The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (17 page)

Someone had seen the
World
diving crew draw a slimy white mass out of the water late the afternoon before. The
Herald
believed the
World
had the scoop of the day—literally scooping William Guldensuppe’s head off the bottom of the East River—and that Pulitzer’s henchmen were now concealing the ghastly thing in their editorial offices. In a burst of righteous indignation, the
Herald
called in the police.

Where is it?

The diver had indeed brought up a white chunk of stone the size of a human head, a
World
staffer patiently explained; but rather than the plaster-encrusted remains of William Guldensuppe, it had proven
to be nothing more than a clump of barnacles that had dislodged from the hull of some passing ship.

“To reassure the gentlemen in charge of the
Herald,
” a night reporter replied tartly, “
The World
has not the head of Guldensuppe and would not keep it if it had.”

Yet there was no denying the head’s importance.
Old-timers in the newsroom still recalled “the Kelsey Outrage” of more than twenty years back, when Long Island poet Charles G. Kelsey unwisely wooed a very engaged woman named Julia. She’d set a candle in the window as their sign to meet, but he was seized in her yard by locals armed with tar and feathers, most likely led by Julia’s fiancé, Royal Sammis. After turning the lovelorn poet into a scalding mass of tar, they sent him screaming out into the night, never to be seen again. Julia and Royal married three months later, freed of the bothersome suitor, and everyone lived happily ever after—at least until ten months later, when fishermen pulled Kelsey’s tarred body from Huntington Bay. Or rather, they pulled out the bottom half of it; the top was gone, and his genitals had been hacked off.

As with Guldensuppe, the facts of the Kelsey case seemed clear: The identity of the victim, the perpetrators, and the motive all appeared obvious. There was even the same shock of betrayal: The candle that lured Charles Kelsey was lit deliberately by Julia, who then allegedly watched his tarring. But without a complete body, and with stories floated by the defense of live Kelsey “sightings,”
no jury had been able to convict a single person involved. The whole grisly affair was crudely preserved for decades in a popular turn of phrase—“
as dead as Kelsey’s nuts”—but Royal and Julia Sammis still walked free.

The
assistant DA had been busy insisting to newspapers all day that, history aside, he didn’t particularly need Guldensuppe’s head to secure a conviction. Suspicious that the
World
had beaten the police to the punch, rival papers were glad to repeat the assertion that finding the final piece of Guldensuppe’s body was a mere formality.
HEAD NOT NECESSARY
, the next morning’s
Herald
headline assured readers.

But the small fleet of hired grapplers that gathered at the riverside again that next morning hinted otherwise. Reporters could already
see that not all the other evidence would hold up; Mr. Buala, for one, now claimed
he couldn’t recognize Nack and Thorn as the couple who rented his Woodside house—because, detectives grumbled, he feared a conviction would keep him from being able to rent it out again. These suspicions were not exactly mollified when the annoyed wine merchant stubbornly
attempted to keep the coroner from touching his precious baseboards to retrieve a spent bullet.

The longer Guldensuppe’s head stayed missing, the more the questions would grow around the unthinkable. Could Nack and Thorn really get away with murder?

THE CROWDS WERE ALREADY GATHERING
outside of the Tombs that morning, milling below thick granite walls built to evoke the ancient Egyptian temple of Dendera but instead memorializing every form of corruption bred by modern Manhattan. There were always crowds here: bailsmen, lawyers, police, food hawkers, and fatherless urchins all lurking in and among massive columns carved to look like papyrus stalks.

It was hardly a welcoming spot to linger.
Intended for a city of 300,000, the decrepit pile now served 1.8 million New Yorkers, with three and sometimes four men crammed into cells meant for one. But it had been a cursed place from the beginning, a heap on a swamp. The massive structure had instantly begun to settle, opening fissures from the roof to the foundation,
throwing the stairways akimbo, and letting sewage ooze into the ground floor. Each of its cells measured only six by eight feet, with a single footlong slit facing outside; the darkness inside was perpetual, with gaslights left blazing at all hours, even on ferociously hot July days like this one. Each cell’s narrow cot was shared by two inmates, sleeping head to foot, on sheets changed every six weeks. As prisoners lacked furniture, meals were eaten off
tin plates perched on the rim of a malodorous toilet. Cold and rusty water dribbled from the single bathtub provided for each of its four floors. It was the largest jail in the country, and quite possibly the worst.

A prison commission had condemned the place as “a disgrace to
the city of New York,” which it certainly was, and recommended that “it ought to be immediately demolished”—which, to everyone’s shock, it also was. Workmen were dismantling the fortresslike walls with derricks and tackles, even while the inmates still lived inside. Just a few days earlier a block of granite had tumbled into the streets below, nearly flattening a workman and two young boys. Not content with exerting its malevolence on those within its walls, the Tombs was now threatening those outside, too.

Inside the women’s wing of the prison, amid the infernal clattering of demolition, a
murmur passed among the inmates roaming the hallways and catwalks on their morning constitutionals.

“It’s Mrs. Nack!”

The knots of prostitutes and shoplifters parted to gape as she passed by in a sort of regal procession. A blond-tressed inmate who had already befriended the midwife walked at her side. Carefully arranging the green ribbons atop her black hat, Mrs. Nack was led out by a side entrance and into a waiting streetcar, with reporters and citizenry in pursuit.

Across town, another carriage left police headquarters, followed down Mott Street by a second mass of hundreds of New Yorkers; they converged at the Jefferson Market Courthouse, where Martin Thorn was the first to stand before the crowded room for his arraignment.
Dressed in a black coat and a straw boater, he didn’t know quite where to put himself.

“
Come on up the bridge, Thorn,” the judge said, waving him over to the bar. “You can hear the proceedings better there.”

