The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (15 page)

William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr, after his own probings into the case, doubted that it would ever be solved. But he had no doubt that if new evidence were uncovered, it would be evidence generally in support of Poe’s theories. “We shall know the truth only if it was somewhat as Poe and Ingram say, if there was a confession by a man of influential family, if this was known as an inside story, and if someone on the inside wrote the secret down in a document which survives and is to come to light.” If this document revealed the murderer as a naval officer, possibly the son of a Secretary of War, then Poe would have triumphed entirely over his critics. “For all his idle argument about bodies in the water,” wrote Wimsatt, “his laboured inconsistency about the thicket and the gang, for all his borrowing of newspaper ideas, or (where it suited him) indifference to newspaper evidence, despite the fact that he was so largely wrong and had to change his mind, he did fasten on the naval officer.”

But if not Poe’s naval officer, then who else?

As early as 1869 a mystic and lecturer, Andrew Jackson Davis, who had been acquainted with Poe, presented his own solution to the Mary Rogers case in the form of a novel called
Tale of a Physician
. Davis thought Mary had become pregnant by a wealthy lover, who then took her to a New York City abortionist, probably Mme Restell. When Mary died on the table, the lover paid off and fled to Texas.

In 1904 Will M. Clemens still had the opportunity to interview several of Mary’s contemporaries about Hoboken. Most of these elders felt that Mary and her “swarthy” escort had both been murdered inside Mrs Loss’s inn by her three unrestrained sons, for purposes of either rape or robbery. In 1927 Allan Nevins thought that the responsibility for the death of Mary Rogers “was not the work of Payne but of another lover”. Nevins believed that Mary had been seduced, and had died of an illegal operation. In 1930 Winthrop D. Lane discovered the original records of Mary Rogers’s inquest in the dusty basement of the Hudson County Courthouse. After reading these and pursuing other evidence, Lane pointed the finger of guilt at Mrs Loss. He regarded her dying confession of the crime as the truth.

“Mrs Loss’s confession,” wrote Lane, “has had a curious history. It seems to have failed to get itself accepted as the truthful explanation of the affair . . . And yet it is the most likely explanation. Why should she make such a confession if it were not true? She was on her deathbed—and had nothing to gain unless it was a clear conscience. A mother is not likely to implicate her son in so serious an affair unless there is some powerful reason. It is less likely that she lied than that the others, for reasons entirely unknown to us, failed to make use of the confession.”

The reason, perhaps, that the confession was not fully acted upon was that its existence was of doubtful authenticity. After the
New York Tribune
reported Mrs Loss’s dying statement to Justice Merritt, the Justice promptly wrote an open letter to the
Courier and Enquirer
denying the confession and stating that the
Tribune’s
story was “entirely incorrect, as no such examination took place, nor could it, from the deranged state of Mrs Loss’s mind”. The
Tribune
replied that it had obtained its story from two of Justice Merritt’s magistrates. The
Herald
challenged the
Tribune
to print the names of the magistrates. The
Tribune
retreated into hurt silence.

Like all the others who have studied the facts of the case, I, too, have played the game. Among the major suspects, my choice for the most suspicious is Alfred Crommelin. I believe that Mary Rogers was his mistress at the time she was engaged to marry Payne. Why, then, the rose in his keyhole? Because she wished to tell him, before aborting his child, that she still loved him. And how, then, his fortuitous arrival at Sybil’s Cave? Because he knew where her body had been disposed of by the abortionist, and he knew where it might be found, and wished to be immediately on hand to identify it and see that it received Christian burial. But how, then, did Crommelin have an alibi for the Sunday? Quite logically because he was not present when Mary died, but with friends, who established his alibi.

To my mind, the most stimulating aspect of the Mary Rogers affair is the broad scope of possible suspicion. A damaging indictment can be constructed against almost anyone remotely connected with Mary Rogers. There is no limit to the boundaries of one’s fancy or surmise. Consider the oft-overlooked John Anderson, tobacconist, who was Mary’s employer. He was beside her for long hours each day. He walked her home. He had, surely, an eye for a well-turned ankle. It was thought, on newspaper row, that he had encouraged her first disappearance. Had he perhaps encouraged her second also?

In 1887 the
New York Tribune
reported that John Anderson had hired Edgar Allan Poe, whom he had long known as a customer, to write “The Mystery of Marie Roget” in order to divert suspicion from himself. While this titbit opens up delightful possibilities, its veracity is certainly to be questioned. It appears that Anderson lived on to a senile old age. After his death in 1881, his will was contested on the grounds of legal insanity. The fight was still in the New York courts during 1901, when Mary Rogers made a ghostly appearance before the bar. In the tug-of-war involving Appleton
v
. New York Life Insurance Company, it was revealed that old Anderson had claimed he knew who killed Mary Rogers. He knew, he told relatives, because she told him. She had often appeared before him as a nightly apparition, and during one such nocturnal tête-à-tête she had revealed the name of her murderer. Unfortunately, Anderson kept the name “a spiritual secret”.

