The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (98 page)

Within a very short time, however, the diagnosis of rape began to lose its validity, as other doctors insisted they could find no evidence at all to support it.

District Attorney Edwards issued the first of his many hundreds of interviews: there was no question whatever but that the girl had been murdered, and he was hot on the trail of the villain who did it.

Now in order to understand the theory which leaped at once to the minds of detectives and newspapermen, you must be familiar with the geography of the scene. The 130-mile-long, narrow strip of sand called Long Island lies almost due east and west, immediately off the coast of New York and Connecticut. Steamships sailing from New York pass along the length of it as they set their easterly course, and often are in plain sight from the beaches.

An immediate investigation showed that two big liners, the
Mauretania
and the
lle de France
, had sailed for Europe in the late afternoon or early evening of 5 June (and presently we shall examine evidence tending to show rather clearly that this was the day on which Starr Faithfull died). During the late afternoon, she certainly went aboard the
Mauretania
. And, just as certainly, she left it well before sailing time. There were numerous witnesses to both of these facts. Certain other evidence, not nearly so convincing, indicated that she also went aboard the
Ile de France
, lying at her pier a short distance from the
Mauretania
. This could never be definitely proved. But, supposing that she did go aboard the
Ile de France
, there is no evidence whatever that she left it before sailing time—10 p.m.

An immediate assumption was almost unanimously agreed upon: the girl had remained aboard one of the ships, secretly, and while the vessel was passing Long Island she had jumped or fallen overboard. The most emphatic dissent from this opinion was delivered in a muted bellow by Mr Edwards. Starr Faithfull had been murdered. No doubt about it. He was promptly joined in this position by Stanley Faithfull. It was an outrage upon the memory of his daughter, he said, to suggest that she had done away with herself. Somebody had killed her. Her death must be avenged.

Well, naturally, the newspapers were eager to throw away their own theories and subscribe to the theory of murder—the more foul and revolting, the better. A suicide is perishable news indeed. A murder mystery is durable goods, front-page stuff for weeks.

But even as they cast a solid vote for murder, the newspapers clung to the romance of the ocean liners. Somebody had thrown her overboard. Had Starr Faithfull ever been to Long Beach before in her life? Did she know anybody there? The answer was a reasonably accurate no.

Meantime the past of the unhappy girl began to emerge. The first item was simple scandal. Just a year before her death she had been in trouble with the police. People heard screams coming from a room in an uptown hotel, and called a patrolman. When he entered the room he found Starr lying naked on the bed, and a vigorous-looking young man in an undershirt regarding her with angry eyes. There was a half-empty bottle of gin on a table.

The man said he was Joseph Collins, and showed his army discharge papers to prove it. He either did not know or would not tell Starr Faithfull’s name.

The police officer seemed more than usually dense. Despite the fact that Starr was rather seriously beaten up by fists, he told Collins to get out—make himself scarce—which he did, permanently, never being heard of again. Starr was revived and taken to Bellevue, where she spent the night. The hospital record was brief and to the point:

“Brought to hospital by Flower Hospital ambulance. Noisy and unsteady. Acute alcoholism. Contusions face, jaw, and upper lip. Given medication. Went to sleep. Next a.m. noisy, crying. People came. Discharged.”

Her own statement to the hospital people reads: “I was drinking gin as far as I know. This is the first time I have had anything to drink for six months. I don’t know how many I had. I don’t remember. I suppose somebody knocked me around a bit.”

But the first hint of something darker and more appalling than mere scandal came now with a series of rumors and half hints. It was learned that Starr had been under the care of one or more psychoanalysts. It was also learned that there was something unusual in her approach to the problems of sex. Could it be that Mr Joseph Collins had been deliberately employed to take her to the hotel, not to beat her up, to be sure, but to give her, if possible, a normal sexual experience? And had her reluctance so infuriated him that he completely lost his temper? No proof of that, at any time. Because nobody ever heard of Mr Collins again.

Now her diary, which she called her “Mem Book,” was picked up by a policeman prowling among the hundreds of books in the little flat (good books they were, too—solid and thoughtful works for the most part). It was written in a sort of shorthand—no names of anybody, only initials—but even its fragmentary nature told clearly enough of a bitter, and frustrated, and indeed a ruined life. Its most interesting feature, to the tabloids, was that it contained passages of eroticism which even they did not feel disposed to print. But a set of initials cropped up persistently: AJP. Sometimes she hated AJP and sometimes she was affectionate in her references, but always she was frightened sick of him. “Spent night AJP Providence. Oh, Horror, Horror, Horror!!!”

It became news, for a day, that when she was nineteen she spent nine days under mental observation in a Boston sanitarium, and the record showed upon her release that she was “much improved.”

And there were some revealing dispatches from London. On one of her recent trips there she had been accompanied by her mother and her sister, Tucker. They had lived in cheap lodgings while Starr cut a swath in the town, wearing beautiful clothes, sharing the champagne and jollities of the giddier fringes of aristocracy. On her second trip, alone, she tried to commit suicide. She swallowed twenty-four grains of allonal, but somebody found her and she was revived.

Even the most cynical of the horde of men and women prying and picking into the brief twenty-five years of her existence knew, by now, that Starr Faithfull was not just another tramp. She was not just another by-blow of the speakeasies, nor a demimondaine like the celebrated Dot King and Louise Lawson who, also, had gone down to violent and early death in those treacherous times. Something about her was pitiful rather than sordid—perhaps even tragic. But what was it?

At this juncture of the affair I went calling one night on the Faithfulls. Thirty-five or forty reporters and photographers were gathered about the stoop, and I asked how one went about getting upstairs to the flat.

The only answer was, “You can walk, can’t you? But it’s hot as hell up there.”

