12.

HEADS OR TAILS

“GOING FISHING?” the small boy asked.

The crews swaggered past him and the swelling crowd along East Tenth Street, pulled their gear out from a tangled mass of ropes and hooks along the foot of the pier, then boarded the police launches gathered by the riverside. These were naphtha boats—steamboats that vaporized petroleum instead of water, which made for quick starts and fiery wrecks—and the men were grapplers, salvagers who worked the docks to drag the riverbed for dropped casks of wine, crates of oysters, and the occasional lost anchor.

This job was a little different. A couple of dozen grapplers had been rounded up, and policemen joined them on six launches. Rather than the usual draglines, they were deploying long rakes with splayed-out tines, and peculiar ice-tong implements that bristled with metal teeth. The riverside crowd knew exactly what these specialized tools were for.

“Three cheers for Guldensuppe!” yelled a spectator. “Rah! Rah! Rah!”

Captain Schultz of the harbor police ushered newsmen aboard his launch and maneuvered midstream to demonstrate his men at work. The imperturbable Schultz was in a droll mood. He liked reporters, and his grisly specialty in body dragging meant that he was always good for the darkest humor in town.

“Heads you win, tails you lose!” yelled a wag from onshore.

Schultz smiled and directed the reporters’ attention to rivermen tossing lines into the water on the approach to the ferry slip. Finding a plaster-encased head would be no challenge for them.

“These men know how to find and pick up a gold watch,” he boasted. “With their hooks down at the river’s bottom, they can feel anything that they come in contact with as well as if they had their fingers on it.”

A series of splashes echoed across the water; police looked up and shook their heads in exasperation. Street urchins were stripping off and swimming out from the riverbank, their gamine bodies diving among the rakes and hooks to try to touch bottom. The riverbed was a good twenty-five feet down, though, so all they were doing was getting in the way.

“Something’s caught!” yelled a grappler. “I’ve got something!”

The mass of New Yorkers onshore whooped as the men on the launch swiftly and steadily pulled the line up to reveal … a waterlogged black overcoat.

“Try a fine tooth comb!” jeered an onlooker.

The hooks and rakes had no sooner splashed back into the murky waters of the East River when the William E. Chapman, a wrecker steamboat, came chugging up the channel and dropped anchor. A man could be seen emerging onto the deck in a comically outsized diving suit, climbing over the gunwales onto a ladder, then pausing while two crew members rigged up a massive brass helmet.

The World was now conducting its own search.

The Journal had already run an operation with hooks a week earlier, an expensive stunt that hadn’t yielded them much copy. But on this morning the Journal was completely upstaged. In a flash of brilliance, Pulitzer’s crew had gone beyond mere grappling hooks and hired veteran deep-sea diver Charles Olsen. He was a survivor of the generation that had discovered the bends while doing underwater work on the pilings of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bottom of the East River, the grizzled diver explained to a World reporter on board the steamer, remained a treacherous place for divers.

“Unless you catch the tides just right, it is impossible to keep on your feet,” he warned. Still, he thought the search might be a short one. “In my opinion, the head, in its plaster of paris casing, would sink just the same as a big, round stone. I don’t think the tide would change its position.”

If they followed the route of the ferry, Olsen suggested, they’d get Guldensuppe’s head. Two assistants then screwed his helmet on tightly, checked the rubber hose leading into his suit, and set to work operating the air pump on deck. Olsen waited until the red Diver Down flag had been raised atop the steamer. Then he clumped down the ladder in his weighted boots, paused, and disappeared below the surface with a mighty splash.

Over on the police launches, the dredging proceeded at a painstaking pace; they were combing each inch of the riverbed. The grapplers might well have had the talent to find a sunken gold watch, but so far all they were pulling up were stones and tin cans. Meanwhile, the steamer crew paid out more and more of the 130 feet of rubber hose to Olsen’s diving suit, receiving nothing in return but an occasional bubble of air on the surface. The prospect of finishing in mere hours was now fading.

But what the police didn’t see as they toiled away was the slightest of movements on a signal rope leading up the World’s steamboat—a wordless series of tugs. Quietly, the World crew began raising Olsen as he relayed his message up the length of rope.

He’d found something.

THE DOOR of the narrow three-story brick boardinghouse on 235 East Twenty-Fifth Street opened to two Manhattan detectives waiting on the steps.

Stolen property, they explained to Mrs. Hoven, the pretty young widow who ran the home. They’d come to examine the room of a gentleman who had checked in the week before; he was believed to have pawned some ill-gotten clothing and possibly a watch as well. She knew exactly who they meant—though, she confessed with some embarrassment, she did not actually know his name.

“A week ago yesterday at about ten o’clock,” she recalled, leading the detectives upstairs, “a stranger rang my doorbell and asked me if I had any furnished rooms to rent. I told him that I had, and invited him into the house.”

But curiously, he had another question as he came inside.

