The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (14 page)

In studying the roll of suspects, Poe felt that there was no evidence whatsoever against Mme Restell or against Morse. He felt that Daniel Payne’s deposition to the police vindicated him entirely. As to Crommelin: “He is a busybody, with much of romance and little of wit. Any one so constituted will readily so conduct himself, upon occasion of real excitement, as to render himself liable to suspicion.”
Brother Jonathan
’s editors had selected Crommelin as the murderer, said Poe, because, resenting their implications that he had not properly identified the corpse, Crommelin had gone in and brashly insulted the journal’s editors. Mrs Loss was a possibility, but, from her actions, Poe felt that she had played only a secondary part in the crime.

Poe refuted most strongly the popular theory of gang murder. The thicket displayed signs of violent struggle, yet several men would have overcome a frail girl quickly and without struggle. There were evidences that the body had been dragged to the river. One killer might have dragged Mary’s corpse, but for several, it would have been easier and quicker to carry her. Nor would a number of assailants have overlooked an initialled handkerchief. Finally: “I shall add but one to the arguments against a gang; but this one has, to my own understanding at least, a weight altogether irresistible. Under the circumstances of large reward offered, and full pardon to any king’s evidence, it is not to be imagined for a moment, that some member of a gang of low ruffians, or of any body of men, would not long ago have betrayed his accomplices. . . . That the secret has not been divulged is the very best proof that it is, in fact, a secret. The horrors of this dark deed are known only to one.”

This, then, was the essence of Poe’s theory. The crime, he insisted, had been committed by a single individual in the thicket at Weehawken. Carefully he reconstructed the murder:

“An individual has committed the murder. He is alone with the ghost of the departed. He is appalled by what lies motionless before him. The fury of his passion is over, and there is abundant room in his heart for the natural awe of the deed. His is none of that confidence which the presence of numbers inevitably inspires. He is
alone
with the dead. He trembles and is bewildered. Yet there is a necessity for disposing of the corpse. He bears it to the river, and leaves behind him the other evidences of his guilt; for it is difficult, if not impossible to carry all the burthen at once, and it will be easy to return for what is left. But in his toilsome journey to the water his fears redouble within him. The sounds of life encompass his path. A dozen times he hears or fancies he hears the step of an observer. Even the very lights from the city bewilder him. Yet, in time, and by long and frequent pauses of deep agony, he reaches the river’s brink, and disposes of his ghastly charge—perhaps through the medium of a boat. But now what treasure does the world hold—what threat of vengeance could it hold out—which would have power to urge the return of that lonely murderer over that toilsome and perilous path, to the thicket and its blood-chilling recollections? He returns not, let the consequences be what they may.”

And who was this murderer?

He was, Poe decided, an earlier lover. He was the young man who had eloped with Mary Rogers on her first disappearance from the cigar store. Three and a half years later he returned and proposed again. “And here let me call your attention to the fact, that the time elapsing between the first ascertained and the second supposed elopement is a few months more than the general period of the cruises of our men-of-war.” He was, then, a navy man on shore leave, the very officer the
New York Herald
stated she had gone off with. When he came back to New York, he interrupted Mary’s engagement to Payne. She began to see him secretly. But why did he kill her? Possibly he seduced her and she became pregnant. He took her to Mrs Loss’s for an abortion, and she died accidentally. Or possibly he failed to seduce her, and, on an outing to Weehawken, he finally raped her. Then, fearing the consequences of the act, he was forced to kill. At any rate, concluded Poe: “This associate is of swarthy complexion. This complexion, the ‘hitch’ in the bandage, and the ‘sailor’s knot’ with which the bonnet-ribbon is tied, point to a seaman. His companionship with the deceased—a gay but not an abject young girl—designates him as above the grade of the common sailor.”

Poe, like the
New York Herald
before him, claimed to know the name of this navy officer. On 4 January 1848, in a letter to an admirer, a young medical student in Maine named George Eveleth, Poe disclosed: “Nothing was omitted in ‘Marie Roget’ but what I omitted myself—all that is mystification. The story was originally published in
Snowden’s
Ladies’ Companion
. The ‘naval officer’ who committed the murder (or rather the accidental death arising from an attempt at abortion) confessed it, and the whole matter is now well understood—but, for the sake of relatives, this is a topic on which I must not speak further.”

