14.

THE HIGH ROLLER

WHEN THE DELIVERYMAN SHAMBLED unannounced into the district attorney’s office on Centre Street, it wasn’t to drop off a package.

I’m going to tell you everything, Herman Nack told the astounded prosecutor.

Assistant DA Ed Mitchell hastily sent for a stenographer as he guided the gruff bakery employee into his office. Clutching his battered homburg, Herman Nack was none too pleased at spending a day off on anything besides beer or bowling, but Gussie’s World interview had been nagging at him.

“She said lots of bad things about me,” he groused. “I wanted to tell what I knew about her just to get square.”

Herman was a man ill used by the case: attacked in the street by Journal reporters, briefly jailed as the prime suspect, his failed marriage paraded before the nation. Now the World was calling him a vicious brute. He’d just wanted to be left alone, but after biting his tongue for two months, he could keep silent no more. Still, he insisted he didn’t want to get into any trouble.

“If I say anything,” he hesitated, “I will be as liable as she is.”

He would be safe, the prosecutors assured him. They were joined by Detective Samuel Price, who leaned in with keen interest; he’d staked out and arrested Augusta Nack at her apartment and harbored deeper suspicions about her.

“There isn’t much to tell,” the deliveryman stalled. “But what I know and remember I will tell.”

“My wife left me in 1896,” he began. “We had a scrap. I had been giving her $10 a week, and she wanted the whole business, which was the $17 that I received. I told her I would only give her five dollars a week.”

The stenographer calmly transcribed the events of that violent evening.

“She came at me with a knife. I seized her by the arms, and she threw the knife on the ground.… Two or three days after that she moved the furniture. She said she did not want anything to do with me but wanted to live with Guldensuppe.”

What was galling to Herman wasn’t so much that his wife was leaving him, but that she already had money from her own sideline: abortions.

“Do you know whether your wife attended women at your house?” Detective Price asked sharply.

“Yes.” He nodded. She charged her customers $25 each. “She had no diploma, either. She failed her examination in Europe.”

Not surprisingly, some of her customers hadn’t fared so well.

“Did any of them die?” Price pressed.

“I know two, for sure,” Herman admitted. “Another case was a girl who came from the country.”

“Do you know if any of these women ever died in your house?”

“No, not in my house. My wife told me that one girl died in Bellevue Hospital. This was about five years ago.”

Augusta was afraid of getting found out. Dr. Weiss of Tenth Avenue, as well as her current landlord and pharmacist, F. W. Werner, quietly assisted in taking care of the women after their botched abortions.

“How would she dispose of the bodies of the infants?”

“Any child would be buried by an undertaker—Alois Palm.”

Mitchell and Detective Price sat amazed. They knew that some doctors and undertakers treated botch jobs and buried fetuses with no questions asked, but Nack wasn’t just making wild allegations now. He was naming names. Palm still ran a thriving undertaking business, just down the street from Mrs. Nack.

In fact, Herman admitted, not all the children were buried.

“My wife placed dead children in jars containing spirits,” he recalled with some distaste—because she’d stored them in his bedroom.

“How many dead children did you see in your room?” an astonished Price asked.

“About a dozen,” Nack shrugged.

“Did you ever see her cut up any of the bodies?” the detective asked pointedly.

“She told me”—he paused to think back—“that she had burned some of them in the stove.”

The sounds of Centre Street filtered in from outside; the Criminal Courts Building stood just across the street from the Tombs, and they could almost see Augusta Nack’s cell window. As the stenographer scratched away, Price finally broke the silence.

“How many?” he asked.

“A whole lot,” the deliveryman ventured. “She burned them for eight or ten years, two or three a month.”

Assistant DA Mitchell quietly did the math in his head: two, maybe three hundred infants had been cremated in the kitchen of Mrs. Nack’s apartment on Ninth Avenue. Herman Nack sensed he’d already revealed too much. Maybe he wasn’t going to tell quite everything—such as, say, just why his wife had to leave the old country back in 1886.

“There is something at the back of that,” the burly driver hinted darkly. “If she says anything more about me, maybe I’ll say something else. She knows what I could say.”

“IT’S A LIE!” Mrs. Nack roared from her cell. “It’s a lie, every word of it!”

The Evening Journal for September 2 had landed the story, but the World was the first to get a reporter to Augusta Nack’s cell. She spun away from the Pulitzer reporter and raged at her ex-husband from inside her cell.

“Fool!” she spat. “Fool!”

Her lawyer was quick to show up and ward off the reporters.

