The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (13 page)

But the mystery of Mary Rogers still remained unsolved. McArdel and his Leatherheads now abandoned Mrs Rogers’s boarders and the other obvious suspects to concentrate on a line of investigation that had been too long neglected. The police asked themselves the following questions: What had been Mary Rogers’s movements after she left the boarding-house for her cousin’s residence? Since she had left at ten o’clock in the morning, while church was out and the streets were filled, who had seen her? And whom had she been seen with? In what direction was she headed? And by what means of transport? These questions, much to the gratification of McArdel, speedily produced an entirely new net of suspects and theories.

A stage-driver named Adam Wall was found who thought he had picked up Mary Rogers at the Bull’s Head ferry and driven her to a picnic area near Hoboken. Wall said she was accompanied by “a tall dark man”, perhaps twenty-six years of age.

Others quickly appeared to support the assumption that Mary had visited Hoboken with a stranger or strangers. In fact, two men told the authorities that they had been walking along the shore, approaching Sybil’s Cave, on 25 July, when they observed a rowing-boat with six young males and a girl. The girl was attractive enough to hold their attention. Minutes after the girl ran off into the near-by woods with her bevy of admirers, another rowing-boat, containing three anxious gentlemen, drew up. Its occupants inquired of the two visitors if they had seen six men and a girl in the vicinity. When the visitors admitted they had seen just such a group head into the woods, the occupants of the rowing-boat inquired if the girl had gone willingly or by force. Upon learning that she had gone willingly, the occupants took to their oars and slid away.

Next, several witnesses came forward with the recollection of seeing Mary strolling that Sunday morning towards Barclay Street in Manhattan. At Theatre Alley, a short lane off Ann Street which once led to the stage door of the Park Theatre, she had been met by a young man “with whom she was apparently acquainted”. From the direction she took thereafter, it was thought she could have gone to the Hoboken ferry—or entered the infamous residence of Mrs Ann Lohman, a notorious and busy abortionist who was known to the carriage trade as Mme Restell.

Actually, there was no direct evidence to connect Mary Rogers’s murder with Mme Restell’s illegal practices. But whenever there occurred an untimely death in New York, especially one involving a fashionable or beautiful female, there were immediate whisperings against the portly and wealthy English-born Madame. Her record, to be sure, was unsavory. She had been an immigrant dressmaker, had wedded a dispenser of quack medicines named Lohman, and, it was thought, had disposed of him for the inheritance. Thereafter she had lent her talents to birth-control.

Mme Restell’s mansion of Greenwich Street was visited by a steady stream of unmarried expectant women, many the mistresses of millionaires and Congressman. At the time of Mary Rogers’s death, the Madame’s shuttered establishment, nick-named “the mansion built on baby skulls”, had netted her earnings upwards of one million dollars. Shortly after Mary’s burial, public feeling against Mme Restell ran so high that crowds gathered about her doorway shouting: “Haul her out! Where’s the thousand children murdered in this house? Who murdered Mary Rogers?” On that occasion, violence was prevented only by the quick intervention of the police, who undoubtedly found the mammoth Madame too lucrative a source of income to trouble with such trifles as the corpse of a onetime cigar-counter employee.

The police had just about exhausted their inquiry into Mary Rogers’s movements when a new and sensational bit of evidence suddenly came to light. Two young men, the sons of a Mrs Frederica Loss, who kept a public inn a mile above Hoboken, were beating about the bush near Weehawken on 25 August. In the thicket they found a small opening that led into a cramped tunnel or cave. They explored further, and discovered inside the cave four stones built into a seat. Draped on and about the seat were a silk scarf, a white petticoat, a parasol, a pocket-book, a pair of gloves, and a mildewed linen handkerchief initialled in silk “M.R.”.

Mrs Loss’s sons immediately gathered up the feminine apparel and brought the find to their mother. She went directly to the Hoboken police, who excitedly contacted their colleagues in New York City. At once the press was filled with woodcuts and stories of Mrs Loss, her inn, and two of her three sons who had made the discovery, and the opening in the thicket near the cliffs of Weehawken.

