The Murder of the Century Page 6

  She hesitated. “Yes, I know him. He is my man. At least he was until Friday morning, when he came from the bath and made me give him fifty dollars. Then we quarreled over a woman, and he went away.”

  Detective Krauch watched her carefully as she spoke. She was not exactly a Gibson girl anymore, but she had dark eyes and the presence to fluster one observer into describing her “pleasing, yet repellant, appearance.” Her man, she claimed, had been wooed away by the wanton widow of a grocer. She’d caught them in the parlor mirror the week before when they thought her back was turned. Why, just that very day that grocery hussy had come by to collect more of his worthless possessions.

  “I gave her a bit of my mind,” she snapped, “and told her she had stolen William from me.” So now she was putting her own goods in storage and heading back to Germany and her mother, and—couldn’t she just leave now?

  No, they informed her, she could not.

  For the detectives knew two things that Mrs. Nack didn’t. First, that Detective Krauch had been watching her apartment, and neither the mistress nor anyone else had come up her stairs that morning. And now they also knew that she wasn’t going to be making it to her Hamburg steamer that day.

  ——

  SITTING IN CAPTAIN O’BRIEN’S OFFICE at the Mulberry Street headquarters, the midwife looked more like a wronged woman than a suspect in a murder case. Her chair was moved over to the window, suffusing sunlight over the fashionable tulle-trimmed hat that she’d quickly donned when detectives hustled her from the apartment over Werner’s Drug Store.

  “My name is Augusta Nack,” she stated carefully for the record. “I am thirty-eight years of age. I have been living with William Guldensuppe for sixteen months.”

  She was, by her account and by her accent, a German immigrant. She’d married Herman Nack in 1883 in Lauenburg, on the Elbe. They’d moved here in 1886, whereupon Herman had squandered a series of jobs—in a pottery works, as a bologna-store proprietor, and finally as a grocer—all on account of his drinking. He was gone, their children were dead, and now she worked as a midwife and kept the occasional boarder, one of whom had been Guldensuppe.

  What, O’Brien wanted to know, had happened to Guldensuppe after their argument the previous Friday, when he’d demanded money from her?

  “The last time he was in the house Friday was about two p.m. He did not come home that night. Saturday morning between six and seven he came into the house.” Mrs. Nack continued her account steadily, carefully choosing her words. “ ‘Where did you come from?’ I asked. ‘None of your business,’ he told me. ‘Have you got that money?’ … I then went to the Franklin Savings Bank at Forty-Second and Eighth Avenue and drew fifty dollars. This was about eleven o’clock Saturday morning. From the bank—”

  Speak louder.

  “From the bank I went to a confectionery store on Eighth Avenue and had some ice cream soda water. From there I went to the dry goods store of McPartland & Flaherty, and reached home about noon. I stayed until Willie came in, which was between three and four o’clock. The first thing he did was ask for the money. ‘Here it is’ I replied, throwing it on the kitchen table. Willie picked it up and went out, and I have not seen him since.”

  O’Brien and his detectives listened and took notes carefully. Home on Saturday afternoon; that was several hours after the first find in the East River. The implication was that Guldensuppe was still alive. Which, of course, he might be; after all, the body still didn’t have a head or legs, and the morgue had filled again that day with people identifying the pieces as belonging to any number of other men.

  So, can we talk with him?

  Well, she explained, that’s just it. Willie hadn’t been back home since then. He’d sent notes asking for more money, though. Just yesterday, come to think of it. Probably spending it all on a woman somewhere.

  “Monday afternoon I was convinced that Willie would not come back to me, and made up my mind to go to Europe—”

  Louder.

  “Go to Europe and see my mother, who was sick. Willie had asked me to draw my money from the bank and give it to him, saying he would accompany me to Europe, but this I had refused to do.”

  The last she’d heard from him, she said, was the day before—on Tuesday.

  “About ten o’clock,” she continued, “a man came to the house with a note from Willie asking for his clothes. I wrote on the back of the note, in German, No; if you want your clothes come and get them yourself. About two o’clock in the afternoon two other men, who were dirty and disreputable looking, and spoke English, came and said Willie wanted his clothes.… I put them in a brown valise and gave them to the men. That was the last I heard of him.”