“Do you recognize me?” he’d inquired rather searchingly.

“No, I can’t say that I do,” she’d admitted after a long pause.

“Why,” he claimed airily as he stepped inside, “I was a great friend of your husband’s.”

Her late husband had known many people in his job as a hotel cook, she explained to the detectives. After his death three years earlier, Mrs. Hoven had resorted to managing a residence house where she and her two young children lived. She hadn’t attached much significance to the question; the boarder, however, seemed unperturbed that she didn’t recognize him—relieved, even.

“I showed him first a hall bedroom,” she recalled. “He was not satisfied with it. It was too small. Then I took him to the front room on the second floor. He liked that one very much, and immediately engaged it. He paid me three dollars in advance.”

By the time she thought to ask his name, though, he’d already locked his valise and his walking stick—his only apparent possessions—in his new room and left for the day.

She opened up the room to the detectives. He was a peculiar boarder, she admitted. When she went to clean his room, she couldn’t help noticing that he was neat—a little too neat. Everything was always left packed and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

“He never left a scrap, not so much as a hair brush around,” she marveled. “You could only tell he had been in the room by the condition of the bed.”

Unlike a hotel, where a fellow was far too easy to trace through the register, this sort of room was a fine place for hiding in and leaving quickly. Here, at one of the thousands of residence houses in Manhattan, one could be safely obscure. Even the landlady herself never saw him again after their first meeting.

“He used to come in late at night after the rest of us had gone to bed.” She shrugged. “He would leave the home early in the morning before we were out of bed.”

As promised, there was nothing inside the room but the walking stick and the valise. The detectives opened the latter carefully, as if wary that they might find something more than just clothing inside. Yet at the top of the case was an entirely ordinary and spartan set of possessions: a brush, a comb, trousers, socks, and shoes. But then, from the mysterious boarder’s bag, there tumbled out something else: copy after copy of murder coverage from the World, the Journal, and the Herald.

THE NEWSPAPERS RELISHED their continuing role in the drama. When Augusta Nack’s lawyer visited her cell with a newspaper announcing Thorn’s arrest, her startled exclamation of “My God!” was gleefully illustrated by a Journal artist who showed her dropping the evening edition in horror. Now the Journal approvingly noted its presence in Thorn’s valise, claiming that he had done little in his hideout but pore over the “morning, afternoon, and evening” editions of their paper.

Thorn would have plenty to read in the latest issues. A reporter accompanying Professor Witthaus and the coroner for yet another examination of the Woodside cottage witnessed them discovering a bullet hole in a baseboard, and claimed to find a second bullet that had entered into the lath of a wall. To top it all off, the paper ran an illustration of “Blood Spots on Martin Thorn’s Undershirt,” drawn so that Thorn himself appeared to be coming straight at Journal readers, thrillingly ready to decapitate them. Thankfully, Hearst declared, “the Evening Journal’s pen and pencil” had stopped him in his tracks. “And the police,” he generously allowed, “for once deserve unstinted praise for having made Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Bucket look tardy.”

The World played the skeptic; it complained that “a nail made the bullet hole” found by the Journal and inconveniently noted that Inspector O’Brien denied the bloody undershirt even existed. Yet among its plentiful complaints—and even more plentiful ads for Cowperthwait’s Reliable Carpets and Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Pellets, for business was rolling in now—the World also boasted the best coverage of O’Brien’s interrogations and Gotha’s ruse. Following up a disquieting comment by Gotha that Thorn had secretly joined the crowds at the morgue to admire his own handiwork, a World reporter discovered that Thorn did indeed resemble a man who’d walked up to Dr. O’Hanlon during the first autopsy.

“Horrible case, isn’t it?” the man had said. And then, to O’Hanlon’s surprise, the visitor had pointed out a collarbone stab wound—one so well hidden in the lacerated flesh as to be invisible to the untrained eye. But before the startled doctor could remark on this, the mysterious man had melted back into the crowd.

If Thorn couldn’t help admiring his own handiwork in the morgue and in the press, then it was no accident that the Herald was the third newspaper found in his valise. A cut above the Journal and the World, it was the one quality newspaper to throw serious resources at the case. Before the arrival of Pulitzer, the Herald had been the city’s colossus, with a circulation of more than 190,000. Under the boisterous editorship of celebrated bon vivant “Commodore” Bennett, it had cavorted with the best of them; along with a splendid 1874 hoax claiming escaped circus tigers were roaming Manhattan, it had also pulled off the greatest publicity coup in journalistic history when it sent reporter Henry Stanley in search of Dr. David Livingstone.

