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MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN












Inspector Byrnes (left) looks on while a rogue is "mugged" for the
Rogues Gallery in the good old days of "The Forty Immortals."




MEMO IR


S


O F


A MURDER MAN
BY ARTHUR A. CAREY
LATE DEPUTY INSPECTOR IN CHARGE OF THE HOMICIDE
BUREAU, NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT
IN COLLABORATION WITH HOWARD MCLELLAN


DOUBLEDAY, DORAN


AND COMPANY, INC.


GARDEN CITY


NEW YORK 1930




COPYRIGHT, 1930
BY ARTHUR A. CARRY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED INI THE UNITED STATES AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE DRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
FIEST EDITION




TO MY FEARLESS, LOYAL ASSOCIATES
AND OTHER GOOD POLICEMEN,
EVERYWHERE




0
41




CONTENTS
I  Small Boy at the Man Hunt                 I
II  Picture of a Thief                       16
III  In "The Immortal's" Pictureland          28
IV   My First Murder Picture                  37
V   Little Murder Jobs in Between            45
VI   The Man in the Straw Hat                 55
VII   The Poison Cycle Resumes                 69
VIII   The Poison Cycle Spins Giddily           80
IX   Fin de Sicle                             96
X   Murder While You Wait                   III
XI   The Murder Clinic Gets a Start          123
XII   The Way Gangs Go                        141
XIII   Dabblers in Crime Analysis              156
XIV   Bushwhackers and Rippers                167
XV   A Horseshoer Joins the Clinic           177
XVI    Glamorous Background                   189
XVII   Magnetic Butterflies                    209
I    XVIII   The Man with Five Hundred Names         223
XIX      Ideal Murder Inquiry                   238




Vill                CO0NT E NT S
CUATrMR?AGG
XX    Faulty Pictures by Feminine Hinds        2-54
XXI    Bunglers' Bundles                        271
XXII    Murder by Invitation                     2,86
XXIII    A Philosophy of Murder:297
XXIV    Murder as a Spectacle                     315




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


Inspector Byrnes (left) looks on while a rogue is
"mugged" for the Rogues Gallery in the good old
days of "The Forty Immortals"       Frontispiece
FACING PAO
The bearded policeman of Carey's boyhood        4
High Constable Jacob Hays, the first famous American detective                                12
How the finest looked in Carey's days on post  16
No. 8 above shows the key nippers used by McLaughlin, the hotel burglar                       20
Exhibits in Byrnes's Pictureland               28
Examining a crook in Byrnes's crime museum     32
Pen and ink sketch made during trial of Martin
Thorn for murder of William Guldensuppe
(Thorn is looking over shoulder of his attorney
at photographs of the dismembered body of his
victim)                                      48
The doctored Bromo Seltzer bottle and the silver
holder in the Adams poisoning case           74
The fake Cornish letter on robin's-egg-blue note
paper with inter-clasped crescents which Carey
found in his long search through patent medicine
letter files                                 84




X         LIST O F ILLUSTRATIONS
PACING PAGE
Writing on the wrapper in which Cornish received
the poisonous bromo seltzer                88
Admitted handwriting of Roland Molineux which he
penned at the dictation of handwriting expert  88




INTRODUCTION


DEPUTY INSPECTOR ARTHUR A. CAREY was retired from
the New York Police Department on December 21, 1928,
ending on this day a police career of thirty-nine years
and nine months.
Thirty-three years of this career were spent, almost
exclusively, upon the investigation of suspicious deaths
in the country's largest and richest city, whose police
department numbers nearly eighteen thousand men and
is maintained at an annual cost of more than forty-five
million dollars.
For almost a quarter of a century he was chief of the
Homicide Bureau, an innovation in murder inquiry of
which he was the author. This bureau has been referred
to in more recent years as a Murder Clinic. Its object is
not only to detect murder and apprehend the slayer but
to control murder through a clinical study of homicide.
Probably no man living has had more to do with murder and its authors than Inspector Carey. The number
of homicides which engaged his attention may be measured




Xl*
Ill


INTRODUCTION


in a general way by the expression of his colleagues at
headquarters that "Carey's murder cases are somewhere
in the thousands." Definite figures are not available, for
in the course of thirty-three years every death in the city
to which suspicion might attach, and very often prove
unfounded, was passed on to him as a matter of official
routine. If the truth were ascertainable it probably would
reveal that the total number of homicides which had his
personal attention, either as an investigator or a director
of operations, is in excess of ten thousand. As a record
for murder inquiry by one man this figure probably
stands alone.
From this fact the inference has been drawn by observers of the inspector's work and his career, that he is
the world's foremost police expert on murder. This statement need not rest upon the premise that the great number
of cases he handled entitles him to special distinction.
One may examine into the efectiveness of his work as
chief of the bureau and determine the bearing it has upon
control of murder.
In this connection the facts are these: with the exception of Los Angeles, New York City has the lowest homicide rate of any large city in the United States, in spite of
its wealth, population, and the cosmopolitan texture of its
masses. It offers to the criminally minded of all types
abundant temptation to kill and steal, while its geographical situation and facility of travel, and its congested
masses, provide the opportunity and means of escape
which the criminaf always seeks. The lowering of the city's




INTRODUCTION


X111


homicide rate began to make itself apparent with the
establishment of the inspector's Homicide Bureau.
It is interesting to note by way of a commentary on murder control that Inspector Carey and his staf had not
been out of office two months when the chief prosecuting
officer of New York County announced with some alarm
that there had been more homicide cases in those two
months than.during any two months in the history of the
prosecutor's bureau, whose duty it is to present to courts
and juries homicide evidence gathered by the police.
Of the inspector's personality, which seems vital in a
narrative having to do with detectives, a thumbnail sketch,
being brief as well as modest, like the man, appears best
to suit the occasion.
Though sixty-three, he is easily taken for a man on the
tender side of fifty. He is of average height and build,
quick in movement and restless. He might be taken for
a man in any walk of life, and this, of course, is the unfailing requisite of the successful man of his calling who must
be all things to all men, and at the same time remain
inconspicuous. His hair, while thin, has not grayed, which
disposes of the presumption that a man long engaged in
unraveling the tangled skeins of the phenomenon known
as murder has an inordinately worrisome job. His face
too is boyishly plump and almost unlined. His hands are
thin and soft, his fingers taper, which invites the surmise
that he has artistic ability. Which he has, as one perceives
in his memoirs that his job has been painti;Ig one picture
after another-murder pictures.




xiv


INTRODUCTION


His eyes are blue and constantly in motion. They seldom
betray eager interest, but, then again, this is the mark
of the long-trained detective, never to appear too anxious
for information-an emotion which if expressed by a
crime ferret is likely to inspire fear, surprise, or reticence
in the person from whom the investigator seeks hidden
and often damaging information. A most noticeable quirk
in his deportment is that he never turns his back in the
presence of someone about whom he knows little. This
may be charged to caution.
And he bears the inevitable "tag," that mannerism with
which the inventors of the fictional sleuths invest their
manhunters. Inspector Carey is possessed of two voices.
Now his speech is soft and sympathetic, almost soothing,
but in the twinkling of an eye it shifts, becomes shrill and
demanding, penetrating. He is hardly aware of the change.
It is not a trick but habit, a part of a technique, acquired
instinctively through the countless hours of verbal combat with murderers with whom it has been his practice to
sit and talk things over.
This duality of voice is paralleled by another uncanny
"tag." When his voice is soft and soothing his face is
alight with a pleasant smile. Suddenly a hand moves
quickly to his forehead, covers it, then comes slowly down
across his face. With this movement the smile vanishes.
His features become stern and unyieldingly serious. And
when he sits his audience is aware that he does so solidly
and intends to remain sitting until the business in hand is
finished to his satisfaction. These mannerisms, of which




INTRODUCTION


XV


he is quite unconscious, have been acquired in the process
of searching the consciences of his suspect subjects.
Outside, on the man hunt in the field, he betrays another
characteristic mark. He comes, for the first time, upon
the scene where murder has been done. He looks about
with an all-inclusive glance at the body of the victim, the
setting, and invariably in a quiet voice remarks: "Well,
this is the picture I get."
Whereupon his deductive faculties, working upon patterns which years with murder have planted in his memory,
build up the picture of what probably happened. With
uncommon, uncanny precision he almost always gets the
right picture the first time, and with quite reasonable
frequency gets his man.
At home he has his family, his dog, and his pipe and
bobks on poisons, weapons, and wounds. But he is most
at ease on the murder hunt, and when they ceased officially
for him he began to live his cases over again.
Hence this book.
HOWARD MCLELLAN.
New York City,
January I, 1930.




I




MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN








CHAPTER I


SMALL BOY AT THE MAN           HUNT
A   LTHOUGH present at the most transcending event in
my life, my testimony about it is based wholly upon information, belief, and hearsay. It took place in July, 1865.
It was a warm day, although, I am informed, cool
ocean breezes swept in through the open windows of a
summer cottage where Mr. and Mrs. Henry C. Carey,
along with other New York City folks, were sojourning
temporarily to escape the sweltering heat of the big city.
In the front room of this cottage, not far from the ocean
beach on Staten Island, was a cradle. In this had just been
placed an infant whose face, I am told, was round as
the moon's.
A tall, well-set man came into the room, looked into
the cradle, and, according to those who stood by eagerly
watching him, said:
"He's a strapping youngster. Set up like a policeman.
I think he'll make one."
The prophet was my father, Henry Carey, and the
moon-faced infant he was looking at for the first time,
and whose destiny he was mapping, was his son, author
of these memoirs. Family tradition always has insisted
that I was born a policeman. To prove this the record.
of my father was cited to me. He had been a policeman 1
i




2   MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


on the New York force and left it to go into business. He
did well in business, but never could get away from the
call of the police. He quit business and rejoined the force
a short time after I was born. He never left the force
after that.
My older sister seems to have watched the instinct to
be a policeman grow within me. She has told me that
almost as soon as I had on my first short pants, made of
navy blue cloth like my father's uniform, I used to stand
in front of our home in lower Manhattan swinging a
policeman's club, reduced size. I have, of course, no recollection of this.
Eventually my father became a sergeant on the force
and he passed on long before I was being referred to in the
public prints as a murder man. My mother was an Acker
descended from early Dutch settlers who came to Manhattan in the Seventeenth Century.
There are several possible deductions as to why my
father picked me out to be a policeman. He was born in
Ireland and came to the land of promise while he was
a small boy. At that time nearly all Irish fathers wanted
their boys to be policemen, firemen, or politicians. None
of my father's ancestors had been policemen. But his male
descendants of the second and third generations have
been policemen, and two are now. I joined the force in
I889 and left it on December 21, 1928. Two of my sons
are now members of the same force. One is a detective.
Certainly the New York Police Department did well by
father Carey and his chickens. For that matter, there
are many men now on the force who can trace back to
grandfathers and fathers who preceded them in the same
line of service.
My own preferred deduction is that the Irishmen who
arrived in America in earlier days knew where and how
to butter their bread and wanted a chance to try their
hand at governing, having had at that time little oppor



SMALL BOY AT THE MAN H UNT


3


tunity in the old country to test their talents in that direction. They were the governed rather than governors.
Here in America the opportunity opened up to them,
starting with police duty. They were equipped by nature,
too, for the job. The Irish are not great worriers and they
were possessed of that smile which often takes the sting
out of tight, temper-trying situations.
And the American police in those early days played
a much more important part in governing than they do
now. They ran the street-cleaning operation, fed and
lodged the poor, kept down criminals, and conducted the
elections. And they wore beards'like Lincoln's, which
seemed then to be the proper insignia of the governing
class.
Police pay wasn't high but it was certain to be forth%
coming, and a man's job, if he kept away from snags, was
good for a lifetime. So all round it looked good to the
Irish. Nearly half of the police captains on duty in my
father's time were born in Ireland. The rank and file
were Irish, too. You couldn't walk two city blocks without running into a bluecoat named O'Brien, Sullivan,
Byrnes, O'Reilly, Murphy, or McDermott.
Gaelic influence ran strong in police affairs. I recall
hearing a tale about this when I was a boy. In 844 Mayor
Harper of New York City went to England. He was
much impressed by what he saw of the London police.
He brought back a star-shaped copper badge such as the
English bobbies wore and installed it as the official insignia of the New York force. A handful of Irish patrolmen,
sporting the new badges, walked proudly into the Old
Bowery Theatre. A tough spotted the new badges and
yelled, "Take a look at the liveried English lackeys, the
coppers." A riot ensued. It was not fomented by the slang
term "copper," which came into use in this country for
the first time at this riot (and which no policeman cares




4      MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
to hear himself called), but rather because they had been
dubbed English lackeys.
So I say that deep down my father's desire to make
me a policeman was ruled by the Irish blood in his veins,
even when I lay in my cradle. I have never regretted the
choice he made for me and have been glad more than once
that he didn't choose to make me a politician.
I went along policeward without knowing as a boy, or
caring to know, why. Just what influences worked upon
me as I grew I can't now recall. The days of my early
youth are obscured by the ramifications of some uncounted
thousands of homicide cases which occupied my mind
during the span of nearly forty years I was on the force.
It's not an easy matter now to look into life's mirror and
recall what kind of a boy I was when the glass is alive
with the faces of men and women upon whom it was my
duty to fasten murders, and the grinning faces of others,
some still alive, who I am positive were murderers but
who beat the law. It's an uncanny pattern to look upon
at the age of sixty-three.
Boyhood seems to have flown past me like a phantom.
At seven there was no doubt that I was on my way. At
about that age my father toted me with him to the
Chambers Street station house where he was on duty.
It stood in the Third Precinct, an old red brick building.
It was in the center of what was then one of the busiest
sections of Manhattan Island. New York City's business
and residential district had not reached Forty-second
Street on the north. In the Third were many hotels and
retail shops and docks along the Hudson River where
wharf rats and pirates had their playground. To the east
several blocks was the squat, gray courthouse that Boss
Bill Tweed built and went to jail for building.
My father's custom was to let me have the run of the
station house while he was on duty at the desk. One of
the first impressions which I remember was the assort



Drilling a Squad of Policemen.
The bearded policemen of Carey's boyhood.








SMALL BOY AT THE MAN HUNT


ment of beards I saw in the station house. Nearly every
policeman wore one, and crooks that were brought in were
adorned likewise. Lincoln undoubtedly set the style.
Beards lasted with policemen until Grant's time, and when
the John L. Sullivan type of walrus mustache came along
police beards came off, but mustaches remained and flourished. It was possible for even a small boy to judge the
status of a policeman by the beard he wore. The rank and
file wore long chin whiskers while the higher-ups sported
side-whiskers, or Lord Dundrearies as they were called.
Among the eighteen thousand men on the New York
force to-day not a beard will be found and scarcely a
mustache. When they disappeared quite a few years back
nimble-witted bunco men turned many a trick selling
to gullible but ambitious barbers the exclusive franchise
to shave the members of the force. Police beards are mentioned not alone because they were a first impression with
me but also to show that the policeman is quite a stylist.
I don't doubt that if President Hoover were to appear
with a Van Dyck police beards too would reappear. Or
if professional crooks began again to conceal cunning
grins under beards, the police, at least detectives, probably
would follow suit upon the theory that a hunter in the
woods should not dress like a volunteer fireman on summer parade.
If there was ferocity hidden under the beards of the
Chambers Street men it never fell to my lot to see it. They
liked children. It was part of their duty to care for a share
of the seven-thousand-odd youngsters who were lost each
year in the city and also to look after the precinct's quota
of some one hundred thousand -homeless and penniless
persons who were quartered during each year in the city's
station houses. The old-time policemen got a closer view
of life's seamy side than do their modern successors. Or
perhaps in this prosperous day there isn't such a seamy
side to American life.




6      MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
Sometimes I mingled with the lost children, but most
often the basement in the old brick house held my attention. There was a sitting room in this basement, in the
center of which was a long, low oak table. Around this
sat tall, square-shouldered men in civilian clothes. These
were the precinct detectives and patrolmen assigned to
plain-clothes duty. They stood aloof and apart from uniformed men. They were very mysterious to me at first.
But after a while I was sitting on their knees, and from
this point of vantage I heard and saw something of the
man hunt.
I got to comprehend more of what these men did by
what I saw upstairs at the sergeant's desk. I can't recall
all that went on here, but I have a recollection of having
seen my fill of action. To this desk the men in plain clothes
brought their prisoners. While the captives stood at the
desk the detectives ran their hands through the pockets
and clothing of their prisoners and out upon the high desk
tumbled rings and watches, money, nippers, keys, billies,
jimmies, gold bricks, and the other paraphernalia of the
thief. There were seldom any guns taken, and when there
was the face of the sergeant came alive. A man with a
gun was a good capture. Thieves of the old days were not
gun carriers. I suppose I remember the tools and occasional guns because of a boy's instinctive interest in them.
Prisoners were taken from the desk to a corner. I have
quite a vivid recollection of gruff police voices hurling
questions at the thieves. Sometimes the captives lunged
at the detectives or struggled to get away. Guns flashed,
clubs whacked, and men fell. Action and conflict, and
I saw most of it as a fascinated onlooker.
It was a world which was closed to other boys. No
matter where he is put a boy will find his heroes. I was
now about nine or ten. I am quite sure that by this time
I had given up carrying the miniature policeman's club, for
there was nothing fascinating in that after I had watched




SMALL BOY AT THE MAN HUNT


7


these plain-clothes men. There was the strangest fascination in watching them search their prisoners; in the way
they seemed to know just where to put their hands to find
the thieves' gear and of flashing things at them that fairly
took the prisoners off their feet. They seemed to be privileged above all men; to be permitted to wander about in
ordinary clothes with the magic power to haul men in.
Being accorded the privileges of a mascot, I listened
to their tales, which they told with many gestures and
in excited voices. They used a language all their own.
Honest men were "citizens" in their vocabulary. Every
wrongdoer was a thief. An arrest was a "collar"; a pickpocket a "dip"; a stolen purse a "leather." A watch was
a "round piece of white or yellow metal." This made the
world they moved in all the more mysterious, fascinating,
to me.
They talked glibly of professional thieves, calling them
by their pet names. They were picturesque names such as
would stick to a boy's tongue. There were Tim Oats;
Marm Mandelbaum, notorious woman fence; Shang
Draper, gambler and thief; Sheenie Mike Kurtz; the
Hopes, father and sons who never have been equaled as
bank robbers; Funeral Wells, who stole purses while
posing as a mourner; Deafy Hunt, expert burglar though
deaf; Grand Central Pete, who sold gold bricks to farmers arriving at railroad depots; Hungry Joe, Pretty Jimmie, and Jersey Jimmie, the butcher cart thieves; Banjo
Pete Emerson; Paper Collar Joe; Eleck the Milkman,
and scores of others. Many of them lived on to meet me
face to face in a professional capacity years later.
And these detectives were forever going to or coming
from the Burnt Rag, Satan's Circus, Hell's Kitchen,
Cockran's Roost, McGuirk's Suicide Hall, the Bucket of
Blood, Billy McGlory's Place, the Slide, and other notorious rendezvous where a man was supposed to take his




8      MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
life in his hands when he entered. It gave these men a
glamor which uniformed men never had.
Of murder cases I saw little but heard a lot. Precinct
detectives spoke of their cases, and occasionally a veteran
dropped in to tell of murders in his time which always
eclipsed those of a later day. Now and then a still more
glamorous figure stepped in to the station house, a
Central Office man, one of twenty great men stationed
at headquarters in an old gray building at No. 300 Mulberry Street, a spot often woven into stage melodramas
and mystery novels.
Central Office and its men were so widely exploited on
the stage that for years audiences merely had to hear
Spring 3100 mentioned and without another clue recognized it as the telephone number of Central Office.
New York City was reputed in my boyhood to be rashly
wicked and untamable. Yet the homicide record then was
about sixty a year, and few of them were like the mysteries
of later years. There was no such person as a murder
expert in the Central Office and hardly need for one.
Central Office men handled anything their chief sent them
out on and they were paid a patrolman's wage. Glory
made up the difference. Their merit was determined in an
odd way. When a detective was spoken of as having "375
years" it meant that he had put away criminals for sentences totaling that amount of time and he was considered
pretty good.
When a man solved a murder or caught a slayer there
was talk, talk not only about his exploit but about all the
big murders and detectives of bygone days. Some of the
older murders had been woven into elaborate legends, a
rich dish to set before a youth who was quite sure that
destiny was cutting him out for a police career. I listened
eagerly when after school I hurried down to Chambers
Street to look and listen.
Boys will be born by the sea and go down in ships.




SMALL BOY AT THE MAN HUNT


9


Other boys will see the first light of day in the home of
a policeman and go the way of his father without knowing
the whys and wherefores, lured on in his youth by the
romance spun on the tongues of his heroes. There was
certainly a lure for me in the tales the veterans told about
High Constable Jacob Hays. Hays had been dead many
years when I was a boy, but in his time he was the oneman wonder in the police world.
High Constable Hays was the first to install a detective
system in the New York Police Department. In I836 he
had a law passed creating the post of roundsman, and
192 men were appointed to the Watch Department-the
forerunner of the New York force. He assigned twelve
to plain-clothes work. They worked in pairs and, besides
keeping their eyes peeled for crooks and watching each
other, saw to it that uniformed men were not amiss
in their duties. Their pay was twelve shillings. The entire
Watch cost the city $262,ooo a year or about one dollar
per citizen. The Watch consisted of 453 men.
At that time I knew nothing about Vidocq, the famous
French detective, but he was contemporaneous with Hays.
Vidocq organized his Brigade de Suirete in I817, but before that Hays was building a reputation in New York
City as a single-handed crime ferret. The story-tellers in
Chambers Street station house called the high constable
a born detective who worked by instinct. He differed from
Vidocq in many ways, chief of which was the fact that
Vidocq before he became a police agent was a criminal,
while Hays, a strict and devout Presbyterian, knew all
about crooks but never had been one himself.
His fame reached all parts of the world. Twenty years
after his death letters reached New York from abroad
addressed to him as the head of the Department and inviting him to visit Europe to work out unsolved crimes. He
slept only six hours out of each twenty-four and made his
men do likewise. He monopolized the mystery solving




10  MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


and went about unarmed. He carried only a light locust
staff with which he knocked off crooks' hats. When they
bent to recover them the high constable gave them a push
and they fell sprawling upon the sidewalk. There they
remained until Hays had given them a brief but edifying
lecture on the better life.
The details of one of Hays's great murder exploits,
relayed to me by a veteran, were thrilling enough. In I820
the captain of a sailing vessel was found slain in Coenties
Alley on the water front. He had been shot in the temple.
Hays arrested one Johnson, keeper of a sailors' hotel, for
the murder. The suspect was coming piously out of Trinity Church when Hays seized him.
At that moment the victim's body lay in the rotunda in
City Hall Park, a few blocks away. Hays marched his
man to the rotunda and stood him in a darkened room
beside a table covered with a sheet. Suddenly the window
curtains went up and the sheet was pulled from the table,
revealing the body of the slain captain.
"Look, my good man," Hays whispered into Johnson's
ear. "Look upon the body. Have you ever seen that man
before?"
"Yes " cried Johnson. "I murdered him."
Johnson was convicted, but upon the gallows recanted
a confession he had made to Hays. Presently he spotted
the high constable moving in the crowd. As the hangman
coiled his noose about the murderer's neck Johnson
shouted, "I can't lie while that man Hays's eyes are on me."
This was the first actual instance I had heard about
of a detective using this method to bring about a confession of guilt. Years later I was to try it myself when our
Murder Clinic was established. It met with varying degrees of success. Murderers since Hays's time had hardened. The ghastliness once associated with violent death
by murder seems to have been greatly minimized. Slayers
nowadays seldom shudder and confess at sight of their




SMALL BOY AT THE MAN HUNT


II


victims' bodies. Perhaps the great war cheapened human;
life, or the advent of the motor car, with increasing fatali-'
ties on public streets, has made death a much too common
sight to be shuddered at. Then too in High Constable
Hays's time the gibbet stood but a block from the common jail, and only a few weeks instead of years stood
between murderer and his penalty. Murderers could be
made to quail at sight of their victims' bodies when out
the window they could also see a gallows.
Death, though I have seen it too many times to count,
though I have sent a good many murderers to their doom,
remains to me a horrible sight. I have never seen a murderer executed and never shall. Such experience in a murder man's career is unnecessary. I don't know what my
reaction would be if I were to witness an execution. I don't
care to know. One thing I am certain of-capital punishment is the only effective deterrent yet devised by society.
If we have more murders to-day it is because an abnormally large number of criminals who deserve it don't get the
extreme penalty. This makes punishment not a certainty
but a gamble, and the greatest gamblers in the world are
murderers. I don't believe I'm calloused or hard hearted.
It is merely because I have seen so much of what is so easily
forgotten, the victims of murderers, not only those slain
and their families, but those other victims, the murderer's
families.
The most impressive murder scene I ever looked upon
was not an actuality but a picture. I don't recall how old
I was, but I was old enough to be impressed. It was the
first I had ever seen. It was a wash drawing from the brush
of a newspaper artist. It was labeled "The Unsolved
Murder." It depicted in graphic detail a bedchamber in
a pretentious home and upon the floor in night attire was
the body of a man. The room was in disorder. I was looking at it when a veteran precinct detective saw me.
"Was this a real murder?" I asked.




12     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
"Don't you know, my lad, what that is?" he said in
surprise. "That was the biggest murder case this town
ever had. The Nathan case. I worked on it."
I had heard about the Nathan case, but I was to hear
more from one who had been there.
"That's a perfect picture of the scene," the detective
went on. "Only one thing wrong about it. You see the
uniformed patrolman standing at the bedroom door with
his nightstick?"
I studied the picture.
"Well it wasn't a patrolman's job," he said quite pompously. "Murder is a detective's job."
He told me the story of the Nathan case. Benjamin
Nathan, a rich merchant, had been beaten to death and
killed in his bedroom. His valuables were missing. Chief
of Detectives James J. Kelso arrived upon the scene with
his assistants. He saw the bloody imprint of a man's hand
upon the casing of the door in the room.
"This," said Kelso, according to the legend, "is the
crime of a gentleman," and he pointed to the imprint.
"Long, thin, ladylike fingers. A dude killer."
The hand imprint showed plainly in the picture.
That, however, was as near as they ever got to the
murderer. A reward of forty-seven thousand dollars was
offered for his capture. The detective bureau split into
factions, each having its pet theory. Superintendent of
Police John Jourdan is reputed to have died of broken
heart mourning his inability to solve the crime.
It was the sensation of the age. Years later, when I
was captain of the Homicide Squad, a letter reached me
purporting to solve the old crime. It developed that the
writer, who had lived during the Nathan case, had become demented trying to unravel the puzzle.
Suspicions rested upon the dissolute son of the dead
merchant. A noted physician of the day offered to put
the son under an anesthetic and in this way unconsciously




High Constable Jacob Hays, the first
famous American detective.
-r0








SMALL BOY AT THE MAN HUNT


I3


draw from him a confession. Public opinion was against
this proposal. It was never tried. To-day the modern
fingerprinting expert would have determined one thing
at least: whether the bloody imprint was that of the hand
of the son who died without having the suspicion against
him lifted or whether it was the hand of someone else.
The detective held me enthralled. There was a pause
as he finished his story. Then he went on:
"Now, if you've got the detective bee in your bonnet
take a good long look at that picture. In this game everything is pictures, pictures, pictures."
Long after he left me I was still looking at the picture
unaware that destiny was cutting me out then to spend
the rest of my life looking at pictures, real pictures of
murder and its authors, and, from these pictures, develop
whatever special talent I may have in the art, or trade,
or profession, of murder inquiry.
Another famous murder case was just petering out
when I was about ready to leave school and seek employ.
ment. I had first-hand accounts of it from day to day.
One Charles Goodrich was found slain in his Brooklyn
home, beaten to death. From the precise manner in which
two damp.towels had been hung on a line in the cellar of
the dead man's home, Superintendent of Police Frank
Campbell, of Brooklyn, reasoned that the slayer was a
woman.
Campbell accosted Kate Stoddard, a public character
more or less, on the street after the murder. As he approached her she tore a gold locket from her throat, and
as it dropped to the sidewalk two dark red particles fell
out. Kate reached eagerly for them and started to put
them in her mouth.
"Don't," cried Campbell. "They might be poison."
"Oh, no," said Kate. "They're just dried blood."
He made her yield up the particles.
And that was as far as he got on the Goodrich murder.




14     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
He had the particles of blood; suspicion ran against the
woman, but no one could determine to the satisfaction
of a court and jury whether they were human blood. The
chemist of to-day, right bower of the murder man, quickly
determines whether particles of blood are human or not.
Science was a little backward in those days. But as to Kate
Stoddard and the Goodrich crime it hardly mattered.
She came to an unhappy end in a madhouse brooding over
the crime.
About this time my unofficial study of murder pictures
ended. I secured employment in the Western Union Telegraph Company's offices where my brother worked and
still works. For me it was just a makeshift; for him a
lifetime career. As soon as I had reached the legal age
I took the civil-service examination for patrolmen and
passed. This meant that I would be in a uniform pretty
soon, and while a uniform wasn't the habit of a detective
it was one of the things a man had to wear until someone
in authority thought he had the makings of a detective.
I waited for the call to join the force. Waiting, I got
a shock.
Although George Washington Walling had retired
from the superintendency of the New York Police Department in 1885 he still had ideas about improving the
force, and plenty of them. His big idea was this, in his
own words:
"I have sometimes fancied that it might be wholly possible to endow policemen with those elegancies and courtesies of life which make refined social intercourse so
pleasant and improving. Imagine an institution in which
the guardians of the peace can learn to make a pleasant
bow, to walk with grace, to shake hands with dignity, to lift
their hats in a courtly way, or extend their protecting arms
to a lady with Chesterfieldian decorum. Such ideas are
teachable."
Dude policemen 1 That was the reaction that met Wall



SMALL BOY AT- THE MAN HUNT


i5


ing's suggestion. And it almost lost New York City a
murder man. It was then and still is my idea that detectives
should dress quietly and be unassuming, for the less notice
they attract the easier their task. I debated whether to be
or not to be a member of a Wallingfied police force.
Walling countered with more details. He would teach
all the graces to policemen. He picked Frank Mayo, then
a reigning Broadway comedian, as his expert to teach
grace of manners; Chauncey M. Depew would have the
chair of deportment; William M. Evarts, noted lawyer
and after-dinner speaker, would instruct policemen how
to "crack a pleasant joke," and in the matter of dress and
social usage their teacher would be none other than E.
Berry Wall, the town's greatest dandy and social lion.
Former Superintendent Walling was a man who meant
well. His grand idea, however, never was put into execution. My shock was over and I was on my way.
On March I, 1889, I hotfooted it to police headquarters
to be sworn in. It was like going after something that
by right of inheritance is yours.




CHAPTER II


PICTURE OF A THIEF
A FTER a month of probation duty I was assigned to a
regular post on April 3, I889. It was in the lower section
of the city, not far from the old Chambers Street station
house, and took in a part of the post my father had walked.
I took care of the multiplicity of duties that befall a uniformed policeman in a big city. There were, in addition
to the watch kept for crimes and their perpetrators, the
duties of guardianship. Women and children had to be
helped across streets, guided to their destinations; lost
youngsters to be found and returned to their parents.
Watch had to be kept for fires, cracked water mains, street
lamps that were out; for suspicious characters and unseemly happenings. Traffic had not yet become a problem.
My physical senses were devoted to their task. In a day
I walked many miles and sometimes imagined that in time
my regulation shoes would wear grooves in the pavement.
The uniform was not irksome, yet it was not the raiment
to satisfy my ambition. I had set my mind on being a detective, and it seemed that if I remained in uniform any
great length of time I would be known to every crook
in Christendom, and thus my usefulness as a plain-clothes
man would be impaired. But the tradition was, and still
exists, that a man is not fitted for detective duty until
16




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11111
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ii\:.a
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On Post.


How the finest looked in Carey's days on Post








PICTURE OF A THIEF


I7


he has had at least two years on post. Central Office, which
was my objective, seemed a long way off. I figured that
if ever the call came to join the hall of fame at headquarters it would be after I had made enough mileage on post
to have circled the globe once at least.
Central Office was in command of a man who was being
referred to as the greatest detective in the world. Newspapers were calling him "the immortal" and challenging
Scotland Yard to produce his equal. He was Thomas
Byrnes, chief inspector of the Central Office detectives,
and one of the most picturesque thief catchers in the history of the American police.
It was said of Byrnes that if he picked a man to serve
under him as a detective and he made good, that man,
like Byrnes, would earn immortality. In I928, nearly forty
years later, I read in a newspaper of my retirement. There
was a line which said: "Carey, last of Byrnes's forty immortals, leaves the force." Such is immortality. I had
never dreamed while walking post that some day my name
would be linked with that of the great man at headquarters, or that my retirement would be the means of reviving his immortality.
Probably every young ambitious policeman on post in
my time hoped eventually to work for Byrnes. I know
I had it, although, while the hope was burning fiercest,
Central Office looked as far away as the White House in
Washington. There was always this much to keep the fires
of ambition burning: Byrnes took on no men for the
Central Office who had not walked a post.
During off-duty hours I studied Byrnes's famous book,
Professional Criminals of America, which he had published in 1886. In this were listed the pedigrees of all
professional thieves of the higher rank, together with
their photographs and complete descriptions of their
methods of operation. It was not only a "Who's Who"
of the underworld of that time but a textbook on the tech



18     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
nique of the best-known and shrewdest criminals. Byrnes
had been gathering the data for years. The book was put
into circulation among police departments, banks, hotels,
and railroad companies, and became a sort of "blue book"
of criminal identification. It was the earliest systematic
attempt to establish crime control and crime prevention
on a national scale.
There was little in the book about murderers. The
reason was obvious. Byrnes did not regard slayers as professionals, and the thieves of that day, unlike the professional criminals of the present era, had not adopted
murder as an incidental to robbery. The book was hated
by habitual criminals for it advertised them to the world
at large. They might not be sentenced to prison as habitual criminals and made to stay there for life, but Byrnes's
book sentenced them to lasting notoriety. Then, also,
death and life term penalties were more often inflicted
than they are now, so there was hardly anything to be
gained by picturing and describing criminals who were
no longer at large.
Frequently criminals objected to having their pictures
taken for the book. There were some mighty struggles
to prevent the operation of "mugging," as the rogues'
gallery process is termed. Byrnes was very proud of his
success in always getting good pictures of professional
thieves. If they would not sit peacefully for a photograph
they were held down while the camera made a lasting
record of their physiognomies. He once pictured the struggles of a crook while being photographed to show the public what the police were up against in working out a system
of crime prevention. The picture was known as "The
Inspector's Model," and shows a bearded crook being
mugged under forced circumstances. The newspapers got
hold of it and spoke of the operation as applying the
"third degree." But the photograph was only a model.




PICTURE OF A THIEF    9


I9


The crook was a detective wearing a false beard who
posed for the picture as Byrnes stood and directed the
scene. I believe this was the first use of the term "third
degree."
It was generally known among the men on the force
that Byrnes would pick out for Central Office duty only
those men who had acquired a wide knowledge of professional criminals and their methods. His first requirement
was that a man should have "the picture of a thief" well
in mind, a sort of mental pattern to fit men and women
of the criminal class. The word "thief," I might explain,
is a generic term applied to all professional criminals of
whatever degree or specialty. Others who have not attained professional status are just "wrong," yet it was
Byrnes's belief that, whether professionals or amateurs,
men who committed crime displayed the same character- t
istics. He believed that a patrolman, if he were at all?
observant and had the knack, with a memory and ordinary
deductive faculties to back him up, could get "the picture
of a thief" while walking post. He might also, if he were
interested in carrying the picture process farther, get "the
picture of a crime."
So I proceeded while on patrol duty to acquire thisessential, hoping that when I had gotten the knack it
would lead me to Central Office. A few months of observation gave me the start on this picture. The mental
process which is involved has remained with me through
all the years and is the foundation of whatever peculiar
skill I may have shown, first as a general investigator of
all classes of crime, and later as a specialist in murder
inquiry. If there is a science to crime detection it is in the
application of this process. The other sciences will help,
but, first of all, whatever rules these sciences lay down,
or whatever clues they develop, they can bear fruit only
when there is a trained mind to put them to practical use.




20     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
I'll try to paint the picture of a thief as I built it up in
my mind while walking my post looking for the details
that composed it.
In his manner of locomotion the criminal betrays instinctive characteristics which set him apart from his
honest fellowmen. He will walk along at a jerky pace,
although his gait is usually fast. He moves in spurts. At
intervals he will pause, or slow up, to look over the scene
or passers-by. He will turn his head furtively and make
his survey in glances and not by studied, calm observation.
In a crowd of normal persons going about their business
the crook will hang behind, sidestep, and loiter. When he
thinks he has found a vantage ground he will halt in a
hallway or on a corner. It is a peculiar twist of fate that
he invariably seeks a shadowed spot in which to pause
and get his bearings. He avoids looking at anything in
a straight, direct way but casts his eyes downward.
On post I followed such movements closely and became
able to pick the suspect out in a crowd with ease and
certainty. In a crowd the contrast between the criminal
and the normal law-abiding person is most noticeable.
Almost every move is a betrayal. The criminal stands out
like a rank weed flowering above a smooth lawn. If he
is a pickpocket his false move is an unnecessary jostle,
an unseemly movement of the arms in a crowd otherwise
still and preoccupied. If he is a burglar, going to or from
a job, he measures his safety by apprehensive glances
sidewise or around, and with each movement of the head
his gait quickens or slows up.
The reason for this became quite apparent to me. It is
the logical working of nature. Crime is an irregular enterprise which reflects itself in irregularities of movement,
manner, and speech. A man walking post for days, weeks,
and months, with his mind concentrated on catching these
peculiarities in men and women, falls as easily into the
habit of sensing them as a skilled carpenter instinctively




No. 8 above shows the key nippers used by McLaughlin,
the hotel burglar








PICTURE OF A THIEF


21


catches the grains in lumber or the tailor, by the feel of
fabric, detects its quality.
And the irony of it is that the criminal, self-confident
egotist, believes that nature has endowed him with a
shrewdness above that of his honest fellows. But nature
tricks him. He hangs himself by his own rope, for these
shifty, jerky movements, the twisting of the head, the
sudden darting off a normal course into a shadow, while
supposed to enable him to pick out and thwart his enemy,
the police, furnishes that enemy with an unfailing index
to his man. Nature seems to refuse to serve as a protector
of unlawful enterprise.
I observed early that thieves always gravitated toward
certain types of haunts, mingled with one class, and came,
as a rule, from one class, the poor and dissolute. If a
burglary or robbery occurred on my post it was possible
for me, on many occasions, to find the man I wanted by
going direct to the places he would likely be, shabby places
that would by the same token invite the thief and attract
the attention of his pursuer. The finding of loot or thieves'
tools in his possession, or the conflicting elements in the
thief's story, to me were the daily tests to which this early
picture was put to determine its accuracy.
And by the same logical course of studying the illogical,
unnatural moments of the criminal I arrived at the picture of a crime. If windows were broken open, doors
forced, safes robbed, or sneak jobs perpetrated it was
possible to determine their authorship; that is, whether
it was the work of a professional or not by the type of
tool used, the marks upon the window, door, or safe. From
these circumstances a man could map out the course of
his investigation and move with very little lost motion.
From what I know of detectives the world over-those
in Scotland Yard, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or Rome-I am
quite sure those who have made an outstanding place for,
themselves possess this basic instinct and operate with it.




22     MEMOrRS OF A MURDER MAN
It is their science. Froest, one of Scotland Yard's most
outstanding detectives, is no great hero to practical police
detectives. He was very successful. Since his work was
contemporaneous with mine, I watched his career with
interest, and from visiting European detectives got more
or less first-hand information about his work. The secret
of his success, if forty years of police work entitle me
to sit in judgment, was this: he had gotten the picture
of thieves and crimes and had trained his mental resources
to work with it. If he was equally successful in dealing
with amateurs at crime as well as professionals, with murderers as well as thieves, it was because of that peculiar
faculty which comes to the detective long in service, and
who has a never-ending flair for the work-the ability to
assimilate two logics, that of the criminal, which is wrong,
and that of the law-abiding, honest human being, which
is right. The latter is normal, the former unnatural; and
by the picture process the detective measures the difference
between the two.
How this process works out in murder inquiry is left
to subsequent chapters. I did not get the opportunity while
on post to apply the process to murder. The first big murder case that attracted my attention during my first years
on the force was the poisoning of Helen Nielson Potts,
a student at a fashionable New York City boarding school,
by her husband Carlyle Harris, a young medical student.
I had nothing to do with the case, but read or heard all
the details and was absorbed in them. Byrnes at headquarters handled the case. It came to an end in January,
1892, with the conviction of Harris. The trial intrigued
me because it penetrated the dark domain of the poisoner,
which is the realm of murder most often entered by the
educated type of slayer. So to keep abreast of developments at the trial, which were shrouded in the technical testimony of medical experts, I bought a standard textbook
on toxicology and at home, after hours, pursued a home



PICTURE OF A THIEF


23


study course in what is perhaps the most fascinating of all
phases of murder inquiry.
Captain Edward Slevin was in command of my precinct. He had been one of Byrnes's most trusted lieutenants. He knew from personal contact with the inspector
precisely what he required in Central Office men. I had
never asked Slevin for plain-clothes work, although itching for an assignment. I had done a little off-duty plainclothes work just to test unofficially the effectiveness of my
picture of a thief. It had worked out quite successfully.
The crimes were minor, but they had built up certain suspicions which I wanted to put to the test, and letting the
picture guide me I solved them and brought in the offenders to Slevin. He was not a man to say much, one way or
the other. If he didn't like a man's work he said little but
acted quickly. If he did like it he said less but also moved
quickly. I imagine that he thought that by this time, if
I had any natural talent for detective work, I should have
a fairly workable picture of a thief in mind.
He assigned me to plain-clothes duty, and the opportunity came to put my picture to its first important test. In
my rounds I became well acquainted with hotel men in the
precinct and made it a point to establish a close contact
with them, for hotels in those days were magnets to crooks.
The hotel detective had not yet become part of a hotel's
complement.
I dropped into the old Hotel Stevens one night and was
informed by the clerk that a guest had registered who had
been in the hotel on previous occasions. Invariably after
he quit the hotel complaints were made by guests that
their rooms had been robbed by an unusual thief who, in
some unaccountable way, visited the rooms while the occupants were asleep and left the doors locked from the
inside. This guest was now occupying a room on the second floor on a hallway leading from the main stairway
to a side window. An elevator shaft ran alongside the




24     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
room he occupied. All rooms on this floor were occupied.
I took it upon myself to solve the mystery. I was anxious
to let Slevin know how good a picture of a thief I had.
If by chance the crook turned out to be a man with a big
reputation among thieves, Byrnes very likely would send
for him. The inspector doted on meeting the big fellows
face to face; on quizzing them about their methods and
their movements. And if, also by chance, the man I was
after happened to have his "mug" in Byrnes's book, it
would doubtless please "the immortal." He might possibly like to see the man who caught him.
It was impossible to watch the suspect's room from a
position in the hallway, for there was no place to stand
and observe him come and go without my being seen. So
I rigged up what is commonly known in detective circles
as a "plant."
I let myself into an elegantly appointed elevator and,
pulling down on the steel cable, was hoisted to the second
floor. I took off my shoes and fell back into a napping posture on an upholstered settee within the lift. I had to
double up my knees to do this. I could see dimly out of
a grated opening in the door to the hallway. I left a small
light burning in the elevator so that if anyone looked in he
would see me and take it for granted that I was asleep.
If I left the elevator in darkness a professional thief, not
being able to see within, might be frightened off temporarily.
Presently a tall figure in stockings came silently down
the hall and halted before the door. He glanced into the
elevator and smiled. Then he looked around quickly along
the hall in both directions. His shoulders went erect. He
started down the hall with a bold step. I caught a glimpse
of his face through the grated opening in the door. I was
quite certain that he fitted into my picture. I arose and
watched him go down the hall. He reached the stairway
and looked down quickly to where the night clerk stood at




PICTURE OF A THIEF


25


his desk. He straightened up again, looked around, and
then stole along the hall: sign number two that he had no
business in the hallway, or he wouldn't have gone to the
pains of looking down the stairway. He wore heavy underwear, woolen socks, and a blue sweater: indication number
three that he was garbed for prowling. A guest would not
enter the hall in his under-attire unless it suited a special
purpose to do so. A thief might. If anyone encountered him
he might easily explain that he was looking for the bathroom.
He disappeared for a moment, then reappeared. He
stood still: the little lull of indecision that comes in the
preliminary maneuvers of a thief. He walked down another short hall, then started up a flight of stairs. He
stepped heavily on the first stair as if testing it for creaks.
I let myself out of the elevator and walked along the
hallway in his wake. I turned and went up another stairway and, reaching the top, looked through the banisters
and saw him halted at the door of a room. He glanced
around. He had a shining instrument in one hand. It
looked like a curling iron. Voices sounded on the floor
above. He turned quickly, listened, and then started down
the stairway. I crept down my stairway to avoid being
seen. I wanted to catch him red handed in a room.
He reached the floor below the same time I did. We
almost bumped. He smiled. I looked at his hands. The
instrument was gone. I seized him.
"Give me that instrument," I demanded.
"I haven't got any instrument," he said, and showed
his open hands. He tried to squirm out of my grasp.
"Give me that instrument," I insisted.
"Say, you got me wrong," he said, pulling his shoulders
back and eyeing me as one who had outraged his dignity.
"You can't do this to me. I'm a guest of this hotel. I'll
sue you."
Two men, whose voices had sounded on the floor above,




26


M EMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


hove in sight, coming down the stairs in a zigzag course as
though tipped off their balance by one too many high.
balls. They came up to me and insisted, rather volubly,
that I had the wrong man.
"Give me that instrument," I demanded once again.
The suspect threatened me. I lifted the sweater up over
his head. On the outside of a white woolen undershirt,
near the armpit, I observed brown stitches, unevenly sewn,
one stitch long, the next short. They were a man's stitches
not a woman's. They ran in a sort of egg-shaped design.
I felt where the stitches were and my hands closed on a
hard object. I felt under the shirt and from a tiny pocket
sewed inside the shirt drew out a pair of key nippers
made in the shape of a curling iron. These explained how
it had happened that the doors of the rooms that had been
robbed were always locked with the keys inside. My man
merely inserted the nippers in the lock, caught the tip of
the key and turned it. He entered and came out by this
means, leaving his victims to wonder at the mystery. He
was a rare operator who worked as his victims were asleep.
I turned to the two misguided samaritans, then at the
man.
"Well," I said to the suspect.
"All right, officer," he said. "You got me."
I looked him over closely. I felt of his underclothing.
It was spongy. He had on two heavy suits of woolen undergarments and two pairs of heavy socks. He was dressed
for a night of business. He was professional but he
wouldn't say who he was. It was the way with old-time
thieves. Caught, they admitted their offense, but the one
thing they seemed to want to crawl out of was their past
record. Perhaps they were afraid of getting into Byrnes's
book. At any rate, there was a wholesome fear in them
which:. later years seemed to have disappeared from succeeding generations of professional crooks.
When I got my man to the station house Captain Slevin




PICTURE OF A THIEF


27


interviewed him. Later I took him to the Central Office.
Here Detective John Heard, one of Byrnes's camera-eyed
men, recognized him as Charles McLaughlin, alias
McClain, one of the best-known hotel thieves of the day.
Byrnes came in and had a look at him and grinned. His
"mug" was in "the immortal's" book, adorned with a lux.
uriant growth of beard.
He pleaded guilty to possessing burglar's tools and
was sent away.
The picture process had worked. Not-only that, but
I had enjoyed the rare opportunity of seeing a thief in
the act; of watching his moves when the stress of crime
was on his mind. It made it possible for me in years to
come to put myself in the place of a criminal in the act,
a most valuable lesson which I applied with some success
when it became necessary for me in more than one murder
case to judge between the pictures of faked and real robberies-fakes built up to shield the real murderers.
It was gratifying also to know that Byrnes had seen
my first important catch and had expressed, in his blunt
way, some delight that McLaughlin's picture was already
in his book.
A short time later an order from Byrnes directed me
to report to him at headquarters. I was ushered into his
presence. He was a man of few words.
"Do you know any thieves?" he put to me.
"Only a few, but I'm willing to learn," I replied.
"That's all," he said with a wave of his hand. "Go back
to your precinct."
Whether I had registered favorably with "the immortal" I did not know. My interview was abrupt and indefinite. But that was Byrnes's way. He looked at a man once,
sized him up, and expected his men to have the same
faculty. He doted on "getting the picture" from hip first
glimpse of a man, an act, or a scene. He had merely subjected me to this process.




CHAPTER III


IN "THE IMMORTAL'S" PICTURELAND
A     PPARENTLY I had acquired a workable picture of
a thief, for on May 24, I892, I was transferred to the
Central Office, thus coming under the eye of Byrnes, who
was now chief of police but still personally supervised the
Detective Bureau. There were forty Byrnes-picked detective sergeants and thirty-two detective officers in the
bureau.
No man who ever worked under Byrnes could forget
him or the picture that surrounded him. He sat at an oldfashioned high-topped desk known in those days as a
secretary. It had few papers on it, but this was not strange,
for the chief was a man with a long memory who needed
few papers to run his job. He had joined the force in
863; had risen through all the ranks to the highest place.
Byrnes stood five feet eleven inches, a huge man, yet
not bulky. His shoulders were broad and erect; his smile
was friendly but firm. He had a flowing mustache and was
at ease in a low, comfortable Piccadilly collar. He was
addicted to the low-crowned derby with wide brim which
he wore well down over his large ears. He always appeared
in a cutaway coat edged with braid. When he promenaded
he went along with military dignity. He was always pointed
out by passers-by, but not because of any vanity or self



Exhibits in Byrnes's Pictureland








THE IMMORTAL'S " PICTURELAND                 29
importance on his part. He believed in dignity because
it won him respect not only from his men but from the
world of professional criminals he was always after. He
was one of the pioneers in crime prevention who understood the effectiveness of visual propaganda on active and
would-be wrongdoers. He held the underworld of his
time in awed subjection.
One look at his offices indicated why he doted on pictures. He himself was not only a picture, but he lived in
a world of pictures, the pictureland of rogues.
Opposite his private office was a large room referred
to often as a museum and by some newspapers as the
"mystery chamber" or "cold room." On its walls were
pictures of famous criminals he had caught. In glasspaneled cabinets running the entire width and height of
the walls were the tools of thieves and the weapons of
murderers, braces and bits, dark lanterns, lock picks, jimmies both one piece and sectional, skeleton keys, spurious
gold bricks, and bunco men's lurid circulars for the gullible. There was a weird assortment of weapons-billies,
pistols, daggers, slung shots, and vials-that had contained poisons and knockout drops. In the center of these
were two black masks and a hangman's noose-both the
accouterments of the public executioner which had actually been used.
Also upon the walls facing chairs in which criminals
sat while under examination were large pictures of men
and women cavorting in low dives. On a large chest which
stood in front of the chairs were enlarged drawings, in
color, of playing cards, dice, and other implements of the
gambler.
"A thief has three weaknesses," was Byrnes's favorite
saying. "Wine, women, and gambling."
His museum pictured the story. It was a stirring exhibit
in chapters. First the cause of downfall-wine, women,
and gambling; the tools which brought about the down



30     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
fall-thieves' paraphernalia and weapons; and the endthe hangman's noose and the black masks or caps. It was
more of his picture propaganda. Amid these graphic mementos Byrnes seldom failed to get a confession from
criminals brought before him in this museum. They saw
the pictures. He was not a bully. His own idea was to
"soften" a criminal, and he expressed it in these words:
"Even the greatest ruffians are amenable to the influences
of a friendly address. No man is so utterly depraved or
lost as not to possess a soft chord in his heart." Byrnes
played upon that chord through his assorted pictures.
A thing about him that impressed me most deeply was
his expression "Here's the picture I get" when he was
discussing a crime, or "Now this is the picture I want
you to get" when he was assigning a detective to a case.
They are two expressions that cling to my tongue to-day.
Of Byrnes's influence upon the modernization of police
departments there is little doubt. When he was appointed
chief inspector in i88o he created the first real detective
bureau. At the time twenty-eight plain-clothes men were
on detective duty. He sent twenty-one of them back to
posts and picked out their successors from men who had
done good work on patrol duty. He increased his staff to
forty men, made them detective sergeants, and thus built
up the first real American police detective bureau. His plan
was copied everywhere.
He judged his men by the number of arrests they made
and convictions they secured. Explaining his administration to a legislative committee headed by A.ssemblyman
Theodore Roosevelt, then making his debut  'olitical
life, Byrnes said:
"During the four years before I took charge of detectives 1,943 arrests were made and 505 years of convictions
secured. For the four years I have been in charge 3,324
arrests were made and 2,428 years in convictions were
secured."




"THE IMMORTAL' S          PICTURELAND         31
Asked about the murder record he said:
"One man hanged and thirty-five arrested for murder."
He was a great man to hurl facts at people and he
expected his men to throw facts back at him. He made
a good impression upon the legislators, for they officially
voted him a "detective without a peer, comparable to
Vidocq, Coco-Lacour, and Mace." His fame spread
throughout the world. He sent men to the ends of the
earth on man hunts and he boldly asserted that he had a
better department than Scotland Yard.
Men working under "the immortal" never became intimate with him. He was a strict disciplinarian. Of all men
he required honesty, common sense, and no political pull.
He had a pat formula for detectives. They had to be good
judges of human nature, or, to put it in his own words,
"they had to be able to size up a man for all he was worth
and be all things to all men." They also had to have muscular and mental talents for the job. The greatest factors
in detective success, he always said, were habitual close
observation and great experience, ability to see the most
insignificant things, and to fit them together and develop
a perfect memory.
They had to be picture builders. He summed this up
as follows "A good detective works like a good physician
who sees at a glance the nature of his patient's illness.
He gets a picture, compares it with other pictures, and
then acts." I don't recall that truer words have ever been
uttered about the qualifications of a real police detective.
A detecti'p who picks out murder for his specialty is a
composit,something of the artist, the scientist, the lawyer, and a little bit of nearly everything that other men
are, plus a memory that not only absorbs everything he
sees or hears but is facile and unfailing in its accuracy.
Otherwise the pictures that he gathers in his daily work
are worthless.
In the capture of McLaughlin my picture of a thief was




32


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


put to its first real test. Under Byrnes's eye it was put
to a severer test. It was the chief's practice to send detectives out in advance of great public gatherings to round
up thieves who were attracted by the crowds. My assignment was to mingle with crowds attending an anniversary
of Columbus's discovery of America.
I spotted two men weaving in and out of an assemblage
One was about twenty-three, his companion much older.
They displayed the usual shifty characteristics which I
have described in my picture of a thief. I accosted them.
"What's this?" exclaimed the older man when I caught
the arm of the younger one. "I'm not saying anything
about myself, but the young feller you got is all right."
"Well, you're not right yourself," I answered, and took
them both along. They fitted into my picture, I thought.
At headquarters I searched them. In the younger man's
vest pocket I found a registered mail receipt bearing the
name Walker and the address Io2 MacDougal Street.
"Where did you get this?" I asked.
"Picked it up on the street," said the young man.
I reasoned that men of their type would not stoop to
pick up a registered mail receipt. They were held as suspects. At the MacDougall Street address I found a Mrs.
Walker who identified the receipt as having been taken
from her the night before when an attempt was made to
snatch her purse. She identified the young man as the
thief. The older thief was a veteran; the young man had
made his first excursion into purse snatching with his elder
as a mentor. Both were sent away.
I was more than ever certain that I was getting the
right picture and using it correctly.
On the same day I made an arrest for murder, a man
named August Langner, a farm hand wanted for strangling a woman in Dedham, Massachusetts. But I had not
worked up the case. As I have stated, there were not many
imurders in New York City at this time, but what there




Examining a crook in Byrnes's crime museum








"THE IMMORTAL'S PICTURELAND 33


had been were handled by older men in the bureau personally supervised by Byrnes. But such murders as had
occurred were built into elaborate legends and were widely
discussed by the men. Hearing about them from men who
worked them gave me additional pictures for my memory
album. One in particular was rated as Byrnes's most notable piece of detective work.
Byrnes had suspected for a long time that the Whyos, a
gang of cutthroats and thieves who roamed the Hell's
Kitchen district, were hiring out to do murder, and that
they had an established price list in which murder appeared as "a big job worth a hundred dollars and up."
The body of Louis Hanier, an inoffensive French saloon
keeper, was found at the head of the stairs in his flat above
the saloon which was located in Hell's Kitchen. A bullet
wound in the head gave Byrnes the picture of how Hanier,
had been killed.
Byrnes arrived upon the scene with an assistant. On
the bar in the basement of the flat he saw three whisky,
glasses. They were empty but had recently been used.
A bit of whisky still remained in them. From this he
reasoned that three men had been drinking in the place before or after the murder, probably before, since slayers
after killing usually hurry away.
He determined that the gun used was of.38 caliber and
he sent men out to find a pawnbroker who might have
bought the gun, reasoning again that if the three who had
drunk the whisky were Whyos and therefore professionals
they would sell the gun and not throw it away. The gun
was found in a pawnshop, left there by a man who answered the description of Mike McGloin, notorious leader
of the Whyos. This evidence was not sufficient to connect
McGloin with the crime. Byrnes assigned a woman to
make the gang leader's acquaintance in the hope that he
would make incriminating statements to her. He gave
the woman some of his own clothing which McGloin wore




34


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


at times. All the woman brought back to Byrnes was a
rather rambling statement that McGloin had made after
the murder to several friends, that "a man wasn't tough
enough to be a Whyo until he had knocked out his man."
McGloin was picked up and brought to Byrnes. For
ten minutes the Whyo chieftain was left alone in Byrnes's
museum to inspect the pictures. On a table near him lay
the hangman's noose and black cap.
Two of McGloin's companions, suspected by Byrnes of
having been his accomplices in the murder, had been smuggled into the prison basement. McGloin did not know of
their arrest.
Byrnes taxed McGloin with the crime. He spat back his
denial. Byrnes repeated the statement credited by the
woman to McCloin, without naming the woman or indicating her part in the inquiry. At this moment the prisoner's
two companions were led across the prison yard below.
McGloin could see them.
"We know whom you made that statement to, and we've
got them," said Byrnes. McGloin's eyes were riveted on
his companions in the yard. He sat silent until they disappeared. Finally he cried out: "For God's sake, Inspector.
I'll call 'er quits. I'll tell yer. I killed Hanier." Subsequently McGloin made an extended confession. He was
hanged in the Tombs. Byrnes had worked this with pictures from start to finish. A good many years later I had a
case in which a whisky glass cut the same figure in a murder case.
Byrnes's murder cases were not the factors that built
his fame. It was the effectiveness of his crime control
system. He established the first police deadline when he
sent a squad of picked men into the Wall Street financial
section with orders to arrest every crook with a record
who stepped across Fulton Street, which was the northern
boundary of the financial and jewelry districts. For the
first few months the deadline was established he paid the




"THE IMMORTAL S )         PICTURELAND         35
rent for the squad's office out of his own pocket. When
he left the Police Department he was able to say that since
he had established the deadline "not a ten cent stamp
had been stolen in the section." The deadline exists to-day.
He also inaugurated the famous morning line-up at
headquarters. Each day at about 9 A. M. all suspects
rounded up during the preceding twenty-four hours were
paraded before the assembled detectives. By this means
the Central Office men got mental pictures of old and
new crooks and frequently recognized men they were
looking for. The line-up is still in operation at headquarters. It has been improved in only one respect-the detectives wear masks to conceal their faces from the suspects.
Byrnes often talked in epigrams. He once said, "There
is no honor among thieves," bursting the old myth that
professional criminals live and operate under a mutually
protective code of honor. Perhaps it was not original with
him. At any rate, Marm Mandelbaum, one of the city's
most famous women fences, who disposed of millions of
dollars in loot brought to her by thieves, disputed Byrnes
on the honor question. He had been after her a long time,
but legal evidence was hard to get.
The woman was well protected, relying chiefly upon
the so-called code. So, while he could not fasten a crime
upon her, he undertook to prove that her ideas of honor
among her own class were wrong. One of her most trusted
lieutenants was a burglar's banker known as Traveling
Mike Grady. Marm had worlds of confidence in him. After
many weeks of watching Byrnes caught Traveling Mike
taking stolen goods from Marm's best customers and disposing of it on his own account. He was double-crossing
the old lady. Byrnes went to special pains to show Marm
that she was being cheated by the man she most trusted.
It was too much. She packed up, left for Canada, and quit
America for good.
One of the last things Byrnes said before retiring was;




36     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
"The old thieves are disappearing. Young people of the
rising generation are going into crime more and more."
He not only saw pictures close at hand but he could
catch their meaning far off. It was not so many years
after "the immortal" passed that a rising generation of
seventeen-year-old murderers, bobbed-hair girl bandits,
and murder mobs chieftained by racketeers came upon
the American scene, and are here yet.
Byrnes was a strong influence upon my professional
life. He taught me the value of pictures and he gave me
my first chance on a real big murder mystery.




