The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (31 page)

(photo credit p5.1)

NOT EVERYONE WAS TRANSFIXED
by Martin Thorn’s stare. True, there were newspaper reports of his “evil eye”;
Hearst even joked that its baleful power had caused that week’s unraveling of Paddy Gleason, the Long Island City mayor caught trying to use the Woodside Water Company to scoop up a
$60,000 windfall for himself. But the evil-eye rumor was taken seriously enough by District Attorney Youngs’s daughter that she loaned him
her lucky piece of coral; this, she told her father, was to be
carried in his pocket for protection against Thorn. In his other pocket William Youngs dutifully carried a rabbit’s foot—a present from his wife. But he knew Thorn had no unearthly power now, and scarcely even earthly power; why, the man could be undone by a schoolgirl.

“Clara Pierce,” Youngs called out into the packed courthouse.

The prosecution, allowed a final rebuttal to Thorn’s testimony, had tantalized the press with the lure of an appearance by Mrs. Nack; but alas, they would not give Howe the satisfaction of attacking her. “The case for the people was complete without her,” one of Youngs’s team insisted. Instead, wending past the jury box and up to the stand was a slender and neatly attired girl, her eyes wide before the murmuring crowd.

Who is that?
the whisper ran.

“
Where do you live?” Youngs asked her after she was sworn in.

“439 Ninth Avenue.”

“Do you go to school?”

“Yes, sir.” Clara nodded earnestly.

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

Her manner was a curious contrast to Thorn’s or indeed nearly every adult who had taken the stand—
her voice small and precise, free of artifice.

“Do you remember”—Youngs measured his words carefully—“Friday, the twenty-fifth of June?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “I got home at two o’clock.”

“How do you know it was Friday?”

“Because I got home early.”

“Friday is the only day you get home early?”

“Yes, sir,” she explained, adding that it was her time to visit Mrs. Stewart, a neighbor in the building, to babysit the woman’s infant.

“What did you do with it?”

“I was bringing it down in its carriage.”

“Did you take it to see Mrs. Nack?”

“Yes,” the girl said plainly.

“You know Mrs. Nack?”

“I didn’t just know her,” the schoolgirl smiled. “She
lived
in 439 Ninth Avenue.”

“Did you see her that day?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes—between half past two and three o’clock.”

“What was Mrs. Nack
doing
at that time?” he asked significantly.

“Trimming her hat,” Clara replied.

A murmur arose in the courtroom. The girl was with Mrs. Nack—at a sewing table, calmly banding ribbons around a brown hat—at the precise moment Thorn claimed she was miles away cutting up a body.

No further questions
, Youngs said as he walked back past Howe. It was a child on an East River pier who had begun
the case one balmy June day; now, five months later and in the winter darkness of a courtroom, another child had ended it.

“
IS THAT ALL YOUR EVIDENCE?”
Howe scoffed.

“I believe it is,” Youngs replied with a slight bow.

Pacing before the bench the next morning, the defense counsel had one last request for Judge Maddox.

“
I ask”—Howe leaned forward—“that the jury be permitted to view the bath tub in which it is claimed the body was cut up—with a view to showing that no one person alone could have put that body in the bathtub without indentation of the tin.”

“These premises are now in the same condition that they were at or about the twenty-fifth of June?” Judge Maddox asked.

“Practically the same,” the DA cut in. “There are certain marks on the walls and things of that kind, but the premises are practically in the same condition.”

“The district attorney cut out little pieces to have it analyzed with respect to the blood,” Howe added. “Our point is that the bath tub should be viewed.”

The judge did not look entirely convinced. “What say you, Mr. Youngs?”

“We have nothing to conceal at all,” the DA shrugged. “The key is in the custody of Detective Sullivan.”

“How long will it take to go from here to the cottage?”

“About twenty minutes.”

After nearly thinking better of it, the judge decided to let them go ahead; Martin Thorn, not surprisingly, wasn’t interested in joining them.

“Gentlemen of the jury”—Judge Maddox turned to the twelve men—“you will be conducted to this house.”

With that, he sent them to fetch their hats and overcoats. Captain Methven and the rest of their police escort cut a path through the crowd as the jurors filed out into the cold air of the courthouse steps and down to the streetcar stop. While a private trolley was requisitioned for the jurors, reporters jockeyed to hire their own. An
Evening Journal
artist stood nearby and hurriedly sketched the scene in pen and ink.

It won’t fit
, a colleague informed him.
One bird can’t carry a sheet that size
. The chagrined artist, realizing his mistake, promptly sliced the drawing down the middle. The two halves were sent across the river by different pigeons.

The jurors themselves wouldn’t see the drawings; Captain Methven made sure of that.
He hadn’t allowed his charges to read anything in their off-hours—“nothing but hotel menu cards,” he declared. But the twelve men climbing aboard the trolley had taken it all good-naturedly, and had even amused themselves the day before by forming a fraternity. After considering calling it the
Thorny Club, they settled upon the
Good Thing Club—good things, of course, coming to those who wait. They’d passed around cigars to make it official, made an appointment for a group photograph, and
genially hazed their police escort by loading his rifle with blanks on the hotel’s trap-shooting range.
Same time next year
, the jurors promised the officers after dissolving into hilarity.
We’ll treat you to dinner
.

But now, it was all business.

The procession—the jurors and police sequestered in their one drafty streetcar, and a parade of reporters and spectators following them—rolled at a stately pace, beyond the saloons selling hot rum, past cart horses shaking off the cold, by greenhouses fogged with winter. When the convoy reached the sleepy corner of Second Street, a crowd was already gathered around the house that locals jovially
referred to as Mrs. Nack’s Office.

