The Case of the Scattered Dutchman

The afternoon of Saturday, June 26, 1897, was warm and moist in New York City, and it is probable that boys were swimming off every idle dock in the North and East Rivers. James McKenna, thirteen years old, of 219 Avenue C, and John McGuire, fourteen years old, of 722 East Twelfth Street—both addresses within a few steps of the East River—were among those who at three o’clock were swimming in the slip on the south side of what was then a disused dock at the foot of East Eleventh Street.

I will lift the next five paragraphs bodily from a story at the top of the first page of the Sporting Edition of the Evening Telegram of that date, because I cannot think of any sound way to amend them:

They saw an object slip into the line of vision past the edge of the dock, and the cross current gave it the appearance of trying to enter the slip. It looked much like a package of merchandise, but the article in which it was wrapped looked like a bright piece of bunting or a flag, with the sun striking it.

The two boys swam eagerly toward what they thought would prove a prize. The bright covering they found to be oilcloth, and the package was carefully tied up with good strong string.

McKenna got on one side and McGuire on the other and between them the package was brought inside the slip and one of the boys pulled one end of the string from around the oilcloth and dropped it over the edge of the stringpiece.

There was a general rush on the part of the dock hangers-on to furnish a knife, and McGuire slipped back over the edge of the dock and dug the knife in the oilcloth covering.

The knife stuck and refused to come out, and the boy gave it a wrench. Then he tried again, and succeeded in working a small hole in the cloth. He saw something white, and the sticky feeling of the knife blade sickened him.

The Telegram, which specialized in sporting news, had a later final edition than the city’s other afternoon papers, since its readers counted on it to report the winner of the last race at Sheepshead Bay. (The race that day was a steeplechase, won by Mars Chan, at 2–1.) On Saturdays, the Telegram’s Sporting Edition was even later than on other days, because there were seven races instead of six. The story of the discovery in the East River was the only important non-sporting item on the first page, and over it were these headlines:

The other top headlines on the page dealt with a bicycle race at Manhattan Beach, the victory of the New York Giants over the Washington Senators (both in the National League then), and the triumph of a two-year-old named Blueaway in the Zephyr Stakes, twenty-five hundred dollars added. (A well-played second choice, he also paid 2–1.)

After telling of the sickened boy, the unknown Telegram writer continued:

It was not until a half hour later that someone reported the matter to the Union Market police station [this was on First Avenue, near Tenth Street], saying merely that something securely wrapped in cloth was knocking against the end of the dock.

Policeman Winter was detailed to take care of the matter. With the assistance of some laborers, he got the package upon the boards.

The policeman cut the cords and rolled back the oilcloth, disclosing to view the trunk of a man, in an almost perfect state of preservation.

The neck had been severed cleanly from the body, almost on a line with the shoulders, and the work was done in such a manner as to lead to the conclusion that it was that of someone accustomed to handling amputating instruments.

The work of amputating the legs had not been done so cleanly. They had been severed from the trunk just below the abdomen, in a rather slovenly fashion, not at all like the work of a dissecting table.

The chest had been marked and scarred a peculiar manner. The flesh had been lifted from the bones just below the left breast and cut off cleanly all the way across the chest to a point almost on a line with the shoulder. The cut was even and laid open to view several of the ribs.

This, in connection with the clean amputation at the neck, inclines the police to the theory that the trunk was fresh from the dissecting table when found.

The only drawback to this is the unprofessional work on the lower half of the trunk.

The possibility that the dissection had been performed by two persons working in great haste—the more professional member of the team on the neck, the other on the torso—had not occurred to the Telegram man.

A district reporter for the Telegram may have been in the police station when the tip came in, and accompanied Policeman Winter to the dock, or he may have learned of the find from the station blotter and hurried to the dock while the parcel was being dragged from the water. In either event, he—or a police surgeon he may have talked to—was clearly an excellent observer, and the further development of the case was to confirm not only the details he phoned in to the rewrite man but many of the rewrite man’s immediate deductions from them. It may be, of course, that my own deductions about how the Telegram story was put together are in error, and that the city editor, apprised by telephone of the interesting nature of the find (he could hardly have been informed of it before four o’clock), dispatched a star reporter straight to the scene in a hack. Even with the prevailing speed limit of twelve miles an hour, the reporter could have got from the Telegram office, in Herald Square, to the foot of East Eleventh Street in twenty minutes, made his notes from his own observation, and returned to his desk by five, after which he could have written his story between the fifth and seventh races. This would have been drawing it fine, however, even for the newspaper titans of 1897, when, according to an old journalistic friend of mine named Ned Brown, “what they call a porterhouse now wouldn’t have counted as a chuck steak.”

The rewrite job, as I therefore judge it to be, continues:

The trunk is that of a man who was evidently in the prime of life. He must have weighed fully 180 pounds, and the arms are big and powerful. The chest is that of a man accustomed to unusual exertion and regular calls for increased lung power.

The flesh is clear and white, and indicates that the man was in perfect health, and the muscles of the body show plainly that their possessor was a giant in strength.

The hands are small when figured in proportion to the evident weight and height of the man. The fingers are small and well shaped and do not resemble in any way the fingers of a man accustomed to manual labor.

On the inside of the left palm is a small blue mark, evidently extending deep into the cuticle. It looks as though it might have been burned in with powder. There are no needle pricks to indicate it is a tattoo mark, nor is there any regular formation to it.

The oilcloth in which the body was enclosed was brand new. It had never been placed on a floor as a covering, the underside bearing no mark. It was of good quality. The pattern was red squares with small gilt stars.

The string was white, very heavy, and after the knots were tied had been cut cleanly with a sharp instrument. Scissors or a small pocket knife would not have been able to cut it so cleanly.

A curious crowd surrounded the object as it lay on the Eleventh Street dock. A messenger was sent to the Coroner’s office.

The police are taking an extraordinary amount of interest in the case, owing to a great extent to the signs of refinement and the fact that the body had been but such a short time in the water.

Between the oilcloth and the spine of the trunk was found a sheet of new cheesecloth, a little heavier than the ordinary kind, more like that used in hospitals, but in no way resembling absorbent cloth.

This discovery has served to strengthen the theory of the police that the work is that of a band of medical students from the dissecting table of a hospital.

In substantiation of the rumor of foul play, its adherents point to the peculiar wound on the breast, claiming that the strip of flesh may have been taken off to destroy tattoo marks or other marks that would help toward an identification.

They also claim that the legs may have been marked in some way, and they too were taken off and disposed of in some way.

None of the other afternoon papers—the Evening World, the Evening Journal, and the Evening Sun—had so complete and incisive a story. Their city desks had been put off by the first reports from the police of the precinct, who, the *Evening World’*s brief story said, “incline to the belief that the body may be that of a medical subject.” The police claimed later that they had taken this position in an effort to keep the newspaper sleuths out of their way while they got started on the serious business of investigation, but the Journal, having been caught flat-footed, continued for weeks to charge that the police had tried to squelch the story just to save themselves trouble. The Journal’s implication was that Lord knew how many other crimes had been shrugged off in this fashion; only the enterprise of newspaper reporters—the Journal’s, of course—had forced the police to revise their attitude in the torso case.

The next morning’s Sun, on behalf of its teammate, the Evening Sun, attributed the medical-subject theory to pure stupidity on the part of the police, and the World of that Sunday morning took the same position. The paper was on to the possibilities of the story and gave it two columns on the first page, under the headline “BOY’S GHASTLY FIND.” In the course of its account, the World observed, “It does not appear that the police made any attempt at investigation, but jumped at and accepted the theory that the portion of the human being had been cast into the river by the students of some medical college who had been studying anatomy.” According to the World, the discovery that it was probably a case of murder had been made by doctors at the morgue, after the torso was removed there.

None of the Sunday papers had anything substantial to add to the Telegram account, although they padded it out with direct quotations from the coroner, Dr. Tuthill; the medical examiner, a Dr. Dow; and the Superintendent of Bellevue, a Mr. Murphy. (First names of such well-known civic characters were evidently considered superfluous in news stories of that golden age.) Both the World and the Herald were skeptical about the likelihood of a solution. “The finding of the upper portion of the headless trunk of a man in the East River yesterday furnishes a mystery that will not easily be solved,” the World reported, and went on, “All indications point to an atrocious murder. There is, however, no apparent clue by which the identity of the victim may be discovered, or his slayer brought to justice.” The Herald stated, “There is nothing to tell when or where the crime was committed, whether on land or on sea, and there is not one chance in a million that the identity of the victim will be discovered.” The suggestion that the man had been murdered and dismembered aboard a ship evoked the romantic possibility that he had been a Spaniard spying on Cuban gunrunners. The police said he could not have been a sailor, because there were no calluses on his hands.