CHAPTER IV


MY FIRST MURDER PICTURE
BYRNES gave me my first murder assignment in June,
I892. There were unusual angles to it. First it was approached by me as a shadow job, and few murder suspects are ever shadowed. Usually they are arrested the
minute they are suspected. Secondly, it marked the beginning of a strange cycle of poison murders in New York
City.
References already has been made to the Carlyle Harris
case, and since it has a bearing upon my first murder
inquiry I'll give a brief resume of the facts. Harris was
a young medical student. In his classes at the New York
College of Physicians and Surgeons he had listened to
lectures on morphine by Dr. George L. Peabody. Among
other things he learned about the uses of morphine, the
symptoms which follow morphine poisoning, and the treatment in such cases. These lectures were delivered in January, I891. On January 3Ist Helen Nielson Potts fell
violently ill in her room in the Comstock School for Young
Ladies and died.
Investigation by Byrnes showed that Harris had given
Miss Potts large overdoses of morphine. He was secretly
married to her and wanted to avoid a public wedding insisted upon by her parents. He was convicted and electron
37




38     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
cuted. A great battle of medical experts took place at the
trial. Several lawyers came to fame, including Francis L.
Wellman, an assistant prosecutor, who later wrote an
admirable book, The Art of Cross-Examination. I regretted not having had a try at the Harris case, but I was
then on post. However, the shadow job was to give me
experience on a still more famous mystery.
My instructions were to follow a short man about
thirty-five, white face, close-cropped mustache, and a very
red nose. His name was Dr. Robert W. Buchanan. He
had lived in a house at No. 267 West Eleventh Street in
Greenwich Village, but his whereabouts were not known.
He drank a lot, which accounted for his red nose, and
after inquiring for him at various saloons I picked him
up in a downtown cafe. He came out of the place with
a lawyer named Davison and went to the lawyer's office.
The first picture I got of him indicated that he was badly
worried. All I knew about him was that he had remarried
his first wife after his second wife had died. The district
attorney was about to have the body of Number Two
exhumed. It was feared that he might flee, and if he
attempted to do so my orders were to lock him up. Nothing was said about murder, but I was instructed to observe
every movement and keep in close touch with the Central
Office.
For days I shadowed him and found he was occupying
a furnished room uptown. I "got him up in the morning
and put him to bed at night," as the shadower describes
an all-day surveillance job.
As the days passed he doubled his visits to saloons and
his nose grew redder and his manner more restless. Then
he began to buy papers at each newsstand as he passed.
He would go into his room with an armful of papers,
come out and buy more, and return to the house. Wherever
he went he bought papers, visited lawyers' offices, and
went into every handy saloon.




MY FIRST M-URDER PICTURE


39


He was greatly agitated. The reason I soon learned.
The body of his second wife had just been exhumed. The
stomach had been sent to Professor Rudolph Witthaus,
a noted toxicologist, for analysis. Dr. Buchanan was eager
for news of the result of that analysis. My close observation of him gave me something of an insight into the
actions of murderers before they are caught. A rare experience, one that comes only a few times in a lifetime. He
seemed to have acquired the furtive movement of a thief,
yet after each libation, or when he was in the presence of
a lawyer, he was as calm as a cucumber. But when the
effects of the stimulants wore off or he parted company
with the lawyers he became more restless than before.
Finally I was ordered to arrest him. He was in a downtown cafe with Davison, the lawyer, when I approached
him. He had just had a drink.
"Buchanan," I said, "you're under arrest."
"What's the charge?" he asked. His face turned gray
as a wet newspaper.
"Murder," I replied.
"Where will you take him?" queried the alert lawyer.
"To headquarters," I said, and started off with my
prisoner. He was silent all the way.
Next morning at headquarters, when I brought him out
to take him to court for arraignment, the first wife whom
he had remarried appeared and walked along with us.
We reached a saloon.
"Can't we have a drink?" the wife asked.
"No," I said, "not this time," and went on. If Buchanan
had flight in mind I wasn't going to let him go into the
saloon and, anyway, I didn't drink and never have.
Next I was assigned to work under the direction of the
district attorney, whose assistant, James W. Osborne,
was building up the case, strengthening the picture so that
it might be laid out on a legalistic canvas before a jury.
The investigation now turned to Dr. Buchanan's his



40     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
tory. He had come from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in I887,
bringing his wife and small daughter. He opened an office
in the West Eleventh Street house. His practice was small.
Suddenly his wife departed, leaving the daughter behind
with her father. On November 12, 1890, he was divorced
by means of a painless litigation known in New York as
an undefended divorce. His wife did not appear in court.
He began to neglect his practice and spent much time
in Newark, New Jersey. Just what he was doing here was
not known until he asked Robert W. Macomber, a restaurant keeper, to go to Newark with him on an important
mission. The two set out for Newark and there Dr.
Buchanan introduced his friend to Mrs. Annie B. Sutherland, who, although she was nearly twice the physician's
age, beamed fondly on him and he on her.
She produced her will and read it to the two men. It
disposed of her property to her husband, but if, upon
her death, she were unmarried her "dear friend and physician, Dr. Robert W. Buchanan," was to receive her
property.
Macomber was asked to sign the will as a witness, together with another man whom Mrs. Sutherland called
in. However, when it was recalled that the day was Thanksgiving, the signing was postponed. Mrs. Sutherland feared
that a will executed on a holiday might be questioned.
Later Macomber witnessed the signing of the will.
Returning to New York on the ferry, the restaurant
man joshed the doctor about the age of his admirer and
benefactor, whereupon the physician said it was not a
case of love but merely a woman's gratitude for professional services he had rendered. Buchanan had no idea
of marrying again. Women were out of his life for good.
A few months later Buchanan told Macomber of great
fortune he had fallen into. Mrs. Sutherland had sold her
Newark holdings for ninety-five hundred dollars, which
she had given him. Adding five hundred dollars of his own




MY FIRST MURDER PICTURE


41


money he had purchased the West Eleventh Street house.
Not many days passed before Mrs. Sutherland came
to live in this house. Macomber, upon seeing her, winked
at Buchanan. He suspected marriage, but Buchanan explained again that he was through with marriage and that
Mrs. Sutherland was merely his housekeeper.
Trouble followed in the Buchanan household. The little
daughter and the aged and taciturn housekeeper were not
mated. The elderly woman, so Buchanan told his friends,
used filthy language in the child's presence. Buchanan
asked friends to take the girl and they did. This situation
forced Macomber to ask Buchanan if there had not been a
marriage,, and the doctor admitted he had wed the woman.
But he hastened to add, if she got worse he "would ditch
the old girl." The restaurant owner remarked that if he
did that the "old girl would remake her will and ditch
him."
It was about this time that the trial of Carlyle Harris
opened in New York City and the experts began their
testimony as to the effects of morphine poisoning and its
symptoms. Wellman, in this trial, had produced evidence
to show that Harris had made no attempt to conceal signs
of the poison, although there were ways a skilled physician
might have concealed them.
Mrs. Sutherland-Buchanan became suddenly ill in the
Eleventh Street house on the morning of April 22, 1892.
She died April 23rd. Dr. B. C. McIntyre, a physician,
called in by Buchanan, signed a death certificate giving
cerebral hemorrhage as the cause of death.
The woman lay in her grave for some time. Then one
morning a man giving the name Smith called at the morgue
to remark casually that he had known Mrs. Sutherland;
she had been a healthy and robust person, and he thought
it strange that she should die in the home of a physician.
Snith also visited the newspapers and made the same
casual statement.




42     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
Thereupon Byrnes exhumed the body, and Professor
Witthaus reported that his analysis showed that she had
died from the effects of poisoning. He had found morphine
in her viscera; also traces of belladonna or atropine, both
derivatives of the lethal nightshade. The admission of
this drug, together with morphine, prevented the contraction of the pupils of her eyes, thus counteracting the usual
symptoms of morphine poisoning and also confusing for
a time the toxicological analysis of the contents of her
stomach.
A strong suspicion pointed at Buchanan, yet no evidence
had been found to put the deadly dosages in his hands and
build the legal case against him. To do this is one of the
most difficult tasks besetting the murder specialist, for
when poisoners administer the means of death onlookers
seldom are around. Circumstances, of course, strengthened the suspicion against Dr. Buchanan. The use of
morphine suggested that the influence in that direction
had come from the Harris case. And Dr. Buchanan was
an experienced physician; Harris was only a medical
student.
The process of boring into the mystery by learning
what had taken place in the Buchanan household prior
to the death of his wife began. Something, the truth of
which never developed, suddenly made Macomber talkative about his medical friend. He remarked that about
the time Buchanan had sent his daughter to friends he
had said "the old lady was getting intolerable." He had
taken to eating his meals at a restaurant because, he said,
she had threatened to poison his food. Then she threatened to kill herself and Buchanan had told her: "Well,
you know where the poisons are kept."
Had the doctor ever mentioned the Harris case? I
asked Macomber. Indeed he had, said the restaurant man.
While the trial was on and details of the medical testimony were being printed, Buchanan had said that if the




MY FIRST MURDER PICTURE


43


medical student had had. a real knowledge of morphine
he would have administered belladonna with the morphine. This would have confused the symptoms of poisoning both externally and internally, thus baffling the attending physician and the toxicologist.
Precisely this had happened in the Buchanan murder.
Yet it was not sufficient to clinch the case against the doctor. It was necessary to find someone who had seen him
administering medicine to his wife just before her death.
Such evidence would indicate an opportunity to commit
the crime alleged. His marriage to the woman and his
possession of her property furnished abundant evidence
of motive, but not as to the felonious means of death.
At the time of Mrs. Buchanan's death several women
lived in the West Eleventh Street house. Ordinary observation and experience teaches that women are quick to
minister to the wants of their ailing sisters. So, working
along this logical premise, I spent some time rebuilding
the picture of Mrs. Buchanan's last days in the house —
her final illness.
A Mrs. Brockway was found. She had lived in the
house; was there when Mrs. Buchanan was taken ill. She
had called in a nurse to attend the doctor's wife and had
attended the woman herself. She recalled that Dr.
Buchanan had given his wife medicine. She saw him feed
it to her with a teaspoon. A bottle of chloral hydrate,
which Dr. McIntyre hadprescribed, was on the table near
the bed. It was the only medicine he had given her. The
directions on the bottle called for a dose of one teaspoonful at a time. Mrs. Brockway had given such doses to the
ailing woman when Dr. Buchanan was not around.
But when Dr. Buchanan administered the dosage he
gave his wife two teaspoonfuls instead of one I Whether
from the bottle on the table Mrs. Brockway could not say.
In the house Dr. Buchanan kept his drugs. Among them
was morphine, belladonna, and atropine. Though the




44     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
contents of the teaspoons in Dr. Buchanan's hands were
not definitely established it added the last touch to the
picture. He had the motive for killing his aged wife; also
the opportunity and the means.
A jury found him guilty of the murder. He made his
fate certain by taking the witness stand in his own behalf.
Wellman, a suave but merciless cross-examiner, tangled
him in one conflicting statement after another. But, even
though he made a poor witness for himself, he smiled
through his examination and was cocksure and haughty.
He confidently expected an acquittal and said so openly
in the courtroom.
He was electrocuted in Sing Sing prison.
Dr. Buchanan was a superegotist, trying to improve
upon the poisoning technique of the young medical student. As the reader follows the famous cycle of poison
murders in subsequent chapters he will discern that this is
characteristic of nearly all poisoners. Each believes himself to be better than the one before.
It was my first experience at building up a picture where
the result would be State's demand for the life of a human
being. It differed vastly from running down professional
thieves with known records and it helped convince me
that all criminals act alike; that they belong somewhere
in the picture of a thief-seasoned professionals or just
amateurs trying their hand at murder for the first time.
Crime, an unnatural, illegal enterprise, tars them with the
same brush.




CHAPTER V


LITTLE MURDER JOBS IN            BETWEEN
T HE outcome of the Buchanan trial put a temporary
quietus on murder by poison in New York City, although
there was an epidemic of such slayings in other parts of
the country. Reading about them in newspapers strengthened my opinion that one poisoner always tries to improve upon the technique of some preceding example.
My chief occupation during I893 and 1894 was running down professional thieves. On the floor, as the Detective Bureau was known, was a detective sergeant of
exceedingly gracious manners and dapper dress who bore
the name "Chesty." Big Bill Devery, captain in the Tenderloin Precinct, and later chief of police during a violent
police upheaval, invented the name. But the possessor of
it signed the payroll George W. McClusky.
He had been a detective since I881 and was one of
Byrnes's most trusted men. He had acquired some of
Byrnes's technique but ran more to strategy than "the
immortal." McClusky looked and acted the part of a
prosperous Wall Street broker. He made his unofficial
headquarters at Delmonico's famous cafe. Here he
mingled with the moneyed crowd while casting an inquisitive eye at the easy-money men who follow the trail of
wealth. In this way Chesty kept in touch with the upper
45




46     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
crust of the underworld. He liked to outguess and outwit
big, shrewd criminals.
In the bureau at this time also was a modest, hard
working detective sergeant, James McCafferty, who had
handled most of the murder cases. He too was a Byrnes
product. He liked marder cases, and so we just gravitated
toward each other, two men with interests in common.
We became partners later on. There was hardly enough
real hard murder work to employ our joint talents. We
worked together on professional thieves. Some laughs
came our way and also opportunities to work out strategy
as McClusky liked to see it done.
A mob of professional thieves were altogether too busy
in uptown hotels. I was assigned to run them down. The
methods employed by the gang seemed to indicate that
a bellboy thief named Byrnes was the ringleader, and
moreover whenever he quit bellhopping in that hotel losses
were discovered by guests. I hunted up Byrnes.
He was stepping out nice and high with two companions
when I spotted him on Fifth Avenue. I anticipated that
he might have loot on his person, so the operation known
as "splitting" was performed. I grabbed Byrnes from
behind. His two companions fled as I expected they would,
hoping they would make for Byrnes's room for refuge.
No loot was found in Byrnes's pockets at headquarters
when I searched him, but he was booked. He gave me
the address of his room and I hurried there.
The savory odor of a cooking steak greeted me in the
hallway. I knocked at the door. It was opened by a lanky,
hungry-looking man with a large fork in his hand and
a pillow case around his front as an apron. The steak
was nice and juicy and plenty for at least five persons.
He saw my face at the door. "Wha's all this?" he demanded. "Wha's all about?"
"Never mind whass all about," I replied. "Plant yourself in a chaEr and don't move." He obeyed. I shut the door.




LITTLE MURDER JOBS IN BETWEEN                47
A huge young Negro was dozing on a bed, stretched
out in solid comfort. A row of gold front teeth shone like
a sunburst. His eyes opened lazily. He closed them and
resumed his beauty nap.
"Up and off that bed," I commanded. He arose and
took a chair.
"Mistah, mistah," he blubbered, "wha's all happenin'?"
He rubbed his eyes and yawned.
The juicy steak was frying nicely.
There were knocks on the door-three short raps. I
opened it.
"Ah," said a young man, looking at the steak, then at
me. "What the ---" he stammered, and started to turn
and run. I yanked him in. Two big Spanish onions, to garnish the feast, bulged in his pockets. I ordered him into
a chair.
Another rap upon the door. It opened quickly and the
caller, bearing a bag of buns, tumbled into my arms. In
a few minutes another visitor came to the door, and I
admitted him. He was carrying a bottle of catsup. When
he spotted me he started out again, but I hauled him in.
They were all members of the gang Byrnes captained.
A patrolman answered my call for assistance. He was
a heavy-weight Irishman. I told him his help was needed
to take the gang to headquarters.
"Let me take the black fellow down," he said, moving
toward the Negro. There was a roguish glint in his eye.
Somewhere, not long before, he had met up with a gang
of colored thieves.
"No, I'll take care of him," I said. There was no good
putting trouble in an Irishman's way.
I turned off the flame under the steak. It was done to
a leathery toughness.
They all went away for long terms, and for quite a
while bellhop thieving suffered a slump. This was no outstanding exploit; just another case of getting the picture;




48     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
knowing what thieves would do and corralling them in
a bunch by the McClusky strategic system.
Then I was on murder again. Just a little case. Two
human legs were found in a bundle which had been thrown
into a grass plot in front of a Greenwich Village bank.
They were identified as the limbs of a dusky matron who
had been missing some time from her home in the Harlem
black belt. Her gentleman friend was a porter. He too
was missing.
The fact that the bundle had been thrown into such a
conspicuous place led me to reason that some confusing
situation had arisen in the mind of the bundle carrier;
that what he probably intended to do was go on farther,
which would have brought him to the Hudson River,
where bundles of this sort were usually thrown. In the
house where the Negress had lived bloodstains were found
in a room she had occupied. The slayer had made a great
mistake. He had used the wrong fluid in an attempt to
wash out the bloodstains. I'll not disclose just wherein
he made that mistake, for a little bloodstain often has
proved the only handy clue to a murderer.
The porter finally was arrested. He confessed that he
had strangled the woman in a fit of jealousy, had cut up
her body, and carried it out in bundles. He started for
the Hudson with one bundle, found himself on the wrong
car, and jumped off. Suddenly confused, he dropped the
bundle in the most conspicuous place. His mind wasn't
capable of rearranging his plot at a moment's notice. I
had grasped the first picture correctly.
He grieved to death, beating the electric chair by one
day. His name was Caesar. His little empire went to pieces,
and having killed his dusky queen he was through. This
case, quickly disposed of, fell into its appointed place
among patterns of murder in my memory. Just an overdark vignette of murder done and paid for.
Then the cry that all policemen dread. Shake-up I I,.~
**^~^




:i..:  /:c,: r~P~~LI


Pen and ink sketch made during trial of
Martin Fhorn for murder of William Guldensuppe. (Thorn is looking over shoulder of his
attorney at photographs of the dismembered
body of his victim.)
/^^ L*LS.




1#40ft




LITTLE MURDER JOBS IN BETWEEN                49
895 Byrnes retired. His successor completely reorganized
the Detective Bureau, and old veterans and young men
trying to get a start were shifted. No charges or comments involving my work were made, but forthwith I was
walking a post in a sparsely settled section of the upper
city where, according to police tradition, a patrolman
helped tend the goats.
But murder followed me here. After a time on patrol
I was detailed to plain-clothes work in the precinct. On a
Sunday afternoon in June, I897, two small boys with
their father were walking through a woods in the precinct. They stumbled upon a bundle containing a section
of a human body. The find was reported to Detective
Aloncle and myself.
We unwrapped the bundle. When an outer wrapping
of brown paper and a secondary wrapping of red oilcloth
with bronze figures were thrown back, the lower section
of a torso including the diaphragm was revealed. Adher-.ing to the back was a small piece of wet wrapping paper.
This paper contained the imprint Kugler & Woolens,
Hardware, 277 Bowery, New York City. Both pieces
of paper were such as would be used in hardware stores.
The thigh bones bore evidence of having been cut with
a saw, and from this I reasoned that the saw had been
purchased at Kugler & Woolens. At this store I found
that sheets of brown paper, the size of that found around
the torso, were used to wrap saws. From the agent of
the maker of the red oilcloth I learned that quantities of
it had been distributed throughout the city. After a canvass of many stores I found that a small shop in Long
Island City, along the East River, had sold several yards
of the material to a stout woman who apparently lived in
the same section. This had been purchased a few days
before the torso had been thrown into the woods.
Then word was received that the upper section of a
human torso had been found in the East River wrapped.daslr




50     MEMOIRS OF A M U R D E R MAN
in the same red oilcloth. A tattoo mark had been cut from
the breast of this. A little later sailors in the Brooklyn
Navy Yard, not far from the store where the oilcloth had
been purchased, found a man's legs in the East River
wrapped in white oilcloth. The soles of the man's feet
were rough and thick, indicating that he had gone barefoot a great deal.
The keeper of a duck farm in the vicinity of the store
where the stout woman had gotten the oilcloth reported
that for some days the water in his duck pond had taken
on a peculiar reddish cast and that it made his ducks sick.
The police machine began to grind. The larger picture
formed. Tracing the reddish cast in the duck pond, detectives found that it came from a sewer serving a number
of new, unoccupied houses in the vicinity of the store.
A man and a woman had visited this house about a week
before as prospective purchasers.
It was concluded that the calloused condition of the
victim's soles was due to his employment in a Turkish bath
as a rubber. Detectives were sent out to visit Third Avenue
cafes frequented by Turkish bath employees, and here they
found that William Guldensuppe, a young rubber, had
been missing for more than a week. He could easily be
identified. Since he worked in the nude everyone had seen
a tattoo mark on his chest. The body was identified as
Guldensuppe's. The head was missing.
The woman who had visited the unoccupied house was
identified as Mrs. Augusta Nack and her companion as
Martin Thorn, her star boarder, while Guldensuppe was
also a roomer in her house whom she had jilted in favor
of Thorn. She had lured Guldensuppe into the vacant
house, where Thorn, hidden in a closet, shot him in the
head and killed him, threw the body into the bathtub and
cut it up with a saw. The red cast in the duck pond was
blood which had run from the bathtub into the sewer.
It was a shrewdly planned murder. The disappearance




LITTLE MURDER JOBS IN BETWEEN                 51
of the head showed this. The head was not only the most
reliable means of identification but it also contained vital
evidence of the felonious cause of death, the pistol wound.
The head was incased in a plaster-of-Paris cast and thrown
into the river and was never found.
Mrs. Nack turned state's witness and fixed blame for
the crime on Thorn. This development threw Thorn's
defense attorneys into consternation, and the missing head
suddenly became a vital issue. Thorn's lawyer got up one
day in court and announced that the body was not that of
Guldensuppe I He, the lawyer claimed, was alive in Germany I The reason was apparent why the murderers had
gone to such pains to dispose of the head.
Detectives were sent to Germany and reported that
Guldensuppe was not there, and ample testimony was
produced to prove by the tattoo mark and other peculiarities on the body that it was the corpse of the missing rubber. The fact that he had gone about nude so much made
it possible to produce these witnesses.
Thorn was convicted and electrocuted. Mrs. Nack
pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the first degree and was
sent to prison for fifteen years.
The case attracted wide attention. From a professional
standpoint it furnished me with several important fundamentals. First, that in a murder case there is no one
obvious clue but that all clues are good if they are direct;
secondly, that the police detective machine, though small
at this time, functioned with precision and relentlessly,
from patrolmen on the beat to executives at headquarters,
gathering, piecing together, and analyzing bits of evidence as they came in piecemeal from a hundred different
sources. It also convinced me that a woman's refuge in
murder, as in other things, is man. Augusta Nack by confessing threw herself into Thorn's arms and at the cost of
his life saved her own.
Whether Captain McClusky thought I had a knack for




52     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
handling murder cases I do not know. He assumed command of the Detective Bureau in I897, and from then
on I was engaged in murder inquiry most of the time.
He handed me a real tough case shortly after he came
in. The details remain clear in my memory because it was
one of the few cases in my entire career that offered possibilities of unmasking a mass murderer of the Bluebeard
type.
A man giving the name of Braun appeared at the offices
of a large life insurance company and presented for collection a five-hundred-dollar life insurance policy on the life
of one Zanoli. Braun's name appeared as beneficiary. The
man who asked for payment as Braun had a swarthy face
and seemed to be an Italian, while Braun obviously was
a German name. However, the company paid the policy.
Suddenly friends of the dark-skinned man became suspicious when they recalled that whenever death overtook
anyone in his employ or in his family he showed signs of
suddenly increased prosperity. These friends communicated with the Detective Bureau.
Braun, it appeared, worked in a barber shop at Tenth
Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street. I went there. To my
great surprise I found that Zanoli was the owner of the
shop and still alive I The man Braun had been dead some
time, and Zanoli had most solicitiously arranged a quick
burial. Zanoli was a queer little man with mixed mannerisms and a strange accent. He had two personalities. He
was of German-Italian parentage. In arranging the Braun
insurance matter this dual nationality was relied upon to
allay suspicion.
I inquired into the little man's history. Some years
earlier his first wife had died and he had collected insurance on her life. He married a widow named Werner,
who died suddenly, leaving insurance which Zanoli collected. He married a third time, and this wife too passed
away suddenly, also leaving insurance which Zanoli also




LITTLE MURDER JOBS IN BETWEEN                 53
collected. And with each collection Zanoli moved to a
better part of the city and opened up a finer barber shop.
In the last shop he hired Braun, who did not live long
afterward.
I arrested Zanoli for forgery. He was held on this
'charge while we considered exhuming the bodies of his
wives and Braun. However, medical experts decided that
owing to the large quantity of poison in embalming fluid
it would be useless to exhume the older bodies. The body
of the third wife was taken from its grave. The death
certificate stated that death was due to typhoid, but no
evidence of this disease was found. It could not be ascertained whether poison had caused her death. The same
situation was true of Braun's body.
There was not sufficient legal evidence to charge Zanoli
with murder, but he was convicted of forgery and sent
to prison.
And into the limbo of unsolved crimes passed the mystery of the deaths of the Mesdames Zanoli, second and
third, and Barber Braun. My conclusion was that the first
wife had died from natural causes, but out of her death,
and the ease with which her insurance was collected, had
come the idea to murder her successors and Braun. I do
not accuse Zanoli of the murders, if they were such. The
circumstances are cited merely to support a hypothesis
which experience has confirmed that the mass murderer,
particularly the Bluebeard type, comes nearest to being
the author of the perfect crime, if such a thing there be.
With such criminals murder is a career. They live for
little else.
And here's a strange thing: If, to-day, a man were to
appear and confess to the murders of the two wives and
Braun, it is doubtful if he could be convicted. Murder
never outlaws, but the evidence of murder in these cases
would have to come from the lips of the murderer himself.
The law will not accept his plea of guilty to murder in




54     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
the first degree. He would have to be tried in regular
course. And there would be nothing but the remotest circumstances, perhaps none at all, at this late day to establish the case against him.
But at that I don't think many murderers escape. Men
and women who I know to a moral certainty have committed murder have beaten the courts, but then as the
reader goes along in these memoirs it may strike him that
nature invariably overtakes them in the end with tragic
circumstances that are even worse than life or death in
prison.
During this period in the Detective Bureau I added
materially to my store of murder patterns, or pictures,
with which I worked on other cases as time went on.




CHAPTER VI


THE MAN IN THE STRAW           HAT
C     APTAIN MCCLUSKY announced my appointment as
a detective sergeant in November, I897. From this time
on, except for a few years of precinct duty occasioned
by shake-ups, my days, and many of my nights, for more
than thirty years, were to be taken up by homicide cases
of all descriptions.
On August i6, I898, McClusky sent word that he
wanted me to meet him in Room 84 of the Grand Hotel,
which at that time was one of the most popular hotels
in the Broadway bright-light district. It was a gathering
place for well-known figures in the sporting and theatrical
life of the city. In the room I found McClusky, Dr. O'HanIon, coroner's physician, and several detectives viewing
the body of a young woman lying on the floor.
She was in her early twenties, pretty and stylishly
dressed. Beside her lay a piece of lead pipe around the
end of which were bound several thicknesses of bicycle
tape. It was a homemade bludgeon. From this I caught
the first flash of the picture-murder with premeditation.
The specially-made bludgeon was sufficient evidence of
this.
With Dr. O'Hanlon's assistance-it then being a rule
that only the coroner or his representative could first touch
55




5t     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
a body-we lifted the body to a table and sat it upright,
resting the feet upon a chair. The young woman's beauty
became more apparent in this lifelike posture, and it was
easier to build the picture. Her hat was taken off, and
Dr. O'Hanlon removed the outer garments. We found
small, superficial cuts about her head, but they were not
sufficient to have caused death. There were specks of
blood upon the floor where her head had lain. Other than
these cuts there were no signs of violence or the cause
of death, although, of course, there was the bludgeon.
The cuts had not been made by this weapon. Dr. O'Hanlon
concluded that death had been instantaneous, and a moment later we found that the young woman's neck had
been broken by a bludgeon blow at the base of her skull,
dislocating the vertebrae and causing asphyxia. To have
effected death in this manner the blow must have been
delivered by someone skilled in a knowledge of human
anatomy.
As the young woman's white shirtwaist was opened
eight dollars and sixty-two cents in currency fell out; also
a bank check for twenty-five thousand dollars drawn on
the Garfield National Bank, dated August I5, 1898, made
payable to Emeline C. Reynolds, signed by Dudley Gideon and indorsed by S. J. Kennedy.
The bank was not far from the hotel. The only name
on the check that was familiar to me was Gideon. I knew
of a race-track bookmaker by that name, whose headquarters were in the Grand Hotel, but his first name was Dave,
not Dudley.
Detective Davis, who was in the room, was sent to
the Garfield National Bank to inquire about Gideon, Emmeline Reynolds, and S. J. Kennedy. On the window sill
I found a prescription blank such as is furnished in pads
to physicians by medicine manufacturers. It was made out
to Mr. and Mrs. E. Maxwell, Grand Hotel. These were
the names which appeared on the hotel register as the




THE MAN IN THE STRAW HAT


57


occupants of Room 84. They had registered the day
before.
Davis reported that the bank had no depositor named
Dudley Gideon or Emeline C. Reynolds but did have
a client, Dr. Samuel J. Kennedy, a dentist, with offices
at No. 60 West Twenty-second Street, who carried a
small account. This office was about nine blocks south
of the hotel. Davis was instructed to find Dr. Kennedy
and interview him.
Newspapers had been informed of the finding of the
body. Scenting a sensational white-light murder mystery,
they spread the story on their front pages. They reached
the conclusion, which we were not warranted in doing,
that the dead woman was Emeline C. Reynolds, whose
name appeared upon the check.
Davis returned with the information that he had talked
with Dr. Samuel J. Kennedy and that he denied knowing
an Emeline Reynolds or any woman of the description
which Davis had given him. The dentist was married and
lived on Staten Island.
Much may be learned from a minute examination of
weapons found at the scene of murder. They have always
intrigued me, and this, I suppose, is because they have
so often revealed the only clues. I studied the homemade
bludgeon. Inside the lead pipe, to stiffen it and make its
blow more deadly, was a piece of thin iron rod which had
recently been severed from a longer piece. It had been
made to kill and not to wound, I reasoned. As I fingered
the lead pipe a gray smear came upon my hands, the usual
coating that rubs from the surface of lead. This circumstance, of no importance at this moment, tucked itself
away in my memory, a matter of habit.
A hotel maid told me of finding the body. It was a busy
hotel. Had anyone seen the woman about? Burns, a waiter
in the hotel dining room, had attended the young woman
at luncheon immediately after she had registered the day




58     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
before. She had asked that the meal be charged against
her room account. Burns went out to inquire at the desk
if this could be done and was told that cash would be
required, since she had brought no baggage. He went back
to advise her of this. She was gone.
That evening the young woman came through the
dining room with a man wearing a straw hat. McGregor,
the head waiter, called Burns's attention to her, and he
then went to Room 84 and knocked at the door. It was
opened by the woman. He asked for payment of the check,
and she offered him a ten-dollar bill. At that moment a
man was seated within the room reading a newspaper.
Burns could not see his face. Apparently the woman had
not left the hotel after that, for the money which fell
from her shirt was the change given for the ten-dollar bill.
Gregory, the hotel night clerk, recalled that at 2:30
A. M. next morning a man wearing a straw hat had come
down the stairway. An elevator operator recalled taking
a couple up to the room the night before, but he was not
certain that the dead woman was the companion of the
man he had taken up. Davis, a colored bellboy, told of
taking a bottle of wine to the room during the night. He
had gone into the room. The man and woman were there.
He had asked the man if he should draw the cork and
was told not to, but to leave a corkscrew behind. The bellboy giggled to himself over this, for one accustomed to
champagne would know that corkscrews were not needed
to open bottles of sparkling wine. Thus the incident was
firmly imbedded in the colored man's mind.
Yet who was the dead woman and the man who had
been with her?
A middle-aged woman from Mount Vernon appeared,
who answered this question. She was Mrs. Reynolds, the
mother of Emeline C. Reynolds, who had cut loose from
her parental home in Mount Vernon and had been living




THE MAN IN THE STRAW HAT


59


in an apartment in New York City. She identified the
body as that of her daughter.
I talked with Mrs. Reynolds late in the afternoon in
the station house.
Dolly, as the mother called Emeline, was an unusual
type. For a time she had worked in a Mount Vernon candy
store, but friends told her that she had too much personality to be behind a counter and that she ought to go
into business for herself. She quit the candy store and
sold books and, on occasion, did odds and ends for lawyers, serving processes and looking up witnesses. One
thing was predominant in her nature. She craved money
and thought as much of five cents as ordinary mortals
think of five dollars. She made out well with her books.
Although she was a book agent, her personality won her
audiences. She was vivid and pretty. Men especially welcomed her calls. It was on such a business visit that Dolly
met a broker, and thereafter she gave up the family home
and went to live in the apartment. This broker had introduced her, the mother said, to a New York City dentist.
This dentist, Dolly told her mother, was treating an
ulcerated tooth. His name was Samuel J. Kennedy, and
his office, the mother recalled, was on West Twentysecond Street. Dolly also had told her that on one of
her visits to the dentist he had told her of a man he knew
"who was in with a jockey who rode horses with an electric
saddle" and could bring in his mounts ahead of the field.
Mrs. Reynolds spoke to her husband about the jockey
and the saddle and wondered if Mr. Reynolds would put
money on such a venture.
"It might be a swindle," the father said.
"Oh, no," spoke up Dolly. "The doctor's all right. He
couldn't afford to be mixed up in anything that wasn't
honest."
Dolly spoke of winnings at odds of fifty to one, which




6o     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
she had been told might be realized from a small investment in the saddle. Later she drew five hundred dollars
from her savings account.
According to my computations, the twenty-five-thousand-dollar check which fell from the young woman's corset might represent five hundred dollars placed on a
winning bet at fifty to one odds, an event commonly known
At race tracks as a big killing. Whether she actually invested
five hundred dollars in such a venture no way existed then,
or exists now, to determine. Her withdrawal from the
savings account was established, but it was in cash. No
check was ever found to trace the course of the money
after it left her hands. She did not have it in her possession when her body was found.
My attention quite naturally turned to Dr. Kennedy.
I found him in his office, which he shared with his father.
He was a slim man, about thirty, with a small black mustache. He greeted me with gentlemanly coolness.
"Doctor, you know Emeline Reynolds," I said to him.
"You said you didn't know her. Why, she was a patient
of yours."
He hesitated for a moment, then quickly, "Oh, yes, yes.
Is that the one you mean? I know her."
I requested him to come to the station house with me.
He went to a closet and took out a soft hat. I noticed
a derby in the closet and a new bicycle cap. There was no
straw hat, although this was New York's hot season.
"Have you got a straw hat?" I asked.
"No," he replied.
"Do you usually wear a soft hat?"
"No. Usually a derby."
"How does it happen that you have both a soft and
a derby hat in the closet?" I queried.
"It looked like rain this morning, so I wore the soft
hat from my home and carried the derby in a bag in
my hand."




THE MAN IN THE STRAW           HAT      bI
It struck me that it was the habit of most New Yorkers
to wear hard derby hats in a rain.
I told Dr. Kennedy to get ready to go to the station
house. I picked up the cap and found that it bore the
label of Smith & Gray, hatters, with a store near by. I
took Kennedy to the station house and then hurried to the
hat store. Here I found a clerk who knew Dr. Kennedy
and who said that he recalled selling a straw hat and a
cap to the dentist the day before Dolly Reynolds's body
was found. Thus a straw hat was placed in Dr. Kennedy's possession, although he denied owning one.
On my way back to the station house I got thinking
about the twenty-five-thousand-dollar check. The name
Dudley Gideon had a strange significance. Dave Gideon
was, as I have said, a bookmaker. Had this name been
signed to the check it would have been forgery. As it was
the name on the check was merely fictitious. But I had
heard that Dr. Kennedy had a friend whose first name
was Dudley.
At the station house McClusky directed me to get hotel
employees who might identify Kennedy as the man with
the straw hat who had come down the stairs, or the man
who had been seen in the dining room with Dolly or in
Room 84 with her.
Kennedy was placed in line with a number of other
men. The witnesses were brought in. The head waiter
picked him out as the man he had seen passing through
the dining room with the young woman; Davis, the colored bellboy, who had served the champagne and left the
corkscrew behind, picked him out as the man who was in
the room with Dolly and who had paid for the wine. And
Gregory, the night clerk, identified him as the man who
had come down the stairs at 2: 30 A. M. wearing a straw
hat.
I searched Dr. Kennedy. On the left-hand side of his
underpants I found a blue-black smudge like that which




62     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
had come upon my hands while examining the bludgeon
in the hotel room. The night Dolly was murdered had
been hot. Lead would soften, and the surface coating
would come off easily on any object rubbed against it.
Dr. Lederle, a noted chemist, said that the smear upon
Dr. Kennedy's underwear was lead.
Kennedy was formally charged with the murder of
Emmeline Reynolds.
Whence had come the bludgeon? It was a homemade
affair. Its place of manufacture might be found. With
the aid of Detective Smith I searched the basement of
the Kennedy home. Smith found a piece of lead pipe in a
cigar box. On a work bench I found a small section of
iron rod from which a piece recently had been cut. A mechanical engineer asserted that the iron rod found in the
basement and that inside the bludgeon had been one piece.
So much for the history of this homemade weapon.
The motive for this murder was obscure. I sought to
establish it more firmly by inquiring into Dolly's past.
Here I got a picture quite different from the one first
given to us. Dolly, after leaving her Mount Vernon home,
had taken up with the broker. Her parents and friends
knew nothing of this. He furnished her with money, but
she continued to do odds and ends. She had saved every
cent she could and had accounts in a number of savings
banks. She seldom rode street cars but walked and saved
the fare. She was penurious and would quarrel over a
penny's change.
The story which has just been related, with many other
details too voluminous to be repeated here, was retold
in court at Kennedy's trial. He was convicted and sentenced to die. This verdict was reversed by a higher court
on the grounds that Kennedy had not been permitted to
reply to one of his identifiers in the police station the day
he was arrested and also because the trial court had erred




THE MAN IN THE        STRAW     HAT      63
prejudicially in permitting a witness to testify to hearsay.
Kennedy was tried a second time.
While this trial was under way an incident occurred
which shows what a murder man sometimes encounters.
A man whom I had never seen claimed that he heard me
tell Detective Smith on a ferry boat coming from Kennedy's home that if he, Smith, would make his testimony
"good and strong" about the finding of the lead pipe it
would be a feather in his cap. No such thing came from
my lips. The man did not tell his story on the witness stand,
but it reached the newspapers.
The district attorney took hold of the stranger, who
denied the story. He proved to be a poor peddler, who,
never having seen his name in print, injected himself into
the case to get a thrill. In my experience I have met many
seeking the same thing. Not all were peddlers. Some came
from higher stations in life, but had the same craving
for publicity.
The second trial resulted in a disagreement. A third
trial ended the same way, and finally the charge against
the dentist was dismissed, and he stands cleared of the
accusation.
Who did kill Dolly Reynolds? This question has been
asked for years.
The reader may ponder the question while I add a sidelight to the picture. Dolly, as has been pointed out, craved
money. She had a firm determined chin and a square little
jaw. She had brushed against the world quite a bit and
had little fear. She went to unusual lengths to earn small
fees. An incident in her life shows this. A lawyer had given
her a paper to serve upon a clergyman who had avoided
service for some months. Finally Dolly arranged to have
the minister marry her and thus gained access to him and
went through a mock ceremony of marriage, handing the
clergyman the process as he was about to bless her. My
surmise is that if anyone owed her money and did not pay




64


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


on demand, or attempted to swindle her, Dolly would
have made life pretty miserable for that person.
Dolly died thinking perhaps that a fortune had come
into her hands. But the check that fluttered from her
corset was worthless. In the room she had a sip of champagne, perhaps to toast her dream of wealth so suddenly
come true. A woman scarcely would have put into her
bosom a worthless check knowing it to be such. What
happened after that no one, I fear, will ever know. It
remains one of those unfinished spots that appear in so
many murder pictures.
For a time there was such a dark spot in the picture
of what had happened to Mrs. Anna Kronman, a woman
built in a pattern vastly different from that in which life
had cast Dolly Reynolds. A small whisky glass removed
the dark spot.
Mrs. Kronman, just past thirty-two, had no great yearning for money. She was prepossessing, always modishly
but modestly attired, and took infinite pains to make her
little apartment at No. 260 West Thirty-fifth Street attractive and comfortable for herself and husband. He
was a wholesale produce dealer. The couple were moderately well off. Mrs. Kronman had jewels and good clothes,
but the thing she most desired had come into her life and
had gone. She was childless. A child had been born to
her but had died.
On August 7, I899, Mrs. Kronman sat alone in the
living room of her apartment. On a table near by was a
photograph of her child. Draped over chairs were the
clothes the little one had worn. Almost every day Mrs.
Kronman locked herself in her apartment and, surrounded
by the trinkets and apparel of her dead child, indulged
her mother love in reminiscent fancy and tragic contemplation. Occasionally she wept. Relatives and friends remained away from the apartment, knowing that Mrs.




THE MAN IN THE STRAW           HAT      65
Kronman spent hours in this way. They did not want
to disturb her.
Late in the afternoon of the seventh I stepped into the
Kronman apartment. The child's photograph, trinkets,
and apparel were as she had left them. Some hours before
Mrs. Kronman had died in Roosevelt Hospital. She had
been beaten to death in her apartment. The murderer had
crashed the blunt end of an axe against her skull, causing
a number of wounds. Any one of them would have been
fatal.
Her jewelry was missing. There were signs about the
place of the professional thief's hurried search for valuables.
Other detectives were sent to question the husband.
They established what jewelry had been taken from the
apartment.
I remained in the apartment to build the picture. If
I seem to dote upon building pictures as I approach each
murder case it is because of an instinctive mental process.
Back in an earlier chapter I told how Byrnes went about
getting a picture in the Hanier murder case by looking
at three whisky glasses on the bar in Hanier's little grog
shop. His exploit had settled into my mind as a pattern.
On the wooden cover of a stationary washtub in the
rear hallway of the Kronman apartment I found a small
business card containing the name and address of a photo.
grapher. Near this card was an empty whisky glass. A
sniff of it convinced me that it recently had contained
liquor. A look into a pantry above the tub revealed a bottle
of whisky partly used.
A detective sent to interview the photographer reported
that one of his solicitors had been at the apartment in
the morning; had knocked at the door; had canvassed
Mrs. Kronman for her patronage and left his card in
Mrs. Kronman's hand. He had not entered the apartment. It was obvious that Mrs. Kronman had dropped,




66     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
the card on the tub cover near the whisky glass. Her husband said she was not fond of whisky and that he kept
the liquor on hand for visitors.
An ice box stood near the tub close to the dumb-waiter.
An axe lay on the floor in the corner, and near its blade
was a small pool of blood, where Mrs. Kronman's body
had lain. I had seen her body and had concluded after
examining the wounds upon her head that the murderer
had not hit her to render her insensible but had deliberately attacked her with intent to kill or he would not
have struck her repeatedly, inflicting each time a fatal
wound.
Now, I reasoned that the murderer was known to Mrs.
Kronman and probably well known to her; that he was a
man, for the blows were dealt by a strong arm; and that
Mrs. Kronman had invited him to a drink. Had it been a
woman friend who drank, undoubtedly Mrs. Kronman
would have joined her in a libation, and after that the
whisky glasses would have been returned to their places
in the pantry where Mrs. Kronman had placed the bottle.
This picture came to me: The murderer was so well
known to the woman that he had killed her to prevent
her from naming him, hence the repeated fatal blows.
My idea of murder inquiry, however, is to dwell not too
long on the picture process but simultaneously to set the
net for the slayer.
The janitor in the apartment house told me of the arrival of ice in the morning. He put the ice in the dumbwaiter, hauled it up, and Mrs. Kronman took it off. The
piece of ice was in the ice box. Its edges showed that it
had been chipped; that apparently it was too large a piece
to fit into the refrigerating chamber and the chipping
had been done with an axe, the axe on the floor. Its blunt
edge was covered with blood stains.
The picture was unfolding. The murderer standing at
the tub near the ice box, drinking his whisky, had wit



THE MAN IN THE STRAW HAT


67,


nessed Mrs. Kronman chopping the ice, and that ill-fated
act had suggested to him the weapon he would use, the
axe in her own hands.
A woman living in the apartment on the floor below
Mrs. Kronman's said she had heard no screams or noise
of a struggle, but that same morning, while she was leaving the house to get some milk for her husband's oatmeal,
a man about twenty-eight years old came up to her and
asked her on what floor Mrs. Kronman lived. She directed
him to the top floor. He was a stocky man with a black
mustache and a large nose. His features were dark.
In a city the size of New York men of that description
are as common as lamp-posts and as much alike.
Another witness was found who had seen the same
man in the vicinity of the apartment house on the same
morning. I was convinced that the man was not a stranger
to Mrs. Kronman, so I cut back on the picture and decided
to locate friends of Mrs. Kronman.
The woman bore an unblemished reputation. She was
above flirtations. She admitted no one except closest
friends to her apartment, and none of these had been men.
Two of her nieces were found. We questioned them at
great length. When we put questions about the possibility
of a male visitor with a big nose having been admitted
by Mrs. Kronman to her apartment, the two girls were
silent, apparently fearful lest whatever they might say
would mar the reputation of their aunt.
Later the young women advised us that they had recalled all of their aunt's friends, and that the only person
they could think of who resembled the man with the big
nose was the son of an elderly woman, Mrs. Neufeld, who
lived on the lower East Side. His name was Billy. His
mother had brought him to the Kronman apartment on
a friendly call during religious holidays, and on this occasion Mrs. Kronman had displayed gifts of jewelry from
her husband.




68


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


From then on the picture was speedily finished. Mrs.
Kronman's jewelry was traced to the possession of Neufeld. He was convicted in twelve minutes by a jury, the
speediest result I ever witnessed in a criminal court. He
was executed.
The Kronman case became an important pattern which
figured vitally in later cases. It had a most uncanny aspect.
It was Mrs. Kronman who unwittingly suggested the
crime by displaying her jewelry and who also suggested
the means by which her end was so horribly encompassed
-the axe with which she chopped the ice. This has happened in so many cases that it would seem that pictures
often supply the murderer with motive and the means for
murder.


A&. L




CHAPTER VII


THE POISON CYCLE RESUMES
A    RM in arm and chatting gayly a young man and
woman swept through the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria
hotel shortly after noon on November 29, I898. They had
just been married in a near-by church.
Two weeks later the couple hurried up the brownstone
steps of a fashionable boarding house at No. 257 West
End Avenue. They were met at the door by Mrs. Bellinger,
the proprietoress who effusively welcomed the honeymoon.
ers. She knew them both. The bride had lived in the house
before her marriage.
The man was Roland Burnham Molineux, a handsome,
athletic young clubman and son of a respected former
officer in the Civil War. The bride had been Miss Blanche
Chesbro, who, sometime before her marriage, had lengthened her name to Chesebrough. She was tall, dark, and
in her middle twenties. She dressed stunningly and possessed a voice that won her distinction as a choir singer.
She had been taken up by a rather lively gaited social set
on Long Island. Young Molineux was credited with having made quite a catch. Miss Chesebrough had been much
sought after by men admirers.
Her beauty was remarkable. People spoke of her as
the true Gibson girl, a living replica of the Junoesque crea69




70     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
tion of Charles Dana Gibson's artistic pen. Her beauty
was the more striking because, though one of her eyes
was glass, nature had made ample compensation for this
blemish by accentuating other factors that go to create
womanly charm.
Young Molineux and his bride settled down in the
West End house to enjoy their honeymoon.
It was soon interrupted by a series of devastating disclosures brought about chiefly by many hours of official toil
on the part of Captain McClusky, McCafferty, and myself, and by much newspaper activity.
The cycle of poison murders that had begun in I89I
with the Harris case, followed by the Buchanan case, was
again set in motion, this time by a man of scholarly attainments and social standing who knew about all there was
to know about the deadliest of poisons and their uses.
On the afternoon of December 28, I898, Captain
McClusky called me into his office and set before me
a small, blue bottle, a silver bottle holder, and a piece
of crumpled wrapping paper with a name and address
sprawled upon it. These articles had been sent to McClusky by the coroner's physician, Dr. Albert Weston,
who also had reported that a widow, Mrs. Katherine
Adams, had died that morning in her apartment at No.
6I West Eighty-Sixth Street after taking a dose of headache remedy from the bottle. Her body was at the morgue,
where an autopsy was being performed.
No Murder Clinic or Homicide Bureau was then in
existence in the Detective Bureau, but McCafferty and
I had handled most of the homicides. I carried the articles
into the general assembly room for detectives and began
an examination of them.
The bottle was of dark blue glass, one-ounce size, and
bore a printed label, Bromo Seltzer, with the manufacturer's name and directions for using its contents. Apparently it was a genuine bottle of the headache remedy, yet,




THE POISON CYCLE RESUMES


71


as I turned it in my fingers, I saw no name blown into
the glass as was the manufacturer's well-known practice.
The color of the glass was darker blue than the bona
fide Bromo Seltzer bottle.
The label seemed to be genuine, but had the appearance
of having been soaked in water, removed from another
bottle, and pasted on this one. A hurried trip to a near-by
drug store placed me in possession of a genuine bottle
as an exemplar. This was of two-ounce size and over its
cork was a thin, evenly applied coating of paraffin, while
over the stopper in the dark blue bottle the paraffin veneer
was thick and irregular, as if pressed down hurriedly by
human fingers. And the name Bromo Seltzer was blown
into the two-ounce bottle l
I dropped the dark blue bottle into the silver holder.
It fitted in precisely. The genuine bottle was a trifle too
large to go into the holder. An obvious conclusion came
to mind. The person who had manipulated the dark blue
bottle had discovered that a genuine bottle of Bromo Seltzer would not fit into the holder so had substituted the
smaller dark blue bottle, dressing it up to look like the
genuine bottle. Why such a person had gone to all this
trouble was not apparent. The fact was known that Mrs.
Adams, after taking a dose from the dark blue bottle, had
died under suspicious circumstances, and this was enough
to start the police machine.
The piece of wrapping paper bore the words, "Mr.
Harry Cornish, Knickerbocker Athletic Club, Madison
Avenue and Fourty-fifth [sic] street, New York City."
The piece had been torn from a larger sheet and bore
postage stamps canceled at the general post office, New
York City, and dated December 23rd P. M. But a Mrs.
Adams, and not the addressee, Harry Cornish, was dead.
Cornish was found at the Knickerbocker Athletic Club,
where he was physical director. He was pale and feeble
when I interviewed him. He was in his thirty-fifth year




72     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
and a man of considerable culture. He had studied medicine at Harvard, but had given this up for a career as
physical instructor. He had specialized in the study of
human anatomy, hoping, he explained, to become perfect
in the cultivation of the human body.
The day before Christmas, he said, he found a package
in his mailbox at the club, carried it into his private office
upstairs, and opened it, throwing the paper wrapper into
a waste basket. Patrick Fineran, his young assistant, came
in. Cornish remarked that someone had sent him a Christmas gift. The package contained a bottle of what looked
like Bromo Seltzer, a small silver bottle holder, a small
envelope, Tiffany embossed, which was empty, and these
were packed in a new light blue Tiffany pasteboard box.
Cornish remarked to his assistant that it was odd the
sender did not include his card. Fineran laughed and
thought it was a joke. He suggested that Cornish keep
the wrapper and perhaps by this means discover the joker.
Cornish fished the wrapper out of the waste basket and
tore off the written address and the canceled stamps.
Later in the day Harry King, a broker, who had been
playing handball in the gym, wandered into Cornish's
office and complained of a headache. Cornish instantly
suggested that he take some Bromo Seltzer. King picked
up a water glass and went to the water cooler to fill it.
The cooler was empty and he did not get his dose.
That night Cornish went to his rooms in Mrs. Adams's
house, where he had been living for several years. In this
house was also Mrs. Florence Rogers, a divorcee, the
daughter of Mrs. Adams. Cornish also was divorced from
his wife. Cornish told Mrs. Rogers of the gift he had
received and described the silver bottle holder. The design
seemed to match silver toilet articles owned by Mrs.
Rogers, and when she mentioned this to Cornish he prom.
ised to bring home the holder so she might look at it.




THE POISON CYCLE RESUMES


73


On the evening of December 27th he brought home
the silver holder and the bottle of supposed Bromo Seltzer.
The next morning Mrs. Adams complained of a headache. Mrs. Rogers suggested a dose of Bromo Seltzer and
asked Cornish for the bottle he had brought home. He
gave it to her. She had some difficulty in pulling the cork,
owing to the heavy thickness of the paraffin. She called
Cornish, and with a fork he pried out the cork and
poured some of the powder into a drinking glass held by
Mrs. Adams.
Mrs. Adams half filled the glass with water, and as it
effervesced she drank quickly. "What a bitterish taste
it has 1" she said, making a wry face. Cornish picked up
the glass and drank the remnant of the dose. He looked
up. Mrs. Adams was writhing in pain and ran into the
bathroom, where she collapsed. Mrs. Rogers and Cornish
went into the bathroom and tried to lift the woman from
the floor. Cornish's knees gave. A hall boy was sent
for a doctor.
Cornish was in violent pain. He hurried out to a near-by
drug store and showed the Bromo Seltzer bottle to the
druggist, who said it looked like a genuine bottle of
the remedy. He gave Cornish a drink of aromatic spirits
of ammonia to relieve him. When he returned to the
apartment he found that Dr. E. F. Hitchcock was attending Mrs. Adams, who had fallen into a stupor. Later
Dr. E. S. Potter was called. Dr. Hitchcock had tasted
of the supposed Bromo Seltzer and was seized with pains
in his stomach and a burning sensation in his throat. He
took the bottle away with him and later turned it over to
the coroner's physician.
In less than an hour Mrs. Adams was dead. Cornish
had taken almost as much of a dose as Mrs. Adams. For
an hour he lay on his bed retching. His constitution was
strong. He had spent years cultivating his body. This
strength saved him. He recovered.




74     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
Dr. Weston, the coroner's physician, who arrived at the
house, detected the odor of bitter almond when he examined the dead woman's mouth. From this odor he suspected that cyanide of potassium had caused her death.
That the bottle might have been filled with this poison in
the Bromo Seltzer laboratory through error was out of
the question. The substitution of the dark blue bottle for
the genuine precluded the possibility of error and pointed,
in my mind, to a diabolical poisoning plot.
Drs. Hitchcock and Potter reported that they had
found traces of "probably cyanide of potassium" in Mrs.
Adams's throat and stomach. Her digestive organs were
sent to Dr. Rudolph Witthaus, noted toxicologist, for
analysis. Cornish hastened to a chemist, who advised him
to tell his story to the authorities. He communicated
with John H. McIntyre, lawyer for Mrs. Rogers, who
also was an assistant district attorney.
Presently Cornish was back at the club, puzzled, and
'frightened to know who had sent him the deadly Christmas gift and why, if the sending of it was the result of a
plot, anyone should have struck at him through Mrs.
Adams. He could think of no enemy filled with such hatred
for him that he would seek his death. In his contact with
club officers and members Cornish had sometimes differed
on athletic policies. He rather vaguely recalled that in
April, 897, he clashed with several club members over the
conduct of club entertainments, and later a disagreement
had arisen over the activities of Bernie Wefers, a noted
sprinter, who was a member of the club and one of its star
athletes. A member of the club's house committee as a result of this disagreement had demanded Cornish's discharge. This member was Roland B. Molineux. When the
club officers refused to discharge the physical director
Molineux resigned and transferred his activities to another
club. Among members of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club
who regretted Molineux's action and sought to have him




ruv
W.-P;L
OTTLV.2


The doctored Bromo Seltzer bottle and the silver
holder in the Adams poisoning case.




