The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (16 page)

“
GOING FISHING?”
the small boy asked.

The crews swaggered past him and the swelling crowd along East Tenth Street, pulled their gear out from a tangled mass of ropes and hooks along the foot of the pier, then boarded the police launches gathered by the riverside.
These were naphtha boats—steamboats that vaporized petroleum instead of water, which made for quick starts and fiery wrecks—and the men were
grapplers, salvagers who worked the docks to drag the riverbed for dropped casks of wine, crates of oysters, and the occasional lost anchor.

This job was a little different.
A couple of dozen grapplers had been rounded up, and policemen joined them on six launches. Rather than the usual draglines, they were deploying long rakes with splayed-out tines, and peculiar ice-tong implements that bristled with metal teeth. The riverside crowd knew exactly what these specialized tools were for.

“
Three cheers for Guldensuppe!” yelled a spectator. “Rah! Rah! Rah!”

Captain Schultz of the harbor police ushered newsmen aboard his launch and maneuvered midstream to demonstrate his men at work. The imperturbable Schultz was in a droll mood. He liked reporters, and his grisly specialty in body dragging meant that he was always good for the darkest humor in town.

“
Heads you win, tails you lose!” yelled a wag from onshore.

Schultz smiled and directed the reporters’ attention to rivermen
tossing lines into the water on the approach to the ferry slip. Finding a plaster-encased head would be no challenge for them.

“
These men know how to find and pick up a gold watch,” he boasted. “With their hooks down at the river’s bottom, they can feel anything that they come in contact with as well as if they had their fingers on it.”

A series of splashes echoed across the water; police looked up and shook their heads in exasperation.
Street urchins were stripping off and swimming out from the riverbank, their gamine bodies diving among the rakes and hooks to try to touch bottom.
The riverbed was a good twenty-five feet down, though, so all they were doing was getting in the way.

“
Something’s caught!” yelled a grappler. “I’ve got something!”

The mass of New Yorkers onshore whooped as the men on the launch swiftly and steadily pulled the line up to reveal … a waterlogged black overcoat.

“Try a fine tooth comb!” jeered an onlooker.

The hooks and rakes had no sooner splashed back into the murky waters of the East River when the
William E. Chapman
, a wrecker steamboat,
came chugging up the channel and dropped anchor. A man could be seen emerging onto the deck in a comically outsized diving suit, climbing over the gunwales onto a ladder, then pausing while two crew members rigged up a massive brass helmet.

The
World
was now conducting its
own
search.

The
Journal
had
already run an operation with hooks a week earlier, an expensive stunt that hadn’t yielded them much copy. But on this morning the
Journal
was completely upstaged. In a flash of brilliance, Pulitzer’s crew had gone beyond mere grappling hooks and hired
veteran deep-sea diver Charles Olsen. He was a survivor of the generation that had discovered the bends while doing underwater work on the pilings of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bottom of the East River, the grizzled diver explained to a
World
reporter on board the steamer, remained a treacherous place for divers.

“Unless you catch the tides just right, it is impossible to keep on your feet,” he warned. Still, he thought the search might be a short
one. “In my opinion, the head, in its plaster of paris casing, would sink just the same as a big, round stone. I don’t think the tide would change its position.”

If they followed the route of the ferry, Olsen suggested, they’d get Guldensuppe’s head. Two assistants then screwed his helmet on tightly, checked the rubber hose leading into his suit, and set to work operating the air pump on deck. Olsen waited until the red Diver Down flag had been raised atop the steamer. Then he clumped down the ladder in his weighted boots, paused, and disappeared below the surface with a mighty splash.

Over on the police launches, the dredging proceeded at a painstaking pace; they were combing each inch of the riverbed. The grapplers might well have had the talent to find a sunken gold watch, but so far
all they were pulling up were stones and tin cans. Meanwhile, the steamer crew paid out more and more of the
130 feet of rubber hose to Olsen’s diving suit, receiving nothing in return but an occasional bubble of air on the surface. The prospect of finishing in mere hours was now fading.