“I am not going to let Mrs. Nack see anyone about her husband’s charges,” he insisted, though the story had already slipped from his grasp. On the way over to the jail he’d been confronted by World front pages with the damning headline:

“It is only natural,” chimed in the Evening Journal, “that Mrs. Nack, in view of her record of baby killing, should place so little value on human life.”

The papers had already been seizing on any death they could pin to the case. When a Woodside neighbor died in July, it was said to be from shock over the crime; so was the death of John Gotha’s ninety-five-year-old father-in-law that same month, though a better theory was that the man had died at the shock of being ninety-five years old. But now there was the dizzying prospect of hundreds of deaths connected to the case. The Tenth Avenue doctors and undertakers named by Herman Nack found their shops invaded by reporters. Dr. Weiss claimed to have no idea what Herman was talking about; nor did Mrs. Nack’s landlord, F. G. Werner.

“I do not think that Nack means me,” the pharmacist demurred. “Surely I never aided Mrs. Nack in any way.”

Alois Palm tried rather unsportingly to pin it all on his own brother, a fellow undertaker. But for all the perfunctory denials, none of them threatened to take Herman Nack to court. For those familiar with the city’s thriving abortion business, it wasn’t hard to guess why they didn’t relish the prospect of testifying under oath.

Discussing the case with reporters, Assistant DA Mitchell found that Herman’s charges made a great deal of sense indeed. Even Mrs. Nack’s friends faulted her as avaricious, and there certainly was quick money to be made in illicit abortions. What was more, she needed quick money.

“We have found out,” Mitchell announced, “that she was a high roller.”

“What was her object,” asked a puzzled Journal reporter, “in preserving the bodies of infants in jars?”

“Why, to sell them,” the assistant DA answered. “Medical colleges and students pay well for good specimens of the kind.”

Herman’s charges also explained one of the oddest testimonies from the early days of the investigation: that of Werner, Mrs. Nack’s landlord and the proprietor of the pharmacy on the first floor of her building. When the World was still trying to undermine the Guldensuppe identification, Werner had been one of the few to claim that he didn’t see a resemblance in the body. Now that peculiar denial had a motive. A pharmacist could make good money providing abortifacients on the sly; perhaps Werner was desperately trying to steer attention away from his shop.

More important, Herman’s accusation gave Mrs. Nack a motive. Martin Thorn’s motive for the murder—revenge—had been clear all along, and vehemently voiced in front of fellow barbers and pinochle partners. But what of Mrs. Nack? Why hadn’t she just left William Guldensuppe and moved in with Thorn? The logical answer was: she couldn’t. Mitchell believed that Guldensuppe had kept Gussie from leaving with his damning knowledge of her abortion operations—and of the mothers who had died at her hands.

“Guldensuppe knew this,” the World reported, “and threatened to tell.”

It wouldn’t be the first time, either. Herman’s charges unearthed still another bombshell. Right after Augusta left him, he’d paid some angry visits to her—and, perhaps, made a few unwise threats about what he knew. So, Mitchell revealed, Mrs. Nack had gone to one Ernest Moring—the brother of her friend Mrs. Miller, who ran Buck’s Hotel—and tried to hire him to kill her ex-husband.

He’d turned her down, and nothing had come of Herman Nack’s threat anyway. But when she was ready to leave her next beau, Mitchell reasoned, Mrs. Nack was threatened with exposure once again. This time she found the right man for the job: a jealous lover with enough anger to do the deed, and to do it for free. And that was how she kept Guldensuppe from talking—forever.

——

THE WORLD REPORTER ascended the rickety stairs of a Grand Street tenement, wandered down a dark hallway, and passed through a doorway into a modest ten-by-twelve room. Before him sat Dr. Giuseppe Lapenta, director, president, secretary, and treasurer of the Italian School of Midwifery. Its entire campus consisted of this modest room.

How much do your degrees cost? the reporter demanded from the startled gentleman.

It was the oldest and surest of headline grabbers. Within a day of Herman Nack’s revelations, Coroner Tuthill announced that he would lobby for new legislation to restrain midwives. The World promptly pursued local midwives with gusto. Reporters pounced on nursing schools for poor immigrant women, where degrees could be had in fifteen days for $50, and marched out with indignant headlines like A SCHOOL FOR BARBARITY and DIPLOMA MILL FOR MIDWIVES.

“Out of 55,000 live births last year, 25,000 and over were reportedly attended by women of this class,” the newspaper warned. “No one knows how many midwives there are in New York City.”

