The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (14 page)

But the
woman in the Detective Bureau’s office seemed insistent.

My husband
, she explained,
is John Gotha
.

The detective on duty sat bolt upright. Gotha was a tall and lanky German barber, and one of Thorn’s old pinochle friends. O’Brien had hauled him in on Saturday for questioning, to which the barber had innocently protested that he hadn’t seen Thorn in a fortnight.

Well, Mrs. Gotha explained, that was true—he hadn’t. But
now
 …

They raced back uptown with Mrs. Gotha. She didn’t want to make a scene at her husband’s workplace, so
detectives waited impatiently at the 125th Street El station while Mrs. Gotha walked over to Martinelli’s Barber Shop. Her husband already knew what she was going to pester him about.

“
I can’t go back on a friend,” he complained when he saw his wife.

“Put on your coat and hat and come with me,” she said flatly. “I’ve told them everything.”

Back downtown in Inspector O’Brien’s office, his story came tumbling out. Thorn had come out of hiding to confide in him. He wasn’t ratting out his friend—really, he wasn’t!—but his wife had
made
him come down here.

When did you see him?

Yesterday, Gotha explained. He’d been waiting for a customer in Martinelli’s when a man entered, sat in his chair, and
uttered a single word: “Haircut.”

Gotha looked up at the mirror and into the face of the country’s most wanted murderer. Martin had changed his appearance a bit—
shed his usual brown derby for a white fedora and shaved off his luxuriant mustache—but there was no mistaking the eyes or the old fighting scar along his nose. The barber clipped in absolute silence, neither of them breathing a word to the other, not even daring to lock eyes in the mirror. After the last clippings were brushed away, his
silent customer stood up and pressed some coins into Gotha’s hand. When Gotha opened his palm, it contained a note.

Meet me at the corner
.

From there, the barber told Inspector O’Brien, they’d gone into the nearest saloon and talked for three hours—and Thorn spilled everything. At the end of it, they’d arranged to meet again.

When?

The barber sat under his wife’s gaze and looked down at his shoes, as he was prone to do. He didn’t want to turn his friend in; the man had trusted him.

Well …

IT WAS
QUARTER PAST NINE
that night, getting toward closing time, and the soda fountain at
Spear’s Drug Store ruled the busy Harlem corner of 125th and Eighth Avenue. Theodore
Spear himself was manning the till, and his clerk Maurice was working the fountain. Like any drugstore, the gleaming bottles and tins of nostrums along Mr. Spear’s shelves—Dr. Worme’s Gesundheit Bitters, Telephone Headache Tablets, Kinner’s Corn Cure—were window-dressing for
the real profits, which lay in the slot telephone, in alcohol elixirs that skirted the liquor laws, in sen-sen gum to cover up that elixir breath, and in petty luxuries like Cosmo Buttermilk Soap and Tilford cigars. But on a sweaty July evening, the only part of the store that truly mattered was the soda fountain, with its gleaming chromium faucets and beautifully tinted bottles of orange phosphate, strawberry syrup, and violet
presse
. Harlem swells and their ladies fanned themselves at the counter seats, and Maurice watched the street scene outside.

Everybody knew it was too hot to work that day;
city after city on the East Coast was reporting relentless heat.
Laborers in soiled overalls had been shiftlessly waiting around for hours, escaping the sun under store eaves, and now whiled away the gathering dusk in the light thrown out by the shop windows onto the busy street. A gentleman stylishly dressed for the evening walked down the sidewalk, ignoring the workmen, and exchanged greetings with a friend.

“
Let’s go take a drink,” his friend suggested, which was a fine idea indeed.

The gentleman demurred. “No, I don’t want a drink. You go along by yourself.”

What happened next came in a flash: The tall and lanky friend sank back into the gathering dusk, and a workman—a tough in a blue flannel shirt—seized the gentleman’s arm and shoved him into Spear’s drugstore.

It’s a holdup
,
Maurice frantically signaled to Mr. Spear at the till.

In a fluid motion, the thief yanked out the gentleman’s coat lining, gathered up its contents, pushed him down into a chair by the cigar counter, and withdrew his own weapon. A crowd of roughneck laborers came barreling in behind him. But rather than break up the robbery, they
also
seized the gentleman in a silent, desperate scuffle. Before Maurice and Mr. Spear knew it, the victim was pinned down, yet the drugstore till remained completely unmolested.

Nothing was what it seemed; the workmen had pulled out revolvers and slapped a pair of handcuffs around the fellow’s wrists.

“He’s shaved his mustache,” one of them muttered.

“What’s your name?” demanded a gruff foreman framed by the dusk.

“
I am Martin Thorn,” the handcuffed gentleman announced defiantly to the astonished store patrons.

The grizzled lurker in the doorway now also appeared transformed. The plain clothes of a slouch cap and dirty overalls no longer disguised a man that the startled druggist and his shop clerk knew from all the newspapers.

“And I am Inspector O’Brien,” he replied.

