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Authors: Paul Collins

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The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (4 page)

BOOK: The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars
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“Do whatever Gus tells you,” the editor snapped. “The
Journal
’s probably got forty guys there already.”

The competition! The newly launched
Evening Journal
had been nipping at the paper’s heels for months, and here the emptied
World
offices would get caught flat-footed on the story. It could be a new victim, or a second helping of yesterday’s East River find; either way, it was sizing up to be another front-pager, and the editor knew they’d have to grab it.

“If the pieces fit, it’s the same stiff,” he declared, and hurried his rookie to the door. “If it’s part of a different stiff, then the guy with the red oilcloth has murdered them both.”

RUNNING FROM THE EL STATION
to the Bellevue morgue, Ned Brown was a sight: A short and stringy bantamweight, his blond hair swept up in a pompadour like his boxing heroes, he sprinted along Twenty-Sixth Street while dodging newsboys and Sunday strollers. The nineteen-year-old NYU student had been angling for any news assignments he could get over the summer. Today was his break, his first real story.

Gus Roeder was waiting for him when he flew into the morgue. So were Deputy Coroner Philip O’Hanlon’s findings on the river bundle, the result of several hours of painstaking autopsy. Gus—a dour, red-faced German with a thick accent—bustled into the crowd of reporters to listen to Dr. O’Hanlon, while Ned went to examine the arms and shoulders found by the pier. By the skin he could immediately see that the victim was probably fair, about thirty-five years old; judging by his soft hands, he was not a manual laborer.

But who was he, and who had done this?


At first,” O’Hanlon admitted to the gathered reporters, “it looked to me as though it were the fore section of a body prepared for photography so as to show the position of the heart and lungs, as might be done in a medical college. But I do not believe so now.”

Observe: not only did the torso still retain all its organs, the body contained no trace of any preservative. On the contrary: inside the broad chest of a powerfully muscled man, the tissue of the
lungs was still spongy and the heart was filled with blood—the very blood that had stopped flowing after a knife was plunged
between the victim’s fifth and sixth ribs.

What?

The reporters looked closely at the body. The flesh stripped away from the chest—and, perhaps, an identifying tattoo along with it—had also quietly hidden two previously undetected stab wounds on the body. A casual observer would not spot them among the gore—but O’Hanlon had.

“They must have been inflicted
before
death,” he flatly stated.

Making incisions around the stab sites, the deputy coroner found that
blood had entered into the surrounding tissue—that is, it was pumped into them. That only happened in the living; a stab or incision made on a dead man created different internal damage than one on a living body. He’d also looked
inside
these stab wounds. A stab will typically show threads of clothing driven into the wound; but this one had none. So
the victim, O’Hanlon concluded, had been
alive and naked when stabbed.


Both wounds were made with a long-bladed knife,” O’Hanlon continued, “and both cuts were downward, as a man would strike while standing. One was above the left collarbone, and the other above the fifth intercostal space. The latter penetrated the heart … this alone would cause instant death.”

Only, Dr. O’Hanlon realized, it
hadn’t
. True, the fatal wound had been driven deep into the heart at a nearly perpendicular angle—plunged into the victim from above, possibly while he was sleeping. But the victim was a powerful man, and the assortment of nonfatal wounds—the other stab wound under the collarbone, a glancing cut to the left hand, blood under a fingernail, and boot-shaped bruises on the arm—these told the story of a horrific struggle. The victim had cut his hand in trying to grab the attacker’s knife, the deputy coroner theorized, and had made an attempt to stand up and fight back in a terrifying but already doomed final effort.


That he was knocked down I think is proved by the imprints of the boot,” O’Hanlon theorized. “He struggled to his feet and was standing erect when someone, who I think must have been very muscular, stabbed him in the collarbone with a big knife. The blood under his nail shows that he struggled hard, or else that he clasped his hand to his bosom after he had been stabbed.”

And with that, the deputy coroner—and the headless torso—had told their story.

The morgue doors slammed open. From outside, orderlies heaved in another load of cargo: a red-wrapped parcel that took two men to carry. Without the preserving cold of the East River, and after a spell sitting in a summertime forest, it was offensively rank. The morgue
keeper ignored the smell to unwrap the bundle and lay it out: the midsection, male and muscular and circumcised. A mass of reporters watched as
the two segments were pushed together on the marble slab.

They fit perfectly.

AT SIX P.M
. on June 27, the body had its first claimant.

Bellevue was hardly the place to spend a Sunday evening, but Miss Clara
Magnusson’s friends and neighbors had been urging her to visit ever since the story in the previous night’s
Telegram
. She lived just three blocks away, yet it had taken until now for her to make the journey over to this dismal place; her neighbor Gustav accompanied her to help with the identification and to provide a steady shoulder. She explained that her brother-in-law, Max Weineke, had been missing for a month: he was a thirty-four-year-old Danish scrap-metal dealer, and the descriptions of the morgue’s find had her friends on East Twenty-Eighth Street wondering. Coroner Tuthill led the two over to the marble slab, and to the legless and headless segmented man who lay nude upon it.

There was a scar on Max’s back, she recalled, and that would surely identify the body. But as she watched the attendant turn the body over, her heart sank; it had been sawed through
exactly
where the scar should be.

It’s him
, her neighbor Gustav decided. He was sure of it. Max had been a moody fellow—industrious, but he drank a bit at times—and … well, there’s no telling what could have happened to him, really. He’d had $30 on him when he disappeared—more than a week’s pay—and that right there was enough motive for a man to be killed.