76


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


reconsider it was his close friend, Henry C. Barnet, a
broker.
Barnet had died in the meantime. He was taken ill
during the preceding October and passed away November
10, I898. Dr. Wendell Phillips, a member of the club,
had attended Barnet and later, when he grew worse, he
was attended by Dr. Beaman Douglass, a throat specialist,
who diagnosed his illness as diphtheria.
Nineteen days after Barnet's death Molineux married
Blanche Chesebrough, who had been seen frequently in
the club dining room with Barnet. However, no suspicious
circumstances had attended Barnet's death. Dr. Douglass,
in the certificate of death, had given cardiac asthenia induced by diphtheric poisoning as the cause of death. Barnet
had mentioned to the doctor that he was in receipt of a
box of Kutnow powder which lay upon a small table near
his bed. Kutnow powder was a popular stomach remedy.
The wrapper in which Barnet had received the box was
gone, but Dr. Douglass, on November 4th, while his
patient was still alive, carried away the box and sent the
contents to chemists, who reported that their qualitative
analysis indicated that the powder had contained cyanide
of mercury. However, Barnet had been given some calomel which contains mercury, and Dr. Douglass concluded
that death was due to cardiac asthenia caused by diphtheric poisoning, and moreover he had no knowledge
that Barnet had ever tasted of the Kutnow powder. And
d;phtheric poisoning produces upon the human throat
symptoms which are not unlike those which mercury
produces.
My immediate concern was not Barnet's death, but to
investigate the poisoning of Mrs. Adams. The Barnet
matter found a place in my memory and came alive a
little later.
On the bottom of the silver holder sent to Cornish I
found the letter "L" and a crescent stamped into the




THE POISON CYCLE RESUMES


77


silver. With this mark to guide me I found the maker of
the silver holder in Newark, New Jersey. Fifteen holders
of this size and pattern had been manufactured and scattered among retail jewelers from Waterbury, Connecticut,
to San Francisco. But since the Cornish wrapper bore the
canceling stamp of the general post office in New York
City out-of-town buyers were eliminated. I confined my
search to the immediate vicinity of New York City. I
found that C. J. Hartdegan, jeweler, Newark, New
Jersey, had purchased one silver holder from the manufacturer.
Newark is but a twenty-minute ride from New York
City. It is a large manufacturing center, and among its
industries was the plant of Morris Herrmann & Company, Nos. 6 and 8 Jersey Street. This firm specialized in
the compounding of dry colors in which rare poisons are
used. In Herrmann & Company's laboratory Molineux
worked as a chemist and color maker.
The date of sale of the holder by the manufacturer to
Hartdegan gave me the approximate time at which the
latter had placed the article in stock, which was sometime
before the Christmas rush. A Hartdegan saleswoman recalled having once polished the holder prior to Christmas.
The holder was not now in stock. Sales books were finecombed to ascertain the date it was sold. Finally a clerk,
running through the sales records, came upon an item of
five dollars and seventy-five cents, but it represented the
sale of a toothpick holder and not a bottle holder. This
sales slip was dated December 2Ist, which was a week
before the death of Mrs. Adams and two days before
the poison package was mailed at the general post office.
Miss Emma Miller, a Hartdegan employee, had made
the sale. I found her at her home. She recalled the sale
on December 2ist. The young man who had purchased
the article had asked for a bottle holder. She knew of no
such article in stock. He suggested that the bottle he had in




78     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
mind using was a Bromo Seltzer bottle. Miss Miller asked
the store manager for a bottle holder, whereupon he suggested offering the silver toothpick holder to the young
man. It suited him and he purchased it.
"What did the man look like?" I asked Miss Miller.
"I believe he had a beard, a reddish beard," she replied.
Back many years, as I have indicated in previous chapters, I had been given an opportunity to study beards.
I reasoned that a red beard probably would be a first
growth on a youthful face.
"How old was the man?" I asked.
"In his early thirties," said Miss Miller. "We were
frightfully rushed. I didn't see a lot of him."
The discovery of the store where the bottle holder
had been purchased was blazed across newspaper front
pages, which were filled with sensational accounts of the
holiday poisoning mystery. Newspapers were referring
inferentially to suspicious circumstances in connection with
Barnet's death. Enterprising newspaper artists built up
wash drawings of the man with the reddish beard. Along
with this were printed facsimiles of the handwriting on the
wrapper of Cornish's poison package.
Molineux and his bride, still honeymooning in the West
End Avenue house, must have watched these accounts
with deepest interest, for Barnet was their mutual friend.
And John Adams, secretary of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, but not related to Mrs. Adams, also was reading the newspapers. He had studied the handwriting
facsimiles most eagerly. His mind ran back to a scene
on December 20, I897, when Roland Molineux, in an
impetuous huff, resigned from the club and bombarded
Adams with letters protesting against the retention of
Cornish.
Adams thought that the handwriting on the Cornish
wrapper bore the closest resemblance to the writing in
Molineux's letters. Strangely too the word "Forty," which




THE POISON CYCLE RESUMES


79


appeared in the address on the wrapper spelled "Fourty,"
was also misspelled this way in the Molineux letters I But,
Molineux had never been seen with a reddish beard 1 He
had worn a mustache, but this had disappeared shortly
before Christmas.
On January 5, I899, Dr. Witthaus reported that Mrs.
Adams had died not from the effects of cyanide of potassium but from the effects of a slower but equally deadly,
corrosive poison, cyanide of mercury, which is used in
the blending of dry colors such as were compounded in
the Herrmann color works where Molineux worked.
Now that Molineux's name was openly being mentioned
in newspapers he began to appear in the company of an
eminent criminal lawyer. This lawyer also was a director
in the club to which Molineux had transferred his membership after his tiff with Cornish. It was Cornish's criticism of the lawyer that had caused Molineux to insist
upon Cornish's discharge.
The first phase of the poison cycle had brought startling
developments. The second phase, even more startling,
merits a separate chapter.




CHAPTER VIII


THE POISON       CYCLE SPINS GIDDILY
G OING back to Newark to settle the question of the red
beard, it occurred to me that if Molineaux were implicated
in the poisoning of Mrs. Adams he had made no attempt
at flight. Flight is one of the surest signs of guilt, and evidence of it is readily accepted in court of law as a damning
circumstance.
Molineux was in possession of newspaper accounts of
our work each day. He must have known we were slowly
approaching the murderer's door. Yet he appeared much
in public, unconcerned and gay, but generally in the company of his lawyer.
Experience will teach a detective that there are substitutes for flight. A murderer may remain close by the scene
of his crime, know that he is suspect, but trust himself
to the enfolding embrace of his lawyer, whose client's
guilt is automatically denied by the mere fact that he has
become his defender. The professional criminal appropriately calls his lawyer "my mouthpiece."
Hundreds of times I have had criminals before me who
I knew to a moral certainty were guilty. But when I tried
to examine them their answer has been, especially in recent
years: "Excuse me, mister, but on the advice of counsel
I can't say a word."
80o




THE POISON CYCLE SPINS GIDDILY                81
They become mum as sleeping clams. This, of course, is
their legal right, and also it makes flight unnecessary.
At headquarters before leaving for Newark I had
heard that Molineux had sent word to McClusky that
he would willingly talk to the police at any time, but in
the presence of his lawyer. McClusky had smiled at
this, assuring Molineux that the police inquiry was being
directed at others. McClusky had a strategic motive in
doing this. The time he spent at Delmonico's was not
wasted.
I interviewed Miss Miller again. Her memory had not
greatly improved since our last talk. She was positive that
the man who bought the bottle holder had a reddish
beard, and that he had come into the store around 5 P. M.,
for an arc light, she asserted, was burning. She could not
have mistaken a mustache for the beard, although it had
been my experience that witnesses frequently transpose the
two. It was necessary to test the accuracy of her observation and memory. I asked her about other sales she had
made on December 2ist. She was unable to recall the
face of any customer she had waited on and she gave
faulty descriptions of persons who had been in the store
when I first entered.
Though the beard question was firmly settled in her
mind it wasn't in mine. Could anyone else have seen the
red-bearded man come out of the store or enter it on
December 2 st? The Christmas shopping season was at its
height on that day. Probably the Newark Police Department had extra men in the shopping section. Talking this
over with Detective Farrell in Newark police headquarters I found that he had been near Hartdegan's on December 2ist. And Farrell knew Molineux. The detective had
been a well-known boxer in his younger days and Molineux
had been a prize-fight fan.
"On the twenty-first," Farrell told me, "I saw Molineux
walking up from the Hartdegan store. He spoke to me;




82


M MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


said he had just been to dinner with his boss. It was a
little after 2 P. M."
"Did he have a beard?" I asked.
"Nothing of the kind," said Farrell.
I step ahead of my story to explain that Farrell testified to these facts and, moreover, the boss, who Molineux
had said had been to lunch with him, also testified that
no such thing occurred on December 2 I st. Miss Miller's
faulty observation was obvious.
Reading in the newspapers of Newark developments,
Molineux hurried with witnesses to Newark and confronted Miss Miller. She declared positively that he was
not the purchaser of the bottle holder. She was positive
that he could not have worn a false beard. Fresh from
this assuring trip, Molineux again presented himself to
McClusky-accompanied by his lawyer-and offered to
do anything McClusky asked him to do. He wanted to
clear himself. McClusky smiled and intimated again that
his men were working in another direction.
The fact that Dr. Douglass had sent the Kutnow powder found on Barnet's sickbed table to a chemist kept popping up in my mind. Then from day to day persons I
interviewed, who knew both Molineux and the broker,
kept referring to the fact that Barnet and Blanche Chesebrough, now Mrs. Molineux, had been on most intimate
terms.
Love, jealousy, spite, and one man's desire for one
woman above all others furnish the most powerful motives
not only for murder but for self-destruction, far more
powerful than a squabble two men might have had over
the conduct of club affairs. And where the motive is possession of a woman whom another man had won, the
murderer, working out his plot under the confusing torments of a frenzied desire, makes glaring slip-ups.
A long way back I had begun a study of poisons. I found
the subject most engaging. When the opportunity pre



THE POISON CYCLE 'SPINS' GIDDILY


83


sented itself I discussed poisons with Dr. Witthaus, who
probably knew at that time more about poisons, especially
the cyanides, than any other living American toxicologist.
Cyanides, I learned, were treacherous poisons; in the
hands of a skilled chemist they could be manipulated and
mixed with other substances so that death from them
might be made to look natural. Their effect upon the
human throat might be taken for the symptoms of several
fatal diseases.
With McCafferty I called again upon Dr. Douglass,
the throat specialist, whose diagnosis of Barnet's death
now puzzled me. It was a rather unpleasant interview
and a strange one, a police detective taking issue with
a skilled medical practitioner on the technical aspects of
his profession. Dr. Douglass was quite upset. He demanded to know what Barnet's death had to do with
Mrs. Adams's murder, since she had died of poisoning
by cyanide of potassium whereas, if poison had been admitted to Barnet's system, it was cyanide of mercury.
Just what connection the two deaths had, I advised the
doctor, would develop in due course; what McCafferty
and I wanted to know was whether the doctor might have
been mistaken in ascribing Barnet's death to a natural
cause.
Dr. Douglass's face reddened. He admitted that he had
taken specimens of the infection in Barnet's throat with
a swab and had made a culture but found no evidence of
diphtheric poisoning. But, he added, it might have been
clinical diphtheria. He was unable to make clear to McCafferty or to me just where the difference lay. Then he
admitted that the chemist to whom he had sent the box
of Kutnow powder reported that it contained cyanide of
mercury. But he was certain that no signs of mercurial
poisoning appeared on the swab. Nor could he say whether
Barnet had ever tasted of the Kutnow powder in the box
or, if he had, that the powder had caused his death. Barnet




84     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
had received other boxes of the same powder earlier. He
might possibly have taken some of this.
I asked Dr. Douglass for the box of powder. It was
a small tin box of sample size. The name Kutnow
Brothers, No. 13 Astor Place, New York City, was on
the box, and across the bottom a small printed label: "This
box does not require internal revenue stamps." I took
the powder to Dr. Witthaus.
In the meantime an inquest into the death of Mrs.
Adams had begun on February 9th. At each session
Molineux was present with his lawyer at his side. He
appeared also as a witness.
A visit to Kutnow Brothers' office revealed that the
tin box was genuine. It was a sample box such as the
firm had been giving away on written request, and to
passers-by on the Boardwalk at Asbury Park, New Jersey.
The label on the bottom indicated an important fact.
This particular box had been mailed, or given away, after
the federal government had decided that samples of patent
medicine need not bear revenue stamps. Reference to the
bill submitted by the printer who had made the labels
established that they had been printed and delivered to
Kutnow Brothers some time before Barnet's death.
For the best part of a week I sat with several assistants
at a desk in Kutnow Brothers' office running through
thousands of written requests for samples mailed in from
all parts of the world. Finally a young woman who was
helping me came upon a sheet of robin's egg blue note
paper with three interclasped crescents embossed at the
top. The handwriting seemed like the penmanship on the
Cornish wrapper. I read the letter:
GENTS:
Please send me a sample of salts to I620 Broadway and oblige
Yours, etc.,
H. CORNISH.




I --


fi      WM      4


q At 4I4 oA^^


4


^


4. W


1674'


The fake Cornish letter on robin's-egg-blue
note paper with interclasped crescents which
Carey found in his long search through patent
medicine letter files.




86     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
Cornish again And an address —620 Broadway. To
this address I hastened and found it to be a small store
where newspaper want ads were taken in and where private letter boxes were rented to persons who preferred for
their own reasons to receive mail here rather than at post
offices or their homes. A man named Koch ran the place.
He rented boxes to whoever wanted them and asked no
questions. On December 2I, I898, he had rented a box
to a man who gave the name of Cornish. And in the
box at the present moment were two unclaimed letters
addressed to Cornish. These I found to be correspondence
from Frederick Stearns & Company, manufacturing pharmacists in Detroit and Von Mohl & Company, patent
medicine manufacturers in Cincinnati.
The Stearns letter was in response to inquiries from
"Cornish" about a young man named A. A. Harpster,
who had been a clerk in the Knickerbocker Athletic Club
and friend of both Cornish and Molineux. Harpster had
worked for the Stears Company and so had Cornish. The
Von Muhl letter replied to a request for a sample of pills
which were advertised "for men only."
Telegraphic requests to these two concerns brought us
the original letters received by them from "Cornish."
Both were written on the robin's egg blue note paper with
the embossedcrescents; both were in the familiar writing
on the Cornish wrapper with an obvious, and unsuccessful,
attempt to make the writing appear different. They had
not been written by the real Cornish.
These letters, together with all other handwriting specimens thus far gathered, and some admitted specimens of
Molineux's handwriting, were turned over to Handwriting Expert William J. Kinsley.
N. A. Heckman, who also operated a private mail box
agency at No. 257 West Forty-second Street, read of the
discovery in Koch's place and recalled that on May 27,
I898 (five months before Barnet fell ill), he had rented




THE POISON CYCLE SPINS GIDDILY


87


Box 217 to a man who gave the name of H. C. Barnet.
"Barnet" had called for his mail about twenty times since
renting the box and had received shipments of patent medicine.
For some reason "Barnet" like "Cornish" had failed
recently to call for mail and, as had happened at Koch's
a letter lay unclaimed in Box 2I7. It was addressed to
H. C. Barnet and was from the Marston Remedy Company, 15 Park Place, New York City. This firm also
specialized in remedies exploited as "for men only." The
context of this letter indicated that "Barnet" had recently
filled out an application blank for a sample and, in this
blank, gave a self-diagnosis of his ailment.
I obtained this application and startling developments
followed. It was written in the familiar handwriting. In
blank spaces provided for answers to diagnostic inquiries
"Barnet" had written his age as 31, his chest measurement as 37, his waist circumference as 32. To the question
"Has any relative ever died from consumption or scrofula?" the answer was indicated by underlining the word
"consumption." A few days later I learned that Molineux's maternal grandmother had died of consumption
some years before in East Hartford, Connecticut.
The measurements of the real Henry C. Barnet were
far from fitting those given in the diagnostic application.
But inquiry at a tailor shop patronized by Molineux disclosed his chest measurement was 37, his waist 32, and
his age, according to a birth certificate in the files of the
Board of Health, was 311
These additional handwriting specimens were turned
over to Kinsley. He reported that one man had written
them all-Molineux. A battery of well-known handwriting experts from various large cities were summoned to
New York City and they studied the handwriting specimens each at a different time and unaware that other experts were also working on the case.




88     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
The inquest was still under way. From questions Molineux's lawyer asked at this inquiry, and Molineux's tactics,
it was obvious that they were trying to throw suspicion
upon Cornish. Remarks dropped by Molineux about
Cornish's activities convinced me that he was having the
physical director shadowed. I determined to find out
whether this was true. I arranged to have McCafferty and
Cornish leave the clubhouse together one afternoon. They
went out the front door; I out a side door. As they gained
the sidewalk a man across the street also moved slowly
in the same direction. I followed at some distance. McCafferty and Cornish turned a corner. Their shadow ran
to the corner. I went up to him and learned he was a
private detective in the employ of an agency hired by
Molineux.
When I communicated this to Assistant District Attorney James W. Osborne he announced that since Molineux
was so eager to aid the police he would be given an
opportunity. So, when the chemist again offered to do
anything McClusky wanted, he was directed to present
himself at Osborne's office. He walked into Osborne's
office with his lawyer.
He took a chair at a long table. He was asked to write
whatever Kinsley, who was also at the table, dictated.
Molineux's lawyer looked on. His client wrote words,
sentences and figures which appeared in all the handwriting specimens we had collected.
The word "forty" he repeatedly spelled with a "u" I
Pleased and confident, he arose and left the room.
This accumulation of admitted handwriting was passed
on to the experts. I resumed the hunt for more patentmedicine correspondence. It was the practice of companies in this field to sell letters they had received asking
for samples. This accounted for the fact that in Barnet's
office desk after his death patent medicine samples he had




Writing on the wrapper in which Cornish received the poisonous Bromo Seltzer.


Admitted handwriting of Roland Molineux which
he penned at the dictation of handwriting expert.




90


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


never sent for were found. His name had gotten on a
suckers' list.
I found a letter in possession of the Fowler Remedy
Company, Modus, Connecticut, asking for a sample of
Rudolph's Specific and inclosing twenty-five cents with the
request that the sample be sent to No. 6-8 Jersey Street,
Newark, New Jersey, the address of the Herrmann
color works. Tracing back I found that Molineux had first
written this letter to a patent-medicine dealer named Burns
who, in turn, had sold it to the Modus company.
It was written on the robin's egg blue note paper with
the interclasped crescents Molineux at the inquest conceded it to be his handwriting.
Then events came with a crash.
The handwriting experts were unanimous in the conclusion that the Cornish and Barnet letters, the Cornish
wrapper, and the diagnosis application were in the handwriting of one person-Molineux.
Dr. Witthaus reported that he had found crystals of
cyanide of mercury in the Kutnow powder found on Barnet's sickroom table, and that the bottle from which Mrs.
Adams had drunk also contained the same deadly crystals.
The coroner's jury accused Molineux of murdering
Mrs. Adams.
McCafferty and I stepped up to Molineux as he was
leaving the inquest room.
"I've got to put you under arrest," I announced.
He grinned, turned to his lawyer, and then came along.
He was nonchalant, confident. He was silent on the way
to prison, but his lawyer, a genial man, talked freely,
commenting upon the outrage committed upon his client.
Molineux did not return to his bride that night, or for
many days and nights that followed.
The day this happened was February 27, I899. The
following day Barnet's body was exhumed and analysis
showed that he had died of poisoning by cyanide of




TH E POISON CYCLE SPINS GIDDILY                91
mercury. The picture of the Barnet murder, however,
was still a little dim and ragged. It lacked substantial
proof of motive; that is, strong, legal proof. I was given
the job to finish this part of the picture.
Barnet, I learned, had never quarreled with Molineux.
On the contrary, they were, to all appearances, the best
of friends. Indeed, both were interested in Miss Chesebrough. Molineux had met her in 1897 during a summer
vacation in Portland, Maine. They met again in I898 in
New York City, where Molineux introduced the woman
to Barnet. Thereafter she was oftener in Barnet's company, dining, riding, and theatergoing.
A suggestive thing entered the picture at this point.
In the fall of 1897 Molineux was a guest aboard the
yacht of a rich young man known as "Sapolio" Morgan,
who had also been seen in Miss Chesebrough's company,
and there was talk of their engagement. Also there was
a guest, Walter S. Baldwin, aboard the yacht. Immediately after breakfast aboard the boat one day Baldwin
fell violently ill and Morgan also complained of terrible
stomach pains. Baldwin died; Morgan recovered. Molineux was not ill, although he had eaten at the same table.
Suddenly in the late fall of I898 Molineux asked Miss
Chesebrough to marry him. She declined. Then Barnet
fell ill and took to his bed in October. Molineux again
pressed the woman to marry him. She agreed. But even
after accepting Molineux she continued to call upon Barnet. During his illness she sent him flowers and visited
him. While he was on his deathbed this note reached him:
I am distressed to learn of your illness. I arrived home Saturday
and am exceedingly sorry to know you have been so indisposed.
Won't you let me know when you are able to be about? I want
so much to see you. Is it that you do not believe in me? If you
would but let me prove to you my sincerity. Do not be cross any
more. And accept, I pray, my best wishes.
BLANCHE.




92     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
A few days later, on November Ioth, Barnet died.
Nineteen days later Molineux married the writer of
the note. It is not within my power to determine whether
Roland Molineux saw that letter written or knew that it
would be written. Nor did Barnet, his friend, ostensibly,
live to know that the writer within a few weeks would
be the bride of Molineux. Nor has anyone ever been able
to say what happened between Barnet and Blanche that
led her to plead "not to be cross any more." These are
unfinished parts of the picture.
My task was not complete, however. Loose ends were
still to be gathered up and put in their place in the larger
picture, that a jury might read its story and act accordingly. At the Herrmann color works we found young Robert Zeller, who had been Molineux's assistant in the
laboratory. He was fond of the chemist. In an unguarded
moment he let slip the fact that Miss Mary Melando,
who also worked in the factory, was fond of Molineux
and often tidied an apartment which the chemist maintained in quarters above the laboratory.
Mary liked fine stationery, and so one morning while
in the apartment she picked up from Molineux's desk several sheets that caught her eye. It was the robin's egg blue
note paper with the interclasped crescents I She admitted
the fact to me, but when it came time for her to testify
at the trial of the man she silently admired she refused to
leave New Jersey. She was within her legal rights, but
a very vital witness for the State of New York. She could
by her testimony put the robin's egg blue paper in the
hands of the accused man. No way existed by which she
could be compelled to obey the mandates of New York
courts, and eminent lawyers saw that the poor working
girl's rights were carefully maintained.
But she did testify, and in New York City. How she
came to do this I shall not detail. Suffice it to say that
she was fond of the theater. She attended one in Paterson,




THE POISON CYCLE SPINS GIDDILY                93
New Jersey, one evening. She left the theater after the
performance in a great hurry and went to the railroad
station. Two trains going in opposite directions pulled in.
A man cried, "This train for Newark." Mary stepped
aboard it. She discovered it was not going toward Newark
but toward Suffern, New York. But the train had started.
She got off at Suffern and stepped into the arms of McCafferty, who was waiting at the depot. Most unwillingly
she testified at Molineux's trial.
Molineux was convicted and sentenced to die for the
murder of Mrs. Adams. An appeal was taken, and for
twenty months he occupied a condemned man's cell in
Sing Sing Prison. Finally the Court of Appeals reversed
the verdict and ordered a new trial on the ground that
the trial court had erred in admitting into evidence at the
Adams trial testimony and documents pertaining to the
Barnet case.
A second trial was had, but Mary Melando and other
New Jersey witnesses were beyond the reach of New York
courts. Mary's testimony at the first trial was not permitted in evidence at the second. An acquittal resulted.
Molineux was never indicted for the murder of Barnet.
While the motive was stronger in the Barnet case, no man
like Fineran had been present to suggest to Barnet that
he save the wrapper in which he received the Kutnow
powder. Thus evidence was lacking to implicate by legal
proof the man accused of Mrs. Adams's murder.
And it was after Barnet's death that the letter signed
H. Cornish was sent to Kutnow Brothers, asking that
samples be sent to the mail box at No. I620 Broadway.
Whether the murderer had intended to send Cornish
Kutnow powders and then switched to Bromo Seltzer is
uncertain unless he knew, through chemical knowledge,
that cyanide of mercury, mixed with bromide of potassium (the base of Bromo Seltzer) would tend to disintegrate and form cyanide of potassium, which is the dead



94     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
lier of the two cyanides. Or he may have discovered also
that cyanide of mercury mixed with stomach-regulating
salts like the Kutnow preparation would remain cyanide
of mercury and that its action upon the membranes of
the throat would produce diphtheric symptoms and fool
physicians, which, in fact, had happened
An extended inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of Baldwin on the Morgan yacht was made.
No conclusive evidence was found that his death had
resulted from poisoning. His remains were not exhumed.
Time had laid an obliterating hand upon whatever evidence of poisoning there once may have been.
In I903 Blanche Chesebrough divorced Molineux and
married a lawyer and went to live in South Dakota.
Molineux wrote a play, The Man Inside, in 1914. It
purported to show the terrors of the death house as seen
by a former inmate. It was taken from his own experience,
but he studiously avoided references to the mooted issues
that arose in his trials. The play was produced on Broadway and failed. After its failure he married the young
woman who had helped him write the piece.
A few months later Molineux, dressed in a gay-colored
bathrobe and a sorry-looking straw hat, ran through the
streets of a small Long Island town shouting and capering like a clown. The chief of police locked him up, and
the following day he was taken to a state institution,
hopelessly insane.
There he died not many years back.
I might add in passing that after Molineux's last trial
I found that the little dark blue bottle from which Mrs.
Adams drank her death potion originally had contained
cyanide of mercury; that it was such a bottle that Roland
Molineux often had received in his laboratory from wholesalers. He used the contents to blend beautiful colorsPrussian blue and English vermilion.
My opinion as to Molineux's guilt? I prefer not to




THE POISON CYCLE SPINS GIDDILY                95
express it and, if I did, what would it avail, now? Briefs
are not required wherever he has gone, nor do I believe
that a murder man's opinions are sought there, either.
Many New Yorkers who remember the trials of Molineux still consider he was innocent. How strange is public
opinion, sometimes. As I was finishing this chapter a
friend told me that for the first time since Molineux was
tried the house where he honeymooned on West End
Avenue had been rented. For years it had no tenant. Now
I wonder why, if so many considered him innocent, that
place was never sold or rented. Surely it wasn't haunted.
No murders were committed there. At least none I ever
heard about.




CHAPTER IX


FIN   DE SIECLE
A     MONG epigrams that rolled from the tongue of
Inspector Byrnes was "the smarter they are the harder
they fall." I don't imagine this was original with him, but
the truth of it was glaringly apparent in the Harris, Buchanan, and Molineux cases. These men were educated
and in varying degrees possessed special knowledge of
poisons.
In September, 900o, there came upon the murder scene
a man thoroughly versed in the processes of the law who
tried his hand, via a proxy, at poisoning, and the cycle
of murders by lethal dosages whirled again and then came
to a stop in so far as New York City was concerned.
Captain McClusky, with his usual economy of details,
handed me an assignment on September 24th. It was at
night after quitting hours. He instructed me to go to
the apartment of a Mr. Rice at No. 500 Madison Avenue.
There I would find the remains of Mr. Rice, who had
died the day before. I was to hold up funeral arrangements and see that the body was removed to the morgue.
I was to question whoever I found in the apartment about
the death of Rice and about his estate.
A thin-faced man admitted me to the apartment along
with several fellow-detectives. He said he was Jones, valet
96




FIN DE SIECLE


97


to the dead man. We advanced into the apartment, and
in the living room at ease sat a short, thin man of about
forty, with a close-cropped Vandyke beard. He introduced
himself as Albert T. Patrick, attorney for Rice. He was
suave, cool, and self-possessed, but Jones moved nervously
about the room as we addressed our inquiries to Patrick.
Rice, the lawyer explained, had died in the apartment
the day before, Sunday, September 23rd. Patrick said
he was not present at the deathbed, but Jones was. Death,
the doctor's certificate explained, was due to natural causes.
The lawyer's answers seemed evasive, and when we asked
for details of Rice's illness and his death he kept referring us to the valet. Jones spoke in a low, quavering voice
and made a poor impression.
The coroner's physician entered the apartment. We
went into the bedroom and viewed the body. I saw the
face of a well-preserved old gentleman about eighty-three,
with white hair. There were signs of conflict and anguish
on the still features.
"The remains will go to the morgue," said the coroner's
physician.
"But arrangements have been made to cremate the
body," Patrick spoke up. "It was Mr. Rice's wish. He
left such a request with me."
"Regardless," said the physician, "the body must go
to the morgue."
"But death was natural," said Patrick.
Jones looked in through the door and quickly withdrew
when the lawyer looked at him. It struck me then that the
valet was fearful, or under the domination of the little
lawyer.
Patrick made one more effort to keep the remains from
the morgue. He said he had written orders from Rice
directing cremation. It was in the form of a letter. The
undertaker spoke up. He said that the crematorium was
being prepared to receive the body. Patrick left.




98     MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
Little was learned on this visit, but the impression
created by Jones and Patrick was far from satisfactory.
At headquarters McClusky enlarged the picture, giving
us details which had come in since we left.
David L. Short, a friend of Patrick's that morning
had presented a check for twenty-five thousand dollars
to a teller named Wallace in Swenson & Company's downtown bank. This check was payable to Abert T. Patrick,
signed by William M. Rice, and endorsed by Albert T.
Patrick. Short asked to have it certified. The teller studied
the check and noted the discrepancy in the spelling of
Albert. He compared the writing and signatures with
other checks made by Rice, who was a depositor, then
handed the check back to Short, advising that before it
could be certified the spellings of the name of endorser and
payee must agree.
Short left but returned quickly with the check reendorsed Abert T. Patrick. Wallace 'phoned to the Riceapartment. Jones answered and said that the check was
genuine because he himself had made it out for Rice, who
had signed it. The teller stamped the bank's certification
upon the instrument and was making an entry of the
transaction in a book when Eric Swenson, one of the bank
partners, looked at the check and directed that Rice be
gotten on the 'phone.
Wallace again called the apartment and insisted upon
speaking with Rice. Reluctantly the valet informed him
that Rice was dead-had just passed away. Wallace told
Swenson of this, and the latter drew a pen through the
certification, canceling it. He handed it back to Short, who
left. Presently Patrick appeared at the teller's window
and insisted that the check be certified in view of the
fact that since Rice was dead payment might be held up
by the probate court. Swenson refused to comply and
Patrick left. The banker consulted his lawyer, James W.
Gerard (later ambassador to Germany), who conveyed




FIN DE SIECLE


'99


the story of the check and Rice's death to the district attorney and McClusky.
Information had been received from two elderly
women, McClusky said, that on Sunday evening they
had called at Rice's apartment with cakes and wine for
the old gentleman, whothey knew well. They rang the
apartment doorbell several times but received no response,
although, at the time, Rice must have been dying, with his
valet at hand. On the heels of this came news that three
checks signed by Rice for $25,000, $135,000, and $65,000,
and payable to Patrick, had turned up at the Fifth Avenue
Trust Company, where Rice also had accounts. A man
named Potts, who shared an office with Patrick, had
deposited the check for $25,000 to Patrick's credit in
another bank and asked that the other two checks be
certified.
We had come into possession of the checks and a letter
signed by Rice directing cremation of his body. I held the
checks up to a light, one check over the other, and found
the Rice signatures to be precisely the same to the slightest flourish. I held the cremation letter before the light
with a check under it. The two signatures agreed perfectly.
They fitted over each other as though they had been
made by the same stamp. Now no matter how often a man
may write his own name there are always variances in his
signatures. A little while later David Carvalho, handwriting expert, was called in and denounced the signatures as
forgeries which had been traced over a genuine signature
thus accounting for their similarity.
While the forgeries became apparent there was yet no
indication that Rice had come to his death under suspicious
circumstances. The nervous actions of Jones, the evasive
replies of Patrick to our questions, and the hurry about,
cremating the body of Rice suggested a motive for his'
death, but the checks might have been forged after his?
death from naturalcauses.




100  MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


"In the meantime," McClusky directed, "pick up Patrick and Jones and hold them for forgery."
Patrick was coming out of a safe-deposit vault, where
he had unsuccessfully attempted to get possession of a
large block of Rice's securities, when I accosted him.
Potts was with him and shrank back when he saw me.
He, too, was under Patrick's domination.
"You're under arrest for forgery," I announced. Patrick grinned at me, then at Potts, and said to the latter,
"Call up that lawyer." Potts scampered off. Patrick went
with me to headquarters, silent all the way. He asked
one question: "Has Jones been arrested?"
The valet was picked up in the Rice apartment by Detective Vallely. Vallely told me that Jones went white
when he was arrested and seemed for a time to be unable
to talk.
"Where's Mr. Patrick?" he finally asked the detective
in a faltering voice.
"He's being arrested, too," said the detective. Jones
braced up.
The two men were placed in adjoining cells and held
for forgery on an affidavit which I signed. McClusky
talked with the prisoners, and their conduct increased his
suspicions.
Rice left relatives and friends in Texas and one of the
latter came on to New York. This man, James A. Baker,
brought with him a telegram which had been received from
Jones on Monday, the day after Rice's death. It read:
MR. RICE DIED EIGHT O'CLOCK LAST NIGHT UNDER CARE PHYSICIAN
DEATH CERTIFICATE OLD AGE WEAK HEART DIARAHUE LEFT INSTRUCTIONS TO BE INTERRED IN MILWAUKEE WITH REMAINS OF
WIFE FUNERAL IO AM TOMORROW AT 500 MADISON AVENUE. WHEN
WILL YOU COME?
C. F. JONES.




FFIN DE SIECLLEE


1IO


The cremation letter attested to the falsity of this
telegram and explained the hurry about disposing of
Rice's remains by means of fire. Texas relatives on Sept.
24 replied to Jones's wire as follows:
PLEASE MAKE NO DISPOSITION OF RICE S REMAINS UNTIL WE
ARRIVE WE LEAVE TONIGHT REACH NEW YORK THURSDAY MORNING.
In spite of this Patrick had gone ahead with the arrangements for cremation, but had been careful to make it
appear that the order for cremation had come from Rice
himself. Apparently there had been a collusive arrangement between the lawyer and valet. And there was. It
came to light in a dramatic way.
A jail guard on duty near the cells occupied by Patrick
and Jones heard groans and, looking into Jones's cell,
saw him writhing on the hard floor. His throat had been
gashed. A penknife, the property of Patrick, lay close
by. A few hours before Jones had been in the district
attorney's office. He had made conflicting but not damaging admissions. He was unable to explain how it had
happened that the two elderly women who had called
with cakes and wine had not been admitted to the Rice
apartment on Sunday evening.
Returning to his cell he had whispered to the lawyer,
explaining what had happened at the interview with the
prosecutor. The lawyer had remarked: "The jig's up.
No use. We're done. You go first and I'll follow." He
then passed Jones his penknife and the valet hacked at
his throat. Patrick had no idea of killing himself, for he
must have known that the shock felt by Jones when he
cut his throat would have made it impossible for him to
pass back the knife so that the lawyer might "follow."
It was apparent that Jones was under the complete domi



102 MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


nation of the lawyer, even to taking his own life at Patrick's suggestion.
The valet, near to death, was removed to the prison
ward in Bellevue Hospital. When Jones was fully recovered I took him to the House of Detention, where he was
no longer near the lawyer. High bail was fixed so that
he would not be liberated. I called on him one morning.
We shook hands. There was an icy, lifeless touch to his
fingers. He could hardly speak.
"How do you feel?" I asked him.
"Terrible. Terrible. Like a man smothering."
He was in great distress. He had reached the point
known in police circles as "the break." His body was limp.
I advised Assistant District Attorney Osborne that it
looked to me as if Jones was ready to talk, and he asked
me to bring the valet to his office.
To Osborne he unfolded the complete story. In my
time no murder conspiracy had ever attained the length
to which Patrick went to encompass the death of Rice. It
was the story of Patrick, a failure as a lawyer, but a superegotist, working with his subservient tool Jones, the
trusted manservant of a kind master and benefactor. Dickens should have known Patrick, and Jones, too.
The story came from Jones's lips in a torrent.
In I897 Jones was a storekeeper in the Capitol Hotel
in Houston, Texas, which Rice owned and operated. The
old man took a liking to Jones, who showed signs of an
education, and engaged him as his valet, companion, and
secretary. Rice was a childless widower and a recluse. He
was possessed of a large fortune and gave generously to
philanthropies. When Rice left for New York City he
took Jones along and the two became the sole occupants
of the apartment at No. 500 Madison Avenue. They
had few callers.
In November, 1899, Jones asserted, a man giving the
name of Smith appeared at the Rice apartment. The valet




FIN DE SIECLE


103


met him at the door and, upon being told that the old
gentleman was in another room, entered. Smith told the
valet that he was seeking evidence to prove that Rice's
residence in Texas was not bona fide. There was pending
at the time a litigation in Texas courts over the estate of
the late Mrs. Rice to which Rice was a party. Smith flattered Jones; told him he was underpaid and unappreciated
and promised if he would furnish the evidence he was
seeking the valet would be rewarded. Jones said that he
could not think of doing a thing like that against a man
who had always befriended him.
Smith left.
A second visit followed in a few days. Smith revealed
that his right name was Albert T. Patrick and that he was
a lawyer hired by the side opposing Rice. He offered the
servant a bribe. For a time Jones demurred, but finally
Patrick put him under his thumb and boldly asked him
to write a letter to which Rice's signature would be forged
and in which it would be made to appear that Rice had
given up hope of winning the lawsuit because proof had
been found of his illegal residence in Texas. Jones wrote
this letter and signed Rice's signature to it. Patrick promised him two hundred and fifty dollars.
The lawyer was deeply interested in Rice's affairs and
questioned Jones at length about them. He learned that
Rice had made a will in i896 in which he left little to his
natural heirs and nearly all of his wealth to the William
Rice Institute, an educational organization in Texas which
the capitalist had founded. The lawyer was solicitous
about the old man's health. Jones told him that while his
employer was past eighty-four he confidently expected
to live many years. His health was good.
In December, i899, Jones and Patrick, while running
through Rice's papers in the apartment, came upon the
i896 will. The lawyer read it and remarked that he
thought it unjust to Rice's natural heirs.




104    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
On a later visit Patrick produced a will he had prepared
in which Rice was to leave him, Patrick, half the estate,
the remainder to be divided among the heirs with little
set aside for the Rice Institute. Jones, at Patrick's direction, copied the will on a typewriter in the apartment.
For this Patrick promised the valet whatever he asked
for and assured him that he would be well taken care of
in the will. For a time, Jones said, he reflected upon what
he was doing and was about to tear up the will when Patrick won him over again.
When Jones asked the lawyer what he intended to do
with the I896 will he replied that he would leave this in
existence so that the heirs of Rice might see how much
better they fared in the latter will and thus refrain from
a contest
The forged will, in its final form, did not suit Patrick.
He had the valet write several substitutes until finally, on
June 30, I900, a document was produced which made
Patrick the sole executor in place of the Rice Institute.
In this will Jones was not mentioned as a beneficiary,
although in the previous drafts he had been remembered.
Now the valet was out in the cold. Patrick apparently had
him under the most complete domination. Patrick was
quick to say that he would take generous care of the valet
when the Rice estate came into his control.
Witnesses to the will were secured by Patrick. One was
Short, and the other a clerk who worked in the lawyer's
office.
At this point the lawyer's plot took a sudden turn. The
appearance of his name in the forged will as residuary
legatee might arouse suspicion when the fact leaked out
that there had always been a deep hostility between Rice
and the lawyer as a result of the will litigation. The rich
widower hated the man, but Patrick took care to keep
out of his sight. Patrick had tried to get around this situ



FIN DE SIECLE


Io0


ation by appearing as a friendly intermediary in negotiations to settle the litigation, but Rice rebuffed him.
The lawyer set about to build up an elaborate background by forgery. In August, 900o, he manufactured a
document purporting to name himself as the agent who
had settled litigation in a way that had pleased Rice. To
carry this picture farther Patrick persuaded Jones to
write a series of thirty letters purporting to be from Rice
to Patrick in which Rice's business affairs were intimately
discussed and in which it was made to appear that the
capitalist reposed the greatest confidence in the lawyer.
One letter gave Patrick explicit instructions as to how
Rice desired the terms of the forged will executed. Carbon copies of these faked documents were inserted in the
Rice files by the valet.
To insure against slip-up in his plan to gain control of
all Rice's estate Patrick made a bold move. He caused the
valet to prepare a forged instrument giving him, Patrick,
detailed instructions from Rice to take full possession
and control of his securities valued at several million
dollars.
His legalistic mind went farther. From Jones he obtained three genuine Rice checks which the old man had
signed but which had not yet gone out to the payees.
Forged checks from a master tracing were made out in
their stead and forwarded to the payees. Thus were placed
in circulation three forged instruments which, in the event
that any of Rice's forged signatures on other documents
were questioned, the check signatures (forged) could
be used as exemplars to sustain the forgeries I
Now Patrick's legalistic mind ran to possible litigation
that might arise over Rice's property after he was dead.
So he forged the checks later offered at Swenson's bank
and the Fifth Avenue Trust Company. The money from
these was to be used to defray the expense of suits to sustain the forged documents. Patrick was penniless. Now it




106    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
appeared clear why he had hurried to have bank certifications placed upon the checks before Rice's body had
been disposed of. He needed ready cash for expenses.
The stage was set. Within the lawyer's grasp was all
of Rice's property amounting to more than $3,000,000
which would come into his control when the capitalist died.
How soon would he die? Jones had told the lawyer
that the old man was robust and had many years before
him. He suffered slightly from indigestion and cooked
his own meals, which consisted chiefly of cereals.
In March, 900o, Jones related, he himself had suffered
from an attack of indigestion, and Patrick had prevailed
upon him to send for a Dr. Curry, who had been the lawyer's physician. Patrick told Jones to caution the doctor
not to mention the name of Patrick in Rice's hearing.
When an attack of indigestion fell upon Rice later,
Jones suggested calling in Curry and the physician came.
Since the physician had given Jones some mercury pills
which had helped him, the valet suggested to his master
that he, too, try them. But they served to improve Rice's
condition, whereupon Patrick gave Jones mercury pills
of such strength that when Jones swallowed one he fell
ill. The lawyer told the valet to try these on Rice.
Rice took some of them and grew worse. Suddenly
Patrick suggested the cremation letter, realizing that mercury left traces in the human body
About this time Rice spoke to his valet about reading
a magazine article touching upon the risks to be encountered in handling anaesthetics, particularly chloroform, in
a sickroom. Jones relayed his master's comments to Patrick. Later the lawyer asked Dr. Curry about chloroform
and whether it would leave traces that an autospy would
reveal. Dr. Curry advised that it would leave only slight
traces if given in small doses to a man with a weak heart.
Rice was in a weak condition. The strong mercury pills
were weakening him.




FIN DE SIECLE


I07


Patrick suggested that Jones send to his brother in
Texas for chloroform. He obeyed. The chloroform
arrived.
On September 6th a violent attack of acute indigestion
seized Rice. On the same day a telegram reached him with
the news that an oil plant in Texas in which he was heavily
interested had been destroyed by fire. He was asked for
funds to rebuild the plant. Rice decided to supply
$250,000ooo-all the cash he had available in New York
banks. Jones and Patrick intercepted the telegram in
which Rice was notifying the plant managers of his decision to furnish funds. Already Patrick had sufficient
forged checks to put his hands on all the capitalist's cash,
but if it were sent to Texas the bank accounts would
be gone.
Subsequently Rice was advised by telegram that a draft
on him for $250,000 would arrive in New York on September 22nd.
"I showed the telegram about the draft to Patrick,"
said Jones. "He said the old man must be put out of the
way at once."
The draft arrived at the Rice apartment on Saturday,
September 22nd, by bank messenger. Jones met the messenger at the door and told him to carry the news back
to the bank that Mr. Rice was too ill to attend to business, but would take care of the draft on Monday, September 24th.
At five o'clock Saturday afternoon Patrick hurried into
the apartment and learned of the draft's arrival. He asked
Dr. Curry if Rice would be able to leave the house on
Monday to attend to business. Dr. Curry said he thought
he would.
Patrick left.
Rice enjoyed a comfortable night. He awoke at eight
o'clock Sunday morning and ate a hearty breakfast.
At I I A. M. Jones rushed out to tell Patrick how im



1o8    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
proved the old man was. Patrick suggested that it was
the time to do away with Rice, for if the draft were met
the whole plot would fall through. He told the valet to
chloroform his master. Jones demurred, pleading that
he could never stand by and see his old employer die at
his hands. Patrick suggested giving Rice a mixture of
ammonia, water, and oxalic acid, explaining that the
administration of this would not require the valet's presence at the moment of death.
Jones tried the mixture. Rice refused to take it. He told
Patrick of this failure, and the lawyer gave him the
chloroform and instructed him in its use. Jones returned
to the apartment. It was six P. M. Rice was fast asleep.
The valet saturated a sponge with chloroform and inserted it into a cone made with a twisted towel. He laid
this upon the old man's face and ran from the room.
The doorbell rang repeatedly. The two elderly women
were there. The valet did not answer it.
At the end of an hour Jones entered the sickroom and
found his employer dead. He burned the sponge and the
towel, opened the windows, and tidied up the room. He
called the elevator man to get Dr. Curry. Then he 'phoned
the nev*s to Patrick.
The lawyer rushed breathlessly into the apartment and
took charge of affairs. The man who hated him was
dead. Presently the chain of forged documents would
come to light. Patrick would be in possession of his
enemy's fortune. He gave orders to have the body cremated and had the forged letter to back him up.
Here the elaborate plot went to pieces. Patrick had
neglected to ascertain important fact about cremation.
Twenty-four hours were required to heat the furnace
and in the meantime Rice's body had gone to the morgue.
A delay of four hours in the arrival of the coroner's
physician would have wiped out all evidence of the felonious cause of the capitalist's death.




FIN DE SIECLE


I09


An autopsy revealed the presence of chloroform in
Rice's body, thus contradicting Dr. Curry's certificate
of death, which gave old age and weak heart as the cause.
And while I was in Rice's apartment Patrick's tools
were running frantically from bank to bank to get possession of the murdered man's cash to defray the expenses
of possible litigation over his estate I
Patrick was tried and convicted for the murder of
Rice. He introduced a novel defense, contending that
there was no legal evidence to prove that Rice's death
had been caused feloniously and that the congestion of
lungs described by the State's experts as having been
caused by choloroform had, in fact, been caused by embalming fluid. He attacked Jones as the murderer if there
had been a murder.
He was sentenced to death. Much sympathy was aroused
for Patrick. While in the death house he won the only
important legal battle in his career. He saved a fellow
prisoner from the electric chair.
The convicted lawyer spent twelve years in jail. He
was sentenced to die in 1902 and resentenced twice to die,
and in I906 the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment by Governor Higgins. In I909 he sought an
appeal on unprecedented grounds. Having been sentenced
three times to die, he contended, and not having been
electrocuted, he raised the unique issue that he was legally
dead and should be given his freedom. The courts refused
to grant this plea. He was pardoned in 19I2 by Governor
Dix after his brother-in-law had spent half a million dollars in his behalf. Not long after he was given his freedom
he publicly announced that he was going to sue for his
share of the fortune of Rice I Friends dissuaded him from
this step.
He disappeared into obscurity. At the time this was
written he was believed to be alive somewhere in the far
West.




IIO    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
Jones, who turned state's evidence, was released and
also vanished, a hopeless derelict.
Patrick struck me as a peculiar type. He had two personalities-Patrick the lawyer and Patrick the man. He
made no attempt at flight. Perhaps this is explained by
the possibility that Patrick the man entrusted his conscience to Patrick the lawyer. The actual slaying was left
to his vassal and proxy, Jones, who was even willing to
die at Patrick's suggestion.
In New York City at least, the Patrick case ended the
cycle of murders by poison. Over this cycle one thing
looms. All the plotters were educated persons. This may
explain why the cycle ended. Educated persons can be
convinced that murder does not pay no matter how skilled
the mind that builds the plot. The best of them, even a
skilled lawyer, will overreach, overpaint and overdo the
picture,
Speaking of patterns that form in a murder man's mind
the reader may recall that in the murder of Mrs. Anna
Kronman she herself had suggested the axe which her
slayer used to kill her. Rice, when he spoke to Jones of
chloroform, suggested also the means by which his end
was encompassed.




CHAPTER X


MURDER WHILE YOU WAIT
ITALIANS who came to this country at the beginning of
this century had a penchant for grouping into small colonies. They came in great numbers to New York City and
settled in districts which became known as Little Italys.
The colonization laid them open to attacks by various
criminal organizations from the Old World who brought
with them much experience in murder and blackmail.
In I902 and 1903 members of these colonies were
terrorized by a series of outrages and murders. Bodies
were found in sacks, boxes, and barrels in various sections
of the city. In a good many cases the victims' tongues were
slit, thus advertising to the colonists that the work was
that of imported, professional villains.
The eighteen-year-old stepson of Giuseppi Morello,
counterfeiter and leader of a Sicilian gang, was kidnaped,
tortured, and murdered. His tongue, too, had been slit.
He had betrayed secrets of his stepfather's society. Morello senior was the known associate of notorious bad
men-Ignacio, Lupo the Wolf and Tomasso, Petto the
Ox. When the names of these men were mentioned in the
presence of Little Italy residents they crossed themselves
and frequently appealed to parish priests for protection.
During these years counterfeit United States bills and
coins made abroad flooded the United States.


III




I12 MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


One of the shrewdest murders that ever engaged my
attention was one of these Italian terroristic killings. It
was shrewd because it showed the perpetrators' long
experience with murder. They did one little thing that
marked them as professionals.
In April, I903, the United States Secret Service
Division set operatives to watch suspected sources of
counterfeit money in the Italian section of the lower East
Side. Three of these operatives were Laurence Richey,
now one of President Hoover's secretaries, Captain John
J. Henry, and George L. Burns.
They took up their stations near a butcher shop at No.
I6 Stanton Street, operated by one Sarconi. Frequent
visitors to this place were Lupo the Wolf, Petto the Ox,
a hulk of a bull-necked man a little past twenty-four, and
Morello. The plan of the secret service was to watch
these men and all others who came into the butcher shop
to join them, and when all their connections were established to swoop down and corral the entire band.
They were especially eager to locate a man about thirty
who was suspected of being the gang's traveling agent
and who distributed the counterfeit bills to dealers
throughout the United States. Our Detective Bureau
at the same time was trying to run down the slayers of
a number of Italians. We suspected several of Morello's
gang, but no one could be found who would testify against
the suspects. Those who might have proved good witnesses were terrorized.
On the night of April 12th a man answering the description of the traveling agent walked into Sarconi's butcher
shop, remained a'little while talking to the Wolf and the
Ox, and then left. His name and identity being unknown
to the secret service men they called him the Newcomer.
On the next night he reappeared, saw the Wolf and the
Ox again, and came out. One of the secret service operatives followed him to an Italian pastry shop in Elizabeth




MURDER WHILE YOU WAIT


II3


Street which was run by Pietro Inzarillo. After a few
minutes the Newcomer came out of the pastry shop,
walked gingerly down the street, turned into Prince Street,
and entered an Italian saloon in the rear of which Morello
operated a small restaurant that was a blind for his counterfeiting operations.
The secret service operative waited until the lights went
out in the place. The Newcomer did not come out. The
operative discontinued his watch and went home.
The next morning Mrs. Frances Connors, an elderly
woman, appeared upon the street in front of her home in
the lower East Side. She was shrieking frantically. Two
patrolmen rushed up to her. Incoherently she told them
that she had just looked upon the body of a man jammed
into a barrel standing in the shadow of a lumber pile
in the east end of the Italian section. She took them to
the barrel, and they reported the finding of the body.
Inspector McClusky assigned McCafferty, Detective
Sergeant Joseph Petrosini, the Detective Bureau's expert
on Italian matters, and myself to the case. In addition
twelve other detectives, including Italian-American plainclothes men, were detailed to circulate in the Italian colonies to learn what they could.
The man's body had been jammed into the barrel, over
the top of which had been thrown an overcoat. Around
his throat, tightly wound, was a coarse burlap sack of
foreign manufacture. The dead man was young and fairly
well dressed. His left hand and right leg protruded from
the barrel, making it obvious that his murderers had intended that the body should be discovered so that it might
be a warning to others. The body was still warm. The
head was almost severed by an ugly wound running from
ear to ear. A razor-sharp knife had been used. A watch
chain dangled from his vest; the watch was gone. Both
ears had been pierced for earrings, the mark of a native




114    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
of Sicily. In one of his pockets I found a crumpled note
in the handwriting of a woman. Petrosini translated it:
Come in a hurry. You understand that it is most urgent.
It was unsigned. This letter had probably lured the
man to his death. He was killed indoors. The presence of
the gunny sack around his neck indicated that it had been
placed there to prevent blood from spattering or falling.
There was not a scrap upon the body to establish identification. It was taken to the morgue and a photograph
of the man's face appeared in the newspapers next
morning.
In the bottom of the barrel I found a thick layer of
sawdust thrown in apparently to prevent blood from
leaking out. This sawdust had been walked upon and in
it were chawed ends of black Italian stogies and onion
skins. This sawdust, I concluded, had come from some
cheap Italian restaurant where floors usually are covered
with it.
The barrel had contained sugar. There were particles
of it caught between the staves. On the bottom of the
barrel, outside, was a stenciled mark: W. & T.-233. On
the Long Island side of the East River were a number
of large sugar refineries. I visited these until I found a
manufacturer who identified the barrel as his and explained that W. & T. were the initials of grocers, Wallace
& Thompson, No. 365 Washington Street, Manhattan.
The figures designated the shipping lot number.
Employees of Wallace & Thompson told me that they
had received six barrels of sugar in the 233 lot, but could
not tell where they had shipped these barrels. No record
was kept of buyers of this lot.
"Have you got any Italian customers?" I asked.
"Only one," was the reply. "Pietro Inzarillo, who has
a pastry shop in Elizabeth Street."




MURDER WHILE YOU WAIT


IIS


An examination of the victim's stomach revealed that
immediately before death he had eaten a heavy meal of
potatoes, beans, beets, spaghetti, and salad. Petrosini
described it as a typical Sicilian meal. Morello's restaurant served only Sicilian food. Thus the dead man was
placed in this restaurant a short time before he was killed.
The barrel came from Inzarillo's. But it was useless to
question frequenters of these places. They would just
arch their shaggy eyebrows and say nothing.
On his way from Brooklyn Secret Service Operative
Henry came upon the photograph of the dead man's face
in a morning newspaper and visited the morgue. He
viewed the body and felt quite sure it was the suspect
known as the Newcomer. Operative Richey came in later
and made a positive identification. The dead man was
the Newcomer whom he had shadowed to Inzarillo's and
then to Morello's on the night of April I3th and who
never came out of the latter place.
But who and what was he?
Petrosini, fearless and therefore respected in Italian
quarters, circulated among the slain man's countrymen and
heard hints that if an unnamed convict in Sing Sing Prison
was approached he might establish the identity of the
slain man. I knew of a convict, Giuseppi de Priemo, who
was serving a four-year term in Sing Sing for counterfeiting. He was reputed to have been one of Morello's gang.
When Petrosini approached de Priemo he found the
convict as dumb as a wooden Indian. They chatted about
this and that; then the detective produced a photograph
of the dead man. De Priemo's huge body trembled. His.
lips set tight.
"Him dead?" said the convict. "He's my brother-inlaw, Beneditto Madonia. Who kill him?" The prisoner
fainted and was revived. Petrosini told of the killing.
De Priemo said that a week back Madonia had visited
him in prison and then went on to his home in Buffalo,




MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


to meet Mrs. de Priemo and arrange to have the counterfeiter transferred to Erie County Jail, which would place
De Priemo closer to his home. Madonia had promised to
return to New York City and demand property which
Morello and the Wolf had taken from De Priemo and
refused to give to Mrs. Madonia.
Petrosini wanted to know more about this property
and the inside details of Madonia's connection with Morello and his gang.
"I say nothing," said De Priemo, scowling. His heavy
jaw snapped. "Never minda," he said. "Bimeby I go down
to New York and see those fella. Bimeby I meeta him.
Alla him."
He said no more.
Mrs. Madonia was found in Buffalo. She had last seen
her husband on April 3rd when he left for Sing Sing to
see De Priemo. A few days later she had a letter from him
in New York City saying he surely would be back on
the twentieth.
He never came.
The woman identified the body of her husband, also
the watch chain found on his vest, and described the case
of the watch, which had a locomotive stamped into it.
Madonia, she said, was a stone mason, but had given up
this work to "go on the road for Morello." Just what
he did on the road no amount of persuasion could get
Mrs. Madonia to say. Her stepson identified the body as
that of his father and said the chain was his, but he was
as silent as his stepmother about the dead man's activities.
Fear had seized both of them.
It was useless to attempt to build up the picture further
with these frightened sources to work with. The best we
could hope for would be to forge a strong chain of circumstantial evidence around the murderers. Circumstantial
evidence is often the best in this type of case, for it is not
easily fabricated, whereas human testimony from fear



MURDER WHILE YOU WAIT


II7


stricken persons is faulty and governed by motives and
foreign traditions not always ascertainable or understood.
The barrel was a pretty good mute witness if it could
be placed in any of the rendezvous frequented by Madonia
and the gang. I visited Inzarillo's pastry shop. In the rear
room I found an empty sugar barrel marked "W. & T. ---
233" which Inzarillo had received a few days prior to
the slaying of Madonia. But there were no signs of foul
play in the little shop, and it was concluded that the murder had not been committed here.
A visit was paid to Morello's little restaurant in the rear
of the saloon. Here I scooped up several handfuls of sawdust from the floor. It contained onion skins and the
chawed ends of black Italian stogies. The place was thoroughly examined for bloodstains, but not a speck was
found. The sawdust was sifted for signs of blood but
none was found. Then information seeped through to
us from Petrosini's private sources, indicating that the
murder had been committed here. One man had held
Madonia's hands behind his back while the other cut his
throat.
Moreover, we knew that Madonia had last been seen
in this restaurant. The secret service man had seen him
enter but not come out. He was murdered while the place
was under watch. Old hands had done this murder. It
was shrewdly planned and brazenly executed. Only professional murderers with long experience back of them
would so skillfully and thoughtfully employ an absorbent
gunny sack to prevent even a drop or speck of their victim's blood from falling on the floor or walls.
Inzarillo was mute when I questioned him about the
sugar barrels. I arrested him. Petrosini had gathered information that on the day Madonia's body was found
Petto the Ox had spent money recklessly in Inzarillo's
and in a wine shop which Lupo the Wolf operated as
a blind for counterfeiting operations. Morello had joined




II8    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
the Wolf on the spree, and as they went about from
place to place, growing more hilarious, acquaintances
congratulated them for some unexplained achievement.
Also on this day Petto's dark-eyed sweetheart blossomed
forth in expensive raiment.
At midnight of the day I arrested Inzarillo, Petrosini
and Detective Foye closed in on Lupo's wine shop. The
Ox was there. When Foye stepped up to handcuff the
bull-necked man he coiled a hairy arm about the detective's neck and drew a long stiletto. He was about to
plunge it into Foye's throat when Detective McCafferty
arrived. Throwing himself on the Ox he knocked the stiletto from his hand and floored him, relieving him of a.45
caliber revolver and a second stiletto which was hidden
in a secret pocket in his trousers.
That night the Tombs Prison held Lupo the Wolf,
Petto the Ox, Morello, Pecoraro, Laduca, an employee
of Sarconi the butcher, Inzarillo, and three other suspects.
All were doubly armed with guns and razor-sharp stilettos
made of files.
In the Ox's pocket we found a pawn ticket for a watch
which had been pledged the day Madonia's body was
found in a Bowery pawnshop. A clerk in this shop, which
was not far from the Wolf's haunts, described the man
who had pawned it as a stocky young man with a bull
neck. But when we confronted him with the Ox the clerk
could not positively identify him. The watch was Madonia's. It had a locomotive stamped on the case.
Petto claimed that the watch had been given to him
by a stranger he met in an East Side boarding house on
the night of April I4th, where he had slept that night.
This story was proved false. Petto had not been near
the boarding house.
The suspects were arraigned in the Magistrate's Court
and held for further action. Eminent counsel appeared
to defend them.