  The room lapsed into an unnerving silence. O’Brien motioned to a woman he had hidden just outside his office door. It was Pauline Riger, dry-goods proprietress of Astoria, and she had been listening all along.

  “This is the woman who bought the oilcloth,” Riger said as she eyed Mrs. Nack. The proprietress had a hawklike countenance, and her face was sharp and pinched in concentration. “I am sure of her.”

  “You haven’t the slightest doubt?” a Journal reporter pressed.

  “No! It is the lady. I know it.… I remember her well because she was a fine looking lady, and better dressed than most people who come to my store.”

  Captain O’Brien maintained his disquieting gaze at Mrs. Nack. “This woman has identified you as having purchased oilcloth from her,” he said evenly. “Which would seem to connect you to the murder of William Guldensuppe.”

  “That is impossible,” the midwife shot back. Guldensuppe, she maintained, was still alive.

  She didn’t know where Willie was now, she didn’t know this Mrs. Riger, she didn’t even know any stores in Astoria. But as she spoke, word passed among the detectives that a new piece of evidence had arrived at headquarters; it had just been fished out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard after it came bumping up against the USS Vermont. And as they stood up to leave, Captain O’Brien coolly swung open the door for Mrs. Nack.

  There, in the middle of his hallway, were two severed human legs—sawn halfway through, then snapped off.

  “Do you know those?” he gloated.

  They were hideous objects—rotted from five days in the river, and still nestled in an opened bundle of oilcloth. O’Brien waited for Mrs. Nack to faint, to shriek, to break down. But the midwife merely turned to him with a look to freeze the marrow.

  “How should I know?” she asked coolly.

  7.

  THE UNDERTAKER’S NEIGHBOR

  WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST wheeled into action—literally.

  Jumping onto a bicycle, Hearst sped up the fifty blocks from Printer’s Square to Mrs. Nack’s apartment building at Thirty-Fifth and Ninth. He marched past the peppermint-stick displays into Werner’s Drug Store looking for the owner, and he was in luck: Franz Werner’s indispensable assistant was vacationing in Larchmont, so Werner himself was in charge.

  Didn’t Mrs. Augusta Nack’s lease run out today?

  Indeed it did.

  The young millionaire made the landlord an offer on the spot: He’d pay handsomely to rent out Nack’s apartment—right now. Werner was delighted, and Hearst quickly conferred with the Wrecking Crew, which had finally caught up with him. Because he was such an upstanding new tenant, the publisher decided to post staff to all the entrances as complimentary doormen. Another group of Hearst reporters was sent out to the neighborhood hotels with instructions to take over every pay-phone booth. By the time Pulitzer’s men caught on to the Nack arrest and arrived, they found a cordon of Wreckers around 439 Ninth Avenue that, as it so happened, allowed only the police and fellow Hearst reporters into the building.

  It was only the latest indignity for the World men. The morning’s triumphant Cyklam story was already being dethroned, and the kind of grandstanding that Hearst was doing here was exactly what Joseph Pulitzer would not and could not do. His eyesight and his nerves shot, over the pas
t few years Pulitzer had increasingly taken to isolating himself in his Fifth Avenue mansion. All the day’s papers were read to him, so that his presence remained constant and ghostly; nitpicking commands were brayed by telephone, telegraph, and memos. And with the Journal savagely attacking the World’s circulation, the messages from Pulitzer were getting harsher.

  “We must smash the interloper,” one memo commanded.

  Other newspapers were looking endangered as well. The Times had briefly gone bust the previous year, and over at the stately Sun—the paper whose respectability the Times still only aspired to—an even more dire drama was now unfolding. It was being whispered that editor Charles A. Dana, after having helmed the Sun for more than fifty years, had stopped coming to his office in the previous week. Only imminent death could be keeping the old man from his desk in the middle of the year’s biggest crime story. New York newspapers without Dana were nearly unthinkable—indeed, Pulitzer himself had trained under the Sun’s publisher before turning on him.

