The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (33 page)

But they hadn’t anticipated William Howe.

Much of the
hotel bill consisted of the usual pettiness—a ten-cent charge marked “Listerine,” a twenty-five-cent charge when a juror borrowed a quarter for a poker game—and a few luxuries as well. Thorn’s trained eye had also been right about the jury’s newfound grooming; they’d run up an impressive $30 barber bill. But it was something else that caught his defense counsel’s eye. The jurors had mown down more than $80 worth of booze and cigars in a single night—and many other evenings as well. The Good Thing Club, it seemed, was a little too much of a good thing.

Intoxication!
Howe bellowed. The jury was incompetent to render a verdict, he declared, on account of their disgraceful state of
inebriation. District Attorney Youngs, flabbergasted, quickly rounded up the jurors and their guards in his office and demanded affidavits.

“
I saw no wine drunk,” insisted Captain Methven. “They were allowed to have a bottle of beer or ale and cigars for dinner, but that’s all.”

One juror allowed that maybe they
did
have wine—but just a single glass.

“I saw only
one
glass of wine while I was there, and that was when I was sick,” a much-recovered Magnus Larsen said primly before quickly adding, “I don’t care for it anyway.” The other jurors admitted to a little more. Maybe there were some other drinks, too—a glass or two—some Bass beer, a blackberry cordial, maybe Jamaican ginger for a bad stomach. But they’d absolutely been quite sober in the courtroom.

When Martin Thorn reported back to the courthouse on Friday, December 3, several jurors joined the crowd of reporters and spectators to hear his sentencing. It took all of eight minutes, for the county still pointedly regarded the entire matter as settled.

“
Prisoner, arise,” commanded the court clerk.

Judge Maddox gazed solemnly on his audience, then read slowly from his finding.

“Thorn,” he began, “you are indicted for having deliberately designed and caused the death of William Guldensuppe. You have had a fair trial—defended most ably by an astute lawyer; by counsel, indeed, who could not have done more than they did for you.” Howe’s expression remained stoic; his fight was not over yet. “A jury found you guilty of murder in the first degree,” the judge continued. “The punishment for that crime is death.”

Thorn’s face paled slightly, but he remained motionless.

“Reflect upon it,”
Judge Maddox instructed, his voice lowered. “Reflect upon your past. Reflect upon the death of him who you have slain.”

From the press tables, the reporters maintained a steady whisper of pencil points against paper and telegraph forms, and the crowd held its breath as Maddox straightened himself for the final pronouncement.

“The judgment of the court,” he announced, “is that you shall be taken to the place from whence you came, and thence to the state prison in Sing Sing. There judgment shall be executed, and you shall be put to death according to law, in the manner provided by law, in the week beginning January tenth.”

Martin Thorn had just five weeks left to live.

WHEN THE CONDEMNED MAN
opened his eyes the next morning, it was still dark outside.

Six o’clock.

Thorn sat up on his jail cot, padded the short distance across the cold floor of his cell, and began smoothing out the creases in his trousers and brushing clean the only outfit he had left—a black coat, a shirt with a standing collar, and his blue polka-dotted cravat.

Breakfast
, his jailer announced, and slid in his tray.

Thorn didn’t much feel like eating; he dangled the morsels above his dog, and watched as Bill Baker snapped and pranced at them. When Captain Methven and Sheriff Doht arrived at the cell at seven-fifteen, Thorn was ready. He pulled on his thin summer coat, asked for his fedora—they couldn’t find it, and gave him an old battered alpine hat instead—and then
he turned to his dog. Bill Baker paused from pouncing repeatedly at a steam grate and tilted his head quizzically as his master was led away from the cell. “Good-bye, Bake,” the man called back.

It was the only farewell Thorn made that morning.

There were
two inches of slush and snow on the ground outside, and as the trio walked out to the Jackson Avenue streetcar in the darkness,
Thorn slid on the ice; only Methven’s beefy hand, manacled to his, kept him from hitting the sidewalk. He hadn’t been outside much in the previous five months, and he had no winter clothes. When they reached the Thirty-Fourth Street ferry, he was shivering. The cabin of the boat was warmer but no more welcoming: The morning commuters immediately recognized the chained passenger, and once they reached the other side of the river a growing crowd was following him.