Among other peripheral suspects, in a category with the Broadway tobacconist, I would be inclined to include the seemingly harassed Mrs Rogers, proprietress of the historic rooming house on Nassau Street. An impoverished old woman, to be sure, and ailing, of course. Yet how did she manage to maintain her house? The boarders seem to have been so very few and far between. Certainly there must have been another steady source of income. The son in South America? Possibly. Or Mary?

Does it strike a blow at motherhood and country to suggest that Mrs Rogers, out of fear of bankruptcy, employed the beautiful cigar girl for the pleasure of her guests—and of visitors to her vacant rooms? Assuming this premise, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Mary was trapped in pregnancy, and that her mother took her to an abortionist, under whose instruments Mary expired. Then it would have been Mrs Rogers, grief-stricken, who disposed of the body with the aid of Crommelin or another.

Or was the secret murderer of Mary Cecilia Rogers one of the most illustrious names in literature? Was the murderer Edgar Allan Poe himself?

Poe knew Mary Rogers when he dwelt in New York City, and in the half-year before her death he frequently travelled from Philadelphia to New York. Might he not have seen her again? Not at the boarding-house, not he, a married man. But at cafés or hotels—or on outings to New Jersey. She was beautiful and gay, and would have served as a welcome escape from the neuter Virginia and the dominating Maria Clemm and the hounding Graham. And of course he would have attracted her. He had some social station; he was published; he was brooding and brilliant.

Might not Poe have been the “swarthy” gentleman who accompanied Mary to Weehawken? And there, in the thicket, in one ofhis drunken, narcotic rages, might he not impotently haveattempted rape, or even actually raped her, and then been forced to silence her forever? His record of alcoholic rage with women is well known. It is a fact that in July 1842, bleary with drink, he took a ferry to New Jersey to see his old Baltimore sweetheart, Mary Devereaux, who was then a married woman. Poe, his eyes bloodshot, his stock under his ear, was already in Mary Devereaux’s house, waiting, when she returned from a shopping-trip with her sister—most fortunately with her sister. Poe fell upon her, screaming: “So you have married that cursed————! Do you love him truly! Did you marry him for love?”

Mary Devereaux held firm. “That’s nobody’s business; that is between my husband and myself.”

But Poe pressed after her. “You don’t love him. You do love me. You know you do.”

While, on this occasion, Poe was finally pacified and sent packing, he may not have left Mary Rogers so easily.

But all of this, I confess, is speculation. As to actual evidence that Edgar Allan Poe murdered Mary Rogers? I can only repeat once more that we are playing a game . . .

After Mary Cecilia Rogers was removed from the Dead House in mid-August of 1841, she was buried in the New York City metropolitan area. No one knows today the exact position of her final resting-place—except that she may be found still in the pages of “The Mystery of Marie Roget”.

(Julia Wallace, 1931)

F. Tennyson Jesse

The Wallace case of 1931 is regarded as the classic English whodunnit, a labyrinth of clues and false trails leading everywhere except, it seems, to the identity of the murderer. It remains, in many ways, a nightmare of a case: every shred of evidence seems to invite equal and opposite meaning, and critics have praised its chess-like qualities. The setting is wintrily provincial, the milieu lower middle-class, the style threadbare domestic. J B Priestley’s fog-filled Liverpool remembrance of
“trams going whining down long sad roads” is the quintessence of it. Events turn tantalizingly on finical questions of time and distance; knuckle-headed police jostle with whistling street urchins for star billing, while at the centre of the drama stands the scrawny, inscrutable figure of the accused man, William Herbert Wallace, the Man From The Pru. Wallace’s wife Julia has been found murdered on her front parlour rug, and the killer has made a mysterious telephone call, but was it Wallace himself fashioning an alibi or an unknown man in the shadows?

F(ryniwyd) Tennyson Jesse (1888–1958), great niece of Tennyson, the Victorian Poet Laureate, was a novelist and criminologist who edited six volumes of
Notable British Trials.
Her best-known novel
, A Pin To See The Peepshow (1934),
is based on the Thompson–Bywaters murder case of 1922. Miss Jesse’s short essay on the Wallace case, written in 1953, appears here for the first time.

