The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (11 page)

Whatever its actual literary merit, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” attained early immortality as one of the three tales—preceded by “The Rue Morgue” in 1841 and followed by “The Purloined Letter” in 1844—responsible for the founding of the modern detective story. Scholars have variously credited Herodotus, the Bible, and the
Arabian Nights
with this honour. Their erudition must be rejected as utter nonsense. As George Bates has remarked: “The cause of Chaucer’s silence on the subject of aeroplanes was because he had never seen one. You cannot write about policemen before policemen exist to be written of.”

Organized crime-detection was in its infancy when Edgar Allan Poe created the character of Dupin. The mystery story was an unheard-of art form when Poe became, in the words of Willard Huntington Wright, “the authentic father of the detective novel as we know it today”. In “Marie Roget”, and in his two other crime stories, Poe prepared the mould for the first eccentric amateur sleuth and his thick-witted foil, a mould which a thousand authors have used in the years since. In these stories, too, Poe introduced the first of a legion of stupid police officers, red herrings, perfect crimes, and psychological deductions.

After Poe, of course, came the deluge. But in his lifetime he had no idea of what he had wrought. His detective tales, as startling innovations, profited him little. With Virginia’s death, he buried Dupin. He dwelt in an alcoholic daze. He became engaged to several wealthy women, but married none. In Baltimore, bleary with drink, drugs, and insanity, he stumbled into the chaos of a Congressional election and was led by hoodlums from poll to poll to vote over and over again as a repeater. Left in a gutter without his clothes or his senses, he was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he groaned: “I wish to God somebody would blow my damned brains out.” It was on a Sunday’s dawn that he died murmuring: “God help my poor soul.”

But seven years before, when he first wrote “Marie Roget”, he saw himself as something better. The character of C. Auguste Dupin was Poe’s idealization of himself, “a cool, infallible thinking machine that brought the power of reason to bear on all of life’s problems”. The name Dupin he had found in an article on the French Sûreté in
Burton’s Magazine
. This was probably André Dupin, a French politician who wrote on criminal procedures and died in 1865.

The character of the blundering Prefect G was undoubtedly drawn from the very real, if quite improbable, François Vidocq, a French baker’s son who was sent to the galleys for thievery, and who later served as head of the Sûreté for eighteen years. Poe read Vidocq’s fanciful four-volume
Mémoires
, which contained the detective’s boast that he had placed twenty thousand criminals in jail. Poe was not impressed. He thought Vidocq “a good guesser” and a man who “erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close.”

But the most important character in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” was the unhappy victim. And she, as Poe had told us, was Mary Cecilia Rogers.

Despite her subsequent notoriety, Mary Rogers’s beginnings remain as enigmatic as her sudden end. For all the columns of copy published in the days following her death, Mary Rogers continues a shadowy, forever tantalizing figure of a young woman. She was born in New York City during 1820. There was, apparently, an older brother, who went to sea in his youth and engaged in a variety of speculative enterprises abroad. We know nothing of Mary’s father, except what Poe wrote of her fictional counterpart, Marie Roget: “The father had died during the child’s infancy, and from the period of his death . . . the mother and daughter had dwelt together.” As Mary grew up, her widowed mother, ill, nervous, harried by debt, sought some means of making a livelihood. This problem was solved by Mary’s seafaring brother, who returned from South America with profits gained from an obscure business venture. He presented a portion of these profits to mother and sister, then signed on a ship and sailed out of our story.

Mrs Rogers wisely invested her windfall in a boarding-house at 126 Nassau Street in New York City. While the house gave Mary and her mother a roof over their heads, it gave them little else. At no time did it entertain more than two or three male boarders, and these were usually struggling clerks or labourers.