Those glories were long past, and Herald circulation had fallen to a distant third behind the yellow papers, but it could still land a scoop or two. Gotha’s fears of Thorn, they discovered, were frighteningly justified. Another acquaintance had heard Thorn pondering aloud how one might lure, say, some fellow into Mount Morris Park, shoot him in the head, and then arrange the body to make it look like a suicide. Gotha was precisely the sort of depressive man whose apparent suicide would have evaded suspicion—and the park was just a few blocks from where Thorn had arranged to meet him. The plot was a chilling coda to Guldensuppe’s murder, and the Herald had uncovered it before anyone else—including the police.

In fact, one could pretty well gauge a newspaper’s health by how well it was covering the case. Galloping to the top of the circulation pile was Hearst’s brash Journal, pulling ahead of Pulitzer’s World; behind them, with still solid coverage, were the Herald, the Staats Zeitung, and the quietly industrious Times. Lagging with lackluster stories were the ailing Tribune and the once mighty Sun, as well as scrappy but outgunned titles like the Evening Telegram and the Press; while the Telegram tried to lure readers with a Free Trip to the Klondike promotion, the latter was reduced to profiling the Woodside duck who broke the case. (“It is an ordinary duck,” their hapless writer concluded.) At the bottom of the heap were the has-beens that could scarcely plagiarize yesterday’s newspapers—the Mail and Express, the Commercial Advertiser, and the scrawny New York Post.

But buzzing along Newspaper Row late on the night of July 8 was a rumor that the World was about to leap ahead of them all with the biggest of breaks—one that might instantly upend the investigation.

IT WAS ONE A.M. when detectives marched into the World offices.

Where is it?

The rewrite and layout men, finishing their final late shifts for the next morning’s July 9 issue, were the picture of innocence. Why, they were busy preparing a story on Mr. Valentine’s turnip giveaway, where the local merchant gave away 171 barrels of last year’s crop—lovely, fine specimens they were, too—because the vegetables just weren’t selling. There’d almost been a riot on North Moore among paupers coming to get them; one poor man plain fainted on the sidewalk while trying to roll his barrel of turnips home, and … Where was what?

Where’s the head?

Someone had seen the World diving crew draw a slimy white mass out of the water late the afternoon before. The Herald believed the World had the scoop of the day—literally scooping William Guldensuppe’s head off the bottom of the East River—and that Pulitzer’s henchmen were now concealing the ghastly thing in their editorial offices. In a burst of righteous indignation, the Herald called in the police.

Where is it?

The diver had indeed brought up a white chunk of stone the size of a human head, a World staffer patiently explained; but rather than the plaster-encrusted remains of William Guldensuppe, it had proven to be nothing more than a clump of barnacles that had dislodged from the hull of some passing ship.

“To reassure the gentlemen in charge of the Herald,” a night reporter replied tartly, “The World has not the head of Guldensuppe and would not keep it if it had.”

Yet there was no denying the head’s importance. Old-timers in the newsroom still recalled “the Kelsey Outrage” of more than twenty years back, when Long Island poet Charles G. Kelsey unwisely wooed a very engaged woman named Julia. She’d set a candle in the window as their sign to meet, but he was seized in her yard by locals armed with tar and feathers, most likely led by Julia’s fiancé, Royal Sammis. After turning the lovelorn poet into a scalding mass of tar, they sent him screaming out into the night, never to be seen again. Julia and Royal married three months later, freed of the bothersome suitor, and everyone lived happily ever after—at least until ten months later, when fishermen pulled Kelsey’s tarred body from Huntington Bay. Or rather, they pulled out the bottom half of it; the top was gone, and his genitals had been hacked off.

As with Guldensuppe, the facts of the Kelsey case seemed clear: The identity of the victim, the perpetrators, and the motive all appeared obvious. There was even the same shock of betrayal: The candle that lured Charles Kelsey was lit deliberately by Julia, who then allegedly watched his tarring. But without a complete body, and with stories floated by the defense of live Kelsey “sightings,” no jury had been able to convict a single person involved. The whole grisly affair was crudely preserved for decades in a popular turn of phrase—“as dead as Kelsey’s nuts”—but Royal and Julia Sammis still walked free.

The assistant DA had been busy insisting to newspapers all day that, history aside, he didn’t particularly need Guldensuppe’s head to secure a conviction. Suspicious that the World had beaten the police to the punch, rival papers were glad to repeat the assertion that finding the final piece of Guldensuppe’s body was a mere formality. HEAD NOT NECESSARY, the next morning’s Herald headline assured readers.

But the small fleet of hired grapplers that gathered at the riverside again that next morning hinted otherwise. Reporters could already see that not all the other evidence would hold up; Mr. Buala, for one, now claimed he couldn’t recognize Nack and Thorn as the couple who rented his Woodside house—because, detectives grumbled, he feared a conviction would keep him from being able to rent it out again. These suspicions were not exactly mollified when the annoyed wine merchant stubbornly attempted to keep the coroner from touching his precious baseboards to retrieve a spent bullet.

The longer Guldensuppe’s head stayed missing, the more the questions would grow around the unthinkable. Could Nack and Thorn really get away with murder?