The morning World and the Evening World had different staffs but shared the eleventh floor of the proud new Pulitzer Building, on Park Row, and dovetailed their coverage of running stories. The Pulitzer Building, with its sixteen floors, was the tallest building in New York, and from their city rooms the men of both Worlds could look over to and beyond the North River or out to sea, as well as at Brooklyn, across the only bridge there was over the East River at that time. All Manhattan lay visibly at their feet, and it accentuated their cockiness. The World had a circulation of 370,000, which was almost as much as the four other morning papers had among them. These were the Herald and the Sun, ex aequo with 120,000; the Times, with 75,000; and the Tribune, with 76,000. The World’s predominance had been achieved within a few years after Joseph Pulitzer came to New York from St. Louis and bought the paper from Jay Gould, in 1883. The Evening World, founded by Pulitzer four years later, had overshadowed its afternoon contemporaries just as decisively until it was challenged by a newer newcomer—young William Randolph Hearst’s Journal, which made its appearance in 1895. Hearst was trying to take over Pulitzer’s afternoon field by imitating all Pulitzer’s circus tricks and then adding an extra elephant for the clowns to jump over. By 1897, despite brilliant retaliatory strokes on the part of Pulitzer, Hearst was beginning to show results. The Evening World still led the afternoons, with a circulation of 360,000, but the Journal claimed 309,000, and was gaining. The Evening Sun and the Evening Telegram, with 100,000 each, were out of the hunt; Edwin Godkin’s Evening Post, with 25,000, had become a symbol of the unpopularity of virtue.

The Hearst-Pulitzer feud made for virulent competition, and in its course reporters became direct rivals of the police. A World or a Journal man finding a useful clue at the scene of a crime would bring it back to his newspaper, in which it would appear as a chalk-plate illustration over the vainglorious line “Made from a photograph taken in the World [or Journal] office.” Had reporters reached the East Eleventh Street dock before the police on the day the torso was found, the officers would have attached no significance to the chunk missing from the victim’s brisket. They would have been sure that a World or a Journal man had carried it away.

Reporters developed their own leads in solving crimes, outbidding the police for stool pigeons and at times outbidding the detective branch for details observed by uniformed men. Then they would follow through in person, “arresting” suspects, if the latter didn’t appear dangerous, and extorting confessions from them. These they would publish as scoops. The practice sometimes proved momentarily awkward when it developed that a reporter had abducted an innocent party, but there were few such mistakes a ten-dollar bill couldn’t square. Neither the World nor the Journal begrudged outlays occasioned by excessive zeal. In making “arrests,” the reporters, who had shiny badges and pistol permits, usually represented themselves as detectives, but when printing the story their papers invariably said they had “made the arrest as citizens.” Some of the reporters, as one might expect, became better detectives than most city detectives, and when a big case broke, the Police Department would put tails on the leading newspapermen, while the newspapers would put tails on the more resourceful detectives. This was a form of recognition the latter enjoyed to the point of sticking to familiar disguises in order not to throw the journalists off their track. Naturally, there were exchanges of information between friends in the two professions, by which cops helped reporters to discredit rival reporters and reporters helped cops to discredit rival cops.

The World and the Journal assumed airs of independent sovereignty. In headlines as well as editorials, the rival sheets gave themselves credit for defeating candidates they had opposed, rectifying conditions they had deplored, stopping outbreaks of leprosy they said they had detected, setting fashions, making slang, and, above all, solving crimes. Even the sportswriters conveyed the impression that they were not merely reporting games but coaching both teams and refereeing. “Being a newspaperman gave you stature then,” says Ned Brown. “Everywhere except in society. It didn’t cut any ice there. But elsewhere a first-string reporter on any recognized paper—especially one of the Worlds—had a lot of prestige. Civis Romanus erat. He was a citizen of no mean state.”

Today, Ned Brown, a small man, is as spare and brisk as a whippet, with a sharp, inquisitive profile and lively blue eyes. He prides himself on his penetrating coup d’oeil, which makes him a master at rapid chess and crossword puzzles, and at sizing up situations. Mr. Brown has worked for only one newspaper in his life—the World. The job lasted thirty-four years, until the paper ceased publication in 1931. During most of his service with the World, he was a boxing writer, but he didn’t begin as one. When the mysterious torso was fished from the river, Ned was a very junior member of the World staff; he was working there during the summer vacation following his first year at Bellevue Hospital Medical School, which was then situated at Twenty-sixth Street and First Avenue, across the street from the hospital, with its wards and morgue. He did small assignments, mostly legwork, at space rates—five dollars a column if he telephoned the stuff to a rewrite man and seven dollars and a half if he wrote himself. The bits he wrote personally were for the most part humorous items he picked up at night in the Tenderloin—the bright-light district that, by his definition, ran from Thirtieth Street to Forty-second, between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. He liked the Tenderloin beat because it permitted him to spend his nights in saloons—looking at people, listening, and fancying himself a young man about town—without having to disguise the fact from his father, who was Frederick Sherwood Brown, the telegraph editor of the World. The elder Brown had established his family in Flatbush, a remote faubourg of the independent City of Brooklyn.

Ned found Flatbush slow. His official hours were from two in the afternoon until midnight, but often when he was covering the Tenderloin he worked an extra hour or two, business merging with pleasure. On such occasions, the long journey home to Flatbush—by steam elevated train to Brooklyn Bridge and then by trolley car into the dark interior of Long Island—frequently seemed too dismal to endure, and then he would spend the rest of the night in the Murray Hill Baths, on Forty-second Street. The Murray Hill Baths were not on Murray Hill but between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, and, like all the other Turkish-bath establishments of the region, they stayed open all night. Turkish baths were infinitely more popular and numerous then than they are now; men on the town for the evening regularly wound up in one or another of them. An individual cubicle cost a dollar, a bed in the dormitory fifty cents; the ticket for either one included a scrubbing and use of the steam room and the plunge, universally esteemed specifics for overindulgence; an alcohol rub cost an extra two bits. There was always a tip for the rubber, who would not scorn a dime. The baths all favored a fanciful Oriental décor, like the tiled interior of a mosque. The Murray Hill was one of the largest and most ornate.

In those days, Mr. Brown says, few medical students went to a liberal-arts college; he himself entered medical college straight from Erasmus Hall High School, in Brooklyn, and in 1897 he was still in his teens. He was a hard-liquor drinker, but not when he was working; on those nights, he would buy a beer or two in each establishment he visited, “just to hold the franchise.” When he retired to the baths, therefore, his mind would still be clear and his curiosity active; he would engage the rubbers in conversation and sometimes land a boulevardesque anecdote worth a dollar and a half at space rates, or a bit of information that might come in handy someday as background. He was keenly interested in anatomy, which was then, as it is now, the principal subject of the medical first year. At the baths, he had before his eyes a living exhibit of anatomical and dermatological peculiarities, and he was accustomed to discuss these with the rubbers; at heart every masseur is a doctor manqué.

Ned doesn’t recall being in the World city room when the torso was first reported, and he is sure he wasn’t sent uptown to the dock. But when he read the Sunday papers the next morning he was fascinated—both as a medical student and as a newspaperman. Coroner Tuthill, he noted, had told reporters at the morgue that the disaggregated man could not have been dead more than twenty-four hours when his chest was taken out of the river; Dr. Dow had said “ten hours at the most.” Even if one accepted the longer estimate, and added a few hours for possible error, the man could not have been killed earlier than Friday. The conclusions different doctors reached as to his height and heft varied a bit—one doctor explained that his estimate of five feet ten inches depended on the premise that a man’s height is equal to the reach of his outstretched arms—but all agreed that he had been taller than average. Every newspaper account mentioned the solid but unworkmanlike hands. He had been a man who kept himself in good physical trim, but not by hard labor. A wealthy sportsman? A college athlete? An Army officer? Anyone of them would make a corking good victim from a newspaper point of view. Ned had a special family interest in this kind of murder, because his father, while a reporter on the Cincinnati Enquirer, had cleared up the murder of a girl named Pearl Bryan, whose severed head had been thrown from the suspension bridge over the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Covington, Kentucky. The guilty wretch may have hoped thus to create a conflict of jurisdiction; the elder Brown, however, proved that the actual crime had been committed on the Ohio side of the river. It is a spiritless son who would not like to outdo his father, but Ned, as he rode the trolley over the bridge to work that Sunday afternoon (like all young and single men on seven-day newspapers at that time, he worked Sundays and had a weekday off), had small hope that he would be assigned to the Ghastly Find story. The Ghastly Find would be in the competent hands of Gus Roeder, the World’s homicide specialist, and of Bill Reitmeier, who covered Police Headquarters, on Mulberry Street. They would need no help in keeping the story fresh for a day or two, after which, if it was as hopeless as the morning-paper stories indicated, it would lapse and be forgotten.

