The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (97 page)

He was utterly terrified. Both for his own sake and for his mother’s, who was an invalid, he wanted to escape the horror of an investigation, perhaps a trial. Foolishly, as he now admitted, he refrained from going to the police at once, and drifted into a policy of silence, then of concealment, and finally of falsehood. He never went out on the green bicycle again, but hid it and at last broke it up and threw it (together with the holster) into the canal. He now frankly admitted all the lies told when the police came to him.

“I see now, of course,” he said to the judge, “that I did the wrong thing”.

He must have been astounded again when the evidence rose against him from the canal. It is recorded that he had looked at this water from his cell, while he was awaiting trial, and exclaimed:

“Damn and blast that canal!”

Ronald Light’s story, as he now told it, could not be contradicted or disproved in any detail. Five hours of cross-examination failed to trip him once.

His lawyer, who was himself an expert on firearms, sharply questioned the Crown witnesses who testified on technical points: about the wound, and about the bullet. Sir Edward maintained that such a heavy bullet, fired, as they thought, from a distance of seven feet, would have blown out the back of the skull. It was absurd that it should not have travelled farther. The only explanation would be that she was shot as she lay on the ground, and even this was not wholly satisfactory.

That it was the same caliber as bullets found in Light’s holster meant nothing: bullets like this one had recently been made in England by the thousand million. Sir Edward suggested that the bullet found in the road might not be the fatal one at all, and that she might have been killed by an accidental shot fired from the neighbouring field. It could be a rifle bullet.

No one had appeared who could testify that Light and the girl were together on the Gartree Road; he was never placed at or even very near the scene of the crime.

The Crown had shown no motive. It was not a lovers’ quarrel; the two were strangers. There had been no sexual assault. Why should Light have shot her?

The defense, of course, slid over the fact that certain kinds of murders, particularly of women and children, are committed for no apparent motive whatever.

The judge, in his charge, seemed rather to lean to the side of the defense. The jury argued the case for three hours, standing nine to three in favour of the prisoner. Then the three were won over, and they reported Ronald Light “Not guilty”. The verdict was cheered.

But who did kill Bella Wright? Probably we shall never know. Probably, also, we shall never know whether we ourselves, if innocent, but in a predicament like that of the rider of the green bicycle, would behave any better.

Now to come back to our raven. A gentleman named Trueman Humphries went down to the Gartree Road, took pictures, and looked about. At the end he wrote, for the
Strand
, an entertaining bit of fiction. He imagines a scientific detective challenged to solve the mystery of the green bicycle. This detective organizes, in the neighbourhood of Gaulby and Little Stretton, a shooting match. A prize is offered and all the boys and men in the region are drawn in.

There are various targets: disappearing images of deer, running rabbits, or the like. All of them are sprung upon the contestants suddenly and as a complete surprise. Before one of these sportsmen—a young lad—as he lies on the ground, firing, there rises what seems to be a dark hedge cut in the middle by a white gate. And on this gate sits a raven!

The boy tumbles over in a faint. When he comes to, he is ready to make his confession. He was in the field near the Gartree Road that July evening. He had sighted a bird of some kind on the white gate. He lay behind a sheep trough two or three hundred yards away (there is really such a trough) and fired. He killed the raven—but the bullet also killed the girl who rode by the gate at that moment.

Far-fetched? Very likely. But it’s not unworthy of the great Sherlock!

