The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (32 page)

As for the innocent schoolgirl from Mrs. Nack’s building, well—surely she told the truth, Howe admitted, but she or Thorn merely had their times confused. No, he declared, the schoolgirl’s testimony made the case against Nack even worse.

“Trimming a ha-aat!” He banged down his fist. “Trimming a hat,
just after she trimmed her lover’s body
!” Howe’s voice, marveled a reporter, roared
so loud that the chandeliers jangled. In the startled silence that followed, he stopped and mopped the perspiration from his brow.

“Now, as to your visit to the cottage just now—you didn’t find a single indentation in that tub, did you? The body could not have been cut unless
two
people had helped with it. Under this indictment it is perfectly reasonable that you could find a verdict of murder in
the second degree—punishment worse than death itself. Imprisonment for life in a tomb of stone! Never leaving that tomb until the dead body is carried out. Some of you”—he motioned to the jurors—“may have been sick in your comfortable houses, and the very paper on the wall begins to punish you with weariness. But picture
twenty years
in a cell.”

His voice dropped low, and he pulled up close to the jury-box railing.

“To take the life which God has given—unjustly—is an awful thing.
Remember that the scenes of this day will never, ever leave you. They will follow you to your farm”—he eyed Valentine Waits, and then the builders—“to your carpenter’s shop. These scenes will sleep by you on your pillow. If it should transpire that this man is innocent after you have judged him guilty, this man will haunt you through your lives. If you find him guilty, at the final accounting
that man’s spirit will rise to condemn you before the judgment seat of God
.”

Youngs’s summation was plodding and methodical: Thorn had the weapons, had the motive, had been placed at the scene, and confessed to a friend. They had unprecedented circumstantial evidence, and testimony by detectives and a firearms expert allowed the jury to draw its own conclusion. “
Put these things together in a mosaic, gentlemen,” he invited. “And see the picture they form.”

The defense, Youngs noted tartly, changed its story with each passing day—first it was Guldensuppe’s body, then it wasn’t; Thorn hadn’t been at the scene, then he had.

“Gentlemen of the jury”—the district attorney smiled faintly—“the eloquence of Mr. Howe is world-wide in its reputation, standing as he does at the head of the criminal bar of the city of New York. The eloquence you have listened to today has been thrilling. And”—he glanced at Howe—“through its exertion, no doubt more than one guilty man has escaped.”

Thorn stared ahead stonily, while Howe glared back in fine indignation.

“We lay no claim to any greatness of oratory,” Youngs continued. Balding and bespectacled, the very diminutiveness of the DA
now
turned against the defense counsel. “He has given you that, but we have given you something stronger than oratory, more powerful than eloquence:
evidence.
”

The district attorney paused before the jury box. He wanted them to also consider their solemn duty as Long Islanders—as the bulwark that honest tradesmen like them kept up against the depredations of the big city across the river.

“Gentlemen of the jury, he has appealed to your heart, your passions. I appeal to your common sense, to your heads. Don’t let it go out that men and women can come over
here
from neighboring cities and conspire to commit crimes.”

The crowd of reporters rolled their eyes; they’d be going back to that great corrupting city tonight—and be glad of it, too. But it was not the reporters that Youngs had turned toward.

“I know,” the DA concluded as he gazed earnestly at the carpenters and farmers, “that I can leave the matter in
your
hands.”

THE COURTROOM WAS RAVENOUS;
closing arguments had taken so long that it was 2:25 p.m. by the time the twelve men left for the jury room. Judge Maddox had lunch sent in to the jurors, while the courtroom itself broke out sandwiches and bottles of ginger ale in a flurry of wax paper and napkins; the spectators, not wanting to lose their seats, had packed their own lunches. It was a masculine affair, with women still hopelessly crowded out on the courthouse steps and in hallways. Their only representative inside was
a single black-veiled woman nearly hidden behind one of the spectator gallery pillars.
It’s Thorn’s sister
, the murmur went.

Thorn himself was led downstairs to a holding cell for lunch, while at his defense table Howe assumed a philosophical look. He was delighted with their case, he declared, but then his expression darkened. He’d torn down every major witness on the stand as an inebriate, a busybody, or an outright criminal—all of them, that is, except one.

“The
one thing
is the testimony of little Clara Pierce,” he confided
quietly to his associates. The schoolgirl’s placement of Mrs. Nack in the city could undermine Thorn’s entire alibi. “It may turn the jury against us.”

Howe’s sheer oratory, reporters and spectators agreed, had expertly maneuvered around the prosecution. “
So long as Mr. Howe kept in a sphere above the actual evidence, he soared triumphant,” the crime novelist Julian Hawthorne telegraphed from his post at the
Journal
table. Along the way, Howe had deftly rolled back his defense from brashly denying Guldensuppe’s death to admitting that someone had caused the fellow to never be seen reemerging from that Woodside cottage.

But who?

“
It is not believed that he cut
himself
up,” a
Brooklyn Eagle
reporter wrote tartly. “It is not supposed that he took a saw with him into the cottage for the purpose of separating himself from his arms and his legs and incidentally his head.”

And yet many clues to who
had
done the deed were not used. Gotha’s testimony was a necessary gamble, but every other marginal witness had been ruthlessly excluded. Youngs saw in the first trial that Howe’s specialty was in demolishing any witness with an ulterior motive or the least vulnerability in character. Mrs. Nack’s testimony was left out, of course; but so was Mrs. Riger’s account of the oilcloth purchase.
It was said that the poor woman had suffered a breakdown over all the publicity. Frank Clark’s old allegation from the Tombs of an infirmary confession was also left untouched; Youngs had planned to use it in the first trial, but now a con like Clark was clearly easy prey to Howe. But so, remarkably, was the analysis of blood spots on the floors. With poisoning charges and money troubles now hanging over Professor Witthaus’s divorce, the forensics expert’s character would have been mauled by the defense—and in any case, while forensics evidence might have worked in Manhattan, Long Island farmers and carpenters had no truck with chemistry professors.