M.URDER WHILE YOU WAIT


II9


In the meantime, information had been gathered showing that the Ox and the Wolf were Morello's spies who
went about Italian colonies selecting victims for Black
Hand levies and reporting on members of Morello's gang
whose disloyalty he suspected. Lupo's wine shop, it was
learned, was the receiving station for cans of olive oil
imported from Italy. These had false bottoms which carried the imported counterfeit money. In Lupo's, Inzarillo's, or Morello's back-room eating house the gang met,
held their secret conclaves, and plotted their activities.
The motive for Madonia's killing was partly revealed
by a letter he had written to Morello. While Madonia
was in Pittsburgh, whither he had gone at Morello's
direction, three of the latter's gang were arrested for
passing counterfeit money. One of these men were
Laduca, the butcher-shop employee. He was released. The
others were sent to prison. Madonia wrote to plead with
Morello that he had done everything in his power to
save the other two and that he was through with that
kind of business and was returning to his home in Buffalo.
Morello feared that Madonia, out from under his domination, was a dangerous man to have about. It was after
Laduca returned to New York that Madonia was killed.
Finally the prisoners were discharged by the police
magistrate but were immediately rearrested by order of
the coroner. McCafferty and I thought that Morello
seemed to be weakening; that he might talk. It had not
been unusual to find that gang leaders like him would talk,
for the tradition prevails among this type of criminal
organization that the king can do no wrong and Morello
was a king; hence, if he talked it was his privilege which
none dared dispute. We took Morello to the morgue.
Madonia's body was brought out. I asked Morello if he
knew the dead man. For a moment he swayed. Then his
thick, flowing mustache twitched, and shaking his head
ruefully he said softly:




120    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
"Poora feller. I never seena him before. I no know
him."
This, of course, was a lie. The letter from Madonia
proved their relationship. Morello's denial of this was
a strong link on our chain. But the gang chieftain knew
his own people, and his power, better than we did.
An inquest was begun May I, I903. Madonia's son
was called as a witness to identify the watch found in
the pawnshop as his father's property. The watch was
handed to the lad. He looked at it and was about to speak
when there was a shuffling of feet and hissing in the court
room, which was filled with swarthy-faced men. One of
these jumped up and put his fingers to his lips. Young
Madonia was now not sure it was his father's timepiece.
Mrs. Madonia took the stand. The watch was handed
to her for identification. There was the same shuffling of
feet in the court room; the same dark-skinned man arose
and crossed his lips with his fingers. Mrs. Madonia, positive the day before that the watch was her husband's,
now suffered a lapse of memory. She couldn't tell. The
one positive link in our chain connecting Petto the Ox
with the murder, by legal proof weakened. The Madonias
perhaps should not be blamed. There was the fate of
young Morello to think of and a dozen more murders
where talkative victims' tongues had been slit.
Inzarillo had shown signs of aiding the State. He was
prepared, among other things, to admit the presence of
the sugar barrels in the rear room of his shop. But when
he appeared upon the witness stand he paled and became
mute as the same sinister shuffling of feet occurred in
the court room. Morello told conflicting stories upon the
witness stand; and, to cap the climax, De Priemo, brought
down from Sing Sing Prison to testify, laughed upon the
stand and said that Petto was his very good friend and
surely would not have killed his brother-in-law. Yet we
knew he hated the bull-necked man.




MURDER WHILE YOU WAIT


121


Petto was indicted as the actual assassin, and the others
were not held. Later the indictment against him was
dismissed. Some time later Morello and the Wolf were
arrested by secret service men for counterfeiting. At the
trial of Morello an Italian physician testified that the
day Morello was supposed to have been working in his
spurious money plant he was in bed, ill. However, men
who had been shadowing the gang leader testified that
on the day he was supposed to be ill he was about the
streets and in the plant.
Morello and the Wolf were convicted of counterfeiting and sent to Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for twentyfive and thirty years, respectively.
Inzarillo was convicted of altering his citizenship
papers and sent to prison.
De Priemo suddenly became an exemplary prisoner in
Sing Sing. His sentence was reduced and he was released
from prison. He went quietly to New York City.
Shortly afterward Petto the Ox moved to Brownton,
Pennsylvania. On the night of October 25, I905, the bullnecked man stepped into the back-yard of his home and
five shotgun blasts did to him what orderly justice had
not been able to do.
Inzarillo, after coming out of prison, opened another
little pastry shop, but hardly had time to get a fair start.
He was shot and killed.
Laduca, the butcher, was slain in Connecticut.
Three other members of the gang met the same fate.
A most tragic sequel robbed the New York Police
Department of one of its bravest men. In I908 Petrosini,
then a lieutenant, was sent to Palermo on a secret mission
to gather the prison records of many notorious Sicilian
criminals in the United States. The federal government
had agreed to deport them when proof of their criminal
pasts were available. Petrosini was to return with the
records. He was walking through a park in Palermo on




I22    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
his way to his hotel when an assassin shot and killed him.
Not long afterward Congress, stirred by this tragedy,
sent a commission to Europe to investigate immigration
matters. In Palermo a member of the commission was
surprised to learn that Sicily was practically crimeless.
"How is it that you have so little crime here?" he
asked a Palermo police official.
"My dear sir," he replied. "Our criminals have gone
to America."
Black Hand terrorism suffered a setback with the
disposition of Morello and his gang. My impression is
that the processes of Americanization and tighter immigration laws were largely responsible. The old Italian
gangs were lawless killers. We have successors to them
to-day who are even more lawless and ruthless, and they
are made up largely of native born. And a good many of
them wriggle through the machinery of the law, but as
a rule they reach about the same end that befell the Ox
and some of his confederates.




CHAPTER XI


THE MURDER CLINIC          GETS A START
IM   Y EXPERIENCE with murder gradually forced the
conviction upon me that it was a subject which required
the attention of detectives who not only were interested
in this special field of investigation but who were equipped
for the job by special training and a natural bent. It was
vastly different from running down professional thieves
and solving other crimes where the victims were alive and
from whom the crime picture could be built up. In murder
victims were dead; and, moreover, courts and jurors required far stronger evidence where a man's life was at
stake.
This situation was brought home to me on many occasions. In particular I recall a case which clearly indicated
the need for homicide specialists. It was a cyanide of potassium mystery.
A man of middle age was found dead in a chair in a
room on the Bowery. His trouser pockets and the pockets
of clothing hanging in the room were pulled out stiff, as
though they had been rifled. A patrolman had been to
the room ahead of me, and later two detectives took up
the case. They reported to McClusky that it looked like
murder, yet no wounds or evidences of a struggle were
found.
A quick glance at the pockets made me skeptical of rob123




124    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
bery. They were pulled out too far to have been the work
of a professional thief. I moved the body and detected
the familiar odor like that of bitter almond. On a mantelpiece, about ten feet from the body, was a bottle. It was
empty but had contained cyanide of potassium.
From my knowledge of this deadly, quick-killing poison
I knew that if the man had drunk it from the bottle at
the mantelpiece it would have been impossible for him
to reach the chair ten feet away, or, had he drunk it while
sitting in the chair he would have been unable to reach
the mantelpiece, place the bottle there, then go back to
the chair. The victim of this poison drops in his tracks.
It looked like a real mystery.
Every place in the vicinity where cyanide of potassium
was available was visited, but the man had not purchased
any. Then I found there was a photographer in the building. Cyanide of potassium is used in photographic dark
rooms. I called on the photographer and put this question
to him:
"Why did you give that man upstairs that poison?"
"He said he wanted to kill some rats," the photographer stammered.
Perhaps I should explain that the abrupt directness
with which I put this question was more or less habit, or
instinct, with me, for persons dislike being drawn into
police investigations, and unless directly and boldly approached will evade questions, especially when a suspicious
death is involved.
The photographer's answer convinced me that it was
a case of suicide, yet how did the bottle get on the mantelpiece?
A short time later I found the patrolman who had
been the first on the scene. I told him that I had been
unable to figure out how the bottle got on the mantelpiece
while the dead man had passed out in a chair ten feet
away.




THE MURDER CLINIC GETS A START 125
"Oh," said the patrolman, "I found the bottle on the
floor at the side of the chair. It smelled rotten and I
dumped out the stuff that was in it and put it on the
mantelpiece."
This man was not murder trained. His error was not
deliberate, but he was unaware that the first step in a
homicide inquiry is to leave things as they are. The first
picture that a murder man gets of the scene is often the
best. Had the bottle not been touched the suicide would
have been obvious. The pulling out of the pockets was
merely an effort on the man's part to remove the stigma
of self-destruction. Scores of suicides resort to the same
device.
I had often commented to my superiors and associates
on the need for trained murder investigators. Some
thought it would be a good thing; others were indifferent.
The idea in the back of my head was a special bureau
within the Detective Bureau which would train men for
murder inquiry and, at the same time, function like a
research clinic in a hospital or medical college. I believed
that men could be found in the ranks who could be trained.
That was the way I had come up.
In I906 General Theodore A. Bingham, a man of
military training, became Commissioner of Police. In'
looking about for likely timber for deputy commissionerships his attention was called to a young man who had
been doing efficient work for the Citizens' Police Committee, an unofficial body which kept its eye upon police
administration. Previous to this work he had been a newspaper reporter in New York City and had caught a pretty
fair glimpse of the picture of crime and police affairs.
Before taking up newspaper work he had been an instructor in English at a well-known private school for boys.
He was a Harvard graduate. His name is Arthur Woods.
Bingham offered a deputy commissionership to Woods,
but before he would accept he felt he would like to add to




126


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


his qualifications by making a study of police systems in
Europe. He was sent abroad to do this. Just before he
left the legislature created a fourth deputy commissionership, and the occupant of this portfolio was to be given
command of the Detective Bureau. At this time I was a
detective sergeant working on general investigations and
handling most of the homicides. By act of legislature
detective sergeants were raised to the rank of lieutenants,
and I automatically was elevated to this position. My old
partner McCafferty was made inspector in command of
the Detective Bureau. Some time later I was promoted
to a captaincy.
Woods returned from his European trip late in I906
and accepted the fourth deputy commissionership. The
idea of a Harvard graduate and former English instructor in a fashionable private school coming in from the
outside to run the Detective Bureau was received with
various reactions by members of the force. Woods soon
convinced the men by his democratic manner and his practical knowledge of police methods that he was fitted for
the job. He put on a workingman's shirt and went out on
jobs; lay all night on important plants with the men. One
of his first public statementswas that the door of his
office would be open at all times to the men and that merit,
and merit alone, would determine a detective's fitness
for promotion.
In Europe he had studied the work and organization of
the Metropolitan Police of London and its famous detective arm, the Department of Criminal Investigation
in Scotland Yard. He liked the Yard system under which
trained detectives were assigned to special investigations
in any part of the British realm upon request from the
local police authorities. He thought well also of the Paris
detective system which employed detective specialists in
squads that were assigned to crimes by classes. The High



THE MURDER CLINIC GETS A START               I27
way Squad or Brigade of the Paris police took care of all
offenses committed on the highways.
He suggested that a special squad might be built up in
our bureau to handle all homicides and another squad
organized to hunt pickpockets. I told him I thought that
would be the only way to cope with the homicide situation
which had grown to some proportions in New York City
owing to the prevalence of organized gangs. We agreed
that criminals and criminal activities had undergone vast
changes in a decade; that old methods of fighting them
were sufficient unto their time, but New York City now
had a greater and faster-increasing population and was
spreading itself over a wider territory. Moreover, the
newer criminals were younger, more wanton, and were
killing either for pay or as a preliminary to robbery. What
Woods hoped for was a completely reorganized system
of crime control to cope with the changing conditions.
His picture of an efficient policeman was a man who, in
addition to other duties, reported dirty back yards, overcongested districts, rendezvous for habitual criminals,
saloons which fattened on the trade of habitual drunkards
and dissolute persons, receivers of stolen goods, gambling
resorts, and other conditions conducive to crime and the
making of criminals. He saw the uniformed force as a
crime preventive arm. Yet he did not want policemen
to be arrogant toward the citizenry. He wanted them
to concentrate their attention upon known criminals and
conditions which bred them and not harass law-abiding
citizens.
In this connection Raymond B. Fosdick, a noted expert
on European police systems, told a story while addressing
executives of our department at Woods's invitation. He
had been present at a suffragette outbreak in London
when mobs of women stormed the House of Parliament.
A bobby halted one of the suffragettes at the door, and




128 MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


she promptly knocked off his helmet with a bottle. He
picked it up and said:
"My dear madam, if you do that again I shall be compelled to take you into custody."
Whether that amount of reserve would work with
New York policemen thrown suddenly into the thick of
a gang feud was a topic laid upon the table for future
discussion. It was generally agreed, however, that the
situations in London and New York City were vastly
different, for in the former city the police had to contend
mainly with members of their own race, while the influx
of aliens to New York City gave the police a problem
not encountered in European cities. And especially was
this true of homicides where racial characteristics govern
the motives and methods of murderers.
Finally Woods announced that a special body of detectives to be known as the Homicide Squad would be organized and placed under my command. I believe this was
the first organization of its kind in the world. It was to
function not only as a special unit to detect and apprehend
slayers but to train men in all branches of murder inquiry.
In the meantime, detectives were to be assigned to special
branches in each precinct to work on crime independently
of the uniformed force but with their cooperation. The
idea back of this was to place a mobile force of trained
investigators at strategic points where no time would be
lost in getting to the scene of murder and taking up the
hunt. I was assigned to open and command two branches
and at the same time instruct men assigned to me in the
handling of murder investigations. Other men in these
branches were detailed to handle other classes of crime,
pocket picking, house breaking, safe and loft robberies,
and gangster activities.
In July, I908, I was called back to headquarters by
-Woods to take command of Squad Number One, which
designated the Homicide Squad. Men were picked for




THE MURDER CLINIC GETS A START                 129
this who had especially good records as patrolmen and
some experience as plain-clothes men or detectives. Lieu.
tenant William Jones, the Department's firearms expert,
was assigned to instruct the men in the models and calibers
of revolvers and pistols, ammunition, powder burns,
scorches, smudges, and the effect of fire from different
distances and angles. It was my idea that first of all a
field man should possess sufficient information about the
weapons most used in murder together with a knowledge
of wounds, for very often the picture is built up with only
these two factors available.
The first class of students in this pioneer murder clinic
was assembled on the rifle range in a National Guard
armory. The shaved heads of hogs were used to demonstrate the effect of gunfire. Dr. Arthur T. Gorham, a
police surgeon of many years' experience with wounds,
and myself measured the wounds for the benefit of the
class and instructed the members in their classification,
indicating to them what could be determined by minute
examination of the point of entry and exit of a bullet.
Most important, from my point of view, was the process of training the men to "get the picture" as I had been
trained to get it, and to understand how each homicide
case, when completed, would form a pattern from which
might be worked subsequent inquiries, using the pattern
as a mold into which available facts might be poured,
mentally, of course, to form the complete picture.
We were making progress, with now and then a murder
to furnish an exemplar for discussion in the clinic. We
were pioneering in a new field. The men we had selected
liked their new assignments, and all had taken up murder
inquiry as a lifetime career.
Then the old cry. Shake-up I The public reading about
shake-ups may relish the excitement they cause, but men
who have settled down to a serious study of murder in
the hope that their work will be of benefit to human society




I30    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
see no thrill in a shake-up. Bingham left the Department
in 1909. His deputies, including Woods, resigned. A new
commissioner came in. I drew a transfer. No reasons
for it were supplied to me, nor could I figure them out
except to surmise that a new man with his own ideas was
now in charge. I found myself again on uniformed duty in
command of a precinct in Brooklyn. The usual thing happened to the Detective Bureau. It was completely reorganized. The branch detective system was abolished.
I spent four years in the uniform meditating upon the
vicissitudes of life in a police department, the largest in
the country, where a man would just get settled down to
building an effective machine to control homicides (when
they were increasing) and then be transferred to a totally
different job.
It may have been well that I put in four years on precinct
duty at this time, for it placed me in contact again with
life as it moves along. I witnessed changing conditions and
their influence upon the lives, hopes, ambitions, habits,
and activities of rising generations, all of which come to
bear upon new causes of crime, new ways of committing
crime, and new factors that rule human motives.
Interesting things happened in the precinct, some of
which may show the reader how a policeman may be an
effective single unit in the control of crime.
Making my regular tours of the precinct I came upon
a saloon conducted by a woman of ill repute. Upon watching the place I saw that many known thieves congregated
there. It was a breeding place for criminals. My job was
to curb crime.
One afternoon I walked into the place and found it
filled with professional criminals whose records I knew.
"Madam," I addressed the woman, "what kind of a
place is this?"
"Very respectable." She smiled.
"'Respectable nothing," I exclaimed. "It is a rendezvous




THE MURDER CLINIC         GETS A START       131
for nothing but thieves." My voice rose. The hangers-on
began to move.
"But, Captain, what can I do? They will ---"
"Then you do want to get rid of them, do you?"
No reply was necessary from the woman. Quietly the
place had emptied. Within a few weeks the saloon changed
hands.
Shortly thereafter I was advised that a notorious man
had taken over the place, and that when someone had
spoken to him about me being in the precinct he had said:
"Ohl Arthur Carey in charge here? Why, I know
Carey."
The inference to be drawn from this statement was that
he was my dear friend. Well, we did know each other,
in a professional way. Naturally I went to see him. I
found him to be Al Jacobs, a notorious pickpocket. At
the bar when I entered stood Chris Mulrooney, who also
had crossed my path before. I asked Jacobs who owned
the saloon now. He said his wife did.
"But," said Jacobs, "we're running a high-class, respectable place here now."
"So I see," I remarked, eying Mulrooney. "But listen,
Jacobs, if you let thieves hang out here I'll come and kick
in the place." I observed that Mulrooney had gone. He
had vanished in a flash.
"I can't do nothing about these fellers coming in here,"
Jacobs whined.
"You do something about it or I will," I said, and left
the place.
In a way Jacobs was right. He was a marked man anjdl
a magnet for thieves. Thieves would follow him wherever '
he went because he was one himself. In spite of my warn-,
ing they would come into his place. So he adopted a tricky
system of crime control all his own. The saloon was in
a busy section. Hundreds of thirsty men to and from work
stopped in. Sometimes they were robbed while drinking.




I32    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
When this happened Jacobs, mindful of my warning,
dispatched Mulrooney to find the thieves who had pulled
the jobs in his saloon and force them to return their loot.
Mulrooney carried the booty to Jacobs, who gave it back
to the rightful owners. In this way he hoped to forestall
receipt by me of complaints victims might have made.
Jacobs's system worked for a short time. Then a young
thief named Dinny Meehan objected to Mulrooney's activities and complained that the latter held out on some
of the stuff given to him. One morning Meehan appeared
at the saloon and called Mulrooney out to the sidewalk.
Pickens Laydon, one of the shrewdest little crooks I ever
met, was with Meehan. Just as Mulrooney poked his head
out the side door of the saloon a bullet hit him between
the eyes and he fell dead.
This ended Jacobs's saloon. Its doors and windows were
boarded. Some years later Meehan was killed in about the
same way he had dealt death to Mulrooney. Thieves are
strong for self-determination and also strong for selfextermination.
We had less crime in the precinct after Jacobs closed
shop. There was no place else for thieves to congregate
and be welcome.
Within a short time I was transferred to another and
quieter precinct. Why? I never asked and never learned.
I was here for only a month or so when business men in
my former precinct, without my knowledge, appealed to
the commissioner to have me sent back. They complained
that crime was on the increase. They said I had stopped
crime. But I never was sent back. Nor did it cause me any
great concern. The station house which had been my headquarters in the former precinct was old and depressing.
The one I now commanded was new and spotless. Sunlight streamed in through the windows. The air was
fresh and invigorating. My men were on their toes, as
always they have been with me. I was quite contented.




THE MURDER CLINIC GETS A START 133
But I was not engaged in my favorite pursuit-murder
inquiry.
An uprising of criminal elements in New York City in
19I3 brought on a reform wave. Organized gangs had
increased both in numbers and defiance. Gamblers began
fighting among themselves-they never fail to do this.
A scandal involving a high police official with gamblers
had broken out. John Purroy Mitchel was elected on a
Fusion reform ticket whose platform was largely a demand for a clean-up of criminals. Mitchel took office as
mayor in January, 1914. Arthur Woods became his secretary. Mitchel appointed him Police Commissioner on
April 3, 1914, while I was still in command of a precinct.
Mitchel gave Woods carte blanche to run the department
in his own way.
Woods sent for me, and presently I was again in command of the Homicide Squad and we started afresh.
Woods reduced seventeen inspection districts of the Detective Bureau to nine branch offices, going back to the
branch detective system which his predecessor had abandoned. More than six hundred detectives in the inspection
districts were distributed among the branches. He brought
experienced detectives back from precincts where they had
been scattered by the previous administration's shake-up.
He restored the line-up, which had been abolished, and
in July, 1914, established a school for detectives serving
in all branches of the Detective Bureau which was now
called a division.
There was talk about putting the men attending this
school through a course in applied psychology. I argued
against it, insisting that the psychology most needed by
detectives was not to be taught out of books or by lectures;
that they developed a psychology of their own from their
experience, and any attempt to impress a stated psychology upon their minds would only confuse them. Training
them to get the right picture at the scene of murder, de



134    MEMOIRS OF A       MURDER MAN
veloping the faculty of quick and accurate observation,
and building up an unusually good memory were, and
still are, the foundations for a workable detective psychology. This formula had worked in my case. Years of
experience have confirmed its efficacy. Let me have a man
who has been a good policeman on post, who is gifted
with natural common sense, initiative, honesty, bravery,
and a never-failing memory; let me put him to work with
an older detective who has made good; add to this a
course of training in the examination of wounds, weapons,
and other murder clues, and he will develop his own psychology and put it to effective use. He may not be able
to pick clues out of thin air, but the clues he does find
he'll know what to do with.
In my own way, using experience as the guide, I gave
the men assigned to the Homicide Squad my ideas on
murder inquiry. It's pretty hard now to detail what I told
them. It was even difficult then to tap my mental resources
and transfer to their minds what was in my own. The
reader will glimpse the knowledge I imparted to them as
he goes from chapter to chapter of these memoirs. I did
emphasize what I consider the most vital requirement in
modern murder investigation. There are two phases to it:
first, establishing that murder has been done; and, secondly, hunting the murderer. These two phases must be
joined, that is to say, the work of establishing the crime
in a legal manner and tracking the slayer must go on concurrently. It is not always possible to do this, nor have
I always found the murderer in every case where murder
has been established, but it has afforded me a modest measure of satisfaction to find that experts outside of the
Police Department who are in a position to know assert
on the basis of nation-wide statistics that New York City
for some years has had next to the lowest homicide record
in the large American cities.
It is a temptation to young detectives to concentrate




THE MURDER CLINIC GETS A START                135
their efforts at first upon the fascinating enterprise of
unraveling the mystery without working at the same time
to find the slayer. Criminals are deterred not by reading
how clever murderers are but by the specter of a trained
machine that finds them, fastens crime upon them, and
turns them over to the prosecuting and punitive agencies
of organized society. This is the substance of murder
control.
Nor are young detectives the only ones subject to this
temptation. I recall having listened attentively to an address delivered to a group of detectives by an eminent
police official from Continental Europe, widely known
for his scientific and psychological methods of detection.
He told of a burned paper match that had been found in
a room where murder had been committed; of the finding
later of a packet of paper matches at a point remote from
the crime. The burned match fitted precisely into a stub
in the packet. Weeks were consumed in establishing this
fact. The lecture had all the interesting high-lights of
a good mystery fiction story.
My opinion was that it was not good stuff to lay before
practical detectives as an exemplar because the criminal
apparently had not been apprehended as a result of the
discovery. After the lecture I met the speaker in the
hallway.
"By the way, Doctor," I asked, "did you find the murderer? I mean through the burned match and the packet?"
"I believe I heard some time later that the murderer
was reported to have been picked up some place or another
for some other crime."
"Through the medium of the match?"
"No, unfortunately, no," the doctor smiled sadly.
I quote this bit of dialogue not to show that I was
sharp or captious but because it goes to the very heart
of efficient, practical murder inquiry. It shows the futility
of spending weeks, perhaps months, developing a clue




136


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


which lacked directness, while during the period spent
on such fascinating research the slayer had ample opportunity to put time and distance between himself and his
pursuers. It is quite all right for the fiction mystery writer
to indulge the fancy of his readers in a long-drawn-out
analysis of this or that clue, but not many murderers
would be caught by the practical detectives of real life
if they followed the same practice. It's good amusement
for readers, but then they are not required to build up
evidence for hard-headed and sometimes inscrutable
American juries.
The personnel of the Homicide Squad represented a
cross section of the Police Department whose qualifications were, first, that they had been good policemen on
post. One outstanding man had studied dentistry before
joining the force; another had been a silversmith, while
others had been plumbers, chauffeurs, locomotive firemen,
and one had been a horseshoer. A former bank clerk,
whose father was a police surgeon, proved to have a mind
with an amazing aptitude for the finest and most intricate
detail while also possessing a certain amount of inherited
medical skill. They were all quick-witted, painstaking
men. The only detective science they picked up was what
came to them on post or in the clinic.
Before our original plan could be carried out to the
fullest extent certain practices in homicide matters had
to be adjusted. Under an old rule the borough coroner
was the only official who could first touch the remains
of a homicide victim. This put us at a disadvantage in
getting the picture and made it impossible to photograph
the body in various positions. The rule finally was changed
so that men from the Squad were empowered to search
the body and scene before the arrival of the coroner or
his physician. Later the office of coroner was abolished,
and in its place came the modern auxiliary of crime detection-the Medical Examiner.




THE MURDER CLINIC GETS A START                 137
This brought to our aid Dr. Charles G. Norris, chief
medical examiner, and his staff. Dr. Norris is an eminent
pathologist who has spent a lifetime in the study of homicide. He had taken a post-graduate course at the University of Vienna and had the advantage of courses established by Kraft-Ebing, noted authority on medical and
nervous diseases. On Dr. Norris's staff were pathologists,
chemists, bacteriologists, and toxicologists to work hand.
in hand with our squad. Thus we had available experts
capable of giving us analyses of poisons, human hair, dusts,
and other articles, and making examinations of stains and
important clues where the scientist could penetrate and
we could not.
With these resources at our command we needed little
of a scientific nature in the clinic. Our men were provided
with kits consisting of measuring instruments, wood- and
glass-cutting tools, electric flash lights, and magnifying
glasses. They didn't carry them around in little black bags
with an air of mystery. This type of detective exists only,
between the covers of an exciting mystery yarn or upon
the musical-comedy stage.
The clinic's technical equipment consisted of a large
portable searchlight, rubber gloves with which to handle
wounds and bodies, a jimmy, saw, metal tape measure,
magnifying glasses, and test tubes in which to seal specimens of importance to our investigations. Cameras, fingerprinting apparatus, microscopes, and scales were not necessary. The Bureau of Criminal Identification in headquarters had cameras and fingerprint experts; microscopes and
scales were available at the Medical Examiner's office to
be used by experts. Here there were microscopes and
photo-microscopic devices, and scales of all descriptions
so fine in adjustment that they could weigh and find the
difference between two human hairs or determine the ingredients and history of specks of dust. In addition the
city contained a number of universities and medical col



138    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
leges where expert counsel also was available if needed.
The Clinic's library was made up largely of my own
books which I had studied for years-Phelps on Wounds,
Brundage on Toxicology, Tanner's Memorandum on
Poisons, and volumes of medical jurisprudence, homicide
laws, firearms, explosives, metallurgy, and a large dictionary.
A more comprehensive library was unnecessary, for
we had at our call an unofficial consulting faculty. The
staffs of three universities, experts on almost every subject under the sun; noted men in great hospitals and research foundations were available when we needed them.
And within the confines of this mammoth city of six
million persons were experts in every line of endeavor,
from the makers of pins to the builders of skyscrapers,
whose advice could be sought-and was always generously given-on any special technical problem that presented itself during our investigations. And why should
this talent go unused? Perhaps no city in the world offers
such a galaxy of experts. How they were employed from
time to time is explained in various chapters. An incident
which brought to my mind the idea of falling back upon
these unofficial experts might not be amiss here.
In the course of my investigation into the killing of
Elsie Sigel, granddaughter of General Franz Sigel, famous Civil War hero, I had occasion to turn to an unusual
expert. In a trunk in the apartment of Leon Ling, a Chinese, who slayed Elsie, I found a batch of letters in
Chinese. It was necessary to have them translated by
someone who knew the language and who also could be
trusted to give me an accurate translation. Columbia University officials referred me to a young Chinese who was
editing a publication in his native tongue and who was
taking a post-graduate course in the university. I found
him to be an affable and highly intelligent Chinese. While
I stood by he translated the letters aloud and from their




THE MURDER CLINIC GETS A START 139
contents much was learned about Ling, who fled after
the murder and has never been found.
Later the young man who served me as translator
became secretary to the first president of the Chinese
Republic. The last time I heard of him he was Chinese
minister at Washington, D. C. One could never tell who
might serve on the consulting faculty of the clinic. Hundreds of New Yorkers have, some quite unconscious of
the fact that they were advisers to murder men. Others
who were aware of our objects were more than pleased
to get an opportunity to view a murder inquiry from the
inside. I never found what is commonly known as a lay
crime analyst. There may be such experts. I never had
need for one.
The office in. which the Clinic held forth at headquarters was a square room with the usual quota of chairs and
desks to be found in a public office. Partitioned off was
my private office. It was about twenty-nine feet long and
narrow and contained a desk and two chairs. Its walls
were bare, but there was a large window at one end overlooking a busy street below. It contained none of the pictures that Inspector Byrnes had in his private office and
museum. Nor was there mystery or uncanniness about
the place.
It was just a refuge where I could step in and have a
quiet talk with a suspect without distracting interruptions.
I usually sat at the desk, the suspect occupying the chair
at the side. There was one picture he might see. This was
outside the big window and he could look upon it at will.
It might be raining or shining, a bright day or a gloomy
one. But whatever kind of a day it might be the picture
was tempting. It was freedom. It served its purpose. I
had long since concluded that murderers when caught and
subjected to examination look back not at their crimes
but think only of getting out, getting free, returning to
that outside seen through the window. Few honest, law



140    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
abiding citizens ever had occasion to visit this room, but
a good many murderers talked their way to doom while
sitting at the desk looking out the window or scowling
at me. Finally when the break came they cast their eyes
at the floor and told their story.
Later I improved upon the method of examining suspects by inviting them to accompany me in a police automobile to the scene or scenes of their crimes. More than
once on such trips I have had suspects point out the most
damaging circumstances against themselves, and in many
cases they uncovered crimes they had committed which
we had not associated with them. Funny that a little
motor trip should lead men and women to purge themselves of all their crimes, including some we had not
known about.
In this office, however, I had my headquarters for many
years, working exclusively upon homicides. For nearly
twenty years I worked with only seventeen days of vacation, but it was my own fault. I could have taken a rest
but there was an unfortunate feature to a job like mine.
It couldn't be left while a case was on. And in a city of
six million persons there is almost a fresh case daily, and
sometimes as many as a hundred, old ones and new ones,
flaring up or hanging fire. If a man stepped out for a
few days' rest his train of thought was broken. A thread
slipped from his fingers. The picture might be spoiled.
I imagine a painter of pictures has a job like that. He
gets busy on his canvas, makes a fine start, and then is
afraid to take time out, fearing that the touch he's been
cudgeling his brain to find might take wings and fly.
The great difference, however, between an artist of
that sort and a murder man is that the artist can throw
away an unfinished canvas, whereas murder never outlaws. The murder man has to keep the unfinished pictures
in the back of his head. I've had tips come in on murder
cases that were thirty, forty, and fifty years old.




CHAPTER XII


THE WAY GANGS GO
ROM      the previous administration  Commissioner
Woods inherited a number of unsolved gang murders.
Between I911 and 1914 powerful groups of thieves,
gamblers, and gunmen were organized in various sections
of the city. They were brazen and reckless. On the day
Woods was installed four of the most notorious professional gunmen, Dago Frank, Lefty Louie, Gyp the Blood,
and Whitey Lewis, were doomed to the electric chair
by the refusal of Governor Glynn to grant them a respite.
In spite of this gang brazenness continued. A placard
hung upon a lamp-post in what was known as the Car
Barn District, which lay along the East River from
Ninety-sixth Street north, indicated the defiance with
which the gangs operated. It read:
NOTICE
COPS KEEP OUT
No policemen will hereafter be allowed
in this block.
By order of
THE CAR BARN GANG
Policemen sent out to break up this gang were beaten
and slugged. Two leaders were finally arrested and coD14   '




I42


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER -MAN


victed of murder and the Car Barn Gang ceased to exist.
There were other gangs which had not been broken up,
and perhaps ten murders known to have been committed
by these gangs, but which could not legally be traced to
their doors. Woods was determined to end gang rule. One
of his first moves was to show them that the old murders
were not forgotten. He directed me to begin an investigation into the slaying of a well-known and respected
citizen, Frederick Strauss, a court clerk, who had been
shot and killed in St. Mark's Place while on his way to
attend a lodge meeting. A bullet fired during a gang war
had slain him. In many of the other unsolved gang killings
the victims had been gangsters killed by their own kind.
The Strauss slaying occurred in January, 1913. Several
arrests had been made, but the suspects were released
in Magistrate's Court. Nothing more had been done with
the case.
Upon reopening it I learned that two rival gangs had
engaged in a long-drawn-out contest for East Side supremacy. The feud had started on November 13, 19I2, when
a notorious pickpocket and gang leader, Dopey Benny
Fein, had sent his aide-de-camp, Jew Murphy, to look into
labor troubles among East Side clothing manufacturers
and striking workers. A number of employees had refused
to strike at command of their leaders. Fein was hired to
persuade these recalcitrant workers to obey orders. Murphy looked over the situation and reported that the bosses,
as the manufacturers were known, had hired protectors
to fight off gangs. These protectors were Tommy Dyke,
an East Side character, and Harry Lenny an ex-prize
fighter who furnished guards to protect the bosses against
the raids of "entertainment committees" that not only
molested workers who took the places of strikers but
smashed up the workshops.
Dopey Benny had many followers. Among those who
admired him was Jack the Dropper, a younger man, who




THE WAY GANGS GO


I43


specialized in protecting East Side gambling places against
holdup men and blackmailers. Also in the picture was a
thug known as Little Orgie, whose real name was Jacob
Orgen. Fein sent Jew Murphy out to warn Dyke and
Lenny that unless they withdrew their protection from
the bosses war would follow. One of the Dyke and Lenny
men punched Jew Murphy whose right name was Joe
Miller, in the face. This amounted to lese majesty. Fein
took it as a personal insult. A month passed. The six-day
bicycle races, an annual sporting event, began in old Madison Square Garden. Fein scattered his gunmen among
the crowds attending this affair, and when they were
emerging from the Garden shooting began. A formidable
Dyke and Lenny man called Tony Cheese was wounded.
This picturesque sobriquet he gained through marriage.
His wife's father was a cheese dealer on the East Side.
Later that same night Dyke and Lenny men sought reprisals. They shot Little Augie del Grasso, a Fein henchman, while he was zigzagging from shadow to shadow
under the elevated railroad structure along the Bowery.
Del Grasso was not killed.
Fein brought his forces together and directed that
the next attack be made against Dyke and 'Lenny
themselves. These two men, both Italians, had a large
following on the East Side. It was customary for them
to bring their friends together once each year at a ball
and reception given in Arlington Hall under the auspices
of the Dyke and Lenny Association. Invitations had been
sent out for this affair; all the big and little bad men of
gangland were bidden, among them dance-hall habitues
who knew Dyke when he was bouncer, or sheriff, forChick Tricker's notorious Bowery dive.
The night of the ball arrived. Togged out in rented
dress suits Dyke and Lenny started up St. Mark's Place
for Arlington Hall, which is in the center of the most
thickly populated section of New York's ghetto. Follow



I44    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
ing them a pace behind was a chubby-faced youngster
carrying a box of lurid silk badges which were to be distributed to the honored guests and members of the floor
committee. The entrance of Dyke and Lenny into the hall
was to be the signal for the commencement of festivities.
The band stood ready to begin with "East Side, West
Side."
As the trio approached the stairway leading up into the
hall pistols cracked suddenly and blazed from a dozen
hallways across the street. The badges went into the air
like a fountain of many colors. The young man carrying
them took to his heels. Dyke and Lenny went up the stairs
four at a time. The shooting continued for several
minutes.
When it ceased Strauss was found upon the sidewalk
just outside the hall. He was dead.
The Dyke and Lenny ball was postponed. Its guests
scrambled out of the hall through rear windows.
The case was cold when I got it. It puzzled me how
Dopey Benny's gunmen had gotten their pistols. It was
not likely that they would walk the streets with them in
their pockets, for they were being hunted at the time.
A new figure in gangland had entered the picture-the
"independent" gun carrier. For two years I sought to find
who had carried the guns of the Fein crowd. I finally
learned that Annie Britt, a chunky blonde, had toted seven
guns into St. Mark's Place in a handbag "just to do the
boys a favor." As each man found a point of vantage in
a hallway she stepped up and handed him a gun. She
waited until Dyke and Lenny appeared, then, gayly swinging her empty handbag, yanished. The shooting began.
With this information as a wedge I split open the story
and named as the gang that had killed Strauss the following crew of Dopey Benny cohorts: Irving Wexler, alias
Waxey Gordon; Little Orgie, who had a special grudge
against Dyke and Lenny; Jew Murphy, who never forgot




THE WAY GANGS GO


145


the punch in the face; Shorty Gordon and Abie Beckerman, a holdup man. Miss Britt, too, was indicted.
A father and son who were passing just before the
shooting began described a man they had seen looking
on from the corner and who appeared to know what was
about to happen. From descriptions given by them I picked
up Joe the Greaser, who admitted that he had stood by
while preparations for the battle were being made. The
generalissimo, Joe said, was Shorty Gordon, who placed
the gunmen in the hallways. Gordon confessed to me in
the privacy of my inner office, revealing the entire conspiracy but reluctantly admitting that a woman had been
employed as gun carrier. He told me where the guns had
been thrown after the battle and we found them. He was
not aware that Strauss, an innocent passer-by, had been
killed until he read about it in the newspapers.
Gordon and Murphy were tried but acquitted. The
testimony we were forced to rely upon came mostly from
gangsters and was involved in many conflicts. Other members of the gang were not tried. A legal issue was raised
when the gang's lawyers contended that their clients did
not have a felony in mind when Strauss was shot. Beckerman was later killed.
Dopey Benny ceased to be a figure in New York City
gang affairs. His mob broke up.
Woods continued a relentless war against gangs. More
than a hundred of the most notorious gangsters were arrested, and most of them sent away for long terms. There
was a cessation of gang homicides in the sections of the
city that had been under gang rule. When Woods took
office the number of murders-for the year previous had
been 244. In i9i6 he had reduced the year's slayings
to i86. During the first quarter of i9iS arrests in the
city numbered 48,0I3, with i0,636 men on the force. This
was a twenty per cent. increase over the number of arrests
for the same quarter in the preceding year. There was also




146    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
a twenty-five per cent. increase in the number of convictions. These figures form a quick index to what can be
done by a commissioner who means business as Woods
did, and who did his best to run the Department for the
public's interest and not the politicians'.
There was little gang activity during his administration. Dopey Benny, Jew Murphy, Joe the Greaser, Punk
Madden, Jack Sirroco, Owney Madden, Little Doffie,
Skush Thomas, and dozens of other notorious gang leaders found police resistance too stiff and dispersed their
gangs. Nor was any more heard of the Car Barn, Slaughter House, and Pansy gangs, the Hudson Dusters and
Pearl Buttons who had given rise to a reign of terror
before Woods came in. Not all of their leaders were
jailed. A good many of them disappeared the way such
crooked potentates usually go-killed by usurpers or
slain in inter-gang battles.
I have already observed how this lawless policy of
self-determination leads to self-extermination even among
cutthroat gangs of the imported variety whose organizations had centuries of experience back of them. Let me
trace briefly how these two factors work out with the
newer type of gang.
Benjamin Levinsky had a long criminal record. He had
associated with thieves as a boy, trained under older gang
leaders, and became ambitious to head a gang of his own.
He gathered together a group of thieves and gunmen and
hired out their services in strike work. He set up opposition to one William Lipshitz, alias Levine, a nineteenyear-old gang leader who saw his lucrative business going
into Levinsky's hand. Lipshitz, too, had a criminal record and was a lob (handy man) for Jack the Dropper
who worked for the bosses in many strikes that occurred
in the East Side needle trades. Levinsky was a follower
of Little Orgie, who hated the Dropper because the latter




THE WAY GANGS GO


I47


had once slashed him across the cheek. Little Orgie had
a monopoly on work for the strikers.
On December 5, 1922, Levinsky stepped out of a taxicab in front of No. 715 Broadway, and as he entered the
place he was shot and killed by Lipshitz. The latter had
been sent by Jack the Dropper to take Levinsky out of
the field and kill two birds with one stone, remove an
enemy and weaken the forces working for the strikers.
Lipshitz pleaded guilty to murder in the second degree
and was sentenced to life imprisonment. We were certain
he had killed others but could not legally fasten the
crimes upon him.
Various attempts had been made to convict the Dropper
of crimes. In his time he had done four "bits" in prison
and knew the tricks by which prisons could be avoided.
He became a great hero among gangsters. He was a
treacherous operator. He shifted from one side to another,
and his gunmen had a hard time telling which cause they
were supposed to espouse. Whoever offered the most
money got the Dropper's services.
Finally on August 27, I924, the Dropper was arrested
in a Broadway office. An arsenal of side arms was found
in the place. It was the concentration point for the Dropper's killers. When a job was to be done they met in this
office: the guns were passed out with directions for the
attack.
Detectives took the Dropper into the Essex Market
Magistrate's Court for arraignment on the gun-carrying
charge. He was discharged on the morning of August
28th. Anticipating gun-play among gangsters who crowded
the court room, patrolmen and detectives began to search
spectators for revolvers. A thin, pale-faced gunman,
Louis Kushner, a sniper for Little Orgie, stepped out of
the court room when he saw the search going on.
Upon discharge the Dropper wheeled round in the




I48


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


court room and smiled benignly. He walked out of the
courthouse with Lieutenant Cornelius Willemse, a member of the Homicide Squad. The Dropper entered a taxicab and closed the door. Willemse stood talking to him
through an open window in the taxicab.
"It's about time you were beating it out of town," said
Willemse. "A man can go so far in your game and  "
"Aw, they're afraid to take me," the Dropper barked
in a raw, pompous voice. "I ---": The Dropper never finished the sentence. Five shots
poured in through the open window. One passed through
the crown of Willemse's straw hat; another hit the taxi
driver in the shoulder. Three lodged in the Dropper's
pudgy form. He toppled over dead.
At the side of the taxi, with a smoking gun in his hand,
stood Kushner, grinning. Willemse seized him.
"Well, I got that guy," said Kushner. "Now gimme a
cigarette."
Little Orgie and another of his henchmen, Sammy
Weiss, were arrested for instigating the killing of the
Dropper, but Kushner protested that the assassination was
his own pet scheme. Little Orgie and Weiss were released.
Kushner went to prison for life.
The Dropper's gang empire broke apart, leaving the
field to Little Orgie. But this gang leader quit his strike
activities and went into another and more profitable field.
He transfered his theater of operations to the Broadway
white-light center and went into bootlegging and hijacking. He flourished and planned to retire with a fortune.
He prospered until October 15, I927. On this day he
went back to the East Side to display his wealth before
old friends. He took along a bodyguard-Legs Diamond. The two stood chatting in front of No. I03 Norfolk Street. A touring car drove up to the curb. A man in
the car called out, "Hey, Orgie." Little Orgie looked
around, smiling, and got a bullet in the back of his head.




THE WAY GANGS GO


149


Legs was wounded. Orgie died on the spot; his bodyguard
recovered.
Nearly all gang murders fall into the same pattern, and
their authors usually come to the same ends meted out
to Jack the Dropper and Little Orgie. For a long time
they beat the courts and laws set up by organized society
for its protection. But theirown form of justice, of which
they are very proud, disposes of them without trial or
hearing or benefit of counsel. They are anxious in a court
of law to take full advantage of every technicality which
the law builds around men accused of murder. Their
lawyers rail against the death penalty and impress juries
with the severity of capital punishment, but their clients
resort to it in their own lawless world on the slightest
provocation.
The most glowering, outraged look a gangster ever
gave me came from Waxey Gordon, whose arrest for
the murder of Strauss I had caused. Waxey was picked
up on a minor charge and stood in the office of Chief
Inspector John D. Coughlin. It was some years after
Gordon's acquittal.
I stepped into the office.
"You know this man, don't you, Gordon?" Coughlin
asked the gangster, indicating me.
Gordon's face screwed itself into a hideous frown.
"Where are you living now?" I asked Gordon.
"On Riverside Drive," he said. The Drive is one of
New York's finest boulevards. Rents are high there.
"Riverside Drive, huh?" I said. "Up in the world.
You never earned an honest dollar in your life, Gordon.
"Wha's 'at?" he snapped. "You're sore because you
tried to burn me once, and I beat it."
"And you deserved to burn," I said.
"What d'yuh mean I ought to burn?" His voice had
risen to a screech. No wrongly outraged citizen ever




150    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
showed more deeply aggrieved feelings than Gordon. His
lynxlike eyes followed me out of the room.
Of all murder cases gang-feud killings are the most
difficult to establish from a legal standpoint. The motives
are obscure. They may have been planted in the minds
of the slayers years back, while in the meantime the feuds
that result have taken a thousand ramifications. And evidence that will meet the tests in a court of law is hard to
get. Witnesses the State must rely upon to establish the
motives, conspiracy, and the actual killing are men and
women of the underworld, ex-convicts for the most part,
whose testimony even under oath must be taken with
a big grain of salt under prevailing rules of evidence.
Even though it may be the truth, and substantiated by
circumstantial and documentary evidence, the known criminal records and activities of such witnesses detract from
their credibility.
Persons on the outside imagine that gunmen and gangsters live in a world of romance, dark romance, and
that among them exists a code of honor. It is a popular
belief that a seasoned crook never squeals on his associates. It's a myth. Of the hundreds of crooks I have examined few, when cornered, fail to squeal. If they don't
it's not because they are bound to silence by a code of
honor. They're afraid to squeal, fearing death at the
hands of their own kind. Alone and cornered they are
most abject cowards. The very fact that they operate in
bands is an indication of this cowardice. They are afraid
to work single handed.
Confessions from professional gangsters are not difficult to get, but the trouble is they usually are full of lies
uttered in a cowardly attempt to fasten their crimes upon
others. Frequently in my career gangs of killers have been
brought before me. Together they display a cool, cocksure bravado, but alone they wilt. Separate them and each
man races to be the first to confess, always throwing the




THE WAY GANGS GO


151


blame on.another or the rest of the gang. In this way they
hope to pave the road to a bargain with the State and
save their own skins. They are so inherently distrustful
of one another that a bare hint to one of a remark which
a pal has dropped brings on the race to see who can tell
the most soonest.
The dying gunman, shot by one of his own, who refuses
to confess or make a deathbed statement naming his slayer
is supposed to be a tragic, sympathy-arousing figure, if you
look at crime through romance-colored glasses. He may
be a killer himself, the most vicious type of criminal, but,
the romancer says, he lives up to the code of honor of
his class. Code of honor? There's no such thing among
these misfits of life. Fear stops them from talking, fear
of death to relatives or pals, or certain death for themselves if they should happen to recover.
If they do talk upon their deathbeds their statements
are usually worthless. It is the practice in cases where
the victim of attack appears to be dying to send detectives
and a police stenographer to the bedside to procure a
dying statement from the victim and record it for future
use at a trial if the slayer is apprehended. The law requires that before such a statement may be admitted into
evidence before a jury in a murder trial it must be shown
that the maker knew he was about to die and had no hope
of recovery.
Human beings, including gunmen that I have encountered on the brink of death, alike display most hopeful
qualities.
"Do you believe you are about to die?" I have asked
many of them who later died. This question meets the
law's requirements.
"Why, how do I know " had been the usual reply, or
a positive "No" or, "Ask the doctor about that." In any
case the reply, even if the dying victim did make a statement, would bar it from a jury's consideration.




152    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
"Have you given up all hope of recovery?" I have
inquired.
"I should say notl" is invariably the hopeful reply,
although at the very moment life was being sustained only
by artificial means. This reply also nullifies whatever
statement the victim may make.
In this one respect honest persons and gunmen are
alike-in the face of certain death they cling to hope
when there is no hope. Gunmen, it is said, show great
fortitude and an easy willingness to die. More myth. They
like life as all of us do. Sometimes they do talk and name
slayers. But the presence of death makes them no more
truthful or trustworthy than they were in the heyday
of their illicit power. The slayers they name in many
instances are not the real slayers but old enemies against
whom they were working out an old grudge with their
dying breath.
The old saying that a professional crook will stick to
his friends through the last ditch belongs also in the realm
of the mythical. I'll cite a case in proof:
Fat Joe Bintel was a pompous easy-money figure on
the lower East Side (nearly all professionals originate on
the East Side, not because the people there are worse than
others but because poverty is still intrenched). He was
an ex-convict with a long record. He was the much-vaunted
friend of every crook that crossed his path. He had a
gurgling laugh and a buoyant spirit. Crooks swore by
him. Knowing his underworld very thoroughly and possessing intimate inside connections that kept him in touch
with crook activities, he went into the bail-bond business,
but dealt only with professionals, killers, thieves, and
holdup men. He had advance information on crimes that
were committed; knew who committed them, and this
gave him a jump on his competitors in the bail-bond business. He was like the proverbial early worm.
He opened headquarters in a shabby little office at




THE WAY GANGS GO


I53


No. 52 Second Street, adjoining the Essex Market Magistrate's Court, which, by reason of its location in the center
of the populous East Side, handled most gangster and
gunmen cases. To outdo his competitors he offered his
customers an inducement. He would also supply lawyers,
not the type learned in law, but the shyster or mouthpiece
type who know the loopholes in the law. Fat Joe also
held himself out to be a great power with the courts.
He boasted he could fix cases.
His reputation for never turning down a crook-that is,
a crook with an established criminal record-ran far and
wide. 'His rates were high, but when he bailed out a man
that left the crooks fret to go back to work at crime
and earn money to pay Bintel and his lawyers. Fat Joe
worked a profitable endless-chain proposition. He became a sort of demigod in the underworld. He had a way
of making strange crooks new to the city see him first
before beginning operations. He had a thousand friends
singing his praise on every occasion as the best friend a
fellow could have. Anyone who ventured to dispute his
standing found himself in a rough-and-tumble mix-up with
Joe's defenders.
At one time he had so many professional crooks out
on bail that he couldn't keep track of all of them, but he
depended upon the so-called code of honor that was supposed to keep crooks in bail from fleeing with Fat Joe
compelled to forfeit the bail.
Suddenly, while Fat Joe was enjoying great prosperity
with scores of felons out on bail, the State of New York
passed a new crime law imposing life imprisonment upon
habitual criminals who were convicted a fourth time of
felony.
All of Fat Joe's customers had long records, three,
four, and five previous convictions for felonies, and were
out on bail pending trial for additional felonies. Convic



154


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


tion would mean isolation in prison for the rest of their
natural lives.
One by one some of these men who were out on bail
put up by Fat Joe disappeared.
Fat Joe, the great, undisputed friend of the underworld, saw ruin ahead when out of his pocket he would
have to make good the forfeited bail bonds.
So quietly he began to "turn in" his customers, tipping
off the fact that they had committed fresh crimes. He
could not afford to ask openly to be released from the
bail bonds. That would be an unfriendly act. But there
was a crowding of jails by felons whom Joe had "turned
in"-secretly, of course.
Consternation prevailed among his customers. For a
while they couldn't figure who was tipping them off.
A week passed. Late one afternoon two men stepped
into Fat Joe's little office. One shot was fired. It hit Fat
Joe in the back of the head. He fell forward in his swivel
chair, dead. The great, good friend was gone; the bullet
was a protest against his idea of honor among thieves.
His slayers could not be identified and consequently
never were found. Fat Joe was given a cheap burial. The
fortune he had built up "chiseling," as his occupation is
called, was swept away meeting forfeited bail bonds.
Self-extermination among gangs is a recognized law in
their shadowy world. Many a gangster and gunman has
beaten apparently fool-proof cases we built up against
them. Months were spent getting the evidence, but in court
they wormed their way through the law's meshes, boasting
of their ability to beat any case the police worked up
against them. We failed frequently to get them in life,
but time and again they came into our hands sooner or
later as victims of just another homicide to be looked up.
In view of this situation it is not surprising to hear
opinions expressed that it might be good police policy,
where gang-feud killings are involved, not to turn loose




T-HE WAY GANGS GO


ISS


a large staff of detectives to run down the slayers and
work for months trying to build up a case when in the end
it will be beaten in court by trickery. Better, some of these
opinions hold, to concentrate the detective energy which
taxpayers pay for on running down the slayers of honest
men and women, for in the end self-extermination takes
care of the professional killers. To me, however, homicide is homicide whether the victim is a murderer or an
honest man. The law makes no distinctions. Murder is
murder, and it is the duty of the police to seek the slayer.
Looking back on the gang murders that occurred in
my time, I recall one fact that seems sufficient to destroy
the myth about the underworld's code of honor. Most
of the gangster victims slain by their own kind were killed
from the rear, usually shot in the back of the head. A code
of honor in gangland? There isn't even a semblance of
sportsmanship, or the sign of an even break, when gangland sets out to kill.
The fact that New York does not suffer from gang
activities to the extent that other large cities do is largely
the result of Woods's work and the efficient administration
of Commissioner George V. McLaughlin, who came later.
Woods spent almost four years at the head of the Department. The mayor gave him a free hand. The men liked him.
He got results. But in I918 a change in administrations
produced the usual reorganization at headquarters. Woods
resigned. There was genuine regret at his going. He had
built up the morale of the Department through the trying
period of the Great War. His successor held office for
exactly twenty-two days. The job was too onerous for
him. Finally Richard E. Enright was elevated to the commissionership from a lieutenancy. He made many changes.
The Homicide Squad became the Homicide Bureau and
went on functioning with about eighteen trained men to
handle homicides in a city of six million persons and
covering more than 350 square miles.




CHAPTER XIII


DABBLERS IN CRIME ANALYSIS
HAKE-UPS are not the only disturbances that come
along to interrupt a murder man. The Homicide Bureau
was not molested in the change of administrations, but
other sources of discomfort opened up. However, life
always offers a compensating influence. For every dark
moment there is a bright one; for every disquieting incident in my work there was a chance to laugh and thus
relieve the heavy atmosphere that sometimes pervaded
the Murder Clinic.
From time to time men and women with startling new
ideas, discoveries, and inventions in the field of criminal
investigation came to see me. I had always been skeptical
about new ideas in this field. I inherited it, I believe, from
my early experience. When Francis V. Greene was Commissioner of Police under Roosevelt he sent a man to
London to study Scotland Yard's fingerprinting system.
The Yard had just installed it.
A very favorable report on the system, then in its infancy, was brought back to Greene. He thought it would
be a good thing to try out. His chief inspector of detectives was noncommittal on the subject, but a very practical
man. He decided to subject the Yard system to a severe
test. There was in prison in New York at the time a noted
English thief whom we all knew. His fingerprints were




DABBLERS IN CRIME ANALYSIS I157
taken and then sent to the Yard's fingerprinting expert.
No name, description, or other indication of the thief's
identity accompanied the prints,
"Now we'll see how good this finger-tip business is,"
said the chief inspector. "If London identifies this man
I'm for the system."
In a month Scotland Yard sent back word that the
fingerprints were those of English Harry, house breaker
and sneak thief. He was the man we had in prison.
The fingerprinting system was installed at headquarters.
To-day it contains more than six hundred thousand prints
of known criminals. It is a sort of an index to crookdom's
population, and these are not, by any means, all the crooks
in the United States.
Whether or not it is because I have a loud laugh when
my funny bone is tickled, visitors with queer devices who
called at headquarters were always sent in to me. Now
it was a man with a mechanical lie detector guaranteed
to tell when crooks were prevaricating. Or someone would
turn up with a divining rod to locate missing weapons
and clues, while others offered psychic powers capable, so
they said, of finding any murderer. They were all anxious
to get the Homicide Bureau's approval of their devices.
One afternoon I was called into the assembly room
where a thin, dark-featured woman was sitting with two
men. She would pass her hand over her face, then gaze
at the ceiling and whisper in a ghostlike voice. She was
on a psychic hunt for crooks, they said.
The two men at her side followed her movements,
jumping up when she pointed, sitting down when she
lapsed into a dreamy mood. They wanted to know what
I thought about her powers. I asked the two men who she
was and who they were. She was about to go on the vaudeville stage, they said, and they were her agents. If the
Homicide Bureau would approve of her methods she
would get a booking and much publicity.




I58    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
I laughed and walked out. Three days later the young
woman was arrested for shoplifting. Well, she should
have known crooks, but not through any gift of divination.
She could "feel" them all right, and so could our men.
They caught her in the act.
Others who called were too far gone to offer any hope.
And the usual number of mentally unbalanced persons
came in to confess crimes they had never committed, or
to solve crimes we had never heard of. Yet their stories
had to be listened to. They were permitted to tell them
up to the point when the ambulance arrived from Bellevue Hospital to carry them off to the psycopathic ward
for observation and treatment.
There were also self-appointed crime analyists who
dabbled in criminology without training or talent for it.
Occasionally they arose to plague us, and some hung on
with bulldog tenacity. Such a person was my friend, whom
I shall disguise as Mr. Holmes. He was not a bad sort,
just a putterer indulging a habit or conceit. He had a
flair for murder inquiry and a predilection for taking
issue with me on cases which looked like mysteries but
were not. He lent a willing ear to anyone who could dig
up a mystery. It had to be murder. He was not concerned
with lesser crimes. He bobbed up with regularity.
One night at ten o'clock the telephone in my home
jangled, as often it did at that and later hours. I answered
it. My office was calling to advise that a body had been
found in a motor boat in Flushing Bay, Long Island. By
a circuitous route, the only one available at that hour,
I reached the bay and, by still more circuitous travel on
water in the pitch dark, reached the motor boat.
In the cabin lay a form in woman's clothing. But the
face was that of a young man. It was peaceful and contented, as is almost always true of suicides. I set it down
for a case of self-destruction after my first look. A man
who has been viewing death nearly all of his adult life




DA BB BLERS IN CRIME ANALY S I S         I59
reaches the point where he instinctively differentiates between homicide, suicide, and accidental death. A good
tailor usually can tell at one quick glance whether the
suit a man wears is ready made or built to order or whether
buttonholes are machine or hand sewn. Men with long
experience in any line, if they are observant, can do the
same thing.
The fact that the young man was dressed in feminine
attire did not point to murder, for experience and certain
studies I had made of the works of Kraft-Ebing explained
this aberration.
The body was cold. Rigor mortis had set in. It must
have lain in the cabin for some hours.
A voice sounded from an opening in the cabin. "Hello.
Is that you, Carey?" It was the friendly, familiar address
of my fellow worker in homicide, Dr. Norris, chief medical examiner. "Well, where did he hang?" he next asked.
Dr. Norris, too, had gotten the same picture from the
first glance, even looking at the picture from the darkness
above. His inquiry was induced by the sight of a rope
around the dead youth's neck.
"He didn't hang," I explained. And so he hadn't. The
rope was a hangman's noose which, once drawn tight, is
almost impossible to slacken without untying. He had
pulled it tight about his neck.
'Plain case of long-studied suicide," said Norris.
"I agree with that," said I.
Further inquiry disclosed that the youth had been taken
to the launch in a rowboat at two P. M. the afternoon
before. Men at work on a boat near by saw him enter the
cabin. He did not emerge. I reported it as a clear case of
suicide and so did Dr. Norris. The verdict was met with
doubt by the youth's father, who gave his version or theory
to my friend Mr. Holmes. Instantly Mr. Holmes, sitting
in his office, figured it as murder. He hung his theory upon
the fact that the young man was dressed in woman's




I6o    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
clothing and that he had employed a hangman's noose.
And, moreover, he opined, no motive existed for selfdestruction. Indeed, these circumstances might appear
mysterious to a layman. I hardly blamed Holmes for getting excited about it. The circumstances were unusual to
a man on the outside, and, moreover, the angle from which
he looked at it made good newspaper reading. But Holmes
was more than excited. He was incensed to think that I
would not countenance his theory.
There was a lull. Holmes may have gone into a seance.
Presently I heard from him. He asked me to meet the
father of the dead youth. I did. The old gentleman protested that I was all wrong. His son could not have killed
himself.
"Now, sir," I said to him, "I have all the sympathy in
the world for you, but your boy killed himself."
No, the father insisted, I was wrong. I had not intended
to prolong the family grief, so had made no extended
investigation into motive. Now, however, my conclusions
were challenged. I resumed my investigation. Just one
short trip was necessary. I found that the young man
had taken out life insurance less than a year before his
death. There was the usual clause in the policy that rendered it null and void if the insured killed himself before
the policy had been in effect a year.
The life-insurance policy was never paid. No more was
heard from Holmes on this case.
But he bobbed up again on another matter that intrigued
his penchant for murder inquiry. A young woman was
found dead on the steps in front of her home, shot through
the temple on the right side, a contact wound. She was
standing on the steps when the shot was fired and fell
backward. The pistol was found beside her body. These
circumstances all pointed, and invariably point, to a selfinflicted death. I so reported. I had made a few inquiries
about motive and found that the young woman had fallen




DABBLERS IN CRIME ANALYSIS 161


Into fast ways, but about this her family knew nothing.
I wanted to spare them the details and not blacken her
memory and had quickly closed the inquiry.
But Mr. Holmes, viewing things at a distance between
puffs of his pipe, saw murder in the picture. He could
not understand how the young woman, happy, prepossessing, of good family, and with everything to live for, possibly could have killed herself. He sent men (he never
went out on his own missions) to examine the body and
they returned with theories which fitted into his picture
-his long shot.
Newspapers flared with a new mystery. It was summer
time, and a good mystery story is relished by the best of
papers during the dog days. The young woman had been
murdered in spite of what the Homicide Bureau said.
I did not care to answer this publicly and thus awaken
unpleasant memories. But I put in a long-distance call
for a certain dentist in Philadelphia. He answered.
"Is this Dr.-?" I asked.
"Yes."
"Do you know a girl named Frances-?"
"I do."
"Have you seen her lately?"
"Last Saturday night. She stayed here in my apartment
with ah-h-h-h friends."
"Doctor, do you own a revolver?"
"Yes, I have one. I keep it here."
"What's the make and caliber and color of it?"
"Smith and Wesson,.32, nickel plated."
It was the description of the gun found on the steps.
"You've got the gun now?"
"Of course. It's in my bureau drawer. I'll see."
He stepped away from the 'phone. I could hear him
say to himself in a loud, surprised tone, "My God. It's
gone."