When Ned stepped off the elevator on the eleventh floor of the Pulitzer Building, he had no need of his peculiar gift to recognize that something extraordinary had happened. The day staff on Sunday was always light, but on that particular afternoon the city room was perfectly empty except for one early copyreader and the man on the desk—a Sunday substitute for Edward J. Casey, the World’s assistant city editor. The man on the desk was telephoning, and as he saw Ned come in he put his hand over the mouthpiece and beckoned him with a sweep of his arm. When other reserves are exhausted, even the summer soldier is welcome. The man on the desk took less than a minute to tell Ned that a second parcel wrapped in oilcloth with a pattern of red squares and small gilt stars had been found, this one on the Bronx side of the Harlem River, at about the latitude of 176th Street, or ten miles from where the torso had turned up. Two boys out berrying with their father had come upon it in a sylvan setting, into which it had apparently been tossed from Undercliff Avenue, a winding carriage drive on the side of a hill. When the parcel was opened at the High Bridge police station, in the Bronx, it had yielded another section of the cadaver. The captain there had dispatched it to the morgue to be matched up with the East River bit. “If the pieces fit, it’s the same stiff,” the man on the desk said. “If it’s part of a different stiff, then the guy with the red oilcloth has murdered them both.” He spoke, Ned remembers, with the pleasure of a man who cannot lose. From the moment the first tip about the second bundle came in from Reitmeier, the Sunday city editor had been calling every member of the staff he could reach by telephone—directing those who lived uptown to the region of the find and ordering the downtown fellows to converge on the morgue or Police Headquarters. He had also been sending out the regular Sunday men as they reported for duty. He told Ned to hustle to the morgue and report to Gus Roeder, who was running the Pulitzer operation there. “Do whatever Gus tells you,” he said, unnecessarily. “The Journal’s probably got forty guys there already.” Mr Brown recalls his emotion on being assigned to his first big story, even though he anticipated only legman’s role (for which he was well suited, being a tireless runner and weighing precisely a hundred and nineteen pounds). The field of his début could not have been better chosen, for, owing to his year at medical school, he was familiar with the morgue, and if there was one subject on which he would back his own opinion, it was a cadaver. The steam elevated bore him to the vicinity of the morgue in quick time, and he ran the rest of the way at quarter-miler’s pace.

Gus Roeder, the homicide man, was a red-faced German-American, already in his forties and therefore, to Ned, a hoary veteran. He could express himself well in English but spoke the language with a perceptible accent. (He worked from pencilled notes, which he surrounded with rhetoric as he dictated his stories to an office boy who, unlike him, knew how to run a typewriter.) He wore conservative dark clothes and a hard hat, and was not enough of a bohemian to be popular with his fellow-reporters. He was on good terms with a powerful faction of the detective force, however, and exchanged information with his police friends, to their advantage and his. He was also a friend of Frederick Sherwood Brown’s, and knew that Ned was a medical student. The Bronx portion of torso had by this time been brought downtown, and the two fragments, put together, matched as neatly as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; so did the cut edges of the two sheets of oilcloth. The second piece of victim included everything from the abdomen to a point above the knees, where the saw or knife had been employed again to detach the legs. These hadn’t turned up yet. Ned found the juxtaposed segments of great interest. “The gaping ends of the blood vessels at the neck, where the head had been severed, and the thighs, where the legs had been cut off, indicated that the man had lost a considerable amount of blood before expiring,” he says now, relapsing into his freshman patter. “In other words, the guy had been alive while they were cutting him up. That knocked out the medical-school idea.” Ned also had a long look at the highly publicized hands. When he finished, he told Roeder what he suspected, and Roeder instructed him to follow his hunch. Roeder already had a score of men out working on even longer shots.

Some indication of the number of paths Roeder’s men explored was to be found in the World of Monday, June 28th. A five-column top head on the first page thundered:

Under it, in lines three columns wide, was:

Then, in single column:

The text of the lead, set in bold type, was exclamatory and consecrated to the obvious. “Somewhere in Greater New York or near it since late Friday afternoon an awful crime has been committed” is a fair sample.

The layout of pictures on the front page illustrated the peculiar attraction of the great Pulitzer’s journalism. Nestling under three columns of the top headline was a chalk-plate reproduction of the “Hand of the Headless Murdered Man—Exact Size (from a flashlight photograph made in the morgue last night by a World photographer).” The hands of the victim had been described in various accounts as large, small, and medium-sized. When I first saw the “exact-size” illustration in a bound volume of Worlds, I could not resist an impulse to put my hand over it and compare the two, and I suspect that three of every four readers of the paper in 1897 did the same thing. (From my comparison, I judge that the victim, like me, wore a size-8 1/2 glove with a wide palm and short fingers.) The stubby thumb in the World’s photograph was superimposed on a map showing “Route headless shoulders would take in floating from spot where other part of body was found.” This had been drawn in accordance with a theory, enunciated in an interview granted by a former Chief of the United States Secret Service named Andrew L. Drummond, that the murder had been committed in the Bronx and part of the body thrown from High Bridge into the Harlem, which leads into the East River. “It would be foolish for a man to carry the body from the Battery, say, to High Bridge in order to throw it into the water,” Mr Drummond had told a World reporter. Next to the upper, or Bronx, end of the map was a sketch of “where the trunk of the body was found,” and, next to the Eleventh Street end, a sketch of “where boys found the headless shoulders.” The layout was completed by illustrations of the oilcloth (“reproduced from sample brought to the World office”) and of the “clumsy knot with which each bundle was tied” (also “photographed in the World office”).

Inside the paper were a dozen stories on assorted angles of the case. The wife of a Dane named Weinecke—an unemployed lumber inspector, of 82 East 115th Street, who had disappeared on May 17th—thought the installments might be of him. The World had to take some account of her views, although it did so with patent unenthusiasm; he would have made an anticlimactic victim, despite a halfhearted effort on the part of the editors to supply him with a mysterious past before his arrival in this country. There was a long story on efforts that were being made to trace the red-and-gold oilcloth pattern through jobbers to retailers, in order to question everyone who might remember selling any recently. Police authorities had wisely refused to theorize about the murder, and in revenge the World and the other morning papers said they were incompetent and “all at sea.” The medical men had allowed themselves to be drawn more easily, and the reporters had induced Dr. Philip F. O’Hanlon, the coroner’s physician who performed the autopsy, to venture a surmise as to how the man had been killed. “From what I can learn from the condition of the body, I should say that this is what occurred,” the World quoted Dr. O’Hanlon as extrapolating. (It was the decade of Sherlock Holmes, and every physician felt that Dr. Watson had been unfairly dealt with.) “The man, who was a big, powerful fellow, was attacked. He made a strong resistance, but I should say he was overpowered by numbers. That he was knocked down I think is proved by the imprints of the toe and boot-heel on his arm. Some of the other bruises on his body may have come from kicks. I should say that he struggled to his feet and was standing erect when someone, who must have been very muscular, stabbed him in the collarbone with a big knife. This was followed immediately afterward by another wound—that which cut the heart. That caused death immediately. The blood under the thumbnail shows that he struggled hard or else that he clasped his hand to his bosom after he had been stabbed.”

A World story on the autopsy itself reported:

A close inspection was made of the hands with a view to determining the man’s position in life. They were long and broad, the fingers were well formed, and while the palms were not callous, yet they indicated that the man had done some work, not recently, perhaps. The nails were cut down almost to the quick, evenly rounded, as though their owner had taken some care of them.

The fingertips of the left hand were smooth and even; on the forefinger was a scar extending from the nail back to the second joint. It was an old one, and in the opinion of the examining physician, might have been caused by an operation. . . . There was little hair on the body, the arms, or the hands, and the latter showed little of the effect of the sun.

Not a man who could live without work, was the judgment of those who examined the trunk, nor yet a man whose livelihood was earned by hard manual labor; he might have been a policeman, a carpenter, a bartender.

The most romantic reconstruction of the crime was furnished by Drummond:

Andrew L. Drummond, for twenty-two years Chief of the Secret Service of the United States Government, and now head of a great detective agency in this city, with offices at No. 1 Park Row. is greatly interested in the developments in the murder case [the World reported].

“I read the account in Sunday’s World,” said Mr. Drummond last night, “and from what you tell me now, of the finding of another part of the body near High Bridge and of the result of the autopsy, I believe that this most atrocious murder was committed by a foreigner.

“In the whole history of crime in this country murders which were done with like ferocity as this have always been committed by foreigners, usually those of a warmer climate than ours.

“I should judge, from what I have heard of this case, that the murderer is Sicilian, or possibly a Spaniard or Cuban. Maybe a Spanish spy has been put out of the way by Cubans.

“But the theory of the murder which strikes me as the most likely one is that it is the result of a family feud among Sicilians. I know the ways of the Mafia so well that this strikes me as the most plausible theory. The red oilcloth points to Sicilians, who love bright colors. . . .

“Probably the murdered man was invited to a friendly game of cards at the home of the murderer, who had sworn a vendetta against him for some wrong to his wife or sweetheart. Then, in an unguarded moment, the man was killed and his body cut up for disposal by one or several men.”

The Drummond story was the last on the murder in the World (it brought the total space the paper devoted to the case to eight and a quarter columns, not counting pictures), and was followed by this plug, in boldface type: “Further developments in New York’s great murder mystery will appear in the editions of the Evening World.”

Ned Brown, reading the story about the hands in the Monday-morning World, may have feared that a couple of the details would set somebody else to thinking along the line he was already following. But if so, there was nothing he could do about it, and he had a full program for the day. Ned was searching for a kind of soap called Cotaspam, or Kotaspam—he is no longer sure of the exact spelling. Not that he looked as though he needed soap; that morning Ned was probably the cleanest man in Greater New York. His naturally pink skin was now positively translucent. He had in a pocket ten dollars that he had drawn from the World treasurer, on the authorization of Gus Roeder, to use as expenses. Cotaspam was expensive soap—twenty-five cents a cake. Ned had to walk over to Broadway to find a druggist who stocked it, and when he did, he bought two boxes containing a dozen bars each, for a total of six dollars.