THE INDICTMENT

(photo credit p3.1)

MARTIN THORN KNEW
it was
O’Brien all along—why, from the moment he’d walked into Harlem.

“
I’ve thought so for five minutes,” he said coolly.

The inspector was unimpressed. “Got anything else but your gun about you?”

“I’ve got a knife.”

Thorn helpfully reached for an inner pocket before a detective seized his cuffed hands.

“Just keep it where it is,” snapped Inspector O’Brien.

Along with the .32 revolver, a closer search of Thorn’s pockets netted the knife and $6. Still in their plain clothes, the “laborers”—top detectives O’Brien, McCauley, and Price, along with the five beefiest backup officers from the precinct—whisked their suspect onto the 125th and Eighth El platform for the next train downtown.

Surrounded by police, Thorn sat stoically through more than a dozen stops on an elevated steam train that passed the second- and third-story apartments of Manhattan; he could glimpse the ordinary scenes of men and women settling in for the evening, washing dishes and hanging clothes for work.
They reached Houston and Bowery just after ten p.m. As the El platform closest to HQ, the rowdy station was an honorary portal into the New York legal system. The lights of the Gaiety Theater and the towering Casperfeld & Cleveland
jewelry billboard were among the last glimpses of everyday life a guilty man might ever have. Nightlife swirled below as newsboys clustered around the steel pillars of the station.
AN ELECTRICAL EXECUTION
, the
Evening Post
announced. It was not prescience, just the fate of a wife killer up in White Plains, but it abutted a front-pager of the day’s latest news on Mrs. Nack.

A plainclothes scrum double-marched Thorn down Mulberry Street, so fast that the hindmost officer could barely keep pace. They hadn’t gone unnoticed. Someone—from Spear’s drugstore, or from an El platform on the way down—had called ahead to tip off the
New York Herald
to a big arrest; the
Herald
instantly relayed it to the round-the-clock watch post they kept across from the police HQ. A reporter and a sketch artist were waiting in the street to meet the grim-faced men.

Who’d you get?

Thorn, still unrecognizable in his new clothes and shaven face, was quickly hustled past them, through the heavy basement door and down a hallway. The reporter jumped up and shimmied his head into the transom, in time to see O’Brien and McCauley disappear with the prisoner up a stairway toward the inspector’s office.

Who’d you get?

But he already knew.

“Pickpockets and
petit
larceny thieves are not hurried to Police headquarters at night, heavily shackled and guarded,” he noted dryly. There was only one man it could be, and the lights burning brightly through the night in Inspector O’Brien’s window were all the proof anyone needed.

THORN STARED OUT
into the night, his fingers smarting from where
they’d been scraped by forensics. Professor
Witthaus himself had come in to collect the samples from under his nails; even though nearly two weeks had passed since the murder, they weren’t taking any chance of losing evidence, and his scrapings were now en route to the Loomis Lab to be tested for blood or viscera. The rest of
Thorn’s
body had been scrupulously measured, too; the station used a Bertillon card system, where each new arrest was mugged for the camera and then a card was filled in with the painstaking caliper measurements of M. Alphonse
Bertillon’s wondrous anthropometric system. Everything from the length of Thorn’s ears and cheekbones to the length from the elbow to the tip of the finger was noted. All that was missing were Thorn’s fingerprints: Bertillon did not approve of such dubious new notions. Just a few weeks earlier the royal governor in
India had adopted a new system invented by one of his own administrators, one that annotated whorls and loops, but neither O’Brien nor anyone else in the United States was bothering with such exotic ideas.

Instead, the
inspector worked quietly at his desk, saying nothing for hours, content to let his suspect stew in uncertainty. The clock ticked past eleven, then past midnight;
Thorn’s gaze fell upon the piles of letters on O’Brien’s table, all rifled from Gussie’s apartment. The useless tin heap of her washing boiler still lay in a corner of the room.

So, O’Brien began: Why had he shaved his mustache off?

Thorn glared back sullenly. He’d shaved it off the previous Wednesday—the same day, that is, that Gussie had been arrested—but he wouldn’t explain why. Asked to account for his movements, he gave a carefully rehearsed story.

“
I at present live in a furnished room at Number 235 East Twenty-Fifth Street. I have not seen William Guldensuppe since I was assaulted by him at the house of Mrs. Nack,” he claimed. “I have been meeting with her two or three times a week ever since, up until Tuesday night. Mrs. Nack spoke to me about leaving Guldensuppe, and buying me a barber shop in the country. She told me that Guldensuppe had been using her badly the last six months, and that Guldensuppe wanted her to open a disorderly house. She agreed to leave Guldensuppe and live with me.”

They’d still been planning for their future together, Thorn said, when he last saw her on June 29—the night before her arrest.

“We took an Eighth Avenue car at Forty-Third Street and went to Central Park,” he recalled. “We sat on a bench in the park until
about eleven o’clock at night. I told her I had seen in the newspaper that part of a human body had been found in the river, and that it stated it was a part of Guldensuppe’s body. I told her how it was also mentioned in the newspapers that a part of the body found must have been boiled before being thrown in the river.”