But what the police didn’t see as they toiled away was the slightest of movements on a signal rope leading up the
World
’s steamboat—a wordless series of tugs. Quietly, the
World
crew began raising Olsen as he relayed his message up the length of rope.

He’d found something.

THE DOOR
of the narrow three-story brick boardinghouse on 235 East Twenty-Fifth Street opened to two Manhattan detectives waiting on the steps.

Stolen property
, they explained to Mrs. Hoven, the pretty young widow who ran the home. They’d come to examine the room of a gentleman who had checked in the week before; he was believed to have pawned some ill-gotten clothing and possibly a watch as well. She knew exactly who they meant—though, she confessed with some embarrassment, she did not actually know his
name
.

“A week ago yesterday at about ten o’clock,” she recalled, leading
the detectives upstairs, “a stranger rang my doorbell and asked me if I had any furnished rooms to rent. I told him that I had, and invited him into the house.”

But curiously, he had another question as he came inside.

“
Do you recognize me?” he’d inquired rather searchingly.

“No, I can’t say that I do,” she’d admitted after a long pause.

“Why,” he claimed airily as he stepped inside, “I was a great friend of your husband’s.”

Her late husband had known many people in his job as a hotel cook, she explained to the detectives. After his death three years earlier, Mrs. Hoven had resorted to managing a residence house where she and her two young children lived. She hadn’t attached much significance to the question; the boarder, however, seemed unperturbed that she didn’t recognize him—relieved, even.

“I showed him first a hall bedroom,” she recalled. “He was not satisfied with it. It was too small. Then I took him to the front room on the second floor. He liked that one very much, and immediately engaged it. He paid me three dollars in advance.”

By the time she thought to ask his name, though, he’d already locked his valise and his walking stick—his only apparent possessions—in his new room and left for the day.

She opened up the room to the detectives. He was a peculiar boarder, she admitted. When she went to clean his room, she couldn’t help noticing that he was neat—a little
too
neat. Everything was always left packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

“He never left a scrap, not so much as a hair brush around,” she marveled. “You could only tell he had been in the room by the condition of the bed.”

Unlike a hotel, where a fellow was far too easy to trace through the register, this sort of room was a fine place for hiding in and leaving quickly. Here, at one of the thousands of residence houses in Manhattan, one could be safely obscure. Even the landlady herself never saw him again after their first meeting.

“He used to come in late at night after the rest of us had gone to bed.” She shrugged. “He would leave the home early in the morning before we were out of bed.”

As promised,
there was nothing inside the room but the walking stick and the valise. The detectives opened the latter carefully, as if wary that they might find something more than just clothing inside. Yet at the top of the case was an entirely ordinary and spartan set of possessions: a brush, a comb, trousers, socks, and shoes. But then,
from the mysterious boarder’s bag, there tumbled out something else:
copy after copy of murder coverage from the
World
, the
Journal
, and the
Herald
.

THE NEWSPAPERS RELISHED
their continuing role in the drama. When Augusta Nack’s lawyer visited her cell with a newspaper announcing Thorn’s arrest, her startled exclamation of “
My God!” was gleefully illustrated by a
Journal
artist who showed her dropping the evening edition in horror. Now the
Journal
approvingly noted its presence in Thorn’s valise, claiming that he had done little in his hideout but pore over the “morning, afternoon, and evening” editions of their paper.

Thorn would have plenty to read in the latest issues. A reporter accompanying Professor Witthaus and the coroner for yet another examination of the Woodside cottage
witnessed them discovering a bullet hole in a baseboard, and claimed to find a second bullet that had entered into the lath of a wall. To top it all off, the paper ran an illustration of “
Blood Spots on Martin Thorn’s Undershirt,” drawn so that Thorn himself appeared to be coming straight at
Journal
readers, thrillingly ready to decapitate them. Thankfully, Hearst declared,
“the
Evening Journal
’s pen and pencil” had stopped him in his tracks. “And the police,” he generously allowed, “for once deserve unstinted praise for having made Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Bucket look tardy.”