(Starr Faithfull, 1931)

Morris Markey

Starr Faithfull was found dead on a deserted beach in June 1931. She was the well-to-do daughter of a Manhattan society couple, but her story is a rackety one of murder, cover-up and political intrigue. Her life and unexplained death still fascinates. Police sources were quoted as saying Faithfull—“an aspiring writer” who apparently never wrote anything—had been kidnapped from her home in Manhattan and brought to Long Beach, where she was killed and her body tossed into the surf. The papers also noted—in a way that suggested it meant something to the case—that Faithfull’s close neighbour in New York was the mayor, James J. Walker. Investigators implied that she was a drunken nymphomaniac who frequented “underworld haunts” and “revelled in the company of known killers and desperate criminals”. Police also found her diary that centred on “men, men, men—all sorts of men in all walks of life”. One source said she met her killers at a party aboard a cruise ship, the
Franconia.
Here, journalist Morris Markey only hints at the back story (he ignores most of Faithfull’s wild shipboard partying and Manhattan society affairs) but his treatment of the case is interesting because he is anxious to suggest a possible solution to the mystery. Puzzled by the strange manner of Starr Faithfull’s death, Markey called on the dead woman’s family and became intrigued by their reactions. His solution seems highly plausible, although no one seems to have thought of it at the time. Markey was the original Reporter At Large for the
New Yorker,
and many of his articles for that magazine have become classics in journalism schools.

The heat wave was subsiding. All over the country the committee of American mayors who had been visiting in France were returning to their respective constituents, and these, except in a few churlish instances, greeted them with flags and whistles and even listened to their speeches. Mr Hoover’s offices in Washington were pleasantly devoid of news. And Mr Daniel Moriarty, up with the dawn to meet the tide, was strolling the sands of Long Beach—some twenty miles out from New York—searching for drift that he might turn to a profit. The flotsam that he came upon, finally, was of a fabulous nature indeed. It was the body of a young woman, really a beautiful young woman, clothed in a silk dress and nothing else, and quite dead. Within half a dozen hours the front pages of the country’s newspapers, on that eighth day of June, 1931, had a new name to fit into their headlines. It was a singularly poetic name. Starr Faithfull.

It lies within the very nature of a mystery story that it must be told backward. The only possible beginning is the corpse. And then things are learned and told about the corpse and the creature that existed before it became a corpse, until at last we do not have a corpse at all, but a living and very human being to remember, with friends and enemies, with hopes and defeats, with sins, and passions, and now and again a few nobilities.

Now be it observed that the District Attorney of Nassau County, the county in which Long Beach is situated, was a man named Elvin N. Edwards. Mr Edwards was just dusting his hands after sending a prominent thug named “Two-Gun” Crowley to the electric chair when this new sensation, this mystery with the wonderful name, came within his jurisdiction. He had discovered already that publicity was no dainty drink but wine with delight in every bubble. We are indebted to his muscular management of the events that ensued, almost as much as we are indebted to the newspapers, for the strange and fascinating story that was unfolded in the weeks to follow—weeks when nothing much was happening except heat, and an occasional thunderstorm, and President Hoover speaking peevishly to the Emperor of Japan about certain dull happenings in a place called Manchuria.

Starr was not born Faithfull. She was the daughter of Frank W. Wyman, occupation unknown, and of a Boston woman who possessed what once were called good social connections. Ten years before our story opens, the mother had divorced Wyman and married Stanley E. Faithfull, a retired manufacturing chemist and occasional inventor of devices that never seemed to work. The Faithful ménage, in the spring of 1931, consisted of the mother and the stepfather—whose name had been eagerly adopted by all hands—of Starr, who was now twenty-five, and her sister Tucker, younger by two or three years.

The first, hurried reports characterized the dead girl as an heiress, “the brown-haired, brown-eyed product of a Boston finishing school, who preferred to be alone, reading volumes on philosophy and kindred subjects.”

But that impression did not survive the first twenty-four hours of journalistic labor. As always in such circumstances, there were friends eager to talk, and they told the tale of an elusive and difficult young woman, devoted to the proprieties and yet capable of the most bizarre escapades, racing at full throttle to escape from the role into which existence had cast her, and from herself.

This urge to escape inevitably guided her toward the sea. She had made two trips to England. But in this, her last spring, she had no money for another voyage. So she haunted the liners at their berths, reveling with the tourists as they prepared to sail and then, with such painful reluctance as we may imagine, stepping back ashore at the last minute.

