The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (28 page)

But the
World
had already blown the scoop.

Blurted out in Thorn’s conversation with Held were four startling words about Mrs. Nack—
“She killed Guldensuppe herself”
—his first public acknowledgment that there
was
a murder, and that it was of Guldensuppe. Not one of Pulitzer’s editors recognized its importance, but Hearst’s men did. As the
World
fussed over its showgirl-in-prison illustrations for the next morning, the
Evening Journal
trumped them with a late-edition headline:
THORN CONFESSES HIS PART IN THE MURDER
.

The
World
just couldn’t get it quite right. It still managed innovations, such as running
women’s fashion plates with actual photographed faces superimposed on the pen-and-ink dress drawings; the result looked comical, but reproducing an entire photo in the newspaper was quite difficult. Still, it hinted at the future. Soon all nineteenth-century news would be distinguishable from that of the looming twentieth century at a glance: The old was monochromatic and engraved, the new, color and photographic. And while Hearst
hadn’t sprung his attack with photography yet, he was busy opening up a widening lead on color printing.
Pulitzer anxiously telegraphed from Maine about the headlines he was seeing in Hearst’s paper: not about Nack and Thorn, but about the
Journal
itself—or, as he called it in a coded cablegram, “Geranium”:

It was. Hearst had ordered up more color presses, and his
Evening Journal
was punishing other competitors so badly that for one precarious night, until it got its finances in order, the
Evening Telegram
ceased publication altogether. The
New York Times
, itself barely recovered from bankruptcy, was trying to beat back at the tide of yellow journalism by running a pointed new motto on its front page: “
All the News That’s Fit to Print.” But other papers were inexorably drifting with Hearst’s powerful current. On the same day that the
Evening Journal
boasted such edifying stories as
COCAINE PHANTOMS HAUNT HIM
and
HYPNOTISM NEARLY KILLS
,
one could also find all these headlines on a single page of the more respectable
New York Herald:

New York papers now ran
far more column inches on crime and accidents than other cities did, and the
Journal
ran so much “bleed” copy in combination with women’s-interest stories and comics that business, labor, and religion were nearly crowded out altogether.

Hearst knew his readers, and he knew what they liked.

“
The two stories of Nack and Thorn have reached an equilibrium of contradiction,” he announced to readers in a column. The
real question, his paper now asked, was
Which one’s more guilty?
They tallied some 1,147 letters from readers: 713 found Augusta Nack the guiltier party, 329 blamed both equally, and just 105 laid the blame on Thorn.

“He is no more guilty of the murder of Guldensuppe than a babe,” a hypnotist wrote in. “Mrs. Nack forced him to do it by the power she exerted over him.” Another reader begged to differ, offering up the novel theory that Thorn
and
Guldensuppe were the real conspirators: “It was a plot of Guldensuppe and Thorn to convict Mrs. Nack of murder,” he wrote. “Guldensuppe got out of the way, and Thorn cut up a body that he palmed off on Mrs. Nack as Guldensuppe’s.” Nine-year-old Helen Weiss of Princeton, on the other hand, was ready to wholeheartedly condemn Nack and Thorn alike: “I think they are both guilty.”

But an even more telling sign was tucked away in the
latest ad for the Eden Musée waxworks, where the scene of Thorn cutting up Guldensuppe was no longer the main attraction. It had been replaced by a slightly different pair of deadly combatants:
Augusta Nack and Martin Thorn
.

ON SUNDAY MORNING BEFORE DAWN
, newsboys hauled off fat bundles of the
Journal
. They were going to be sure sellers. The paper had produced an alarming scenario headlined
THE INVASION OF NEW YORK
, complete with “a thrilling description by an expert of what would happen with the Spanish Fleet in New York Harbor.” But even that took a backseat to what they’d used to headline the entire front page:
THE STORY OF MY LIFE—BY AUGUSTA NACK
. Along with a sober-looking portrait of Mrs. Nack taking pen to paper in her prison cell, Hearst’s front page was given over to her melancholy and remorseful account of life before she became New York’s most notorious woman, back when she was still young Augusta Pusat. “I was born in the little village of Oskarweischen, in Posen, Germany,” she wrote, remembering the poverty of her family there. “When I was a girl I used to tend the geese and drive them down to the water in the morning.… In Germany idleness is considered not the right thing for either girls
or women, and when I was tending my geese and looking after the kettles to make sure that they did not boil over, I made my lace.”

After moving to the United States, she was soon earning more money than the rest of her family in the old country—“I had everything—and they had nothing,” she marveled—but after she begged her mother to save the family’s prayers for their own needs, she received a stern response.
“My daughter,”
the elder Mrs. Pusat wrote back,
“you don’t know. Everything you have may be taken from you in a twinkling of an eye.”

Mrs. Nack often thought upon that letter.

Her confession in the case, she told
Journal
readers, was inspired by the visits of the Reverend Robert Miles to her cell. At first she’d spurned him and his Bible, but then one day the minister had brought his four-year-old son, little Parker Miles, and as he prattled on and jumped up into her lap, asking her to tell him a story, her steely reserve cracked. She broke down in sobs and confessed to the loving God of Reverend Miles. The
Journal
had a fine portrait of the clergyman too, and of his angelic son on Mrs. Nack’s lap; it was a heartwarming story for a Sunday paper, and it would fly off the stands.

But one person wasn’t buying her story yet: the DA.

As the newsboys fanned out into the still-darkened streets of the city, Augusta Nack was quietly let out of her cell and joined the district attorney, Detective Sullivan, and Captain Methven in a waiting carriage outside the Queens County Jail. It was a private hire, with the passenger veiled so that nobody on the street could spot her. She arranged a shawl around herself in the bitter predawn air, and they headed up Jackson Avenue.