That, alas, was due to the previous midwife murder scandal: the death of Mary Rogers, the beautiful shopgirl whom Edgar Allan Poe barely fictionalized in his “Mystery of Marie Roget.” After her body was found in the Hudson River in July 1841, Mary’s despondent fiancé committed suicide, and suspicions ran strong that “Madame Restell,” the city’s wealthiest abortionist, had dumped her body after a procedure gone awry. She promptly became the designated villainess both for moralizing Herald journalists and for the American Medical Association, who cast midwives as a meddling and undertrained menace. The state criminalized abortion soon afterward, and a later wave of obscenity laws made it illegal to even discuss the procedure.

This, naturally, merely ceded the procedure to opportunists and criminals. Unregulated midwives still readily pierced the amniotic sac and then induced contractions with abortifacients such as pennyroyal, tansy, and black hellebore. The better practitioners were often immigrants from Bohemia, where stringent training was still available; the worse ones included anybody walking in from Grand Street with $50 to hand over to Dr. Lapenta. But for those with plenty of nerve and few scruples, there was money to be made. And it was a consensual crime that no woman—from chambermaid to heiress—was eager to volunteer information about.

“Their methods are so hidden and their ignorance so dense that they have no conception of law to restrain them,” the World thundered against midwives. “Most can hardly sign their own names.” But another anxiety shadowed the genuine concern over their scattershot training: namely, that it was women taking business away from men. Even as the World was pursuing midwives, it was running the headline WOMEN FARM, MEN COOK—a story noting that “the New Woman” was moving into traditionally male jobs in farming and manufacturing, while more men were taking domestic employment. Hearst’s Journal, though generally sympathetic to women’s labor, still ran headlines such as SHE’S PRETTY, EVEN IF SHE IS A LAWYER.

Yet the reporters could hardly fault their own motives in pursuing Mrs. Nack. After all, for a case initially written off as a prank, the Guldensuppe affair was now becoming an open sewer of murder, dismemberment, adultery, contract killing, false identity, gambling, illicit abortion, and medical malpractice. And as World reporters swarmed local diploma mills, all of it would have been curiously familiar to the blustery old editors of New York during the Mary Rogers case more than fifty years earlier.

“Really,” the Herald’s publisher had mused during the throes of that scandal, “the newspapers are becoming the only efficient police, the only efficient judges that we have.”

ACTUAL POLICE AND JUDGES, though, were now moving swiftly. With Martin Thorn and Augusta Nack in attendance at the Criminal Court on the morning of September 17, their indictment was dismissed. That wasn’t exactly a victory for the defense, because another indictment had just been handed down from Queens County.

Guldensuppe was lured from Manhattan, murdered in Queens, and then scattered in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. The consolidation of the city’s five boroughs was just months away; had the crime happened a bit later, there wouldn’t have been any question of jurisdiction. As it was, with Inspector O’Brien off the case and with the murder scene firmly fixed in Queens, the lawyers and the DA’s office had agreed to a move. The two prisoners were handed over to Undersheriff Baker of Queens County and led to gather their meager belongings from their cells at the Tombs. Then they said their goodbyes to cell mates and slipped out the Leonard Street exit.

One thousand New Yorkers were waiting for them outside.

Undersheriff Baker quickly bundled Mrs. Nack and Martin Thorn into a waiting carriage. A phalanx of black cabs slowly pursued them, all filled with reporters ready to cover the pair’s every move and scrambling for hotel accommodations by the Queens courthouse. “The line of carriages looked like a funeral procession,” a Sun reporter marveled.

The crowd surged, gawking at the prisoners as they headed toward the ferry slip by New Chambers Street. It was only as the boat finally pulled away from its moorings that, with the expanse of the East River stretching out before them, Nack and Thorn could feel some measure of solitude. Any solace in the quiet journey was brief; the undersheriff was staring quite fixedly at them, trying to read their faces. The ferry was passing the East Eleventh Street Pier, where the first gory parcel had been discovered.

Martin and Gussie remained expressionless, watching as their adopted island of Manhattan slipped away for what might be the last time.

Anything was a welcome change after the Tombs. The Queens County Jail was everything the Tombs was not: quiet, modern, and brightly lit. Thorn, though, was uneasy. He’d become used to the sound of pile drivers and hammers at the Tombs; in the eerie silence of the Queens jail, he could ponder the steady drip of evidence against him.

“I rented the Woodside cottage under the name of Braun,” he finally blurted out to Journal reporter Lowe Shearon. It was a stunning admission, but Thorn insisted that it was perfectly innocent. Sure, he’d rented it under a false name—“What of it?”—but that was no capital offense. And a new claim by a clerk that he’d bought seven cents’ worth of plaster on the day of the murder left him unimpressed.