This publicity flushed forth a new witness. A stage-driver came forward. He dimly remembered transporting a girl of Mary Rogers’s description and a tall “swarthy” man to Mrs Loss’s inn on 25 July. This recollection succeeded in stirring Mrs Loss’s own memory. She vaguely remembered the couple. They had had cakes and drinks. Then Mary, or someone like her, and the “swarthy” man had gone off together into the nearby woods overlooking the river. Some minutes later Mrs Loss had heard a woman’s scream from the vicinity of the woods. She had paid no attention. On Sundays the area was filled with gangs of rowdies and loose young ladies who were often vocal.

With the find at Weehawken, all the tangible clues were in. Since the case had not been broken in fact, it could only be solved on paper. Police authorities and amateur sleuths of the city room were soon busy formulating and publishing theories. The overwhelming majority were in accord on Weehawken as the site of the crime. But on the subject of the criminal’s identity there was a great passionate diversity of opinion.

Who killed Mary Rogers? In the months after her death, almost every literature contemporary was certain he knew. The authorities seemed to lean towards Mrs Loss and her three sons. Justice Gilbert Merritt, of New Jersey, devoted much time to questioning Mrs Loss. He believed that she practised abortion, or permitted her inn to be employed by physicians for that purpose and that Mary Rogers had died during an operation in one of her back rooms and had been disposed of in the Hudson by her sons. The effects in the thicket, he felt, were only a red herring to divert suspicion. “The murder of the said Mary C. Rogers was perpetrated in a house at Weehawken,” Justice Merritt announced, “then kept by one Frederica Loss, alias Kellenbarack, and her three sons, all three of whom this deponent has reason to believe are worthless and profligate characters.”

Sergeant McArdel, of the New York Leatherheads, interrogated only the three sons, and found them as undelightful as had Justice Merritt. They were sullen and they were contradictory. But they steadfastly denied that their mother had practised abortion. When one of them was asked if visitors ever paid their mother fifty dollars for any purpose, he replied: “I never have known any sick person brought to my mother’s house to be attended upon.” McArdel, too, concluded that Mrs Loss was guilty of manslaughter, and that her sons were her accomplices in removing the body.

Of all the authorities, Dr Richard F. Cook held most heartily to his original theory that Mary had been gang-raped and then brutally killed. Again and again he told the press that he was “confident” she had been “violated by six, or possibly eight ruffians; of that fact, he had ocular proof, but which is unfit for publication.”

The majority on newspaper row supported Dr Cook’s theory. Murder after murder had been committed by roving bands of rowdies in the New York metropolitan area and among the outing-sites of New Jersey. The weekly
Saturday Evening Post
saw signs of gang violence in the disorder of the thicket, and the
Journal of Commerce
saw the handiwork of street ruffians in the fact that no men’s handkerchiefs had been used to strangle Mary. “A piece of one of the unfortunate girl’s petticoats was torn out and tied under her chin, and around the back of her head, probably to prevent screams,” remarked the
Journal of Commerce
. “This was done by fellows who had no pocket-handkerchiefs.”

For weeks the
New York Herald
, which had been crusading against vandals and butcher boys, also championed the gang-rape notion. The
Herald
theorized that Mary and her “swarthy” escort had indeed visited Mrs Loss’s inn for refreshment, and then proceeded to the woods for further refreshment. In the brush they had been set upon by a waiting gang of roughnecks. Mary’s escort had been assassinated immediately, and Mary herself slain after she had been attacked. Then both bodies had been shoved into the river. But if this held any probability, what happened to the remains of the “swarthy” escort? As a matter of fact, the body of an unidentified man was found floating in the Hudson five days after Mary’s body was recovered. But the man was neither tall nor dark.

The
New York Herald
flirted with one other intriguing possibility. It recalled Mary’s first disappearance, three and a half years before the murder. “It is well known that, during the week of her absence . . . she was in the company of a young naval officer much noted for his debaucheries. A quarrel, it is supposed, providentially led to her return home. We have the name of the Lothario in question . . . but for obvious reasons forbear to make it public.” The
New York Herald
was suspecting someone Mary had met through young Keekuck, possibly a superior on the USS
North Carolina
. Or possibly it was still making allusions to Keekuck himself.

