The Murder of the Century Read online

  “It is surely George,” his brother assured the morgue attendants.

  On and on the identifications came, all day, like an endless handkerchief pulled from a magician’s pocket. Watching outside was a young man dandling an infant; when asked by a World reporter what he was doing there, he refused to talk; all questions for him had to go through the gentlemen over there. The reporter turned to find himself face-to-face with the assembled forces of the Evening Journal. They were a formidable sight. Hearst was fond of giving his reporters bicycles, so that his crew were like another regiment of “scorchers”—the lunatics who barreled through city traffic on Sylph cycles, Lunol racers, and greased Crackajack bikes, their futuristic bronze headlights ablaze and slopping kerosene. There were enough of these wildmen riding up the sidewalks and getting horsewhipped by irritated carriage teamsters that Hearst retained a specially designated “bicycle attorney” on the paper’s staff.

  Cycles tossed aside, the Wrecking Crew pushed their way in. Their witnesses, they told detectives, were the nephew and niece of one Louis Lutz, a cabinetmaker who had disappeared from his Upper East Side home on Wednesday. His namesake nephew examined the left hand for a scar.

  “I feel sure it is my uncle’s body,” he proclaimed.

  The attending detective wasn’t impressed.

  “They are too willing,” he muttered.

  “The finger of the dead man looks like my uncle’s marked finger,” young Lutz insisted—whereupon a morgue attendant leaned in and wiped away the scar with a rag. It had been a streak of dirt. Now was Lutz sure?

  He wasn’t so sure.

  As the Lutzes filed out, a hysterical woman passed them on the way in.

  “Oh, Dick! Oh, Dick, why did you go away and leave me?” she wailed, and was led sobbing over to the body. It was her husband, she moaned—Richard Meggs, a retired liquor dealer of West Fifty-Second Street. He’d left on Thursday for a card game with $500 in his pocket, never to return. When shown the scarred finger on the left hand, she broke down again. “Dick had a scar right there,” she sniffled.

  The detectives and coroner’s assistants weren’t quite convinced. Did her husband have any other unique characteristics? Why yes, she recalled. Her husband had a very distinct scar on his groin. The attendants dutifully displayed it to Mrs. Meggs’s full view.

  It was not Dick.

  IN THE DOORWAY of a redwood-paneled office at the New York Journal, a dapper young man could be seen dancing a little jig. Then, as page proofs were laid out over the floor of the war room, he’d indulge in another little dance—tapping over the day’s stories, snapping his fingers like castanets. He might well dance: He was becoming the most powerful publisher in New York.

  LOUIS A. LUTZ THE VICTIM? his evening edition demanded. Lutz wasn’t, of course, but that hardly mattered. The important thing was that the Journal had a great story. “The public,” he reminded his staff, “likes entertainment better than it likes information.”

  A generation younger than Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst represented everything his Park Row neighbor was not: He was young, native-born, and the scion of a California senator and mining baron. Hearst seemed to have careless wealth written upon him, right down to the $20 gold piece he used for a tiepin. At Harvard he’d shown more interest in newsrooms than in his studies, and after presenting his professors with piss pots emblazoned with their portraits, he was booted out of the school. But no matter; he slummed around as a freelancer for the newly launched World, carefully observing the business. Pulitzer, he believed, had invented a whole new way to make a fortune from journalism.

  “I am possessed of the weakness which at some time or other of their lives possesses most men,” he wrote to his father. “I am convinced that I could run a newspaper successfully.”

  A decade later, he’d lifted Pulitzer’s ideas to remake the scrawny San Francisco Examiner into the country’s fourth-largest paper and bought the near-worthless New York Journal—“the chambermaid’s delight,” some called it—to turn it into a juggernaut of high-speed presses and color graphics and sensational headlines. He mocked rivals as doddering dinosaurs stuck “in the Silurian era.” His comics pages were blazingly ornate and complicated print jobs; perfecting them chewed through equipment, though demolishing new presses was a price that Hearst was happy to pay. “Smash as many as you have to, George,” he instructed his printer. Now Hearst had the best color Sunday supplement in the country—page after page of The Yellow Kid, the adventures of The Katzenjammer Kids, and Happy Hooligan—“eight pages of iridescent polychromous effervescence,” his paper boasted, “that makes the rainbow look like lead pipe.”

