19.

SCYTHE AND SAW

THE JURORS SPENT the night disconsolately gathered around the Garden City Hotel billiard table, not even bothering to pick up the cues, just aimlessly rolling the balls. They couldn’t focus while Magnus Larsen was at death’s door; he was doubled over with appendicitis by the time the train pulled up, and had to be carried to the hotel, where doctors decided to operate on the spot. Injected full of morphine, Larsen was now laid out on his bed upstairs in room 27, slipping miserably in and out of consciousness.

At the empty courthouse the next day, disappointed crowds scoured the floors for souvenirs, and locals pointed out the chairs in which Nack and Thorn had sat. When the trial reconvened two days later, the matter of life and death was not Thorn’s but Magnus Larsen’s. A scrum of reporters ran after Howe on the way in, cutting one another off with overlapping questions: Will you—? Can you—? Have you—?

“Yes, yes, yes—no, no, no,” Howe joked from atop the courthouse steps, then marched inside. The artists were already after him, sketching his rose-and-scarlet scarf; fastened across his chest by a weighty gold cable shone a diamond-encircled moonstone pendant. It was the size of an egg, and carved with the figure of a young maiden.

“The gallery was nearly full of Long Island folks,” one Times reporter smirked, “who, as this blazing, scintillating apparition flashed up, leaned forward and gasped and gazed.”

Thorn soon followed him in, looking rather reinvigorated himself. Howe jokingly shook a fist under his client’s nose: Bah, look at all the trouble you’ve caused this week! The prosecutor and Judge Smith, though, had a more pressing concern to attend to: When, exactly, could their missing twelfth juror report back to the courthouse?

“Larsen had a very narrow escape,” an attending physician explained. Upon opening the juror’s abdominal cavity, they’d discovered that it was already filling with pus. “We found a perforation of the appendix. It is certain that he will be unable to leave his bed for three weeks, and I am not prepared to say that he will recover—though the indications are that he will.”

Continuing without Larsen was mulled, but to Howe it was out of the question.

“No!” he said sharply. “Such a proceeding would be against all legal precedent.” In the Cancini case of 1857, he noted, a man accused of killing a policeman had agreed under similar conditions to continuing on with a jury of eleven. After he was sentenced to the gallows, though, his conviction was thrown out: Even Cancini himself hadn’t the right to waive his guarantee under the state constitution to trial by a jury of twelve peers.

“The judge would censure me if I consented to any such arrangement and I would deserve to be censured,” Howe added stiffly. “The court would very properly ask me if I had ever read the law.” Restarting the trial from the beginning, but with the eleven remaining jurors and one newly selected one, was a slightly less shaky idea—but only slightly.

Prepare for a brand-new trial, Judge Smith decided, in ten days’ time, on Monday, November 22. Journal reporters dashed for their telephones and their pigeons; and on his way out of the courthouse, Howe suddenly cut in as Manny Friend chatted with a cluster of men from the World and the Times.

“You! You insignificant little imp!” Howe roared at Mrs. Nack’s counsel on the courthouse stairs. “You insect! I ought not to notice you! You are not worthy of being considered a respectable rival of Howe & Hummel!”

It was more, perhaps, than just his usual grandstanding. The master of legal escapes, William F. Howe knew there was one final rap that he couldn’t beat—and that at seventy-one, his career was already longer than his famed appetites augured. Falling quiet as he walked away, he turned suddenly to a Times reporter.

“This,” Howe said plainly, “is the case of my life.”

HOWE ARRIVED at his office on Centre Street to cheers and congratulations from his staff, with a coterie of reporters following as he settled back into his lair. The usual huddle of gangsters and madams awaited appointments, but Thorn was still on Howe’s mind. The lawyer had instantly—without the least discomfort—abandoned his theory about Guldensuppe being alive and was now instead pouring all his effort into pinning the murder on Mrs. Nack. The black-clad femme fatale, Howe added, was “a damnable spider” sinking her fangs into the love-struck Martin Thorn.