162    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
He came back to the 'phone. "The revolver's gone,"
he said.
"Now, Doctor," I said, "could you come over to my
office at police headquarters?"
"When?" he asked eagerly.
"Oh, in a couple of days," I replied.
I hung up.
Scarcely four hours later he rushed breathless into my
office and told me a version of the young woman's life
which her family and Holmes had not heard. And the
dentist was in Philadelphia when she killed herself. She
had taken the revolver without his knowledge. But the
most convincing indications of his innocence was his outcry when he went to the drawer in his apartment and the
rush he made to get to my office when I had told him a
couple of days would be all right.
Holmes was deeply chagrined. A newspaper sensation
died. And in so far as I was concerned Holmes was
through. My official connection with murder inquiry ended
a few years later. During my time in the Detective Bureau
I might have devoted all my time to running down theories
propounded by self-styled and self-appointed crime analysts like Holmes. For almost every suicide and many
accidental deaths may be conjured into murder mysteries
by an over-active imagination. A thousand letters pouring
weekly into the Detective Bureau of a large city from
experts, cranks, and revengeful persons voicing theories,
tips, and ideas on murder indicate the throng of potential
sleuths that are at large and unknown but willing to stick
a finger in the pie. In more recent years there has been
a drop in the number of amateur crime analysts. Possibly
they satisfy their imaginations in the detective story books.
If so I thank the writers of these, for they have done their
part in relieving homicide men of one source of annoyance.
Holmes would have found fertile ground for his talent
in the tragic case of Barbara Reig. It was a sensation




DABBLERS IN CRIME ANALYSIS 163
while it lasted, but a little case from a murder man's
standpoint. For a time it was wrapped up in mystery.
Barbara was twenty, good looking and well thought of
by girls she worked with. One July evening her body was
found on top of a tool box in a shelter house in Irving
Park, Brooklyn. There was a pistol wound in the right
side of her head, again a contact wound, which showed
that the pistol had been held against her temple. Her
legs were crossed, which is a frequent thing in suicides.
Blood had run down back of her right ear and around
her neck. Had she been murdered this would have taken
different courses.
There was no pistol in the place I I offer the reader an
opportunity to guess whether it was murder or not. From
the facts just described I said at once that it was suicide.
The solution follows.
A summer thunderstorm had come up which drove the
girl into the shelter house. Her skirt was wet. She took
it off and hung it upon a hook to dry. Presently Patrolman Shillard, on duty in the park with a probationary
patrolman, entered the house. Barbara was infatuated
with him. The night was hot; the shelter house had one
light over which Shillard put his cap to dry. He took
out his revolver in its holster and laid it on the tool box.
For three hours they sat talking, Shillard trying to convince the girl that she should be courting someone her own
age. The girl, in a huff, arose and was drawing her dress
down over her head when she shot herself with the officer's
pistol which she had picked up in the dark unseen by him.
He picked up the pistol and ran from the place. He
encountered another patrolman who, having heard the
shot, was rapping the sidewalk with his nightstick.
"Did you hear that shot?" the officer asked Shillard.
"No," said Shillard, "but I heard you rap. Where did
the shot come from?"
"I don't know. Let's look in here," said the officer,




164


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


advancing toward the shelter house. The two entered, and
with feigned surprise Shillard looked again upon the
body. He said he did not know the girl, but later admitted
having flirted with her and finally described what had
gone on in the place. He claimed that he had left the
shelter house more than an hour before. He was indicted,
tried, and the jury disagreed. The case was dismissed.
It was plainly suicide.
The trouble with Officer Shillard was that he was married, for one thing; that he was afraid if he admitted
being in the shelter house three hours the punishment
for being off post that length of time would be greater than
if he admitted having been gone only an hour. So he only
admitted the hour, tangled himself up in all kinds of
trouble, and created mystery where there should have
been none.
What Analyst Holmes might have made out of that
case
In story books and in some newspapers, and frequently
on the stage, one hears and sees much that would tend
to support the belief that policemen fasten crimes upon
the wrong persons to satisfy revenge or to gain glory. The
story that known criminals are hounded by the police and
convicted of crimes they have never committed has gained
a good deal of currency. My experience has been to the
contrary.
Back in my early years in the Bureau Sergeant Goldenhammer was shot and killed by a bartender named Byrnes,
who was an associate of crooks, though not one himself.
Goldenhammer was on plain-clothes duty, hunting for a
thief. He had been informed that his man was sharing
a room with Byrnes. He went to the room. Byrnes
admitted him, and a few minutes later Goldenhammer
dropped to the floor, shot through the head.
Byrnes was arrested and admitted shooting the sergeant. He said that the officer had come to his door




DABBLERS IN CRIME ANALYSIS              I65
dressed in a dark blue shirt and working clothes. He
demanded admittance without saying that he was an officer. Byrnes objected. Goldenhammer pressed in. Byrnes
ran to a bureau drawer, got out his revolver and, thinking Goldenhammer was an intruder bent on robbery,
tussled with him. Goldenhammer seized Byrnes's right
arm. The pistol went off, the bullet entering the side of
Goldenhammer's head and going almost straight upward
through the skull. The sergeant died almost instantly.
In view of Byrnes's association with thieves it might
easily have been possible to fasten murder upon him. But
my conclusions did not run that way. The course of the
bullet upward plainly indicated the truth of Byrnes's
version of the shooting-that it was accidental. Moreover, Goldenhammer was known as a man who plunged
into things without due judgment. His life would have
been spared had he announced that he was an officer, for
it was soon determined that, although Byrnes knew crooks,
he was on friendly terms with many policemen and had
helped them on various occasions. He was not tried.
To have fastened that crime on Byrnes not only would
have been a grave injustice but a professional error of
the worst kind. It would have been like cheating at solitaire, fooling yourself. Only by playing the game square
do you learn its niceties, the winning plays. The same is
true in murder inquiry. You become adept at it only when
you strive to get at the truth, for in the processes thus
employed is the knack of real detection acquired. At threescore and three years I am inclined to believe that it's true
of the whole game of life.
One more little humorous incident before I close this
chapter. 1 don't want every word I write to be about
murder.
Not many years ago a stout little man came into my
office. I was first attracted to his presence by the squishy
sound of his feet as he sauntered in. I looked at his feet.




i66    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
They were what a policeman calls boloney butcher's feet,
long and round like an inflated inner tire of a motor car.
"Inspector," he said very seriously, "I want to interest
you in a great idea."
"Well, let's have it."
"I've done a lot of detective work up around Canada.
I always found it hard to communicate with my brother
detectives when there were people, maybe crooks, around.
I got to thinking it over, and for two years I've been
inventing an eye language for detectives."
"So?" I invited him to a chair.
"I've got a whole code arranged so that two detectives
can talk to each other any time in secret. For instance,
if you wanted to say 'Arrest him' you'd move your eyes
this way." His eyelids fluttered and his eyeballs circled in
their sockets. "Now, it won't take long for your men to
learn this code. Wherever I go people are greatly interested in my invention. Think of what it would mean to
the men on this force."
"I am thinking, thinking hard," I said. My caller smiled
pleasantly. I looked out the window. There was a silence
of about half a minute.
"How would it work if the detectives were out in a
dark alley on a pitch black night?" I asked.
"Well, of course, you understand, Inspector, this system is for daytime detectives."
Very shortly he bowed himself out the door, backing
out, his feet making the same squishy noise. I had to
laugh loud and long. His feet were as funny as his eye
language. Still I would not have barred him from my
office. Not even a black subject like murder will make1
a man worry if he knows where to turn for comedy relief.




CHAPTER XIV


BUSHWHACKERS AND RIPPERS
THERE are two types of murderers whose identity and
apprehension are difficult, almost impossible, to achieve.
One is the bushwhacker, a chameleon-like criminal who
slays wantonly as a prelude or aftermath to robbery, and
the other is the ripper, author of the most atrocious crimes
on the calendar. The crimes of both types grip the populace with profound terror, horror, and puzzlement. To
a man of murder experience they are not the deep mysteries they seem to others, though their solution in a
legal sense is rarely ever perfected.
The bushwhacker emerges at night out of a background
of foliage in public parks and along lonely highways to
prey upon couples carrying on clandestine flirtations. Police have given him this name because it aptly describes
his modus operandi-out of the bushes and whack I Blackmail is one of his assistants in crime. Let me furnish a
typical case.
Patrolmen on post in Van Cortland Park, a wooded
playground at the northern edge of New York City, heard
pistol shots on the night of September 3, I9I6. They
hurried in the direction of the firing and came upon a
touring car at the side of a tree-bordered lane known as
Golf Links Road. The night was unusually dark. In the
167




i68


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


front seat at the wheel slumped the form of a welldressed, distinguished-looking man about forty. Beside
him sat an attractive woman about two years his junior.
He was dead. The woman had fainted.
When revived the woman gave her name and said that
the dead man was Dwight Dilworth, a lawyer, who lived
in Montclair, New Jersey, a fashionable suburb of New
York City. An examination of his body showed that three
bullets had been fired into the region of his heart. No
revolver was found in or near the car. The young woman
was gravely concerned and confused.
She told her story. At about six o'clock that evening
Dilworth, who, she said, was her family's lawyer, asked
her to accompany him on a motor ride and she agreed.
They dined at a popular roadhouse, got back into the
automobile, and started through Van Cortland Park. It
was a warm, pleasant night in Indian summer, and hundreds of persons were on park benches and lawns. Dilworth drove beyond into the more heavily wooded section
and entered Golf Links Road. The car stalled. He pulled
to the side of the road and stopped. He was about to
arise and alight from the car to look at his engine when
two men jumped from a clump of bushes.
"Hands up I" commanded one of the men.
"I won't," Dilworth shot back. He was a tall, robust
man. He lunged at the robbers. Three pistol shots were
fired at him. He fell back dead. The woman fainted. The
slayers disappeared into the woods and were never found.
The woman could not give a description of them. In the
darkness she could see only the bulk of their forms and
not their faces. She reconstructed the murder scene as
best she could for the benefit of detectives. There was
little that she could reconstruct. All had occurred in the
flash of a minute in the black night.
In spite of the apparent simplicity that attended the
crime, newspapers, with an elaborate background avail



BUSHWHACKERS AND RIPPERS                 169
able, made a sensational mystery of the killing. It was
hinted by unnamed sources, who are always valuable in
building backgrounds, but worthless in a court of law
where every accused person must be confronted by the
witnesses against him, that a jealous woman had plotted
to kill Dilworth. It was known, by rumor, that Dilworth
had a wide acquaintance among women, although he lived
in respectability with his wife and small son, who at the
time of the killing were visiting relatives in Kansas City.
Likewise it was hinted that his slayers were gunmen hired
by a woman to kill him.
The Great War, too, crept into the background. It was
intimated that a firm with which the lawyer was associated
was making ammunition for foreign armies, and that it
had been blacklisted by the British government. The inference was that his death was caused by secret agents of
one' of the nations at war. Nothing was ever uncovered
to support this theory.
Had Dilworth not attempted to fight back at his slayers the probability is that he would have lived, but more
than likely the story of the attack in that case never would
have reached the police. Therein lies the secret of the
bushwhacker's method. He is first of all a professional
thief equipped and ready to kill on the slightest provocation. Prowling about parks and highways with his eyes
and ears alert he discovers couples whose conduct and conversation indicate a clandestine relationship. He swoops
down upon them and robs. If they fight back he wounds
or kills, usually the latter, for it is the certain way of
eliminating a witness against him. He figures that owing
to the clandestine relationship the victim will submit to
robbery and not reveal the crime, for revealing it to
the police or others involves admitting the relationship.
If the victim submits to the robbery, as most do, that
is the last of it. Reports of these crimes scarcely ever
reach the police unless, of course, the victim is slain, in




170    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
which case the identity of the killers is seldom established.
When the victim submits and makes no report of the
robbery to the police the thieves are left to repeat the
operation on other trysting couples. Men have been
wounded by robbing bushwhackers, but the report of the
crime often has reached the police only by accident, and
then invariably the victim shies away from prosecution
of his assailants.
Bushwhacker cases are quite numerous in large cities.
The Homicide Bureau has had its share of them. Now and
again a criminal of this type is caught and confesses, and
the murder man gets a complete pattern. In 1907 we had a
case which fully revealed the bushwhacker's secrets. A
young tea taster, married and apparently happy, was
promenading one summer's night with a pretty manicurist.
They got off a car in a sparsely settled section of the city
and walked arm in arm in the shadow of a stone viaduct.
Suddenly a man sprang out and ordered the couple to
throw up their hands. The tea taster offered resistance.
He was struck over the head and killed. His companion
ran screaming. The assailant was captured some blocks
away, and in his possession was identifiable property of
the slain man.
This bushwhacker was a Negro and a seasoned hand
at this nefarious specialty. He confessed that he had followed the couple along in the shadows; had overheard
enough of their talk to tell him that the tea taster was
married and that the young woman on his arm was not
his wife. Thereupon he struck, as he had done on other
occasions in the same vicinity. These earlier victims had
willingly submitted to robbery and made no report to
the police. The Negro was executed.
Some time later a young man was sitting with a girl
on a bench in Central Park when a man came out of the
darkness and ordered them to throw up their hands.
Being too slow in obeying the man was shot. He recovered




BUSHWHACKERS AND RIPPERS                171
and told his story. His assailant too was a Negro who
was never caught.
Bushwhacking is a crime to which the criminally inclined Negro is peculiarly adapted. He is like a chameleon.
His black skin makes concealment and escape easy. He
melts into his background of heavy shadows and underbrush. Grouping the few crimes of this type which have
reached the police, one thing stands out in most all of
them-about all the victims ever saw of their assailant
were two rows of pearly teeth and the whites of eyes.
These are high lights which the Negro bushwhacker
cannot conceal, but they are not enough to identify an
assailant by, for nearly every Negro possesses the two
characteristics.
With a famous double murder case which occurred
near New York City in 1922 I had no official connection,
but watched developments only as an interested professional observer. A clergyman, who was married to a
highly respected woman, and an attractive woman who
was a member of his church choir, and also married,
were found murdered in a dark and unfrequented spot
on the outskirts of a small city where both lived. The
minister was shot through the head; the woman was shot
three times and her throat cut. The murder was committed about 10: 30 P. M. Two days later the bodies were
found.
A sensational background was provided for the case.
The minister's widow and her two brothers were tried
for the crime and acquitted. In this case the colorful,
insinuating background was followed. I can only express
an observer's opinion about it. This fact I consider of
utmost importance: the minister's watch, chain, and wallet were missing indicating robbery. And the woman's
throat was cut. The Negro bushwhacker frequently wields
a knife. I am inclined to think that the woman, true to
her sex, screamed, and her assailant cut her throat to




172


MEMOI RS OF A MURDER MAN


silence her; that the minister charged at her attacker and
was killed. The bullets fired into her body were to make
death doubly certain and instantaneous, for there were
houses near by with occupants in them.
The background of gossip, suspicion, theory, and illicit
relationships, and the wealth and social position of the
murdered minister's widow, made sensational reading.
The murder still remains a mystery, one of the most
talked-about mysteries of recent times.
Backgrounds are diverting and interesting. To the public a good mystery with new fresh developments each day
is like a three-ringed circus. The spectator finds it difficult
to concentrate his eyes and mind on one ring at a time
while the other rings are alive with performers, and
clowns are cavorting, and the air is being plowed by
hurtling aerialists. The murder man is like one of these
aerialists. He's got to keep his mind on the business in
hand and not on the large and diverting background all
about him.
Ripper murders, like poison slayings, occur in cycles
and are directed against women and small children. The
perpetrators are hard to find. Patterns explain why to
the murder man.
In March, I9r5, the mother of Leonora Cohn, aged
six, sent the child to a grocery store for a pail of milk. She
did not return. The mother, hurrying frantically out of
her apartment to look for the child, found her body in
a dark corner of the hallway. A fiend had violated the
child and had horribly mutilated her body, slashing the
abdomen with a small knife which I concluded was a
pocketknife. A pail of milk.stood near the body, and
near by was a piece of moist candy which the child had
been eating. No one in the tenement had heard screams
or a struggle, nor had anyone seen the child or her assailant enter or leave the tenement house.
We located the manufacturer of the candy, but since




BUSHWHACKERS AND RIPPERS                 173
his product was widely distributed to almost every small
candy store in the East it was impossible to trace the
piece the child had been eating. The presumption was
that the fiend had lured the child with the sweet. Asylums
were searched for a man with such a propensity who might
have been released from the institution or had escaped
just before the crime.
Three months later Charlie Murray, aged four and
a half years, was slashed and killed in the same way. His
body was found under a staircase in the tenement where
his family lived. A small knife also had been used by the
fiend. No clue ever was found to lead us to the slayer.
Indications were that the same murderer committed both
crimes. In the Murray case, as in the Cohn case, no one
had seen the slayer enter or leave the tenement, so the
most important thing necessary to start a search and
vital to the process of fastening the crime upon a slayer
was missing. The two ripper killings also occurred in
approximately the same neighborhood. Parents throughout the city were terrorized. Small children were kept indoors for weeks. Plain-clothes police were concentrated
in the sections of the city where the murders had occurred. They did not recur.
Great surprise and indignation are expressed when
ripper murderers are not caught. Police departments
come in for a lot of criticism. Yet the circumstances under
which this type of crime is committed almost always preclude the possibility of finding the slayers. They are
deliberately planned atrocities. The perpetrators purposely make certaij. Iat no one is around at the time,
and they select dark and hidden recesses for their act.
That such crimes are committed in cycles is explained
by Kraft-Ebing, who says that the slayers are perverts.
The lust to kill comes suddenly upon them. They appease
it and the cycle ends. Very frequently the desire never
occurs again in their lifetime or, if it does, long intervals






174    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
elapse between their acts. In some cases, which have come
under psychopathic observation, rippers have forgotten
all about their crimes.
It is generally believed that the ripper murderer is a
follower of the sea or a man who has long been out of
touch with civilization. Scotland Yard invariably looks
for a ripper in low dives in seaports. There are several
patterns in my mind to support this. One is the Totterman
case.
Totterman was a misfit of the sea. In a water-front
rooming house the body of a young woman was found
slashed in the ripper fashion. Her slayer left behind a clue
to his luggage. We found it and then began a long search
for Totterman. Being a sailor he had gone from ship to
ship. McCafferty and I combed water-front resorts for
trace of him and finally located him aboard a vessel in
a New England port. He was arrested. Had it not been
for the finding of an article which he had unwittingly
dropped in the slain woman's room Totterman probably
never would have been found. No one had seen him enter
or leave the place. He had carefully studied his opportunity to visit the woman's room unobserved. Except for
the age of the victim this crime varied little in its details
from the killing of Leonora Cohn and Charlie Murray.
Many years, however, elapsed between the crimes. Totterman was convicted and sentenced to die. He escaped from
Auburn Prison and was recaptured, and later sentence
of death was commuted to life imprisonment.
Men of this perverted type often are presumed to be
mentally unsound. Notwithstanding, they display shrewdness in eluding arrest. It took us five years to locate a
murderer of this species whose crime, while not a ripper
case, falls into the same category.
In I92i a young woman was found dead in a closet
in a midtown tenement house. From articles found in the
room it was ascertained that she shared the apartment




BUSHWHACKERS AND RIPPERS                175
with her brother. Both went under the name of Fay. The
brother was missing. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, we
learned that his real name was Harry Townsend and that
relatives and friends had not heard from brother and
sister for several years. Townsend had been born in Nova
Scotia in a town near the sea. He had shown a desire in
early youth to be a sailor. No deep-water vessels came
into the small port where he was born, but a great many
coastwise barges did.
Detective Oswald was sent to Nova Scotia to gather
together the man's past and make a picture. He found
that Townsend had become a bargeman. The last heard
of him was many years back when he was employed aboard
a barge running between Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and
Boston, Massachusetts.
Barges are plentiful along the eastern coast and they
are forever moving. I sent men to nearly every port along
the seaboard with instructions to make inquiries for
Townsend among barge workers. They left behind verbal
descriptions of the man and asked those they interviewed
to let us know if a man of that description ever turned up.
This process is known in detective circles as "laying the
wires." It is a long-drawn-out operation involving the
scattering of descriptions among thousands of persons.
Years may elapse before the information required comes
into the murder man's possession. Great patience is required; the detectives engaged in the task must keep in
constant touch with their "wires."
For five years this process went on. Finally Detective
Thomas J. Martin, a most patient member of the Bureau,
heard from a "wire" in Philadelphia that a man answering the description of the man he was looking for had
been seen on a coal barge in that city and quite strangely
was going by the name of Collier. Martin went to Philadelphia, attired in the garb of a bargeman. Circulating
among barge workers, he learned that his man had last




176    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
been seen on South Street, which lies along the New York
City river front.
The search was transferred to New York. Martin spent
days on South Street, while other men were sent to interview wholesale coal dealers who operated barges. New
York City uses more coal, perhaps, than any other city
in the world. Most of it comes in by barge. Finally a
dealer was found who had a man in his employ that
answered Townsend's description, but was known as
Collins. He was living on a stake boat moored at Whitestone Landing on Long Island Sound.
With DetectiveJoseph Donovan of the Bureau Martin
visited the stake boat at five o'clock one morning and
found Collins. He admitted he was Townsend and confessed. He pleaded guilty and was sent away for life. Five
years, almost to the day, had elapsed since we first started
the hunt for him. For two years he abandoned the sea
and buried himself in a lumber camp. But the call of the
sea was too much for him. He had to get back to a barge.
In a preceding chapter I spoke of the unofficial consulting faculty of experts which the Murder Clinic employed
from time to time. Also, when occasion required, the
Clinic had an unofficial army of scouts. In the Townsend
case they were bargemen, hundreds of them, scattered
along the seacoast, canals, rivers, and lakes, with eyes out
for the man we wanted.




CHAPTER XV


A HORSESHOER JOINS THE CLINIC
A T FIFTY-SEVEN seconds past noon on September i 6,
1920, the financial district in lower New York City was
shaken by a tremendous explosion. Thirty-one persons
were killed outright; one hundred and twenty-five were
injured, some of whom died later. Most of those killed
and injured were on their way to or from hasty lunches.
The explosion seemed to have been timed for twelve
o'clock, just when crowds on the street would be thickest.
As near as could be ascertained a bomb had exploded
in Wall Street near Broad directly in front of the United
States Assay Office which adjoined the Federal Subtreasury Building. Across the street was the bank of
J. P. Morgan & Company, one of the world's great banking institutions; to the west 205 feet, the Bankers' Trust
Company, and to the southwest, i65 feet, the New York
Stock Exchange.
The destructive charge thus had been set off in the very
heart of the banking district. J. P. Morgan was in Europe
at the time. His bank building and the Assay Office suffered the greatest damage. Windows were shattered and
granite walls bitten into by myriads of metal missiles
hurled in the explosion. The marks of these missiles still
177




178    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
are to be seen in the outer walls of the Morgan bank.
One Morgan employee was killed.
All available detectives at once were sent to the scene,
where later appeared United States secret service operatives, Department of Justice agents, post-office inspectors,
private detectives, and explosive experts.
The scene was a shambles when we reached it. It was
at once apparent that an outrage was committed which
far overshadowed the Haymarket assassinations in Chicago many years back and the I. W. W. killings in Seattle
of more recent date. It was wholesale murder.
Dr. Norris was early upon the scene. In the body of
a sixteen-year-old victim he found a section of smooth,
curved sheet iron, apparently part of a metal jacket which
held the explosive.
In the street pavement near the curb in front of the
Assay Office was a shallow depression, about two feet
in diameter, which looked like the mark which might have
been made by the impact of a heavy barrel falling on hot
asphalt. It was such a depression as the downward force
of dynamite or T. N. T. would have made. A search of
the immediate surroundings revealed bits of metal and
two handfuls of cylindrical metal objects which might
have been packed into a large bomb.
The process of building the picture of what had stood
over this spot began. Herman Davis, a nineteen-year-old
chauffeur, told us that he was standing beside his employer's motor car in front of No. 40 Wall Street looking
west toward the Assay Office when the pavement seemed
to give way and he heard a deafening thud. A wagon
standing in front of the Assay Office burst into flames
and vanished. Davis dived under the motor car to escape
the rain of metal, glass and debris which flew in all
directions.
A dying victim declared that immediately before the




A HORSESHOER JOINS THE CLINIC                179
explosion he saw a rickety old wagon tip over at the curb
and go up in flames. A street cleaner said he had been
sweeping in front of the Assay Office a few minutes before
twelve when an old wagon with one horse rattled up from
the west. A voice cried out to him: 'Hurry up, beat it,
get out of this." He looked up and on the driver's seat
saw two poorly dressed, dark-skinned men. They looked
like East Side peddlers. Within a few minutes the explosion took place. From the street cleaner's account it was
reasoned that the drivers had not wanted to kill a laborer.
Others asserted that shortly before noon they had
seen a red wagon carrying flags going east on Wall Street
toward a building under construction. They thought it
might have been an explosive wagon delivering dynamite
to the building.
Dr. Norris reported that yellowish burns had been
found on the bodies of victims which were found nearest
the explosion. Trinitrotoluol (T. N. T.) burns on the
human body are yellow.
All that was left of the wagon were two worn hubs,
pieces of a single-horse shaft, a pair of damaged whiffletrees, two bent axles, several spokes, scraps of wagon
iron, and torn harness. The horse had been torn apart.
Examination of the spokes and the hubs disclosed that
the wagon was old, for the spokes had come easily from
the hubs. The wagon had long been in disuse and apparently the sun had loosened the spokes. The rear axle was
bent downward, indicating that the explosion had occurred
in the back of the wagon.
Confusing elements entered the picture at the very
start. Theories without end and reason were offered. The
statements of eyewitnesses that they had seen a red wagon
carrying flags in the vicinity was one confusing factor.
The theory that a gang of anarchists had set off the bomb
was immediately proposed. Suspicion was at first directed




I80 MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


against a group of Mother Earth Anarchists. In I914
three members of this group had been killed by the premature explosion of a bomb they were making in a flat in
Lexington Avenue. It was suggested that the survivors
of this gang mighe have caused this explosion. But the
anarchists who were killed were members of a group
which had been annoying John D. Rockefeller at his
country home in Tarrytown, New York, whereas this
explosion, if directed against any particular person or
group, was meant for the financial district. The theory
that these anarchists were again busy seemed untenable
for the simple reason that the disastrous consequences
which had come to two of their members likely would
deter other members of the group from handling bombs
again.
A still more confusing element was the fact that a number of prominent Wall Street men had received warnings
a few days before the explosion. One broker had received
this letter:
Greetings. Get out of Wall Street as the gong strikes at 3 o'clock,
Wednesday the fifteenth.
It was signed "Ed Fischer." He was found and it was
learned that he had been employed by the French Military
Commission during and immediately after the war. He
was in Canada at the time of the explosion and, moreover,
he was mentally deranged.
On Friday, September I7th, Captain Cochran, chief
post-office inspector, reported that his men had found a
batch of circulars in a mail box at Cedar Street and
Broadway, about a block away from the scene of the
explosion. They had been dropped in the morning before.
The postal authorities calculated that they had been put
in the mail box between I I: 30 and i 1: 58 A. M., probably
while the rickety wagon was turning into Wall Street.




A HORSESHOER JOINS THE CLINIC                18I
These circulars were printed with rubber type in red
ink. They contained this message:
Remember
We Will Not Tolerate Any Longer
Free the political prisoners
or it will be death
for all of you
American Anarchists
Fighters!
Obviously these circulars had a direct bearing upon the
crime. They tended to support the conclusion that the
diabolical slaughter was the work of direct-action anarchists but of foreign, not American, origin. Several words
in the circular were misspelled, and the use of the words
"American Anarchists" apparently was intended to divert
suspicion from a foreign group. Many groups of anarchists were active, and nearly all of them were engaged
in campaigns to liberate men who were in prison for
subversive activities in connection with our part in the
Great War. To investigate all these groups would be an
undertaking of months, with the possibility that.in the
end nothing would be found to legally fasten the crime
upon its perpetrators. And while this work would be
going on the criminals would be scurrying to cover.
The two most direct clues were the rubber-typed circulars and remnants of the horse and wagon. In the meantime detectives were sent out to circulate among anarchistic groups to gather such information as these sources
might reveal.
The task of tracing the authorship of the American
Anarchist circulars came to a blind end. It was apparent
that the rubber type was new; the face of the type showed
this. Probably the outfit had recently been purchased. A
canvass was made of the manufacturers of rubber type,




I82    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
and here it was learned that such an outfit was carried
in stock by stationery stores all over the country. It might
also have been purchased in other English-speaking
countries.
But the wagon and the horse presented possibilities
that narrowed the search to New York City. The age of
the wagon indicated that it probably had been in the city
for a long time. Therefore we set out to build up a
minutely accurate picture of the wagon and the horse.
The remnants of both were taken to headquarters, and
here we subjected them to an intensive study. We had before us the wagon shaft, whiffletrees, a bent axle, hubs,
and spokes. We had torn bits of leather harness, the
horse's four legs, and part of the jaw bone; also a pair
of new shoes on the hind hoofs.
As I have pointed out in the chapter telling how the
Murder Clinic was organized, a murder man in New
York City has at his call an unofficial faculty of experts
in almost every line of endeavor. It had been my aim to
build up a wide acquaintance among men, and often
women, who were experts in their own lines and upon
whose expert opinions I could safely rely. Also I had
within reach of my voice some fourteen thousand policemen that had entered the Department from various walks
of life who would have, in addition to police experience, an
expert knowledge of many trades in which they had been
engaged before joining the force. A request for their
services, sent through official channels, would bring them
into the Homicide Bureau for special or permanent duty.
Accordingly I sent for wagon manufacturers and harness makers who would be willing to help us build up the
picture of the wagon and the horse. Explosive experts
were already on the job, but so little was left of the bomb
that nothing was learned of its size, shape, or contents.
At my request Patrolman Spillane was assigned to the
Homicide Bureau. Before coming into the Department




A HORSESHOER JOINS THE CLINIC 183
Spillane had been a horseshoer, and a very competent one.
With the aid of the wagon manufacturers we reconstructed the wagon. It was found to have been what is
commonly known in the trade as a butter-and-egg wagon
of one to one and one-half tons capacity. It was covered
and had double tailboards which opened up and down.
Its running gear was painted red, which accounted for
the picture some witnesses had given of a red wagon.
The spokes were black and striped with white. It had patented wheels. Originally it had been built for two horses,
but the remnants of the single horse shaft showed that it
did not belong to this wagon. The steel couplings were not
an exact fit. The condition of the hubs and spokes which
were covered with dry stable refuse indicated that the
wagon had lain a long while in disuse, perhaps for years
in the yard of a stable exposed to deteriorating elements.
Harness experts advised that the pieces of leather they
had studied plainly indicated that more than one set of
old harness had gone into the making of the outfit worn
by the horse.
A newspaper artist rebuilt the wagon and horse in a
wash drawing, which was published and broadcast.
Sufficient detail had been supplied up to this point to
build quite a definite picture. It was this. Whoever had
driven the wagon into Wall Street had gone to careful
pains to use a horse and wagon which would be difficult
to trace. The use of more than one old set of harness
indicated this as did also the old, dilapidated wagon which
might have been picked up anywhere in a vacant lot or
stable yard. The premeditation with which this was done
plainly showed that the crime was not the act of a madman, nor could it have been an accident. Days, if not
weeks, had been spent in the creation and execution of the
plot. Perhaps more than one mind was in it; indeed the
presence of two men on the driver's seat pointed to this.
Publication of the wash drawing of the horse and




184    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
wagon brought no one to us who could identify them, nor
did a canvass of stables reveal a missing butter-and-egg
wagon or a horse.
We built up a picture of the horse from the jaw bone
and four legs in our possession. The teeth showed the
animal to have been about twenty years old, fifteen and
one-half hands high, and a dark bay whose coat recently
had been clipped. The shoes on his front hoofs were old
and worn; those on the hind hoofs apparently had been
put on the day of the explosion, so again evidence of
premeditation appeared.
A horseshoer's union brand was stamped into the two
hind shoes. Spillane studied them. The stamp told him
that the shoes had been made and put on in a shop in
a certain union jurisdiction. This territory took in all of
New York City and three counties in New Jersey. Again
the hunt narrowed down to our immediate vicinity.
Spillane had been abroad with the American army, and
his natural interest in his former trade led him to observe
the methods of foreign farriers. As in other trades so
in horseshoeing; the artisan leaves his individual mark
on the thing he makes. Spillane found that the heels of
the hind shoes were drawn closer together and were
thicker than shoes made by an American-trained horseshoer. He thought that a farrier of foreign training had
made the shoes, and with him on this point other experts
agreed.
Search for the farrier of foreign training began. The
entire territory indicated by the union stamp was fine
combed by sections. The hunt was most intensive in districts in the city that were frequented by peddlers with
horses and wagons. Wherever the detectives called and
showed the hind shoes the remark of the farrier was the
same: "Made by a foreigner, probably an Italian." Finally
one horseshoer of Italian extraction said that he thought
the shoes might have been made by two Italian brothers




A HORSESHOER JOINS THE CLINIC I85
who had a shop on Elizabeth Street. This man recognized
the hammer marks on the heels made by a lighter, smallernosed hammer than American farriers use.
The detectives found the shop on Elizabeth Street run
by two Italian brothers.
Here it should be explained that a detective of long
experience with certain races uses the indirect, undercover approach when dealing with members of these
races. The operation of Black Hand and anarchist groups
is well known to the men of these races. They fear their
vengeance, and not without good cause, as was shown in
the Morello-Pupo-Petto murder cases. Death, I have reason to suspect, has more than once been the penalty for
an honest man's conscientious effort to help the police in
an endeavor to run down criminals in this racial group.
Even native-born Americans now have reason to understand how gang power to enforce silence is built up in
this, the freest nation in the world.
So, instead of approaching the two brothers openly
and indirectly, Detectives Martin, Donohue, and Spillane
entered their shop and had a horseshoe made. They took
this away and upon comparing it with the hind shoes of
the mutilated horse saw the same evidence of one horseshoer's handiwork. The two brothers had learned their
trade in Italy.
The elder brother then was approached directly and
asked if he recalled shoeing a horse of the description
given by the detectives which was attached to a rickety
butter-and-egg wagon. The Italian denied that he had.
The detectives gave him the date upon which he might
have shod such a horse. It was the day of the bomb
explosion.
The man's eyes brightened. He shook his head. Oh,
no, he hadn't shod such a horse.
They showed him the two hind shoes and asked him
if he hadn't made them. He shook his head again.




i86    MEMOIRS 0F A MURDER MAN
They showed him the shoe they had made in the shop
and indicated where the three shoes were alike. Now,
he reluctantly recalled, on the day of the explosion, quite
early in the morning, two dark men drove up to his shop
in an old covered wagon. One man got down from the
driver's seat and, addressing the horseshoer in Italian,
arranged to have hind shoes made for the animal. The
brother made the shoes and fitted them. The dark, squat
man who was dressed like a peddler paid him and jumped
back into his seat and drove off. The horseshoer had not
observed the men closely. His description of the squat
man he had talked with was meager, but what characteristics he had noticed about the man agreed with the also
meager description given by the street sweeper who saw
the drivers in Wall Street a few minutes before the
explosion.
The horseshoer would say little. When his fears were
quieted by the detectives, who told him he would be protected, and that neither his statements nor his identity
would be made public, his tongue loosened. He said that
he had seen the same squat man loitering about certain
places in an Italian section of the city. He was certain
it was the same man.
The detectives suggested that he accompany them
through this section of the city in an effort to point out the
man. The horseshoer balked. He was willing to go as far
as he felt- it was safe to go to aid the law, but he was unwilling to make a target of himself. The news that he was
helping police detectives would spread fast.
The horseshoer was brought to my office. For hours
I sat with the hard-headed, fearful little man, trying to
get him in the frame of mind to do as we wanted him to.
I impressed him with the seriousness of the crime; how
he could aid the authorities; how we would arrange complete protection for him not only now but in the future.
He was the only man who could help us. His part in the




A HORSESHOER JOINS THE CLINIC 187
search would never be known. I had given orders that
nothing be said of this development to the newspapers.
He sat in silence but restless for quite a time. Finally
he spoke up and agreed, when all arrangements to protect
him were made, to go with the detectives. He was convinced that the newspapers were not aware of his discovery, for nothing was printed about him.
He went home. He was to accompany our men next day
to point out the suspect.
I arrived at my office, early the next morning, quite
certain that we were about to uncover one, if not both,
of the men who had driven the wagon into Wall Street.
The horseshoer's description of the squat man was definite. There was no "maybe" or "perhaps" or "I guess so"
about it.
I picked up a morning newspaper and on its front page
read of our discovery of the horseshoer. It was not credited
to our department but to another investigating agency not
a part of the city and county government. Moreover, the
horseshoer's name and address was given and he was to
be summoned before a federal grand jury I
An hour later the little horseshoer came rushing into
my office. His face was white. He trembled and spoke
incoherently. He was in terror of his life. He could not
go on with our plan. He was publicly known now. No
amount of persuasion or compulsion could change his
mind.
And here the hunt for the driver of the wagon abruptly
ceased.
I have no means of knowing how the information leaked
out. I am certain none of my men passed it on. It was our
duty and ours alone to find the murderers, for the prosecution would lie in our jurisdiction where the crimes were
committed. Someone had butted in. Unfortunately some
officials holding public office are overfond of publicity.
They climb on the shoulders of others to get it. The




I88


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


official who gave this important information to the press
was such a person. He was not connected with the Police
Department. He loved to find his photograph on newspaper front pages.
Whether, if our plan had gone through, we would
have found the suspect, and, if we had found him, he
would have turned out to be one of the fiends who planted
the bombs, I cannot say. The lead the horseshoer had
given us, after days and nights of unrelenting toil on the
part of our men, looked most promising, but we were
robbed of the opportunity to develop it to a finality.
The Wall Street bomb case remains among the Homicide Bureau's pending matters. Some day it may be closed.
My opinion is that the explosion was the work of legally
sane men with some experience at handling bombs. The
care with which the wagon and harness were put together
to prevent detection indicates the working of a shrewd
mind, probably more than one mind. Moreover, the outfit
cost quite a sum which probably was shared by more than
one person.
Will the perpetrators ever be found? I can only rely
upon experience in answering this. The vagaries of human
nature and time play tricks on even the shrewdest conspirators. For years they may go along, the best of friends
bound together by the tie of guilt. Then one day they
may quarrel. Interested ears will listen, memories will
quicken, and tongues will wag. A tip may reach the police.
Human nature-is that way the world over. Conspiracies
of this sort take time to build up and time to uncover.
Or the horseshoer may one day spot the man he was
about to find for us and, having in the meantime lived
down his fear, "turn him in," as the police saying goes.
We went as far as we could with the horseshoes. They
offered the only definite, direct clue, but our plan was
nipped by a man who was trying to build up a synthetic
fame for himself.




CHAPTER XVI


GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND
IN THIS chapter I shall depart from the reminiscent
form in which I have been writing and invite the reader
to place himself at my side and imagine we were together
on the morning of Friday, June I I, 92o. For the time
being consider yourself attached to the Homicide Bureau
as an unofficial observer looking on at one of New York
City's most widely exploited murder mysteries.
It is a little after 10 A. M. An official report informs us
that a man is at Bellevue Hospital, dying from a pistol
wound. He was found unconscious but breathing in his
home at No. 244 West Seventieth Street. The ambulance
call was received at the hospital at 8:31 A. 1m. The supposition is that the man has attempted suicide. It is useless
to visit the hospital and talk to him. The surgeons are
certain he will expire in a short time.
The wounded man is Joseph Bowne Elwell. The name, '
particularly if you play bridge or follow horse racing, is
instantly recognized as that of a famous sportsman and
card expert, the author of many books on bridge and a
familiar figure in the social life of the town. As an authority on bridge he is known the world over.
With Inspector John Cray of the Detective Division
we proceed at once to the house in West Seventieth Street
in a police flyer.
189




190    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
It is a three-story, gray stone building on the south
side of the street. Not far to the west is the Hudson River.
Just below on the south is San Juan Hill and below that
Hell's Kitchen. These are districts which are known to
experienced police officers as "busy spots." They are frequented by professional criminals. In earlier days they
were the scenes of gang battles.
In the immediate vicinity of the house are scores of
boarding places and small apartments, furnished, which
are patronized largely by transients. This locality, by
reason of the transitory character of many of its inhabitants, is a favorite hunting ground for sneak thieves,
burglars, and other types of house breakers.
The Elwell house is of precisely the same pattern as
the houses which adjoin it on both sides. Apparently all
were built at the same time. We survey the exterior of
the building. The window curtains are drawn; the panes
are dusty. An iron gate opening into the basement is rusty
and fallen apart. It is propped up from the inside by a
stick of wood. The occupant of the house, judging by its
exterior, may have gone away for the summer, for this
is the time of the year when New Yorkers begin their trek
to beach and mountain resorts. Down the block are houses
whose doors and windows are boarded, indicating that
their owners have gone for the season.
In the police-trained mind this suggestion arises instinctively: a professional housebreaker would very likely pick
out the house before us as a target for attack, thinking
it unoccupied. There is a type of burglar known as an
unoccupied houseworker who specializes in this kind of
robbery. He is a killer type of thief. What we have seen
of the house from the outside may or may not figure in
the picture built up on the inside, but it is well to place
it in a handy recess in the memory.
We enter three doors. The first are swinging storm
doors with large plate-glass centers. The second are heavy




GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND


I9I


solid wooden doors which are thrown open against the
vestibule wall. The third and last door is a single door
with a panel of leaded glass. It has a snap lock and is shut
by an automatic self-closing pressure device.
The house is well but not luxuriously furnished. We
walk along a short hallway, which is quite dark, and enter
a small reception room on the right. Just as we step into
this room, not more than a pace, we see on our right at
large, comfortable plush-upholstered chair with curved
arm rests-a piece of period furniture. It faces west and
stands out from the wall about a foot. In this wall, about
a foot above the top of the back of the chair, plaster has
been gouged out as though a bullet had struck it. There
are spots of blood _, the wall and on the chair. Less than
an arm's reach from the chair, on its right, is a collapsible
card table on which a telephone is standing.
On this table is a misshapen, metal-cased bullet covered
with flecks of plaster evidently from the gouge in the wall.
From the shape and condition of this bullet it appears to
have passed through the head of the occupant of the chair,
struck the wall, ahd bounded back upon the table. There
are several pieces of mail on the floor in front of the chair.
One letter lies open near its envelope. This and the other
mail must have been dropped by the person who had sat in
the chair.
The open letter is addressed to Elwell. It is signed by
Lloyd Gentry, who has charge of a stable of Elwell's race
horses quartered in Covington, Kentucky. It tells of the
condition of the horses and the expenses of the week incurred in maintaining the stable. It was mailed in Covington the day before. Another letter which we open is from
a private school which the bridge expert's fifteen-year-old
son is attending. The remaining five pieces of mail are
advertisements.
It is evident from these two letters that Elwell was
more deeply interested in his stable of horses than in his




192


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


son's schooling, for the trainer's letter was the first he
opened.
A discharged brass cartridge shell is found upon the
carpeted floor to the right some distance from the spot
where the sitter's feet touched the floor. This cartridge
is of.45 caliber and was made in 19I7 for the United
States army. The year is stamped upon the rim. It was
fired from an army automatic pistol of that caliber.
On the shelf of a mantelpiece set into the westerly wall
of the room a few paces from the chair is a vase of flowers,
and near this, resting on the edge of the shelf, is the
burned stub of a cheap cigarette.
There are two other chairs in the room, a wide, highbacked chair and an ordinary living-room chair, each in
a corner of the south wall of the room. A man could conceal himself behind the large chair.
The only window in the room is in the front wall. It is
locked and barred by iron gratings on the outside.
We now have the bare picture of the scene of the shootin of Elwell, all that the eye can give us up to this moment.
It is the usual picture a murder man first encounters on
a case. It is being recorded for future use by police photographers who are busy with various cameras getting the
room from all angles. No opportunity is offered us to see
the body as it sat in the chair. Inasmuch as Elwell was
breathing he was rushed to the hospital. Other details,
and perhaps very important ones, might have been furnished had we seen the body in the chair, when we could
have noted the position of the arms, legs, and head.
A middle-aged woman appears, hatless and frightened.
She is Mrs. Marie Larsen, Elwell's housekeeper. She tells
us in somewhat disconnected sentences that it was her
regular practice to enter the house in the morning, cook
breakfast when her employer asked for it, and remain to
arrange the house until he left, which usually was around
noon. This morning she arrived at the outer door at,




GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND


I93


about 8:Io, opened it, picked up a quart bottle of milk
standing in the vestibule, and unlocked the inner door with
her key. She had this key; Elwell had the other. These
were the only two keys to the door. And the lock on this
door, she says, was recently changed by Elwell because
he was suspicious that watchmen paid to observe the house
were not doing so.
Mrs. Larsen closed the inner door, at least she let go
of it, and permitted the self-closer to complete the opera.
tion. She walked into the living room. She thought she
smelled powder smoke in the hall. In the plush-upholstered
chair at the card table she saw Elwell sitting, his chin upon
his chest, blood flowing from his forehead and breathing
heavily. She called to him. No response. She stepped closer.
Her employer was in his silk pajamas. The coat was unbuttoned. His feet were bare. His head was bald-a rather
strange sight to the woman, for she had never known he
was bald. His mouth was open, but no teeth were visible
-another strange sight, for Mrs. Larsen had noticed
that Elwell had two rows of fine teeth. A gaping wound
in his forehead between but slightly above his eyebrows
told Mrs. Larsen what had happened. She hurried out
and called a policeman. The ambulance arrived shortly
and took away the unconscious man.
We are told now that Elwell has just passed away.
Mrs. Larsen continues. She saw no pistol in the room,
nor had she ever seen one in the house. The room is
searched for a pistol. None is found. We may dismiss
the suicide conjecture. Mrs. Larsen has told all that
she can remember. Her story will be checked presently.
Dr. Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner, arrives
and a few minutes later several assistant district attorneys.
Detectives from the Homicide Bureau and precinct station
house are on hand. The latter are at once detailed to find
the milk man who left the quart bottle of milk in the
vestibule, the letter carrier who must have brought the




194


MEMOIRS OF A MU R D E R MAN


mail found on the floor, and to interview every person
living in the block to determine whether anyone was seen
entering or leaving the Elwell house and whether a shot
was heard. All the tradimen who might have had delivery
wagons in the block are also to be questioned.
Mrs. Larsen is again questioned, this time about Elwell's entourage. It consists, she says, of William H.
Barnes, a sort of a confidential business manager for
Elwell, and Edward Rhodes, chauffeur. Detectives are
dispatched to find and question them and to check up on
their movements during the morning. Barnes and Rhodes
do not sleep in the house. They had not been in the house
during the morning or the night before. Mrs. Larsen lives
uptown in her own apartment with her husband.
Elwell's bedroom is on the third floor, two flights up.
We inspect the house. In the rear of the first floor is the
kitchen and a storeroom which are not connected by door
or window with the reception room. The second floor contains a den and card room in the front, a small reception
hall and a dining room in the rear. These rooms have not
been disturbed. The windows in them are locked and have
not been tampered with.
In the front of the third floor is a guest bedchamber.
The bed is made up. It had not been slept upon. The window in this room is locked and dust upon its sill indicates
it has not been opened in some time. In a closet is found
a number of women's garments-lingerie. From one of
these garments an embroidered monogram or a manufacturer's label has been cut. This room is connected with
Elwell's bedroom in the rear by an open passageway which
was once a hall but is now furnished as a bar. Prohibition
has been in effect not long. A sideboard contains a small
but choice supply of liquors and fine glassware. The bar is
handy to both front and rear rooms. There is no indication
that it had been used in the last twenty-four hours.,Elwell's bedchamber in the rear contains a double bed




GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND


I95


with a canopy over the head. A dark satin spread with
lurid stripes covers the bed. One corner of this cover is
turned back slightly, but the bedclothes under it have not
been slept in. The night before and the early hours of the
morning were muggy; the occupant of the bed probably
sprawled out on top of the bed. An extension telephone
stands upon a small bedside table.
On the floor beside the bed is a copy of the Morning
Telegraph, a racing newspaper. Its pages are open to the
entries for to-day's races at various tracks and tips on
horses that will run. Several of Elwell's horses are among
them. Piecing together what has been observed up to this
point the picture is a little more complete. Elwell probably
lay upon the bed in his pajamas with blouse open, reading the racing news. For some reason he arose, probably
quite suddenly, for the newspaper was thrown upon the
floor. He went downstairs in his bare feet, dressed in his
pajamas, without his toupee and false teeth, for both are
on a chiffonier in the room.
His dress clothes are hanging upon the back of a chair
four or five feet from the foot of his bed. On a small
table near by is a whisky flask. On a couch is about four
hundred dollars in currency, a watch, pin, and other
jewelry valued at seven thousand dollars. Elwell had been
out the night before, apparently. Mrs. Larsen has been
looking through the house and finds that nothing is missing. If robbery were the motive of the slayer it is evident
that the plan miscarried. Yet robbery cannot be dismissed
from consideration.
Again I refer to patterns in my mind. They tell me that
housebreakers, especially those who rob unoccupied residences, are frequently surprised in the act and kill or
wound their discoverers, hurrying from the house without
carrying anything away, especially when the weapon they
use is a pistol whose report may be heard throughout the
house and on the outside. We proceed a little farther with




196    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
the picture. What probably happened was this: Elwell,
with his mind on his race horses and the races that were
to be run as shown by the Morning Telegraph, learned
that the morning mail had arrived. It was customary for
him to receive weekly letters or reports from Gentry, his
trainer. His mind therefore was on his horses as he lay
upon the bed. He threw down the newspaper and went
downstairs.
He did not expect to meet anyone, for as already mentioned he was in his pajamas with the blouse open and
without his toupee and false teeth. Mrs. Larsen says that
on other mornings she had encountered Elwell, but she
had never noticed that his teeth or toupee were missing,
and he was always attired in a bathrobe with slippers
on his feet.
Mrs. Larsen, upon further questioning, says that she
saw no one leaving the house when she arrived at 8:Io.
An intruder could not have entered or left by the basement, for the door in the basement has not been touched
in a long while, nor have its windows been tampered with.
Of Elwell's mode of life and habits we learn more from
the housekeeper. He was separated from his wife, and in
this house maintained bachelor quarters. Women frequently visited him. He led a gay but not dissolute life.
He knew many women; he sent money to some of them;
they called him up frequently or he called them. Mrs. Larsen says that no woman was in the house the day before or
this morning when she arrived. She knows of no enemies,
of either sex, that her employer might have had.
A list of names is found in an index in Elwell's private
desk in the den on the second floor. They are the names,
addresses, and telephone numbers of women. This is not
strange when we learn that one source of the bridge expert's income was lessons in bridge playing which he had
given to many prominent women whom he tutored either
in small classes or alone.




GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND                  197
Detectives are sent to find these women, obtain their
statements, and check them up. The possibility that a
woman may have killed him presents itself, but unless
she was an expert with pistols she would not have chosen
a.45 army automatic, which is a heavy weapon with a
hefty kick.
There is much activity in front of the house. The stoop
is crowded with young men questioning everyone who enters or leaves the house. They are newspaper reporters
gleaning, as fast as they can from whatever sources are
available, the details of the murder, Elwell's history, and
theories concerning the crime. As I already have stated
Elwell was a national figure. His wealth, associations, and
the suddenness of his taking off conspire to make a great
newspaper story. It will make a greater story than usual
because women's names have become involved and the
mystery will develop and deepen from day to day, giving
each day's news fresh angles.
If Elwell was an ordinary man, unknown, and lived in
this same house, there would be no reporters on the stoop.
The case would flare and die down the same day. But there
is background in this case. The newspapers are building
it up. Their business is to present the news, and news
may be anything, while our search is for legal proof that
a murder has been committed and for clues that will lead
us to the slayer and then fasten the crime upon him. In
this case it will be difficult to do this. Nothing having been
stolen from the house, there will be nothing by which to
trace the slayer and connect him with the crime by finding
Elwell's property in his possession. And no one saw anyone enter or leave the house or heard the shot. You may
be sure that the newspapers, supplying a popular demand
for news of the tragedy, will stir up suspicions and here
and there point to more or less prominent persons-the
more prominent the greater will be the "play" given to
them. But newspaper readers are not juries, courts, or




I98


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


presecutors. In considering the newspaper background it
is well to remind the reader that the greater the prominence of the persons named in the newspapers and the
closer their association with Elwell, the less possibility exists that they are involved in the crime.
The body of Elwell is next examined. The wound is
between the eyes, just above the nose, as Mrs. Larsen
said. About the point of entrance are ingrained particles
of smokeless powder. These particles are close together.
From this fact we may be certain that the gun was fired
at close range or the ingrained powder would have been
scattered over a great area, and the imbedded particles
would have been wider apart. The slayer probably was
not more than three feet away when he fired.
The range of the bullet through the head is slightly
upward. Its point of exit in the back of the head is about
an inch above the point of entry. From Dr. Norris it is
learned that the muzzle of the pistol was held not more
and probably less than three feet away from Elwell's face.
The narrowness of the little reception room makes it improbable that the murderer could have stood and fired
at a greater distance. There are no powder burns about
the wound, only the particles of ingrained powder. The
pistol was held so near that the bones of the forehead
were broken inward by the explosion of powder gases.
From the course of the bullet it would now appear that
Elwell's head at the moment he was shot was tilted back
and he was looking up; or he might have half arisen
from the chair in surprise with his head tilted in this
position, which would account for the bullet gouge in the
wall back of the chair about a foot above the back of
the chair. An examination of the bare soles of his feet
shows them to be clean. He could not have walked much
before he was shot.
The picture grows. We have the approximate position
of the slayer and the attitude of Elwell when he was shot.




GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND


199


His assailant might have come from behind the large
high-backed chair in the corner and made for the hallway
when Elwell looked up from the letter he was reading,
saw him, and made a move for him, whereupon the slayer
halted and killed him. Elwell was a shrewd man, a card
player, a man who had studied moves and strategy most
of his life. Moreover, he was robust and quick on his feet.
Or the slayer may have recognized Elwell as a man who
knew him. The card expert and horse owner was a public
figure known to thousands in the sporting world and he
knew thousands. Surprise, fear of identification, is a motive which impels the cornered house thief to kill.
The cheap cigarette, whose stub is on the mantelpiece,
may have a bearing upon the situation, although there
is no evidence that it was the intruder's cigarette. None
of the same brand was found in the house and Elwell
never smoked them. Its cheapness attests to the possibility
that if it were the slayer's he came from a low, perhaps
criminal class. But it is hardly likely that the intruder
was smoking if he were concealing himself.
The position of the exploded cartridge shell is a little
confusing. Since the automatic pistol would have ejected
the shell to the right of the slayer it seems strange that it
would be lying on the floor to the left of the position which
the murderer must have held when he fired. We make
a test in the pistol range at headquarters and find that it
is quite an easy matter for an ejected cartridge to strike
an object like a chandelier and bound back off its normal
course. There is such a chandelier in the Elwell reception
room which the ejected shell might have hit and been
thrown to the left where it was found on the floor. Or in
the confusion of finding the wounded man and rushing
him to the hospital Mrs. Larsen or the ambulance attendants might have kicked this shell across the floor. At any
rate, the shell has served a useful, definite purpose. It has
given us the make and caliber of the pistol.




200 MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


Henry Otter has been found by the detectives. He is
the driver of the milk wagon who left the quart of milk
in the vestibule where Mrs. Larsen found it. He fixes the
time he did this at about 6:15 A. M. He saw no one about
the house or activity within. The two outer doors were
unlocked, and he put the bottle in its accustomed place.
He went on about his deliveries.
Charles G. Torrey is located. He is the letter carrier
who brought the mail to the door. At about 7:25 A. M.
he walked up the Elwell stoop, found the outer storm
door unlocked, which he thought unusual because it was
usually locked, entered the vestibule, and dropped the
letters on the tiled floor. He pressed the doorbell twice
-two short rings. He had been giving this signal for
years. People on his route knew this signal. He saw no
one near the house or in it and went on making his
deliveries.
Mrs. Larsen had already told us that she arrived about
8: I1 A. M. and not later than 8:15. We knew that Elwell
had the letters dropped by Torrey at about 7:25, that
the milk was left at about 6: 15, and that the telephone
company's record discloses that the ambulance call was
sent in at 8:3. Thus we have a pretty complete picture.
Elwell was killed between 7:25 and 8: 5 and possibly
nearer the latter time, for Mrs. Larsen detected pistol
smoke upon entering the hall and Elwell was breathing.
A better picture of Elwell's movements is available.
He was lying on his bed upstairs with his mind upon
racing and his horses. Two short taps on the bell by
Torrey announced that mail had arrived... Gentry's
letter about the stable.... He arose in his pajamas...
no one was in the house... he went downstairs barefooted. He opened the inner door and picked up the mail
Torrey had left. He spotted the Gentry letter. He was
eager to read it. He may have taken his hand from the
doorknob to pick this letter out of the seven. He stepped




GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND


201


back into the hall, started to open the envelope and, not
looking back to see whether the door closed, left that
operation to the self-closer. He stepped into the reception
room to read the letter, sat down, and before he had
finished the letter was shot. For the letter lay open upon
his lap when Mrs. Larsen first saw him.
Now the vital, focal center of mysterious killings of
this type enters into the picture. How did the slayer enter
the house? There are several possibilities. He may already
have been concealed in the reception room behind the big
chair, or he may have entered as Elwell turned his back
on the door and went into the reception room. The selfcloser may not have fully dosed the door. The action of
self-closers is often slow. Moreover, there are patterns
in my mind too numerous to mention where skilled house
thieves have stolen into a house past butlers, maids and
even owners without being seen.
I can picture another, but perhaps more remote, possibility. There is a type of thief who trails letter carriers.
Such a criminal might have followed Torrey, the mail
man, up the block —saw him enter the Elwell vestibule
with mail in his hand. He may have waited until the postman came out and was busy at another door and stepped
into the Elwell vestibule. The letters were gone, but the
door had not yet been closedl Elwell had gotten the letters and had gone into the reception room. The thief may
have pressed in and suddenly come upon Elwell in his
chair. There may have been mutual recognition with killing resorted to to remove the risk of identification by
Elwell. This type of professional thief, invariably a killer,
is primarily interested in robbing hall letter boxes. He
operates in the early morning hours when the bulk of
the day's'mail is being delivered. If he sees an opportunity
to sneak into a house through an open or unlocked door
he does so. He is one of the most skilled operators. He
makes a special study of screening his entry and exit.