In 1880 John H. Ingram published a biography of Poe. In it he revealed the name of Poe’s suspected “naval officer”. The name of the murderer, said Ingram, was Spencer. He did not know his first name, or explain where he had learned his second name. Based on this bit of name-dropping, William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr, of Yale University, in an investigation of Poe’s deductive prowess, attempted to track down the elusive Spencer. He learned that at the time of Mary Rogers’s death in 1841 there were only three officers in the United States Navy named Spencer. One was in Ohio at the time Mary vanished in New York; another was infirm; the third was active, and a definite and fascinating possibility. He was eighteen-year-old Philip Spencer, the problem son of Secretary of War John Canfield Spencer. In short, his family was sufficiently influential to hush up any bit of unpremeditated homicide and sufficiently impressive to make Poe admit that “for the sake of relatives, this is a topic on which I must not speak further”. Philip Spencer, it might be added, was quite capable of carrying on an affair with Mary and seeing her to an abortionist, or of killing her under different circumstances. Three months before the murder he had been expelled from his third school, Geneva College (now Hobart College), for “moral delinquency”. He drank too much and he absented himself from classes too often. Where did he spend his time of truancy? In New York, and with Mary? We do not know. But we do know that in the year following her death he was caught and convicted of planning, and almost executing, the only mutiny in American naval history. Returning from a training cruise to Africa aboard the brig
Somers
, Acting Midshipman Philip Spencer chafed at the conditions on the vessel. He conspired with two subordinates, Boatswain’s Mate Samuel Cromwell and Seaman Elisha Small, to kill his superiors and convert the
Somers
into a pirate ship. His plot—though the seriousness of his intention later became a matter of great controversy—was exposed in time by Captain Alexander Mackenzie, and young Spencer, hooded and manacled, was hanged from the main yard-arm with his unfortunate companions.

While the publication of Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget” created a brief flurry of interest in Mary Rogers, it must be remarked that this interest was confined largely to readers of
Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion
. By 1842 the Leatherheads had given up their hope of obtaining the cash reward and had reverted to their old, less complex practice of restoring stolen merchandise. By 1844 the Leatherheads had been replaced by the more efficient, better-paid Municipal Police, and High Constable Jacob Hays was in retirement. As for the press, it had turned to matters of more topical interest. With each passing month, as the Mary Rogers case receded in time, the chances for its solution became more difficult. For one thing, popular interest, always fickle, had subsided, and with it the pressure that stimulated police activity. For another, the mortality rate among the suspects had mounted in rapidity—and violence.

On Friday, 8 October 1841, Daniel Payne followed his betrothed to an early grave. On that morning a boatman, walking down a path to the Hudson River at Weehawken, passed the much-publicized thicket. He saw a man stretched on the ground. The man was Daniel Payne. Beside him was an empty bottle of laudanum. He was alive when the boatman reached him, but lapsed unconscious and never recovered. Two days later a coroner’s jury agreed that he had committed suicide, but decided that his death might also be attributed to “congestion of the brain, brought about by irregular living, exposure, aberration of the mind”. His friends announced that from the day he learned of Mary’s death Payne had lived almost exclusively on a diet of rum, and had probably drunk himself to death.

A month later Mrs Loss was also dead. One of her sons had been tampering with a loaded gun, when it accidentally discharged. The bullet struck her. As she lay dying, she summoned Justice Gilbert Merritt. She said she had a statement to make concerning the fate of Mary Rogers. According to the
New York Tribune
, Mrs Loss had the following deathbed confession:

“On the Sunday of Miss Rogers’s disappearance she came to her house from this city in company with a young physician, who undertook to procure for her a premature delivery. While in the hands of the physician she died, and a consultation was then held as to the disposal of her body. It was finally taken at night by the son of Mrs Loss and sunk in the river. . . . Her clothes were first tied up in a bundle and sunk in a pond . . . but it was afterwards thought that they were not safe there, and they were accordingly taken and scattered through the woods as they were found.”