The reason Ned wanted Cotaspam specifically, he says, was that once, before having dinner at the home of a wealthy boy he was tutoring in Brooklyn, he had washed his hands in the bathroom there and had been so impressed with the fragrance of the soap that he asked the name of the brand. “It smelled Elysian to me,” Mr. Brown says now. “Sandalwood, verbena, geranium, Sen-Sen, and Ed Pinaud’s Eau de Quinine all in one.” With the two boxes under his arm, Ned took a Broadway car as far as Herald Square, where he transferred to a westbound Thirty-fourth Street crosstown and rode Ninth Avenue. Then he walked half a block north and entered a tenement at 441 Ninth Avenue. It was a family neighborhood of working people, mostly respectable and chiefly German or Irish. During the years after the end of the Civil War, brick tenements had replaced frame houses as the city marched north. They were mostly small buildings, three or four stories high with two families on a floor, and sometimes a store on the street level. A parking lot occupies the west, or odd-numbered, side of the block now, but some even-numbered houses still standing on the east side of the avenue in the next block north give at least an idea of what the neighborhood must have looked like. Ned climbed the stairs to the top floor of No. 441 and worked his way down, knocking at each door in turn. There was a woman in practically every flat, and to each Ned presented a cake of soap and delivered a little spiel. The company he represented was trying to find a larger market for its soap, he said, and so was making a special introductory offer. Each recipient was to use the soap for a day, just to experience how good it was. If she liked it, she could give him a nickel for it when he returned in the evening; if not, she was privileged to return the soap without any obligation “One smell and they fell for it,” Mr. Brown says. “They could tell it was expensive soap. Some of them wanted to give me a nickel right then, but I said no dice. ‘The company wants to get your opinion of its product after you have used it,’ I would say. ‘I will be back at six o’clock.’ ” Such door-to-door canvassing was more common then than it is now; Ned had heard the routine scores of times in his own home. His appearance was plausible; he was young and thin, and wore a cap and a shiny second-best suit. He got rid of half a box of soap in No. 441 and then went through the same performance in Nos. 439 and 437, omitting only one apartment. This was on the second floor, above a drugstore, in No. 439, and a nameplate on its door bore the legend “Mrs. Augusta Nack, Licensed Midwife.” When Ned had finished with No. 437, he had only a couple of cakes left, and he stuck them in his pockets. It was nearly noon, and he walked out of the neighborhood to a café near Herald Square to eat lunch and look over the afternoon papers as they came out. Talk about the elegant soap would spread through the three tenements, he knew; the women visited across the halls or from their fire escapes in warm weather, and in the afternoon there would be knots of them on the sidewalk getting a breath of cool air.

“There is nothing like a sweet smell to catch a woman,” Mr. Brown says. “I know it from experience now, but at the time I had to figure it out for myself. I was what you might call precocious.” Ned read the afternoon papers with apprehension, which turned to smugness as he found more and more signs that they were off what he felt was the right track. Monday morning’s papers had had a big new development to report—the discovery of the second segment. All the afternoons could do was ramify speculation.

the three-o’clock edition of the Evening World proclaimed, listing Clues (no new ones) and Theories (same) in its lead. It had on its front page a portrait of the missing Weinecke (which it spelled Weincke, three columns wide, with question marks at either side of his head, but he bore an unexciting resemblance to a testimonial writer in a patent-medicine ad. “Is he the murdered man?” the caption writer asked, and most readers’ reaction to Mr. Weinecke’s photograph must have been “Who cares?” The Evening World had balanced its front page with an equal display of a story headed “JOHN L. SPARS WITH WORLD MAN,” written and illustrated by the World man, W. O. Inglis; his account of this terrifying experience took the form of a letter addressed to Bob Fitzsimmons, the heavyweight champion, to fight whom the thirty-eight-year-old John L. Sullivan had announced his emergence from retirement. (Sullivan’s advertised comeback had a patriotic motive. On losing his championship to James J. Corbett, in 1892, he had said, “I am glad I was beaten by an American.” On March 17, 1897, Corbett had lost the title to Fitzsimmons, a New Zealander born in Cornwall.) “Friends tied on our four-ounce gloves,” Inglis wrote. “I could not have tied a knot in a two-inch hawser, much less in the laces of a boxing glove. You will feel that way, Mr. Fitzsimmons, when you are getting ready to go into the ring with Sullivan.” It was the true World tone, and it amused Ned, who correctly suspected that the comeback would go no further than the first time Sullivan raised a thirst.

In the Evening World, the exact-size picture of the victim’s hand had been moved back to page 2 and reinforced with a diagram of the body, in which the recovered portions were printed in black and missing areas in gray. “The inhuman, fiendish manner in which the butcher cut up the remains of his victim seems to suggest that it was the work of a maniac,” a hard-pressed rewrite man had ventured, and there were a couple of sidelight stories on the Jack-the-Ripper murders in London and other unsolved mysteries. “The superb handling of this interesting case in the World this morning, both as regards writing and illustration, made all other morning papers look like second-rate provincial sheets,” a house plug at the bottom of the page announced. “If there is anything left to tell about the mystery when today’s Evening World is done with it, the World tomorrow morning will again show the little imitation morning papers how to handle a big local story. From the Evening World’s last night extra the thread of the strange crime will be taken up and carried on by the morning edition The World is a continuous performance of newsgiving—morning, noon, and night. It never stops. It has no rival. Remember that.” Despite this advertised unity, there was hot rivalry between the staffs of the World and the Evening World.

The Evening Sun, which had lost the dash of its Dana days, took a thoroughly dim view of the case and assailed the police. “Indications in Mulberry Street this morning pointed to the conclusion that the police had not yet waked up to the serious import of the case,” it grumbled. “Chief Conlin wasn’t there. . . . Chief Conlin is a man who has no taste for murder mysteries. . . . Capt. O’Brien [the chief of detectives] has even less than Conlin. Like every other policeman not possessed of distinct detective genius, his one wish is to get rid of a case of that kind, and, consciously or unconsciously, the wish will take the form of pooh-poohing it at first and letting it slip out of sight and out of mind as soon as the excitement about it dies out.”

The Telegram, its field forces outnumbered by the hordes of World and Journal reporters, tried to sell papers with the headline:

“Coroner’s Physician Weston has advanced a most important theory in regard to the great murder mystery,” a Telegram reporter had written. “He was at the morgue this afternoon on another case, and while he was there he examined the mutilated, headless, and legless trunk. He said to me afterward: ‘It appears to me that an attempt has been made to dispose of this body by boiling it. The flesh of the stump of the legs appears to have been dipped in boiling water. It is probable that the murderers thrust the legs into a kettle, hoping to boil the flesh off, but found they could not do it quickly or easily enough, and that they then cut up the remains.’ ” The doctors made decidedly better copy than the detectives.

Ned moved along to other bars as the afternoon wore on, avoiding those most frequented by newspapermen. Had he been one of the World’s stars he would have had to take precautions against being trailed, but he knew he was too inconspicuous for that. All he had to avoid was a chance encounter. The dark interiors, cooled by electric fans, offered escape from the afternoon sun, and each time he changed saloons he bought a later batch of papers to read over his next nickel beer. The Late Edition of the Evening World, which went to press at four o’clock in the afternoon, headlined a typical Pulitzer stroke—a five-hundred-dollar reward. “The World will pay $500 in gold for the correct solution of the mystery concerning the fragments of a man’s body discovered Saturday and Sunday in the East River and in Harlem,” an announcement read. “All theories and suggestions must be sent to the City Editor of the World, in envelopes marked ‘Murder Mystery,’ and must be exclusively for the World. Appearance of the solution in any other paper will cancel this offer of reward.” There followed a “suggestion” of what the solution should include: motive, identity of the criminal or criminals, time, place, and method of the crime, actions of the criminal or criminals after commission of the crime, and, last but not least, identification of the murdered man.

This was the final regular edition the Evening World, and it ordinarily coincided with the Journal’s final, but within minutes of its appearance the latter paper hit the street with an extra run of its Night Edition, in which a three-column head on the right-hand side of the first page read:

It was the familiar Hearst technique, infuriating to World men, of waiting for Pulitzer to think of something and then raising his bid.

The Journal, Ned noted with distaste, had followed the World’s example in its play of the striking hand picture. The first page of the Journal bore detailed illustrations of the unknown’s right hand, his left hand, his injured finger, and his broken fingernail. “The Evening Journal has the Most News, Latest News, Best News,” the left ear of the paper’s masthead boasted, and the right ear stated, “The Evening Journal Prints the Best Local, Telegraph, Cable News.” It was enough to raise the hair of Ned’s blond, James J. Corbett pompadour haircut.