How quickly would such a jury weigh a secondhand confession to an unemployed barber and a series of circumstantial clues from friends and neighbors? Not too quickly, it seemed. As the cigars and flasks were swapped among the denizens of the galleries, the
courtroom’s pendulum clock ticked slowly forward to three o’clock, and then to four. Passing by the guarded jury-room door a half hour later,
reporters could make out raised voices.

Sitting at the jury room’s table, among the picked-over remains of their lunches, one builder was demanding that the jury vote remain by secret ballot. And after six votes in a row, the foreman had opened the slips of paper, counted them, and hit the same result each time.

Eleven to one
.

One hour later—after demanding and then
poring over the intercepted jailhouse correspondence between Nack and Thorn—the twelve men filed back into the courtroom through the side door, and drowsy spectators scrambled to their feet.

“
Remove your hats!” deputies bellowed up into the galleries as Judge Maddox returned from his chambers and then as Martin Thorn was led back in. Actually, it was Thorn doing the leading: He was so nervously eager that he was nearly dragging in Captain Methven with his handcuffed arm.

The twelve solemn men looked to the judge and waited.

“
Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?”

“We have,” their foreman replied.

“Defendant, rise,” the court clerk commanded Martin Thorn. “Jurors, look upon the defendant. Defendant, look upon the jurors. What say you?”

The men locked eyes, and Thorn knew his fate.

“We find the defendant guilty,” the foreman announced—“of murder in the first degree.”

MARTIN THORN KNEW
they were out to kill him.

“
I suppose Howe will get a new trial, but it won’t do any good in this county,” he snorted to the
Herald
reporter waiting back at his cell. “You can’t get a jury in this county who wouldn’t hang you for stealing a loaf of bread.”

There wasn’t much left to cheer Thorn up other than
wrestling with his adopted mutt—the only creature on earth uninterested in judging him.

So, did you do it?

Thorn sat down and looked pensively around his cell; the room had been freshly whitewashed the day before in anticipation of the press, and it still smelled of paint.

“
I had no motive to kill Guldensuppe,” Thorn said quietly, and then eyed the
Herald
reporter. “He did
exactly
what I would have done under the circumstances. What could he have done? I never had any ill will against the man for striking me.”

So then …

“Mrs. Nack had a motive,” he snapped. “I didn’t.”

But when Thorn’s sister Pauline and her husband came to visit, his defiance was to no avail: They both looked thunderstruck.

“Martin!” his sister sobbed, and grasped his hand. “Martin!”

The husband stood by, eyes welling up, also unable to speak. Thorn sat his sister in a corner of the tiny cell, a rather melancholy gesture toward privacy.

“
Martin!” she wept.

“Well,” he motioned cheerfully outside. “Pretty cold out today, ain’t it?”

She was not fooled by his nonchalance.

“Poor fellow!” Pauline dabbed her eyes and finally composed herself a little. Her expression turned indignant. “It’s a shame that they should make a deal with Mrs. Nack. It’s a shame. She—”

“Hush, hush.” Thorn held his hand up. “I don’t want you to say anything about her. I wouldn’t care if she were turned loose tomorrow. I don’t care what becomes of her.”

His sister looked astounded—as did everyone else in the cell.

“Yes, I mean it,” the prisoner insisted. “I do mean it.”

His sister and brother-in-law left the cell as distraught as when they’d arrived, unsure whether they’d ever see him alive again.

Do
you mean it?
a
Herald
reporter asked.

“
It doesn’t make any difference to me what they do with her.” Thorn shrugged. But he was struggling with his feelings, because it wasn’t just the jury or the State of New York that he knew was out to kill him. “I am convinced,” he said slowly, “that these letters that Mrs. Nack sent to me are part of a scheme—to commit
suicide
. She thought I would carry out my part of the contract, and then she’d change her mind. Then I would be out of the way, and she would have nothing to fear.”

It’s true
, one of the jailers admitted quietly—they hadn’t told the press at the time, but before the trial they found a smuggled dose of morphine in Thorn’s vest—enough for an overdose. They’d had an extra guard on him ever since.

“You needn’t trouble yourself about me trying to commit suicide,” Thorn laughed. He wasn’t going to die for Mrs. Nack—not
now
. And he wouldn’t die for the people of New York, either. “I’m not going to do anything to save the county or the state the expense of killing me.”

The prisoner’s expression darkened.

“I’ll make the state pay,” he said.

HOWE WASN’T WORRIED
about their case at all.

“
I am smoking a cigar in contentment,” he informed reporters the next morning. He’d file an appeal, and he expected to win it. “My mind is in a state of peace and tranquility. I shall take lunch in a dress suit and drink a quart of white.”

“On what ground will you base your appeal?” asked a reporter for the
Eagle
.

“I do not wish”—Howe smiled enigmatically—“to unmask any battery.”

His first salvo came just one day later, and from an utterly unexpected source:
the jury’s hotel bill. The
Garden City Hotel dutifully filed an itemized list with Queens County’s board of supervisors: $2,049.90 for both juries. It was steep, but it was a long trial and retrial, after all, and it included hundreds in private jury streetcars and in attending physician’s bills for Magnus Larsen’s appendicitis. The supervisors were relieved: Some had feared that, along with misadventures like
Detective Sullivan’s fruitless trip to Hamburg to find Guldensuppe,
the entire cost of the case might balloon to $40,000 or $50,000. Instead, it was looking like everything might come in at less than $20,000.