William Herbert Wallace was an insurance agent employed by the Prudential Insurance Company and he lived alone with his wife Julia in a small modest street of grey two-storey houses at Anfield, Liverpool. He was a quiet and studious man of rather frail appearance and he customarily wore steel-rimmed spectacles. He may have taken undue pride in his fine bushy mustache but that we shall never know. He was fond of intellectual pursuits and his behaviour was gentle, considerate and sweet-tempered. Julia was a delicate fluttery little woman of his own age—they were both fifty-two—who painted graceful water-colours and appears to have shared her husband’s intellectual pretensions. She took no part in the local activities, such as they may have been, but was content to listen to her husband’s views on the new atomic science and on his stoic philosophy, and pleased to give an accomplished if somewhat rusty accompaniment on the piano to her husband’s earnest efforts on the violin. He, on the other hand, was a chess-player of no mean order and several evenings a week he would set out for his Club at the City Café to join his fellow addicts. Monday was competition night so, whatever mutual arrangements he might make with Julia on other nights for music practice or reading aloud, on Mondays he invariably went to his Chess Club. For eighteen years he and his wife had lived amicably, even affectionately, together, with never a harsh word, and for the last sixteen years they had shared this humdrum routine under the humdrum roof of No. 29 Wolverton Street. They were childless but whether from choice or cruel chance is not known. No other man, no other woman, seems to have disturbed emotionally the domestic peace of this fond couple.

At about seven-fifteen on the evening of Monday 19 January 1931, a telephone message for Wallace was taken by Mr Beattie, the Captain of the Chess Club. Wallace was expected there for an important competition game but had not yet arrived, so Mr Beattie wrote the gist of the conversation down and passed it on to Wallace later in the evening when taking a look at the competition in progress. It was to the purport that a man of the name of Mr R.M. Qualtrough wanted to have a talk with Wallace “in the nature of your business”; he was in the throes of a twenty-first birthday party for his daughter and didn’t want the bother of ringing again but would Wallace be good enough to call at his house No. 25 Menlove Gardens East at half-past-seven the following evening. Wallace was playing an excellent game, which he won, but he allowed himself to be weaned from it long enough to make a careful note of the message and to murmur as he did so that he had never heard of the gentleman, nor of Menlove Gardens East, and wasn’t sure that he would go. After the match, pleased with his success and feeling expansive, he reverted to the subject of Qualtrough’s request and curious name and asked the advice of several members on how they would make the journey. Nobody had actually been there and after belabouring the question Wallace left the Club for home still dubious. However, business is business and on the next evening when the normal work of the day was over he must have decided to keep the appointment.

Now, according to Wallace, just after six o’clock on Tuesday 20 January he had tea with his wife in the kitchen-living-room as usual—they only used the front-parlour for music or for their rare guests—and at six forty-five he left the little grey house to embark on the complicated series of trams which should bring him to the district where he hoped to find Menlove Gardens East. It cannot have been much later than six-fifty for at seven-ten he was on a tram quarter of an hour’s journey from Wolverton Street asking his way of the tram conductor with fussy insistence. It is a curious fact that although there is a Menlove Avenue, a Menlove Gardens South, a Menlove Gardens North and a Menlove Gardens West, there is no Menlove Gardens East. It is not surprising then that nobody could help him, but Wallace was a conscientious man to whom insurance commission was important and having come so far he wanted to make very sure. He questioned the conductor of his second tram also and was put down amiably at Menlove Gardens West where he quartered the area without success, asking an occasional passer-by and presenting himself hopefully to the lady of No. 25 Menlove Gardens West. Crestfallen he then inquired of a policeman who told him firmly there was no street of that name, but Wallace, remarking that it was still only quarter-to-eight, asked him if there was a post office or newsagent open nearby where he might look up a directory. There he was finally convinced that the place did not exist, and he said so to the manageress who had helped him. As it was now after eight o’clock he hurried home, fitting in his trams like a jigsaw puzzle, feeling foolish, frustrated and vaguely uneasy. On reaching home he tried his key in the front door as he normally did but for once it seemed to be bolted. There is an alleyway running parallel to the street at the back of this row of houses leading to each of the back entries and very frequently used by all the occupiers, so he went round to the back which has a solid dark-green painted door giving on a little yard. He could not open that either and, more uneasy now since he could see no slit of light issuing from the back kitchen through the scullery window, he began to knock. Then he thought perhaps his wife, who had a bad cold, must have gone to bed, so he went round and tried the front again as he knew it had a troublesome lock that was apt to stick. Here he had no better success and he was returning to the back entry for a further onslaught when he met his next door neighbours Mr and Mrs Johnston coming out of their own back entry into the alley-way.