“
Can you point out the place?” Youngs asked her again.

“Yes,” she promised.

“If you do,” he said significantly, “
then
we shall be prepared to believe what you say.”

Youngs eyed her carefully as they made their way along the muddy avenue. His star witness had already been terribly undermined on the stand—it wasn’t for nothing that William Howe was considered the best trial lawyer in the city. Youngs still hadn’t offered her a plea deal, and before he did, he wanted more from Mrs. Nack, some solid
evidence that Howe wouldn’t be able to bully and balderdash his way out of.

Woodside
, announced their driver.

The trio of lawmen stepped out of the carriage, and as the sun rose they watched Mrs. Nack wander aimlessly in the garden of the Woodside cottage—hesitating here, stopping there. She hadn’t been back in five months, since just after the murder, and the gardens that had been lush in that dangerous time were now barren and frosted.

Well?
Youngs demanded.

She couldn’t remember … but … perhaps she
could
remember. Yes, what they were looking for was surely in an entirely different place.

Youngs snorted in disgust and sat heavily back in the carriage. He kept a peeved silence as they made their way through Flushing toward College Point, past a series of scrubby, empty lots.

“That’s the place!” yelled Mrs. Nack.

The carriage stopped by a crumbling stone wall on a vacant lot; it was an African American neighborhood, and the party’s presence was becoming uncomfortably conspicuous to passersby. The veiled prisoner pottered in the weeds a bit—Was it here? Perhaps it was there?—until the DA finally lost all patience. The carriage promptly left with a jolt, hauling the humiliated prisoner back to Queens County Jail.

“
Did you find the saw?” Detective Sullivan was asked as he returned from the jaunt.

“No,” he snapped. “We didn’t.”

The rest of
Augusta Nack’s story wasn’t holding up much better. Within hours after she and Manny Friend paraded her newfound piety to the papers, a familiar figure turned up at the
World
’s editorial offices: Herman Nack. The bakery driver was upset—deeply upset. He’d already
lost his job at the Astoria Model Bakery from the bad publicity, couldn’t sleep at night from the worry it had caused. He appeared, one reporter remarked, like nothing so much as a sleepwalker.

“I can only think of her,” he sighed.

With the
Journal
getting Augusta’s childhood, the
World
ventured into Herman’s.

“Where did you first meet Mrs. Nack?” the paper asked.

“In Kiel, in Germany. She was a servant girl then. The family she worked for was a very fine family. I was working in a pottery. I loved her, and that’s all.” He paused, then admitted thoughtfully: “By and by Guldensuppe, he loved her. He was not a bad man either. I always liked him, but he loved her—that was the matter with him.”

“
What do you think of the strange course the trial has taken?”

“What do I think about it?” he mused, and fell silent. “I think so much that I do not know what to think. It is with me think, think, all the time. Maybe she killed that fellow, maybe Thorn did. I do not know. If she did, I hope they will”—he stumbled over the language, and then over the emotion—“how do you call it? Put her in the chair of electricity.”

He was growing animated. There was something else, he said, that had truly made him upset: her confession.

“I am sure of one thing: it was not from religion or fear of God that she tells about the death of Guldensuppe. She was
not
religious. She was
not
good. Sometimes she used to go with one of her customers to church—but when she comes home she laughs at such things.” Herman Nack’s expression was becoming anguished. “I want to tell you, sir, that woman will not go to heaven. She is bad—
she is bad.
”

And a bad liar as well, by the look of it. The
newspapers gloated after word of her failed carriage trip leaked out. But two days later, as
laborers worked with scythes to clear a salt-hay field in College Point, a call came in to the DA’s office. Just by the spot Mrs. Nack had pointed out, they’d discovered a
rusting eighteen-inch surgeon’s saw—a Richardson & Sons model for slicing through bone. It was found jammed blade first into the ground, as if someone had tried to murder the dirt itself.

MALWINE BRANDEL CLUTCHED
a bouquet of red roses. Barely eighteen years old, with lustrous blond hair and blue eyes highlighted by her most stylish high-collared velvet jacket, she was begging Sheriff Doht to let her inside to that morning’s retrial.
I want to give these to Martin Thorn
, she pleaded.

The sheriff regarded her with sheer disbelief. “No, I can’t do that,” he finally managed. “As long as I am in charge of these proceedings, Thorn will never receive any flowers in the courthouse.”

But I must
, she begged. Mrs. Brandel had recently lost her husband, and already had her heart stolen by the newspaper pictures of Thorn.

“Thorn is a fearfully
interesting
fellow,” she said breathlessly. “I cannot believe him guilty of such a fiendish crime. The more I look at him and his honest eyes, the more I like him.”

The sheriff shook his head.

“Don’t you know,” he mocked gently, “that you are subject to imprisonment if you send flowers to Thorn? He might
poison
himself with them.”

“Then I’ll give them to Mr. Howe,” she insisted. “He’ll give them to Thorn.”

Sheriff Doht held out his hand; if she was going inside, she’d have to give up the roses. The heartsick young widow reluctantly parted with the bouquet, and he tossed it aside as she pressed past.

“I wish women with these sort of ideas would stay in New York,” he muttered.

But they wouldn’t. The ferries and streetcars coming over from Manhattan that morning were crowded with wave after wave of spectators. Women poured into the galleries, chatting and carrying
the de rigueur accessory of the trial—opera glasses. “I came here out of curiosity—woman’s curiosity, if you want to call it that,” one devotee explained. Her name was
Tessie, and she’d come up from Greenpoint early that morning to get the best front-row gallery seat. “I think that every woman that has heard of this case is interested in it.”