The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (12 page)

When Payne came down to breakfast in the morning, Mary had not yet appeared. Since it had poured the night before, and since the hour was still early, her absence was not unusual. But when Payne made his way back to the house for lunch and found that Mary had still not appeared, he was disturbed. Mrs Rogers was also disturbed. She was heard by her coloured maid to remark that “she feared she would never see Mary again”.

Immediately after lunch Payne set out for Mrs Downing’s place in Jane Street. Upon his arrival he was surprised and agitated to learn that Mary was not there. Nor had she been there the previous day. She had been expected, but had not appeared. Mrs Downing had not seen her for over a week.

By nightfall Payne and Mrs Rogers had contacted all of Mary’s relatives and friends in the vicinity. None had seen her. None had heard from her. She had disappeared completely. Payne and Mrs Rogers were now sufficiently alarmed to try other means of inquiry. Payne went to the offices of the
New York Sun
, the most widely read of the cheaper newspapers, and placed an advertisement asking for information about Mary Cecilia Rogers.

The advertisement appeared in the
Sun
on 27 July. Among its many readers was Alfred Crommelin, the rejected suitor who had so recently received a rose from Mary. He, too, was troubled by her curious disappearance, her second such in three and a half years. Crommelin promptly appointed himself a search party of one. He assumed that Payne and Mrs Rogers had thoroughly scoured the city. He determined to try the outskirts. On Wednesday morning he made his way towards Hoboken, New Jersey. What sent him so far afield, yet with such unerring accuracy, we must deduce for ourselves.

It was a sweltering morning when Crommelin reached Hoboken. He was about to make inquiries after Mary, when he noticed a group of people gathering on the Hudson at a site where spring water was sold for a penny a glass. This site, a cool retreat on the water, was known as Sybil’s Cave. Crommelin joined the crowd, and then became aware for the first time of what they were watching. All eyes were on a rowing-boat, manned by two men, being pulled towards the shore, dragging behind it a body attached to a rope.

What had occurred, only minutes before, was that two sightseers, James M. Boulard and Henry Mallin, while strolling beside the water, had noticed a human form floating in midstream. The pair had immediately requisitioned the rowing-boat and headed for the body. Almost simultaneously three men in a sailing-boat, John Bertram, William Waller, and someone named Luther, had also seen the body, which they had at first thought to be a bag of clothing, and started towards it. The rowing-boat got there first. The body was that of a disfigured, fully dressed young female. Boulard and Mallin hastily secured a rope to her and pulled her in.

When the unfortunate female at last lay on the beach, Crommelin pressed forward with the others for a better view. Crommelin recognized the corpse at once. “It’s Mary Rogers!” he exclaimed. “This blow may kill her mother!”

She was still wearing the costume she had worn four days earlier—flowered bonnet, its ribbon tied under her chin, blue dress, petticoat, pantalettes, stockings, and garters. Her face had been badly bashed, and her body bore bruises of violence. From the condition of her corpse, there was every evidence of foul play. Mary’s wrists were tightly tied with hemp, and about her throat was wound a strip of lace torn from her petticoat. Edgar Allan Poe, in his graphic account, made it clear that death was caused by strangulation, not by drowning. “The flesh of the neck was much swollen,” he wrote. “There were no cuts apparent, or bruises which appeared the effect of blows. A piece of lace was found tied so tightly round the neck as to be hidden from sight; it was completely buried in the flesh. . . . The knot by which the strings of the bonnet were fastened was not a lady’s, but a slip or sailor’s knot.”

Upon the arrival of the Hudson County authorities, the body was promptly transferred from the beach to the small village of Hoboken. There, Dr Richard F. Cook, serving as county coroner, hastily performed the autopsy. By nine o’clock that evening the formal inquest began. Crommelin once more identified the corpse as that of Mary Rogers. He spoke of her reputation for “truthfulness, and modesty and discretion”, and theorized that she had probably been lured to the Hoboken area by some man. Dr Cook then testified as to the results of his autopsy. She had been murdered, he stated. She had also been subjected to sexual intercourse, most likely raped, possibly once, possibly many times.