  His headlines were equally colorful, especially for the wilder Evening Journal edition. THE MAN WITH THE MUSICAL STOMACH, proclaimed one, while a particularly fine science story announced that A GENIUS HAS CONCEIVED A PLAN FOR A MACHINE THAT WILL KILL EVERYBODY IN SIGHT. A good headline could always be ginned up; even a bizarre old 1856 French undertaker’s patent for the “Application of Galvanoplating to the Human Flesh” might yield the splendid DROP DEAD AND HAVE YOURSELF PLATED. It wasn’t the best quality journalism, granted, but it was the best quantity journalism. At an unheard-of cover price of one cent, the paper could proudly display its motto: “You Can’t Get More News; You Can’t Pay Less Than One Cent.”

  And that night, you couldn’t get more on the river murder. Hearst proudly looked over an Evening Journal whose front page boasted lavish illustrations of both sides of a dead man’s hand, the entire forearm—and a close-up of the wounded fingernail—and a “butcher’s diagram” showing exactly how the body had been cut up. The next page was given over to a pictorial tour of the infamous Ogden’s Woods and the East Eleventh Street pier, plus a complete list of current missing persons with their identifying marks. Column after column of crew reporting covered witnesses, the police chief, the coroner, and the invaluable Mr. Lutz.

  Hearst barely had time to enjoy his grisly triumph when word arrived of the upcoming four o’clock World.

  He had his spies in neighboring pressrooms, of course—he liked to know what his competitors were about to publish. But that evening’s final edition of the World, stuffed with illustrations and columns about the case, had a real shocker right up front:

  $500 REWARD

  The World will pay $500 in gold for the correct solution of the mystery concerning the fragments of a man’s body discovered Saturday and Sunday in the East River and in Harlem. All theories and suggestions must be sent to the City Editor of the World, in envelopes marked ‘Murder Mystery’, and must be exclusively for the World. Appearance of the solution in any other paper will cancel this offer of reward.

  It was a jaw-dropping amount—a year’s pay for the clerk who could recall selling the oilcloth; several thousand bottles of cheap claret for the proprietor in whose establishment the deed was hatched; a personal horse and carriage for the commuter who might have overheard it. It was $500, for that matter, to any reader who could deduce a solution, just like readers had been doing with the Arthur Conan Doyle stories that the World ran. Now they could do more than just read Sherlock Holmes; they could be him.

  This was going to be a sensation.

  Hearst ordered his pressmen into action: Run an Extra Final Edition, timed to appear just minutes after the World’s $500 reward. He had an utterly devastating headline to run atop his Evening Journal, and the words rolled deliciously off the tongue.

  $1,000 REWARD …

  5.

  JILL THE RIPPER

  ONE READER ALREADY KNEW who the culprit was: Hearst.

  The body was the work, a Journal reader wrote in, of “some enterprising newspaper or group of men who wish to test the efficiency of the local detective force, which has been called in question quite often under its present management.”

  As letters piled into the Journal offices on Tuesday morning, other reader guesses included tramps killing a peddler (conveniently “using rope and oilcloth from the peddler’s
pack”); bickering butchers (“probably employed in one of the slaughter houses on the East Side or in Harlem”); a nefarious cabal (“I think the man was tattooed or branded with the marks of some secret society”); and, of course, “fiendish” Spaniards who “hacked him to pieces with their machetes.” Some suspected a woman of the deed, since only “jealousy could have terminated with such terrible results.” Still others invoked Sherlock Holmes, who seemed the best guide to such a baffling case. Alas, Arthur Conan Doyle had recently killed off his great detective. “If he were still alive,” one reader mourned, “Sherlock Holmes would surely earn your thousand-dollar reward through deduction.”

  Still, the suggestion of Hearst himself topped them all. “It would be a comparatively simple matter,” the reader insisted, “for a newspaper to secure through a physician a suitable cadaver and to dispose of the portions effectively, yet theatrically, so as to secure the widest possible publicity.”

