The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (50 page)

The aforesaid American people, fairly pop-eyed with excitement, were at first defrauded. On the tenth day of the proceedings, one of the jurors succumbed to apoplexy and the whole verbose, complicated trial had to be started all over again. This form of mishap occurs so often in our courts that there is considerable backing now for a proposed law to provide a thirteenth juror who should hear all the testimony but be called on for a vote only in such an emergency. Roughly the idea is that every jury ought to carry a spare.

In the testimony it was brought out that Nan, aided by her sister and her sister’s husband, had in that last spring worked desperately to regain a hold over her once lavish lover, trying every trick from hysterics to a quite fictitious pregnancy. On the night before the murder they had spent some clandestine time together in what was supposed to be a farewell colloquy. It was begun late in the evening at Flannery’s saloon in West 125th Street, with one of Mrs Young’s plethora of watchful brothers-in-law sitting carefully within earshot. Nan had reached the morbid stage of predicting darkly that Caesar would never, never sail next day. Profanely, he taunted her with not even knowing on what boat his passage was booked. Indeed he tossed a hundred-dollar bill on the beer-stained table and offered to lay it against fifty cents that she could not name the ship.

“Caesar Young, Caesar Young,” she made answer, while abstractedly pocketing the stakes, “Caesar Young, there isn’t a boat that sails the seas with a hold big enough or dark enough for you to hide in it from me tomorrow morning.”

Between two and three on the morning of the fourth, they parted—unamicably. Indeed there was testimony to the effect that at the end he called her by an accurate but nasty name, slapped her in the mouth, and threatened to knock her damned block off. It was the more difficult for the State to surmise how a few hours later they ever came together in that hurrying and fatal hansom. It was seven-twenty when he left his wife in West 140th Street. It was not yet nine when he was shot at the other end of the city. Nor was all of that brief time at Nan’s disposal. For the new hat was on his head when he was killed. And somewhere, somehow he had also paused for that shave.

There were sundry such
lacunae
in the State’s case. The pistol had been sold the day before in a pawnshop on Sixth Avenue but the proof that it had been bought by Nan’s sister and her husband was far from water-tight. Anyway the jury must have been left wondering why, if these people had all been battening on Caesar Young, they should have wished so golden a goose slain. Another weakness was Young’s general rakishness. But the State’s chief weakness, of course, was Nan herself. She was such a pretty thing.

The strength of the State’s case lay in the fact that it seemed physically impossible for anyone else to have fired the pistol. The direction of the bullet, the powder marks, the very variety of the trigger-action all pointed only to her. To the ill-concealed rapture of the reporters, a skeleton was trundled into court as a model whereby to convince the jury that Caesar Young would have had to be a contortionist to have pulled the trigger himself, as Nan implied he did. Of course she was not sure of it. It seems she was looking dreamily out of the window at the time and was inexpressibly shocked at his having been driven so desperate by the thought of a parting from her.

It is needless to say that Mr Levy, who managed to suggest that he was just a shabby neighbour of the jurors, seeking to rescue a fluttering butterfly from the juggernaut of the State, made the most of that “Caesar, Caesar, why did you do this?” At such a time, could this cry from the heart have been studied.

“Is there a possibility,” Mr Levy argued, “that within two seconds after the shot she could have been so consummate an actress as to have been able deliberately to pretend the horror which showed itself in her face at that moment? Do you believe that this empty—frivolous, if you like—pleasure-loving girl could conceive the plot that would permit her at one second to kill, and in the next second to cover the act by a subtle invention? Why, it passes your understanding as it does mine. My learned and rhetorical and oratorical and brilliant friend will tell you that this was assumed. My God, you are all men of the world. You are men of experience. Why, you would have to pretend that this girl possessed ability such as has never been possessed by any artist that ever trod the boards, not even by the emotional Clara Morris, not even by the great Rachel, not even by Ristori, not even by Mrs Leslie Carter!”

Reader, if you are faintly surprised to find the name of Mrs Carter in that climactic spot, consider that it may have been a delicate tribute to her manager, Mr Belasco, who was attending the trial as a gentleman (
pro
tem
) of the Press. Then, as always, the Wizard’s interest in the human heart and his warm compassion for people in distress took him often to murder trials, especially those likely to be attended by a good many reporters.

Mr Levy’s “learned and rhetorical friend” was not impressed. Indeed, he could not resist pointing out that Levy himself, while no Edwin Booth precisely, nor any Salvini either, had just read that very line with considerable emotional conviction.

“It does not require the greatness of histrionic talent,” Mr Rand said dryly, “to pretend that something has happened which has not.”

Mr Levy referred a good deal to Nan’s dear old dad sitting there in court and, to play perfectly safe, he also read aloud from Holy Writ the episode of the woman taken in adultery. The jury disagreed.

The State tried again in the following April, moving the case for trial this time before Justice Goff, perhaps in the knowledge that, despite his saintly aspect, that robed terror to evil-doers could be counted on to suggest to the jury, by the very tone of his voice, that hanging was too good for Nan. In his final argument, Colonel Rand was magnificent. In after years at the civil bar he argued in many cases of far greater importance and it was always one of the minor irritations of his distinguished life that laymen everywhere always tagged him as the man who prosecuted Nan Patterson. This gaudy prestige even followed him overseas when he was a high-ranking member of the Judge Advocate’s staff stationed at Chaumont for the prosecution of those of us in the AEF who were charged with cowardice, rape, insubordination, and other infractions of the military code.

