The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (15 page)

O’Brien eyed him intently.

“She said,” Thorn continued, “she did not believe it was Guldensuppe’s body, because she did not believe Guldensuppe was dead. She told me that he had not been home since Friday morning, and that she did not know where he was. Mrs. Nack went home after we made an appointment to meet the next day—Wednesday—but I saw in the morning newspapers that detectives were at Mrs. Nack’s house, and I did not go there.”

The inspector allowed one of his long, disconcerting silences to fill the room. But he was quietly pleased by this alibi. The times were wrong: They couldn’t have discussed Guldensuppe’s identification on the park bench that evening, because that revelation hadn’t hit the streets until the following morning. And he had an even more unpleasant surprise for his suspect.

“Do you deny,” he pressed, “that you were at Frey’s saloon on East Thirty-Fourth Street on Tuesday morning, Tuesday afternoon, and Tuesday night playing cards with ‘Peanuts’ and Federer?”

“I don’t exactly deny it.”

“Do you remember being in Frey’s saloon on Tuesday, June 29, when Federer was reading a newspaper in regard to the reward of one thousand dollars, and how Federer said to you, ‘I guess that’s you, barber,’ and you said, ‘Yes, that’s right’?”

Thorn could see the darkened city out O’Brien’s window; everyone was asleep but them.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Do you remember being in the saloon on Tuesday, June 29, and going out and coming back with a woman, and having one glass of beer each in this saloon?”

“Yes.”

O’Brien paused, readying his knockout.

“Do you remember being in Frey’s saloon on the night of Tuesday,
June 29, and telling Federer that you were going to meet a woman, and it was a case of life and death, and exhibiting to them a pistol?”

“I cannot say that I remember that,” Thorn answered warily. “I had been drinking a good deal that day.”

“Do you remember going back to Frey’s saloon about eleven o’clock that same night, and playing pinochle with Federer and Gordon until nearly one o’clock in the morning?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember saying to them that by tomorrow night at this time you would be on the ocean?”

Thorn stared blankly at him. “I do not remember saying that.”

He didn’t need to; plenty of others at the saloon did.

The hours crawled onward until
four in the morning, when O’Brien finally let his prisoner collapse onto a cot in his jail cell. Thorn had scarcely fallen asleep before he was awoken again, first to stand before a magistrate, then to drag himself back into O’Brien’s office. The inspector was waiting for him, seemingly unaffected by the early hour, and invigorated by the fine day the Detective Bureau was having. And he wasn’t alone.

That’s him
, said Mrs. Hafftner, looking the unshaven prisoner up and down.
That’s who rented the house
.

Thorn kept a stony silence as another man was brought in.

That’s him
, said the undertaker’s assistant.
That’s who picked up the surrey
.

After they were led out, O’Brien turned his searching gaze back to Thorn. “
Looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?” the inspector remarked.

Martin Thorn fanned himself with his fedora, considering the situation.

“I don’t fear death,” he replied evenly.

“
HIT HIM!
” they roared down the cell block.

Thorn grabbed the bars of his jail cell and looked down the station’s hallway; a man was being dragged in heavy shackles, shoved and smacked by jeering detectives.

It was John Gotha.

“I won’t go in there!” he yelled. He looked exhausted and hollowed out. “I have done nothing, and you have no right to lock me up!”

“Go on, go on!” a detective yelled. “Hit him with your club!”

The mêlée continued down the hallway, and Thorn stared as his friend scuffled with the officers; he could hear yelling and the sounds of a solid police beating all the way into the next block of cells, until they finally disappeared.

The officers slung Gotha into an empty jail cell with a couple of final yells and dramatic groans, then waited a moment. And then, through Gotha’s wan countenance, there flickered a sunny expression.

Thanks
.

The detectives rolled their eyes. The whole ruse had been at Gotha’s insistence; the lanky barber was still bitterly disappointed that he hadn’t been arrested in Harlem alongside Thorn.
That was part of the deal
, he insisted. They’d been too busy with Thorn and had left Gotha there feeling like a fool. So now they were giving him the sham arrest that he’d wanted.