After Mrs Loss’s death, her sons were closely questioned. They refused to confirm their mother’s confession. The authorities also discredited it, and it was soon forgotten.

On April Fool’s Day 1878 Mme Restell, hounded by Anthony Comstock and fearing a jail sentence (she had once served a year on Blackwell’s Island), donned a diamond-studded nightgown and stepped into her bathtub. Minutes later she was dead by her own hand. She had cut her throat. “A bloody ending to a bloody life,” was Comstock’s epitaph. The
Police Gazette
only regretted that she had expired without a word about Mary Rogers.

In the more than one hundred years that have passed since the death of Mary Rogers, every other suspect went to his grave in silence. Yet no one was permitted to rest in peace. For the mystery of Mary Rogers provided too fascinating and gruesome a game to be affected by any time limit. Though the $1,195 cash reward may have long since expired, the pursuit of a solution continued to hold rewards of its own. The reason is plain: a solved crime is a mere spectator sport, but an unsolved one remains an invitation to participate.

“There is no more stimulating activity than that of the mind, and there is no more exciting adventure than that of the intellect,” Willard Huntington Wright once remarked. “Mankind has always received keen enjoyment from the mental gymnastics required in solving a riddle.” Few unsolved crimes, it is true, have possessed those elements of murder most foul, yet complex, with clues and suspects sufficient, yet bizarre and simple, to provide riddles of enduring quality. But there have been a handful that managed to meet all specifications. The destruction of Andrew and Abby Borden, in Fall River, Massachusetts, was such a riddle. The shooting of Joseph Bowne Elwell, the bridge expert, in his New York apartment, was another. The discovery of Starr Faithfull on a Long Island beach fulfilled the stringent requirements. And certainly the savage slaying of Julia Wallace in a Liverpool suburb while her husband, William Herbert Wallace, searched, or pretended to search, for an insurance prospect at the non-existent Menlove Gardens East has, in a few decades, become “the perfect scientific puzzle”.

However, the mystery of Mary Rogers, more than most, has stood the test of time as a mental exercise because it offers a challenge provided by only a few other unsolved murders. While it had the standard ingredients—the beautiful victim known to celebrities, the provocative clues from sailor’s knot to the arrangement of apparel at Weehawken, the colourful collection of suspects ranging from lovers to abortionists—it also had the genius of Edgar Allan Poe. Thus, when we transport ourselves in time back to that sweltering July morning in 1841 and begin the game and the hunt, we not only compete with the police and press of the period, but we challenge the analysis and deduction of the world’s first great detective-story writer. In short, we have the added excitement of pitting ourselves against Poe.

Ever since Poe’s death in 1849, armchair amateurs at detection have begun the game by attempting to discredit the master’s theories before proceeding with their own. Will M. Clemens, who visited Sybil’s Cave and the Weehawken thicket in 1904 for
Era Magazine
, decided that “the confessions mentioned by Poe are of doubtful authenticity”. Edmund Pearson after studying contemporary accounts, concluded that “Poe, in writing fiction about the case, was in the position of being able to depart from fact when he liked, and adhere to it when it suited his purpose; that he was first and last a romancer, and a devotee of the hoax; and that the theory that he actually solved the mystery of the death of the real Mary Rogers is not proven, and is very doubtful.” Russel Crouse, after pondering “The Mystery of Marie Roget”, stated: “As an actual aid in the solution of the crime it is of no more use than the less literary contributions of the stupid and bungling police of the day. For Poe’s ratiocination stems from untrustworthy and highly controvertible rumour rather than from fact.”

Several other commentators on crime have been less harsh with Poe. They have seen some merit in his deductions, and allowed for the possibility of his being proved right in the future. A quarter of a century ago Winthrop D. Lane reopened the case for
Collier’s
magazine. He announced that if Mrs Loss’s deathbed confession was correct, it vindicated Poe completely. “He absolved Payne and Crommelin of complicity,” said Lane. “He said no gang did the murder. He advanced the idea of a fatal accident under Mrs Loss’s roof (though he had no idea of the nature of the accident)—and here he made an extraordinarily shrewd guess. He thought the articles of clothing might have been placed in the thicket to divert attention from the real scene—and here he was exactly and uncannily correct.”