  The irony was not lost on the denizens of Newspaper Row. Pulitzer had made his fortune by attacking his old colleagues at the Sun as dinosaurs, and he then went after James Gordon Bennett’s equally celebrated New York Herald by undercutting its newsstand price. Now Hearst, trained in his college years at the World, was doing the exact same thing.

  “When I came to New York,” one editor heard Pulitzer say with a sigh, “Mr. Bennett reduced the price of his paper and raised his advertising rates—all to my advantage. When Mr. Hearst came to New York I did the same. I wonder why, in view of my experience?”

  The World’s unmatched circulation of more than 350,000—an audited figure it proudly advertised atop its front pages by proclaiming CIRCULATION BOOKS OPEN TO ALL—was now in danger of being overtaken by the Journal. And as the two pulled perilously close in record-setting circulations, the city’s other papers were getting shoved further aside. A future owned by yellow journalism was not one most reporters wished to contemplate. Some libraries had already barred the World and the Journal from their precincts, with one Brooklyn librarian sniffing that they attracted “an undesirable class of readers.” Rival papers were quick to agree, and laid into the salivating coverage of what the World had dubbed the Missing Head Mystery.

  “The sensational journals of the city have now become scientific and publish anatomical charts and figures, solely in the interests of science, and to supply a want which the closing of the dime museums in the Bowery creates,” mocked the New York Commercial Advertiser. A Times reporter bemoaned the sight of the yellow journals co-opting the case from a bumbling police force: “The freak journals, those startling and irrepressible caterers to the gross and savage side of human nature, are having a particularly fine time with their new murder mystery … and putting all the celebrated detectives of fact and fiction to shame.” Worse still, he admitted, they were good at it: “Yet it seems that in an enlightened age criminals might be brought to justice in a manner less demoralizing to the whole community.”

  But it was another observation by the Times, one being quietly made all down Newspaper Row that day, that contained the real sting for Pulitzer’s men.

  “The Journal, by the way,” they wrote, “is generally doing better nowadays. The pupil is taking the master’s place now.”

  It was all too true. Ned and Gus and the rest of Pulitzer’s newsmen were barred from the very crime scene that they’d been the first to uncover. Locked out of Nack’s building while a joyous Hearst scampered about inside, infuriated World reporters marched off to the neighborhood pay phones to call the newsroom and complain. But when they picked up the earpieces, nothing happened.

  Hearst’s men had cut the cords.

  WHILE PULITZER’S JOURNALISTS fumed in disbelief outside, the police carefully picked through Augusta Nack’s apartment. Detectives Price, Krauch, and O’Donohue, the three who had taken Nack in, spent the next few hours unpacking and rifling through the hastily packed boxes. It wasn’t easy. Nearly everything had been readied for storage, and by Nack’s own account, she’d been busily brushing and sponging the apartment down before moving out. But was it to get her deposit back, or to wash away evidence?

  Amid the crates of crockery and bedclothes there remained intriguing hints of life at 439 Ninth Avenue. Photographic albums immediately went into the evidence pile; so did a large number of letters, including the telegram that had arrived on Sunday, the day after the first bundle was found in the river. It was signed Guldensuppe, something that occasioned more than a little skeptical commentary among the detectives.

  More policemen spread out onto the other floors of the building. There was, almost unnoticed in the fuss upstairs, a small trapdoor in the ground floor of the stairwell. It led to a basement, where their torches shone upon a motley assortment of barrels and stray wooden planks; against the wall stood a large wooden display cabinet, one of its doors fallen off onto the floor, filled inside with an array of bottles. An eerie spot, perhaps, and yet there was no particular sign of any scuffle or recent activity.

  Upstairs was a different matter. Neighbors watched from the adjacent buildings to see a hatch atop Werner’s roof thrown aside. Then, climbing a ladder from the top of the stairwell, officers and reporters emerged onto the roof, blinking in the sunlight. Normally the only noteworthy attraction up there was a small Werner’s Drug Store billboard, but on this day a more humble object caught their attention: an overturned tub. It was exactly what one might need to boil a body. They grabbed it as evidence, though not before Hearst artists ran up a sketch of the suspicious tin hulk for the paper.

