The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (11 page)

Listen, did he know of a barber by the name of Thorn?

Martin Thorn? Sure, Vogel knew him. He’d worked here, though
he’d quit on the spot last week, and hadn’t been seen in the shop since.

You don’t say?

McCauley was in luck, though: Thorn’s coworker Constantine Keehn was in that day. Keehn was a handsome, slicked-down Berliner, his mustache curled up like ram’s horns in the German style—not unlike Thorn himself, actually. Keehn knew Thorn better than anyone else at the shop did. But, he mused as he slid a cold steel straight razor across the detective’s face, their personalities could not have been more different.

And Keehn already knew why the detective was there.

“
As soon as I saw in the papers that Nack had been arrested,” he said, “I thought right away of Thorn.”

Why?

“Martin was very
friendly
with Mrs. Nack,” Keehn explained as he lathered. Thorn had been a brooding sort, but he was a first-rate barber, an even better pinochle player, and an absolute cad with women.

I always told him it would get him into trouble
, another barber piped in.

“Thorn was a queer man,” Keehn agreed. “He told me that for years he had been in the habit of hiring furnished rooms from women. If he learned that his landlady had money, he would make advances to her. If she repulsed him he would move away from her house and try someone else.”

He had
a particular fondness, Keehn said, for widows. He even used to advertise in German-language newspapers like the
Morgen Journal
for them. McCauley made a note of that. Mrs. Nack had taken to listing herself in the city directory with the notation
Widow
—a claim that would have been news to Herman Nack—and so she must have looked perfect to Thorn. There was just one thing in his way: her boyfriend.

“
He used to laugh at Guldensuppe,” Keehn recalled, “because for months Guldensuppe did not suspect his relations with Mrs. Nack.” That changed when Thorn’s suspenders turned up in her bedroom. Soon he was out of the house, and exiled to an apartment on Twenty-First and Third Avenue.

So why hadn’t Nack just ordered Guldensuppe out instead?

“She was tired of him.” The barber shrugged. “But he said the woman was afraid of the big fellow—that he was a powerful man, and that he threatened to kill both of them.” They’d kept their trysts going until Guldensuppe caught on. “While they were drinking in there Guldensuppe rushed in and began to punch Thorn. Thorn had been expecting something like this for a long time, he said, so he always carried a revolver. He drew the revolver and tried to shoot Guldensuppe …”

Scrape—scrape—scrape
.

“ ‘The damned pistol wouldn’t go off,’ Thorn said to me. ‘I pulled and pulled and it wouldn’t work. The rubber took it away and pounded me with it. That’s how he blackened my eyes and smashed my nose. Then he threw me out. That taught me a lesson. No pistol for me after this. I’m going to get a dagger or a knife. I’ll catch him some time when he isn’t expecting me, and then I’ll fix him.’ ”

It was an angry brag one might laugh off, except that Thorn wasn’t the sort of fellow to laugh at, and he wasn’t joking.

“He asked me if I knew where he could get a stiletto. I told him
my brother-in-law, a police captain in Berlin, gave me one years ago. He wanted me to sell it to him.… For about three days he was at me all the time. One day he went downtown, however—I think it was in the Bowery—and bought a stiletto like mine. The stiletto had a yellow handle, and a yellow leather case.”

A few months passed, but Thorn just couldn’t let the idea go.

“Barbering is not my regular business,” Keehn admitted. “I was a dentist in the old country. Thorn knew that, and he was always asking me about different poisons. He wanted to know how to give chloroform. I told him there were different ways. You could put it in a sponge, saturate a towel with it and put it up to the nose.”

He’d gotten uncomfortable, Keehn said, when Thorn started asking about other poisons and then started showing up to work with little bottles in his vest. But how could Thorn think that he had any chance with Gussie, especially after that beating?

“Why, the man was always dreaming.” The barber laughed. He’d even talked of marrying her. “Thorn had Mondays off. He used to talk about trips he made out to Long Island with Mrs. Nack, looking for a house where she could set up a baby farm and he would run a barber shop.”

Really?

Mac kept a poker face. The
Journal
and the Detective Bureau had been sitting tight on Frank Gartner’s story about a Woodside house—a lead that hadn’t made it yet into any of the newspapers.

“He said,” Keehn added innocently, “she had one thousand dollars in the bank and she would furnish the money for the whole business.”

“He wanted to be a boss for himself,” another barber agreed.

Thorn certainly had the ability to run a shop, the barbers concurred, if he just put his mind and a bit of money to it. But Detective McCauley had heard enough. He walked out into the summer evening,
his face prickling painfully as theater-bound crowds swirled around him, emptying into and out of the multitude of tenements and houses of the teeming city. The detectives still hadn’t found anything over in Woodside, but all the signs pointed to someplace across the river.

Thorn had fixed his rival, all right—but where?

THE FARMER FROM WOODSIDE
was insistent: Weren’t the police interested in the extraordinary coincidence that he’d discovered in connection with their murder case?

“I noticed last Saturday morning,” he explained earnestly, “that several of my ducks were sick.”

Yes, of course he had.

The case was becoming a headache. Not only was it attracting curiosity seekers, but the newspapers were taking their circulation fight into the case itself.
Journal
and
World
reporters were tampering with witnesses, trampling crime scenes, and making wild accusations. The headline of yesterday’s
World
bellowed,
THE IDENTIFICATION UPSET
—but the only dissenting identifier was unnamed and “refused to talk any further,” the
World
claimed, “after being threatened by a
Journal
reporter.”
World
reporters in turn humiliated Mrs. Riger, attacking her over accepting $30 in Hearst blood money, and rattling the Astoria storekeeper with a surprise lineup to identify a confederate who had just shopped there.

