The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (24 page)

THE MEN WHO STEPPED OFF
the
Long Island Rail Road’s special jury car the next morning
held ordinary jobs; there were three farmers, three oystermen, a grocer, a saloon keeper, a janitor, a street contractor, a real estate agent, and a floor waxer. They weren’t used to
this sort of fuss, or to the courthouse crowds that parted before them and their escort of deputies. The twelve men trudged down a long marble hallway punctuated by
a warning sign from the sheriff:

Led by their genially rotund foreman, Jacob Bumstead, the jurors were dutifully silent, if still a bit groggy. The farmers had stayed up until midnight talking crop forecasts and fretting over their livestock—“I’m afraid something’ll happen to the brindle cow while I’m away,” one said with a sigh. “Best milker for miles around, that cow.” The others had warded off thoughts of the case by playing cards over cigars and cider, then
puzzling over the newfangled electrical switches in their hotel rooms.

But now it was time.

The deputies pushed open the door, and twelve men filed into their jury box, their footsteps echoing in the nearly empty room. Bumstead settled in heavily against one front corner of the box; Magnus Larsen, a rather pained-looking road builder from Norway, took the other. The silence around them did not last for long: A
janitor was still sweeping out clouds of dust when the first spectators poured through the gallery doors, clutching
precious white slips that read “PASS ONE.” The upper galleries filled with men and women talking excitedly, while down in the arena entered DA Youngs and Counsel Howe, along with their scores of accompanying journalists. Youngs was still looking a bit uncomfortable in his skin—he’d
only just gotten over a neck rash—but Howe, in his yachting cap, helmed his custom-built table as if he were setting sail for the West Indies. The reporters duly noted the
flower in Howe’s lapel that day—a pink rose—and sat, as if at a county fair, guessing at the volume of gems on his person. “
About a half-pint of diamonds,” one
Times
reporter hazarded.

There was other guesswork going on, too: A
Herald
man was keeping track of the betting pools on whether or not Thorn would get the chair. But Howe wasn’t having any of it. “Just you watch. Martin Thorn will be a free man,” he grandly assured reporters, slapping his client on the shoulder. He wasn’t worried at all, not even by an
anonymous note that warned:
The yellow journals have a plant on the jury
. Well, just looking at the jury box quickly dismissed that theory. These were not exactly men of the world: One of them dealt with courtroom drafts by sitting with a handkerchief atop his bald head.

“
Hear ye! Hear ye!”
cried the court clerk. The old-fashioned formalities, it seemed, were still used in Queens. Howe and Youngs shook hands, and the DA promptly began his attack.

“
This is one of the most remarkable crimes of the century,” Youngs announced to the hushed room. “One of the most widely advertised in the world.”

But now, he said, it was time to examine the facts.

“
Somewhere
, at
some
time, by
somebody
a most terrible tragedy has been enacted,” he began. “Was this a crime? And if so, who were
the actors in it?” Youngs paced the floor of the courthouse, looking searchingly at the jurors.

“The person alleged to have been murdered is William Guldensuppe, the place a cottage in Woodside, the time June 25, 1897, and the man accused of the murder sits there.” He swung out his arm and pointed at the prisoner,
sitting just a few feet away.
“Martin Thorn.”

The accused returned his gaze coolly, with scarcely a flicker of his eyes.

“The evidence will be mainly circumstantial,” Youngs continued. “A murderer of this kind does not seek the broad highway for the place of his crime, but we shall show you link after link of evidence that will bind Thorn in a fatal embrace.

“Mind you,” he added, “the head is still missing.”

Youngs gave the jury a quick recounting of the case—the love triangle, the fatal cottage in Woodside, the body cut in four, the head forever hidden in plaster—and he turned to the jury box.

“
Where
is Guldensuppe?” he asked warmly. “He was well known to many. The great newspapers of the country have published his pictures.” The roomful of reporters basked in his momentary attention. “There are few people in the East that have not seen a picture of the missing man. If he were alive, hundreds of witnesses would be produced by the defense to prove it.
He has never been seen since he entered that cottage with Mrs. Nack.
”

And they, the jury, would not be fooled.