The Journal was also playing up its own favorite candidate of the moment for corpus delicti, with a slashing first-page head:

The missing Mr. Lutz, a carpenter in a piano factory, had not been home for five days, the Journal said, and while he had no known enemies, and no money on his person when he left his house, his nephew was sure he had been killed, because he didn’t think he would have committed suicide. (No other possible explanations of his absence were considered.) The Journal presented a boxed, signed, and undoubtedly paid-for statement by the nephew, who was named Louis E. Lutz, in which, as a clincher, he remembered that his uncle had once hit himself on the left hand with a hammer, injuring a finger. Stephen O’Brien, the Chief of Detectives, had furnished a signed statement to the editor of the Journal to the effect that until they found the missing sections of the body, his detectives had little to work on. “LITTLE TO WORK ON” was the headline. Dr. Nelson A. Conroy, of Bellevue, still another medico out to vindicate Dr. Watson, had given the Journal a personal statement, in which he declared irrefutably: “It is hard to say just what the man’s face looked like.” Apparently something of a palmist, Dr. Conroy added, “The conical hand of the man indicates practical temperament. This man must have been engaged in some useful art—an artist of some sort—for it is evident he had not done any hard work for some time.” All references to the dead man’s hands had a special interest for Ned, and he was relieved to see that Dr. Conroy was as far off the track as the rest.

If the Journal ventured gingerly into palmistry via Dr. Conroy, the Evening World, in a Night Extra that shortly followed the Journal’s, went all the way.

a headline across the first six columns bellowed, and then:

A four-column cut under the reward line showed the “Hands of the Murdered Man,” and under this was a two-column cut of “The Broken Nail.”

“An analysis of the hand of the dead man of the river mystery was made this morning for the Evening World by Queen Stella Gonzales,” the first-page story began. (The paper’s editors brushed off the Journal’s Mr. Lutz with a one-paragraph sneer under the lower-case line “Alleged Identification.” “The morgue people take no stock in the identification,” the item ended.) “Queen Stella and Cheiro are the two most famous palmists of America, Queen Stella’s drawing-room reputation excelling that of Cheiro.” Queen Stella, the story went on, admitted that she was handicapped by having only a photograph of the back of the hand to work from. “She said it impressed her at once as a tragic hand,” the Evening World reported. “ ‘. . . Having square nails, that denotes ruling power. His little finger, pointed and reaching above the third phalange, denotes business capacity in a higher degree. . . . Through his domineering disposition and rashness in speech he must have made one or more deadly enemies.’ ”

Queen Stella’s analysis was the beginning of a complete coverage by the World of the occult aspects of the case, which included appeals to another palmist (a man, who was smuggled into the morgue), a phrenologist (slightly handicapped by the absence of the head), a clairvoyant, a physiognomist (working from a photograph of the supposed victim after his identity became fairly certain), a handwriting expert, and, finally, a spirit medium.

The woman’s-angle theory mentioned in the Evening World’s head got equal play with Stella’s. It was written by a Mrs. McGuirk, not otherwise identified and possibly invented. It wasn’t a woman’s work, Mrs. McGuirk ruled, and continued, “There is just one thing in the whole business that might suggest a woman’s hand. The knots with which the parcels were fastened are the clumsy, uneven ones which women are prone to make.” Mrs. McGuirk thought the victim might have been a peddler and the oilcloth part of his stock in trade. “Women poison,” she concluded. “It is easier. They seldom use knives, unless very hot blood runs in their veins.” The Evening World’s Night Extra had a total of thirteen masterly columns on the case, which make good reading even after fifty-eight years. They included a remarkable collection of mystery-solution letters, which the editors claimed had been written by readers and delivered by hand between four o’clock, when its reward offer appeared, and about five, when the Night Extra went to press. A biting bit next to the reiterated reward offer contrasted honest and dishonest journalism and accused the Journal of snitching the letter-contest idea.

By the time Ned had finished with the evening papers, it was nearly six o’clock, and he accordingly made his way back to the west side of Ninth Avenue between Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Streets. One reason Ned chose the time he did to return was that in such a neighborhood it was an hour when the man of the house was almost sure to be at home, except on Saturday night or unless something had happened to him. The women with whom Ned had left soap that morning and who had their nickels ready to clinch their bargain must have been doubly delighted, because he never came back to collect. Instead, he went directly to No. 439, climbed to the floor above the drugstore, and rang the bell at the door—slightly more pretentious than the others—of Mrs. Augusta Nack, Licensed Midwife, which he had skipped a few hours earlier. He waited in hot-and-cold anxiety. It was possible, of course, that Mrs. Nack wasn’t at home, or that if she was, she wouldn’t come to the door. These were the longest days of the year; it was full daylight, and he hadn’t been able to tell by a lighted or unlighted window whether anyone was in. The greatest blow to his hopes would have been the heavy tread of a man coming to answer the doorbell, but, instead, he heard the slupping sound of the advance of a woman in house slippers. Then the door was ajar and Mrs. Nack stood in the aperture. She was just about Ned’s height—five feet six—but she must have weighed at least two hundred pounds. Her face was wide and flat and lardy white, with small eyes, not much of a nose, and what Mr. Brown still remembers as an extremely sullen mouth. She was wearing an apron over her house dress, and there was a smell of cooking sauerkraut that has left Mr. Brown with permanent distaste for the stuff. Ned would have given anything to see into the room behind her, but she was a hard woman to see around.

Before Mrs. Nack could ask what he wanted, Ned began, “Good evening, Madam. Have you enjoyed your trial bar of Cotaspam soap? Hasn’t its fragrant lather left your hands feeling as if freshly kissed?”

“You didn’t giff me any!” Mrs. Nack replied angrily, and Ned understood immediately why she had looked sore from the moment she laid eyes on him. The other women had described him while telling her about the wonderful soap, and Mrs. Nack felt she had been slighted, as usual. (Feeling slighted is a characteristic of especially high incidence among Germans and unattractive women, and Mrs. Nack was both.)

“I would have sworn I’d been to every flat in the house,” Ned said. “But guess I wasn’t, or I would have remembered you sure.”

It was coquetry lost on Mrs. Nack, who said merely, “Giff me the soap now.”

“I’m sorry, Madam, but I’m afraid I can’t,” Ned said. “You see, I have to get a report for my company on what each lady thought of the soap. That was the purpose of our special offer.”

“Leaf it and come back tomorrow,” Mrs. Nack commanded.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am, but I can’t do that, either,” Ned said. “Tomorrow I’ll be working up in Yonkers.” Then he tried to look as if he had just had a bright thought, and went on, “But happen to have a couple of bars left over. If you could give the soap a trial now, while I wait, I’d be glad to let you have one.”

After thinking this over for a minute, Mrs. Nack said, “All right. Giff me the soap.” Ned moved toward her, fumbling in a pocket and being careful not to give her the soap until he was inside the apartment. He knew she wouldn’t shut the door in his face before he came through with the special introductory sample. As she pulled back from the door, he went through it as in the suction set up by her big body.

“Here it is, Ma’am,” he said after he was safely inside. Mrs. Nack took the soap in her pale, shovel-like paws, raised it to her nose, and sniffed it. She looked mollified. “As a matter of fact,” Ned continued, “I’ve got just two left, and since I’m putting you to all this trouble, I’m going to let you have both of them, if you like the first one. But I get awfully thirsty, climbing stairs all day in this heat, and I wonder if I might ask you for a glass of water before you start washing your hands.”

“I guess so,” Mrs. Nack said. “Sit down on the chair there while I get you the water.”

Ned sat down in a black leather upholstered chair and looked around him while the woman went to the kitchen, in the rear of the flat, to get his drink. Within a few days, the newspapers were to describe the contents of Mrs. Nack’s apartment in much more detail than Ned was in a position to take in, but his eyes fell on one item that subsequent newspapermen were destined never to see. “Leaning against a lamp, on a kind of a knickknack stand, there was a studio photograph of a big blond guy with little turned-up mustaches under his nose—a kind of Dutch version of a sport,” Mr. Brown recalls. “The minute I saw it, I was sure I had seen him around, without ever knowing his name.” The floor was bare, and Ned noticed that the rug was rolled up and tied, as if Mrs. Nack were getting ready to move. When Mrs. Nack brought the water, he downed it thirstily, just as if he hadn’t been drinking beer all afternoon.

“Now, Madam,” Ned said after thanking her, “you will have the rare pleasure of making the acquaintance of the world’s most luxurious hand soap. Do not hurry it, but run a basin of warm water and then work up a creamy lather. Let your hands soak in it! You will feel each finger separately caressed. When you withdraw your hands, hold them to your nose! The fragrance is a secret formula, copyrighted by the makers of Cotaspam. You have beautiful hands, Madam. They deserve Cotaspam!” The midwife slupped away again, and as soon as Ned heard water running in the rear of the apartment, he grabbed the photograph and slipped it under his jacket. He now passionately desired to leave at once, but he knew that to do so, if his suspicions were correct, would be likely to frighten Mrs. Nack into immediate flight. He also had a hunch that the longer he waited, the more he would learn. All Mrs. Nack’s actions indicated that she was alone in the apartment, but the apparently substantial nature of the meal she was preparing hinted that she expected company for dinner. If it was the man in the photograph, all Ned’s theories would come tumbling down and he would probably feel obliged to invite the fellow out to the nearest saloon and buy him a seidel of beer. But if it wasn’t the man in the photograph, it might be Mrs. Nack’s accomplice in his murder. Ned had formed a most unfavorable impression of Mrs. Nack; she looked capable of murdering an infant—and probably had, for midwives often doubled as abortionists. But he was not physically afraid of her, despite her lardy bulk. He was an athletic young fellow, who, with his brother, had rigged a trapeze and flying rings in the attic at home in Flatbush; Ned could chin himself innumerable times with one arm, and fancied himself as an amateur boxer. The dinner guest, however, would almost certainly prove to be a large adult male, armed and with a nasty taste for fragmentation. While Ned was pondering this prospect, Mrs. Nack returned, a smile for once suffusing her desk blotter of a face. “It is nice soap as possible,” she said. “Very elegant.”

