The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (18 page)

Gussie was back in business.

MARTIN
THORN PASSED
the days in cells #29 and #30, a double unit he was crammed into with five other men—all petty offenders, and all chosen to watch the star inmate for suicide attempts. Deprived of that pastime, Thorn resigned himself to
tutoring cell mates in pinochle, a pursuit occasionally interrupted to watch newly arrived
drunks hauled down the stifling cell block. The most entertaining was Johnny
Boylan, who was found collapsed on the Bowery, so weighted down with stolen silverware that he couldn’t walk; when the police collared him, dozens of pieces came crashing out of his jacket. Once Thorn tired of watching these new inmates arrive, he read the newspapers. His own story had traveled across the country and the ocean; even the
Aberdeen Weekly
in Scotland was carrying the headline
THE HORRIBLE MURDER IN NEW YORK
next to yet another announcement of
INTENSE HEAT IN AMERICA
. But there was other news to follow here at home: whisperings that
Japan and Spain were considering an alliance to wrest Hawaii and Cuba from America, rumors of President McKinley allying with England and France to finish the Panama Canal, and
reports of massive strikes by coal miners in Ohio and Indiana. It bothered Thorn that
his own starring role on the front pages meant he’d miss the city elections in the fall; with the five boroughs set to consolidate for the first time under a single mayor, it looked like an entertainingly dirty race.

He’d settled into his routine for a few days when a new cell mate appeared, a smoothly polished
businessman named Horton. It was said that he had been a lawyer, or perhaps an estate agent—nobody was quite sure. In any case, the genial old gent wanted in on the pinochle game.

After a few rounds, Horton looked squarely at Thorn. “Where’s the head?” he asked affably.

Thorn continued regarding his flushes and his next bid. “What head?” he answered coolly.

Another minute passed, and more cards were exchanged.

“Where’s the head?” Horton cheerfully repeated.

The accused murderer gave his opponent a withering look.
“What head?”

Another minute of card play crawled by. Then: “Where’s the head?”

This continued all day long.

And it was, to be fair, a very good question. Captain Schultz’s crews were doggedly working their way up the East River from Tenth to Ninety-Second Street in the largest dredging search operation the city had ever mounted. “
The new industry of finding William
Guldensuppe’s head,” a
Herald
reporter cracked, “is developing rapidly.” Readers in the daily papers lobbed suggestions for locating it—floating
mystically body-homing loaves of black bread with a candle inside, for instance—but the river workers remained as busy and as empty-handed as ever.

A steady stream of bewildering leads poured in throughout the summer. Children proved especially fond of claiming severed head sightings. A boy found a plaster-caked head in Branchport, New Jersey, panicked, and threw it into a local stream. Despite a welter of news stories about “little Tommy Cooper” and his ghastly find, the police couldn’t turn it up again. It took
an intrepid
Herald
reporter to discover why.

“The main fault with the Branchport discovery,” the reporter ventured, “is that there is no such person as Tommy Cooper.”

Three more boys spotted a head floating by the 117th Street Boat-house, but to no avail. Yet another “
decomposed mass” frightened passing ferry passengers and was indeed found to be a head—but of “a large fish.”
A grisly find made in an Upper West Side boardinghouse by a janitor—he ran into the local precinct station screaming, “A head! A head! My god, the head!”—proved to be a med school’s well-polished learning skull. But when a seven-year-old
girl from Woodside found an actual chunk of plaster from a local ditch, matters began to look more promising. The police wasted no time in busting the plaster chunk open.

And it really did contain a head—of cabbage.

Another
Woodside child promptly discovered a brown derby hat with a bullet hole in it—evidence curiously unnoticed by the one thousand other children who had thrashed Woodside’s undergrowth on July 4. Hearst’s and Pulitzer’s men both immediately fell under suspicion of manufacturing the relics.

“
Woodside is undergoing a boom in the agricultural line. They plant plaster casts with cabbage in them, blood-stained clothing, and bullet-perforated hats, and within a day or two they raise a crop of fakes,” jeered the
New York Sun
. “There is more money grubbing for plaster in Woodside than for gold in the Klondike nowadays.”

Another bonanza of plaster fragments found at the scene only made matters worse.

“It is impossible to dig anywhere in Woodside, if one is to take as evidence the results of recent excavations, without striking this product,” the
Sun
continued. “All the town needs to do in order to get good roads is to clear away the upper surface, and there, only two feet or so below, will be found a complete Plaster of Paris pavement.”

Allegations emerged that
someone
—and only two good guesses were needed as to who—had paid a couple of local utility workers a dollar an hour to salt the neighborhood with bogus evidence. It was a brilliantly unscrupulous investment. By the end of August,
Evening Journal
coverage of the case helped vault Hearst’s newly debuted paper to
more than half a million in circulation. It was more than every other evening newspaper combined in New York, and nearly double its circulation from before the first parcel had been hauled onto the Eleventh Street pier.

Yet for all their plaster jokes and deep-sea divers, every newspaper seemed to come to a dead end when it came to finding Guldensuppe’s head. Nor, alas, did pinochle games lull Thorn into giving any hints. His cell mate “Horton” was none other than
Perrin H. Sumner, a colorful con known in newsrooms as “the Great American Identifier.” In his three-decade career Sumner had
nearly bankrupted an Indiana college,
run Florida real estate swindles,
fleeced would-be fiancées,
passed off worthless mining stock, and—in his finest moment—
descended on the Bellevue morgue to identify an unclaimed suicide as a mythical Englishman named Edgar. Sumner and two confederates buried the fellow and wept over the grave of their “friend,” while producing documents to prove they’d inherited his fabulous estate; the promised riches would presumably lure greedy women and gullible investors. Instead, the whole affair earned Sumner nothing more than his immortal nickname. Jailed for yet another con job, he’d talked the DA into putting him in Thorn’s cell to pry out the location of the head.

