The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (10 page)

“The detectives of the Central Office have very little faith in the case against Mrs. Nack,” the paper insisted. The
World
found a few men who knew Guldensuppe—including drugstore owner Franz Werner,
now profiting nicely by both papers—who were
willing to testify that the body was not his. Alas, only one of them had actually been to the morgue to see it. A more serious challenge came from a woman identifying the headless body as belonging to
her
man, a soldier named Alpheus Clark, whom, she claimed, was killed “by a Spaniard named Julian.” She seemed utterly certain of this, until a few probing questions were asked.
Mrs. Clark, it turned out, had been caught up in a divorce with her now-missing husband and was trying very hard indeed to have him declared dead.

The coroner was not impressed by her story.

While the
World
kept rowing in circles, Hearst had more men shuttled over into the morgue to make positive identifications on the body, and blitzed the Murray Hill Baths with
Journal
reporters. A picture was beginning to emerge of Guldensuppe and his fate. He was a ladies’ man, his boss said—“
always mixed up in several affairs” with women, so much that it was a running joke that he’d get into trouble someday. But the man who really knew Willie’s secrets—his best friend at work—was his fellow masseur, Frank Gartner. And when the
Journal
reporters sat down with Frank, a whole new story began to unfold.

THEY WORKED LONG HOURS
there in the baths, nearly naked, sweating, feet calloused from the heated marble floors. And between jobs, they’d get to talking—especially about women and money. The previous Wednesday night, Frank said, Guldensuppe had a name on the tip of his tongue, and asked him if he’d ever heard of a Long Island town that sounded something like
Woods
.

“Well, there are three that I know of,” Frank offered. “Woodbury, Woodhaven, and Woodside. Do you recognize any of those names?”

Guldensuppe wasn’t sure, but he’d find out. On Thursday night, he told Frank just what
Woods
was about.

“I think,” he confided, “that I am going to make something good out of that Long Island matter. A woman whom my wife performed an operation on about two years ago and for which she gave my wife four hundred dollars cash came to our house again this afternoon and told my wife that she would need her services again. She
is a pretty little woman, twenty-two or twenty-three years old, and she’s married to an old man.”

Frank didn’t need to read between the lines much. Everybody knew
the illicit service that some midwives quietly provided: abortion. And in an old-fashioned May-December marriage, it wasn’t hard to guess why the young wife needed one.

“This
voman
owns a small house on Long Island,” Willie continued in his accented English, warming to the subject. “Her husband did not know that she owned the house, and I think she used it as a rendezvous. She told my wife that she had no ready money, but that she would sell her this house in Woodside for $1,500 cash. The remainder would, of course, be my wife’s fee.”

It was the deal of a lifetime, and Willie didn’t have to do anything but go and look at the house with his wife.

“How do you get out there?” he asked Frank. “I think my wife went there this afternoon.… If she likes it, why, I’ll go out there tomorrow afternoon.”

“I know a little about Woodside,” Frank offered. “If your wife does not want to go with you Friday afternoon, I’ll go over with you Saturday morning as soon as I get through here, and we’ll see if the place is worth $1,500.”

But in his mind, Willie was already buying the house. “This woman who owns the house is in a tight fix,” he theorized. “I am only going to offer her
vun
-thousand dollars for the place. I’m tired of working here.”

And with that, there was a call on the phone for him.

“Is that you, Gussie?” he answered. After a happy pause, Willie came back over to Frank, beaming. “It’s all right,” he said. “She was there today with a friend of hers, and says the house is well worth the money. I will take tomorrow night off and go there with her.”

The masseur worked the rest of the night quietly, happily contemplating the new home awaiting him. When he finished his shift, he turned to Frank and the other masseurs on his way out:
“Vell, good-bye, gentlemens.”

And that, Frank said, was the last anyone ever heard from William Guldensuppe.

WHEN CAPTAIN O’BRIEN MADE IT
to the office on Thursday, July 1, he found that he was a captain no more. Word had come down from the top: He’d
finally been promoted to acting inspector.

It was a strange morning, amid all the backslaps. O’Brien wasn’t born to the force like some men were; he’d spent his first few years out in the world as, of all things,
a composer of novelty tunes. It was a local pol who talked him into trying for the police force. A life of patiently arranging notes and an easy familiarity with saloons had given him, oddly enough, just the right mindset for a good detective.

This morning he was orchestrating for an audience of one;
on the table and chairs in O’Brien’s office lay a revolver, a saw, a broken knife, and a washing boiler dismantled from a Ninth Avenue rooftop. Before these implements, sweating and tight-lipped in the rising heat, sat Augusta Nack. O’Brien had arranged the tools into an accusatory choir, facing her from whichever way she looked, while he questioned her about the events of Friday, June 25.

But Nack still wasn’t budging.

“She is,” marveled a
Brooklyn Eagle
reporter, “
the most cold blooded woman in the world.”