It’s him
, word shot across Grand Central Depot. The vast space—the marble colonnades, the luggage wagons being loaded for the Waldorf Astoria, the morning shoppers clutching Charles & Company praline bags—it all seemed to contract around the three men. The
crowd was pressing on Thorn and his two jailers and into the scrum of
World, Journal
, and
Telegram
reporters that already surrounded them.
You must intervene
, they beseeched the station police, who then pushed the mob back into the onrush of commuters. But as Methven and Doht picked up smoking-car tickets for the next train
—three for the 8:05 smoker
—the masses cascaded wildly into adjacent lines, buying ticket after ticket to Sing Sing.

“
They all want to see you,” a
World
reporter marveled aloud. Thorn allowed himself a small smile as he was yanked by a manacled hand toward the train platform.

Inside the smoking carriage, the seats were crammed with onlookers, and there was nothing the conductor could do about it; they had bought tickets, after all. Even more were pressing their faces up against the glass where Thorn took a window seat on the left side of the carriage; it took another sweep of patrolmen to clear the un-ticketed gawkers off the platform. Thorn stared down, his hat pulled nearly over his eyes.

Cigar?
Captain Methven offered.

Thorn shook his head; he wasn’t interested. The train pulled forward with a jerk as the couplings tightened, and the last of the pursuing crowd pulled away; here, among the smaller crowd of gawkers who had bought their smoker tickets, Thorn at last looked up and watched as the landscape of the Hudson Valley slid by.

The reporters and sketch artists, sitting across from Thorn and his jailers, tried drawing him out: What were his thoughts on Mrs. Nack? But the prisoner wouldn’t respond. Another tried a more clever opening: What did he think of the city elections a few weeks earlier?

“I wish that Tammany won,” Thorn admitted. “I’d have voted for that ticket.”

The thought seemed to depress his spirits further as he stared back out the train window. Captain Methven made a gruff attempt to cheer him up.

“Say, Martin.” Methven nudged his prisoner. “Wouldn’t you like to have your dog up here? He’ll be lonely in jail.”

“Yes.” Thorn brightened a little. “If you will send him.”

A
World
reporter quietly shook his head; maybe Methven and his prisoner didn’t know Sing Sing well, but he’d accompanied condemned men there before, and he knew they’d never let Bill Baker into that place.

The train pulled up to Ossining station, where a second crowd had gathered. Thorn was hustled into a waiting hackney cab and past the onlookers, through the outskirts of the small town, and to the great stone gate that marked the entrance of Sing Sing. On the road in, crews of convicts in striped outfits worked in the freezing cold, breaking rocks and raking gravel under the gaze of men holding Winchester rifles.

His journey was almost over.

THERE WERE HUNDREDS
of them out in the cold the next morning in Manhattan—and then thousands. They’d all read the newspaper accounts of Thorn’s trip to Sing Sing, and then caught the notice beneath:
William Guldensuppe’s viewing to-day, 115 East Third Street
.

The block of Third Street between First Avenue and Avenue A had never lacked for strange stories: At one end,
a piano maker’s wife had thrown herself from the top of a building; at the other was the home of a
man recently arrested for assisting a high diver’s illegal leap from the Brooklyn Bridge. The diver, as it happened, had not fared any better than the piano maker’s wife. Conveniently, in the middle of this block sat the obliging funeral home of Herr Franz Odendhal. True, even this establishment had a bit of local infamy—an
employee had once run off with the florist’s wife, which made for some rather awkward moments in ordering memorial bouquets. But this Saturday morning they had a fine display ready for their latest casket.

At 10 a.m., Franz threw the doors open and the mourners poured inside. Facing them was a
burnished oak coffin, and leaning against it, a photograph from life of the handsome, mustachioed masseur whom everyone in the city now recognized. At the back of the coffin
rose a four-foot-high floral arrangement, ordered by his eight coworkers from the night shift at Murray Hill Baths, its blossoms spelling out a single word:
COMRADE
.