“You have been selected with great care,” the DA assured them, at last returning to the prosecution team’s table. All eyes turned to Howe and Thorn.

“I shall also prove”—here Youngs suddenly leapt back up from his seat like a billy goat—“that Guldensuppe ‘snored’ in the bathtub
even after Thorn had begun to turn the knife.
”

The men visibly shuddered. The trial of Martin Thorn had truly begun.

WHEN YOUNGS CALLED
his first witness, the
air in the room had already grown foul again, and it was about to get worse. Youngs slipped
on black rubber gloves and produced a piece of red oilcloth. He hesitated before passing it to a court officer. The officer, he suggested, should wear gloves, too.

“It is
covered in blood
,” Youngs explained, “and if you have a cut on your hand, it might be dangerous.”

John McGuire was called to the stand; the fifteen-year-old boy had
picked out some friends of his in the gallery and was grinning broadly at them. He’d already been
signing autographs at just fifty cents a pop on their new copies of the latest Old Cap. Collier dime novel:
The Headless Body Murder Mystery
.

The prosecutor briskly turned the boy’s attention to more serious matters.

“
Where were you shortly after one o’clock last June twenty-sixth?” he asked.

“I was at the foot of Eleventh Street,” the teenager replied. “East River.”

“Did you see anything?”

“I seen a bundle a block away from there in the water,” McGuire answered earnestly. “I showed it to Jack McKenna. He swam out and got it and brought it in. There was a wrapping of brown paper, and then a wrapping of oilcloth, and then a wrapping of cheesecloth with a bloodstain on it.”

An attendant held a creased and fetid piece of red-and-gold oilcloth up to the boy.

“Was this the oilcloth?”

“Yes.”

His friend Jack McKenna proved to be a saucer-eyed twelve-year-old with none of Johnny’s bravado, and unsure whether Judge Smith or Counsel Howe was in charge of the courtroom.

“What was in the bundle?” the prosecutor asked him gently.

“The upper part of a human body, with arms and hands on it,” the boy stammered. “There was no head.”

The prosecution team shuffled through a stack of morgue photographs that lay on the exhibit table, one observer marveled, “
like a ghastly pack of cards,” and plucked out a grisly shot of the severed thorax.

“
Is this the part of the body found by you?”

“Yes, sir.”

His turn over, the boy gratefully bounded away, and Howe stood up to cross-examine Officer James Moore, the first policeman on the scene.

“Some portion of the breast was removed. How deep was the incision?”

“I can’t say, exactly,” the policeman replied modestly.

“Were any bones splintered?” Howe pressed.

“I can’t say.”

“How was the head severed?”

“I don’t know.”

“How was the lower part severed?”

“I can’t tell that, either.”

Wasn’t it possible, Howe reasoned, that the head might have been eaten off by fish? There was surely a reasonable explanation for everything the boys found. The prosecution team was rather more skeptical; fish, after all, did not know how to bundle parcels and tie knots.

“A piece of rope was found by the oilcloth in the dock?” the DA asked.

“Yes,” the officer replied.

“I object!” Howe pounced. “That’s immaterial. There’s plenty of rope around the docks, isn’t there, Officer?”

“
I
object,” the prosecutor snapped back.

“
Please
don’t,” Howe sighed theatrically, and his audience guffawed.

The witnesses proceeded at a brisk pace, with Herbert Meyer and his little brother, Edgar, called up to recount finding the second package in the woods by the Harlem River. One
Telegram
writer dryly observed that the younger child, a towheaded boy still in knickerbocker pants, possessed “a voice entirely out of proportion to his size.”

“
He is a good little boy,” Howe said, smiling indulgently at the bemused jury.

“
Was there any one else there but your brother and your father?” the prosecutor dutifully went on to ask the older brother.

“Yes,”
Edgar replied.

The defense and prosecution alike looked up, startled; nobody had heard
this
before. In the youthful logic of the two Meyer children, it may simply have been that nobody had ever asked them that precise question. Martin Thorn, whose foot had been swinging impatiently under his chair, suddenly froze.