202    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
We will turn to the elaborate system of robbery records
kept at police headquarters. In these we find that in the
winter of the year before three thieves entered the Elwell
home via the basement. The card expert was in Palm
Beach, Florida, at the time. His home was closed. A neighbor saw the thieves enter, notified the police, and detectives caught the intruders. Two were hiding behind the
chairs in the reception room-the same chairs that are
now in the room. The third man was crouched behind a
door. They had loot, but dropped it when they heard
the detectives enter. The three had come up out of the
San Juan Hill section just south of the Elwell house.
But this trio are now in prison, have been there for
almost a year. They are eliminated as suspects, but their
attempted robbery furnishes a pattern. It supports the
conclusion that the Elwell house would be, indeed has
been, picked as a target, and that the thieves were found
in the same reception room, about to leave the house with
their loot. Moreover, they had entered the place shortly
after 7 A. M. The trio were men who made a specialty of
entering unoccupied houses. They didn't kill when cornered because they were confronted by detectives with
guns drawn.
As yet we know nothing of Elwell's movements the
night before his death. Mrs. Larsen, Barnes, the confidential business manager, and Rhodes, the chauffeur, know
nothing of their employer's social affairs. Their statements have been taken, their movements checked. Mrs.
Larsen's husband has been seen. Only the woman has
relevant information which she already has given. But
in Elwell's bedroom his dress clothes were found on the
back of the chair.
The bell of the telephone on the table in the reception
room rings.
"Get that call!" A detective steps to the telephone.
"Yes, this is Mr. Elwell's home," says the detective.




GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND


203'


"Who is calling him?" The detective jots down the name
and address of Walter Lewisohn, who is the speaker at
the other end of the telephone. He is a member of one
of New York City's most prominent and wealthy families.
He advises the detective that Elwell had an engagement
with him to go motoring with Mr. and Mrs. Lewisohn
and friends at I P. M. to-day. It is past that time. They
have not heard from Elwell. They were out with him the
night before and at that time to-day's engagement was
agreed upon.
The detective states that Elwell cannot be seen. The
telephone receiver is replaced upon its hook. And that
detective hurries to talk with Mr. Lewisohn.
An intensive search of Elwell's effects takes place. Letters, notes, memoranda, scribblings, are found. Some of
the letters are from women, some friendly, others importuning the card expert for funds, while others speak of
bridge, parties, horses, money, and social affairs. One
letter in girlish handwriting, and of old date, speaks of
the writer's approaching trouble and seeks ElwelI's help.
It was written in Kentucky and is signed "Annie." A detective is sent to find Annie and interview her.
The glamorous background which is built up by newspapers in all cases where the persons involved are prominent unrolls like a lurid panorama. The bare facts surrounding the killing have dropped into the distance. Now
there are names, hints, gossip, women friends, blackmailers, jealous lovers and angry husbands, enemies, racetrack plots. A score of motives are intimated. In it all
there is not one legal clue which would justify police action,
nothing that would stand up before the tests applied to
evidence.
The detective returns with Mr. and Mrs. Lewisohn.
They are greatly upset. Elwell was a close friend. They
had dined with him on the evening of June Ioth in the
main dining room of the fashionable Ritz-Carlton Hotel




204


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


A fourth member of the party was Viola Kraus, the attractive sister of Mrs. Lewisohn. Elwell had been in high
spirits. Just as the party was about to enter the dining
room at 7:30 P. M. they encountered Victor von Schlegell
and a young woman, Emily Hope Anderson, a singer
from Minneapolis attending voice school in New York
City. The two are said to be engaged.
Von Schlegell is well known to the Lewisohn party,
for earlier that very day Viola Kraus was divorced from
him and was already using her maiden name. Miss Kraus
was Elwell's dinner partner. Pleasantries were exchanged
between the former husband and wife and Elwell. The
Lewisohns and their guests enter the dining room; Von
Schlegell and his fiancee go elsewhere. The newspapers
are saying that Von Schlegell was cool toward Elwell;
the facts are that they were on the best of terms, and,
moreover, the divorce was welcomed by Von Schlegell,
for it will make possible his marriage to Miss Anderson.
Elwell is not divorced from his wife. He is ineligible thereforce to wed Miss Kraus. The divorce offers no motive
for the killing of Elwell.
About 9 P. M. in the roof garden of the New Amsterdam Theatre the Lewisohns and their guests again encountered Von Schlegell and Miss Anderson. Here a
young South American, Octavia Figueroa, joined the
Lewisohn party. Von Schlegell, sitting with Miss Anderson at a table two rows away from his former wife,
laughed and remarked to his companion how odd that he
should again so soon meet his former wife. He smiled
repeatedly at Miss Kraus and at Elwell.
At 2 A. M. the Lewisohns and their guests left the roof
garden, descended in the elevator, and reaching the sidewalk hailed a taxicab. All save Elwell got into it. He said
something in an undertone about it being too crowded.
The taxicab departed. Elwell started west toward Eighth
Avenue. This would be the direction he would take to get




GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND


20o


a taxicab, for Eighth Avenue was not as crowded as other
thoroughfares and it would be a direct route to his home.
Detectives are detailed to find a taxicab which might
have taken him home.
The taxicab which took the Lewisohns and Miss Kraus
to the home of the former and dropped Figueroa at his
apartment is found. The driver's story agrees with that
told by the Lewisohns and Miss Kraus. They made no
stops except at the Figueroa apartment.
Miss Kraus is interviewed. She can throw no light upon
the murder. She was well acquainted with Elwell. At the
time he was slain she was in her bedchamber in the Lewisohn home, asleep. Shortly after coming from the roof
garden she called Elwell on the telephone. She was wondering whether he was put out by not having ridden home
with her in the Lewisohn machine. He was not in the least
upset, he told her.
Von Schlegell and Miss Anderson were interviewed at
great length. Miss Anderson knew Elwell. Von Schlegell
not only knew him but admired the man. Both establish
irrefutable proof that they were not near the Elwell home.
The taxicab driver who took Elwell home is found.
He drives us over the route he took, up Eighth Avenue
as I had reasoned Elwell would go. Ten blocks south of
his home the card expert directed the driver to stop. He
bought the Morning Telegraph at a corner newsstand.
The taxi went on. At 2:30 A. M. Elwell got out in front
of his home, paid his fare, tipped the driver, then entered
his home, alone. No one was following or watching Elwell
as far as the driver could see. The driver's whereabouts
from the time Elwell got out of his car until long after
the body was found are established by yerbal and documentary evidence.
We turn for a moment to see what has happened in the
newspaper background. They are still suggesting various
motives and hinting that a disgruntled race-track follower




206  MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


slew him. Elwell's racing stable partner is brought into
the picture, but that angle already has been investigated
by our men and it offers no solution.
A lurid touch is added by the naming in the newspapers
of the Countess Sonia Szinswaska, a Polish noblewoman,
and Princess Hassan el Hammel. Both are friends of
Elwell. There is gossip that the countess's husband once
had threatened Elwell's life. A still more lurid touch is
the gossip that Elwell, during the war, was a voluntary
spy hunter and in this capacity made unfavorable reports
to the government about the countess's war opinions. The
countess and the princess, the former's husband, their
friends, all are interviewed, and this phase, delectable
reading from a newspaper standpoint, fades into nothingness. The two women establish unshatterable alibis.
So we have only one definite picture of Elwell's movements from 7:30 P.M., the night before his death, to the
next morning at about 8:IO or 8:I5, when Mrs. Larsen
found him in the chair. And we have the other picture,
the colorful, interesting background built up by the newspapers-possibilities, suggestive situations, suspicions,
gossip, and rumors which are always possible to find or
to be suggested in the life of almost any active, prominent man. We have, too, that interesting gentleman, the
anonymous crime analyst, who wonders why we haven't
worked the case like the Paris Suirete would have worked
it. He does not appear in person, however, but it is apparent that he would have relished the arrest of anyone
or all of the figures who have been mentioned in the case.
One more figure appears in the background. It is that
of Helen Derby Elwell, wife of the slain man. She informs us that about three weeks before his death Elwell
had asked her to divorce him and she had agreed to visit
Reno, Nevada, for this purpose. She was already legally
separated from him, receiving alimony which he never
failed to remit, and she was charged by the court with




GLAMOROUS BACKGROUND


207


the custody of her fifteen-year-old son. She is bitter against
Elwell. She had helped him write his first book on bridge,
which brought him a small fortune and started him on
his way to fame. Blit he sought the company of other
women. Mrs. Elwell's movements on the morning of the
murder are carefully checked. It was impossible for her
to have been anywhere near the house at the time of the
shooting.
Annie, writer of the note appealing to Elwell for help
and hinting at trouble she anticipated, is found in Kentucky living with her parents. Elwell had met the girl
and her father while he was in Kentucky looking over
his stable. The girl knew him to be a man of wealth and
appealed to him for funds. Neither she nor her father
had been in or near New York in months. Scores of others
known to Elwell, scattered from Palm Beach to Canada,
have been seen and absolved. The elaborate background
in the newspapers slowly dissolves. After a careful sifting the bare picture, built up at the scene of the murder,
remains.
In as concise a form as it is possible to tell the story
I have given the details of the Elwell mystery. so clue
has been found to this day to establish the identity of
the killer or to supply motive for the act.
I have a conclusion drawn from the facts, but before
stating it I might add one fact not hitherto related. During
the course of my investigation I learned that a maid, Miss
Kane, who had worked for Elwell some time before his
death, had spoken to a friend about having seen a young
man dressed in a soldier's olive drab uniform talking to
the card expert sometime before he was slain. The soldier's clothes were unkempt and wrinkled as though he
had slept in them. His hair was disheveled. Others who
knew Elwell had seen the same man talking to him.
In the meantime Miss Kane had left the employ of
Elwell and went back to Ireland. We asked the Irish




208    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
police to find and interview her for us. Miss Kane told
them that the man in the soldier's uniform lived in New
York City and gave us the name of the street where he
was supposed to reside. This street was searched from
end to end for a trace of the man, but the inquiry was
fruitless.
The information she gave to the Irish officers was
meager. She was reluctant to talk freely. I hoped that
she would return to the United States before I left the
Homicide Bureau, but she did not do so. Only her incomplete story was in my possession.
This man suggests interesting possibilities. The pistol
which killed Elwell was, as will be recalled, an army automatic and the discharged shell found on the floor was
army ammunition. This man may know something.
My conclusion, or opinion, as to who killed Elwell will
be found at the head of a subsequent chapter, "The Man
with Five Hundred Names." In that chapter I offer the
reader a master pattern which explains much that is missing in the Elwell picture and also missing in the two
cases which follow this chapter.
I call it a master pattern because the killer in the case
was found and convicted. On the mooted issue of how
Elwell's slayer entered and left his home this master pattern throws much light. It is about as complete a pattern
as the murder man ever gets.




CHAPTER XVII


MAGNETIC BUTTERFLIES
IN THE same pattern with the Elwell case belong the
murders of Dorothy King and Louise Lawson. To be
sure, they were young women, and they were not shot to
death. In these respects they differed from the Elwell
slaying, but their youth, good looks, and the sudden exposure of their amours which involved prominent figures
furnished glamorous backgrounds. And the focal point
around which the mystery of their killing revolved, the
means of entrance and exit employed by their slayers,
parallels the mystifying elements in the Elwell case.
They were also Broadway figures, which always furnishes a gilded frame for murders in the big city.
Dorothy King was found dead on a bed in her studio
apartment on the top floor of a five —story building at
No. 144 West Fifty-seventh Street at 11:30 o'clock on
the morning of Thursday, March 15, 1923. A colored
maid, known as Billy, found the body and reported it
to a policeman on post. An ambulance attendant who came
to take the body away saw burns about the mouth of
the young woman, and an empty bottle on the bed, and
concluded it was a case of suicide by poison.
It was not until a medical examiner, many hours later,
expressed the opinion to me that "it did not look right,"
209




210    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
that I went to the apartment and began to piece together
the picture. It was plainly murder. The apartment consisted of a living room, bedroom and bath, and a cubbyhole kitchen with a window opening on a court.
The usual search for fingerprint patterns was made,
but revealed nothing from which the experts could work.
Police photographs were made of the room. At the foot
of the bed was an empty bottle which had contained
chloroform and pieces of absorbent cotton. Near the
bottle was a vest pocket comb such as a man might carry
and which apparently had fallen out of the pocket of a
man as he leaned over the, bed to apply the chloroform.
In a rack in the entrance hall was an umbrella of the
size usually carried by a man. A shred of cotton like that
found on the bed was caught upon the folds of the um.
brella.
A pair of man's pajamas was tucked under a couch in
the living room. They were yellow silk and of large size.
They had been hurriedly stuffed under the couch. Two
medium-priced cloth coats belonging to the dead woman
were found on the floor near the door of the living room
which opened into the outer hallway. There was a Yale
lock on this door. It had not been tampered with, nor
were there signs that the door had been forced. There
were windows in each room. The one in the bedroom
was opened from the bottom. The thief might have entered through this, the door, or might possibly have been
admitted by the young woman.
The motive for the murder clearly was robbery.
The face of the victim was burned about the mouth
by chloroform and there was a slight abrasion inside her
lower lip, while the rumpled condition of the bed indicated that the young woman had struggled with her assailant.
From the maid, Billy, a clearer picture of what probably had happened was obtained. Billy had arrived in




MAGNETIC BUTTERFLIES                211
the apartment at I I:30 A. M., admitting herself with a
key. The two cloth coats lying on the floor first alarmed
her. She walked through the living room into the bedchamber and found the body. It lay on its right side, Miss
King's head half buried under a pillow. Her left arm
was twisted under her body and her right hand hung over
the edge of the bed. The maid had touched the young
woman's bare feet. They were cold but the bosom was
warm, which gave the approximate time of death, which
we fixed at between 7 and 7:30 A. M.
The maid next observed that the telephone, which
always stood upon the table at the head of the bed, was
upon the floor in the adjoining living room, but still
connected. This indicated the probability that the murder
was the act of a professional thief who had administered
the chloroform to render the victim insensible and not
to murder her. Had the intent been to murder it is improbable that the telephone would have been touched. The
< use of chloroform and the displacement of the telephone
were circumstances pointing to the fact that the thief or
thieves anticipated that the woman might regain her
consciousness. It is reasonable to assume that he or they
were strangers to her; otherwise they would not have
risked the possibility of her recovering and thus revealing
their identities.
A patent-leather suitcase was missing, the maid reported. Jewelry valued at fifteen thousand dollars, money,
and wearing apparel also were gone. A light summer
ermine fur coat and an expensive wrap were missing. The
two cloth coats on the floor were the cheapest garments
Miss King had in her wardrobe. From this it was reasoned that a professional thief, of the type known as a
"flat worker," had committed the crime. He had been
careful to select the most expensive coats and leave the
cheaper coats behind, a trick in taste which is common
to an experienced flat worker. Many criminals of this




212 MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


type are colored and run strongly to the theft of clothing,
which after a crime is frequently found adorning their
women friends. Moreover, the position of the cloth coats
on the floor showed that the thief had intended taking
them, too, but found the suitcase too small to accommodate them.
Two moves were made as a result of this reasoning.
A thorough investigation among the friends and acquaintances of Billy was started, but she was soon cleared
of even an unwitting part in the affair. Also every drug
store in the city eventually was visited in a search for
the place where the bottle of chloroform had been purchased, but no trace was ever found.
One other article was missing. I purposely have avoided
naming or describing it in the interest of public policy.
It is the one clue that may lead eventually to the slayer
Dr slayers.
The maid spoke of many letters that Miss King had
received from male admirers. Billy produced a packet
of them. They were couched in affectionate terms and
signed by a masculine hand. They were all of an amorous
nature. One, which I quote in part, will serve as an index
to all the others:
DARLING DOTTIE:
Only two days before I will be in your arms. I want to see you,
O so much! and to kiss your pretty pink toes...
The handwriting, I might add, had about it a slight
waver, but yet was done slowly and meticulously as if by
an older person of some dignity.
The yellow silk pajamas found stuffed under the couch
came in for further consideration at this point. I was
about to examine the maid about them when a rather
pompous woman entered the apartment. I questioned her.
She was the mother of the dead woman. She was highly




MAGNETIC BUTTERFLIES


213


incensed and spoke in angry gusts about a man named
Guimares. She said she hated him because he had been
cruel to her daughter. His first name was Albert and he
was a frequenter, she said, of night clubs.
Detectives were immediately detailed to find Guimares
and take him to headquarters.
I resumed questioning the colored maid. She declared
that the pajamas were not those of Guimares, whom she
knew, but had been left in the room by her mistress's
rich friend, a Mr. Marshall, of Boston. Mrs. Keenan,
the mother of Dorothy, spoke up at this point and said
that a friend of Mr. Marshall had called up at noon
and was shocked to learn that Dorothy was dead. When
the mother went on to supply the man with details he
hung up the telephone receiver.
Billy was evasive about the pajamas. Finally she ad.
mitted that she had stuffed them under the couch when
she had entered the apartment that morning because she
had not wanted the police to see them. Mr. Marshall, she
added, was "such a nice man."' She was under the impression that Marshall must have been in the apartment
the night before.
The letters found in the apartment, the maid said, were
from Marshall while he was in Palm Beach, Florida. A
few days after the last "Darling Dottie" letter arrived
Marshall 'phoned the apartment from New York City
and said he would be up to have luncheon with Miss
King. He arrived with a Mr. Wilson, whom the maid
described as Marshall's secretary, about noon on Wednesday, March 14. The two men dined with Miss King and
Wilson left. Marshall also departed an hour or so later,
promising Miss King that he would return at 7:30 P. M.
and take her to dinner.
Marshall, the maid said, had not been gone long when
Miss King called Guimares on the telephone and told
him of jewels and money her luncheon caller had brought




214    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER. MAN
her. Apparently, the maid declared, Miss King quarreled
with Guimares, for her voice rose as she spoke, and when
she hung up she was in tears.
Marshall and Wilson returned at 7:30. A few minutes
later they left with Miss King. They were taken to the
street floor in an elevator by the colored hallboy and
elevator operator, John Thomas. About midnight,
Thomas said, the three returned to the apartment, and
later he took Wilson down. He denied that he had taken
Marshall down, but finally, under extended questioning,
he admitted that at 2:30 A. M. on Thursday morning,
March i5th, he had taken Marshall down in the elevator
and that he had given him a two-dollar tip.
This placed Marshall in the King apartment about
five hours before the young woman was slain. Both the
elevator man and Billy described Marshall as a man of
middle age, tall, dignified and white haired.
Detectives were detailed to find Marshall.
While this search was on Guimares was brought in.
He proved to be a young Porto Rican who had met Miss
King in a night club about a year before and she had
become enamored of him. He admitted that he had once
been indicted for dealing in worthless stocks and bonds,
but before the indictment had been returned had fled. He
was apprehended in another state, but was successful
with extradition proceedings and was admitted to bail.
Miss King had furnished the bail.
He admitted his relations with the young woman and
that she had showered gifts of money, jewels, and clothes
upon him. He had opened a brokerage office with funds
given to him by Miss King. In his cuffs at the time I
talked with him were a pair of diamond links which he
admitted Marshall had given to Miss King. It was established, however, that this gift to Guimares was made long
before the young woman's death. He had no knowledge of
the murder and no suspicions. On the evening before Miss




MAGNETIC BUTTERFLIES


2IS


King's death he had dined at a popular cafe with two
young men who were members of prominent New York
families. After dinner he had made a tour of night clubs.
At 2:30 A. M. he reached his hotel. He called Miss King on
the telephone but got no response. He went to bed. Breakfast was served at about 7:30 or 8 in his room. His
whereabouts at the time of the murder were clearly established.
While examining him, however, it was observed that
there were several bruises on his right hand. He said he
had been scratched in a fight in one of the night clubs the
night before, but had only a dim recollection of the incident, as he had been drinking. This part of his story was
checked and found to be accurate.
A gun was found in his room and he was held on a
charge of violating the pistol-carrying law. While he was
incarcerated a thorough investigation of his movements
was made, and it was found that he could not have been
in the King apartment immediately before, during, or
after the murder.
The ingredients for a sensational newspaper mystery
had been mixed. The connection of the mysterious Mr.
Marshall with the case, our difficulties in locating him,
his suspected prominence, supplied the elements that haul
a killing from back to front pages. Guimares supplied that
other element which builds mysteries, the protagonist
whost past and current difficulties gave the newspaper
accounts a second figure to manipulate and around which
to build absorbing conjectures. He was a night-club
hanger-on; the lover of the dead woman; he had been
in trouble and he owned a revolver. He was referred to
as a blackmailer, yet there was no basis for this. A tag
was found for Marshall. Newspapers referred to him
as Miss King's "heavy sugar daddy," and this expression, now much in use, was invented to describe old gentlemen who supplied prepossessing young women with




2i6


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


much money or "heavy sugar." Again, as in the Elwell
case, an elaborate background was built up. The young.woman's past was revealed in infinite detail. Public interest switched from Guimares, the less prominent figure,
to Marshall, the unfound figure. The girl's life possessed
possibilities for much imaginative writing. She had cut
a wide swath in the night life, boasting of her rich pro.
tector and displaying her jewels, clothes, and finery before the eyes of cafe habitues, among whom there are
always professional thieves on the lookout for women of
her type-young, indiscreet women known to possess loot
attractive to thieves and to be under the protection of
rich men.
Backgrounds such as these are sometimes useful to the
murder man. They may not offer legal evidence upon
which he can act, but they often point to the incentive
which thieves look for, a situation into which they can
project themselves, knowing that suspicion will point instantly away from them and at the figures of others involved clandestinely with their victims.
Dorothy King had been born in poor circumstances.
She was the youngest of four children and had been
christened Anna Marie Keenan. At eighteen she had
developed into a good-looking girl with blue eyes and
golden hair. In 1912 she married a chauffeur. They were
divorced ten years later, and Anna went to work as a
model in a fashionable shop and became known as Dorothy King. She was not averse to being entertained by
men. She became the intimate of night-club owners and
patrons.
She met Marshall and presently began to appear in
expensive clothes and jewels. She left the small hotel in
which she had been living and established herself in the
little studio apartment where she was found dead.
In the vernacular of glib Broadway she had "made
the grade." Here, where success is measured by standards




MAGNETIC BUTTERFLIES


2I7


other than would prevail on Main Street, her poor start
in life was forgotten in the more glamorous setting which
Broadway furnished. A wild story was put into circulation that her protector had attempted to gain possession
of his amorous letters, but the letters had been found
intact in her possession.
The name of Draper Daugherty, son of a former
United States Attorney General, appeared in newspaper
accounts. He was spoken of as one of the dead woman's
intimate friends. In the war young Daugherty had been
a major. He had been in army camps in this country and
abroad, and out of this service came the gossip that he
had had more than one opportunity to lay his hands on
a supply of chloroform! He might have taken it from
army medical supplies!
An old chloroform bottle had been found on Miss
King's bed. She had been killed by an anestheticl But
when we checked up on army medical matters it was found
that the government received all of its chloroform in tins,
not bottles, and so young Daugherty was quickly dropped
from the intriguing background.
Our search for Marshall was going on. Suddenly an
assistant district attorney was advised by a prominent
lawyer that his client, John Marshall, desired to lay his
version of the King case before the prosecutor and police.
He appeared in the prosecutor's office and I questioned
him at length.
He admitted that Marshall was not his right name. I
do not propose to give his right name and have these
memoirs make a permanent record of an indiscretion
which his children and grandchildren may have pointed
out to them. He is a man of distinguished family and
prominence in the social and business world. For several
uncomfortable hours he sat and revealed his relations
with Dorothy King. He admitted many facts about that
relationship-the letters, the gifts, and other matters. He




2I8 MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


even volunteered facts that both Billy the maid and the
elevator man had concealed to protect him.
I was convinced then, and am now, that he had no
more to do with the slaying of Dorothy King than I
had. His story was checked, his movements traced, and
even an attempt was made to blackmail him as a result
of his connection with the affair. Some newspapers were
not very kind to us and to the assistant district attorney
because we had refused to violate the condition that we
had agreed upon with him-that his voluntary visit and
the details of his story be not given out to the public
unless we decided that he was involved in the killing. It
is quite easy to understand this newspaper attitude. We
had eliminated the most glamorous figure in the picture!
Guimares was turned loose upon the pistol-carrying
charge, but later was tried and convicted in the federal
courts for swindling and was sent to a penitentiary and
later paroled.
No two murders are, or can be, alike in all their details,
but a most striking similarity exists between the King case
and the murder of Louise Lawson. This likeness is not
strange to a man who has become accustomed to sorting
his cases into patterns. Among these patterns are other
forgotten Dorothy Kings and Louise Lawsons who were
a little less and sometimes a little more glamorous.
Miss Lawson was an attractive music student of twentyfive. On the morning of February 8, I924, little less than
a year after the King tragedy, her body was discovered
also by a colored maid in her small studio apartment at
No. 22 West Seventy-seventh Street, about twenty blocks
north of the King apartment.
She had been slain between 7 and 9 A. M. The body
was found face down on a mahogany bed. Her feet and
hands were bound with strips of gray silk stockings and
toweling. Over her mouth were bands of adhesive tape,
and a towel covered her face.




MAGNETIC BUTTERFLIES


219


American Beauty roses, taken from a large basket,
were scattered over the floor and had been stepped upon.
A pet wire-haired fox terrier was tied to a chair. The
hand loop of his leash had been slipped over her foot.
Miss Lawson, like Miss King, had known many men.
Letters from them were found in the apartment together
with photographs of various admirers. A record was
found among her papers showing that she had about
twelve thousand to her credit in a Wall Street brokerage
firm. A member of this firm, who was prominent in social
and club circles, admitted having taken a deep interest
in the young woman, although he was married, and from
time to time had supplied her with funds, jewelry, and
clothing. The jewels and money were missing from the
apartment.
Ostensibly Miss Lawson was a student of the piano.
She had come to New York several years before from
Walnut Springs, Texas, had worked a short time in
motion pictures, but gave up this work and became a conspicuous figure in the night life. She made lavish display
of her jewels wherever she went. Among these were a
diamond platinum wrist watch and a two-and-a-half-carat
diamond ring-the gifts of an admirer. These were gone
from her jewel box. An ermine cape was missing. A small
assortment of liquors was found in the apartment, and
from the maid it was learned that she drank. Men friends
sent her liquor.
Along Broadway the young woman was well known. She
was described as "a perfect blaze of jewels" and she took
pains to see that they could be seen and admired.
The medical examiner determined that Miss Lawson
had died from suffocation, and that the position of her
arms, which were tied at her back, and of the bed indicated that she had been overcome by, a man, or men, of
powerful build. No anaesthetic was used.
Lillian Harvey, the colored maid, said she had found




220    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
the body at I0 A. M. A Miss Peggy Tompkins, who occupied the adjoining apartment, said that at 8:30 A. M. she
heard the Lawson apartment bell ring and the voice of
Miss Lawson sounded, inquiring "Who's there?" A man's
voice replied: "A couple of expressmen with a package
for you." Miss Lawson said she was not dressed and
asked the man to wait. A few minutes later the door
opened, and Miss Tompkins heard no more.
The body was found clad in a blue silk nightgown over
which was thrown a pink silk kimono, thus supporting
the story told by Miss Tompkins. The kimono clearly
indicated that Miss Lawson had thrown it over her night
attire to open the door.
The apartment-house elevator operator told of taking
two men to the apartment at about 8:30. One carried a
package in brown paper. The elevator operator had refused to take them up without first telling him what
apartment they intended to visit. He let them out on
the fifth and top floor and he saw the men walk toward
Apartment 56, which was occupied by Miss Lawson.
About twenty minutes later the elevator bell rang and
the operator ascended in the lift to the fifth floor. One
of the two men he had previously carried up entered the
elevator and, on the way down, remarked that Miss Lawson wanted Scotch, not rye, and added: "You never can
tell what they want." The inference to be drawn from
this remark, dropped as a screen, was that the two men
were bootleggers. They knew something of Miss Lawson's habits, for she often received packages of liquor
from callers. The man lighted a cigarette, took only two
puffs, and threw it away, indicating, if anything, that he
was under a nervous strain.
The second man did not come down in the lift, nor did
the elevator operator see him leave the house. It would
have been possible for him to walk down the stairs while
his companion was descending in the lift and in this way




MAGNETIC BUTTERFLIES


221


carry the ermine wrap without being observed, which
probably is what happened.
Two weeks before a burglary was committed in an
apartment on the floor above Miss Lawson's and a month
before two men, representing themselves as expressmen,
had called at her apartment between 8 and 9 A. M. They
rang the bell. Miss Lawson answered without opening
the door, and when her callers announced that they had
"a case for her" she told them she was not expecting a
package and the men left. The elevator men had not seen
these two callers.
Newspapers played up Miss Lawson's relations with
men, particularly with the well-to-do married broker.
The background thus created was not unlike that in the
King case. There were men friends, jewels, letters, night
life, and amours. But the knowledge that two strange
men, unidentified and probably thieves, had called at her
apartment, and the previous attempt to enter her apartment, robbed the case of the elements that were mystifying in the King case. A few days of exploitation by the
newspapers, and the case dropped into the limbo of unsolved crimes.
As in the King case, no trace was ever found of Miss
Lawson's stolen property, nor identification made of her
slayers, so we were up against a stone wall.
Miss Lawson was another magnetic butterfly, "a perfect blaze of jewels," an attraction for men, including
professional thieves, who had ample opportunity to appraise her as a possible victim for robbery and to learn
something of her habits and the fact that she was living a
protected existence. It is probable that her slayers reasoned that if they robbed her after gagging her and she
recovered consciousness she would scarcely report the
matter to the police, knowing that to do so would reveal
the source of her income and the names of her admirers.
It is not my purpose to indulge in censorious criticism




222    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
of newspaper treatment of murder cases. But this much
is apparent: In cases like the King and Lawson murders
they are manifestly unfair to the police, for they arouse
among the public wrongly directed suspicions, and when
the police fail to apprehend rich, prominent men as the
slayers public opinion unjustly suspects that the police
have failed.
But now and again a thief of the killing type is found
and the murder man finds himself in possession of a
master pattern which guides him in analyzing the mysterious elements in cases like the Elwell, King, and Lawson murders, although it does not always aid him in the
apprehension of the slayer.
Such a master pattern is discussed in the next chapter,
sans glamorous background, because there wasn't any to
build up.




CHAPTER XVIII


THE MAN WITH         FIVE HUNDRED NAMES
T   HE slayer of Elwell, in my opinion, was an invader,
most likely a type of thief known as an unoccupied houseworker or possibly a letter thief.
Dorothy King probably was slain by a professional
thief or thieves, possibly by a gigolo type of thief. The
crude manner in which the chloroform was administered
is typical of thieves.
There is little doubt that Louise Lawson was slain by
one or both of the men who entered her apartment, and
in this case the manner of their entrance and exit was
established.
These conclusions have not been arrived at arbitrarily.
They have been built up by the pattern process in almost
the same manner that a physician arrives at a diagnosis
of a patient's illness by the use of cases precedent; or
as a lawyer prepares his case, or a judge his decision, by
following precedents in case books.
With these conclusions there may be disagreement.
There are those who will say that I have elected to dispose of the three mysteries in the easiest way, or at least
in a way calculated to place our inability to apprehend
the slayers in a most favorable light. With this critical
223




224    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
attitude I have no quarrel. My conclusions, as I have
stated, are based on patterns gathered in a lifetime of
murder inquiry, which may not have been the lot of those
who take issue with me.
Many pictures of crimes form these patterns. One picture in particular seemed to fit all three murders quite
precisely, and this picture has the advantage of being
new and therefore very clear as to every detail. It is the
case of "The Man with Five Hundred Names." In a
sense it is quite a perfect pattern, for he was caught; he
talked and was convicted, thus affording the opportunity
to subject all phases of the crime to clinical study.
On the morning of December 29, I927, a woman living
in an apartment at No. 6I7 West One Hundred and
Ninetieth Street observed that the hall door of an apartment on the same floor was ajar. She knocked and receiving no response called out, and again receiving no response summoned the janitor and entered the apartment.
On the floor of the bathroom she came upon the body
of Mrs. Emeline Harrington, the tenant of the apartment, an actress, about thirty-nine years of age. Her
attire was a nightgown over which a kimono was worn.
Her legs were bare. She had been dead some days. The
police were notified, and through regular channels the
Homicide Bureau was set in motion. With the investigating officers I visited the apartment.
Mrs. Harrington's forehead bore a number of wounds,
the shape of which convinced me that she had been beaten
by an instrument with a small, round head. The body lay
between the bathtub and the wall. The door was open.
There were no blood marks on the door, but behind it
hung a pair of stockings spattered with blood, indicating
that the woman had been beaten while the door was
closed. A broken bottle, which had fallen to the floor




MAN WITH FIVE HUNDRED NAMES                 225
from a wall rack, pointed to a struggle. The condition
of the body showed that death had occurred at least five
days before. The woman's attire indicated that she had
been killed either in the morning or at night, since she
was dishabille. The position of the bloodstained stockings,
hanging about five feet six inches above the floor, led
to the conclusion that her assailant was about that height
and was standing when he attacked her.
An inspection of the apartment supplied motive.
A table drawer was open. It had been emptied. Articles
on top of a dresser were disarranged. A thief had been
in the apartment.
The woman who had found the body furnished vital
details. She said that on the morning of December 23rd
at about 10 A. M. she had heard a scream in Mrs. Harrington's apartment and, neighbor-like, had gone to the
door of the actress's apartment. She rang the bell but got
no response and, hearing no further sounds, concluded
that Mrs. Harrington might have made the outcry when
frightened by some slight mishap. She returned to her
apartment and a few minutes later heard footsteps in
the Harrington apartment and decided that all was
well.
Tenants of the house spoke of the actress's husband,
but he had not been seen in the house for weeks. A search
for him was begun.
The wife and the daughter of a former superintendent
of the apartment house, having the natural curiosity that
all women have about the apparel of another, described
a caracul coat, several expensive rings, a wrist watch, and
other jewelry they had seen on Mrs. Harrington. These
articles were missing from the apartment, as well as
things to be found in every household, bills for gas and
electricity and keys.
The robbery, therefore, had been consummated.




226    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
Thus the pattern up to this point is almost precisely
the same as was presented in the King and Lawson murders and differed from the Elwell case in two particulars,
a pistol having been the weapon in that case and the
robbery had not been completed.
How did the slayer enter?
The windows and doors disclosed no marks of having
been tampered with. The door was ajar, indicating that
the murderer had left by this means and had either neglected to pull the door shut or had pulled it to, but it
had failed to latch.
From the owner of the apartment house it was learned
that on December 22nd Mrs. Harrington had spoken to
him of a man who had inspected her apartment with the
idea of subleasing it, furnished. Mrs. Harrington was
planning to leave the city over the Christmas holidays to
visit friends in Detroit and relatives in Joplin, Missouri.
The prospective tenant had first called in answer to a
newspaper classified ad. which Mrs. Harrington had inserted. Since the owner had insisted upon knowing something of prospective subtenants Mrs. Harrington had told
him that the man who had called apparently was responsible, for he had shown her what she described as
a city pay check. The man was coming the next morning
to sign a sublease and take the apartment.
Other tenants in the house asserted that Mrs. Harrington was careful about admitting visitors. Usually
when the doorbell rang she called out "Who's there?"
without opening the door unless the person calling was
known to her.
The dead woman's husband had been located in a city
distant from New York, where he had been for several
weeks. He, too, was on the stage and was not, in fact,
her husband. The couple had been divorced but the final
decree had not yet been handed down.




MAN WITH FIVE HUNDRED NAMES                227
Newspapers made front-page stories of the murder up
to the time when the woman's former husband appeared.
When it became apparent that he had no knowledge of
the tragedy the developments from day to day were relegated to back pages and to diminishing space. There was
little glamor to the dead woman's life. She had been quite
well known on the stage in younger years, but more recently had been accepting engagements in out-of-town
stock companies. She had a few jewels, was good looking
and attracted admiration, but she was not a magnetic
butterfly and there were no amours with rich protectors.
In these respects, of course, the case differed from the
Elwell, King, and Lawson tragedies. It lacked rich background.
The picture we had built up was quite simple. The man
who had called with the city check to take Mrs. Harrington's apartment was the murderer. No one had seen him
come or go except the dead woman. He had come to the
apartment through the medium of the want ad. and had
promised to reappear the day following to take the apartment. But the only one who coild testify to these facts
was dead. The pattern had to be resorted to in order
to build up the picture of the thief slayer's entry and exit.
What happened probably was this: Mrs. Harrington had
gone to the door and, as was her custom, before opening
it had inquired who was there. The man probably said
he was the prospective tenant who had called the day
before. She may have opened the door slightly. He pushed
in. She fled to the bathroom, which is a move most women
make under the same circumstances. The thief followed
her and there he beat her. He then robbed the apartment
and left.
He was a professional thief. Of this there was no doubt
in my mind. He had watched his chance to enter and leave
without being observed. And no one had seen him. A few




228 MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


years of stealing furnishes the professional thief with
proficiency in picking the right time to work. The greatest
risk he assumes is that of being seen going to or coming
from the scene of the crime by human witnesses. He knows
that in modern police departments there are elaborate
collections of rogues' gallery photographs out of which
the persons who have seen him may select his likeness.
He has built up a defensive system to meet this development in crime detection.
So to a man who has acquired patterns from hundreds
of robberies and murders there is little mystery in the
means of entry and exit which to the lay mind appear to
be the focal points around which speculation is built as
in the Elwell and King cases.
The medical examiner reported that Mrs. Harrington
had been beaten with an instrument which appeared to be
a hammer, but her skull had not been fractured. The
wounds themselves had not caused death. The loss of
blood had. It is highly probable that had the woman
who found the body entered the apartment on the day
of the murder she would have found Mrs. Harrington
alive but unconscious, and in that case her life would
have been saved. Here again the circumstances parallel
the King and Lawson cases. The thief had not intended
to kill. He had beaten his victim into insensibility. Comparatively a stranger to her, he had little fear that if she
recovered she would identify him.
Up to this point the Harrington case follows the Elwell,
King, and Lawson patterns, save for the glamorous backgrounds. When the Harrington murder was being investigated and we had reached this point my conclusions,
which I recorded in official reports, were that a thief had
killed her.
The patterns gave me the type of a thief he was. Police
robbery charts, by which the city is laid out in sections




MAN WITH FIVE HUNDRED NAMES                 229
and the crimes recorded day by day, were of material
assistance. For some time prior to.Mrs. Harrington's
murder letter-box thieves had been busy in the general
vicinity of the apartment house in which she lived. Hallway mail boxes were broken into and robbed, and in some
cases the thief went a step farther and entered apartments
in the same houses where apparently mail boxes had not
yielded loot. A Mrs. Peterson, living with her daughter
in an apartment house not far from One Hundred and
Ninetieth Street, had been robbed a few weeks before
Mrs. Harrington was slain. The thief's means of entry
was a mystery until the daughter explained that she had
left the key to the apartment in an envelope in the hall
mail box for her mother. The letter box had been broken
into. The robbery of the apartment had taken place a
little later.
I shall not detail here how the detective machine operates when it seeks to find a thief or slayer through the
medium of stolen articles. It may or may not be a secret
to the reader, but I'd rather not reveal the workings of
the system. At any rate, it was employed in the hope of
finding Mrs. Harrington's slayer. We were hopeful that
something would turn up and ran down every clue that
offered a possibility. Feelers were out, although we were
well aware that sometimes they reach out and trip up
the man we want and then again do not. The professional
thief, well versed in underworld methods and habits, has
a thousand hideaways into which he can disappear and
a thousand assumed names he may hide behind. But there
are moments when, like all human beings, he needs excitement, amusement, and stimulants-and always, of
course, money.
In January, 1928, a man signed the register at the
Hotel Taft in New Haven, Connecticut, and was assigned
to a room. He carried a suitcase. Within a few hours he




230    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
was in touch by telephone with two young women in a
near-by city, and later they drove up to the hotel in a
taxicab and he joined them.
A few days later he presented a check to Julian Lavin,
manager of the hotel, and asked that it be cashed. The
guest seemed to have been dissipating. His hand was
unsteady and his eyes bloodshot. Lavin recalled that the
guest had come in with only a suitcase and refused to cash
the check. The guest left the hotel hurriedly, apparently
disgruntled, but did not take the suitcase with him. When
he failed to reappear and pay his bill Lavin visited his
room. He found the suitcase and opened it. There was
a packet of letters addressed to a man, but not with the
name the guest had signed when registering. Lavin's
suspicions were aroused. He inspected other articles in
the suitcase and found a bunch of keys, fifteen in number,
several receipted gas and electricity bills, and a wedding
ring bearing the engraved inscription, "Guy to Emma."
The bills were made out to Mrs. E. Harrington, No. 617
West One Hundred and Ninetieth Street, New York City.
Lavin looked again at the letters. They were addressed
to Frederick W. Edel, No. I21 West Ninetieth Street,
New York City. This was not the name signed to the register. Lavin, who had been a hotel manager in New York
City, still read New York newspapers and recalled the
name Harrington and the West One Hundred and Ninetieth Street address and the bare details of the tragedy.
He called in the New Haven police. Instantly they
recognized the name Edel as that of a man who had been
tried and acquitted of the murder of a man in Meriden,
Connecticut, in I925, and who later had been implicated
in the killing of David C. Dudley, whose body was found
in a woods near Meriden. Reference to current parole
reports showed that Edel was out on parole from Dannemora Prison in New York and had failed to report to




MAN WITH FIVE HUNDRED NAMES


23I


the parole authorities. He had been imprisoned for robbery of a taxicab driver.
New Haven police immediately notified us. Detectives
Winkelman and Roge of the Homicide Bureau were sent
to New Haven armed with photographs, fingerprints, and
description of Edel. These were incorporated into a circular and broadcast to five thousand police departments
throughout the United States. Other detectives were sent
to cover the address in West Ninetieth Street which was
found on the letters,
The suitcase was brought to the Homicide Bureau.
Winkelman and Roge remained in New Haven and interviewed the two women who had been with Edel. He had
given one of them a caracul coat to "save for him." This
was identified as Mrs. Harrington's missing garment.
They told of money Edel had spent.
In the suitcase we found a box opener-a nickel-plated
combination tool, half claw hammer and half jimmy. It
was bloodstained. The letters were of greater importance.
They told something of Edel's past. For some years he
had been a bartender in the Snelling Hotel, St. Paul,
Minnesota, and reference was made to a number of persons in that city who seemed to be on intimate terms with
him. I concluded that if Edel claimed any city as his home
it was St. Paul. The police in that city were immediately
communicated with, but had no information about him.
However, he did answer the description of a man who
had been cashing forged money orders in small cities in
Minnesota. In the meantime post-office inspectors who
were looking for the man were in possession of our circulars. They wanted Edel for letter stealing as well as
money-order forgeries.
In March a man appeared at the money-order window
in a post office at Hopkins, Minnesota, and asked to have
a small money order cashed. The clerk had seen a circular




232    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN'
describing Edel and also had been warned that it was
his practice to buy a small money order, then raise it to
a large denomination and cash it.
"Wait a minute," said the clerk. He stepped away from
the window and sent for the town marshal. Edel dashed
out of the post office, and after being pursued a mile or
so fell exhausted and was arrested. He was brought back
to New York City to face a charge of murder.
Thus the investigation of Mrs.. Harrington's murder
was advanced a step beyond the unsolved mysteries of
the killing of Elwell, Dorothy King, and Louise Lawson.
A suspect had been arrested to answer for a crime which
had been almost as complete a mystery as the other three
slayings.
A man working with patterns and applying them to situations the truth of which is not known is interested in
getting a statement from a suspect for more than one
reason. It is fair to the prisoner, since it gives him an
opportunity to establish his innocence. It is fair to the
State, for if he is guilty the statement expedites procedure in the processes which lead to trial. Finally it tells
the detective whether his pattern method has justified
itself.
Securing statements or confessions from accused persons is a somewhat difficult task. As evidence in a court
of law they are subject to various tests and safeguards.
Before they are admissible under rules of evidence the
judge must determine by inquiry the conditions under
which they were secured; that is, whether made voluntarily by the accused. To meet this requirement I developed a special technique in taking statements from suspects. In addition to questioning them in my office at the
Homicide Bureau I have always taken them out in a police
automobile to the scene of their alleged crimes, accompanied by a Bureau stenographer and investigating offi



MAN WITH FIVE HUNDRED NAMES                 233
cers. As we went along in plain view of whoever might
be passing, I have put my questions. This not only precludes the possibility of having the issue raised by the
lawyers of the accused that their clients were unfairly
treated, but it has other distinct advantages. One of these
is that the suspect voluntarily, without coaching or leading, may point out while he is making his statement the
various places where he lived, his movements, and the
manner in which he committed the crime. This process
has been referred to in newspaper accounts as reconstructing the crime.
Often I have had accused men and women while on
such tours point out places they had robbed or visited that
we knew nothing about, or develop facts about a murder
which were vital but were not apparent except to the eye
and the memory of the murderer himself. Cases have been
frequent where men were taken out like this to visit the
scene of only one crime we knew about, but the day has
ended in the suspect's leading us to a dozen places he had
robbed about which we had received no information.
Moreover, from the questions asked the accused, and
his answers, which were recorded verbatim by the stenographer and later reduced to writing and signed by the
accused, it is possible for judge and jury to determine,
from context and circumstances, what was in my mind
when the questions were asked and in the mind of the
accused, thus forestalling any attempt upon the part of
the defense to claim that the accused was unjustly or
brutally treated.
Upon his return to New York Edel was taken on such
a trip as I have just described. We drove first to the
vicinity of the furnished room house where he had lived.
He was uncertain as to the house. We drove around the
block several times. Finally he pointed it out and we entered and he led us to the room he had occupied. In it we




234


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


found an antique clock which he said he had stolen from
a house uptown. He encountered the landlady and spoke
to her. She recalled him.
"Let us go now to the house where you stole the clock,"
I suggested.
We entered the car, Edel directing its course. We halted
in front of a large apartment house and Edel escorted us
to the apartment of Mrs. Peterson, which he had robbed
previous to the Harrington murder, effecting entrance
by means of the key he found in a mail box in the hallway
which he had broken open. We stepped into the Peterson
apartment, and in the presence of Mrs. Peterson Edel
went through the motions he had gone through while robbing the place, much to the amazement of the woman
standing by. We exhibited the clock. She identified it as
hers. Edel readily answered all questions.
We reentered the automobile. The driver was instructed
to take us to West One Hundred and Ninetieth Street.
On the way I talked to Edel about his past. He admitted
that he had been a thief for many years; that he had used
in his time more than five hundred aliases. He explained
how he had fled from New Haven to St. Paul, using a
different name each day.
Finally we approached the apartment house in which
Mrs. Harrington was murdered.
"Have you ever worked in this vicinity?" I asked Edel.
"Never," he snapped.
We halted in front of the apartment house.
"Have you ever been in this house?" I asked.
"Never in my life."
As we ascended the stairs to the floor on which the
Harrington apartment was located Edel became restless,
halting.
A detective took out the bunch of fifteen keys found in
the suitcase and inserted one into the door lock and




MAN WITH FIVE HUNDRED NAMES                 235
opened it. We stepped inside.
"What hour did you come to this apartment?" I
queried.
Edel did not answer. He hung back. We stepped into
the bathroom.
"Do you recognize this place?"
He did not answer.
"What did you use to gain entrance into the apartment?"
He was silent.
"Where did you take the articles from which were
found in your suitcase, and which belonged to Mrs. Harrington?"
"She sent them to me," he said. "A taxi driver brought
them to me one morning."
"Then you knew Mrs. Harrington?"
"I met her in a restaurant several years ago," he said,
quite eagerly. "We flirted. She wrote me letters, and when
I got here she sent the stuff to me."
Here I may interject the explanation that this admission is the typical strategy of the professional criminal.
The only person who could testify and deny the story
which Edel had just told was dead-Mrs. Harrington.
And the only person who could establish the contact between Mrs. Harrington and Edel the day before she was
murdered was the apartment-house owner to whom she
had mentioned the man with the city check. But this evidence, being hearsay, would be inadmissible. He was
compelled to admit possession of the dead woman's property. We had it, but this did not place him on the spot
at the time of the murder, except circumstantially.
We returned to headquarters. It was soon established
by facts which could not be introduced in evidence that
prior to the day Edel called to inspect the Harrington
apartment he had never seen or heard of the woman




236


M EMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


in his life. He had selected her apartment for attack
through the medium of the want ad.
It is interesting to note that the aspersions thrown
upon the woman's character by Edel placed her, so far
as he was concerned, in the same class with the King
and Lawson women. They not only served him as an
explanation of how he happened to be in possession of
her stolen property but suggested the possibility that she
was of loose character and therefore, as he reasoned,
a target for attack by others. In a motion for a new trial
Edel's attorney vigorously attacked the woman's character.
The most damaging thing about Edel's statement was
the big hole in it, the denial that he had ever been near,
or in, the apartment house. And we were unable to establish his means of entry and he knew we were up against
it in this particular. We found the keys to the apartment
in his possession, yet it could not be proved that he had
ever used them, nor could it be proved that he had them
before or after he entered the apartment.
He was willing to admit, and did admit, other crimes,
but not murder. The reason was obvious. He was eager
to go back to jail on any charge save murder; eager to
get out of the hands of the police and prosecutors. He
was willing to pay for crimes that did not involve the
death penalty. He admitted that he had gone from city
to city stealing letters. I believe he would have admitted
any crime except that murder.
Edel was convicted and sentenced to death. He had
himself strengthened the case against him by leaving the
gap in his statement which was read to the jury.
Edel was in the death house awaiting execution when
he was granted a reprieve by Governor Franklin D.
Roosevelt. His attorney urged that since the Court of
Appeals had affirmed his conviction and sentence new evi



MAN WITH FIVE HUNDRED NAMES 237
dence in his favor had been discovered. This evidence was
largely an attack upon Mrs. Harrington's character. Application for a new trial was made and subsequently three
additional reprieves were granted while the Court considered the motion.




CHAPTER XIX


IDEAL MURDER INQUIRY
ON NEW YEAR'S DAY, I926, George V. McLaughlin
was appointed police commissioner. He resigned the
state superintendency of banks to accept the office. He
was without previous police experience, but was both an
expert accountant and a lawyer, and an all-round executive. He was tall, square shouldered, with a rich understanding of men. He had risen to public life from an office
boy's bench in a small bank. He came into the Police
Department at a time when a so-called crime wave was
at its height, and he made one of the quickest clean-ups
in the history of American police departments.
The men were glad to see him come. Morale instantly
improved. There were no shake-ups, just a gradual readjustment. He gave politicians a wide berth and struck
at crime at its sources. He singled out for special attack
the professional receivers of stolen property and thus
broke up the market for stolen goods. He stopped gambling, which dammed the outlet for most of the money
that thieves steal, at the same time closing up the favorite
hiding places of criminals. When men of no matter what
rank did a good piece of work he rewarded them-with
promotions for those who could be advanced; commendation for those who could not be promoted.
238




IDEAL MURDER INQUIRY


239


In a short time he built up one of the most efficient
police machines it has been my pleasure to work with.
He had been in office three months when he sent for me.
"How long have you been on the force, Captain?"
he asked.
"Thirty-seven years."
"Why haven't you been promoted to a higher rank?"
"I can't explain that," I said. "I don't know." And
neither did I. I had never asked for promotion and had
never sought the aid of anyone else in that direction. I
was too busy with murder for one thing, and for another
I never believed in "working the wires" for promotion.
"Well," said McLaughlin, "I'm going to promote you."
That afternoon my appointment as deputy inspector
came through. It was the first advancement in nineteen
years. It made me very happy. It was recompense for the
many vacationless years I had put in; for days of toil
when I had gone without sleep. It justified, too, my belief
in men of the McLaughlin type, of which unfortunately
there are too few in public life.
As I have said, the whole Department, man for man,
was on its toes ready to show that, given a fair break
under a real leader, they would respond.
On February 26th Patrolman Biegel, on night duty
in Queens Borough, an outlying section of New York
City, saw a tall, slender man wearing a gray cap and a
light overcoat hurrying along the sidewalk. He stopped
him and addressed to him the usual inquiries. The man
reached into his coat as if to draw out papers to establish
his identity, but instead of papers he whipped out a pistol
and shot Biegel in the side of the neck. The wound was
not fatal.
Exactly a month later in the same borough Detectives
Frank Donnelly and Arthur Kenny saw a man enter a
house and presently observed a light flash. The two detectives were not together when they saw this. Kenny,




240    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
however, went to the front door of the house and Donnelly to the rear door. Kenny rapped on the door and
a woman upstairs put out her head. Kenny told her to
open the door and admit him as he was a detective looking for a burglar.
Almost at the same time this was happening a slender
man in a gray topcoat came to the back door at which
Donnelly was standing.
"What's up?" the man asked the detective.
"There's a thief in this house."
"What " the man exclaimed, blinking his eyes.
"And who are you?" the detective demanded.
"Me? I'm all right. I'm ---" and he dug his hand into
the inner pocket of his coat ostensibly for credentials.
Donnelly stepped into the hallway, came up close to the
man to look at whatever credentials he might produce. In
a flash the man drew a gun from the coat pocket and shot
the detective in the side of the neck.
Donnelly fell. The man fled across the back yard.
Kenny,. hearing the shot, sprinted around the house in
the darkness and saw a form hurdling a fence. He gave
chase, but the man had disappeared. At the corner of a
dark alley Kenny saw a man.
"Did you see a man running this way from over that
back fence?" asked the detective.
"Somebody ran up that way," said the man, pointing
over Kenny's shoulder and blinking. Kenny turned his
head to look and was shot in the side of the neck. He
died three hours later. Donnelly recovered.
A few weeks later Detective George McCarthy spotted
a man ambling along a Queens street with a box under
his arm. It was late at night. There had been numerous
complaints in the district about the loss of expensive radio
sets. McCarthy halted the man and asked him if the box
was a radio set.