The
World
played the skeptic; it complained that “
a nail made the bullet hole” found by the
Journal
and inconveniently noted that Inspector O’Brien denied the bloody undershirt even
existed
. Yet among its plentiful complaints—and even more plentiful ads for Cowperthwait’s Reliable Carpets and Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Pellets, for business was rolling in now—the
World
also boasted the best coverage of
O’Brien’s interrogations and Gotha’s ruse. Following up a disquieting comment by Gotha that Thorn had secretly joined the crowds at the morgue to admire his own handiwork, a
World
reporter discovered that
Thorn did indeed resemble a man who’d walked up to Dr. O’Hanlon during the first autopsy.

“Horrible case, isn’t it?” the man had said. And then, to O’Hanlon’s surprise, the visitor had pointed out a collarbone stab wound—one so well hidden in the lacerated flesh as to be invisible to the untrained eye. But before the startled doctor could remark on this, the mysterious man had melted back into the crowd.

If Thorn couldn’t help admiring his own handiwork in the morgue and in the press, then it was no accident that the
Herald
was the third newspaper found in his valise. A cut above the
Journal
and the
World
, it was the one quality newspaper to throw serious resources at the case. Before the arrival of Pulitzer, the
Herald
had been the city’s colossus, with a circulation of more than 190,000. Under the boisterous editorship of celebrated bon vivant “Commodore” Bennett, it had cavorted with the best of them; along with a splendid
1874 hoax claiming escaped circus tigers were roaming Manhattan, it had also pulled off the greatest publicity coup in journalistic history when it sent reporter Henry Stanley in search of Dr. David Livingstone.

Those glories were long past, and
Herald
circulation had fallen to a distant third behind the yellow papers, but it could still land a scoop or two. Gotha’s fears of Thorn, they discovered, were frighteningly justified. Another acquaintance had heard
Thorn pondering aloud how one might lure, say,
some fellow
into Mount Morris Park, shoot him in the head, and then arrange the body to make it look like a suicide. Gotha was precisely the sort of depressive man whose apparent suicide would have evaded suspicion—and the park was just a few blocks from where Thorn had arranged to meet him. The plot was a chilling coda to Guldensuppe’s murder, and the
Herald
had uncovered it before anyone else—including the police.

In fact, one could pretty well gauge a newspaper’s health by how well it was covering the case. Galloping to the top of the circulation pile was Hearst’s brash
Journal
, pulling ahead of Pulitzer’s
World;
behind them, with still solid coverage, were the
Herald
, the
Staats
Zeitung
, and the quietly industrious
Times
. Lagging with lackluster stories were the ailing
Tribune
and the once mighty
Sun
, as well as scrappy but outgunned titles like the
Evening Telegram
and the
Press;
while the
Telegram
tried to lure readers with a Free Trip to the Klondike promotion, the latter was
reduced to profiling the Woodside duck who broke the case. (“It is an ordinary duck,” their hapless writer concluded.) At the bottom of the heap were the has-beens that could scarcely plagiarize yesterday’s newspapers—the
Mail and Express
, the
Commercial Advertiser
, and the scrawny
New York Post
.

But buzzing along Newspaper Row late on the night of July 8 was a rumor that the
World
was about to leap ahead of them all with the biggest of breaks—one that might instantly upend the investigation.

IT WAS ONE A.M
. when
detectives marched into the
World
offices.

Where is it?

The rewrite and layout men, finishing their final late shifts for the next morning’s July 9 issue, were the picture of innocence. Why, they were busy preparing a story on
Mr. Valentine’s turnip giveaway, where the local merchant gave away 171 barrels of last year’s crop—lovely, fine specimens they were, too—because the vegetables just weren’t selling. There’d almost been a riot on North Moore among paupers coming to get them; one poor man plain fainted on the sidewalk while trying to roll his barrel of turnips home, and … Where was what?

Where’s the head?