“That is all rot. I never bought plaster of paris in my life. I never even had a pinch of it,” he insisted.

And with that, he retreated into the darkness of his new cell.

WHILE THORN WAS ASSIGNED to Murderers Row, Mrs. Nack had pulled an upper-floor unit with a vista of Long Island. The landscape was still pleasant and green; in a few weeks she’d be able to watch the foliage turn color. If she looked carefully, she could even make out the infamous Woodside cottage from where she stood. Gussie didn’t care; she was delighted with her new cell.

She’d said little, though, since Herman’s disastrous retaliation for her last interview. So while the Journal worked over the sullen Thorn, the World sent to Mrs. Nack’s cell their star women’s columnist: Harriet Hubbard Ayer. Gussie instantly relented.

“Come in if you want to see me,” she heard herself saying.

Mrs. Ayer was startled to be welcomed; Mrs. Nack was even more startled by who she was letting in. For the first time since being jailed, she was face-to-face with a bigger celebrity than herself. Harriet Hubbard Ayer was a household name, a glamorous riches-to-rags grand dame whose cosmetics empire had fallen apart in a messy divorce. After her ex-husband schemed, successfully, to commit her to an asylum, Mrs. Ayer made a sensational comeback as a beauty-and-manners columnist. Surely she would understand the terribly wronged Mrs. Nack.

“Must I be locked in?” Mrs. Ayer asked the jailer fearfully as she entered the cell. The memory of her own year in an asylum was never far away.

“Don’t be afraid, you’ll get out all right,” Mrs. Nack assured her, clasping her hands in sudden sympathy. “I know just how you feel. Ach, mein Gott!”

Mrs. Nack’s two cell mates fluttered about tidying the cell; they were so deeply in Gussie’s thrall that they did all her washing and chores for her. As they fussed over the new arrival, Mrs. Nack led Harriet to a corner of the cell, where a table was festooned with one of the many bunches of flowers sent by admirers. She was, she confided to the columnist, still angry at how newly overthrown Inspector O’Brien had interrogated her.

“Fifty times or more already Inspector O’Brien tells me he knows just how the murder is committed. ‘Ve know, ve know. Vill you tell or not?’ ” She punched her palm as she slipped into her old accent. “I say, screaming at him: ‘Ven you know the story so well, vy in hell isn’t that enough for you?’ ”

Mrs. Nack regained her composure and gazed intently into the columnist’s face.

“Yes, I say just so,” she continued. “Do you think if I have murder on my soul I could be as quiet as I have been? I sleep soundly all night—ask the Warden.”

“It’s a fact,” her jailer piped up from outside the cell.

And, Harriet asked tenderly, had she lost her friends since being jailed?

“Yes.” The midwife shook her head sadly. “My friends they all say, so Augusta Nack is a murderer, or if she isn’t we better not have anything to do with her.”

“Our friends want little to do with our troubles,” Mrs. Ayer empathized.

Instead, Mrs. Nack had her cell mates and her sewing for company. Her dresses, already a sensation at her court appearances, would be even better for the trial. And Mrs. Nack was, of course, a woman you could trust with long needles.

“Have you seen in the papers that the Warden is afraid I am going to kill myself?” she scoffed incredulously. “Well now, I am going to show you how easily I could kill myself if I wanted to.”

Nack crossed the room and pulled out a small basket from under the sink; it was filled with silverware. To Ayer’s amazement, she drew five sharp steel knives and laid them out on the table before the columnist.

“You see”—the prisoner laughed—“if I want to cut my throat I have every convenience. I could take a knife in each hand and have some to spare. But I am not going to cut my throat. I am going to be acquitted.”

Every night before she went to bed, she admitted, she spun and twirled about her cell in anticipation: “When I think of how near the trial is, I dance around.”

“If we had a piano,” a cell mate chirped, “it would help so very much.”

And then the heavy iron door was unlocked to Harriet once again, just as Mrs. Nack promised. But as she emerged, the beauty columnist was haunted by what she’d seen. Mrs. Nack’s was a curious love story indeed, for the fates of Thorn and Guldensuppe had not even arisen once in the conversation.

“Augusta Nack knows nothing whatsoever about love,” Harriet Ayer mused to her readers in the next morning’s World. “That is to say, of the love which means self-abnegation. She loves herself.” As for Martin Thorn, the columnist believed that to her he was merely a losing hand that she now wanted to fold—just as Herman Nack once was, just as William Guldensuppe had been.

“If she thinks of Martin Thorn at all,” she wrote, “I believe she thinks of him to hate him.”