If they knew Thorn like he did, Gotha explained, they’d understand covering up his role as an informant. Gotha worried that their suspect could slip free or get turned loose, and he’d known Thorn too long to believe that any betrayal would go unpunished.

“
I first met Thorn nine years ago,” he recalled. “We were introduced in a saloon, where we played cards together.”

They were a curious pair at the card table. Gotha was unmotivated and gawky, so tall that colleagues nicknamed him “Legs,” and so unsuccessful in his barbershop trade that his wife had resorted to living in her parents’ basement. Thorn was handsome and talented, and he always seemed lucky with women and money. Gotha couldn’t help a sneaking admiration of his friend’s life. But Thorn had a fierce temper when a card game didn’t go his way, and Gotha was under no illusions about the murder charges against his old pinochle partner. Thorn, he admitted, “would be capable of such an act.”

For now, his friend would stay in the dark about his betrayal; but as Gotha walked free from his untouched jail cell, he could no longer hide from the reporters.

——

JEFFERSON MARKET COURTHOUSE
was less a municipal building than a misplaced Gothic castle, its bands of red and tan brick spiraling over the Sixth Avenue El and up into a great crenellated clock tower; far below, a heavy iron door swung open day and night to admit a ceaseless rabble that was, as one reporter put it, “
old—prematurely old—and young—pitifully young.” That Friday morning in a grand-jury hearing, the assistant district attorney led a procession of witnesses—Mrs. Riger, Frank Gartner, and a nephew of Guldensuppe’s—through their statements, but then stopped short at John Gotha.

The terrible secrets entrusted to the man had kept him awake and unable to eat for days; reporters and jurors craned to watch the shaken man led to the stand. Martin Thorn was not present for this indictment, but that was of little comfort; John Gotha was clearly a haunted creature.

“
He had the look of a man going to the electric chair,” a
Herald
reporter marveled.

Laboring to keep his composure, the hapless barber spoke of drinking with Martin Thorn just three days earlier. “
I met him at a saloon between 128th and 129th Streets, on the west side of Eighth Avenue. We had a couple drinks, and I said ‘You made a botch job of that fellow.’ ”

Thorn had stared at him in terrible silence for a full minute.

“I know it,” he finally said. “Have you read the newspapers? It is all the woman’s fault.”

Gotha struggled as he recalled his friend’s next words. “I looked at him, and he said ‘You are the only friend I’ve got, and I’ll tell you all about it. I expect you to keep a closed mouth.’ ”

“Well, then,” Gotha stammered, “he spoke about Guldensuppe, and said they wanted to get rid of him. He said: ‘We talked the matter over, and decided to kill him. We looked about and rented the house at Woodside. We thought it was far enough out of the way and decided to do the thing on Friday. She bought the oilcloth at that place in Astoria, and bought the cheesecloth at Ehrich’s.’ ”

“Thorn told me that he reached the house early and went upstairs and waited for Guldensuppe and Mrs. Nack to arrive, as she was to bring him. While waiting he took off all his clothing but his undershirt and socks. He did not want to get them bloodstained. About eleven o’clock he said he saw Mrs. Nack and Guldensuppe come up to the front gate. They entered the house.”

The witness paused; the packed courtroom was dead quiet. Then, Gotha recalled, clad in underclothes and with a revolver in his hand, Thorn had hidden himself behind a closet door in an upstairs bedroom. He could hear the two talking downstairs.

“Go and see the rooms upstairs,” he heard Gussie tell her boyfriend. “I think you’ll like them.”

Thorn cocked his pistol.

Guldensuppe’s heavy footfall came up the stairs, step by step, growing closer. He could hear his rival whistling, walking room to room, looking out windows. Then, as the slit in the ajar door darkened, the hinges on the closet moved.

