstruct their placement,” she offered.

The purported scene of the crime proved to be a curious, if convenient, alcove in the woods. The area was furnished with three large rocks, one of which formed a sort of seat, while a second formed a makeshift backrest, and the third a footrest or ottoman. The clearing was heavily surrounded by dense brush.

As Mrs. Loss said, every last article had been collected and removed by her and her boys. Not a shred left. Hays had only Mrs. Loss’s word for where they had been found and under what circumstances (“Here was discovered a strip of torn dress, thrice impaled on a single thorn”). The area was much trampled upon, attesting to what might have been sign of a colossal life-and-death struggle. There were indications leading from the clearing to the river that something of weight had been dragged.

The following day, September 17, 1841, a steel-point etching appeared on the front page of the
New York Herald
depicting the Nick Moore House, its clapboard siding, the wooden stairs and rail going up, the single dormer in the center of the shingled roof.

Beneath, in large bold type, was printed the legend:

Opposite, also on the front page, a poem inscribed “To Mary,” credited to the city’s laureate poet and signed “Fitz-Greene Halleck,” took residence in the lefthand column.