  The Journal had a good laugh and ran the letter; if only they’d thought of it themselves! Hearst loved promotion; he’d already run bandwagon signs and sandwich-board men around the city and advertised his paper’s one-cent price by mailing out sackfuls of pennies to New Yorkers. He’d invaded the city, as one editor put it, as quietly “as a wooden-legged burglar having a fit on a tin roof.”

  And the roof he most loved to dance on was the World’s. When he’d rolled into New York, Hearst stole his old paper’s crown jewel by grabbing Sunday World editor Morrill Goddard, a daredevil journalist who’d made his name as a London correspondent covering Jack the Ripper. “Take all or any part of that,” he’d told Goddard, tossing him a crumpled Wells Fargo bank draft for $35,000. Then, for good measure, Hearst immediately bought the rest of the Sunday World staff as well. An outraged Pulitzer purchased them back, only to find his repatriated World men emptying their desks yet again and walking back to the Journal. Hearst had stolen them twice. The Park Row sidewalk between the two papers, newsmen joked, was wearing thin.

  Now, rallying his pirated staff from his barber’s chair as he took his morning shave, the young millionaire was ebullient. “We must beat every paper in town,” he declared.

  His first blow for the Journal would beat them all—maybe even top the sensation created by the reward. It would be something nobody had ever seen before. He had his pressroom chief working up a special color illustration. Not for the Sunday comics supplement, mind you—but for that day, Tuesday.

  And if that didn’t knock the competition sideways, his next idea would: an elite band of Wreckers dedicated to homicide coverage. Backed by veteran crime reporter George Waugh Arnold, they’d be even better than the NYPD’s rudderless Detective Bureau, which had been adrift ever since Inspector Byrnes was forced out. Not so George and his men. They’d carry their own badges, pack licensed pistols. They’d make arrests, they’d get things done. Hearst even had a dandy name for them, one that might have sent that suspicious letter writer into a tizzy: the Murder Squad.

  ——

  CROWDS POURED into the morgue that morning, ready to identify the city’s most famous body, but they were made to wait; the coroner had scheduled yet another autopsy. Three days had now passed since the body’s first discovery, and reporters were growing jaded about the odds for any more would-be identifiers. “One might as well have tried to identify a particular Texas steer by the sirloin hanging in a butcher’s shop,” a Hearst man dryly observed.

  Some guesses had certainly been less helpful than others. Occultists plied their way into the city morgue, including at least one phrenologist apparently undeterred by the absence of a head; that morning’s World ran a palmist’s not particularly edifying judgment: “Did love or jealousy have aught to do with the tragedy? Perhaps.” Not to be outdone, the Journal hired the country’s most famous palm reader, Niblo, who swanned into the morgue and performed a reading on the dead man’s hands. Among his pronouncements: the victim had been murdered for love rather than money, and the killer might be a “female Jack the Ripper.”

  Oddly enough, it looked like Niblo might be on to something. Inside the Bellevue morgue, five men gathered around the dissecting table: Deputy Coroner O’Hanlon, three consulting physicians, and pathologist Frank Ferguson of New York Hospital. Dr. Ferguson had seen this kind of case before; three years earlier he’d been in this very same room, at this same table, examining the headless and limbless body of Susie Martin, an eleven-year-old girl who vanished from her Hell’s Kitchen tenement. Twelve days later her remains were found in a cellar just blocks away, identifiable only by the clothes the killer had used to bundle her body into. The crime had gone unsolved; and now, reading the details of this new case in the papers, Ferguson sensed a chilling familiarity.

  Look, he pointed to two stab wounds: one to the left lung, the other from a downward thrust to the collarbone. Both made with a long, narrow blade.

  The same had been done to Martin.

  The sawing along the neck and atop the legs?

  The same.

  Dr. Ferguson directed their gaze to a previously ignored wound—a faint cut into a rib, where the saw had glanced off the body. It was a crucial clue, for unlike the stumps, it was here that you could determine the width of the saw.

  “The same kind of saw was used,” he surmised after measuring the cut. “The blade of the saw is only a millimeter in thickness. A butcher’s meat saw is about that thickness. A carpenter’s saw is thicker.” In fact, the angling of the cuts told a story of their own. “By examining the marks made by the saw and the knife,” he said, “I can tell about how the murderer went at it to carve up the body.” The body, disassembled under the terrible light of the dissecting room, bore mute witness as Ferguson envisioned its fate.