“From my first interview I found him saturated with chivalry,” he rhapsodized, “ready, if necessary, to yield his life to this Delilah who has placed him in this present position.”

Yes, Thorn was chivalrous—“too chivalrous for his own good,” the lawyer lamented. For William F. Howe himself was the city’s great defender of virtue; he and Abe Hummel ran a million-dollar operation in breach-of-promise cases, where comely showgirls settled with wealthy men who’d wooed them without intent of marriage. A private communication from Howe & Hummel was all that was needed for the firm and the showgirl to evenly split five or ten thousand in hush money. It was extraordinarily lucrative, and extraordinarily moral, and just about the only man it hadn’t worked on was the actor John Barrymore, because he didn’t give a damn about his reputation. But Martin Thorn was no Broadway rake, Howe insisted. The humble immigrant barber was the victim of “this modern Borgia” and her venomous lawyer.

“She is the biggest liar unhung,” Howe snapped. “And I want to say, for publication, that the conduct of Mr. Friend is the dirtiest piece of unprofessional work I have heard of in all my experience.”

All that dirt would stick to her, Howe promised—for his firm had dug up plenty more. They now had the names, he declared, of the two women she’d killed with botched abortions—and he’d have Herman Nack himself on the witness stand to back it all up.

“Mrs. Nack admitted that she herself had cremated Guldensuppe’s clothes—she must have been skilled at the art of cremation,” Howe mused aloud. “Apropos of all this cremating, it is just possible—mind you, I say possible—that Guldensuppe’s head was cremated instead of having been dropped overboard.”

And if that wasn’t damning enough, sitting in Howe’s office was a brand-new witness: a stern, bespectacled Bronx landlady named Ida Ziegler. A full three months before Mrs. Nack claimed the plot had begun, Ziegler had received a curious response to her home-rental ad for 1671 Eastburn Avenue.

“On one Sunday,” she began, “I believe it was prior to the fifteenth of March, a woman in the company of a man called upon me and wanted to see the room that I was advertising. The gentleman, after examining the rooms, said they were all very comfortable, and suited him just fine; but to the lady they were not at all suitable.” Mrs. Ziegler, a little wounded, enumerated all the alleged faults of her lovely home. “Because there was not any sewer conduit leading from the house; the neighborhood was too lively; the house was somewhat conspicuous; because the bathtub was too small, although an average man could bathe himself with ease. She also became displeased with the rooms upon learning that I was not in the habit of going out during the day.”

The prospective tenant, the landlady recalled, also had a very peculiar question. “We had a garden in the back of the house. She asked me whether I would strike water if I were to dig three feet down.”

The woman, she said, was a midwife who had given her name as Mrs. Braun. Ziegler was shown a photograph of Augusta Nack.

That’s her, she said.

THORN READ THE NEWSPAPERS that Howe sent him, played pinochle, and tried to lose himself in a volume of Emerson’s essays left in the jail. He was not feeling very high-minded, though: For days the accused barber had been left unshaven, much to his professional disgust. When his jailers finally deigned to break out his shaving cup, the undersheriff and a barber showed up at Thorn’s cell with manacles.

“What are you going to do with those things?” the prisoner asked.

“Just put them on, that’s all,” the undersheriff replied.

“I never put handcuffs on a customer when I shaved him,” Thorn shot back.

“Look here, Martin,” his jailer said, pulling Thorn’s arms behind the chair back and slapping the cuffs shut, “we are going to run no chances.”

Thorn fumed as he was shaved—they kept missing the stubble over his lip. It only took a look in the mirror after he was unshackled to see why. DA Youngs had directed the jail to bring back Thorn’s mustache for the trial—to grow it in, inexorably, against his will—so that soon he would look precisely like the man their witnesses had seen entering the Woodside cottage.