When the witnesses at the inquest had concluded their testimony, the coroner’s jury deliberated briefly, then announced that the victim’s death had been caused by “violence committed by some person or persons”. And thus the mystery of Mary Rogers was officially embarked upon its journey into history.

Mary’s mother and Daniel Payne had been notified of the tragedy earlier in the day. The news was brought to them by the man named Luther, who had witnessed from his sailing-boat the recovery of the body. The day following the inquest, Alfred Crommelin appeared at the boarding-house to confirm the identification of Mary. He had secured from the Hoboken morgue a flower from Mary’s hat, a curl from her hair, a strip of her pantalettes, and a garter. These he displayed to the bereaved mother. Mary had been buried hours before. The speedy interment was made necessary by the rapid decomposition of her body due to excessive exposure to water and hot weather.

Though Mary Rogers had vanished on 25 July 1841, and had been found on 28 July, no New York newspaper mentioned her murder until 1 August. After that, for more than two months she was rarely off the front pages of the popular press.

The sensational publicity accorded the case created wide and feverish interest. Despite this, the police made only desultory efforts to solve it. There was an immediate dispute over the matter of jurisdiction. New Jersey authorities tried to lay the investigation in the lap of the New York police, arguing that Mary had been killed in New York and dumped into the Hudson, and had drifted into the New Jersey area by sheerest accident. The New York police, on the other hand, replied that Mary had been slain off Hoboken, had been discovered near that community and buried there, and that therefore the problem was plainly a responsibility of the New Jersey authorities.

While both states wrangled, the Manhattan press helped resolve the issue by accusing the New York police of shirking their duty, pointing out that Mary Rogers, no matter where she was killed, had been a resident and citizen of New York. At last New York City officialdom bowed to this pressure and reluctantly undertook the case. On Wednesday, 11 August, Mary Rogers was exhumed from her Hoboken grave and removed to the Dead House at City Hall Park in New York City. Mrs Rogers and several relatives were brought to the Dead House, where they positively identified various articles of clothing that had belonged to Mary.

The New York police now had the enigma in their hands. They were neither equipped to solve it, nor, it must be admitted, were they terribly interested. The High Constable of the force, a squat, bald-headed old man named Jacob Hays, was capable enough. He had solved many crimes during his career, and had introduced the techniques of shadowing and the third degree to America. But at the time he was handed the portfolio of the Mary Rogers case he was sixty-nine years old and approaching retirement. Hays, therefore, turned the case over to his handfull of Leatherheads—so-called after the heavy leather helmets they wore—and assigned its perusal to a Sergeant McArdel.

The Leatherheads, who wore no uniforms and carried no firearms, were divided into two groups. The daytime force consisted of two constables from each city ward and a half-dozen marshals. The night force, called the Night Watch, consisted of 146 men. The latter group worked as labourers during the day, then supplemented their salaries by becoming policemen at night. Their pay, as part-time law-enforcement officers, was eighty-seven cents an evening.

Naturally, since they were overworked and underpaid, the Leatherheads had little interest in any new crime that might require extra exertion. Furthermore, many resented any intrusion upon their routine activities, which had been so organized as to give them bonuses above their meager police pay. For, since the city would not raise their wages, a great number of police bolstered their incomes by secretly allying themselves with professional criminals. The standard practice was for thieves to ransack a shop while the Leatherheads turned their backs. Then, when the shopkeepers offered cash rewards for the return of their merchandise, the Leatherheads miraculously recovered the loot, though rarely the looters. Upon collecting the rewards, the Leatherheads split the money with the criminals. Theft was a paying business; murder, unless there was a reward involved, was not. The Mary Rogers case, then, was little more than an unprofitable nuisance.

For almost two weeks after the murder, the police remained inert, while the press fumed and the public boiled. On the day Mary Rogers’s corpse was transferred to New York, a committee of angry citizens acted. They sponsored an open meeting and collected $455, to be given as a reward to anyone who apprehended the killer. Shortly after, Governor Seward of New York added an official reward of $750, and the guarantee of a full pardon to any accomplice willing to turn informant.