  “I can almost see him in the room with his dead victim,” he told his transfixed audience. “I can see him tearing off the clothing, if he had any on when he was slain. I can see him turn the body belly-down, so that the wild eyes should not stare at him. I can see him sever the flesh of the neck and then use the saw on the vertebrae. The murderer stood on the right-hand side. The marks of the teeth of the saw on the shoulder prove that there must have been a twisting motion as the sawing was finished.”

  The backbone had also been sawed from the right-hand side, and with the body still facedown; the left leg had been severed from the left side. The head had been sawn off not in one downward cut but rather around in a circle. These were the same actions the Martin killer had made. And there was an even more troubling similarity: the boiling of this body’s legs. The body of Susie Martin had also been boiled, and a sliced-off bone fragment showed signs of at least some of its flesh having been consumed.

  This, Ferguson announced, was the work of the same killer—a cannibal.

  ALERTED BY FERGUSON’S FINDINGS about the saw, detectives coursed uptown to inspect the cellars of local butchers. But a lone cub reporter could be seen walking determinedly to Forty-Second Street, notebook in hand, his blond hair pompaded high under his hat. Ferguson hadn’t been the only one with an unnerving feeling that there was something familiar about that body in the morgue.

  Those well-muscled arms and soft fingers: they were something Ned Brown had seen before—felt, even. It was a combination found in just one place, among the muscled masseurs of Turkish baths. The baths were where revelers would go after a night of hard drinking in Midtown; with rooms heated to 120 degrees, they were thought to evaporate the alcohol—and even to cure bites by mad dogs. Ned Brown had been known to work off a few shots in Murray Hill Baths, a long and narrow Times Square establishment on Forty-Second Street. A Romanesque space with white marble floors and a delightfully long swimming pool, it advertised itself as “the Most Handsome and Perfect Baths in the World.” The locals had another name for it: “The House of a Thousand Hangovers.” After signing up for a steam bath and massage there, Ned idly let a question drop. Had anyone slacked off from showing up for work that week?

  That would be Bill, snapped an attendant.
r />   “He took Friday off because he was going to look at a house in the country with his girl—or so he said … Guldensuppe is his name.” He hadn’t been back in since then, the attendant added, though someone had called him in sick on Sunday. “Drunk someplace, of course.”

  “I must have seen him around here,” Ned ventured, “but I can’t place him in my mind.”

  “He’s just built like a big Dutchman. He has the upper half of a woman tattooed all over his chest—used to be a sailor on one of them Heinie windjammers when he was a kid.”

  If you see him, the baths’ cashier warned as he rang up the $1 ticket, tell him he’s fired.

  Bill lived somewhere around Thirty-Third and Ninth Avenue, it was thought—a German and Irish neighborhood of low brick tenements. Ned joshed his way through the nearest bar there, knocking back a couple of beers and posing as a long-lost pal of Willie’s. Had anyone seen his old buddy?

  Not lately, the saloon’s cook said, but try the apartment over Werner’s drugstore, where he’d shacked up with his landlady.

  “She got plenty of cash.” He winked from behind the bar. “She treats him good.”

  “He’s a hot sketch!” Ned quickly agreed. “Always after the dames.”

  “You bet!” The cook laughed. Strangely enough, though, he hadn’t seen Willie around in the last few days.

  Ned Brown knew he had to think fast.

  How would he get inside the apartment? Pleading ten bucks from the World, he bought a suitcase of expensive twenty-five-cent soaps and made his way through the tenements around Werner’s building, posing as a salesman with a five-cent trial offer. The air stung with the smell of cooking sauerkraut and the clatter of tin washtubs; hausfraus inside leaned out windows to gossip as they strung laundry over the fire escapes. They knew good sandalwood and verbena soap when they saw it, and at a nickel a bar, they didn’t care if it was a trial offer or just plain stolen. Word was passed around quickly, and by the time Brown reached the apartment over Werner’s, he was down to his last bars.