The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (95 page)

Did she sell liquor? She did not. She had been shown pictures of Rothstein and McManus and Biller, but she couldn’t recognize any of them. She was mighty reluctant about telling the name of a lady friend with whom she dined in her room the night of the killing, but finally admitted it was a Mrs Herman Popper. She explained her reluctance by saying, “I don’t want to get other people mixed up in this”.

3 December 1929

The most important point to the State in the trial of George McManus yesterday seemed to be the key to room 349 in the Park Central Hotel, which, according to testimony, was found in a pocket of an overcoat hanging in the room.

This overcoat bore the name of McManus on the tailor’s label in the pocket.

The prosecution will, perhaps, make much of this as tending to show the occupant of the room left in a very great hurry and didn’t lock the door, besides abandoning the overcoat, though Detective “Paddy” Flood said the door was locked when he went there with a house detective to investigate things.

It was Detective Flood who told of finding the key. He was relating how he entered the room and found, among other things, an overcoat with the name of George McManus on the label. He was asked, “What other objects did you find?”

“A handkerchief in the pocket of the overcoat with the initials ‘G. Mc’. There were other handkerchiefs in the drawer in the bedroom and a white shirt.”

“Did you find anything else in the coat?”

“A key, in the right-hand pocket, for room 349.”

“A door key.”

“Yes.”

Aside from that, the testimony brought out that “the master mind,” as the underworld sometimes called Arnold Rothstein, died “game.”

Game as a pebble.

In the haunts of that strange pallid man during his life, you could have had ten to one, and plenty of it, that he would “holler copper”, did occasion arise, with his dying gasp.

Indeed he was often heard to remark in times when he knew that sinister shadows hovered near—and these were not infrequent times in his troubled career, living as he chose to live, “If anyone gets me, they’ll burn for it”.

And cold, hard men, thinking they read his character, believed they knew his meaning. They felt he was just the kind when cornered by an untoward circumstance, that would squeal like a pig. It shows you how little you really know of a man.

For when the hour came, as the jury in Judge Nott’s court room heard yesterday, with the dismal snow slanting past the windows of the grimy old Criminal Courts Building—when Arnold Rothstein lay crumpled up with a bullet through his intestines, knowing he was mortally hurt, and officers of the law bent over him and whispered, “Who did it?” the pale lips tightened, and Rothstein mumbled, “I won’t tell and please don’t ask me any more questions”.

Then another “sure thing” went wrong on Broadway, where “sure things” are always going wrong—the “sure thing” that Rothstein would tell.

But as the millionaire gambler lay in the Fifty-sixth Street service entrance of the Park Central Hotel that night of 4 November 1928, with the pain of his wound biting at his vitals, and the peering eyes of the cops close to his white countenance, he reverted to type.

He was no longer the money king, with property scattered all over the Greater City, a big apartment house on fashionable Park Avenue, a Rolls-Royce and a Minerva at his beck and call, and secretaries and servants bowing to him. He was a man of the underworld. And as one of the “dice hustlers” of the dingy garage lofts, and the “mobsters” high and low he muttered, “I won’t tell”.

A sigh of relief escaped many a chest at those words, you can bet on that.

Detective Flood, who knew Rothstein well, was one of those who bent over the stricken man.

Patrolman William Davis, first to respond to the call of the hotel attendants, also asked Rothstein who shot him, but got no more information than Flood.

The head of the millionaire gambler was pillowed on a wadded-up burlap sack when Davis reached the scene, which was important to the State in trying to show that Rothstein was shot in the hotel, in that it had been said that Rothstein’s overcoat was put under his head.

Before the session was completed, the tables in the court room were covered with exhibits of one kind and another taken by Flood and other officers from room 349 in the Park Central.

There was a layout of glasses and a liquor bottle, and ginger ale bottles on a tray. But, alas, the liquor bottle was very empty. Also the State had the dark blue overcoat with the velvet collar that was found in a closet of room 349, said overcoat bearing a tailor’s label, with George McManus’s name on the label.

Likewise, handkerchiefs found in the room were produced and these handkerchiefs were elegantly monogrammed. One was inscribed “g Mc M.,” another like “G. M. A.” with the “G” and “A” in small letters, and the “M” big. A third was monogrammed “J. M. W.” with the “J” and “W” in small letters on either side of the large “M” while the fourth bore the marking “J. M.”

A white shirt with collar attached, some race tracks slips, and a window screen with a hole in it, were spread out for the jurors to see. Also the .38-calibre pistol, which one Al Bender, a taxi driver, picked up in Seventh Avenue.

This is supposed to be the pistol with which Rothstein was shot, and the screen is supposed to be the screen through which the pistol was hurled out into the street after the shooting, though the point where the pistol was picked up is quite a hurling distance from room 349.

While Flood and some other officers were in the room Hyman Biller, a cashier at the race track for McManus, and under indictment with McManus for the murder of Rothstein, came in with Frank and Tom McManus, brothers of George, and remained about twenty minutes.

It was the failure to hold Biller on this occasion that brought down much criticism on the heads of the Police Department, for Hymie was never seen in these parts again.

The lights were burning in room 349 when Flood got there. Four glasses stood on the table which is the basis of the indictment returned against McManus, and Biller, and the celebrated John Doe and Richard Roe. The State claims four men were in the room when Rothstein was summoned there by a message sent by McManus to Lindy’s restaurant.
⁴³

Vincent J. Kelly, elevator operator at the Park Central, testified he was working on the service elevator the night Rothstein was shot, and saw Rothstein in the corridor, holding his hands across his stomach, and didn’t see him come through the service doorway, through which he must have passed to make good the State’s contention he came from upstairs.

He heard Rothstein say, “I’m shot”.