IDEAL MURDER INQUIRY


24I


"Yes," said the man. "I got a set in the box. It's my
set."
"And who are' you, and what you doing?" McCarthy
demanded.
"Oh, I'm O. K.," said the man, thrusting his hand
under the fold of his coat. "I got the sales check to show
that I-  " He fumbled in his pocket. McCarthy stepped
closer to examine papers he expected to see, but instead
a pistol flashed and he fell with a bullet in the side of
the neck. The man fled. McCarthy emptied his pistol after
him, but he escaped. The detective described his assailant
as a man with a light overcoat, gray cap, scarlet muffler
and with a queer way of blinking.
The morning following a pocketbook was found on
the sidewalk near where McCarthy had fallen. It contained two bill folders, one stamped "William Cody" in
gilt letters, and the other bore the imprint "Frank Merriwell." The former was the real name of Buffalo Bill;
the latter the nom de plume of a hero in the blood-andthunder dime thrillers of a bygone age. The bill folders
were empty.
McCarthy recovered.
Kenny having died, the task of finding his slayer was
assigned to the Homicide Bureau. It was obvious that the
same man had shot the four policemen. He had one
peculiarity that seemed present in all the descriptions we
had of the murder. He had a way of nervously blinking
his eyes. Yet almost any man accosted suddenly by a
policeman is likely to blink. As for the rest of his description-the light overcoat, gray cap, and red muffler-men
who would answer it might be found any place at any time
by the scores. I reasoned that McCarthy, who had fired
at the man several times, might have a fair picture of
him in his mind.
McCarthy looked through the rogues' gallery in the
Bureau of Criminal Identification and settled upon the




242    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
photograph of a man known as Paul Emanuel Hilton as
the one picture that bore closest resemblance to his assailant. Hilton had been an inmate of reformatories and a
prison.
In the Detective Division at the time was a young man,
James A. Pyke. He had joined the force in I92I. During
the war he had served as chauffeur to Major General John
F. O'Ryan, commanding the New York Twenty-seventh
Division. He had been detailed to duty in Queens Borough in the hunt for the man who had shot the four policemen. Also, Pyke was fond of baseball. He looked to me
like a man who had the makings of a homicide investigator, patient and painstaking. He was twenty-eight,
slender, snappy, with plenty of nerve, soft spoken and
bright. These qualities especially fit a man for homicide
work. I asked Chief Inspector John D. Coughlin of the
Detective Division if he would let Pyke come into the
Homicide Bureau for a tryout. He was transferred.
Pyke was gratified when I assigned him to work with
Detective Sergeant William Jackson on the case. The
killing of Kenny and the wounding of the other officers
had stirred the Department.
I offered them this caution: "Look out for that insidepocket stall."
It would not be likely that Hilton, if he were the killer,
would be going by his right name. More than likely Cody
or Merriwell would be his current alias. Among a class
of reckless young criminals who have no talent for inventing original names these two aliases are in common
use. Pyke and Jackson started out to look for Hilton
under these names. They put out gentle feelers for thieves
who were using them.
A wizened little man was found who told the detectives
that he knew an ex-convict who used both aliases; that
he had done a stretch with him in a Rhode Island prison.
His right name was Tilton, Milton, Hilton, Wilton, or




IDEAL MURDER INQUIRY


243


something similar to these. The man picked out Hilton's
prison photograph as that of the man he knew in the
Rhode Island prison. He added that when Hilton left
prison he had stolen a high sheriff's revolver.
Prison records showed that Hilton, as a boy, had been
incarcerated in the Elmira, New York, Reformatory, the
county penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, New York City,
and the Rhode Island institution from which he had been
released in 1924 after a term for burglary.
Where Hilton might now be the informant did not
know. He scattered his patronage among speakeasies all
over town, but he most often had been seen in the vicinity
of Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street, where there are
many cheap theaters, dancehalls, and poolrooms. He
hadn't been in this locality for months.
In the Murder Clinic men were instructed that one of
the most valuable indexes to a crook's whereabouts are
incidents that may be picked up from his life's history.
These frequently reveal a man's habits, idiosyncrasies,
hobbies, and his friends. Hobbies usually show themselves in youth and follow a man to the end of his days.
Hilton had spent a good many years in penal institutions. Most certainly the characteristics that mark one
man from another would be observed in prisons where
the inmates have little else to look at but one another and
listen to a man's boastful accounts of the things he is
proficient at or very fond of.
Pyke and Jackson gathered information about Hilton's
prison life from guards and men who had been doing
time with him. One thing stood out above all others. He
had a heavy hobby. It was baseball. He wouldn't play on
prison teams unless he could hold down third base. When
he didn't get this position he sat, or stood, as near third
base as he could get, watching the game intently, blinking.
He had boasted in prison that when he was on the outside
he went to every baseball game played by the New York




244    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
or Brooklyn teams in the National League. He was a
rabid follower of the New York Giants.
Their search for Hilton had now brought them into
April. One afternoon the two detectives wandered into
a poolroom near Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street
and sat down at a round-topped table. They began a heated
argument about baseball. In a chair against the wall sat
a young man who had known Hilton but from whom the
detectives had been unable to get a word.
Suddenly Jacldson's fist hit the table and he shouted at
Pyke: "Am I right about that or not?"
"Aw, if that bird Hilton was only around, he'd settle
this argument in a minute," said Pyke in a loud voice. "He
knows baseball. I wonder where he is, anyway?" He cast
his glance around the room.
The man in the chair against the wall leaned forward.
"That guy Hilton?" he asked. "He hasn't been around
here for weeks. And he don't know nothing about baseball except third base. All he can think and talk about is
Heinie Groh, the Giant's third baseman. He thinks Heinie
oughta be president of the United States. When he hears
his name mentioned he blinks and chatters like a monkey."
That afternoon the Giants were to open the baseball
season at the Polo Crounds uptown. Pyke and Jackson
left the poolroom, picI*d up a newspaper, and found that
Groh was booked to play third base in the opening game.
The two detectives reasoned that if Hilton were such
a rabid Groh fan he would attend this game and see his
hero play; and, judging from recent descriptions of the
man they wanted, he would likely be found in a cheap
bleachers seat as near third base as he could get.
Pyke and Jackson went to the Polo Grounds. An hour
and a half before the game was to start they stood at the
gate nearest third base scanning the faces of thousands
who came up, bought tickets, and entered. Their minds
-were focussed on a slender man with a light overcoat




IDEAL MURDER INQUIRY


245


and gray cap possibly with a red muffler around his neck.
While they were waiting Sergeant George Ciquette came
along and asked them why, if they wanted to see the game,
they didn't go down to the pass gate and walk in. Pyke
told him to wait around. They were looking for something. Ciquette waited with them.
Suddenly Pyke exclaimed: "There he is. Third man
from the end of the line." There stood the man with light
overcoat and gray cap, the visor of which was pulled
down over his eyes, which were blinking. Jackson walked
along one side of the line, Pyke along the other. Ciquette
followed behind a few paces.
Pyke caught the man and pulled him out of the line.
"Say," the suspect protested, "what's this?"
"Never mind that but come out here," said Pyke.
"What right you got to stop me?" the suspect demanded. "I'm all right. I'll show you — " He reached
for the inside pocket of his coat.
Pyke's hand snapped out and caught the man's wrist.
"No, none of that old stall this time," said the detective.
He thrust his hand into the coat pocket and drew out the
revolver later identified as the one he had stolen from
the Rhode Island high sheriff. Ciquette grabbed the man's
free arm. He fought back ferociously. Finally he wilted
and gave up.
He was Paul Emanuel Hilton.
I questioned him in my private office. He was boastful
of his coat-pocket trick. "If I carried my gun in my hip
pocket," he explained, "the minute I reached for it a cop
would know what I was after, but when I shoved my left
hand into my inside coat pocket they thought I was after
a wallet or papers. I flashed the gat on them before they
knew it."
This accounted for the fact that each policeman shot
had been hit in the side of the neck. I took Hilton out in
a police automobile, and with utter bravado he pointed




246


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


out the spots where he had hit each policeman and, in
addition, designated a dozen houses from which he had
stolen radio sets. Radio was not his hobby. He merely
had a fence who gave him a good price for homemade
radio outfits. He went about Queens Borough, where
almost everyone lives in two-family houses. When he
heard a good radio set he marked the house, and when
he thought the time right stepped in and stole it. He was
widely exploited as the Radio Burglar.
Hilton was convicted of the murder of Detective Kenny
and sentenced to the electric chair. There had been a number of policemen shot in the neck before the four fell
before Hilton's gun in Queens. One of these men died.
I was certain Hilton had killed him. An effort was made
to get Hilton to admit this killing while he was in the
deathhouse. He said he was through talking. He was
through, too, with life. He was executed February I7,
1927.
Hilton's course in life followed the average way that
nearly all modern professionals go. He was burglar as
a boy. He went on and on at this game until he thought
himself sufficiently schooled to try murder. He was one
of those who would have been saved from himself, and
victims saved from his murderous impulse, if he had been
classed earlier as an habitual criminal and isolated from
society. A thing that struck me forcefully was his namePaul Emanuel Hilton. A good name, apparently the
name of a respectable family. But when I got to digging
into his history I encountered the same old story. The
boy had never had a chance to climb out of squalor and
unhappy surroundings.
Pyke and Jackson were advanced in grade by Commissioner McLaughlin. To my way of thinking the capture of Hilton was a perfect piece of crime detection,
good headwork all the way through, sound reasoning,
and keen, safe judgment at the end of the chase. It was




IDEAL MURDER INQUIR Y


247


what I would call an ideal murder inquiry. It comes about
as near being a story-book achievement as any case I have
encountered.
Cases which at first possess all appearances of an absolute mystery and then unfold themselves smoothly when
the murder man gets the faintest suggestion for his picture
have lingered for years in my memory as ideal from the
standpoint of detection.
A case I handled many years back comes to mind as
an example of the ideal.
The body of a priest was found in the West Drive of
Central Park one morning. He had been shot through
the head and was breathing when found by a couple
strolling through the park. He died later in a hospital.
Papers in his pocket revealed that he was Father Arturo
Ascencio, a Santo Domingo clergyman. No money, jewelry, or watch were found on his body.
The killing had been done with a bulldog revolver,
which lay near the wounded man. The wound in his head
was jagged, and this was explained by the bullets in the
gun. Their noses had been flattened apparently to make
them fit into the chamber of the revolver.
It looked to others like suicide. Yet the last man in
the world to take his own life would be a priest. I was
certain that it was murder.
Father Ascencio recently had arrived from Santo Domingo and was staying at the Ingleterra Hotel, whose
guests were mostly South Americans. The night before
he was shot he had mentioned to the hotel clerk that he
was going out to keep an engagement with a friend, whom
he. was to meet at One Hundred and Tenth Street and
Eighth Avenue, which is near the upper end of Central
Park. The clerk had seen the clergyman standing on the
hotel stoop looking at a chronometer which he took from
his vest pocket. Then he moved on.
The chronometer. was not found on the body, which




248    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
supplied the first element the murder man looks for, the
motive.
A postcard found in the priest's room had the name H.
Henriquez signed to it and the address, No. 257 West
One Hundred and Tenth Street, which was in the vicinity
of the place where the priest had told the hotel clerk he
would meet his companion. The hotel management reported that a few days before his death the priest had
reported that two watches and money were missing from
his trunk. It was his habit when visiting America to bring
along watches which his parishioners gave him to have
repaired in this country.
Among the priest's visitors was a young man known
as De Lara, who had come up from Santo Domingo with
the priest on the same steamer. They were apparently
good friends.
I started out in search of the person whose name was
signed to the postcard. I found no such address in West
One Hundred and Tenth Street, but reasoned that a
mistake might have been made in the address; that probably it was meant for a street above One Hundred and
Tenth. In this section were a number of South American
boarding houses. At No. 257 West One Hundred and
Twelfth Street I found the name Henriquez on a door
bell and rang. A woman admitted me, and I was ushered
into the parlor.
She was well acquainted with Father Ascencio, and
the youth known as De Lara was a boarder in her house.
The night before the priest was killed he had visited her
and upon leaving said he was going to One Hundred and
Forty-seventh Street.
"Was the father in the habit of going into Central
Park?" I asked.
"Oh, yes. He and De Lara often walked through the
park." The woman described De Lara as a youth of seventeen and a student. He was not in at present. I left. At




IDEAL MURDER INQUIRY


249


the head of the stairs I encountered a man who said he
was the brother of the woman I had just talked to. A
minute later a young man came running up the stairs. He
was about to brush past me.
"Hello, De Lara," I cried. He swung around quickly
and stopped.
"Where's the gun you own?" I shot at him.
"I own no gun."
The brother looked at him. "De Lara," he said, "you
do own a pistol. I saw you with bullets last Sunday night."
The man looked at me. "He was pounding the noses of
the bullets to make them fit the gun, and I saw him doing
it," said the man.
With these few sentences the bulldog gun found at
the priest's side was placed in the hands of the youth
through the medium of the stub-nosed bullets.
I started to question De Lara about visits to Central
Park with the priest. He was evasive. I then searched
his room and found pawn tickets for watches, a chain,
and a locket. De Lara said these had been given to him
by a strange man he met on a steamship pier. I started
with him to headquarters. We entered the subway. VWe
sat in silence for some time. The youth's face was beaded
with sweat.
The psychological moment had arrived.
"That story about getting the watches from the man
on the pier is not the truth," I said to him.
"It's the truth," he said.
"You killed Father Ascencio."
"I did," he replied, "but I never stole his watches."
Later he confessed the murder to me in detail, but
stoutly maintained that the watches, chain, and locket,
which we found in the pawnshop and which were identified ~as the property of the slain priest, all had been
given to him by the man on the pier.
On a visit to his cell a day later I found him in a half



250    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
comatose condition and had him sent to the prison hospital ward. After confessing he had wanted to die and
had taken morphine. In oiled paper tucked in the toe of
his shoes I found packets of the drug. Because of his youth
he was permitted to plead guilty to murder in the second
degree and sentenced to twenty years to life in state's
prison. He was out in twelve years. I heard of him later.
He had been arrested by the Buffalo, New York, police.
There had been a murder and De Lara was found in the
vicinity with a revolver in his possession. The murder
had been committed in a public park. Twelve years in
prison had not cured him of the gun-carrying habit. I
am not aware what happened to him as the result of the
Buffalo arrest, but I know that if he was carrying a gun
he was going along like most of them do who deliberately
kill for the purpose of robbery and instead of getting
the law's prescribed penalty only serve a few years. I
believe they call that "getting away with murder."
The De Lara case at the start offered confusing possibilities-the wrong address and the suicide theory.
After these were straightened out developments came
with speed and precision. The murderer was in our hands
within a few hours after his victim's body was found;
indeed before the victim was in his grave. This case from
the murder man's technical standpoint worked out ideally,
and from a bad start.
A famous jiujitsu murder was another inquiry that fits
the pattern of ideal mystery solution.
A 'phone call one afternoon took me to the Empire
Hotel. Upon arrival I found that a young Japanese had
been found dead in a room upstairs, but that there was
nothing to indicate foul play.
The body lay on a floor rug under a bed, and around
the Japanese's neck was a linen table cover, loosely
tied. There were no visible marks upon the body, no
signs of poisoning or other violent means of death. The




IDEAL MURDER INQUIRY


251


dead man was fully dressed. His pockets contained no
money. Nothing had been taken from the room and there
were no signs of a struggle.
Suicide was suggested to me, but I declined to enter.
tain it. It was urged that the table cover about the man's
neck was merely put there by the dead man in an effort to
make suicide seem implausible. But my picture offered other
possibilities which pointed to murder. The body and the rug
had together been pushed under the bed. A suicide could
not possibly have pushed himself and the rug into the
position in which the body was found. I reasoned that
the man had been robbed, but that before this act could
be accomplished his assailant had struck him a blow which
rendered him unconscious and had then fastened the linen
cover around his neck, held it tight until strangulation had
been effected, loosened it, and then robbed the victim. No
man would have permitted his assailant to tie a table
cover around his neck without making a violent struggle,
of which the room offered no evidence.
Moreover, the victim was an Oriental. There is a blow
in jiujitsu that may be fatal. It is delivered under the heart,
and while it is not always fatal it renders its recipient
unconscious.
The coroner's physician set all conjecture at rest.
Death, it was determined, had been caused by strangulation, but the victim had been unconscious when death
occurred, made so by a blow under his heart I
The next step was to find the murderer. From the
hotel management we learned that the dead man was
known as Yoshihara and that at different times he had
displayed sums of money. But the hotel room had been
rented not by him but by another Japanese whose name
upon the register could not be deciphered. The day
before his death Yoshihara had been seen in the hall
talking with the Japanese who had rented the room. The




252    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
latter, a maid said, wore a brown suit with a thin red
stripe in it.
For weeks our men circulated among the Japanese
boarding houses and steamship offices on a search for the
murderer. It was a more or less blind hunt, for we did
not have the name of the suspect, and his description
might have fitted any Japanese. We found that Yoshihara
had worked aboard steamships and at sanitariums. Now
and again as the search went on we encountered the figure
of the same little brown man in the brown suit with the
thin red stripes. But even with a description of the cloth
in our possession it was difficult for our men to make
themselves understood in Japanese quarters. Finally we
learned that Yoshihara and the man with the brown suit
had frequently eaten together in a Japanese restaurant
in Cranford, New Jersey.
At this eating place we found that the suspect had had
a suit made by a near-by tailor. From this tailor we got
a piece of the brown red-striped cloth from which the
suit had been made. Armed with samples of this material, our men redoubled on their tracks, and where they
had been unable to make clear the purpose of their quest
on previous visits the pieces of goods were displayed, and
instantly they were recognized as stuff worn by a Japanese
who had come to America on a steamship with Yoshihara.
We found the slayer within three days after our men
had come into possession of the sample of goods. He
confessed to me, declaring that he had rented the room
for the purpose of luring Yoshihara to it and killing and
robbing him. He had fastened the linen table cover about
his neck, drew it tight, and strangled him.
"But he put up a fight, didn't he?" I asked the slayer.
"Nuh, nuh," said the little man. "I do this- " And
he described by gestures the jiujitsu blow which he delivered under his victim's heart. He would never admit the
exact amount of money he had stolen from Yoshihara.




IDEAL MURDER -INQUIRY


253


He admitted a smaller amount than we knew the dead
man had. Why murderers always claim that the money
they steal from their victims is less than the actual amount
I have never fully understood. It may be that robbery
to them is a worse crime than murder, or they may think
that admitting a lesser amount reduces the degree of
murder. Of course it doesn't. The theft of a half inch
of old thread is sufficient to establish robbery as a motive
for murder.
The jiujitsu case had more than one ideal aspect. In
the first place, the inquiry was conducted against great
odds among a people with whom we were little familiar.
In the second place, it might easily have gone down in
the records as a suicide, for few would have missed the
little brown man. In fact, his friends hadn't missed him.
They thought he had gone to sea. And the final aspect-in
spite of the handicap of language and only a very limited
knowledge of Oriental minds and customs-a little piece
of woolen cloth not larger than the palm of a man's hand
brought the slayer to book.
He was executed for the crime.




CHAPTER XX


FAULTY PICTURES BY FEMININE HANDS
M      URDERESSES, especially those who slay their husbands, invariably make the same slip-up. Seeking to throw
suspicion upon another they build elaborate pictures or
"set ups," as the police saying goes. They do this to throw
the police off the right track. But they overdo the picture.
It is never real. It smacks of an effort to be overmelodramatic which, I suppose, is due to woman's highly
emotional make-up. It is perhaps for the same reason
that women seldom are successful detectives. They are
tempted to overdo the pictures they set out to build; to
make too much out of circumstances that really are of
little or no consequence.
The murderess runs to a heavy plot. Frequently it is
years in the making and yet, with all the care and time
given to it, glaring defects appear. Their chief concern
as plot builders seems to be to throw blame for their
crime upon one man or several, seldom upon another
woman. Male slayers most often offer alibis or farfetched defenses when accused. If they do try to throw
the crime upon another the target is usually one of their
own sex. The woman slayer relies upon the presumption
that the male and not her own sex has the natural or
inherited propensity to kill. When she slays her plot is
254




FAULTY PICTURES


255


so arranged that an issue is raised between the sexes. She
expects popular opinion to favor her against the man.
She looks to man for protection in crime as in other affairs of life.
There are murder patterns to support this conclusion.
Two of my more recent cases were so much alike as to
suggest that murderesses, too, work by pattern.
Daniel F. Kaber was a well-known publisher of Cleveland, Ohio. On the morning of July i8, I919, he was
found in a dying condition on his bed in his home in Lakewood, Ohio, where he lived with his wife Eva, and her
daughter by former marriage, Marion McArdle. He had
been stabbed twenty-three times with a sharp file. He
died in a hospital after making a deathbed declaration
that he believed that someone close to him had instigated
the stabbing. He had been confined to his bed for six
weeks under care of a male nurse. On the night of the
attack, while the nurse was in another part of the house,
two roughly dressed men stole in and stabbed Kaber.
The house had apparently been robbed. A drawer in
the dining-room buffet had been broken open and family
plate was missing. Shortly after Kaber's death his relatives instituted litigation to prevent his widow from coming into control of his estate, which was quite large and
included the home in which he was attacked.
No one was arrested for the crime. Two years elapsed.
On Friday, June 2, 1921, the district attorney of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, wired the New York Police Department to find and arrest Mrs. Eva Kaber, who was believed
to be in New York with her daughter. Marion, we learned,
had arrived in New York the day before, followed by
two Lakewood detectives and several reporters. She became aware that she was being followed, and to prevent
her from disappearing she was brought to the Harlem
police station. She refused to talk and was released. Private detectives, hired by the Lakewood authorities, shad



256    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
owed her as she left the station house, hoping to be led
to the mother, but she threw them off. Mrs. Kaber, in
the meantime, had moved. Through sources unnecessary
to disclose I learned where she was living. I took up
watch on the house, and when she appeared I caused her
arrest. Marion, upon visiting her mother in prison, was
arrested. The two were kept apart.
In my mind, as I considered questioning the two women,
were patterns of earlier husband slayings where wives had
resorted to the conventional means of making it appear
that the motive for murder was robbery. I sought information from the Lakewood detectives as to the condition
of the Kaber house when the stabbing was reported. They
informed me that the buffet drawer had been broken open
with an ice pick, which is not the tool used by thieves.
Moreover, rugs had been dragged from the house to the
porch and pieces of silver were scattered about the lawn
in the front of the house, which, again, is not the practice
of professional thieves. With these facts I put the patterns to work.
I first talked with Marion. She told me she had been
educated in one of the leading women's colleges in the
East. She was shrewdly evasive, that is, talkative, but
gave little information that was incriminating or valuable.
She was blase, modern. After many hours of questioning
she told a story. It was that her mother had asked her to
break open the buffet drawer and she had done so with
an ice pick; had taken out the silver and scattered some
of it on the front lawn; had upset the rooms to make it
appear that robbery had been done.
A few days before the murder, Marion told me, she
was in her mother's motor car when they met two roughlooking men. Mrs. Kaber left the car and talked with
them. When she returned she told her daughter that she
"was going to get rid of him," meaning her husband.
"What are you thinking of?" the daughter demanded.




FAULTY PICTURES


257


"I'm going to have my own way, once," said the mother.
The following morning Kaber was found dying.
With these admissions in my possession I talked with
Mrs. Kaber. For hours she sat, stolidly refusing to answer
my questions. She was unlike her daughter. Marion had
the confidence and naivete of one better educated; her
mother had not been to college and could not carry on
a shrewdly evasive conversation as the daughter did. She
had no skill at fencing. Finally, after I had repeated to
her all that Marion had told me, Mrs. Kaber began to
weaken. She admitted that many months before her husband was murdered she had consulted a midwife about
"doing something to her husband that would cure him
of his meanness." In nearly every answer she attempted
to show that Kaber had mistreated her, although the information from Lakewood indicated that he was a jovial,
generous husband.
The midwife, she said, had given her a bottle of fluid
whose contents she poured into Kaber's morning coffee.
He became ill and took to his bed, but recovered. She
denied that the bottle contained arsenic, saying that she
did not know what the midwife had put into it.
"But why did you ask your daughter to break open the
dining-room buffet and try to make it appear that the
house had been robbed?" I put to her repeatedly. "And
you knew the two men who stabbed your husband?"
There were at first long lapses of silence when I put
these inquiries to her.
Suddenly her head shot up.
"The midwife told me to hire ghosts to frighten my
husband out of his meanness," she said. She went on to
say that she found two men who would play the role of
"ghosts," and she instructed them to give her husband
"a rough shaking to scare him." She would not admit that
she had hired them to kill Kaber.
The ghost story smacked of movie-plot influence. Ob



258    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
viously men hired to give a man a shaking would not come
armed with sharp files. After seventeen hours of steady
questioning her stolidity broke. She made other admissions, but always qualified them with a statement that
Kaber had been mean to her; that his meanness had
goaded her on.
Mrs. Kaber was not an unattractive woman. Her features were heavy; her face large and square. She had
a determined jaw, large, popping blue eyes, and her hair
was light. Her jaw moved with determined shifts. Her
age was thirty-nine. When we discussed the details of
her past life, and other matters not connected with her
husband's murder, she was affable and soft spoken, but
when we returned to the murder her features became animated and she moved restlessly in her chair. She resembled so closely in features and mannerisms another noted
murderess, whom I shall presently discuss, that the resemblance was strikingly uncanny. Almost anyone might
have taken the two women for twins. Their crimes also
were alike in many particulars.
Marion was young, vivacious, the college type. When
pressed hard she would say in a soft, pleasant voice:
"Now, Inspector, you don't really expect me to answer
that." She was constantly asking after her mother and
seemed to me to be talking, accepting some of the guilt,
to lift the burden from her mother's shoulders. They were
not permitted to meet until after they had been questioned separately. They ran into each other's arms and
wept profusely. They were returned to separate cells.
On the night of June 8th Mrs. Kaber slashed her wrists
and was saved from death by a prison matron. In her
extremity this was the only means of flight available.
This act was precipitated by the news from Lakewood
that the supposedly stolen silverware had been found
in the home of Mrs. Kaber's friends, to whom she
had given it three days before her husband was slain;




FAULTY PICTURES


'S59


and by the more menacing news that several unnamed
men were dickering with the Lakewood police to reveal
the slayers for the reward of twenty-five hundred dollars
bffered by the city. Mrs. Kaber, it was disclosed, had not
paid in full the money she had promised to the two thugs
who had attacked her husband, and they were seeking
the balance by negotiating for the reward.
Mrs. Kaber and Marion were returned to Lakewood
on extradition papers. Before the trial was called three
generations of women in the same family were involved.
Mrs. Mary Brickel, the sixty-nine-year-old mother of
Mrs. Kaber, was indicted for complicity and became a
witness for the State against her daughter. She admitted
setting fire to the Kaber home a year before her son-inlaw's murder because her daughter was "tired of home
life and wanted to go to a hotel." This attempt having
failed, Mrs. Kaber told her that she was "going to have
Dan killed," and on the night of the stabbing she was in
the house with Marion at Mrs. Kaber's request to lend
plausibility to the picture of robbery by two thugs. She
accused her granddaughter of throwing the silverware
on the front lawn and dragging the rugs onto the porch.
It was obvious from the assistance called in by Mrs.
Kaber to arrange the defensive features of her plot that
she had not the plotting ability to take care of these details, and leaving them to her mother and daughter found
herself the victim of her own sex's, indeed her own kin's,
faulty picture building.
Mrs. Ernimine Colavito, the midwife, upon whose
shoulders Mrs. Kaber placed responsibility for the "ghost
attack," was'indicted and admitted that on Wednesday
before the attack upon Kaber she went to his home, at
Mrs. Kaber's direction, with two men, Sam and Tony,
and rehearsed the stabbing of Kaber. While they were
tramping about the hall and rooms upstairs, going
through the motions of the attack, Kaber lay ill from the




260


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


effects of arsenic, which had not worked quickly enough
to suit the wife. Marion, by prearrangement, sat at a
piano downstairs drumming loudly to drown the noise of
the plotters upstairs.
The actual killing was left to hirelings, Salvatori Cola
and Vittario Pisselli, the two men with whom Mrs. Kaber
had made arrangements. The weapons they used, files
made into stilletto-like knives, were not unlike the homemade weapons used in the killing of Madonia in the
famous Lupo the Wolf-Morello-Petto the Ox conspiracy,
which I have covered in an earlier chapter. These two
men, having failed to gain the reward offered by Lakewood authorities, fled Ohio. One was later arrested in
Buffalo, convicted, and sent away for life; the other escaped to Italy and was imprisoned there.
Mrs. Kaber was found guilty of murder in the first
degree and a jury recommendation of mercy resulted in
her imprisonment for life. Marion was tried and acquitted. Mrs. Brickel, having aided the State, was released. The midwife was tried, but the case was nolprossed.
The motive for the crime was Mrs. Kaber's desire to
get rid of housekeeping. She was ill-suited to her husband. She craved a gayer life than he wanted.
There is no way of telling whether Ruth Brown Snyder
ever had read about the Kaber case. She may have. Newspapers were full of it about the time Mrs. Snyder began
concocting an elaborate plot to get rid of her husband,
with the same motive in mind that impelled Mrs. Kaber
to resort to desperate means to free herself from the
cares of a home.
Between the two women there was a striking resemblance in age, features, habits, mannerisms, and plot manipulation. There was one great difference: Mrs. Snyder
had the shrewder mind. She tried to improve upon the
Kaber plot by eliminating hired assassins. In their stead




FAULTY PICTURES


26i


she brought into her famous conspiracy a lover who was
completely under her domination. She tried, however, to
throw the crime upon the shoulders of a phantom robber
and, failing in this, shifted the blame to the lover.
And what a faulty picture she fabricated
Newspapers on the morning of March 21, I927, had
upon their front pages a story which may be briefed as
follows:
Little Lorraine Snyder, the nine-year-old daughter of
Albert and Ruth Brown Snyder, had been awakened the
morning before at 7:30 by the sound of tapping on the
floor of the hallway just outside her bedroom door.
Frightened, the child called to her mother, whose bed,
room adjoined, and receiving no response, called to her
father. Husband and wife occupied a front room on the
same floor. No reply came from her father, so the child
arose and went into the hall.
Here she found her mother lying on the floor, her
wrists and ankles bound by wire.
"Mother!" the child cried. "What's the matter?"
"Run to the telephone," Mrs. Snyder gasped. "Call
Mr. Mulhausen. They hit me over the head and I'm
afraid for your father."
The child called Mulhausen, a neighbor. He carried
Mrs. Snyder into a bedroom, laid her upon the bed, and
loosed the wire about her wrists and ankles. He then went
into the couple's bedroom in the front and found the
body of Albert Snyder on a bed. There were two wounds
upon his head. His body was rigid. He had been dead
some hours. Mrs. Snyder, hair disheveled, came in and
screamed at sight of her husband's body. She could not
speak, but pointed to various objects on the floor. The
room was in disorder. Incoherently she told Mulhausen
of two men who had attacked her, then her husband, and
who had carried her out into the hallway where she had




261


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


fainted. They then bound her. She looked for her jewels.
They were gone.
Newspapers printed the story of the attack and robbery. They told of the little home, the happy couple and
their child, and of the sudden intrusion of robbers who
had beat Snyder to death. The couple were quite well
known and highly respected. Before her marriage Mrs.
Snyder had been her husband's secretary. He was art
editor of a well-known motor-boating magazine. He was
forty-five, a muscular, athletic man of quiet disposition
and devoted to his family and home. There had been no
disagreements between the couple. Mrs. Snyder was liked
by her neighbors. She was a vivacious woman who had
a broad smile for everybody. Friends called her "Tommy."
In company with other men from headquarters and
local police precincts I arrived at the Snyder home soon
after the tragedy was reported.
The house was a single family dwelling. Its grounds
were in apple-pie order. A lawn surrounded the white
Colonial house. There were bird baths and sanctuaries
among maple trees on the grounds. There were crumbs
of bread about the bird refuges, showing someone's kindly
interest in the feathered family.
A door in the side of the house was unlocked. Its key
lay upon the floor inside. I examined the key and its lock.
The story that had reached me was that the robbers had
entered and left through this doorway. If they had it
didn't seem right that they would have taken the key
from its lock and thrown it on the floor. It was the kind
of lock from which the key would not fall and, moreover, professional thieves after a robbery and killing
would not bother to take a key from a lock and throw it
down. If they left through that door they were on hurried
flight.
The Kaber case with its faulty picture came to mind.




FAULTY PIC TURES.263


Entering the house I found the rooms as they had been
described in newspapers, in great disorder. Sofa pillows
were thrown about the floor. They had been taken from
settees and chairs. A thief, looking for valuables, hardly
would have hunted for them on settees and chairs, nor
would he have gone to the pains to toss pillows on the
floor in the center of the room.
In the bedroom I found Snyder's body. There were
two wounds on his head, one on the back and one on
the side. They had been made by a round, blunt, heavy
object. About his throat were wound several strands of
new picture wire. Each strand was made of sixteen thin
threads of wire woven together. Why would a thief go
to this trouble when, with the instrument he had used,
he could have made certain of death by one or two more
blows? Why had the wire been added?
On Snyder's upper lip, under his nostrils, was a small
piece of soiled cotton waste caught upon the stubble of
his mustache. To me it looked as if someone had brushed
a handful of cotton waste across his mouth and a piece
had caught upon a hair. I could find no other waste about
the room.
The tiny thread of waste challenged my attention. Instinctively I searched my memory for patterns to fit this
little circumstance. I recalled a number of cases where
similar threads and wisps of cotton had been left behind
on the victim's upper lip by the administration of chloroform. There was no odor of chloroform in the room, yet
I was quite certain it had been used.
That two professionals would have struck, strangled,
and then chloroformed their victim seemed implausible
to me. I turned to the medical examiner and suggested
that when the autopsy was performed special care be
taken to look for traces of chloroform.
A revolver lay upon the bed, its chamber open, and




264    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
shells scattered about the bedclothes. I was told that it
was Snyder's gun. Would thieves have left the gun and
cartridges where they could have been picked up and used
upon them by someone in the house as they, the thieves,
were fleeing? Thieves show more caution than this.
Also on the bed was a blue bandanna handkerchief and
a piece of newspaper, a corner torn from an Italian newspaper. I got the complete picture it was intended that the
police should get but not necessarily believe-robbery by
dark-skinned thugs, motion-picture villains. But in this day
and age robbers seldom go masked; if they do they seldom
leave behind their masks and a piece of newspaper tending
to establish their nationality. And the three objects, handkerchief, piece of newspaper, and revolver, seemed in
unnatural positions, like an arrangement devised by the
property man in a motion-picture scene.
Before I had arrived Mrs. Snyder had told of the disappearance of her jewels, but they were found under a
mattress in the room. In her confusion, she explained, she
had hidden the jewels there and had forgotten about it
And from Lorraine it was learned that the bindings
about her mother's ankles and wrists were loosely applied.
Two professional thieves, knowing that the revolver and
cartridges lay upon the bed, would have made certain
that the woman was bound securely so that she might not
have used the weapon against them.
I was ready to talk to Mrs. Snyder.
I entered the room where she lay upon a bed. For a
moment I studied her in silence. She was lying on her
side, groaning, but her sharp blue eyes, squinting out of
their corners, observed my movements. I caught the face
of a woman which, it seemed to me, I had seen at close
range before. The same square jaw and face, high cheek
bones, cold blue eyes, light hair, about thirty-five years
of age, and of buxom stature.
I hadn't seen this woman before, but the image of Mrs.




FAULTY PICTURES


265


Kaber lay before me on the bed. In my time I have never
seen two women who resembled each other so closely.
"How are you feeling, madam?" I asked her.
Mrs. Snyder moaned. I asked her to tell me her story.
She related what she had told others previously; the
story of the stockily built dark-skinned thugs with heavy
mustaches and about thirty-five years old who had seized
her in the bedroom and dragged her into the hall where
they bound her. She had heard suspicious noises in her
daughter's bedroom and arising to investigate had been
seized by the intruder. She fainted and fell to the floor.
She could not remember what happened after that.
"You fainted, madam?" I queried.
She nodded.
"About what time did you faint?"
"When they first came in. About 2:30 in the morning."
"And you were found by your daughter about 7:30
A. M.? Is that right?"
"Yes."
"Then you lay upon the floor insensible from 2:30
until about 7:30 A. M. in a dead faint?"
"Yes."
"That couldn't possibly have happened," I insisted.
"You couldn't have lain five hours in a faint." She in.
sisted she had. It is an established fact that in fainting
the blood leaves the head for only a short period. If the
body lies flat consciousness returns within a few minutes.
But she was stolid in her insistence, another quality which
Mrs. Kaber possessed.
I passed on to the woman's history. She brightened as
she went back to her girlhood and her marriage. I got
down to the amount of money her husband allowed her
out of his weekly salary. She was quite chipper in supplying answers to these questions.
"And you carry insurance on your husband's life?" I
asked casually.




266 MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


"Oh, yes," she replied, lifting herself to a sitting position. "A thousand dollars." She paused. "It was a thousand dollars," she added in a low voice.
"Not what it was, madam, but what is it now?"
"Now," she said. "Oh, it's twenty-five thousand dollars
now."
"What kind of a policy is it?" I asked.
"Accident and death," she said.
"How long has the policy to run?"
"Three years."
"And it's paid up for-?"
"A year."
For the time being I was through with Mrs. Snyder,
My mind was quite satisfied as to a probable motive for
the murder of her husband. The dark-skinned thugs
passed completely out of my mind. The faulty picture
vanished when I learned that the insurance which Mrs.
Snyder carried on her husband's life was for forty-five
thousand dollars, with double indemnity if death were
caused by violence
A more intensive search of the house was undertaken.
In the hope of finding picture wire of sixteen strands, like
that found around Snyder's neck, every picture and nook
in the house were examined, but no such wire was found.
A window sash weight was found in the basement. Among
canceled bank checks signed by Mrs. Snyder I found one
made out to H. Judd Gray for $200 and indorsed with
that name in a masculine handwriting. I got a new figure
coming dimly into the real picture-a man. In the dining
room a bottle of whisky sat upon a table and near by a
whisky glass filled with liquor from the bottle. The bottle
had recently been opened. At least five drinks had been
poured out of it. Mulhausen, who had seen Mrs. Snyder
first on the morning of the murder, had said her breath
did not smell of whisky and that she was not intoxicated
in the slightest degree. Someone else, then, had drunk




FAULTY PICTURES


267


from the bottle, and the glass filled to the brim indicated
a drink of a man's and not a woman's size.
I turned my attention next to the autopsy. Dr. Archibald McNeaill, an assistant medical examiner, performed
it. The two wounds, he had found, had not fractured the
skull. The blows with the instrument had not been heavy
enough to break the skull.
The doctor turned to me. "Say, Inspector," he said,
"this man was insensible, almost completely out, when
the wire was fastened around his neck. It looks like death
was caused by strangulation while he was unconscious.
The two blows did not fracture the skull."
"Have you examined for chloroform?" I asked. The
doctor hadn't yet gone that far. In my presence he exposed the skull. Snyder's brain was sent to the pathologist. The day following it was established that Snyder
had been chloroformed and that this and strangulation
had caused his death.
The sash weight found in the basement of the Snyder
home was found under chemical examination to be
stained with human blood. It was a heavy affair such as
a woman would have had difficulty in lifting and striking
an effective blow with. The wounds upon Snyder's head
indicated that the blows had been lightly or weakly inflicted.
Up to this point, however, nothing tangible had developed to indicate either a disagreement between Mrs.
Snyder and her husband or to detract from her respectability. There had been occasional tiffs between them, but
they were light affairs such as usually happen between husband and wife.
It was Chief Inspector Coughlin of the Detective Division who started breaking down the picture of domestic
tranquillity when he asked Mrs. Snyder what sort of a
husband he was; how he treated her.
"He was just the opposite to me," she smiled. "I am




268


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


younger and like to have a good time. He likes to stay
around the house and fix it up and dig in the grounds and
feed the birds. I like to go out on parties and dances. I
like hotel life, dinners, gay affairs. He has never liked
them."
And so again this side of the woman's nature fell into
the mold of the Kaber woman. And so also had developed
a motive for killing Snyder-his insurance, which would
tave amounted to ninety thousand dollars in the event
of violent death, and the lack of affection upon Mrs.
Snyder's part, out of which would come the impulse to
kill him in cold blood.
She was taken to the precinct station house, questioned
by the district attorney and later by Police Commissioner
McLaughlin. For hours she sat stolid, refusing to answer
questions. She was incensed that anyone should suspect a
woman of her respectability.
Then one of those unanticipated forces crept into the
situation.
Mrs. Snyder was sitting in a small office, silent and
sullen. Suddenly the door opened. A young man looked in.
"Why, hello, Ruth," he smiled.
"Oh, are you —?" she started to reply, greatly surprised to see him. He whispered to her, something that
was never disclosed. The veil of respectability fell. The
man knew a great deal of the woman's past, hidden chapters. She weakened. Her stolidity vanished. For the best
part of a night she sat in the little room revealing the
details of how she had murdered her husband. At first
she denied that she had been aided by an accomplice. Then
finally she admitted that a man had helped her kill her
husband.
"And is this the man?" I asked her, showing her the
canceled check which had been cashed by H. Judd Gray.
"Yes, he helped me," she said.
And so her companion in murder came into the picture.




FAULTY PICTURES


269


Mrs. Snyder revealed that she had met Gray, a corset
salesman, through a flirtation and they had become intimate. After a few meetings she bluntly asked him to help
her get rid of her husband. He refused to be a party to
it. Finally on the night of the murder, while the Snydershusband, wife, and daughter-were at a whist party in
a neighbor's home, Gray by prearrangement entered the
Snyder home and concealed himself.
Early next morning Mrs. Snyder arose, called Gray
from his hiding place, and told him she was ready to kill
her husband. Gray was unwilling to participate in the
crime. Mrs. Snyder brought out the bottle of whisky.
Gray drank it from glasses which she filled to the brim.
She flattered him; embraced him; told him what a vastly
more manly man he was than her husband and how much
more attractive. Gray, a weakling, was pleased. His vanity was struck and his mind befuddled with drink. He
was completely in the woman's power.
They went into the bedroom where Snyder was asleep.
Gray, whose hand was unsteady from drink, hit him a
light blow with the sash weight and Snyder fought back.
Mrs. Snyder then took the weight and administered a
second light blow, but sufficient to stun Snyder. Then
chloroform was applied and the wire bound around his
neck.
The murder itself was encompassed within a few minutes. But it was hours before Gray left the house. He
was delayed by the work of building up the faulty picture, the fake robbery. The time taken to accomplish this
indicates to what pains murderesses go to build up pictures and in building overdo them. Between the time
Snyder was killed and the time Gray left the house five
hours had elapsed. This time was spent throwing pillows
about the floors, arranging revolver and shells, blue bandanna handkerchief, the torn piece of Italian newspaper,
and taking the key out of the lock of the side door.




270    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
The final act was the fastening of wire about Mrs. Snyder's ankles and wrists. The drink with which she had
plied Gray so unsteadied his hands that he was unable
to twist the wire about her wrist. Her hands kept slipping
from him. Finally in anger, Mrs. Snyder bound herself
and with a furious gesture dismissed Gray from the house.
He had made a miserable botch of the last act in the
drama.
Mrs. Snyder was far from being a woman of low mentality. My last session with her led to an incident that
had never occurred before, nor has it since, in my career.
From a newspaper account, printed while the inquiry was
under way, I quote this excerpt:
When Inspector Carey told Mrs. Snyder when they first met
that it did not look to him like a real burglary she became highly
indignant.
"What do you mean?" she cried at him.
"It doesn't look just right," said Carey.
"How can you tell?"
"We see lots of burglaries," said the inspector. "They are not
done this way."
She was the first person, man or woman, brought before me for murder who could forget their plight long
enough to ask a murder man about the secrets of his technique. And so the faultiness of her elaborate picture was
brought home to her, but too late to be of any value.
Only a few minutes elapsed between the electrocution of
Ruth Brown Snyder and H. Judd Gray.




CHAPTER XXI


BUNGLERS BUNDLES
L   AY minds imagine that the most atrocious murders
are those in which the slayer kills, cuts his victim to pieces,
totes them away in bundles, and scatters them. This type
of slayer is popularly conceived to be a diabolical plotter
as well as a particularly savage killer. On the contrary,
the plots of such murderers are the least effective. The
mere fact that they resort to hacking the body indicates
that they were incapable of conceiving enough plot to
fit their crime and, caught with a corpse on their hands,
resorted to the quickest and crudest means of getting rid
of it.
The actual killing usually is accomplished in the simplest and quite often in the most primitive way. One of
the strange sidelights on this type of murder is that the
victim's head is seldom found. Doubtless the murderer
reasons that the most important part of the body to get
rid of is the head, believing that the disappearance of
this will prevent identification and thus forestall a murder
charge. As a matter of fact, the first thing a murder man
looks for in a dismemberment case is evidence that the
death had been caused feloniously, which is the law's
vital prerequisite. Invariably the slayer who has hacked
a body into sections goes to great pains to destroy or hide
271




272    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
the head and usually succeeds, but drops in most obvious
places those parts which reveal the cause of death.
A few years ago a young colored woman had an altercation with her man and in the heat of the fight stabbed
and killed him. She had warned him that if he mistreated
her she would make him suffer, so she had conceived the
stabbing with some premeditation.
The slaying was unearthed through the finding of the
man's torso under a sink in the woman's apartment. The
head and other parts wrapped in paper were thrown into
a pail and ultimately dumped into the ocean by the streetcleaning department. She had disappeared, but we found
and arrested her. She would not admit the stabbing, although the torso revealed the fatal knife wound.
She was a woman of average intelligence. I put the
ghastliest question first.
"How did you take off his head?"
"Oh, I doan know, mister," she said in a singsong voice.
"Jes' kep' a-cuttin'."
"How did you take off his arm?"
"Jes' kep' a-cuttin', cuttin', cuttin'."
"Where did you put his head?"
"Jes' let it fall into a pail. I didn't know what I could
do with that corpse, mister. I had to git it out befo' the
ghosts began walkin'."
She was nonchalant about the cutting up of the body,
but never did admit the stabbing. She finally pleaded
guilty to manslaughter.
In spite of their gruesome aspects, dismemberment
cases interest a large audience, for they receive much
attention in the newspapers. The finding of a human
hand, arm, or leg in a city of millions of inhabitants offers
intriguing possibilities to the lay mind. Interest is heightened by the fact that it would seem, offhand, almost impossible to trace the find and solve the mystery. Human
limbs have been brought to me on more than one occa



BUNGLERS BUNDLES


273


sion, and as a rule a cursory examination tells the murder
man the story. Familiarity with medical college practices
discloses at once whether the limb has come from a dissection room and, as a rule, that is their origin. But,
under certain circumstances, even a medical college specimen has dramatic and mysterious possibilities.
Late one afternoon an excited voice, speaking from a
district attorney's office in the county in which Sing Sing
Prison is located, informed me that the head keeper of
the prison had reported finding a human ear in a basket
of lunch brought to an inmate. The prisoner was a notorious bad man of the gangs. His wife had brought him
the lunch. In searching the basket a turnkey had found
the human ear. It looked like a real, life-sized murder
mystery.
"The prison officials are inclined to believe that someone on the outside had murdered an enemy of the inmate
who received the lunch and was sending the ear along to
show the job had been done," said my informant.
Well, murder on the C. O. D. basis had been done
before, but about this instance I refused to get excited.
I examined the ear and started a hunt for the wife
of the convict. After three days she was found and was
surprised to learn about the ear.
"Oh, my," she exclaimed, "that must've spoiled Jim's
lunch I And I went to such trouble to get him up a nice
basket I Chicken and everything 1"
She had bought the chicken, she explained, and had
taken it to a restaurant where it was cooked for her. She
ate half of the fowl and the remainder was packed into
a basket with other food to be taken to her incarcerated
husband. The son of the restaurant keeper had packed the
lunch. He was a chubby-faced youth.
"Say, youngster," I said to him, "what in the world
did you put that ear in the lunch for?"




274


M7 E M MOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


He snickered. "Aw haw, jes' to give them a laugh up
at the prison."
"Where did you get it?" I demanded sternly.
"A tailor's boy around the corner gave it to me."
The tailor's son explained to me, as I anticipated he
would, that he had finished his first term at medical
college and, as a departing souvenir, had taken the ear
from the dissecting room. Then the fat-faced boy in the
restaurant asked him for something suitable with which
to decorate a convict's lunch. The most appropriate thing
he could think of, which was handy, was the ear which
he drew from his pocket and gave to the boy.
A summer passed. One day the tailor's son appeared
in my office with a long face. The notoriety which had come
to him through the ear episode had caused the medical
college faculty to think seriously of not admitting him
to finish his education. I called the dean of the college
and cleared up the situation. I advised the young man to
be more careful in the future about picking out suitable
decorations for convicts' basket lunches.
Not all dismemberment mysteries turn out so ludi.
crously.
The Doll's House Murder had more serious consequences. The body of a man was found in the water along
the Rockaway peninsula. The legs and arms were tied;
the body had been hacked but not severed. There was a
knife wound in the throat. Through the medium of a
laundry mark on the man's shirt collar I established his
identity and learned that he had been on friendly terms
with a young woman who worked in the same office with
him but who had married an older man.
I called at the young woman's home and found her in.
It was a small house, kept spotlessly. It was in perfect
order. It reminded me of a doll's house and seemed not
to have been lived in. In the kitchen was evidence of the
yroung woman's neatness and order. On hooks were en.




BUNGLERS: BUNDLES


i75


velopes labeled "For Gas," "For Electricity," "For
Laundry," and "Pin Money." Into these envelopes the
meticulous housewife put her funds. I wandered through
the rooms, rather enjoying this example of housekeeping.
The young woman was pleased to see that I observed the
evidence of her tidiness. But as my eyes roved the living
room I saw that one of two portieres was missing from
a double doorway; that there was a light square on the
dark oak floor, where apparently a rug had lain and recently had been taken up. These circumstances did not
harmonize with the rest of the picture of orderliness.
Sudden confrontation frequently accomplishes quick results, especially with women.
"There were two portieres hanging between these
rooms?" I asked.
"Yes, sir," said the young woman. "I took one down
because it was soiled. It's in another room."
"And there was a small rug on the floor right there?"
I asked, indicating the light square on the floor.
"Yes, I took that up," she replied. "It's in the room
with the portiere." Her face flushed red.
An officer who accompanied me went into the other
room and brought out the portiere and the rug. The
former was bloodstained and the latter cut into strips
and also bloodstained. I went into the kitchen and searched
for a weapon with which the victim's throat might have
been cut. I found a grapefruit knife with curved blade. I
showed it to the woman and asked if it had been used
to murder the man. She made an emphatic denial.
There were tiny holes where the blade of the knife
fitted into the wooden handle. I turned it over to Dr.
Alexander Gettler, the medical examiner's pathologist,
who found human blood in the little holes. Confronted
with this evidence, the young woman broke down and
confessed. After marrying the older man she had been
unable to repulse the man who was dead. He kept annoy



276


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


ing her, trying to get her to leave her husband. But she
was very fond of the home she had made, the doll's house.
The only menace to her happiness was the younger man
who insisted upon calling when her husband was out.
The night before the body was found she met her annoyer, and he walked with her to the apartment. Her
husband entered, flew into a rage, and attacked the man.
The latter seemed to be getting the best of the combat,
and the young woman ran into the kitchen, got the grapefruit knife, and handed it to her husband. A blow felled
his wife's annoyer, and it was then that his throat was
cut, the blood spurting onto the portiere and rug. The
body was put in a bedroom. An effort was made to cut
it up, but the job was only partially done. The corpse
was put into an automobile, carted to the beach, and
hurled into the sea.
Husband and wife were convicted of manslaughter.
The young woman had no deep affection for her husband.
The dead man had been a threat to her happiness in the
doll's house, and so she arranged to have him removed
from the scene. The disposition of the body furnished
evidence of consciousness of guilt, otherwise the husband
might successfully have urged in his defense the so-called
unwritten law.
Bundle bunglers are not as a rule mentally deficient.
They are stolid types, capable of working out a plot to
a certain point, but no farther.
Ludwig Lee, a stocky Norwegian, had a natively alert,
shrewd mind. He was perhaps the worst bundle bungler
that I encountered in my experience, and I have seen a
goodly number.
Around two o'clock on the morning of July 9, 1927, a
patrolman was going through Battery Park, the southernmost tip of Manhattan Island. He had his nightstick '
out, and now and then as he came upon a man asleep upon




BU NGLERS BUNDLES


277


a park bench he tapped him on the soles of his feet and
roused him. In the course of his travels he saw a fat bundle
at the corner of an air vent of the subway. He poked at
it with his nightstick. Brown cord around the bundle came
apart. He investigated a little further and found within
a wrapper of cheap brown paper two laundry bags, a
towel made from a white cotton bedspread, a pair of
oil-stained, brown denim trousers, and the right and left
leg of a human being, each in a laundry bag.
From an examination of the limbs I determined that
they were the legs of an aged woman, and that they had
been severed from the body by an axe. The denim trousers
were made to fit a thin man about five feet six inches.
There were no identifying marks on the laundry bags or
towel.
But upon the brown wrapping paper I found a column
of penciled figures, written hurriedly:
I0
49
i5
39
IO
IO
13
25
33
204
They were large Spencerian figures such as a clerk in
a grocery store might write in figuring up sales to a customer. And the paper was of cheap quality, such as
chain grocery stores would use. Moreover, I reasoned
that the nine articles for which the figures stood were
commodities likely to have been purchased in a chain
store. The sale they represented must have been made




278    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
a day or so before the murder, since wrapping paper does
not ordinarily lay long about a house.
I tapped those sources of expert advice which I have
already referred to as the unofficial consulting faculty of
the Murder Clinic. Paper manufacturers were called in.
They informed me that brown paper of the color, quality,
and size found around the legs was purchased in large
quantities by two groups of chain stores-Bohack's and
the Atlantic & Pacific stores. There are several hundreds
of these stores in New York City. A search among all
of them for the clerk who had made the column of figures
would be long drawn out, and while it was under way
the slayer might flee or cover up his tracks.
The paper and figures were photographed and at my
request published in several newspapers with a note asking
the man who had written them to get in touch with me.
I did not believe that the slayer had made the figures.
Had he done so he would not have used the paper. In
the meantime records in the Missing Persons Bureau of
the Police Department were searched for reports of aged
women who had disappeared within the fortnight.
The next day was Sunday, July Ioth. At 6:35 A. M. a
sixteen-year-old boy playing on the lawn of a Catholic
church in Brooklyn called the attention of a woman to
a bundle on the edge of the lawn, which, it seemed to
him, had been placed there while his back was turned
as he played. It was wrapped in a rose and white checkered blanket. The woman, thinking it might be an abandoned infant, placed there to catch the eye of churchgoers, called a patrolman.
He unwrapped the blanket. In a thickness of "cheap
brown wrapping paper were found the hips and back section of a woman's torso. A medical examiner reported
that the torso had been severed with an axe.
At 10:30 A. M. a motion-picture theater manager found
the arm and left shoulder of a woman's body at the base




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of a fire escape on his theater a dozen blocks from the
church where the torso had been found. The ring finger
had been cut off and in the clenched hand were gripped
several strands of black hair about the length that a man
wears his hair. This parcel was wrapped in a red and
white blanket and cheap brown paper. The medical examiner said that death had taken place about three days
before and that the instrument used in severance was a
sharp axe.
A few hours after this ghastly find Alfred Bennett, of
No. I6 Lincoln Place, Brooklyn, reported to the police
that his wife, the mother of four children, had been missing since seven o'clock Saturday night, July 9th. His son,
John, aged nineteen, had last seen his mother cross the
backyard and go into a house at No. 28 Prospect Place,
which she formerly had conducted as a rooming house
but had sold to Sarah Elizabeth Brownell, a seventy-sixyear-old spinster, who now occupied the house and rented
furnished rooms. Mrs. Bennett's oldest son, Carl, still
lived in the house as one of the spinster's roomers.
In the meantime I was eagerly awaiting word from the
grocery clerk who might recognize his figures in the facsimile published in the newspapers. He did not show up
for reasons which presently will appear obvious. I anticipated also that other parts of the body would be found,
for invariably the bundle bungler scatters his parcels in
many places. And they were found-not only the remnants of the body of an aged woman but parts of a second
woman's bodyl All were picked up in Brooklyn, thus
narrowing the hunt for the slayer to that borough of the
greater city.
From John Bennett, the nineteen-year-old son of the
missing woman, detectives learned that his mother had
gone into Miss Brownell's to see her about an installment
due on the purchase price of the house. The detectives
called at the Brownell house. The doorbell was answered




280  MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


by a short, thickset man with a bull neck, about thirtyeight years old. His hair was black.
He gave his name as Ludwig Lee and said he was a
Norwegian. He had been rooming with Miss Brownell
for several years. He also knew Mrs. Bennett. She had
complained to Miss Brownell on Saturday that the water
pipes in the house were leaking and that her yard had
been flooded. He went with Mrs. Bennett into the basement and had left her standing near the furnace looking
at the pipes. As to Miss Brownell, Lee said that on July
4th she had left for Gloversville, New York, to visit relatives over the holiday and had not returned.
The detectives noted a strange, damp odor in the house
as they stood at the door talking with Lee. Finally the
investigators separated, one going into the basement, the
other calling on a Mrs. Emma Lohman, whose house
adjoined the Brownell place. Mrs. Lohman told the detective that Mrs. Bennett had been with her about seven
o'clock Saturday night waiting for Lee to enter the
Brownell yard and admit her to the basement. A little
while later the Norwegian came into the yard, and Mrs.
Bennett jumped up and went to him. And Mrs. Lohman
was certain that she had seen Miss Brownell in the house
since July 4th
Flashing about in the basement with a hand lamp, the
detective who had remained in the Brownell house came
upon a woman's torso half buried in an ash can, and other
parts of a human body. Standing against the side of the
furnace was a sharp axe recently washed and polished.
Lee was taken to Brooklyn police headquarters for
further questioning. As he stood in the detectives' room
the peculiar damp odor detected in the basement permeated the place. It was that strange, repulsive odor one
encounters often at the scene of murder where human
bodies have been dismembered.
Detectives left on guard at the Brownell house heard




BUNGLERS ' BUNDLES


28Il


the doorbell ring and opened the door. A man walked
in. He gave his name as Christian Jensen and said he was
calling to see his friend Lee, with whom he had formerly
roomed in a house previously owned by Miss Brownell.
Jensen said he had been out to get a morning paper. He
had a copy of one in his hand, but had not yet seen it.
He told the detectives that he was a clerk in a Brooklyn
Atlantic & Pacific grocery store.
On the front page of the newspaper in his pocket was
the facsimile of the brown wrapping paper with the column of figures on it that I had caused to be printed. He
explained to the detectives that he was going up to Lee's
room to look over the paper. He was sent to Brooklyn
police headquarters for further questioning.
A search was made of Lee's room. In his trunk was
found a passbook on Miss Brownell's savings bank account which contained four thousand dollars. Penciled on
the wall above the trunk was the name Otto Nielson and
an address in Brooklyn.
Two assistant medical examiners arrived at the house
and on the floor of the kitchen they pieced together the sections of the bodies found in the basement and elsewhere.
Several parts were still missing. They were found in an
alcove in the basement. One head was missing-that of
Miss Brownell. A police emergency squad drained the
basement and found human fingers, one of which wore a
ring identified as Miss Brownell's.
Neighbors reported that on Sunday morning they had
seen Lee leave the house early with a bundle, return half
an hour later, and carry out two more bundles. Nielson,
upon being interviewed, stated that about 9 P. M. Saturday night, two hours after Mrs. Bennett had last been
seen alive, he had called at the Brownell house with Jensen, but had some trouble in getting an answer to the
doorbell. After a while Lee appeared, nude, and said he
was taking a bath. Nielsen and Jensen went upstairs to




282


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


Lee's room, and after waiting for him an hour Nielson
went to the basement door, found it locked, and rattled
it. Lee cried out from within the basement, "Don't do
that." His voice was angry.
Faced with this incriminating evidence, Lee stoutly denied that he had killed the two women and insisted that
Miss Brownell had gone to Gloversville and had not returned; that he had left Mrs. Bennett standing in the
basement. He admitted, however, that on several occasions, at Miss Brownell's request, he had cashed checks
against her savings account and had spent the money.
He was taken back to the Brownell house and led into
the kitchen where the pieced-together bodies of the two
women lay.
"Who killed them?" he was asked.
He became sullen and ferocious. "I don't know " he
cried. "How should I know?" He added spitefully that
"the old woman had begged me to marry her and I first
refused, then consented."
Jensen came into the room. He heard Lee's last remark. He spoke up and said that on Thursday night,
July 7th, he brought home a package from the store where
he worked. It contained a lamp. It was wrapped in brown
paper which he had taken from the counter in the store.
Lee had seen him with the package and asked him if he
was going to throw away the wrapping paper. He said
he was. Lee asked him to let him have it. He did.
This was the piece of paper which had the figures on
it. They were Jensen's figures, a column he had written
down hurriedly when a customer who had bought a bill
of groceries had asked him, "What are the damages?"
This disclosure fell into a damning niche, for it established that the legs found at the air vent in Battery Park
were those of Miss Brownell; that she was dead at the
time Lee asked for the paper or he would not have asked




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283


for it. Moreover, it definitely put the bundle in Lee's
hands.
What had happened to Miss Brownell and Mrs. Bennett was clear. Lee had first killed the older woman,
striking her on the head with the axe. This happened on
Thursday night, the night Jensen had handed Lee the
wrapping paper. He had her body on his hands, but his
plot had not taken into consideration the disposition of
the remains. Then on Saturday night, the night Neilson
and Jensen had called, Mrs. Bennett went into the basement to find the leaking pipes. It was about that time that
Lee was cutting up the body of Miss Brownell. And to
prevent Mrs. Bennett from telling of the ghastly sight she
must have seen as she entered the basement he killed her.
Thus he had two bodies on his hands. His plot had not
encompassed the disposition of a second body. Confused,
he hacked them both to pieces, bundled them, and dropped
them about Brooklyn with disastrous consequences.
He was electrocuted in 1928.
I am inclined to believe that even had the other sections
of the body not been found, even had the detectives not
entered the basement or had been taken elsewhere in their
search, we would have been led to Lee. The piece of paper
with Jensen's figures on it had already put us on the right
trail, for Jensen later said that when he did look at the
Sunday newspaper he instantly recognized the figures as
his and had the case not come to such a sudden climax
would have gotten into touch with us.
And so it runs with bundle bunglers. The Lee case was
a striking example of what can be done in modern murder
detection, with medical experts working, on one hand;
and, on the other hand, trained detectives selecting the
most direct clue, like the paper and the figures, which
lead to the murderer in the shortest possible time. And
the work of the Murder Clinic in calling in consulting
experts like the paper manufacturers whose advice nar



284    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
rowed the hunt for the maker of the figures to two groups
of chain stores.
I call the dismembering murderer a bundle bungler
because the bundle usually traps him. It is a strange play
of fate that a good many slayers of this type will get as
far as the bundle, but lack the nerve to take it out, or,
when they do take it out, they drop it in places where it
is most likely to be seen.
In I910 Ruth Wheeler, an attractive girl in her teens,
was a student at the Bankers' and Merchants' Business
College in New York City. A postcard reached the school
one day asking that an advanced student in stenography,
preferably a woman, be sent to an address in East Seventyfifth Street. The writer, Albert Wolter, had work for such
a girl.
Ruth was sent. She did not return that night to her
home. Her sister learned that she had been sent to the
East Seventy-fifth Street house. Accompanied by two
patrolmen she went to the house and interviewed Wolter.
He insisted that Ruth had been there, but had gone home.
Wolter said that he was a German stenographer and
lived in the small apartment with his wife.
Wolter displayed signs of undue nervousness. The sister
did not like his appearance or his actions. At her request
Wolter was taken to the station house and held upon a
charge of abduction.
The day following tenants of the apartment next to
that of Wolter noticed a bundle on the fire escape near
their window. Peeved because it had been pushed near
their outlet to the sunlight the tenants shoved the bundle
over the edge of the fire escape. It fell into the yard below,
where the janitor picked it up. He found it to contain the
charred torso of a human being.
McCafferty, my old partner, who had been elevated to
the rank of inspector, accompanied me to the Wolter
apartment. I examined the torso and from the charred




BUNGLERS' BUNDLES


285


throat extricated a small gold chain which Ruth Wheeler's
sister identified as one owned by the missing girl. Thus
identification was clearly established. The girl had been
assaulted, then choked, and her body put into the fireplace.
But burning it was a slow process, and while Wolter was
doing this he momentarily expected his wife, who was
that only in name, to come in. Thinking the policemen's
knock was hers, he hauled the body out of the fire, hurriedly wrapped it, and put it on the fire escape, pushing
it over to one side so that his consort would not see it.
Wolter was electrocuted-another bundle bungler who
had fallen short of plot.
Once in a great while this type of slayer is nipped red
handed in the act of disposing of his bundle. Many years
back an acrobat living in a cheap boarding house heard
a shot in the room next to him. He waited half an hour,
heard sawing and chopping, and heard a man leave the
room where the shot had been fired. He peeked out and
saw the man carrying a suitcase. The acrobat notified a
policeman of what he had heard and seen. The policeman
learned that the man with the suitcase was a pork butcher.
When he came out of the boarding house again with
a suitcase and a wicker carrier the policeman accosted
him. Upon opening the two pieces of luggage the officer
found sections of a human body in them. The body was
nearly complete, but as usual the head was missing. The
murderer had done what all slayers of this type dogotten rid of the head first. It was found in a lumber yard
near by and the slayer was convicted and sent to prison
for manslaughter in the second degree.
They all seem to forget that it is one thing to kill a
person, but another thing to get rid of the bodies of their
victims. For some reason bundle bunglers never think of
fleeing themselves. They are almost always caught at the
scene of their crime. Fate seems to pin them to the spot.