  Looking down from the rooftop, they could see an avenue that was turning increasingly chaotic; word had gotten out, and police were holding back more than just competing reporters now. But in the neighboring tenements and stores, resourceful newsmen from the World, the Times, and the Herald were all conducting their own searches—and finding plenty. An undertaker’s assistant up the block, George Vockroth, had rented a horse and surrey to Nack on Saturday morning; she’d come by at ten a.m. to arrange it, and then a mustachioed German stopped by at three thirty p.m. to pick it up. It wasn’t Guldensuppe, though; this fellow was shorter, moodier, and darker-haired. Mrs. Nack’s other neighbors had a notion of who that might be. They murmured that another boarder had lived in the apartment for while—a mysterious German barber known only as Fred, though that wasn’t thought to be his real name. Mrs. Nack had been more than friendly with both of her boarders, until back in February when Guldensuppe had beaten his rival so badly that the barber was left with a black eye. He had moved out after that.

  But if “Fred” was back, why was he picking up carriages on behalf of Mrs. Nack? Back inside her kitchen, the detectives had a good guess. One of them reached into the recesses of a cupboard and found that it was not empty. His hands emerged holding a butcher’s knife, a broken saw, and then a revolver. And held up to the light, by the hammer of the pistol there appeared to be a dried spray of blood.

  WORLD REPORTERS WERE TAUNTED all the way to Mulberry Street by Augusta Nack’s visage staring out from below that evening’s Journal headline:

  MURDER MYSTERY SOLVED BY THE JOURNAL

  Mrs. Nack, Murderess!

  Crowds of commuters swarmed the pint-sized newsboys to grab precious copies of the Evening Journal. The paper, ginning up the publicity, ostentatiously sent out beefy guards to tamp down any riots by customers. To complement four full pages breaking open the case and the sensational find of the legs that afternoon, Hearst also whipped up portraits of everyone from Augusta and Herman Nack to William Guldensuppe and the oilcloth seller Mrs. Riger. That night he’d outdone the police, he’d outdone the World, and he’d very nearly outdone himself.

  “When patting oneself on the back for a recent achievement, it is a reprehensible thing to boast,” the tycoon began modestly. “But in an instance like an overwhelming victory over its rivals in the Guldensuppe murder case, the Journal comes to the front, sweeps the curtain
away from the mass of doubt connected with the case, and exposes almost every detail of the crime.” If his neighbors on Newspaper Row still didn’t get the message, Hearst was happy to elucidate: “All this was done, of course, with the main purpose of exhibiting the Journal’s superiority over its rivals.”

  Inside police headquarters, evidence kept piling up. The telegram in Mrs. Nack’s apartment, dated from the day after the murder, was signed Guldensuppe, which was what other people called him—and not Gieldsensuppe, which was how the victim himself spelled it. Detectives poring over Mrs. Nack’s bank account and purse couldn’t find missing money she claimed to have given Guldensuppe just a couple of days earlier—it was all still on her, for a jail matron found it hidden in her corset.

  The alibi literally didn’t add up.

  The matron also noticed bruises along Mrs. Nack’s upper arm—signs of a struggle, perhaps—and called in a doctor to have a look. From their faded color, they were judged to be about five or six days old. Mrs. Nack couldn’t account for those, either. Captain O’Brien made a great show of having her fingernails pared and scraped out—if there was any foreign blood or tissue there from a fight, he assured her, they’d find it.

  Sitting in his office later that night with a crowd of reporters, O’Brien was pleased indeed. He had the putative murder weapons laid out on his desk, nearly a dozen identifications on the body in the morgue, and the prime suspect in a jail cell upstairs.

  “Do you believe that Mrs. Nack killed the man whose body is now in the morgue?” one reporter asked.

  “If that body belonged to William Guldensuppe, I believe she did, or is implicated.”

  It was a dramatic turnaround in just one day. That morning he’d had only two people in custody in connection with the case, and both were clearly useless. One was a Bowery waiter who’d seen two men carrying awkward packages on a streetcar—as if that were newsworthy in New York City—and the other was a babbling metal-polish peddler who’d led the police on a wild-goose chase after claiming to spot an eyeless and toothless severed head in a vacant lot. The “head” was nothing but an old hat. The peddler was booked purely out of pique, and returned the favor by giving a home address that proved to be a lumberyard.