Ned whipped out his reporter’s notebook and started writing in it. “May I quote you, Madam?” he asked. “We intend to publish testimonials in the newspapers, and a testimonial from a midwife would have double value. It would be a good ad for you, too.”

“I don’t need ads,” Mrs. Nack replied. “I am going soon anyway back to Germany.” For a moment, she seemed sorry she had said so much, but Ned’s look of bland innocence evidently reassured her. “Now you give me the other soap also,” she said. “Here is a dime.” Ned felt sure she had been told by other women that the soap regularly sold for twenty-five cents—that they knew it did because they had priced it in the drugstore downstairs. “It is wonderful how with any woman the idea of a bargain will obscure larger issues entirely,” Mr. Brown says. “She was looking at me and talking about the soap, and it never occurred to her to look around the room and notice that the picture was missing.”

Ned gave Mrs. Nack the second bar of soap, took her dime, said goodbye, and walked through the doorway. Then he stopped, because a man was coming up the narrow stairs. “He was a husky man—no giant, but a full-sized middleweight,” Mr. Brown says. “About thirty years old, I should guess. He was wearing a derby hat, although it was summer—only the dudes wore straw kellies—and he had long black mustaches. I remember them as black, although the papers said afterward they were light brown. Maybe he had dyed them. Still later, he shaved them off. What I particularly remember about him, though, was his eyes. They were deep-set and glaring, and they shone like a cat’s. At his trial, the artists had a field day drawing those eyes. He was furious at seeing me there—the door to the apartment was still open—and he grabbed me by the shoulder. ‘Wer ist’s?’ he yelled in German—‘Who is it?’ and then he started giving the woman hell. I could see she was frightened—he had her buffaloed. I had learned enough German at Erasmus to understand that he was bawling her out for not keeping the door closed. He said he had told her not to let anybody in. She started explaining who I was, and telling him if he made so much noise the neighbors would come to see what was the matter. Finally, he took his hand off my shoulder—I certainly didn’t look dangerous—and went inside. ‘Donkey-head!’ I heard him call the woman, in German, and then the door slammed, and I heard a slap you could hear right through it. I ran down the stairs and kept going. From the way those two had acted, I was sure that I had the right man’s picture and that they were the ones who had killed him.”

The reason Ned’s skin had appeared translucent that Monday morning was that during the previous evening it had been buffed to gauzy thinness by successive pairs of large, powerful, clean, untanned, uncallused, well-kept hands with nails trimmed extremely short in order not to scratch customers. He had spent a good part of that night, after leaving the morgue, in a series of Turkish baths, making discreet inquiries about rubbers who might be missing from work.

“The minute I saw the hands on the mystery stiff at the morgue, I noticed that the skin on the tips of the fingers was crinkled, like a baby’s sometimes after a hot bath,” Mr. Brown says. “I remembered I’d seen the same thing recently on an adult’s fingers, and then I remembered where it was—on a fellow named Bill McPhee, who was giving me an alcohol rub at the Murray Hill Baths. And I’d asked McPhee, ‘Do your hands get that way permanently from the hot water and soap, or do the crinkles go away when you go home?’

“ ‘Oh, they stay that way for a couple of days, maybe a week, if you aren’t working,’ he said. ‘But then they go away and the skin looks just like anybody else’s.’

“I sized the stiff up. Good muscular development—massaging twenty or thirty customers a day is hard work, and some of those fellows used to pride themselves on how hard they could grip. Clean, white skin—where could you keep cleaner than working in a bath, and where would you get less sun on you? Carefully trimmed fingernails, but too short for a dude or a society fellow. The big fuss about the ‘extraordinary refinement’ of the hands was cleared up in a minute. I told Gus Roeder that Sunday afternoon in the morgue, ‘This guy was a rubber in a Turkish bath,’ I said, ‘and he must have worked not long before he was killed, for the crinkles on his hands would have smoothed out.’ Then I explained what McPhee had told me about the crinkles’ lasting only a few days. ‘If we check the Turkish baths in the city and find one that has had a rubber missing for less than a week and more than a day, we’ve got our man,’ I said. Gus was a hard fellow to get excited. He pointed out that there were hundreds of baths in the city; they were popular on the East Side and in Harlem as well as in the Tenderloin, and you’d have to check those in Brooklyn, too, and anyway the man might have been lured or shanghaied from out of town. The World didn’t have enough men to spare for that kind of quick check, Gus said. We had a dozen hot crime men—real sleuths—but they all wanted to try out theories of their own. If we passed my idea on to the police and they thought much of it, some detective would be sure to spill it to the Journal and we would get no credit for it. ‘But if you want to work your hunch yourself, kiddo, go ahead,’ Gus said. ‘I assign you to it. All the baths you take you can put on the swindle sheet, but more than a quarter tip the auditor won’t believe, so don’t try to get away with it.’ ”

Thus admonished, Ned hit out straight for his favorite district, the Tenderloin—first, because the biggest establishments were there, and, second, because he thought the rubbers in that area were more worldly types, and so more likely to get in trouble, than their confreres elsewhere. He did not begin with the Murray Hill, his habitual retreat—probably because we never expect the strange and mysterious in surroundings that are familiar to us. He began, instead, at the Everard, on West Twenty-eighth Street, and tried three more before he arrived at the Murray Hill, at about nine Sunday evening. By that time, he had been scrubbed until all his surfaces felt like Jimmy Valentine’s sandpapered fingertips. In each place, he had asked the attendants to put him through fast because he had a heavy date and wanted to get rid of a hangover before he picked her up. He began his quest at each bath by asking where the big fellow was who didn’t seem to be on the floor that night. In each, he was told that the staff was at full strength, and upon hearing this he mumbled that he must have been thinking of some other Turkish bath. At the Murray Hill, since he was known there, he varied the approach slightly by remarking to the rubber, McPhee, that the place looked kind of shorthanded, and asking him if anyone was missing. McPhee, an irascible type, said there damn sure was. Bill, the big Dutchman, who always had Sundays off, had taken Friday that week, trading days off with a man who normally would have been working Sunday. The other man had worked Friday and Saturday and then stayed home, but the big Dutchman had failed to show, leaving them one man short. Naturally, there had been more of a rush than they expected. The previous night had produced an unusually heavy crop of bad heads; it always happened that way when you were short a man. “He took Friday off because he was going to look at a house in the country with his girl—or so he said,” McPhee snarled. “Saturday, some Dutchman called up to say Guldensuppe wouldn’t be in to work Sunday because he was sick. Guldensuppe is his name,” McPhee added in a tone of distaste. “Drunk someplace, of course. Today, when he didn’t show, the boss said he was fired.” Ned submitted to his fifth scrubbing in five hours without feeling any discomfort. He was anesthetized by preoccupation. “About how big is this big Dutchman?” he asked. “I must have seen him around here, but I can’t place him in my mind.”

“Oh, probably around five eleven,” McPhee replied. (That was taller for a man in those days than it is now.) “And he’s built big—big shoulders and a fine big chest on him. He’s just built like a big Dutchman. You must have noticed him. He has the upper half of a woman tattooed all over his chest—used to be a sailor on one of them Heinie windjammers when he was a kid. He has one of those trick mustaches like two half-moons on his lip. Not a bad Dutchman,” McPhee conceded, “but skirt-crazy.”

When McPhee mentioned the tattoo, Ned’s heart jumped. “I remembered the torso I had looked at that afternoon, with a slab of integument—of whole skin—removed from the chest, apparently to get rid of some distinguishing mark,” Mr. Brown says.

Stopping at the cashier’s desk on the way out to pay for his massage, Ned asked the cashier where Bill Guldensuppe lived. “I borrowed a dollar from him last time I was in here, and now I hear he’s not coming in any more, so I want to send it to him,” he explained. The cashier looked at a list and said that he didn’t know where Guldensuppe lived but that he got his mail at a saloon on Ninth Avenue, near Thirty-sixth Street—not an unusual arrangement. “And if you’re going to write to him, you might add that he’s fired,” he said. “That’ll save us a stamp.” When Ned got out of the Murray Hill Baths, he didn’t write. He grabbed a hack and told the driver to get down to Thirty-sixth and Ninth and not to spare the horse on the way. He felt like Richard Harding Davis, who at that moment was covering a war between Greece and Turkey, after attending the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg.