“Oh, gentlemen, gentlemen,” cried Mr Rand in his peroration, reaching at last his guess at the scene in the hansom cab. “We are near the end, we are near the end now. Going back to revisit his early home and his old friends, a richer, stronger, heartier man than Cæsar Young that morning you shall not find. But the harvest of the seed he had sown was still to be reaped and the name of the reaper was Nan Patterson. And his companion, what were her thoughts? What were her reflections as she sat there by his side? One call, you may be sure, was insistent in her thoughts. One call she heard again and again. ‘You have lost, Nan, you have lost. The end has come, your rival has triumphed, the wife has won. The mistress has lost, lost her handsome, generous lover. No more riots, no more love with him. He is going back, he is going back. Caesar is going back, Nan. Back, back, to his first love. Back to his true love. Caesar is going back, Nan. Back, back to the woman who had shared his poverty, who had saved his money, who has adorned his wealth. Back. Caesar is going back to the wife he had sworn before God to love, honour and cherish.’ Oh, if she had doubts, they vanished then; then she saw red; then the murder in her heart flamed into action, and she shot and killed. A little crack, a puff of smoke, a dead man prostrate on a woman’s knee, the wages of sin were paid!”

Thus the District Attorney. But again the jury disagreed and after a few days he moved for a quashing of the indictment. It was immediately announced that Nan would be starred in a musical show called
The
Lulu
Girls
. It opened a fortnight later in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and got as far as Altoona, where, although billed by that time as
A
Romance
of
Panama
, it quietly expired. Shortly thereafter Nan was remarried, after a lively vacation, to an early husband from whom she had been obscurely divorced. She then vanished from the newspapers, although there occasionally finds its way into print a legend that she is living in Seattle a life given over to good deeds and horticulture.

Ten years ago an elderly and indignant washerwoman living in a shanty in White Plains found herself surrounded one morning by a cordon of reporters and photographers all conjured up by a fanciful and self-sprung rumour that she was Nan Patterson. The White Plains
blanchisseuse
was furious, as it seems she was not Nan Patterson at all. Why, she had never been in a hansom cab or a Turkish Bath in all her life. She had never even been in
Florodora
.

(Brighton Trunk Murder, 1934)

Jonathan Goodman

Between the wars, the golden age of rail travel produced a sanguinary slew of trunk crimes. In Brighton, a raffish seaside town on the English south coast, there were two in the same summer, that of 1934; only one was ever solved, leaving the other (so to speak) still to be called for. The unsolved case became known as the Brighton Trunk Crime No. 1. The victim—a woman—was never identified, and her killer never caught. By the most extraordinary of coincidences, barely a month later, a second corpse was found in a second trunk in the same town. This time, the remains
were
identified; they were those of Violette Kaye, a onetime dancer turned prostitute, whose lover, a petty crook calling himself Tony Mancini, was tried for her murder in a case known as the Brighton Trunk Crime No. 2. Thanks to an Olympian defence by his lawyer, the great Norman Birkett KC, Mancini was acquitted. Sensation (eventually) followed sensation: forty years on, in 1976, in an interview with the
News of the World
headed
“I’ve Got Away with Murder”, Tony Mancini confessed his guilt. Trunk Crime No. 1, meanwhile, remains unsolved. This account is by Jonathan Goodman (b. 1931), unquestionably Britain’s leading historian of crime. A former theatre and television director, his dissection of the Wallace case in Liverpool in 1931 (see F. Tennyson Jesse’s Checkmate pp. 81-93), published in 1969 as
The Killing of Julia Wallace
remains an unrivalled achievement of original research and forensic insight.

By midsummer of 1934, that year had the stench of decay about it. It was the sort of year that is remembered for what most people who lived through it would prefer to forget.

In Callander, Ontario, an accident of fertility called the Dionne quins was perverted into a multimillion-dollar industry. Only a day or so after the births on 28 May, while it was still touch-and-go whether any of the babies would survive, the father received an offer for them to appear, a constellation of stars outshining singular freaks of nature, at the Chicago World’s Fair; he signed the agreement after consulting the local priest, who gave his advice in return for a commission on the deal. But before long other offers, and more lucrative ones, poured in, giving ample reasons to welsh on the bargain with the Chicago promoters, ample funds to contest their claim. The Dionne Quins (yes, with a capital Q by now) went on to become an advertising symbol, a public relations exercise, a product to boost sales of other products. It never occurred to anyone that they might need protection against anything other than breach of contract.

On the sweltering-hot Sabbath-day of 22 July, John Dillinger—“Public Enemy No. 1” and the first gangster to have a fan-club—was shot to death by an impromptu firing-squad of FBI agents as he left the Biograph Cinema, Chicago, after seeing
Manhattan
Melody
, in which a prosecutor (played by William Powell) convicted his friend (Clark Gable) of murder. Following the shooting, the most human gesture was that of a policeman, so delighted to see Dillinger dead that he shook hands with the corpse. Spectators dipped hankies in the blood; some lady onlookers went so far as to kneel and soak the selvedges of their skirts in it. As soon as the inquest was over, a queue-shaped mob surged past the body as it lay in state in a mortuary. A crowd even more dense—5,000 strong, it was reckoned, many carrying picnic-hampers—was locked outside the cemetery (and was drenched but not depleted by a thunderstorm—“God’s tears,” according to someone who was prevented from attending) while Dillinger’s remains were interred. Those remains, for which Dillinger’s father had turned down an offer of $10,000, weren’t quite complete: during the autopsy—a select, all-ticket affair—a light-fingered person with a quaint taste in mementoes had pocketed the brain.