On 29 May, ten days before her dead body was found, she had been overcome at the last moment by that reluctance. She went aboard the Cunard liner
Franconia
to see the ship’s surgeon, Dr George Jameson-Carr. She was madly in love with him. Her emotion was not reciprocated, and for several months Dr Jameson-Carr had been embarrassed by her eager attentions, her incessant confessions of devotion. On this day, she was pretty drunk when she went aboard the ship. Drinking was not her vice, ordinarily. Those were, of course, the bootleg days, and because he was terrified of speakeasy gin her stepfather, Faithfull, often mixed a flask of Martinis for Starr to take with her. As often as not she came home altogether sober, the flask still full. But on this day of waning May she was tight—volubly and almost boisterously tight.

Dr Jameson-Carr sent her away from his sitting room some time before the ship’s sailing hour. But she did not go ashore. She mingled with the passengers, and the
Franconia
was well down the bay before her presence became known to the ship’s officers. The vessel was stopped, and she was put ashore by a tugboat after a scene in which the doctor’s embarrassment was made public property. The ship, with Jameson-Carr still aboard, of course, sailed on for England.

The next day, 30 May, she wrote a letter to him.

On 2 June, she wrote another one.

On 4 June, she wrote still a third.

These letters will appear somewhat later on in our narrative.

June 4, a Thursday, was the day she disappeared from home. She had been, apparently, in normal spirits—which is to say, irritated by her incessant febrile depression, and trying to compensate that emotion with little bursts of gaiety and generosity. The family was low in funds Only three dollars could be spared for her purse. Nobody in the house asked where she was going or when she would be back, and she did not volunteer the information.

This is the time for our first glimpse at the Faithfull home. (We shall, before the end, visit it again.) Nobody ever was able to find out, not even the strong-minded District Attorney, Mr Edwards, the source of the Faithfull family’s income. There were theories, beginning with blackmail and ending with an international drug ring, but they were mere flights in the tabloids, and nobody ever took them seriously. There is a fairly sound assumption that we are able to make about the family finances, but that, again, belongs somewhat further on.

However—

The family lived in a second-floor walk-up apartment at No. 12 St Luke’s Place, in Greenwich Village, three doors away from the home of Mayor Jimmy Walker. The building itself was almost identical with the Walker home, an early New York façade with a high front stoop, not without its attraction to the passer-by. The flat cost eighty-five dollars a month to rent, and it was distinctly not roomy enough for four people. But in it there was more than fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of very beautiful antique furniture—Empire and Chippendale chests, a buffet by Sheraton. Such things.

There were, to be sure, manifestations of eccentricity in great abundance in this family. But Stanley Faithfull, according to his lights, was a devoted father even to a bewildering girl who was not his own daughter. When Starr did not come home on the night of 4 June, he was worried. And by nine-thirty the next morning he was at Police Headquarters. There he gave a confidential report to the Missing Persons Bureau—which meant that his wish to avoid publicity would be respected. He also telephoned numerous friends and acquaintances, asking if they had seen Starr, and even wrote notes to certain of the girl’s acquaintances whom he had not met.

The Police Department put in motion its routine confidential search. It got nowhere. The next news of Starr Faithfull was telephoned by an excited Mr Daniel Moriarty to the Long Beach police station.

Late in the afternoon an assistant medical examiner reported upon the findings of the first autopsy (there were to be two more). Starr Faithfull had died by drowning, he reported, and her body had been in the water at least forty-eight hours. There were no traces of alcohol, but she had taken from one to two grains of veronal—possibly enough to cause unconsciousness but certainly not enough to cause death. She had also eaten a large meal. There was much sand in the lungs, suggesting that she had still been breathing as she lay in the shallow water at the edge of the beach. There were many bruises, resembling finger marks, on her upper arms. And she had been criminally assaulted. The last phrase was the euphemism of the day for rape.