He fired point-blank into the face. The masseur had a moment of recognition—his hands flew up—but they never made it. Guldensuppe crashed to his knees, then slumped backward onto the floor.

Gotha swallowed hard, and what he said next made the jury gasp.

“
He was not dead
. Thorn dragged him into the bathroom and put him in the tub.” Thorn slit his throat until a final breath came out of the hole he’d made.
“I heard a snore,”
was how he put it.

The assistant DA stopped Gotha for a pregnant moment. “Are you
positive
”—he leaned forward—“that Thorn said Guldensuppe was ‘snoring’ or breathing when the razor was drawn across his throat?”

“Yes,” Gotha said quietly. “He told me the man was ‘snoring’ when he cut his throat.”

And Thorn kept cutting.

“
He nearly severed the head from the body with the razor,” Gotha told the jury. Then Thorn went downstairs to Mrs. Nack, who was waiting patiently for him.

“
It’s done,” he said.

“I know,” she replied. “I heard.”

“
He told her,” Gotha continued, “to go away and come back at five that evening.”

With hot water running at full blast, Thorn finished sawing off the head, then sliced away the chest tattoo. He sawed and bundled the legs, the midsection, and the chest—terribly strenuous work, really—then mixed up a basin full of quick-drying plaster and dropped the head in. When it was set into a smooth ball, he washed the tub and floor clean, lit his pipe, and waited for Mrs. Nack to return. They quickly carried their parcels out to the surrey and from there drove it onto the Tenth Street ferry.

“
As the boat neared the slip the passengers walked to the front of the boat,” Gotha explained. “Thorn remained behind with the bundle, and at a signal from Mrs. Nack that everything was all right, and as the boat was entering the slip, it was tossed from the stern.”

The head went overboard as well. But ever the barber, Thorn now had second thoughts—not about the murder, but about his victim’s
hair
.
He fretted that he hadn’t shaved off Guldensuppe’s telltale mustache. But he wasn’t really that worried, because the block of plaster sank instantly.

“They can’t find it,” he boasted to Gotha, adding dismissively, “I don’t care.”

But the bundled arms and chest were different: They
didn’t
sink.

“
I saw by newspaper reports that it was recovered fifteen minutes after I had dropped it from the boat,” Gotha recounted Thorn saying. “Great God, what a fool I was! In the first place, we selected the house in which there was no sewer connection, and in the next place I permitted myself to be persuaded to hurry off to dispose of the bundles before having weighted them. If I had examined the house and seen where the drain led to, it never would have happened that way. I was a fool [in] every way.… I must have been blind, but the woman led me to do some things that I should not have done.”

Among those things, Thorn didn’t include the murder itself. No, Gotha’s friend was angry at the
way
they’d murdered. “I should have weighted the bundles I threw into the river, but Mrs. Nack said no.”

After disposing of the other portions uptown, Nack and Thorn
parted. He pawned the dead man’s clothes and watch for money to hide out, first in the Maloney Hotel, and then for $3 a week in an apartment on Twenty-Fifth Street.

The witness was spent, his story nearly told. The grand jury didn’t need enough evidence to convict Thorn, just enough to determine that he could be tried—and now they’d heard plenty. They conferred while Gotha waited miserably on the stand.

“
Mr. Gotha, I do not want to detain you, because I can see that you suffer,” the jury foreman said in a kindly tone. “You should leave the city and take a long rest.”

Gotha still looked terribly shaken, and he couldn’t help it. His explanation before he was led away was simple and appalling: The murderer’s parting words in the saloon still haunted him.

“Thorn said to me,” he choked out,
“ ‘
I wish to God I had not told you all this.’ ”

In that farewell in the saloon, a realization had crept over John Gotha—one that brought his anguished confessions to his wife, to Inspector O’Brien, and now to this grand jury. From the moment he became Thorn’s sole confidant, he’d also become a marked man. Gotha had been horrified by his friend’s insistence that they meet the next evening, because he’d instantly understood what it meant.

He was to have been Martin Thorn’s next victim.