To supplement the meagre income of the boarding-house, Mary Rogers decided to seek outside employment. This was in 1837, when she was seventeen. All accounts agree that she was beautiful. Crude contemporary prints depict her as a dark-eyed brunette, who wore her hair fashionably bunned. She had a complexion without blemish and an aquiline nose, and was much admired for her “dark smile”. She was favoured, too, with a full, firm bosom, a slender figure, and a manner of great vivacity. She did not have to look far for employment. Her beauty came to the attention of one John Anderson, a snuff-manufacturer who ran a tobacco shop at 319 Broadway, near Thomas Street. Aware that “her good looks and vivacity” would be an asset to a business which catered to male trade, Anderson installed Mary behind his counter. The store was already a popular hangout for gamblers, sporty bachelors, newspaper reporters, and magazine editors. With the appearance of Mary Rogers, the clientèle grew and improved.

We know that during 1837 and 1838 Edgar Allan Poe frequented the tobacconist’s and was impressed with Mary Rogers. But there were other author customers, more prosperous and better known, who were equally impressed. Fitz-Greene Halleck, the somewhat forbidding, partially deaf, middle-aged poet, who had once served as secretary to John Jacob Astor, often appeared carrying his familiar green cotton umbrella. He was, it is said, sufficiently enchanted by Mary to write a poem rhapsodizing her beauty.

James Fenimore Cooper, on his frequent trips to New York from Cooperstown, was another regular at John Anderson’s. He was a breezy, frank, pugnacious man, who had already published
The Spy
and spent a fortune instigating libel suits against reviewers who called his writings “garbage”. Cooper was uninhibited in his opinions, and highly vocal, and there can be little doubt he often sounded off to Mary on the money-madness of America and the provincialism of New York.

The most famous customer, however, was fifty-four-year-old Washington Irving. He dwelt alone in a small stone Dutch cottage on the Hudson, and was known everywhere for his creation of Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle. A stout, genial, unaffected man, Irving must have entranced Mary Rogers with anecdotes of his youth. As a lawyer he had helped defend Aaron Burr. And he counted among his friends Dolly Madison, John Howard Payne, and Mary Godwin Shelley.

Few of the customers attended Mary Rogers after shop hours. At her mother’s insistence, the proprietor, when he could, escorted her home at dusk. For New York was shot through with rowdyism. At nightfall the gangs, the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, rose out of the slums to molest, to maim, and to murder with butcher knives. It was estimated that in the waterfront area alone over fifteen thousand sailors were robbed of two million dollars in a single year.

Though there was much that was unlovely in New York—Dickens disliked the spittoons as much as the slums, and Cooper objected to the pigs in the red-brick streets—there was also much that held attraction for a young lady. There were beer gardens that seated a thousand persons, and behind the wrought-iron fences of the great homes couples danced the polka and the waltz, and to the north of the city were vast green picnic grounds and glistening ponds for boating. There is every reason to believe that Mary Rogers enjoyed these pleasures.

While she may not have dated her customers, there is evidence that Mary Rogers was a gay girl. After her death, much was made of her chastity. Dr Richard Cook, of Hoboken, who performed the autopsy, announced that Mary had been “a good girl”. He reaffirmed to the
New York Herald
“that previous to this shocking outrage, she had evidently been a person of chastity and correct habits”. Surely the good doctor’s diagnosis was more sentimental than scientific. From the number and variety of the young men who were interrogated after her death and who seemed to know her intimately, it is unlikely that Mary Rogers was a virgin.

Especially she seemed to have great affection for numerous of her mother’s boarding-house guests. William Keekuck, a young sailor who had boarded with Mrs Rogers in 1840, had occasionally dated Mary, as had his older brother before him. Alfred Crommelin, for whom she left a rose on the last day of her life, was a handsome boarder characterized by the press as her “former suitor”. Daniel Payne, a cork-cutter and an alcoholic, lived under the same roof as Mary, dated her regularly, and intended to marry her. These were three escorts known by name. There were probably many more. In the light of her environment, it is surprising that Mary’s reputation was not worse. She had grown to maturity without paternal discipline, without family life, without security. Her beauty had marked her as a perpetual target for adventurous men-about-town. Her job, in a shop patronized solely by males, made her sophisticated beyond her years. Her oppressive financial status and her confinement to a rundown boarding-house, coupled with a lively personality, encouraged her to accept nocturnal escape with any attractive gallant.