CHAPTER XXII


MURDER BY INVITATION
A     RARE experience befell me on the morning of February 6, 1928. I stood again at the desk of the Grand
Hotel in Thirty-first Street, where I had stood thirty
years before getting the first dim picture of the murder
of Dolly Reynolds. Murder had called me to the hotel
this time-a tragedy so much like the Reynolds case up to
a certain point that one might have believed that the same
type of mind, if not the same slayer, had conceived both.
Strange developments arose in this case. People have
often asked me what would happen as a matter of law if
one person invited another to kill him; whether in that
case it would be murder as the courts see it. It's a rather
grotesque situation, but this case supplies the answer.
The body of a young woman, clad in a kimono, had been
found in a room in the Grand Hotel annex. She had been
beaten to death. Before me on the hotel desk were the
registry cards. Upon one, in masculine handwriting, were
the names of Mr. and Mrs. T. J. James, Troy, New York.
The room to which they had been assigned was the room
in which the woman's body was found. Apparently she
was Mrs. James.
It has always been my practice to run back through the
pages of a hotel register. In this case guests registered on
cards. I ran through the cards, and under date of Jan286




MURDER BY INVITATION


287


nary Ioth, a little more than a month before, I found the
same names. The "J's" in the two entries were similar,
both having been made with a peculiar flourish which
made them look like a character on a printed music staff.
The previous entry, however, gave Gouverneur, New
York, as the couple's address, and not Troy.
Closer study of the two handwritings revealed other
peculiarities. The January ioth entry was bold and steady,
whereas the recent entry was ragged and wavering. From
this difference I reasoned that the man who had written
both entries was under a strain when he wrote the last
one; that possibly something was upsetting him when he
wrote it. The woman had not been in the room long when
she was beaten to death.
I entered the room where the body lay. The woman's
features were refined. She was in her middle thirties.
Wounds on her forehead indicated that she had been
struck by a hammer, and this was supported by the finding
of a cheap hammer in the room. The body lay upon a bed.
Search of the room disclosed these articles:
A time-table of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, which runs between New York City and
New England points. This was found in the bottom of
a waste basket, where it might have been thrown by the
occupants of the room, a maid, or someone who had previously used the room.
A woman's new hat which bore the label of a Fifth
Avenue store located close to the Grand Central Terminal,
where New York Central and New York, New Haven &
Hartford railroad trains arrive and depart.
A black silk underskirt, or slip, which bore the tag
of another Fifth Avenue store not far from the same
railroad terminal.
A small patent leather handbag, quite worn, and filled
with toilet requisites, which offered no clue to the woman's
identification.




288    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
A pair of 4AA snakeskin pumps of ornate design bear.
ing the name of a well-known shoe manufacturer.
And several undergarments.
From these articles and the woman's body the picture
had to be built. The task which confronted me was to
make a quick, decisive move which in the shortest possible time would lead to the identification of the woman
and her slayer and lead to the apprehension of the latter.
The reader is in possession of the same clues we had to
work upon.
One bit of additional information was gathered from
a hotel maid. About 9:30 A. M. she was passing down the
hall when she saw a man locking the door of the room
in which the body was later found. He was a tall man
with a florid face and an erect, military bearing. The maid
had been impressed by his stature and observed that he
"looked very much like a member of the King's Guard
in London." He stopped the maid and explained in a
soft voice that his wife was asleep in the room and did
not want to be disturbed, so he was leaving quietly. She
was sleeping late because they were checking out at noon
and had a long railroad journey ahead of them. He left,
taking the room key with him. He did not leave the key
at the desk downstairs.
The clerk at the desk described the man as tall, military in his bearing. He was the same man who had inscribed the names on the registry card.
When the man did not appear at noon the maid entered
the room with her pass-key and found the body.
A few more details are added to the picture. Undoubtedly the murder was committed by the tall, military man
known as Mr. James, who was the same man that on
January Ioth had written the entry on the registry card.
I reasoned that the woman had been shopping immediately before she was slain, and that this shopping had
been done in Fifth Avenue at stores near the Grand Cen



MURDER BY I NVITATION


289


tral railroad terminal. Thus the articles found in the room
established the relevancy of the New York, New Haven
& Hartford time-table found in the waste basket. The
time-table lay open at pages giving the time of arrival
and departure of trains operating between New York
City and Stamford, Connecticut, which is a suburban city
about an hour's ride from New York on the New York,
New Haven & Hartford Railroad. Many of the intermediate towns and cities are in Westchester County, which
adjoins New York City on the north. Hundreds of thousands of commuters travel daily between New York City
and Stamford and the intermediate points.
My conclusion was that Mrs. James had traveled from
one of these cities or towns to do her shopping. The
absence of luggage convinced me that the trip was a
shopping trip.
The body was photographed from various angles, as
is done in every homicide case. A good likeness of her
face was obtained. The Bureau of Missing Persons was
notified.
Detectives were then detailed to locate the store in
which the hammer was purchased, with instructions to
concentrate their search among five-and-ten-cent stores in
the vicinity of the hotel. The hammer was a cheap tool.
Its head had been cast in a mold. There were defects in
the metal casting-notches and furrows which usually are
found on tools sold to low-price stores in large job lots.
A detective reported that in a five-and-ten-cent store two
blocks from the hotel he had found hammers of the same
make and with the same defects. He had bought one for
ten cents and upon comparison with the hammer found
in the room its head proved to have come from the same
mold. The salesgirl who had charge of the booth could
not recall anyone to whom she had sold hammers on the
day before.
The hammer, as a lead, petered out.




290


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


In the meantime I had sent detectives to scour the
cities and towns along the route of the New York, New
Haven & Hartford Railroad. They were armed with
photographs of the woman-a complete description of
her attire and the articles found in the room. The only
facts about the man which they had in their possession
was the meager information that he had a florid face, was
tall, and deported himself like a man who had seen, or
was in, military service. And as far as we knew he was
T. J. James and the woman his wife. The aid of police
detectives in the towns and cities was enlisted.
Some days passed before our inquiries developed. Then
a New Rochelle police detective, who had made it a point
to interrogate commuters that boarded trains at that point,
found a man who recalled having been impressed by the
uncommonly erect carriage of a tall man with red face
whom he had seen several times on the train, and who
apparently had boarded it at one of the cities farther
north.
This transferred the search to cities above New Rochelle. At Mamaroneck, several stops above New Rochelle, a commuter was found who recalled having seen a
woman step aboard a morning train with a man of florid
countenance and military bearing. He was especially attracted by ornate snakeskin pumps worn by the woman.
They seemed to be out of keeping with the rest of her
costume, which was plain and severe. He had seen the
tall man help her aboard the train, then got aboard himself. The train was New York bound. This had happened
several days before the body was found.
In Mamaroneck shopkeepers, ticket agents, newsboys,
taxi drivers, and real estate agents were interviewed. A
man was found who had seen the couple described come
out of an apartment house. The detectives made inquiries
at this house and learned that no one lived there named
James, but when the description of the tall, military man




MURDER BY INVITATION


29I


with red face was announced the owners of the apartment house instantly recognized it as that of "the Major,"
but not Major James. The name he had given here wag
Cecil Campbell and the woman was his wife. They had
occupied a two-room studio apartment with bath. They
had given up this apartment some time back at the request
of the owners, upon whom the major had passed several
worthless checks. The couple had then moved to a cottage
on the edge of the town.
The major had been a non-communicative person, the
apartment house owners said. He had only once gotten
into a lengthy conversation and upon this occasion spoke
of his military service. He had been all over the world
and had encountered much adventure, soldiering in Mexico
and India and leading troops in China. Luck had downed
him in recent years, he told his hearers. He did what he
could get to do, anything. He grinned when a woman
in the apartment called him a soldier of fortune. His
wife was a retiring woman. She had spoken only to trades.
people while she lived in the house.
The cottage on the edge of town was located. It was
unoccupied but furnished. Neighbors knew nothing of the
couple, for they neither visited nor were visited and had
seemed anxious not to know anyone around them. The
cottage was watched for three days. The Campbells not
having appeared, detectives entered and searched the
house. They found letters indicating that Campbell had
lived in South Wyndham and Portland, Maine, and had
worked in New Jersey as a military disciplinarian in a
boys' school. More recently the couple had lived in Rye,
a town adjoining Mamaroneck, and thither the detectives
carried their investigation. Here it was learned that the
couple had lived in Lynn, Massachusetts. Detective Martin was sent to New Jersey to find additional traces of
Campbell; Detective Jackson went to various towns in
Westchester County, and Pyke hurried to Lynn to talk




292    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
with a Mr. and Mrs. Haskell, to whom Mrs. Campbell
had sent a child's coat a few days before Christmas while
she was living in Rye.
The Haskells had not heard from the Campbells since
Christmas, but, they told Pyke, there were other friends
who might know where they were. One of these was Mrs.
John Murphy, who before her marriage had worked in
an office with Campbell. Also in the office at the time
was Mary Lyle McLean. Campbell had married Miss
McLean after he had given up the office and had gone
to work as an instructor in military tactics at a boys' institution at Shirley, Massachusetts. This marriage had
taken place in May, I922. Shortly afterward Campbell
left the institution and went to Boston and later to New
Jersey. It was impossible for him to stick at one job.
Four years later he was appointed superintendent of
a disciplinary institution at South Wyndham. The appointment was announced in South Wyndham and in
Boston newspapers with complete and somewhat thrilling
accounts of Major Campbell's adventurous life. A young
woman, known only as Cornelia, and who was employed
as a telephone operator in South Wyndham, read the
account. She was amazed. Back in 1917 she had married
Campbell and had a child by him, now aged eight. Campbell had disappeared shortly after the marriage. Tired
of waiting for him to return, Cornelia had filed suit for
divorce in September, I925.
Miss McLean, whom he had married in I922, was the
dead woman. He had contracted a bigamous marriage
with her. The first wife knew nothing of Campbell's present whereabouts. He was a rover, she said. It would take
years to find him. She had hunted for him eight years
without success.
However, Pyke brought back a photograph of Campbell and his dead wife. Officials of New Jersey correctional
institutions recognized the photograph of Campbell as




MURDER BY INVITATION


293


an instructor who had been employed by them a month
past and who had told them when he left that he was
going to Philadelphia. The major acted strangely, they
said, as though he had come to an impasse with life.
Detectives Martin and Jackson were sent to Philadelphia
and located an institution where Campbell was believed
to be a visitor. It was a refuge for derelict men. Martin
entered the place and saw a tall, military-looking man
sitting erect at a desk staring blankly out a window. He
went over to the man.
"Campbell, we want you in New York," said the detective. The man looked up, nodded, then arose.
"What happened to your wife?" Martin asked him
outside.
In a low voice he said, "She's dead."
The major told me one of the strangest stories I had
ever listened to. He admitted killing his wife with the
hammer. The two had come to New York to carry out
a suicide pact. He was at the end of his rope. The couple
were deeply in love. They went to the Grand Hotel to talk
over plans of their pact. They both agreed that they
were through with life, but the means to encompass their
destruction could not be agreed upon.
Finally they boarded a Hudson River ferry, intending
to throw themselves into the water when the boat reached
midstream. She would be first to go and he would follow.
There was some disagreement about this, Campbell said.
He thought he should go first. But when the time to
jumps arrived he looked about. Too many persons were
standing by, so the attempt was abandoned and they
came back to the hotel and entered the room on the fourth
floor.
They had twenty-five cents between them. The woman
suggested that she take ten cents and buy a hammer.
Campbell gave her the money. She left the hotel. He
went out, intending to take a ferry boat and leap into




294


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


the river. At the ferry house he changed his mind and
returned to the hotel. His wife was on the bed in her
kimono. The ten-cent hammer lay upon the dresser. She
suggested that he kill her with it.
And so while she lay upon the bed he struck her on
the forehead and killed her. Alone with her body on his
hands, he turned to complete his part of the pact. He
opened a window and was about to jump but his nerve
sagged.
"Why didn't you jump?" I asked him.
In a lifeless voice he replied: "There was a ledge below
the window and so many people down on the street that
I couldn't bring myself to do it. I was afraid I might hit
the ledge and fall on the sidewalk and injure someone."
On the witness stand Campbell admitted the crime and
described the act in detail. He went into his life at great
length. He was an abject figure, a man completely beaten
by life. He was convicted of murder in the second degree;
and sentenced to from twenty years to life. The jury was
moved to pity for him in spite of the fact that he had
wanted to die and expressed a willingness in court to do so.
The jury's verdict settles the grotesque issue as to
what would happen if one person asked another to kill
him. It is murder just the same.
A strange thing occurred during this case. I took Campbell in a motor car to show me the store where his wife
bought the hammer and to have him point out his movements on the day of the murder. I asked him what he had
done with the key to the hotel room. He said that on
February 6th, while wandering about Brooklyn trying to
make up his mind to die, he had thrown the key into a
rubbish can in Brooklyn miles from the hotel.
At 3:30 that same afternoon Patrolman Charles
Reicher on duty in Brooklyn saw a key on top of a rubbish
can, read the address on its fiber tag, and mailed it back
to the hotel. It was then turned over to the property




MURDER BY INVITATION


295


clerk's office at police headquarters and a few minutes
later came into my possession. It was identified as the key
to the room in which Campbell had slain his wife. It was
an important link in the chain of evidence against Campbell, for it proved action on his part to conceal the crime,
albeit the woman had invited him to kill her.
A great French detective once was asked to name the
greatest detective.
"Monsieur Bon Chance," he replied-Mr. Good Luck.
In so far as the finding of the key was concerned Mr. Good
Luck was on the job working through the alert eyes of
Patrolman Reicher, who, however, had a little picture
come to his mind when he saw boys playing around the
rubbish can. It was not the thing for boys to be doing.
It was an offense against the sanitary code. He did his
duty. Then he saw the key on top of the rubbish. He, no
doubt, decided that the key did not belong there. People
seldom throw away keys, even though they are useless.
Usually they put them in a box or drawer or on a ring
and keep them. He picked up the key and sent it to the
hotel.
Patrolman Reicher in his way was working with pictures, too, and the key finally was fitted into its right
place in the right picture.
The Campbell case stands alone in my mind as a pattern. No case ever paralleled that picture of a soldier
of fortune standing over the form of his wife and at her
invitation beating her to death with a ten-cent hammer
which she herself had purchased. In a way I can conceive
what brought him to that terrible extremity. He had lived
a life of real adventure; had been near death or in its
presence many times. Perhaps he had lived too full a
life too soon, and when adversity overtook him there
was nothing more to live for.
The soldier of fortune had become a soldier of mis



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MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


fortune-the strange human paradox which I call a murderer by invitation.
It was one of the last important cases I concluded
before my retirement in I928. And one of the weirdestperhaps the sort of finish that might be expected to the
career of a man who had been probing into murder for
nearly forty years. And as I look back-time-tables, whisky
glasses, keys, bits of writing, wisps of cotton waste, bottles and bottle'holders, men's false moves, and women's
faulty pictures-they are like tiny peaks of paint on an
artist's palette. The mind and memory furnish the sensitive brush with which you touch the colors to the canvas,
and at last you get the finished picture, but always in
heavy tones, the blackness of murder.
You get highlights, too-lurid, tempting, distracting,
like brilliant sunsets. These are the glamorous backgrounds. You have to look out that they don't dazzle the
eye and destroy the fine detail of the picture. In a way
the murder man is like an artist, but a very practical one.
And his pictures are not for sale. They may cost a man
or woman a life.
And out of it all, out of the many pictures, as they pass
in review, a man will come to some general conclusions
about murder and the reasons for it, and why we have so
much of it to-day.




CHAPTER XXIII


A PHILOSOPHY OF MURDER
P URELY by coincidence the writing of this chapter was
begun on April 3, 1929. Just forty years ago to the day
and month began the career which is the basis of these
memoirs. After that length of time on one job a man,
if he has been at all observant, if he can piece together
his experiences and has a retentive memory, should have
a philosophy about the thing he has been doing; if not a
philosophy at least a pattern for one.
I have never kept track of my cases by numbers; have
never counted them. Somewhere in the thousands lies the
total number of homicide investigations I have worked
upon or have directed. Nor is the number important. The
patterns are, for they are what I've worked by. They
are stored away to come into use when a face, an act, a
scene, or a circumstance in a current murder suggests a
parallel to something encountered before in my experience.
The murder scene in America has undergone vast alterations since I first set about getting the picture of a thief.
In those days murder was a rarity. But in twenty years,
the statisticians tell us, the homicide rate in this prosperous and progressive nation has doubled. Forty years
ago if sixty persons met violent death in a year in New
297




298    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
York City at the hands of another the homicide rate was
abnormal. The normal rate to-day is between six and eight
killings a week, not including an average of one hundred
who meet death each week in accidents. A week without
murder or accidental killing sometimes happens and is
viewed as a phenomenon. Yet New York City, the statisticians also advise, has next to the lowest homicide rate
in the large American cities.
If the homicide rate has doubled the increase has not
occurred among the class which furnished the slayers of
Mrs. Adams, Mrs. Buchanan, and William Rice. If murderers of this type can be classified they would fall into
the category of murderers who kill for escape. They
were, as near as I can see, misplaced human units. Had
Buchanan not been a doctor, Molineux not a chemist, and
Patrick not a lawyer, it is probable that their lives would
have taken vastly different courses. I dare say that in
their cases the motive to kill grew out of their professional activities. They were at that age where people
begin to think about settling down or readjusting themselves. None was an outstanding member of his profession, and each may have realized that he was misplaced.
In an attempt to capitalize upon what mediocre skill they
possessed they turned to murder-Buchanan and Patrick
to get money enough to escape from professions which
had failed to yield the returns they expected; Molineux
to escape from a sense of inferiority which stood in his
way as clubman and wooer of women.
Their plots were elaborate, indicating minds that were
capable of concentration-trained minds. Of this type
of murderer there has been a decrease in the last forty
years. I hardly think this is attributable to the skeptic's
reasoning that minds of to-day are less capable of concentration or elaborate plotting. Rather prosperity, the
processes of civilization, and the wider accessibility of
amusements have greatly reduced the number of trained




A PHILOSOPHY OF MURDER


299


minds that turn to murder. Human relationships are
freer, education is more accessible, luxuries are' not hard
to get, and the great industrialization of the country has
made it easier for people to get what they want-to lift
and readjust themselves, find places for themselves, and
become more satisfied with life.
In short, escape from unhappy conditions is more easily
achieved, and those whose minds grasp this situation can
find no reason to slay. They also are the ones most likely
to comprehend the futility of attempting to win by murder.
Ruth Snyder and Mrs. Eva Kaber were of yet another
type, products of the new desire to gain luxury quickly,
which unfortunately is one of the penalties which prosperity exacts. The Buchanan and Patrick types were
patient plotters, produced by an age not in such a hurry
to acquire wealth. Mrs. Snyder and Mrs. Kaber were
impetuous, impulsive. Their plots were the fruits of impatience, the hurry to get what others had. They, too,
were seeking escape, not from impoverished conditions
which Buchanan and Patrick faced by reason of their
professional mediocrity, but to make a quick jump from
middle-class comforts to the luxury that greater wealth
would bring. Nor is it among this class of slayers that
the increase in homicides has occurred. We probably shall
have slayers of both classes as long as there are divisions
in human society.
The increase has been chiefly among another and more
modern class, to describe which I can think of no more
appropriate classification than murderers by privilege.
How great the increase has been in this class is reflected
in a current newspaper. It records that in 1929 A. D.
in the second largest city in the United States seven men
were lined up along a garage wall and their lives snuffed
out in the flash of a minute by professional killers. Seven
a minute doubtless is a record, and if not massacre as
we know it is at least a first cousin.




300    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
Killers of this type have come to be known in this age
of speed and slang as the "murder mob." The act itself,
like all others of the same type, is described in the light
language of the era as giving somebody "the ride," "bumping them off," or "croaking them." When these expressions
appear upon the motion-picture screen there are titters in
the audience, and from this reaction one comes to the conclusion that a large part of the public, represented by the
seats occupied in our massive motion-picture theaters, publicly and tacitly share in the light-hearted view of murder
as the professional killer sees it.
If there is any philosophy to be made out of this spectacle, it is that the authors of this type of murder look
upon murder as a privilege conceded to them by their
own lawless world and not over-aggressively disputed by
the populace. It is termed a phenomenon, but then we are
fond of calling anything we do not understand, haven't
got the time to understand, or do not care to face frankly,
a phenomenon. It doesn't strike me that way.
I've watched the thing grow. The old type of professional criminal was not a killer. His world granted him
the privilege to steal, but he avoided killing. A thief was
unwise to kill and by so doing bring on violent eruptions
in crookdom. Cunning, rather than an ability to kill, was
the test of eligibility among criminals in that sparsely
populated underworld of thirty and forty years ago.
If caught, and they made a pretense of injured innocence, it was just a flash in the pan. There was a certain
sportiveness among the old-time crooks. When the cards
were set against them they knew enough to drop their
hands. They availed themselves of the services of lawyers, but these men were practitioners of the old school
who relied upon forensic skill and open battle rather than
shrewd, underhanded manipulation of legal technicalities
and baseless defenses to win their causes. There was a
time when the orations of criminal practitioners in the




A PHILOSOPHY OF MURDER

301


defense of noted professional crooks were considered
masterpieces of oratorical skill and logic, and great
speeches to juries were often reduced to brochures and
widely distributed and read. It has been a long time since
a great speech at a criminal trial has been reduced to type
even in a newspaper.
Lawyers rose to great eminence as criminal practitioners. To-day one of the quickest ways to draw resentful
fire from a successful lawyer is to call him a specialist in
criminal law. The bar in America seems to have withdrawn itself from its once important place in the administration of criminal justice, leaving the field to a small
coterie of practitioners over whom bar associations seem
to exercise little control.
This precisely is what the modern, organized criminal
wants. He is not looking for high-class lawyers who will
fight cases on merit. He much prefers the man who is
short on all the professional qualities that once made
lawyers great, but who possesses an intimate knowledge
of legal trickery and will put it to adroit use in getting
the criminal off, so that he may resume the privilege of
working again to make up for lost time and pay off the
debts that legal difficulties have brought on.
The professional criminal calls this type of practitioner
his "mouthpiece." I have commented already upon the
appropriateness of this title. Anyone who has observed
the process of trial in a criminal court where the defendant is known to be a seasoned veteran at crime will note
how infrequently the accused and his lawyer will confer
and also how infrequently such a defendant will take the
witness stand. Planning and talking seems to be left entirely to the lawyer whose capacity is not a defender but
a spokesman or mouthpiece.
And it is the criminal's law-given privilege thus to be
defended. Perhaps a better way to picture the part the
mouthpiece plays is to tell a true story. It has been told




302    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
by a young lawyer who served for some years as an unpaid
defender of penniless criminals. The accused, a young but
active thief, was in jail for robbery. He did not get the
loot he set out for, hence the scarcity of attorneys to
offer their services. He mistook the unpaid defender for
a regular mouthpiece. They were conferring for the first
time in jail, in anticipation of the prisoner's approaching
arraignment in court.
"Well, my friend, what is your story?" the lawyer
asked.
"I was pulled into this job by accident," the defendant
began. He went on with a long rigmarole, claiming not
only an accidental intrusion upon the job but eventually
offering all other defenses, including an alibi, police
frame-up, mistaken identity, and first time in trouble. It
was obvious that he was guilty.
The lawyer listened in patience, then smiled. "And is
that your story?" he asked in surprise.
"That's it," grinned the thief. "You asked me for it
and I'm telling it to you." He bent toward the lawyer.
"But, counsellor," he added, "if you know a better one,
well, spring it. Ain't that what you're here for?"
From the defenses I have seen projected in court where
the accused were known to be professionals and were
charged with murder I am inclined to think that many
of them were born of just such a conference as this.
I recall an incident which will give the reader a picture
of the professional's defense advanced another stage.
Five notorious young bandits of the new crop, who had
tried murder as a part of the robbery job but had failed,
were called for trial. We had them almost red handed.
One of them had been shot in the get-away, but he had
been thrown out of the gang's car on the sidewalk in
front of what the mob leader mistook for a hospital but
was an apartment house. Here he was left to die, his
companions fleeing. Our men found him. The cold-blooded




A PHILOSOPHY OF MURDER


303


manner in which his gang had left him to die had embittered him, and when he recovered he told us the story
and became a state's witness against the gang.
The leader of the mob as he came into court on the first
day encountered some of the officers inside the railing.
"When you guys get us," he sneered, "aeroplanes'll be
selling for a nickel apiece."
They had no legitimate defense we knew of and indeed
had made overtures to plead guilty if the degree of the
crime were reduced. This overture was rejected. But the
defense interposed in their behalf was interesting if often
used. They cried police third degree, for which there was
not the slightest foundation, as was proved when two of
the gangsters took the witness stand. They were convicted.
Their defense had been manufactured, but it proved
futile.
There are lawyers, of course, who are above reproach.
They come into the practice of criminal law with lofty
ideals and ethical standards, but if they stick to them
their business dwindles to nothing. They are generally
found defending criminals by appointment from the court,
where the State pays for their defense, since they were
without funds sufficiently large to be attractive to paid
counsel. The cream of the business falls to the establishqd mouthpieces. The others do not prosper because
they are unwilling to absorb the viewpoint of the criminal element-that deeply instilled and arrogant belief
that pillage and murder is the privilege of their class.
In their own world, as I have pointed out in earlier
chapters, this privilege to kill is undisputed and protected. The rule of self-extermination indicates how this
privilege is availed of in the endless chain of underworld
killings.
The American murder scene seems to have entered
upon its greatest change at the begininng of the present
century. I have made no intensive study of the history




304    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
of murder in this country, but I am aware that in my
own time the class of self-privileged murderers has grown.
Many elements contributed to the growth.
It was about I900 that the greatest influx of foreign
elements began and uncontrolled immigration permitted
the bad to come with the good. Concurrently criminals
began to drop their masks and become more brazen and
less fearful of the law. The murder rate began to rise.
Laws to safeguard the privileges of criminals began to
pile up on statute books. New defenses to murder were
invented, including dementia Americana, which now has
been lost sight of in a maze of other defenses invented
and invoked by shrewd lawyers. It was about 1900, too,
that American prosperity began to increase and to become more accessible to classes which previously had not
had their share of it.
Of the criminally inclined aliens admitted under unrestrictive immigration not a few brought with them a
traditional viewpoint that murder was a privilege. This
tradition in many cases was inherited from medieval times
when kings were privileged to murder and brigands setting themselves up as kings intrenched themselves behind
the privilege. If the relation of race to murder is emphasized here it is because my clinical observations give
dominance to this phase. I have given much thought to
weapons in all murder cases, for they are not only the
first thing a murder man looks for to establish the felonious intent of the slayer but they indicate the part that
racial instincts play in homicide.
The knife, for instance, betrays a slayer of lower order,
and almost invariably where the wielder of the knife is
apprehended he is a member, or a descendant, of a racial
group from southern Europe, Asia, or is colored. The
knife as a weapon of murder is of primitive origin. It
came before gunpowder. It is the weapon of slayers who
have been pretty close to poverty.




A PHILOSOPHY OF MURDER


305


The club, hammer, axe, and other tools commonly used
by mechanics usually disclose a murder committed by
other groups of foreign origin. In many parts of Europe
and Asia pistols and knives remain in the luxury class,
while the club or tool is a common household possession.
Murderers who use these weapons select them instinctively
because of a native familiarity with them. Moreover, the
races from which this type of slayer is most often recruited have been oppressed for centuries, and the club
was the common weapon of their marauding oppressors
and also a weapon of defense against them. They were
born, or their ancestors were, to the sight of the club or
tool as an instrument of attack and defense.
Bombs and other explosives are the weapons most used
in industrial and political sabotage and by nihilistic radicals. They are group weapons where the motive is not
only to kill but to spread terror. In recent years the blackmailing racketeer has resorted to the bomb or an abbreviated form of it called the "pineapple," his purpose
being not only to kill enemies but to increase his power
by terrorism. The reader may trace the origin of this
weapon by a study of the names of those who have beent
convicted for manufacturing and planting them. With few
exceptions the stock from which the bombers were recruited did not come over on the Mayflower. The "pineapple" is nothing more than a military hand grenade first
used in the late war, and for its introduction into the
American murder scene the war, rather than any one
racial group, may be blamed.
Arson as a means of murder is no longer common. When
it is resorted to the act is that of a pyromaniac, whose
motive is to destroy property and not murder, an insurance cheat, or a murderer employing fire to destroy
evidence of his crime. Insurance company records disclose
that the arsonist invariably is of foreign birth or extraction. As this was being written New York City news



306    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MA-N
papers were recording the third of a series of so-called
"torch" murders where the victims' bodies were burned.
The very fact that they occurred in series and that the
murder was first accomplished by other means explains
both the cycle and the use of fire. The first suggested the
second and the second the third to minds that had been
unable to decide upon other ways to dispose of the bodies.
The murderers were not foreigners but of the lower type
of mind found in bundle bunglers.
The strangler belongs to no one racial group. He is
invariably a man, never a woman, and usually of large
stature and strength. The killing is done on a sudden impulse, where the motive is anger, passion, or drunken
frenzy. Now and again an Oriental strangler is encountered who has become adept in the use of his strength
and can apply it with fatal consequences.
Murder by poison is, of course, of ancient origin. It is
the choice of no particular racial group, but rather the
weapon employed by a class, a superior or educated class
whose members possess minds which can concoct elaborate plots, but who shrink from the sight of death and
resort to poison because it does not involve their presence
at the time death takes place. They are superegotists, but
too smart, too confident, or too eager; they overdo the
job. I am firmly of the belief that the will to poison has
been pretty well educated out of would-be poisoners by the
fatal consequences which have overtaken murderers of
this type.
Murders committed by the means just referred to have
greatly decreased in recent years. The common weapons
in America to-day are firearms. No one race or group
of races holds a monopoly upon their use, nor does any
class of murderers, professional or otherwise, resort to
them because of any racial or traditional instinct. Firearms are just handy and their use involves no degree of
skill.




A PHILOSOPHY OF MURDER


3o7


Except in recent years little restraint has been imposed
upon the purchase of firearms. They are for sale everywhere, and those who haven't the price steal them. There
are laws against carrying them or possessing them, but
the task of enforcing these laws is beset with great difficulties. Policemen are not privileged to go about tapping
hip pockets indiscriminately to find gun carriers. How
effective the gun-carrying permit system is may be judged
by the fact that in the great majority of murders committed with firearms the perpetrators had no permits.
Obviously a professional gunman would be the last person to ask for a permit. Shotguns, machine guns, and
automatic rifles are the accouterments of the professional
murder mob of to-day making war upon society to intrench themselves in privilege.
It is no source of wonderment to me that the older and
more primitive weapons have been discarded for the firearm. Not only does the criminally inclined immigrant find
the privilege to possess these weapons, cheaper, freer,
and easier than abroad, but the native-born also is influenced toward them by their accessibility.
And laws extend other privileges to criminals. If a
defendant accused of murder (until recently in New York
State) declined the opportunity to take the witness stand
in his own behalf to explain away damaging evidence this
was his law-given privilege, but the public prosecutor was
restrained by law from exercising in behalf of society
the privilege of commenting upon the fact that the accused did not take the stand. If a receiver of stolen goods,
the creator of the market in which thieves sell their loot,
were arrested the thief who sold him the goods-and
who by reason of that fact was the only one who could
testify to the secret illicit transaction-went on the witness
stand his testimony had to be corroborated or was worthless. This was a handy privilege for both receiver and
thief. If a habitual criminal with a long prison record




308


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


were arrested the law extended to him the privilege of
putting up bail in spite of his known record. Thus he enjoyed equal privileges with a person never before accused
of crime or persons who might later be found innocent.
And when known criminals furnished bail the law gave
them the privilege of using stolen property as indemnity I
These are a few of the laws which force the criminal
to the not illogical conclusion that though he may be a
habitual offender the law specifically singles him out for
privileges. And from this class of criminals the murderers
responsible for to-day's increased homicides are recruited.
My philosophy of murder is concerned chiefly with them,
for they make the murder scene what it is to-day.
Who sponsored such laws? How did they get on the
statute books? For answers one must turn to legislators.
Our legislative bodies are made up largely of lawyers.
A certificate admitting a man to the practice of law has
become almost a prerequisite to entering politics. Bankers, merchants, and farmers are seen less and less in
American legislative assemblies. Nor are the lawyers
who enter law-making bodies always the most brilliant
successes in their profession. Politics, and not the law,
attracts them. And the legally trained mind is an adaptable one. Though the guilt of a client may be clear, it is
required of the lawyer that he see beyond, around, or
through his client's guilt, or not see it at all. This gives
the lawyer an elasticity of viewpoint. By this process he
becomes the fervent defender of his client, and it frequently works out that the greater the guilt the more
intense the fervor. For this the lawyer is hardly to blame.
The ancient ethics of his profession fix his conduct toward
his client.
When he becomes a legislator he carries this elasticity
of viewpoint and fervency with him and exercises it, not
in behalf of one, two, or three clients, but in behalf of
all accused persons. Any law that tightens the hold of




A PHILOSOPHY OF MURDER


309


courts, jails, and police upon criminals becomes at once
a menace to man's liberty and an infringement of constitutional rights. It is always made to appear that some
great principle of justice is at stake and that innocent
persons will suffer if the laws are passed. And that law
is talked to its doom. On the other hand, a law that
weakens society's effort to protect itself against the criminal element is lauded as a modern, humane development.
More than likely when it becomes operative it is found to
bestow one more privilege upon the criminal class.
Of course there are good and bad lawyers, just as there
are good and bad policemen, soldiers, and business men.
But their position in our law-making and enforcing machinery is odd, to say the least. It is paradoxical. Lawyers
both make and unmake the laws; they enforce them as
prosecutors and tear them apart as defenders of accused
persons. They interpret them as judicial officers. I do not
mean to imply that they are actuated by venal motives.
They are merely taking care of things closest to them;
the sources of their livelihood. A physician-legislator
would oppose laws inimical to his profession; a farmerlegislator would do likewise. The difficulty, in my opinion,
lies in giving the lawyer-legislator the balance of power
in framing and enacting penal laws. It is this one-sided
complexion of legislatures that causes the criminal to
believe that the one agency he must employ when he runs
up against the law-the lawyer-will, in the matter of
legislation, instinctively favor that class of clients, like
himself, who in the aggregate mean most to a lawyer.
Criminals do not have to lobby to protect their interests
or gain privileges.
A development that has struck me with great force in
recent years is the readiness with which the modern type
of killer admits his guilt or confesses his crime. It has
led me to believe that they have little dread of our elaborate machinery for justice. I have watched men sweat and




310    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
twitch through a confession; observed the quieting effect
that it had upon their demeanor when once their guilt is
acknowledged, but I have also seen the same men assume
an attitude of bravado in court when their skilled lawyers
tore the confessions to pieces, or attacked the police, not,
however, by putting their clients upon the witness stand,
but by attacking the States' case by innuendo or false defense. In this way they achieve a more subtle effect with
a jury, and they avoid the risk that lies in putting a guilty
murderer upon the witness stand.
What has happened, as near as I can measure it, is
this: Criminals have learned to look with hope beyond
police, confessions, and that sort of thing. In court, in
the hands of a lawyer, they expect to find, and do find,
their privileges. Why worry about a confession, being
caught red handed, previous criminal records, and evidence the police uncover when the giant machine which
society has set up to mete out justice yields privileges to
the criminal class?
Add to the situation I have just pictured the specter of
prohibition and the unprecedented, widely distributed
prosperity, and the final, lurid touch is added to the picture of murder in the United States in 1929. When one
talks about prohibition nowadays it is customary to classify him as a wet or dry. I am neutral. I do not use and
never have used liquor, having neither desire nor need
for it. The country could be stone dry, dewy, or wringing
wet; it would not affect me personally. And I am looking
at it now in its relation to murder.
Perhaps the statement about prohibition should be
qualified and the trouble that it has caused be diagnosed
as an unwillingness to obey prohibition laws. At any rate,
it plays a dual part in the murder scene. On the one hand
it has created a disrespect for law and on the other has
built up a new school for crime.
Both the youth and the mature man with law-breaking




A PHILOSOPHY OF MURDER


31I


tendencies observes that while the law stands plain upon
the statute books, and has been upheld by courts, there
are two classes who feel privileged to violate it: the man
who wants a drink, and the man who supplies the want.
Both have arrogated to themselves the privilege of disobeying the law, which as I have attempted to point out
is what the habitual criminal has been doing for years.
It so happens that a large mass of otherwise law-abiding
citizens now refuse to accept the law, and so with even
more logic than hitherto has supported the criminal's
viewpoint he comes to understand that at last the rest
of the world sees laws as he does. The criminal now becomes one of the larger mass, or, to put it conversely, a
large part of the so-called honest world has accepted his
philosophy. And this, he reasons, must make his philosophy
right, where before there was doubt about it.
And if men are slain in their attempt to keep flowing
the supply of liquor-well, the criminal reasons, they
were primarily serving the interest of wet citizens whom
an undesirable law robbed of certain privileges. Precisely
this is what the criminal has been battling for since time
began. He would prefer no laws at all. He has done his
best to make murder and robbery profitable if not lawful,
which is neither more nor less than prohibition has accomplished with liquor. This all has a bearing upon the
murder rate.
There is still another important angle to prohibition,
or this widespread unwillingness to obey the law, which
the murder man encounters in his daily work. It breeds
criminals of the killing type faster than they ever were
bred before. A gregarious youth seeking adventure, as
all do, finds it awaiting him in the bootlegging industry.,It could hardly be unlawful, he reasons, when so many
citizens are getting their supply from sources which are
provided in almost every community. He tries his hand,at rum running. He finds that the hazards of the occupa



312    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
tion require him to go armed to fight off hijackers. Or he
may have gone into the hijacking end of the game. At
any rate, he becomes a gun carrier. He discovers the power
that a loaded weapon has to compel men and women to
hand over their property. He acquires the knack of handling a gun and finds he has little to fear after the first
experience at holdup is encountered. He never knew that
before.
"Where did you get your experience with a gun?" I
have asked many of the young murderers brought in.
"Handling booze," is the usual reply.
"How did you get into robbery?"
"Just went after the bigger stuff."
This exchange of question and answer sums up the
situation. Why bother about all the roundabout tricks
involved in handling liquor when it has become apparent
to the youth that men and women at the flash of a gun will
yield up their valuables as quickly as rum runners yielded
up their contraband supplies? Bootlegging is abandoned,
now that the gun-carrying experience has been obtained,
for the type of robberies so common and in which most
of the lives lost are now lost through murder. When the
thief robs and kills he has refuges without number where
no one will ask him questions-speakeasies, into which he
can throw himself and enjoy protection. He knows that the
protection will be quite secure, otherwise the speakeasy
would not be operating. If his means of livelihood is not
apparent, and people ask questions of him, he is in "the
booze racket," and this explains a lot and disarms suspicion. On every hand, at every step, he finds privileges
awaiting him.
Prosperity, too, at least a misconceived notion of what
prosperity is, has affected this new class of slayers. They
are no longer satisfied with purses, the family plate, and
odds and ends of jewelry. The old-time type of thief has
almost disappeared from the scene. It is interesting to




A PHILOSOPHY OF MURDER


313


note how pickpockets have disappeared since women began to strap their handbags around their wrists and to
carry checks and not currency. Million-dollar robberies
have been common in recent years. Robberies that yield
loot in five or six figures are daily occurrences throughout
the United States. The underworld octopus, which slang
usage dubs the "racketeer," is not content with one gang.
He seeks to build an empire of murder mobs and to have
his hand in every easy-money activity. The big idea seems
to be to grasp the greatest amount of wealth in the quickest way, with murder merely an incidental to robbery.
The great wave of installment buying in America may
have been an influence in creating this desire to gain possession of the thing desired at the quickest possible mo.
ment and pay later, or perhaps not at all. Then, too, in
this age people cling with greater tenacity to their property, which of course is the right organized government
guarantees. By far the greatest number of murders to-day
are committed in the course of robberies and attempted
robberies. Men and women not only show greater courage
in facing armed bandits, but they display a more determined resistance to attempts to take their property. Thus
in the conflict that occurs between victim and thief two
irresistible forces meet-the bandit who will kill to steal
because he must have his easy money at once and the
owner of the property who puts his material possessions
above life itself.
On top of this is the age-old belief of the criminal that
he and his world are right and that other people and
systems are all wrong. He is not unlike the old lady who
with uncontrollable pride saw her awkward son marching away with his regiment. He was the only one out of
step, but to her not he but all the others were wrong. To
the misfits of the human family whom we call criminals
crime is not a descent in the social and moral scale. Almost
every act associated with their criminal careers to them




314    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
marks an ascent. When they are sent to prison they never
speak of going down. It's always "going up." When youthful slayers and old ones, too, are asked where they started
in crime, and who schooled them, it's always "up there,"
referring to some penal institution in which they served
time. Every move as they get down deeper into crime is
an upward trend. They see themselves as holders of privileges. Every down is an up. They attain full stature as
big men of crime when they have done a job or two of
murder.
There is quite a mass of murderers by privilege. Just
what society will do to rid itself of the menace is hardly
for me to say. My business for almost forty years has
been to catch them after they turned criminal and let the
law finish the picture.




CHAPTER XXIV


MURDER AS A SPECTACLE
T HE criticism most frequently directed at the police
in murder cases is that they catch only criminals whose
mentality and ability are inferior to their own. Because
of this, it is urged, a great percentage of murder mysteries go unsolved, and to satisfy an inherent desire to
see detectives of superior mentality go after and catch
criminals of superlative ability and mentality the public
turns to fiction mystery.
In these memoirs I have tried to give the reader a
variety of cases so that he might judge for himself whether
this criticism is true. Perhaps the average murder in real
life falls short of supplying a need which becomes more
pressing as life's complexities increase. Or is it need or
impulse, an impulse which lies deep in human nature and
which finds satisfaction only in seeing a fellow being of
superior mental attainments and social position dragged
down to the lowest levels? This is a harsh criticism to
make of human society; yet I am quite certain that if
every murderer I had arrested had been eminently successful, prominent, and above the average in intelligence
I would have succeeded to international fame as the
world's greatest detective.
I am also quite certain that if I had arrested, without
3I5S




3I6    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER            MAN
legal evidence that would satisfy a jury, every person of
success, prominence, and intelligence at whom the finger
of popular suspicion pointed, I also would have been
known, not as a fairly successful detective, but as one of
the world's worst blunderers. Most assuredly I never
would have been permitted to serve for nearly forty years
as a guardian of public safety.
What a glamorous spectacle these hundred of successful, prominent, and bright though sometimes indiscreet
persons would have made, haled into court to answer to
murder charges merely because they might have known
the deceased; might have been seen with him or her; or,
having been indiscreet in their relations with the murdered
person, as a consequence invited suspicion. On occasion,
the popular demand has been met by arrests in cases such
as the Patrick and Molineux cases, but the peculiar
denouement that invariably arises in cases like these and
many others is that mass emotions reverse themselves.
Almost without exception the popular cry goes up that
such persons when finally brought up for trial are being
pilloried because of their wealth, success, or position
in life. Great public sympathy is aroused. The populace splits into factions. The contest which justice brings
on becomes a spectacle like football played between a
home and a visiting team, with the home team attracting
the heaviest rooting because the stands are filled with
alumni, students, and local residents-all ardent supporters of the home team.
On the other hand, when the police capture a peculiarly
diabolical killer from a low station in life the killing and
the capture attract a flash of interest, for almost as soon
as it is known that he comes from an inferior station, or
is an habitual criminal, popular interest subsides. Yet, if
there has been a scarcity of what might be called a "better
class" of murders, the newer order of journalism reflected
in newspapers which specialize in murder and scandal




MURDER AS A SPECTACLE


317


single out the low-type murder for special treatment, discovering some morbid phase about the crime or a mental
quirk in the murderer and playing these up.
The difficulty with the average murder from the spectacle standpoint, or what is known in the theatrical profession as "box office value," is that the accused was not
bright, was unsuccessful, not prominent, and had no social
standing. The inference always seems to be that if he
were bright he would not have been caught, and since he
was stupid enough to be caught he merits little attention.
Against this situation the practical detective must work,
attracting condemnation if he catches only poor criminals
and condemnation also, in the end, if he gets a so-called
bright one in his net. Well, the detective must perforce
ask himself, what kind of murderers do they want us to
catch? Only bright ones? After my experience I can only
say that there are few, if any, bright murderers. If they
were bright they wouldn't be murderers. The popular
theory seems to be that the bright ones get away and
leave their crimes on the hands of the police unsolved.
A good deal depends upon the meaning you give the
word "bright," and your interpretation of the term "unsolved crime." If a murderer is bright because he has
committed an unsolved crime the implication is that he is
bright because he escaped punishment. If watching men
and women confess their crimes entitles me to speak with
authority upon the subject, I would say that no murderer ever escapes punishment-those caught and uncaught. I do not pose as a metaphysician analyzing the
operation of human conscience. I only know from prac.
tical observation, watching the things that touch murderers' consciences and torture them, that no sane murderer can live, even though the world does not know him
as a murderer, and escape the contacts that make the conscience sting. Anyone who puts his conscience in that trying situation is, to my way of thinking, hardly entitled to




318    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
be called bright. As one looks at them, studying their
lives, their plots, their crimes, the conclusion is reached
that practically all murderers, those in high as well as
low station, are cracked vessels of life. They could not
hold what life put into them.
Nor is this popular idea that our murderers should come
from a better class shared only by laymen. Juries and
even prosecutors sometimes swing that way. I recall a
very efficient assistant prosecutor, new to the job, who
was amazed at the type of witnesses we procured to testify against a criminal who was a well-known figure in
the underworld. The witnesses nearly all were criminals
like himself and by reason of that fact the only ones who
could furnish evidence the State required to prove its
case.
"Why, these witnesses are a pretty low class themselves, Captain," the prosecutor said, surprised and disappointed. "They are all thieves and jailbirds."
"Well," I replied, "we have to get along with what we
are able to find in crookdom. They are all associates of
the defendant. What did you expect us to find as witnesses? Professors, teachers, clergymen, and bankers?"
Perhaps a so-called transcendent detective who had
developed a psychic sense might have found other witnesses, but by what peculiar processes I am unable to say.
I have never seen what might be termed a true scientific
detective who had reduced to a pure science the solution
of a crime, the capture of the perpetrator, and his conviction. They exist in the story books, but then these are
written for amusement, and I observe that few of them
end where the crime mysteries of real life end-in capital
punishment or prison sentences. All that science has been
able to devise to help find criminals and fasten crimes upon
them is available to the practical police detective if he
knows what he wants and has kept in touch with affairs so
that he knows to whom he may turn for competent scien



MURDER AS A SPECTACLE


319


tific advice and aid. This system has been employed in
the Homicide Bureau and other branches of the New
York Police Department. Scotland Yard uses it. Continental European detective systems have brought the scientific expert a little closer to the police department. In
some cases medico-legal experts are attached to European
police departments. America's scientific resources are unlimited. Why not use them as business in America uses
them-in consulting capacities?
In the main, outstanding police detectives in Europe
differ little from those in America. Indeed, there always
has been an interchange of ideas and methods. To be
sure, European detectives seem more romantic figures to
Americans, but this is largely because they are so distant
and a literature has been built up around them which invests them with supernatural qualities and perfectibility.
Those whom I have known, or whose work I have studied,
possess the same underlying faculties. They have learned
to know crimes and criminals and, knowing both, a detective will instinctively acquire a pretty accurate picture
of the operation of the crime-bent mind. From time to
time I have had contact with European detectives. I have
never found one yet who boasts that in Europe the police
catch brighter criminals than we catch on this side of
the water. On the other hand, murderers of the mass type,
like Bluebeards, will go along in Europe from one crime
to another for years without being caught until that final
slip-up, which is the betrayer of almost all criminals, guides
the police to them. Murder in Europe is less of a spectacle
than in America. But this is a young nation.
The belief is common, too, that we have more unsolved
murders in America than abroad. A favorite comparison
by which our police are judged is the low murder rate in
England and other European countries. Better scientific
methods of detection as well as greater certainty of punishment share credit for this salutary condition, but the




320


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


comparison is unfair to those American police depart.
ments which have striven to keep pace with the times.
In the first place, this country's large cities comprise a
great melting pot. In England the police deal mostly with
members of their own race and understand better their
motives and acts, being themselves of the same race. This
is true of other European countries. Moreover, the system of registration among natives as well as aliens provides European police with a check upon the population,
transient as well as fixed. A similar system in this country
would be thought of as espionage repulsive to American
ideals of liberty. In the course of a month's work a mem —
ber of the Homicide Bureau in New York City may be'
called upon to investigate a dozen murders committed by
the members of as many different races, each case involving some different hidden racial tradition or motive and
necessitating inquiry among persons who speak foreign
languages.
In the administration of criminal justice in Continental
Europe there is a still more important factor that works
against the criminal and in favor of the police. In America
the basic law requires that the burden of proving the
guilt of an accused rests upon the State. Upon the State
then-and chiefly upon its evidence-gathering arm, the
police, without which the costly machinery of justice would
not function-rests the responsibility of making out a
case uithout the aid of the accused and in nearly every
instance against the machinations of the accused and his
defenders. In Continental Europe the burden is upon the
accused to establish his innocence. Thus the law in these
countries commits the accused to the necessity of aiding
the police and courts or suffering the consequences of
silence and trickery.
To the unsolved murder problem in America there is
still another side. To each state is given the sovereign




MURDER AS AS SPECTACLE


321


right to make its own penal laws, establish its courts,
prisons, and police systems. There is no methodical, unerring exchange of criminal identification data between all
states, although in recent years a national bureau serving
as a clearing house for this data has been established.
Thus a man wanted for murder in one state may be arrested for robbery in another and sent away for that
crime while the murder charge goes unanswered. The case
of Edel, the slayer of Mrs. Harrington, is one of many
examples. The exchange of information about him with
police and postal authorities in Minnesota resulted in
bringing him to book in New York City for murder. But
had this not taken place, Edel might never have been
found and convicted of murder. He might easily have
gotten into prison in, say, Texas or Georgia for thievery,
served his time, come out, taken a new alias, and resumed
his criminal career. A criminal who has committed murder, but who has not been revealed as the murderer, is
not likely to confess to a crime that may cost him his life
when he finds himself in prison for a lesser crime.
There is a desire on the part of most seasoned criminals when caught forlesser crimes to plead guilty to them
in a hurry, which to me is a sign that they are glad to
be imprisoned for the lesser crime because some greater
crime which has not been fastened upon them will likely
be forgotten by the time their sentences are served.
To blame all police detectives and departments for failing to solve all or a larger percentage of crimes when
they are faced by a situation like this is on a par with
condemning a doctor for failing to cure every patient or
a lawyer for not winning every case. But the public's
readiness to criticize the police and not the doctor and the
lawyer lies in the fact that the former are paid public
servants. An old newspaper editor once observed to his
staff that when there was a dearth of sensational news




322


MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN


at the usual sources they could "get busy and roast the
police because they haven't got any come-back." Judged
by the frequency of these "roasts" and the public approval
that usually attends the activity known as a "police shake.
up," they apparently are relished by the public regardless
of how the eruption may affect their own safety and the
man on the force who is trying honestly to meet increasing demands which the public makes of its paid guardians.
I'm not posing here as a defender of the police. I am
merely trying to put the reader behind the scenes at the
spectacle. Police forces are no different from families,
armies, navies, and massed bodies of workers anywhere.
There are as many efficient, bright, loyal, and honest men
in police service as there are in other bodies of organized
men, and of course as many who do not fit. When the
police have a leader whom they respect and follow they
respond, and their efficiency is favorably reflected. When
they have a leader who is otherwise the morale drops as
it will in an army when the leadership lies in wrong hands.
It takes no expert eye to detect the effect of leadership
on the men. If efficient they are on their toes; if bad they
slump. The result is reflected in greater activity of the
criminal element, and murder, like all other crime, increases. And murder control, after all, is effective only
when the two branches of police service, the uniformed or
preventive branch, and the non-uniformed, or detective
branch, are functioning up to snuff.
There is such a thing as murder control. The decrease
in New York City's homicide rate during the administration of Commissioner Woods and again during Commissioner McLaughlin's administration bore eloquent testimony to the fact that efficient leadership bears vitally
upon murder control. Probably the greatest factor that
gained whole-hearted respect and loyalty from the men
under him was Woods's separation of politics from police
affairs. He summed it up in 1917 in this formula:




MURDER       AS A    SPECTACLE             323
The day I took office a general order was issued announcing that
any man on the force might have a personal interview with me
upon request. It was also made clear that while I was glad to see
any member of the force on any subject he wished to speak to me
about I wanted to see him personally and not some friend who
might come to speak for him.... The baneful effects of political
influence on a police force, leaving aside the grosser manifestations
of it which take the form of crookedness and dishonesty, lies in
the unavoidable conclusion that if a politician can secure favors
which the policeman wants, that policeman owes favors to the
politicians and the favors are always pretty sure to be paid for in
a way which gives privileges to the politician and his friends which
should not be given and which usually constitute a license to break
the law. It was made clear by me that every member of the force
was expected to stand on his own record.
A criminal or one criminally inclined reading that pronunciamento is likely to think twice before setting himself
against a police department operated on such a basis. A
policeman reading it senses a square deal and, satisfied
he'll get it, works a little harder.
Ten years later McLaughlin, who, had he remained
longer at the head of the Department, might have given
the country an unparalleled example of police administration, established the policies which Woods had tried
with success and made war against the denizens of easymoney street.
"I am in this job," said McLaughlin, "to curb crime
and I have found that one sure way to do it is to eliminate
gambling. Commercialized gambling cannot possibly exist
on legitimate money. It must have easy money. No man
regularly employed can afford to contribute long to a
professional gambling game. And no game can thrive
long on the patronage of a small group such as membership,of a club. It must have outside money. No large gambling
1business can thrive long without some kind of protection.!The police are bound to know about the place, and if




324


M E M O I R S OF A M U R D E R M A N


there is not police protection there must be some other
kind of protection. Once let the word spread that there is
any kind of protection for gambling and the rush of criminals starts like the stampede of easy-money men and
women to a new mining camp.
"To maintain the gambling game, its patrons must have
an easy-money revenue. They cannot earn it, so they go
after it in other ways. Then comes the robber, stick-up
man, and the type that are committing to-day's wanton
murders. It is a vicious circle. Crooks soon learn that where
there is protection for gambling there is protection also
for other kinds of crime. Show me where there is protection and I will show you a city where there is a high rate
of crime of every kind."
Unfortunately McLaughlin remained in command of
the Department only a short time, but by the end of his
term in the City of New York-richest of fields for the
predatory criminals-all crime had been greatly reduced
and homicides had dropped sixty per cent. He stopped the
flow of easy money at its source and outlet. He put an
effective stop to gambling and he ran the professional receivers of stolen goods out of business, and murder
dropped with the rest of crime. He had struck at the
criminals, who are out for quick and easy money, the murderers by privilege as I have called them.
There is a still more vital requisite to a tighter control
of murder. This is to remove the privilege as it has been
built up by laws. This has been done by laws which compel
courts to impose life sentences upon habitual criminals
convicted more than three times of major crimes. Such a
law was recently passed in New York State. By its operation a criminal who has been convicted three times of a
felony receives, upon his conviction for a fourth felony, a
life sentence. A law has also been passed increasing the
penalty where robberies are committed or attempted with
the aid of dangerous weapons.




MURDER AS A SPECTACLE


325


The life-sentence law has been branded as harsh and
barbaric, a throw-back to the dark ages. Yet is it? Take
Edel or Hilton. Their careers at crime made them habitual criminals. They had shown no signs of redemption.
Short prison sentences had not changed them. Edel was
out on parole when arrested for murder; Hilton had
just come from prison. Many cases follow the patterns
of the Edel and Hilton matters. The law gave to them as
it does to others who venture into crime the privilege
of enjoying liberty when they had earned isolation from
human society.
If there is anything barbaric about sending away for
life men who can't get away from crime and who go from
small pilfering into the realm of murder, I am unable to
see it. Of course the man who is caught by the law, aided
by his mouthpiece, will call it barbaric. Which savors
most of barbarism-the act of the State or society in
permitting a man to go along at crime for a lifetime until
he is finally put to death by the State, or letting him have
his life but denying him the privilege of liberty to effect
eventually his own destruction and the death of innocent
victims? In one case the State holds the rope and lets him
dangle at the end of it till he kills and then it hauls him
in. In the other case he has proved himself unsuited to
society by his self-chosen career and is pulled in before
he kills. In the former case society plays with him like a
cat with a mouse.
The life term law saves him from himself, which, I have
observed, in forty years of dealing with criminals, is the
most humane thing you can do for him.
Perhaps all this advice I have given might dim the
spectacle of murder as it runs along to-day, in which case
the populace might find that a murderless world is quite
a dull one, for a "big" murder, as it is exploited to-day,
sells more newspapers than a presidential election and
almost as many as a championship prize fight will sell.




326    MEMOIRS OF A MURDER MAN
Perhaps, too, there no longer would be the cry so often
hurled at murder men-"Go catch us some bright murderers," when, as I have already set forth, there is no
such thing.
To those who must have life seasoned with a little
murder, I commend the detective fiction tale, for here
the murderers are invariably bright, and the detectives,
too, and the slayers are always caught.
In the world of imagination there's perfection even in
murder. I've had to take murders as I've found them. If
there is such a thing as a perfect crime in the domain of
the murderer I've never found it, nor an approach to it.
Nor a perfect detective.
THE END








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