And yet the body did not seem
quite
right. Max had been missing for more than a month, but this body was fresh. Then there was the matter of those strong but supple hands—so soft, so smooth and pampered. These were not the hands of a scrap-metal dealer. And there was a scar on the left hand—and an old fingernail injury where it had been partly cut away—that neither of them recognized or could account for.

For Bellevue’s superintendent, it was the scar on the finger that did it. “
If they had only been able to account for the scar on the finger.” He sighed. “I should have thought the body was that of Weineke beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Gustav and Clara stepped back out into the fading evening light, leaving just as much of a mystery as when they’d arrived.

WHILE THIS PUZZLING DRAMA
played out, the morgue had received another visitor.
A few among the reporters took notice:
Art Carey?

They hadn’t seen Byrnes’s exiled protégé in ages. The detective was energized, back in his element. He walked briskly around the body—the segment he’d unwrapped earlier that afternoon now reunited like a jigsaw with its top half—and examined the matching red-and-gold oilcloth of both segments. He’d come to know it well, though maybe not as well as the newspaper reporters who’d scooped him on finding the fabric wholesaler. In fact, the newspapermen had been ahead of the police force all day.

I knew it was a murder all along
, Captain Hogan had blustered earlier, claiming that he’d blamed it on medical students out of a concern for public safety—keeping the citizenry, you see, from panicking. The reporters were incredulous. Was Hogan joking? It took a
Telegram
reporter to actually get the first crime scene’s facts right, since
the patrolman’s report claimed that the bundle included the abdomen but no organs—a patent falsehood to make it sound like a med-lab cut-up. And the police hadn’t done anything since; it was a
Herald
reporter who had fetched the coroner the night before and escorted him to the morgue, and a
World
reporter who started knocking on doors even later that night to interview groggy oilcloth dealers around the city. The police
hadn’t secured the crime scene at the pier, hadn’t assigned any extra men to the case, hadn’t even admitted it was murder until the coroner telephoned and
insisted
they do something.

Well,
Hogan ventured, the murder had probably been committed among a ship’s crew, and so maybe it was out of their jurisdiction.

Wait, a
Herald
reporter had asked. Didn’t the hands lack the kind of calluses a sailor would have?

Hogan didn’t really have an answer on that one.

In fact, there was a lot the police didn’t have answers for. They’d already been on the defensive all weekend, even
before
this case; one of their captains had led
sweeps of women guilty of little more than walking along Broadway after midnight, filling the courts with the tragic injured respectability of sobbing baker’s assistants and late-shift shopgirls. When one cop was asked for his evidence, he’d scarcely sputtered, “I saw her walk up and down the street a few times” before being cut off by a magistrate’s bellow of “Discharged!” Reporters had been having a field day with it; a new murder was the last thing the department needed that day.

But Carey was different: He knew this was a homicide case, and he was making it
his
case. He even had
his own pet theory. The murder, he mused aloud to a reporter, might have been committed in Long Island or Brooklyn. The killers—for it would have required more than one to cut up and dispose of the body so quickly—had taken a ferry and dumped the first piece. But then they’d panicked. Maybe they thought that they’d been seen. That’s when they went back and fetched the larger piece with a wagon, drove over the Washington Bridge, and dumped it onto the loneliest stretch of road they could find. Of course, this was just a hunch—half a hunch, really. And as for who did it, or who the victim was … well, there was no way to tell yet.

Taking one last look at the body before he headed back to the World Building with Gus, though, young Ned Brown wasn’t so sure about that. When he examined the headless corpse’s hands,
an unnerving sense of recognition crept over him. Those well-muscled arms and smooth fingers—they were like something he’d seen somewhere before.

But where?

4.
THE WRECKING CREW

ON MONDAY MORNING
, New Yorkers awoke to find a hand shoved in their face.
HAND OF THE HEADLESS MURDERED MAN—EXACT SIZE
, crowed the June 28
New York World
. There, above the fold, the life-sized fingers splayed across the morning paper—a dead man reaching out of the page to grab readers by the collar.
RIVER MYSTERY GROWS IN HORROR
, bellowed
Press
newsboys, while the high-minded
Herald
fretted over “the strangest and most brutal murder of the century.” Even the immigrant sheets took notice, with the staidly Teutonic
New Yorker Staats Zeitung
trumpeting the latest on
Der Kopffabschneider
—“the Headcutter.” But none topped the
World’s
engraving—procured, it boasted, “from a flashlight photograph made in the Morgue last night.” The illustration irresistibly invited readers to place their own hand across the dead man’s—to clasp their fingers across his—and wonder at his identity.

An overnight autopsy of the second parcel by Coroner Tuthill furnished some intriguing hints. The victim, as one reporter put it delicately, “
may have been a Hebrew.” He had
no alcohol in his stomach, which discounted a drunken brawl. Nor was there food in there—so it had been at least three or four hours since his last meal. But among this minutiae, one of the coroner’s consulting physicians had made a sensational finding:
The leg stumps had been boiled
.


It appears to me,” he’d confided to an
Evening Telegram
reporter, “that an attempt has been made to dispose of the body by boiling it. It is possible the murderers thrust the legs into a kettle hoping to boil
the flesh off, but found they could not do it quickly or e
asily enough, and that they then cut up the remains.”

Well, that was one way of looking at it.

CANNIBALISM SUGGESTED
, the
Herald
announced. Or was it something more subtle—quicklime or a harsh deodorizer on the skin, the remains of a failed attempt at a hasty cover-up? The most fascinating solution offered up in the morgue came from a
Times
reporter: Weren’t butchers in the habit of scalding stuck pigs to loosen up their skin? The suggestion was compelling; a butcher’s handiwork might account for the curious quality of the murderer’s saw cuts—more skilled than an amateur, yet cruder than a med student.

BOOK: The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars
2.18Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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