Mr Faithfull was standing thoughtfully in the doorway of his living room, a big pipe in one hand and a volume of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
in the other.

“Come in,” he said. “I was just trying to determine the normal weight of the human liver. There are some things about that last autopsy report I don’t like, and I’d like to satisfy myself. Do you know how to translate grams into pounds and ounces?”

A very large photograph of Starr stood in a leather frame on a table, with a vase of peonies drooping over it. On the table, too, were several volumes on criminology and one on anatomy, and a pad of yellow foolscap with much writing upon its top sheet.

“The answer to everything lies in that veronal,” said Faithfull. “We’ve got to know exactly how much was given her.”

“You think she did not take it herself?”

“Nonsense!” He wrote more figures on his pad.

Mrs Faithfull came in—a thin woman with what we used to call the touch of good breeding upon her, wearing a nervous smile and offering hospitality in words that tumbled over each other.

“I’m quite relieved it is just you,” she said. “We thought it might be the police to take Tucker away. One of the reporters told us an hour ago that they were coming to arrest her. We thought he was just saying that to see what reaction he would get, but we were a little upset anyway. That man Edwards out there is likely to do anything to keep his name in the papers. So Tucker went back and got into bed. She was going to say she was too ill to move.”

“Would it be possible for me to meet Tucker?”

“Why, certainly.”

(Remember that I had never been in the Faithfull home before, never met one member of the family before.)

She led me back through a dark little passageway to the room the two girls had shared until the week before. Tucker was propped up in bed reading a book—not the newspapers—and she was very steady in the nerves.

“What can I do about these?” she began, and threw a handful of telegrams out upon the pink counterpane. The telegrams were from Broadway, from agents and movie scouts, from nightclub owners and vaudeville people. All of them begged for luncheon appointments, and all of them talked of wonderful contracts that were waiting to be signed. Tucker did not wait for my answer.

“I can’t take any of them,” she said. “It’s terrible I can’t take any of them up, because I’d do almost anything for that much money. I haven’t got a dime.”

Mrs Faithfull laughed gaily. “And we are the family of blackmailers the papers are talking about! They’ve told us in the papers how shabbily we live, how much rent we pay, how many bills are in the mailbox downstairs, and that we can’t even afford a telephone. Not very competent blackmailers, I would say—wouldn’t you?”

With the utmost coolness, Tucker began to talk about the newspapers. “Why is it, really, that they print all of that stuff? One of them said today that we were pals with Legs Diamond. I never heard of the man except in headlines, and neither have any of us. Do they really make up stuff like that? And half the things they print about Starr are perfectly ridiculous.”

I said, “Mr Faithfull talks too much to the newspapers. You ought to have a lawyer who could protect you a little.”

Tucker said, “We couldn’t pay a lawyer.”

Feet tramped on the stairs, and Tucker said wearily, “Well, I guess those police are coming after all.” But it was only a new detachment of reporters, who settled around Faithfull in the living room, and puffed pipes, and discussed his theories with him.

I stayed there in the back room for an hour, chatting with them. And our talk drifted far from the mystery and the dead girl who was the center of it—about books, about Europe and travel in general, finally about the theater. They were very fond of the theater.

“How did you like
Wonder Bar?
” Mrs Faithfull asked.

I confessed that I had found it dull.

“Well, now!” she exclaimed brightly. “Isn’t that an interesting reaction? It was the last show Starr saw, and we loved it but she thought just as you do. She said it was dull, too.”

Tucker asked, “What’s going to happen to all of us when the excitement dies down? Will they let us alone? Will we take up living again just like we lived before?”

Mrs Faithfull said, “There’s one thing you can say for all the excitement. It keeps you so worked up you don’t have much time to think that Starr is really gone, and isn’t coming back.”

Tucker looked up with a peculiar expression.

“Starr!” she said. And she did not smile.

The apartment was suddenly cleared of all such intruders as myself. A dapper young newspaper reporter arrived, and he was a very special visitor who required privacy within the family circle. He had been engaged to write Mr Faithfull’s own personal narrative for a press association—a literary undertaking in which Faithfull declined to share the profits.

As its chapters began to appear, the confusing character and actions of Starr Faithfull were clearly explained at last. She had been seduced at the age of eleven by a middle-aged Bostonian of wealth and prominence, with whose children she was accustomed to play at the beach and in the parks. Her seduction had been accomplished by the use of ether, and thereafter she had become something of an ether addict. The relationship with this man had persisted for a number of years and it had obviously had a profound effect upon her. She went through periods of “queerness” which her family could not understand at all—periods when she refused to go swimming because she would not expose herself in a bathing suit, indeed insisting upon ankle-length skirts and even upon boys’ clothes—periods when she would not associate with any of her young friends and spent days at a time alone in her room.

At last, after two nights in a New York hotel with this man, when she was still in her teens, she told her mother all about it.

The villain of the piece was identified by Faithful in his story as “Mr X.” But it did not take long for those who had read the girl’s diary to associate this individual with the “AJP” so often referred to in its pages. And, almost as quickly, a man was located whose name fitted the initials. He was Andrew J. Peters, former Congressman, former Mayor of Boston, and a distant relative of Mrs Faithfull’s.

It was certainly true that Starr had played with his children, that the two families had seen a good deal of each other, and that he had been alone with Starr on many occasions. Next it developed that the Faithfull family had been paid a considerable sum of money for signing a formal release to some unnamed individual, quitting him in lengthy terms of all liabilities for damage done to Starr. Faithfull said that the sum was $20,000, and that all of it was spent on medical and psychiatric care for the girl. Other reports indicated that the sum was about $80,000, and that it had been the source of the Faithfull family’s income for years. The firm of Boston lawyers which negotiated the payment and release had only one comment: “If Faithfull wants to say that it was only $20,000, then we’re satisfied to let it rest at that.”