And yet his days were not without some strange rewards. As Thorn sulked over his treatment at the jail, a Howe associate led a short impresario and a willowy actress through the heavy clanging door to the Flats, up to the bars of Martin’s cell. Florenz Ziegfeld, Broadway’s showgirl master, was not particularly used to visiting jails. But even stranger was the presence of his star talent and personal mistress, newly acquired from the Folies of Paris—Miss Anna Held, whose famed dark eyes stared out from promotional posters all over town.

Thorn greeted Howe’s assistant warmly, while eyeing the actress with caution. He’d seen her soak up publicity by sitting in on some of the trial, but she was strangely out of place here on Murderers Row. Still, the sympathy of a famous starlet was not a bad thing for an accused man to have, especially with World reporters watching nearby.

What do you think of Mrs. Nack’s confession? she asked breathlessly.

“She lies!” He shrugged. “All lies.”

Anna watched as Martin Thorn sat in his cell, nuzzling the stray dog he’d adopted; a brindle-and-black bulldog-pug mix, it had recently wandered into the jail and unaccountably attached itself to him, refusing to leaving his side. Thorn cheekily dubbed it “Bill Baker,” after the jailer who’d shackled him. The mutt, he mused aloud, was his only real friend anymore—since Mrs. Nack certainly wasn’t.

“Would you have died for her?” the actress asked.

“Yes, I would,” he replied evenly. “But she has killed my faith in all women. She killed Guldensuppe herself. I have loved that woman, and she has ruined me.”

Miss Anna Held leaned dramatically against the cell door; she felt so dreadfully sorry for him. New York World artists frantically sketched her mooning through the cold bars of the prison cell.

“Were you … happy with her?” She lowered her voice.

“Yes,” he paused. “I was, once.”

The World artist tore off his sheet; it was a minor publicity coup for Howe and a fine morning front-pager, with the glamorous starlet providing an appropriately dramatic quote to accompany it: “Thorn is a man of impulse, a man of passionate temper,” she explained to readers, “and such men are but easy prey in the hands of women they love.” It was good copy, and—taking a page from the Journal’s favorite strategy for humiliating them—World editors even put together an accompanying montage of competitor’s pages, to show how the World had been the first to discover that Mrs. Nack was about to make her treacherous confession on the stand.

But the World had already blown the scoop.

Blurted out in Thorn’s conversation with Held were four startling words about Mrs. Nack—“She killed Guldensuppe herself”—his first public acknowledgment that there was a murder, and that it was of Guldensuppe. Not one of Pulitzer’s editors recognized its importance, but Hearst’s men did. As the World fussed over its showgirl-in-prison illustrations for the next morning, the Evening Journal trumped them with a late-edition headline: THORN CONFESSES HIS PART IN THE MURDER.

The World just couldn’t get it quite right. It still managed innovations, such as running women’s fashion plates with actual photographed faces superimposed on the pen-and-ink dress drawings; the result looked comical, but reproducing an entire photo in the newspaper was quite difficult. Still, it hinted at the future. Soon all nineteenth-century news would be distinguishable from that of the looming twentieth century at a glance: The old was monochromatic and engraved, the new, color and photographic. And while Hearst hadn’t sprung his attack with photography yet, he was busy opening up a widening lead on color printing. Pulitzer anxiously telegraphed from Maine about the headlines he was seeing in Hearst’s paper: not about Nack and Thorn, but about the Journal itself—or, as he called it in a coded cablegram, “Geranium”:

It was. Hearst had ordered up more color presses, and his Evening Journal was punishing other competitors so badly that for one precarious night, until it got its finances in order, the Evening Telegram ceased publication altogether. The New York Times, itself barely recovered from bankruptcy, was trying to beat back at the tide of yellow journalism by running a pointed new motto on its front page: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” But other papers were inexorably drifting with Hearst’s powerful current. On the same day that the Evening Journal boasted such edifying stories as COCAINE PHANTOMS HAUNT HIM and HYPNOTISM NEARLY KILLS, one could also find all these headlines on a single page of the more respectable New York Herald:

New York papers now ran far more column inches on crime and accidents than other cities did, and the Journal ran so much “bleed” copy in combination with women’s-interest stories and comics that business, labor, and religion were nearly crowded out altogether.