Now, at last, there was sufficient bounty to spur Sergeant McArdel and his Leatherheads into action. Quickly a long list of suspects was summoned to police headquarters and interrogated. Foremost among these was Daniel Payne. He had known Mary Rogers best, and spoken to her last, before her disappearance. It was felt that he had acted in a suspiciously “unloverlike” manner, presumably because he had not troubled to wait for her at Broadway and Ann Street as he had promised. The police theorized that she might have left him for another, and that he, in a drunken rage, might have killed her out of jealousy. But Payne, in a detailed statement, was able to account for every hour of the critical Sunday.

Alfred Crommelin was the next to be questioned. The police, remembering the rose in the keyhole, felt that “there was still some slight tendresse betwixt him and the young lady”. Also, Crommelin had been curiously anxious to halt the police investigation. Earlier, he had begged McArdel to drop the case, since a continued inquiry, with its attendant notoriety, might be seriously damaging to Mrs Rogers’s health. Yet Crommelin, like Payne, had an acceptable alibi.

Another of Mrs Rogers’s boarders remained suspect. Dr Cook had indicated that the bonnet string about Mary’s chin had been tied in a sailor’s knot, and that there was a sailor’s hitch behind her dress, by means of which she had been lifted and dropped into the Hudson. It appeared that, the year before, a young man named William Keekuck had roomed with Mrs Rogers. Keekuck was now an ordinary sailor in the United States Navy. He was at sea, on the USS
North Carolina
when the authorities sent for him. The moment his ship docked at Norfolk, Virginia, Keekuck was taken off and hustled to New York for cross-examination. There was indeed some evidence against the frightened sailor. He had boarded his vessel in a great hurry, and very late, the night of 25 July. His trousers had been stained, though it was no longer possible to prove that these had been bloodstains. Keekuck admitted that he had dwelt with Mrs Rogers, and had known Mary, but insisted that he had been only an acquaintance. It was his brother who had been a suitor. Though in New York City on shore leave during 25 July, he had not seen Mary Rogers. In fact, he had not seen her since 3 July, and was able to substantiate this to the temporary satisfaction of the police; but before he was finally dismissed William Keekuck was three times hauled off the
North Carolina
for questioning.

Meanwhile, the police were bringing in other promising suspects. Great hopes were held, briefly, over the apprehension of one Joseph M. Morse, a rotund and bewhiskered wood-engraver, who lived in Nassau Street near Mrs Rogers’s boarding-house. On the Sunday of Mary Rogers’s disappearance, Morse had been seen travelling to Staten Island with an attractive young lady who was not his wife. On the morning Mary was removed from the Hudson, Morse heard about it, left his business at midday, returned home in a frenzied state, had an argument with his wife, beat her up, and departed the metropolis for parts unknown. The authorities were swiftly on his trail. They found him in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had shaved off his beard, purposely lost weight, and was hiding under an assumed name. His prospects, to say the least, were dismal.

Morse was brought back to New York City under guard. There were street mutterings of lynching. Morse quickly admitted that he had picked up a comely young lady on the Sunday in question and escorted her to Staten Island. His purpose was not homicidal, but carnal. He had, in fact, shown some ingenuity. He had set his watch back in order to miss the last ferry home. The ruse was successful. Morse then suggested to the young lady that they adjourn to a hotel. She proved amenable. They rented rooms, whereupon Morse made amorous advances, as planned. These advances, he remarked unhappily, were rejected. He slept the night alone, and returned on the morning ferry to his family hearth and his wood-engraving business. Shortly after, he heard from neighbours of Mary Rogers’s Sunday disappearance and death. At once he worried that his attractive companion might have been Mary Rogers. Though he had left her defiant and healthy, he realized that she might have been murdered after his departure, and that he would be discovered and blamed. Without further ado, he fled the suddenly oppressive climate of New York City for Massachusetts.

While the police weighed the veracity of Mr Morse’s little adventure, the penny press publicized it. And luckily for Mr Morse. For, shortly after, the young lady Morse had abandoned on Staten Island came forward to identify herself and to corroborate his story and her own virginity. The police promptly turned the Sunday Lothario over to the custody and further cross-examination of his waiting spouse.