By now there were so many waiting outside that each was given about one second to view the body—they had to walk through the parlor briskly. It was just enough time to glance at the flowers, the photograph, and the brass plate at one end of the coffin. It bore the full name that the man himself had never used:

As each New Yorker walked up, the glass top that Franz had placed over the coffin revealed the contents: a cleansed and carefully dressed man, wearing a suit and with
his right hand laid upon his breast—protecting, it seemed, his stilled heart.

The body had no head.

Some ten thousand New Yorkers had filed past by two o’clock, and hundreds more lingered to follow a carriage procession to a ferry at the foot of Houston Street. The waiting boat soon slipped away from its mooring, its cargo bound for the Lutheran Cemetery across the river. And there, so long after that phone call to the bathhouse one warm June evening, Willie Guldensuppe finally got the Long Island home that Mrs. Nack had promised him.

THE ALLEGATIONS
were terribly unfair, Mrs. Nack insisted to the
Journal
women’s page reporter who visited her on Christmas Day. Having turned State’s evidence in the first trial, she was still waiting for what she hoped would be a reduced sentence. In the meantime, she wanted the world to know that the crime wasn’t her fault at all—it was the fault of her husband.

“Then Herman Nack was cruel?” the reporter pressed.

Mrs. Nack looked up and burst into tears.

“If he had not been, I would not be here now,” she sobbed. “I would still be with him, for I loved him. If I did not, I would not have married, for my people didn’t like him. But he said we need not mind that—we could be in this new country, and he would earn good wages, and I could learn a new business, and we would get rich.

“We both worked, but we didn’t get rich.” She dabbed her eyes. “We only got poorer.”

And now, she sighed, she was here. Weeks had passed since Thorn was sent to Sing Sing, and on this day—Christmas Day—she was still in Queens County Jail, still assailed in the newspapers. Though the common wisdom among legal experts was that Mrs. Nack’s confession meant that she’d escape the chair, the
Eagle
still pronounced her the “
head devil” of the case, and Howe’s office had been even blunter to the
Journal
.

“
They should place her in the electric chair with Thorn,” one of Howe’s team snapped, before quickly adding, “
if
Thorn is to be placed there.”

But for Mrs. Nack, passing her hours in jail making handcrafts, every page of the newspaper was trying reading. It wasn’t just the cartoon in the
Evening Telegram
that showed the Woodside ducks proclaiming:
“Once again the town is ours!”
It was that the world outside was passing her by, what with the holiday and the coming of the New Year. One Christmas ad in the
World
rode the craze for Professor Röntgen’s new discovery—
“
Imagine Santa Throwing an X-Ray,”
it announced—with an illustration of the jolly old man irradiating the Third Avenue façade of Bloomingdale’s to reveal the bounty of toys within. Beyond the
Herald
’s usual headlines of
FIRE IN A MATCH FACTORY
, the future beckoned with a
proposal to put bike racks on trolley cars, and a promise that an eccentric British scientist had developed a photographic brain scanner:
THOUGHTS PICTURED
, it announced. The
Journal
had kept its headline circus running, too: Microscopic shrimp in the water supply inspired the headline
FISH CHOWDER POURS FROM THE FAUCETS OF BROOKLYN HOUSES
. But for the holiday season Hearst’s men topped themselves with a new
contest—
the Prophecy Prize, which had readers stopping by the office to drop their predictions for 1898 into giant ironbound boxes in the lobby.

“Perhaps at the end of 1898 Queen Victoria will have passed away,” editors helpfully suggested on the front page. “The problem of aerial navigation may have been solved, America may have annexed Cuba, a great war may have begun between European nations.”

When the boxes were opened in a year’s time, the best prediction would win $1,000. Yet there would surely be no prize for guessing the likely fate of Martin Thorn.

“
Poor Martin,” Gussie sighed. She could not help him now; and the paper flowers and lace heaped upon her cell’s table would be of no comfort to the man.

Suddenly, her face brightened with an idea: “I cannot wish him a merry Christmas, but I can wish him a happy Christmas.” She quickly jotted down a note on a sheet of paper, then puzzled over a second notion. “
And
I would like to send him a basket of fruit. Do you think they’ll let me send it? … How will he get it?”