The saloon on Ninth Avenue was quiet that summer evening. It was a Raines Law hotel, with the ten bedrooms upstairs and the petrified sandwich on every table that entitled it to remain open on Sundays, under the statute passed not long before to appease the Sabbatarians upstate. (The bedrooms established its status as a hotel; the sandwiches represented the food that was legally required to be served with every drink.) The Irish bartender had the cowlick center part in his hair and the handle-bar mustaches that were tonsorial caste marks. The sandwich man, on hand in case anybody wanted one that could really be eaten, was an old German. Ned sized the saloon up as a neighborhood headquarters—the most pretentious place for a hundred yards in any direction. He ordered a schooner of beer and knocked it off with unaffected enthusiasm; the baths had dehydrated him until his shoes felt large. He ordered another and bought one for the bartender, at the same time ordering a ham-and-cheese on rye, for he had not eaten since noon. Having established relations, he asked the bartender if he knew big Bill Guldensuppe, the Dutchman who worked at the Murray Hill Baths. Acquaintance with a masseur in a flashy Turkish bath was a social reference over on Ninth Avenue. The bartender said he knew the big Dutchman who worked in the baths, but the last name didn’t sound right. He thought it was Nack. The sandwich man, arriving with the ham-and-cheese, said the name was Guldensuppe, all right; he and the rubber belonged to the same Low German death-benefit society. “He even gets mail here under the name Guldensuppe,” he said. “He goes by Nack in the neighborhood because he lives with his sweetheart—Mrs. Augusta Nack, the midwife, right over Werner’s drugstore.” The sandwich man winked. “She got plenty of cash,” he said. “She treats him good.”

Ned, trying to seem casual, said that he’d happened to be in the neighborhood, so he’d stopped by, hoping to meet Guldensuppe and have a beer with him, since he knew Sunday was the rubber’s night off. “He always talks about this place,” he said. “He’s a hot sketch!”

The bartender said he hadn’t seen the big Dutchman for a couple of nights. “Maybe they’ve went to Coney for the day—him and his lady friend,” he suggested. Come to think of it, he added, he hadn’t seen him around since late Thursday night. “He usually be in for a few beers after he gets through the baths,” he said. “The work takes the moisture out of them. I hope he isn’t deserting us, because he’s a good customer.” Ned felt like a poker player who, peeking at the second card dealt him, sees it is another ace. If Guldensuppe had been on a protracted drunk, as McPhee had supposed, it was inconceivable that he wouldn’t have once poked his nose into his favorite barroom in seventy-two hours.

“He’s a hot sketch!” Ned said again, to dissemble the depth of his interest in Guldensuppe’s absence. “Always after dames.”

“You bet!” the sandwich man said. “You should see some of the letters he gets here. Pink envelope! No wonder he don’t want Mrs. Nack should know.”

Ned said, “He’s got a hell of a build. If he had been born in this country, he might be fighting Fitzsimmons.”

The bartender said he had heard the big Dutchman could handle himself pretty good, at that. “There was a fellow trying to beat his time with some dame, I heard, and the Dutchman give him a good going over,” he said. “The fellow pulled a gun and the Dutchman took it away and kept it.”

Walking down Ninth Avenue, after a valedictory beer, Ned had a good look at the building that housed Werner’s drugstore—No. 439. There were no lights in the windows on the second floor. Back in the World office, he found Roeder just finishing off his lead story on the mystery—the one declaring that an awful crime had been committed. After Roeder had dictated and sent away the last take of his two-and-a-half-column story, which would earn him $18.75, he consented to listen to Ned. Roeder was still not overly impressed by Ned’s theory. “The fifth place you visit, you find a man missing,” he said. “Maybe if you went to all of them you would find two dozen. The tattoo sounds good, all right, and the jealous dame and the fellow with the gun he took away from him. What you got to do tomorrow is have a talk with this Mrs. Nack and get a good look inside the flat. Maybe there are signs of a struggle—bloodstains. Maybe the head is still in the apartment. And get a picture of Guldensuppe.”

Ned thought up the soap scheme on his long journey home to Flatbush.

With Guldensuppe’s picture under his jacket and the other man’s glare still vivid in his memory, Ned made his way down to the World again on Monday evening. He was now dead certain he had the solution of the mystery. The sequel was inglorious. Colleagues of greater prestige had turned up what the city desk thought was a better bet. When the Early Edition of the next day’s World came off the presses Monday night, the front-page headline on the murder read, promisingly enough:

But the story under it was a letdown for Ned.

The most interesting discovery of the day was made by reporters for the World [it read]. It was that a wagon, in which were two men and which contained two packages, crossed to New York on the ferry from Greenpoint, L.I., on Saturday afternoon, a short time before the finding of the headless shoulders in the East River at Eleventh Street.

The Greenpoint ferry landing on the New York side is at Tenth Street, and a bundle thrown from an incoming boat would have been carried towards the Eleventh Street pier, with the tide running as it was that afternoon. . . .

That a saloonkeeper from that very section was reported missing last night having left home on June 2 with a considerable amount of money, makes this phase of the case especially interesting.

All day Monday, while Ned was making the rounds with his soap, the World’s torso campaign was being run by Casey, the assistant city editor, under constant inspirational prodding from the front office. Roeder, Reitmeier, and a platoon of other reporters were working with the police, and Ike White, the World’s famous lone-wolf star reporter, was working against them, with a squad of special undercover agents. Fred Sturtevant, a celebrated rewrite man, was welding the gross crude output into an artistic whole, and the circulation department was having such a picnic that there must have been a substantial psychological resistance to Ned’s story, with its possibility of putting an abrupt end to the frenzy. Roeder, however, was beginning to think well of it, and that Monday night he told Ned to hand over his precious photograph to the art department, so that it could have an engraving ready. “It was a good day’s work, kiddo,” he said. “Thanks.”

Ned was so full of his story that even though it was after midnight, when he got home to Flatbush, he awakened his father and told him about it. “Why didn’t you grab the fellow and bring him in?” Frederick Sherwood Brown said. “That’s what I would have done.” He then went back to sleep.

The mystery continued to sell unparalleled multitudes of newspapers all the next day—Tuesday, June 29th. A World editorial that morning stated that in offering a reward the paper was acting simply as a minister of justice, without ulterior object. The Journal editorialized in the afternoon, “The only reason why every crime is not detected is that society does not employ the best order of brains in its work. . . . The Journal’s offer should bring to the investigation of this mystery intellects and intentions not usually given to this kind of work.” To offset the World’s two-men-on-a-ferry story, Tuesday’s Journal splashed a report by one Charles Anderson, of No. 7 Bowery, that he had seen two men on a Mount Vernon trolley car on Sunday afternoon loaded down with bundles wrapped in the fateful red oilcloth with gold stars. The resourceful Telegram, ever on the lookout for a sporting angle, promoted the candidacy of “a heavy bettor named McManus, who has not been at the track for five or six days,” under a headline that read:

The Evening World, in its Night Extra, which was relatively safe from Hearst plagiarism, offered a stimulating speculation by still another medical man, under the headline

The same paper also presented an exclusive interview with former Police Inspector Alexander S. Williams, who said, inter alia: “The motive was revenge. . . . More than one person committed the crime. . . . It was probably done by a German.”

Ned felt that the former Inspector was getting warm. But there was nothing more he could do about the case himself. Ike White and Roeder had vetoed the idea of going straight to 439 Ninth Avenue and “arresting” Mrs. Nack and the man with the black mustaches before somebody had positively identified the torso as Guldensuppe’s. It would have been easy to visit the Murray Hill Baths, collect a couple of the big Dutchman’s colleagues, and take them to the morgue, but this would have been hard to keep quiet from the competition. Roeder therefore waited until Tuesday night and then got a man named Joseph Kavenagh, a Murray Hill rubber who was off duty, to accompany him to the “storehouse,” as the gay police reporters called the morgue. In consequence, the Late Edition of Wednesday’s World had a technical scoop—a brief story on the second page with the headline

The story under this reported that two detectives had left Police Headquarters at one-thirty that morning looking for a suspect; they were “acting on information given by Joseph Kavenagh, of 229 Madison Street, Hoboken.” At the Murray Hill Baths, some cautious person in charge had informed the World that Gildensupper (the name was spelled a half dozen ways in the newspapers when the story first broke) had not worked there in three months.

The World of Thursday, July 1st, proudly claimed credit for this first revelation of the torso’s identity, which it had printed with little display and less conviction. The reason for its original lack of enthusiasm was that on Tuesday night, while Roeder was squiring Kavenagh to the morgue, another identification of the torso had been made, this one seemingly more plausible and circumstantial, and the directors of the World’s board of strategy had fallen for it. A cabinetmaker named Theodore Cyklam, who, like the already forgotten Mr. Lutz, had injured the index finger of his left hand (an occupational disfigurement, since a cabinetmaker uses it to hold every nail he drives), had disappeared from his home in College Point. (The locale jibed beautifully with the World’s pet exclusive story about the two men and the wagon on the Greenpoint ferry, which carried traffic to and from College Point.) Louis Zimm, the superintendent of the factory employing Cyklam, and three fellow-workmen had appeared at the morgue and sworn, after looking at the torso and its scarred forefinger, that it was Cyklam, or part of him. It was therefore Cyklam’s picture, sketched by a World artist “from full and detailed description given to the World by Louis Zimm,” that appeared on the first page of Wednesday morning’s paper, instead of Guldensuppe’s, reproduced from the photograph snatched by Ned Brown.

Wednesday morning’s Herald, although it didn’t have the murdered man’s name, profited by a quick tip from its man at Mulberry Street to head its main story:

“It was reported early this morning that the victim of the murder had been identified . . . and suspicion pointed to a jealous husband,” the text below this stated. “It was said that the man was a shampooer in an uptown Turkish bath house, who has been missing for a few days. This man, it is said, had been living with a baker’s wife.”