“A man jumped out of the bushes,” Edgar prattled on diligently, “and asked me about the blackberries, saying they weren’t ripe. I told him they were
raspberries
, and—”

“Do you see that man in the court?” the prosecutor interrupted.

Edgar looked all around the room, sweeping his gaze back and forth several times as the crowd held its breath.

“No, sir,” he said finally.

Martin Thorn exhaled and allowed his foot to fidget again.

Officer Collins of the Brooklyn Navy Yard stepped up to identify the legs, but the rows of newspapermen paid particular attention when a more familiar officer took to the stand: newly promoted Detective Sergeant Arthur Carey, the very first to track the oilcloth in the case. Carey was a sharp dresser: In his silk-faced Prince Albert jacket, left rakishly unbutt
oned, he might have been the only witness to risk outshining Counsel Howe.

Carey nonchalantly handled the dirty piece of oilcloth. He’d carried another swatch all over the city while looking for fabric dealers and was unfazed by the grisly evidence.

“What did you subsequently do with the piece you retained?” the prosecutor asked.

I matched it to the other one at the morgue
, Carey explained, waving the oilcloth about. A deathly stench wafted from the bloody scrap.

“Please, don’t move it any more than you
have
to,” Howe winced from the defense table. “You ought to have more consideration for our health.”

Judge Smith agreed; the air was so bad that he adjourned for lunch. Or, at least, what lunch they still had an appetite for: Magnus Larsen, whose
corner seat in the jury box was right next to the exhibit table,
looked like he was about to turn green.

——

THE AFTERNOON’S FIRST WITNESS
was a morgue keeper named
Isaac Newton—a gaunt, severe fellow who failed to see anything funny about his name. He’d been in the job for more than a year and had handled some 7,000 bodies in that time. The DA’s office, though, was only interested in one.

“
Did you see these three portions together and take any measurements?” he was asked on the stand.

“Yes.”

“Did the pieces fit?”

“I object!”
Howe bellowed.

“This would seem to be a question for an expert, and this witness is hardly qualified,” Judge Smith agreed.

“We intend, Your Honor, to show that this is a misfit,” Howe explained, and Thorn nodded his vigorous agreement. The beaming defense counsel, his thick watch chain swinging around and his eyes alight, turned to Newton for cross-examination. “Have you these pieces of a body in your possession?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“As I understand”—Howe leaned in—“they have been pickled, or whatever the process is, and are as yet intact?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They could be
brought
here?” the lawyer asked with unfeigned delight.

“Oh yes, sir,” the morgue keeper agreed, a little puzzled. “I suppose so.”

“There!” Howe crowed. “I shall object to
any
evidence by this witness, or
any
identification of photographs, on the ground that the body itself is available and is the best possible evidence.”

The crowd, packed into the airless courthouse, wasn’t sure whether to be delighted or horrified by this prospect—or both. And, Howe reminded them, there had been false identifications at the morgue before; indeed, just recently a woman had identified her husband at the Bellevue morgue, only to have him turn up very much alive at home the next day.

“Many visitors have called at the morgue since you were there.…
Were you there when some persons from Virginia said the body was that of Edwards, a photographer?”

“Object!”
Youngs cried.

“Overruled.” The judge waved it off. “Proceed.”

“I don’t remember the circumstance,” Newton replied.

“You see Mr. Moss here?” Howe pointed to another lawyer at the defense table. “You don’t
remember
him coming with an order to show the body?”

“Yes,” the morgue keeper admitted slowly.

“I see in this photograph—I don’t know whether it is the
original,
” Howe muttered contemptuously as he shuffled through the gory stack on the exhibit table, “that the great toe overlaps the next. Have you seen that condition in others?”

“Yes.”

“How many?” Howe demanded.

“I don’t
know
,” Newton snapped.

“Fifty?”

“I never kept count.”

“Then forty-nine? Thirty?”

“Well, very likely.”

And then there were, Howe mused, the other famed distinguishing characteristics of the body—five in all, including a mole and a small scar from a finger infection, or a “felon.”