That hadn’t worked either.

The grapplers and Professor Witthaus’s lab were the two lagging
investigations left; the
professor spent July embarrassingly tied up in divorce proceedings, and the crews continued to toil thanklessly in the East River. Witthaus was the first to announce a result: The spots on the floorboards in Woodside were
human blood, he declared, and the grisly sediment in the house’s plumbing was a mix of blood and plaster of paris. As for the grapplers, they had nothing to announce, but they still expected to get paid. That August the city was hit with
a whopping dredging bill—and while the incorruptible chief of the Detective Bureau had gambled that finding the head would justify the heavy cost, he hadn’t built a network of cronies willing to overlook an expensive failure. Lacking Guldensuppe’s head, Acting Inspector Stephen
O’Brien lost his own: He was relieved of his post the following week.

“
I HAVE BEEN DESCRIBED
in a paper as a ‘murderess,’ ” the prisoner mused. She shot a significant look toward the
World
reporter visiting her cell. “Do you, young man, think that I have that appearance?”

No, he quickly assured Augusta Nack—she didn’t look like a murderess at all.

“It did not seem,” the reporter assured readers, “that her facial expressions were those of a fiendish woman.” To the contrary: Manhattan’s most famous prisoner had “a sparkle in her eyes,” not to mention a “finely modeled neck” and “very fine white teeth.” He complimented the low collar on her black wrap, and well he might; Augusta Nack was granting the
World
the first full interview since her arrest.

“Wait a moment and I will get you a chair.” She ushered the reporter into her cell. “We can sit in this corner.”

She’d agreed to talk, she explained as they sat down, because the
World
was the one paper that had treated her fairly. The rivalry between Pulitzer and Hearst was such that now they’d even taken opposing prisoners; thanks to the early doubts that
World
reporters had thrown on the
Journal
’s accusations against Mrs. Nack, they were the closest thing she had to a friend in the press. The quiet and brooding Thorn, on the other hand, was a confirmed
Journal
reader, and when he talked much at all, it was generally to Hearst reporters.

“I will cheerfully tell my life story to the
World,
” Mrs. Nack announced. “All the others have condemned me.”

The reporter joined in her indignation as he looked around her quarters. Mrs. Nack had settled into the Tombs over the course of the summer. True, she’d complained about the bad food in her first days there, and was shocked by the sight of women smoking—“a most degrading habit,” she complained—but then she wised up fast. She was the undisputed queen of the cell block by one simple strategy: The quarters she charged from curious visitors and female well-wishers went to buying coffee and cake for her fellow prisoners. Short of a good lawyer, a berth alongside Augusta Nack was the best luck a Tombs woman could hope for.

She felt for these women, Nack wanted the
World
reporter to know—for she too had suffered a hard lot in life. She was a deeply wronged woman. Herman Nack, she claimed, was a drunkard who had abused her terribly.

“Shortly after my baby was born he seemed to become more abusive.” She shuddered. In the few spare moments when he wasn’t ordering her around their home in Germany, she’d bettered herself by studying for a midwifery degree. “A short time after I received my diploma, we decided to come to New York.” This had only made matters worse.

“I first made the discovery that, in addition to being cruel and neglectful, he was unfaithful to me.” She sighed. “I caught him several times in our house with strange women.” In lieu of contrition, Augusta recalled bitterly, Herman beat her and made her sleep in the cellar.

“I made up my mind to leave him. I considered that living the life of a slave was paradise compared to living with that man.”

And that, she pleaded, was why
World
readers—especially women readers—had to understand that her story was not about a murdered man, but about a wronged woman. “I ask those women who are happy and who have good, true husbands and pleasant families and happy homes, not to judge me too harshly,” she pleaded. Her concern wasn’t with the murder—
there had been no murder
—but with how people viewed her leaving her brutish husband. She was drawn to Guldensuppe because of his tenderness. Was that so wrong?

“He was kind and indulgent of me in every way,” she declared passionately, “and I do not feel that I am deserving of blame that I grew to love him.”

She did not mention Martin Thorn.

Mrs. Nack stood up and excused herself—it was time, she explained, for her to crochet. Also, she’d have to make time for her devotions; she was a pious woman, she explained, and “never a day goes by that I do not pray to God.” But she knew those prayers would soon be answered. As long as the police and the DA couldn’t find a head for the body in the Bellevue morgue, she could insist that it didn’t belong to her boyfriend. Even if they’d argued and fallen out, Willie would surely come back to save her.

“There is no doubt in my mind that William Guldensuppe is alive today.” She smiled. “I know he will turn up soon and clear me of this horrible suspicion.”

The story of Augusta Nack’s life, it seemed, was not a sordid crime drama; it was a love story.

WHEN THE DELIVERYMAN SHAMBLED
unannounced into the district attorney’s office on Centre Street, it wasn’t to drop off a package.

I’m going to tell you everything
, Herman Nack told the astounded prosecutor.

Assistant DA Ed
Mitchell hastily sent for a stenographer as he guided the gruff bakery employee into his office. Clutching his battered homburg, Herman Nack was none too pleased at spending a day off on anything besides beer or bowling, but Gussie’s
World
interview had been nagging at him.

“
She said lots of bad things about me,” he groused. “I wanted to tell what I knew about her just to get square.”

Herman was a man ill used by the case: attacked in the street by
Journal
reporters, briefly jailed as the prime suspect, his failed marriage paraded before the nation. Now the
World
was calling him a vicious brute. He’d just wanted to be left alone, but after biting his tongue for two months, he could keep silent no more. Still, he insisted he didn’t want to get into any trouble.