THE WORLD DESPERATE
, the
Journal
shot back in a headline. “If Guldensuppe is dead, the
World
feels that it is going to be dead, too.”
One of Nack’s neighbors signed an affidavit alleging overtures from the
World
for testimony favoring Mrs. Nack; outraged
Journal
reporters claimed that Pulitzer had a $10,000 slush fund dedicated to
perverting the case. But it was becoming apparent along Newspaper Row that while Pulitzer and his editors were dictating hostile headlines, their crime reporters had few doubts left about the murder. The denials from up top were becoming such an embarrassment that the
Journal
had taken to simply reproducing its rival’s front page with the devastating caption
STILL TWENTY FOUR HOURS BEHIND THE NEWS
.

On this morning, July 3, just as they were gearing up for a blowout Sunday holiday that would see half the city tipsy and shooting off fireworks, the police were having to field questions about the latest stunt by the papers. After
World
editors wisely decided on a new strategy, a pair of their
reporters hired Mrs. Nack’s surrey and horse, promptly dubbed the Death Carriage, and galloped around asking if anyone recognized it. An impressionable young lady in Long Island said she did, and a nearby campsite offered up an old handkerchief and a few scraps of paper. This, the paper loudly announced on the front page, was surely where Guldensuppe’s clothes had been burnt. It then helpfully directed the police to a “murder den,” largely on the evidence of it being a frightful-looking old house.

And now this fellow wanted to talk about ducks.
His name was Henry Wahle, and he lived in Woodside over by Second and Anderson. There was a two-hundred-foot-long field between his place and the next house, and his ducks had crossed it—toward
Mrs. DeBeuchelare’s dairy, you see, but not all the way down to the next street, where
Mr. Jacobs kept that greenhouse, and …

Yes
, they said.
Go on
.

“They had eaten something that they could not keep down,” he explained with alarm. And it got worse. “I knew they had been swimming and paddling about in the open drain in Second Street, across the way. I went over to investigate … right at the end of the drainpipe that comes from the house on Number 346, Second Street.”

The cottage, Wahle said, was a vacant one. That’s why it was so strange to see that ditch full on a hot summer day. “Water was running out of the drain-pipe as if it had been left turned on in the empty house,” he mused aloud.

Was that so?
Officers took notice; maybe there was something to this. But Wahle still wanted to talk about his ducks.

Yes, the ducks. When they came out of that ditch, something had been running off their feathers—perhaps the very thing that had made them sick. A substance that was pooling into the mud by that drainpipe.

“Red stuff,” the lamplighter confided.

FOUR MANHATTAN DETECTIVES
marched off the New York & Queens County trolley at eleven that morning, accompanied by a sharp-eyed
World
reporter who’d at last gotten a jump on the Hearst men. It was hard for Woodside residents not to notice the group. They were out of their neighborhood, out of their jurisdiction, and out of the city altogether.

Detective Price surveyed the scene before him. He’d come from searching Mrs. Nack’s place in Hell’s Kitchen to … this?

Woodside was one of the sleepiest villages within reach of the city, a precinct of lonesome farmhouses and overgrown marshy lots, a place where churches were still the tallest buildings. A general store by the trolley stop sold hay and groceries, while up the street the local
Greenpoint Avenue Hall offered wholesome rube entertainments like bowling and a shooting gallery. The city detectives swatted away insects as they strolled over to the village center, where the
fire chief and a coroner were convenient neighbors. The local police captain was summoned as well—they were now in Queens County, after all, in his jurisdiction.

Did they know the way to 346 Second Street?

Sure
, the detectives were told.
We’ll walk you over there
.

Second Street held little more than a placid dairy and a flower nursery that supplied Broadway swells across the river with carnations for their lapels. Just up the street stood three cheap new wood-frame houses—two stories apiece, flat-roofed boxes with nearly windowless, unadorned sides. The eight men walking up to them hadn’t gone unnoticed; a scowling woman was waiting in the nearest one, at number 344.

“
Mrs. Hafftner,” she introduced herself.

She was the caretaker for these three houses. The owners, the
Bualas, ran a wine shop over in the city. And yes, she said, someone had been in 346 recently—a couple from the city who had wanted to rent it—a Mr. and Mrs. Frank Braun. She’d warned them that it was a little desolate out here.

“On the contrary,” Mrs. Braun had assured her, “I like to be where it is quiet.”

The
World
reporter thrust a photo forward.
Is this her?

Mrs. Hafftner examined the unlabeled photo of Augusta Nack. Yes, she said, that was the very image of Mrs. Braun.

The crew eyed the block around them. It was a good place to get in and out of quickly, if you were coming from the city. It
looked
rural, but
near one end of the block was the stop for the NY & Queens County trolley line. A couple of blocks in the other direction was Jackson Avenue, which was a straight shot down to the East River ferries.

The couple had signed a year lease and paid the first month’s rent, Mrs. Hafftner said, but after coming to their new house a few times, they’d disappeared.

“They promised me they were to move in yesterday or today,” the caretaker fretted. “But I haven’t seen them.”

She unlocked the door of 346, and the detectives strode into the empty building, their footsteps echoing. It was
a dreary little house, coated in cheap brown paint; its seven rooms sat vacant, the gloom unrelieved by the rays of light filtering in through the shutters. Someone
had
been here, it seemed, because crammed in among the ashes of a stove there lay
the remains of a man’s shoe. Just the steel shank was left, the leather having been consumed into fine ash. Someone had stoked the fire as hot as they could get it. Interesting. But that could have been the previous tenants, who’d left a couple of months before.

Detectives fanned out into the empty bedrooms upstairs, and one of the doors along the southeast side creaked open into a bathroom. There was nothing in the eight-by-ten room but a large zinc bathtub. It was spotless. Yet the pathologist, Frank Ferguson, had claimed there was some scalding on the body. Was this where it had happened?