Thomas Calhoun, of Corona, Long Island, thirty-two, a watchman on the Fifty-sixth Street side of the hotel at the time of the murder, saw Rothstein at ten forty-seven standing in front of the time office at the service entrance. Calhoun ran and got Officer Davis.

He heard Rothstein say something to the policeman about taking his money, and it was his impression that Rothstein had his overcoat over his arm and that it was put under his head as he lay on the floor, which impression was not corroborated by other testimony.

Through Calhoun, Attorney Murray tried to develop that Rothstein might have come through the swimming pool by way of Seventh Avenue. While cross-examining Calhoun, Murray suddenly remarked, testily, “I object to the mumbling to the District Attorney”.

He apparently had reference to Mr Brothers, of the State’s legal display. Everybody seemed to be a bit testy yesterday, except the ever-smiling defendant, McManus, who just kept on smiling.

Calhoun heard Rothstein say, “Call my lawyer, 9410 Academy”.

Thomas W. McGivney, of No. 401 West 47th Street, who was also near the service entrance, testified he had taken Rothstein’s overcoat off his arm and placed it under his head. Rothstein’s overcoat hasn’t been seen since the shooting.

McGivney, a stout looking young man with a wide smile, and a rich brogue, gave the spectators a few snickers, but by and large it wasn’t an exciting day one way or the other.

Although George McManus was indicted for murder, Judge Nott eventually ruled there was insufficient evidence against him and ordered the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. Arnold Rothstein’s murder was never solved. One theory holds that he was killed by members of a new crime cartel because Rothstein controlled so many rackets. The whereabouts of his fortune remained undiscovered, but AR’s criminal empire was quickly carved up by his minions, including Jack “Legs” Diamond.

(Bella Wright, 1919)

Edmund Pearson

If ever a man worked hard to put a rope around his own neck, declared one seasoned crime reporter, it was Ronald Light. But in spite of himself and his foolish behaviour, Light was cleared of murdering Bella Wright and her death has remained a total mystery ever since. She was last seen alive on a summer’s evening in 1919 accompanied by an unknown stranger on a green bicycle. The couple rode off into the dusk gathering over the remote Leicestershire countryside. Less than an hour later, twenty-one-year-old Bella was found dead in the road, shot in the head. Some six months later, a green bicycle dredged from a canal at Leicester was traced to Ronald Light. With it was a revolver holster containing live cartridges. Light admitted encountering Bella Wright on his bicycle, but said their ways later parted and he left her alive, albeit with a wobbly wheel. Spooked by the publicity over the girl’s death, Light said he panicked and ditched his green bicycle and holster in the canal. “I didn’t make up my mind deliberately not to come forward,” he later explained. “I was astounded and frightened at this unexpected thing. I kept on hesitating and, in the end, I drifted into doing nothing at all.” Edmund Pearson (1880–1937) wrote on the case in a collection of pieces on murder published the year before he died. Pearson was a trained librarian, and worked at the New York public library from 1914 until 1927, when he resigned to take up a full-time writing career. In 1923, following in the tradition of de Quincey, he wrote an essay on murder considered as one of the fine arts. “The study of murder”, he wrote, “is the study of the human heart in its darkest, strangest moments. Nothing surpasses it in interest”. The following year Pearson published
Studies in Murder,
his best-known work which established his international reputation as the leading American writer on famous crimes.

There was a murder case in England which not only needed a Sherlock Holmes but seemed as if it had been devised in solemn conclave by Conan Doyle, Holmes, and Watson themselves. It could be entitled The Mystery of the Green Bicycle; or, The Curious Incident of the Dead Raven.

Unfortunately, there was no great hawk-faced detective from Baker Street in it. Only, at the beginning, a local constable named Hall. Perhaps that is why one of the men best informed on this case says that it has “considerable claims to be regarded as the most fascinating murder mystery of the century”.

Bella Wright was twenty-one and lived with her father and mother in a tiny place called Stoughton. This is within a mile or two of the city of Leicester, and in that city she was employed in a rubber factory.

She was a girl with good looks and good character, and was engaged to be married to a stoker in the navy.

The country round about Leicester is full of little villages connected by old Roman roads or by lanes with high hedges. To the north is the famous hunting center of Melton Mowbray.

The lanes are charmingly picturesque and lonely, but were made for a less motorized age. They are sometimes full of surprises and excitement for the pedestrian or the cyclist. At a curve he may suddenly be confronted by a flock of sheep just as an enormous motor bus, brushing the hedge on either side, comes up behind him.

Miss Wright was accustomed to go to and from her work on a bicycle, and sometimes, in the long daylight hours of the English summer evenings, to cycle from one hamlet to another to do errands or to call on her friends. Her uncle, a man named Measures, lived in the village of Gaulby, three miles from her home.

She was on the late shift at the factory, and one Friday evening in July rode home from her work at eleven o’clock, going to bed soon after. Next day seems to have been a holiday, so she thoroughly made up her sleep, not getting up again till four o’clock Saturday afternoon. Then, after writing a few letters, she rode with them to the post office at Evington. Again she came home, but finally, at six-thirty p.m., set out on her cycle in the opposite direction, away from Leicester. Her mother had seen her start for Evington, and never after that saw her alive.

At nine twenty that evening (still daylight) a farmer named Cowell was driving cattle along the old Roman road called the Gartree Road or
Via Devana
. At a point about two miles from Gaulby, where the way is very lonely and the hedges, at that season, more than eight feet high, Cowell found Bella Wright lying dead in the road. Her head was covered with blood, and her cycle lay askew, with its front wheel pointed toward Stoughton—that is, toward home.

The farmer supposed that she had been killed by a fall or similar mischance. He placed her on the grass at the side of the road. Her body was still warm. Close to the spot where it was found—and this may be important—there was an opening in the hedge: a field gate which led into the grassy meadow beyond.