Hearst knew his readers, and he knew what they liked.

“The two stories of Nack and Thorn have reached an equilibrium of contradiction,” he announced to readers in a column. The real question, his paper now asked, was Which one’s more guilty? They tallied some 1,147 letters from readers: 713 found Augusta Nack the guiltier party, 329 blamed both equally, and just 105 laid the blame on Thorn.

“He is no more guilty of the murder of Guldensuppe than a babe,” a hypnotist wrote in. “Mrs. Nack forced him to do it by the power she exerted over him.” Another reader begged to differ, offering up the novel theory that Thorn and Guldensuppe were the real conspirators: “It was a plot of Guldensuppe and Thorn to convict Mrs. Nack of murder,” he wrote. “Guldensuppe got out of the way, and Thorn cut up a body that he palmed off on Mrs. Nack as Guldensuppe’s.” Nine-year-old Helen Weiss of Princeton, on the other hand, was ready to wholeheartedly condemn Nack and Thorn alike: “I think they are both guilty.”

But an even more telling sign was tucked away in the latest ad for the Eden Musée waxworks, where the scene of Thorn cutting up Guldensuppe was no longer the main attraction. It had been replaced by a slightly different pair of deadly combatants: Augusta Nack and Martin Thorn.

ON SUNDAY MORNING BEFORE DAWN, newsboys hauled off fat bundles of the Journal. They were going to be sure sellers. The paper had produced an alarming scenario headlined THE INVASION OF NEW YORK, complete with “a thrilling description by an expert of what would happen with the Spanish Fleet in New York Harbor.” But even that took a backseat to what they’d used to headline the entire front page: THE STORY OF MY LIFE—BY AUGUSTA NACK. Along with a sober-looking portrait of Mrs. Nack taking pen to paper in her prison cell, Hearst’s front page was given over to her melancholy and remorseful account of life before she became New York’s most notorious woman, back when she was still young Augusta Pusat. “I was born in the little village of Oskarweischen, in Posen, Germany,” she wrote, remembering the poverty of her family there. “When I was a girl I used to tend the geese and drive them down to the water in the morning.… In Germany idleness is considered not the right thing for either girls or women, and when I was tending my geese and looking after the kettles to make sure that they did not boil over, I made my lace.”

After moving to the United States, she was soon earning more money than the rest of her family in the old country—“I had everything—and they had nothing,” she marveled—but after she begged her mother to save the family’s prayers for their own needs, she received a stern response. “My daughter,” the elder Mrs. Pusat wrote back, “you don’t know. Everything you have may be taken from you in a twinkling of an eye.”

Mrs. Nack often thought upon that letter.

Her confession in the case, she told Journal readers, was inspired by the visits of the Reverend Robert Miles to her cell. At first she’d spurned him and his Bible, but then one day the minister had brought his four-year-old son, little Parker Miles, and as he prattled on and jumped up into her lap, asking her to tell him a story, her steely reserve cracked. She broke down in sobs and confessed to the loving God of Reverend Miles. The Journal had a fine portrait of the clergyman too, and of his angelic son on Mrs. Nack’s lap; it was a heartwarming story for a Sunday paper, and it would fly off the stands.

But one person wasn’t buying her story yet: the DA.

As the newsboys fanned out into the still-darkened streets of the city, Augusta Nack was quietly let out of her cell and joined the district attorney, Detective Sullivan, and Captain Methven in a waiting carriage outside the Queens County Jail. It was a private hire, with the passenger veiled so that nobody on the street could spot her. She arranged a shawl around herself in the bitter predawn air, and they headed up Jackson Avenue.