In October of 1838, when she was only eighteen, there occurred a curious interlude in the life of Mary Rogers. On the morning of Thursday, 4 October, she failed to appear for work at the cigar store. The same day, her distressed mother found a note from Mary on her bedroom table. The contents of the note, which Mrs Rogers turned over to the city coroner’s office, were never divulged. Three and a half years later, at the time of her death, the
New York Herald
told its readers: “This young girl, Mary Rogers, was missing from Anderson’s store . . . for two weeks. It is asserted that she was then seduced by an officer of the US Navy, and kept at Hoboken for two weeks. His name is well known on board his ship.”

The reporters who frequented the cigar store, and knew Mary, quickly filed stories on her disappearance. With one exception, they all suspected foul play. The one exception was an anonymous cynic on the
Commercial Advertiser
who thought that the young lady had gone “into concealment that it might be believed she had been abducted, in order to help the sale of the goods of her employer”.

After two weeks the erratic Mary returned to her mother and her job. She had no explanation to offer, beyond remarking that she had “felt tired” and gone to rest with some friends in Brooklyn. When she was shown a copy of the
Commercial Advertiser
, with its snide suspicions of hoax, she became furious. “She felt so annoyed at such a report having got abroad during her temporary absence on a country excursion,” said the
Journal of Commerce
, “that she positively refused ever to return to the store.” It is not known for certain, however, if she actually left John Anderson’s because her honesty was impugned by the customers, or if she left simply because her mother, ailing and infirm, required her assistance to help maintain the boarding-house. But leave she did, in 1839, some months after returning from her mysterious holiday.

Her activities in the three years following are unknown. It is to be presumed that she spent her days cleaning and cooking in her mother’s boarding-house, and her nights supplying diversion for her mother’s paid-up roomers. We know that one boarder, Alfred Crommelin, ardently pursued her and was rejected. Her lack of interest determined him to remove his person from the boarding-house. However, he made it clear that if she had a change of heart, he might still be available. Another roomer, the convivial cork-cutter Daniel Payne, had more success. Though a man of limited means, he found ways to entertain Mary and became her most frequent escort. They soon reached an understanding, and Mary began to refuse all outside engagements. Payne was under the impression that they were engaged to be married. But before a date could be determined, another date occurred of more historic importance in the annals of crime.

Sometime on Saturday morning, 24 July 1841, Mary Rogers visited the office of her rejected suitor, Alfred Crommelin. He was out to an early lunch and his business quarters were closed. From his door, as was the custom, he had hung a slate for messages. On this slate Mary engimatically scribbled her mother’s name. Then she inserted a rose in the keyhole of the door and departed. Crommelin discovered both the signature on the slate and the red rose shortly after lunch, but, as far as we know, did nothing about them. Perhaps he was occupied with his business. Perhaps he was not satisfied with the show of affection. Or perhaps he visited her after all and never confessed it.

The following morning—the now famous morning of Sunday, 25 July 1841—broke hot and humid. It was, the press duly reported, ninety-three degrees in the shade. Many New Yorkers went to church. Many more New Yorkers fled the furnace of the metropolis for the greener pastures of New Jersey and Connecticut. Mary Rogers, too, decided to escape the heat of the city’s centre. It was ten o’clock in the morning when she rapped on Daniel Payne’s bedroom door. He was busy shaving. She called to him that she was going to spend the day at the home of a cousin, Mrs Downing, whom she frequently visited. Payne, occupied with his beard, called back that he would meet her when she descended from the stage at Broadway and Ann Street at seven o’clock that evening. This was agreeable to Mary, and she promptly left for her cousin’s residence on Jane Street two miles away.

Late in the afternoon Payne bestirred himself, went into the city, and dallied at several grog shops where he was well known. When he emerged shortly before seven to keep his rendezvous, he noticed that heavy clouds hung low overhead. There were rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning. Certain that rain was in store, and aware of Mary’s habits, he decided that she would probably spend the night with her relative. He did not bother to go to Broadway and Ann Street. Instead, he returned directly to Mrs Rogers’s boarding-house and went to bed.