Mrs. Nack’s legal spouse, Herman Nack, was, in fact, the driver of a bakery delivery wagon, but he had not particularly resented it when his wife left him, and after the identification of Guldensuppe he considered himself lucky to be all in one piece. He nevertheless enjoyed the eminence of a putative master criminal for at least one day.

an eight-column streamer across the front page of that newspaper bragged on Wednesday, and more headlines dropped away beneath it:

The Journal—by its own account, at least—had unravelled the whole mystery; it had had the body identified by Guldensuppe’s colleagues, had interviewed Mrs. Nack and scared the devil out of her, and had put the police wise to the whole solution, all on the previous day, but had refrained from saying anything about it at the time, for reasons it didn’t go into. Nearly half of its Wednesday front page was given over to an idealized sketch of Mrs. Nack’s head, which made her look rather like Pallas Athena. The caption under it read, with what papers would now consider reckless disregard of the law of libel, “Mrs. Nack, Murderess!”

After tracing the bakery wagon driven by Herman Nack all night, Journal reporters overtook it at 11:15 this morning at the corner of Fortieth Street and Ninth Avenue [part of the Journal eulogy of the Journal ran].

It bore the sign of the Astoria Model Bakery, owned by Joseph B. Schaps, of Astoria, L.I.

Nack was on the driver’s seat. The two Journal representatives tried to climb up on the steps of the wagon, but Nack pushed them off.

He then whipped up his horse and dashed through Fortieth Street to Tenth Avenue.

He turned down Tenth Avenue, with the two Journal men in close pursuit. They watched for a policeman, but saw none until they reached the corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirty-third Street.

They managed to attract the policeman’s attention, and he joined in the pursuit.

The wagon was overtaken in another half block, and then another struggle ensued.

Nack was desperate, and with his whip beat off the two Journal men.

He was ghastly white and seemed determined to escape arrest at all hazards. He fought with desperation.

Finally the policeman, who belonged to the West Thirty-seventh Street station squad, climbed up on the opposite side of the wagon and subdued Nack.

The two men from the Journal helped the policeman to overpower the desperate driver, and he was at once taken to the West Thirty-seventh Street station in his wagon.

There he proved to know nothing at all about the murder.

The Evening World, chronicling “The Arrest of Supposed Murderer of William Guldensuppe (Nack),” gave all the credit to detectives, and didn’t even mention the horsewhipped Journal reporters. It published a picture of Mrs. Nack and one of Guldensuppe, which, Ned was delighted to see, it had reproduced from his trophy. It also carried a long, if not entirely veracious, story of Mrs. Nack’ s love life, obtained by detectives from her and from neighbors of hers on Ninth Avenue. She said that she had quarrelled with Guldensuppe and that he had gone away, but that she did not believe he was dead. She had had telegrams from him on Sunday and Monday, she said. The name of a third man, known familiarly as Fred, crept into the stories of both the Journal and the Evening World. He was the man who had had the fight with Guldensuppe.

Guldensuppe’s legs turned up on the same day, Wednesday, floating into dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. And on the following day a notice appeared on the bulletin board in the World’s city room announcing an award of $5 to E. G. Brown, for outstanding work on the Guldensuppe murder case.

During the next few days, it became clear that Fred, and not the complaisant husband, was the man in the case. Fred’s real name was Martin Thorn, the police learned, “Thorn” being a Germanization of “Torzewski.” Thorn was born in Posen, in German Poland, and was a journeyman barber—a silent, moody kind of man, whom other men shunned and who, like Guldensuppe, lived in part off women; the rubber had been a genial maquereau, the barber a sombre one. Guldensuppe had driven Thorn away, but the latter had sneaked back to see Mrs. Nack during the rubber’s working hours. Once Mrs. Nack’s picture had appeared in the newspapers, a woman in Woodside, Long Island, identified her as the stout woman who, with a male companion, had rented a house from her in what was then a sparsely settled neighborhood. The companion matched the description of Thorn. The house had outside drains, which leaked, and the neighbors’ children now recalled that for two days the pipes had run “red water,” which ducks had drunk with avidity.

Mrs. Nack was under arrest, but she refused to admit anything. Every policeman and every reporter in town, including Ned Brown, was out looking for Thorn, but nobody turned him up, and there was a report that he had got safely away on a ship to Germany. Actually, he was living in a cheap hotel on money he had obtained by pawning Guldensuppe’s watch and clothes. He felt that his revenge on Guldensuppe would be incomplete if he kept it to himself, so within a few days of the identification of the fragments he walked into a barbershop where a man he knew was working, and told him the whole story—swearing him to secrecy, of course. The other barber, a man named Gartha, went home in a cold sweat and told his wife, who went straight to the police. Gartha made a date with Thorn at the corner of 125th Street and Eighth Avenue for nine o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, July 6th. Inspector O’Brien, disguised as a farmer, and about a hundred of his detectives, in various other disguises, kept it—each detective, to judge by subsequent newspaper accounts, trailed by a reporter. Thorn was waiting, and O’Brien arrested him.

The Sun of July 8th summarized the story Thorn had told to Gartha more or less as follows: Mrs. Nack had got tired of Guldensuppe (in the Sun’s version, Gieldsensuppe) and Thorn hated him. It was not long before they decided to get rid of him for keeps, and for that purpose they rented the house in Woodside, because it was a place where nobody knew them. Guldensuppe had been after Mrs. Nack to open a house of prostitution, so when the time came to do him in, she told him that there was just as much money in baby farming, and that, moreover, taking care of illegitimate children was a legitimate business. Then she said she knew of a good spot for a baby farm in Woodside, and lured Guldensuppe over there to look at it. It is a safe bet that Mrs. Nack packed a picnic lunch for the excursion.

Thorn was at the house when the couple got there, but Guldensuppe didn’t know it. Thorn had bought a new revolver. He had a razor, too, and on the way over to Woodside he had bought a saw. The lovers had also laid in a supply of plaster of Paris, oilcloth, cheesecloth, cord, and other supplies they thought might come in handy. When Mrs. Nack and Guldensuppe arrived at the Woodside house, Thorn was hiding in a closet near the second-floor stair landing. He had taken off, and neatly hung up, his outer garments, because he didn’t want to get blood on them, and he was standing in his undershirt and socks. When he heard the gate outside the house click shut—a prearranged signal—he made ready. Mrs. Nack suggested to Guldensuppe that while she went and had a look at the outhouse, he go upstairs and see what he thought of the arrangement of rooms; she was familiar with it already, she said. Guldensuppe went upstairs, and when he looked into a bedroom by the landing, Thorn opened the closet door behind him and shot him in the back of the neck. The rubber fell, almost certainly mortally wounded but still gasping—“snoring” was Thorn’s word. Thorn dragged him into the bathroom, put him in the bathtub, and cut his throat with the razor; Ned Brown’s deduction that the man in the morgue had been dissected alive was correct. After the butchery, Thorn ran hot water into the bathtub, washing a good deal of blood down the drain and making the puddle for the ducks. Then he encased the head in plaster of Paris, so that it would sink when he threw it in the river, but he failed to do this with the other pieces, an omission he later regretted. He and Mrs. Nack together tied up their neat bundles, lugged them to a trolley line, and took a car to the Long Island slip of the Greenpoint ferry. The head sank beautifully, but when they saw that the parcels containing the legs and the upper torso were floating, they decided to hold on to the one with the lower torso. The day after the murder, they hired a hack from an undertaker near Mrs. Nack’s flat and drove to the Bronx, where they got rid of that bundle. They meant to live happily ever after, in a flat Mrs. Nack had rented at 235 East Twenty-fifth Street, but the excitement over the serialization of Guldensuppe disconcerted them.

Thorn and Mrs. Nack were indicted for murder by a New York County grand jury on July 9th, but the indictment was found faulty, because the crime had been committed in Queens County. They were reindicted there, and in November Thorn was found guilty of murder in the first degree. He appealed, and was granted several stays, but in August, 1898, he was electrocuted in Sing Sing. Mrs. Nack, who had turned state’s evidence against him, was permitted to plead guilty to manslaughter in the first degree. In January, 1898, she was sentenced to fifteen years in state’s prison, which meant, with good conduct, nine years and seven months. The District Attorney defended this leniency on the ground that without her testimony it might have been difficult to establish a corpus delicti, since Guldensuppe’s head had not been found; William F. Howe, of Howe & Hummel, who was Thorn’s attorney, was prepared to contend to the last ditch that the pieced-together headless body could have been that of anybody at all. Mr. Howe said that Mrs. Nack reminded him of Lady Macbeth and all the Borgias rolled into one, and that she had hypnotized his client. “Martin Thorn is a young man of candor,” he said. “From my first interview with him I found him saturated with chivalry—ready, if necessary, to yield his life as a sacrifice to the Delilah who has placed him in his present position.”

Mr. Howe said this on November 11, 1897. By then, the Bellevue Hospital Medical School had been in session for a good month. But Edwin Gerald Brown, better-known as Ned, had not reported for his sophomore year. In fact, he never has. ♦