The courtroom was sweltering and packed with the fan-flapping female curiosity seekers whom the case seemed to attract. With his back to the gallery as he ascended the platform, Thorn took no notice of them at all, or even of himself. The once-dapper barber now sported three days’
stubble, the result of a suicide watch that barred him from shaving.

“
Have you any counsel?” the judge asked.

“No sir,” Thorn replied quietly.

“Do you wish for any counsel?”

“I don’t know anybody.”

It wasn’t the usual response; most murder suspects had previous scrapes with the law to draw on. But Thorn was not a usual case.

“I will send for anyone you wish.”

Thorn didn’t know what to say. He twirled his hat on his finger and looked blankly at the floor.

The door at the back of the courtroom swung open, and the crowd turned to look—everyone, that is, except for Thorn himself. He heard a second prisoner led up to the table next to him, but he did not dare look to see who it was.

“
We appear for Mrs. Thorn,” her lawyer started before correcting himself. “I mean Mrs.
Nack.
”

The courtroom tittered, and Thorn smiled quietly while still staring fixedly ahead. The two moved close together until few in the courtroom could see or hear what happened next: a quick squeeze of their hands. It was exactly two weeks since the alleged murder, and the first time they’d seen each other in more than a week. Mrs. Nack leaned in to her lover and whispered.

“
Shweige still
,” she murmured to him.

OR PERHAPS SHE DIDN’T
. A reporter for the
New Yorker Staats Zeitung
, a paper eminently qualified to eavesdrop on a German defendant, heard this instead:
“
Halt den Mund und Spricht nicht!”
But both messages were the same: Tell them nothing.

“
Mrs. Nack and Martin Thorn refuse to talk,” Hearst mused over the proceedings. “All of which is very strange, considering that she is a woman and he is a barber.”

They had already said plenty, of course, as had their witnesses; the mythologizing of the case had begun. Within hours of the indictment, Hearst had a team assembling
Journal
clippings and reporters’ notes into a 126-page illustrated book titled
The Guldensuppe Mystery
. The instant book hit the streets just days later, as the first title by the newly launched True Story Publishing Company. Naturally, it heaped praise on the
Journal
as a “great newspaper” while calling for the miscreants to be electrocuted.

The city followed that prospect so avidly that New Yorkers even
attempted trying Thorn themselves. One
Lower East Side summer-school teacher found that his charges only wanted to discuss Guldensuppe, and he allowed his bookkeeping course to be turned into a mock trial. The result was covered in the
Times
, which noted that “the bookkeeping lessons quickly dwindled in interest and the full details of the cutting up and hiding of Guldensuppe’s body were gone over by the boys with the greatest relish.” Amid the blackboards and inkwells, “Thorn” and his “attorney”—two eleven-year-old boys—wilted under the aggressive questioning of a roomful of street urchins. Despite an impassioned half-hour-long closing argument by the diminutive attorney, his client was found guilty and sent to the electric chair—which, this being a Manhattan classroom, was simply a
chair
. School trustees were none too pleased when they learned of this extracurricular jurisprudence. Children were sent back to their bookkeeping texts with a stern admonition from the principal:
“I shall permit no more murder trials.”

But it was only to be expected in a city where
masseurs were now slyly referred to as “Gieldensuppers” and where even local vagrants took a wild-eyed interest in the case. One unhinged man, chasing telegram messengers around William Street while shouting obscenities, was dragged off to Bellevue yelling: “
That’s not Thorn the police got! I’m the only original Thorn! I sliced Guldensuppe! I’m a holy terror! All others are imitations!”

In fact, there
was
an imitation Martin Thorn.

THE MURDER OF WILLIAM GULDENSUPPE
, announced signs at the Eden Musée on West Twenty-Third Street. The Eden was the most upscale—or perhaps just the least downscale—of Manhattan’s fabled dime museums. It was
one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations, and its elaborate waxworks could hold its own with Madame Tussaud’s of London. Boasting the world’s largest wax tableaus, and airy recital spaces for visiting Hungarian musicians and Japanese acrobats, it maintained a top-floor workshop that could whip up a body within twenty-four hours from wax, papier-mâché, wig hair, and costumes. Just days after Gotha’s revelations, New Yorkers were lining up on Twenty-Third Street to hasten past old Ajeeb
the Chess Automaton and beyond the impressive new re-creation of a Klondike
gold-rush mining camp. Instead, they ventured down into the famed Chamber of Horrors. Along with its usual exhibitions of the Spanish Inquisition and a “Hindoo Woman’s Sacrifice,” it now housed the
Woodside Horror; the infamous bedroom and bathroom had been painstakingly re-created, complete with Guldensuppe’s decapitated body draining into a bathtub, and a waxen Martin Thorn industriously plastering the severed head.

Over at the Tombs, the prison matron couldn’t help noticing that Augusta Nack was becoming something of a tourist attraction herself. She received a bewildering number of admirers, some bearing bags of oranges and bunches of flowers for the woman who had done away with her beau. One man sent her a letter professing undying love: “
Your face possesses a charm that entrances me,” it rhapsodized. “I wish I could make your acquaintance.… I should long to take you in my arms and give you a thousand kisses.”

The object of his affections snorted in disgust and crumpled the note into a ball. When a group of curiosity seekers arrived begging the prison matron to see a
real
Mrs. Nack, one not made of wax, she became even less amused.

“
I’m no freak,” Mrs. Nack snapped at the matron. “Tell them they can’t come in here and look at me. I’m not on exhibition.”

But then she paused to reconsider. If Eden Musée and the
Journal
made good money off the case, why couldn’t she? The Musée charged fifty cents admission, and surely she could beat their likenesses and their price.

“Wait a moment,” she called to the departing matron. “Tell them they may come in and look as much as they like—
if they’ll pay twenty-five cents apiece.
”