“Can you point out the place?” Youngs asked her again.

“Yes,” she promised.

“If you do,” he said significantly, “then we shall be prepared to believe what you say.”

Youngs eyed her carefully as they made their way along the muddy avenue. His star witness had already been terribly undermined on the stand—it wasn’t for nothing that William Howe was considered the best trial lawyer in the city. Youngs still hadn’t offered her a plea deal, and before he did, he wanted more from Mrs. Nack, some solid evidence that Howe wouldn’t be able to bully and balderdash his way out of.

Woodside, announced their driver.

The trio of lawmen stepped out of the carriage, and as the sun rose they watched Mrs. Nack wander aimlessly in the garden of the Woodside cottage—hesitating here, stopping there. She hadn’t been back in five months, since just after the murder, and the gardens that had been lush in that dangerous time were now barren and frosted.

Well? Youngs demanded.

She couldn’t remember … but … perhaps she could remember. Yes, what they were looking for was surely in an entirely different place.

Youngs snorted in disgust and sat heavily back in the carriage. He kept a peeved silence as they made their way through Flushing toward College Point, past a series of scrubby, empty lots.

“That’s the place!” yelled Mrs. Nack.

The carriage stopped by a crumbling stone wall on a vacant lot; it was an African American neighborhood, and the party’s presence was becoming uncomfortably conspicuous to passersby. The veiled prisoner pottered in the weeds a bit—Was it here? Perhaps it was there?—until the DA finally lost all patience. The carriage promptly left with a jolt, hauling the humiliated prisoner back to Queens County Jail.

“Did you find the saw?” Detective Sullivan was asked as he returned from the jaunt.

“No,” he snapped. “We didn’t.”

The rest of Augusta Nack’s story wasn’t holding up much better. Within hours after she and Manny Friend paraded her newfound piety to the papers, a familiar figure turned up at the World’s editorial offices: Herman Nack. The bakery driver was upset—deeply upset. He’d already lost his job at the Astoria Model Bakery from the bad publicity, couldn’t sleep at night from the worry it had caused. He appeared, one reporter remarked, like nothing so much as a sleepwalker.

“I can only think of her,” he sighed.

With the Journal getting Augusta’s childhood, the World ventured into Herman’s.

“Where did you first meet Mrs. Nack?” the paper asked.

“In Kiel, in Germany. She was a servant girl then. The family she worked for was a very fine family. I was working in a pottery. I loved her, and that’s all.” He paused, then admitted thoughtfully: “By and by Guldensuppe, he loved her. He was not a bad man either. I always liked him, but he loved her—that was the matter with him.”

“What do you think of the strange course the trial has taken?”

“What do I think about it?” he mused, and fell silent. “I think so much that I do not know what to think. It is with me think, think, all the time. Maybe she killed that fellow, maybe Thorn did. I do not know. If she did, I hope they will”—he stumbled over the language, and then over the emotion—“how do you call it? Put her in the chair of electricity.”

He was growing animated. There was something else, he said, that had truly made him upset: her confession.

“I am sure of one thing: it was not from religion or fear of God that she tells about the death of Guldensuppe. She was not religious. She was not good. Sometimes she used to go with one of her customers to church—but when she comes home she laughs at such things.” Herman Nack’s expression was becoming anguished. “I want to tell you, sir, that woman will not go to heaven. She is bad—she is bad.”

And a bad liar as well, by the look of it. The newspapers gloated after word of her failed carriage trip leaked out. But two days later, as laborers worked with scythes to clear a salt-hay field in College Point, a call came in to the DA’s office. Just by the spot Mrs. Nack had pointed out, they’d discovered a rusting eighteen-inch surgeon’s saw—a Richardson & Sons model for slicing through bone. It was found jammed blade first into the ground, as if someone had tried to murder the dirt itself.