The Murder of the Century Read online

  “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 ma
de 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 easily 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.

  “A butcher may have done it,” Coroner Tuthill mused aloud. “Or, perhaps, a carpenter.”

  Yet the scalding seemed to favor a butcher, and reporters and morgue employees alike could hardly keep from thinking of the Luetgert case—a recent Chicago murder where a local sausage maker dropped his wife into one of his factory’s vats. Luetgert’s case was a peculiar one, since there was no witness and no victim left to produce. But this Manhattan mystery provided a horrifying and neatly packaged clue—a body with skin, a Herald reporter marveled, that was “as white as marble.” That, the coroner explained, was because “the body had been washed, and the blood removed before it was wrapped up.”

  But who would do such a thing? The victim might not have been drinking, a Press reporter suggested, but the killer surely had been. Not just to commit the deed, mind you, but to steel himself to venture into the Bronx woods at night. “His nerves must be of iron,” he speculated, “and probably he fortified himself with liquor for the ordeal.” Even just the sawing would have been exhausting, awkward work. On this the coroner spoke from some experience, after all—in cutting through the trunk, he explained, you’d need somebody to hold the arms so that they wouldn’t keep getting in the way. And that meant an accomplice.

  Or, perhaps, an entire gang.

  The World knew just the man to ask about the case: Andrew Drummond, the former head of the U.S. Secret Service.

  These days he was running a detective bureau at the foot of Newspaper Row, and he’d been following the case closely. “I believe that this most atrocious murder was committed by a foreigner,” he huffed to a World reporter. Its ferocity, he deemed, was the work of men hailing from warm and lusty climes. “The murderer is a Sicilian, or possibly a Spaniard or Cuban. Maybe a Spanish spy has been put out of the way by the Cubans. The most likely one is that it is the result of a family feud among Sicilians. I know the ways of the Mafia.”

  To Drummond, the clincher was the oilcloth. What murderer would call attention to his deed by wrapping it in lurid red cloth? Ah, but attention was the point with a Mafia hit. And of course, as Drummond reminded readers—“Sicilians love bright colors.”

  Even as scores of reporters were fanning out across the city, beating the bushes and shadowing the police along the riverbanks and in the Bronx woods, Drummond was sure of one thing: Whether the head was burned, buried, or sunk in the river, they wouldn’t like what they’d find. “When the head is found,” he warned, “it will be seen to be horribly disfigured.”

  But where some saw horror, others sensed opportunity.

  EVERY DAY OR SO for the last couple of years on Newspaper Row, a mob of mustachioed, derby-hatted men would come tumbling out of a low brick building, the first of them saddling up onto their squeaking bicycles even as they ran, and then careening wildly past City Hall; then a second group, more raggedly bohemian with their leather portfolios and wooden camera tripods, would clamber aboard carriages and go clattering madly after the bicycles. Behind them, editor Sam Chamberlain could be heard roaring from his desk.

  “Get excited. God damn it, get excited!”

  This was the Wrecking Crew.

  The appearance of the Wrecking Crew meant just one thing: that a splendid story—a lover gunning his society sweetheart down on Broadway, a passenger ferry upending itself, or a rollicking downtown building collapse—was to appear in the next edition of the New York Journal.

  You could tell when New York was having a peaceful day, it was said by friends, by how despondent Journal publisher William Randolph Hearst looked. But give him a murdered lad or tragic maiden, and Hearst joyfully revived. And a man dying at the hands of a maniac who scattered parts all around the city? He was ecstatic.

  For their newly created Evening Journal edition—meant to be even saucier and more shameless than the morning Journal—it was pure homicide gold. What a way to launch! And so the word came down from the top: Do whatever it takes. Hearst editors sent reporters off to tail detectives and swipe evidence from the scene if necessary, the better to run it in the Evening Journal first. Photograph the Meyer boys, map the spot where they found it, show the twine and the knots and the pattern of the oilcloth around the torso. Get diagrams of the nude body. Get graphics and put it on page 1. That morning the Wrecking Crew seemed to be rushing in and out of the Journal almost nonstop; it was like nothing anybody had seen before.

  “Events seem to indicate that men, like dogs, go mad at certain seasons,” Hearst mused as he surveyed the day’s news. There were race riots in Key West, idiots stealing electricity off high-voltage streetcar lines in Ohio, and two millionaires fighting over a $15 dog here in New York. But this story, this was something more than ordinary madness. It was already getting picked up by the wires and running across the country. And so the order came from Hearst’s offices: Hire four launches, and set them to dragging the bottom of the East River—immediately.

  Find that head, the chief wrecker commanded.

  CAPTAIN O’BRIEN COULDN’T ward it off anymore, not with every newspaper headline on his way in to the Mulberry Street headquarters yelling at him. After two days of hopeless stalling by the police, several detectives were sent trudging over to the morgue in the early-morning hours to take down names and addresses.

  They had a long day ahead of them. The steps and wooden porch leading into the death house were crowded with bereaved families—scores of people, all convinced their lost loved ones were inside—as well as local curiosity seekers, lounging surgeons from the neighboring hospital, and legions of reporters. The detectives and the coroner could barely make their way inside. The first two visitors to squeeze in gave their names to a detective as John Johnson and Adolph Carlson of 333 East Twenty-Eighth Street. They were fellow boarders with Max Weineke. As men living in close quarters, they’d seen Max nude a number of times; there was a mole on his shoulder, they said. There wasn’t one on the body, so that settled that.

  But then, marveled a Herald reporter, three “Japanese—or at any rate, Orientals” pressed their way to the front and were led to the slab. They announced that it was Weineke. Who were they, and how did the three of them know a Danish scrap-metal dealer? They wouldn’t say. Another mysterious visitor correctly described, sight unseen, a surgical scar on the abdomen; the fact had not been announced to the public, and he was quickly led to the slab. He identified the body as Weineke; but the fellow wouldn’t identify himself, and promptly melted back into the crowd. So now they had five positive identifications of Weineke—four by men who refused to name themselve
s—and three negative identifications of the very same body.

  The morning had only just begun at the morgue.

  Next came the presumptive widow of Mr. Robert Wood. She was regal in her floral-decked hat and dark mourning dress, waiting with her attending minister amid all the tumult and weeping outside. Wood, it seemed, was a Long Island City butcher who had gone missing after leaving his shop with a $150 bankroll in his pocket, and his empty wagon had been found abandoned in front of a Greenpoint saloon. His description, the location, the motive—they all matched the body pretty well. Mrs. Wood and the minister were led inside, and the headless and legless body—further decomposed and sliced into by two autopsies—was revealed to her. She fell into a dead faint.

  It was too much—too much. She slumped into her minister’s arms and was carried into a morgue office and revived. She wanted to try again. There was a scar on his left hand, she recalled, and so the morgue attendants covered up the remains, leaving only the forearm and hand undraped on the table. Mrs. Wood and the minister approached quietly, while the crowd inside kept keen watch from a close but respectful distance. She held the cold, lifeless hand in her own and examined the nails of the man she believed to be her husband—and a man with a distinctive scar on his middle finger. This body also had a scar on its finger … the index finger.

  It is not him, Mrs. Wood announced.

  It was also not missing Mafia murder witness Agguzzo Baldasano; neither was it a missing young Mr. Levaire of 106th Street, nor the Brooklyn gas engineer Charles Russell. But it was Brooklyn bartender John Otten, or Brooklyn printer John Livingston, or perhaps New Jersey carpenter Edward Leunhelt. The body also, apparently, belonged to a Manhattan bricklayer.