“
All off here for Woodside cottage!” the conductor called back to his passengers, and the twelve men stepped out of their streetcar and into the scene of the crime.

THE PLACE
had hardly changed at all.

The trees were bare now, the grass in the backyard high and unmown, but otherwise it remained recognizable from last summer’s front pages. The house’s windows slumbered under closed wooden shutters, heedless of the men treading through the mud and ice up to the creaking wooden front porch. There the jurors paused
while Detective Sullivan fished out a key and slid it into the lock.

Back, back
, they could hear the police yelling behind them,
shooing gawkers to a perimeter around the property line.

The door groaned awake on its hinges, and they quietly filed into the darkened parlor. The air in the unheated house was frigid, leaving
their breath visible in white clouds; with the power long shut off, Detective
Sullivan busily threw open the shutters to let in the subdued light of the winter morning.
This way
, he motioned them downstairs. He’d been one of the first in the house back in the summer, and he knew it well. Down in the cellar lay the smashed remains of a chimney, a hole still gaping where detectives in search of Guldensuppe’s head had attacked the brickwork with sledgehammers. A peek inside the hole revealed why that search had failed: The aperture inside was scarcely four inches wide.

Back upstairs and through the parlor, they paused in the kitchen to peer into the black iron stove that had held the ashes of the dead man’s shoes, then trod up the steep flight of stairs to the house’s second story. Their footsteps echoed loud and hollow through the hallways. It was a modest home, cheaply made and of small proportions, with just two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The jurors barely fit into the front bedroom. Its walls still bore neatly penciled forensics notations and small scars down to the wooden lathing—specimens pried away by detectives extracting the two bullets that Gotha said Thorn had test-fired from his revolver.

At the next room, the men paused.

The second bedroom remained as it had been—without a hint of trouble, save for subtle shavings planed off sections of the floorboards for blood analysis. The closet was empty, its door ajar, waiting. With a rug over the nicked-up floor, one could imagine a tidy little boarder’s room being made of such a space. Yet the murder had been perpetrated in
one
of these two bedrooms, for according to Nack and Gotha, Thorn had fired from this very closet, while Thorn contended that Mrs. Nack had done the deed herself in the front room.

The bathroom’s back here
. Sullivan waved them along.

The jurors inspected the metal bathtub, leaning down one by one to examine its surface. As Howe had promised, there was neither a dent nor a saw mark to be found. It would indeed have been difficult for one person to do the dismembering alone. But if both hands had grasped that terrible saw, which one had leveled the revolver or grasped the dagger—and in which bedroom?

Walking back downstairs, Foreman Morse led his jury into the
weedy backyard, the ground furrowed with the diggings of detectives and treasure hunters. Then they strolled out front to the roadside ditch, where ducks cavorted in half-frozen water. It was the same flock that had turned pink with Guldensuppe’s draining blood, and the jurors watched the ducks waddle past them and across the yard of the emptied house.

In a few hours, the jurors would have to decide just what had happened inside that cottage.

JUDGE MADDOX HADN’T YET
finished his cigar when the jurors returned; the justice was gazing out over the packed room with a thoughtful look. It was too bad they hadn’t taken a bit longer; cigars were just about the only way to make the room’s air fit to breathe.

Quiet!
He gaveled the tumultuous crowd, and he motioned for Howe to come up. The defense had elected to give the first closing argument, and it was time for him to make his last stand. The old lawyer
tugged down on his pin-striped vest—a favorite gesture of his—and then turned to the hushed room with great seriousness.

“May it please Your Honor and gentlemen of the jury,” Howe began quietly. “I firmly believe that the woman with a pistol taken from her apartment and brought here into this court is the one who shot William Guldensuppe. Mrs. Nack, the vile thing that left her husband, tells Thorn that she loves
him
dearly:
‘I love Thorn and would die for him.’
Instead she made another man die—Guldensuppe.”

Howe’s voice climbed in indignation as he paced before the jury box.

“Yet you’re asked to place the blame on this man! He was no more the murderer of Guldensuppe than you were. The District Attorney was too astute to have dared a second ordeal of that woman on the stand. He was afraid to have her confronted. He feared she would go to pieces on the rack of truth, and you would see into the recesses of her murderous heart. Thorn is on trial for what
she
did—and I say, God forbid that murderess should go free, and Thorn pay the penalty.”

Howe paused before one juror and then the next—hovering,
one reporter mused, like an immense bee before each blossom in a flower box.

“Gotha is the
only one
who testified that Thorn confessed.
Gotha
. Judas was a saint compared to this
Gotha.
”

Howe turned and swung out his arm.

“Who is
Gotha
?” he barked. “Thorn was a hard-working barber until he fell in with this vile creature, this harridan.
Gotha
left his wife and lived alone. And then he came here, with blood money in his pocket, to swear away the life of this
man.
”

The courtroom was electric with silence, the crowd almost holding its breath.

“He had read about the one thousand dollar reward. He had Detective Price’s one hundred dollars. But we don’t stop with Sam Price’s one hundred dollars. We have him going to the New York District Attorney’s office. This barber, who from his looks couldn’t earn ten dollars a week by shaving, gets one hundred dollars in a lump and then
lies
to you. He was acting a lie from the time he put on the handcuffs until he went on the stand.”

Howe glanced between the jury box and the prosecution team.

“Suppose the evidence of Gotha were out of the case. What evidence is there that Thorn fired the shot or did any killing? Can they find anything besides that? No—and I can’t conceive of your believing
Gotha.
”