Brother Jonathan
was the first of several journals to subscribe to the idea that Mary Rogers had not been murdered at all. Its editors argued that a body in the water only three days, or less, would not be “so soon afloat” and that it would not be “so far decomposed”. The corpse fished out of the Hudson at Sybil’s Cave must have been in the water “not three days merely, but, at least, five times three days”. Therefore, the body could not have been that of Mary Rogers.

On the other hand, if the body had actually been that of Mary Rogers, then
Brother Jonathan
’s choice for the murderer was Alfred Crommelin. “For some reason,” said the journal, “he determined that nobody shall have anything to do with the proceedings but himself, and he has elbowed the male relatives out of the way, according to their representations, in a very singular manner. He seems to have been very much averse to permitting the relatives to see the body.”

Daniel Payne fared better than his rival boarder. While there were murmurings about his motives, and about his addiction to drink, all sources agreed that his affidavit concerning his activities on the fateful Sunday was foolproof. Though, as a matter of fact, no original suspect completely escaped judgment in the press. Even the unlucky Joseph Morse, wood-engraver and commuter to Staten Island, had his backers. The
New York Courier and Inquirer
had received anonymous letters which made its editors regard Morse as quite capable of “the late atrocity”.

Only one publication advocated Mme Restell as a candidate for the Tombs. The
National Police Gazette
doggedly waged a campaign against her. As late as February 1846 the
Police Gazette
was editorializing: “The wretched girl was last seen in the direction of Madame Restell’s house. The dreadfully lacerated body at Weehawken Bluff bore the marks of no ordinary violation. The hat found near the spot, the day after the location of the body, was dry though it had rained the night before! These are strange but strong facts, and when taken in consideration with the other fact that the recently convicted Madame Costello kept an abortion house in Hoboken at that very time, and was acting as an agent of Restell, it challenges our minds for the most horrible suspicions.”

There was yet one more theory to be put forth. And this, appearing more than a year after the crime, proved to be the most widely publicized and controversial of them all. It was, of course, the theory advanced by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” which he expected would give “renewed impetus to investigation”.

In his thinly disguised novelette—he used French names in the body of the story, but identified each character, newspaper, and site with factual footnotes relating to the Mary Rogers case—Poe began by attempting to demolish the pet theories promoted by his predecessors. “Our first step should be the determination of the identity of the corpse,” Poe stated, obviously referring to
Brother Jonathan
’s conjecture that Mary Rogers still lived. At great length, and with questionable scientific accuracy, Poe pointed out that a body immersed in water less than three days could still float. “It may be said that very few human bodies will sink at all, even in fresh water, of their own accord.” As to the impossibility of decomposition in less than three days: “All experience does
not
show that ‘drowned bodies’ require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place.” In short, Poe had no doubt that the body recovered at Sybil’s Cave was that of Mary Cecilia Rogers.

However, as to the exact scene of the crime Poe was less certain. That the thicket at Weehawken “was the scene, I may or I may not believe—but there was excellent reason for doubt”. Poe set down his doubts in detail. If the articles of clothing had been in the thicket the entire four weeks after the murder, they would have been discovered earlier. The mildew on the parasol and handkerchief could have appeared on the objects overnight. Most important, “Let me beg your notice to the highly artificial arrangement of the articles. On the upper stone lay a white petticoat; on the second, a silk scarf; scattered around, were a parasol, gloves, and a pocket-handkerchief. . . . Here is just such an arrangement as would naturally be made by a not-over-acute person wishing to dispose the articles naturally. But it is by no means a really natural arrangement. I should rather have looked to see the things all lying on the ground and trampled under foot. In the narrow limits of that bower, it would have been scarcely possible that the petticoat and scarf should have retained a position upon the stones, when subjected to the brushing to and fro of many struggling persons.” Yet, after all these observations against the Weehawken thicket as the scene of the crime, Poe, in the end, concluded that Mary Rogers must have met her end there, after all.