Her nerve was a thing of wonder, so much so that
alienists wandered in and out of O’Brien’s office to scrutinize Nack for telltale facial characteristics of criminal degeneracy. Doctors, after all, now looked for the devolution of mankind; they had neatly flipped Darwinism
on its head, and then measured that head with craniometer calipers. They sought the inherited stigmata of criminal tendencies, and
Evening Journal
readers were treated to close-ups of Mrs. Nack’s prominent chin, her ears, and her “dull and shifty eye.”

Another doctor, though, observed the interrogations more quietly.

“
I made an especial study of her facial and bodily peculiarities,” Dr. Edward Spitzka told a
Herald
reporter. He was the city’s top alienist, famed for discovering “
masturbatic insanity” and for
presiding over the electric chair’s rather messy debut. And while Dr. Spitzka didn’t know whether Mrs. Nack was guilty, he knew she had a guilty
look
. “A very coarse-minded animal creature,” he pronounced. “Brutal, frozen and stolid, extremely selfish, with small mentality, yet with a certain amount of low cunning.”

He listed the damning evidence: “Her ears are her most animal features. The lobules are of the short, stumpy, fleshy variety so often seen in state prisons and penitentiaries.… A pyramidal neck.… Her hands are remarkable for their breadth. In the old times an examiner in obstetrics would never have passed a medical student as being fit for that branch of medicine if the measurement of the hand at the finger line extended beyond three inches.”

She had masculine hands, in other words—and bad ones at that.

“
Did you know,” a reporter ventured, “that she has never reported a live birth to the Bureau of Vital Statistics?”

Spitzka knew perfectly well what the reporter meant. “She might have been in the habit of disposing of the bodies of children stillborn or prematurely born in exactly the way in which she disposed of Guldensuppe’s body,” he agreed. Her likely sideline in abortions, he surmised, was why O’Brien’s gambits were doomed. “
I cannot understand how detectives could expect such a clumsy trick to succeed as showing the severed legs, the suspected tools and the wash boiler to a woman whose occupation has long deadened her.”

But Inspector O’Brien was undeterred. He had detectives in hot pursuit of the
Journal
reporters headed for Woodside, and he still had one more surprise to spring on the midwife. A dignified gentleman in dark clothing was ushered in to the office, his bearing speaking of his profession; he was Mr. Streuning, the undertaker Mrs. Nack hired
her surrey from. He’d identified her from a lineup and could point officers to the very carriage and horse that she’d used.

I did not hire a surrey
, the lady insisted quietly.

Did she not even know who this gentleman was?

Not at all
.

O’Brien was flabbergasted.

“
She is a decided liar,” he informed reporters afterward. She dissembled at every opportunity. Why, she’d returned the carriage the previous Saturday night with the complaint that the horse was balky—even though the animal was exhausted and sweating and the carriage muddy from a long run. And now she claimed that she’d never met the undertaker in her entire life? This very undertaker, the inspector explained, was a longtime neighbor and acquaintance of the Nacks, all the way back to when Herman and Augusta had
lost their own five-year-old daughter to diphtheria. And he was not just any old acquaintance, either.

“Streuning buried a child of hers,” he said incredulously.

HEADQUARTERS WAS
the usual mess of cases the rest of the day:
a servant girl who let burglars into a bandleader’s house on Seventh Street,
a would-be parachute inventor found dangling comically from a bridge arch,
a severed black-stockinged leg netted from the East River. And there were the suicides—
the druggist who hanged himself from a hotel transom, the lovelorn young man in Harlem who turned on the gas—there were always those.

The inspector paced his office and stayed focused on his subject.

“You will remember,” he mused aloud to colleagues, “Mrs. Nack told me she had seen Guldensuppe three or four times on Friday, and that the last time he called to see her was on Saturday afternoon between three and four o’clock. That was the time she said she gave the man fifty dollars.”

Before him in his office was a prim, dark-haired woman in her thirties and her angelic blond ten-year-old daughter, Amelia. And in these two witnesses, O’Brien saw the midwife’s doom.

“
My name,” the mother began, “is Sophie Miller. I have known
Mr. and Mrs. Nack for about five years. I worked for the Nacks in their delicatessen store on Tenth Avenue.”

After the Nacks’ business and marriage both went under, Miller became a cook at Buck’s Hotel but stayed close to Gussie. She knew Willie Guldensuppe well, and even knew about the fight he’d had with their boarder “Fred” back in February. The boarder was a silent and brooding sort, she said—a barber, apparently—and had been thrown out by Willie months ago.

“The last time I saw Willie was on Thursday,” she recalled. “He came into Buck’s and went upstairs with Mrs. Nack.… On Saturday night I went shopping in Eighth Avenue and took Amelia with me. We stopped at Mrs. Nack’s house between 9 and 9:30 p.m. and rang her bell, but got no answer. A lady standing at the door of the house next door said … ‘I don’t think you will find her home. She has been out all day. I saw her shade down and her windows shut.’ ”

When she ran into Gussie later that evening at a grocer’s down the street, Guldensuppe was nowhere to be seen.

“She said, ‘Willie has not been home since Friday.’ I said, ‘What is the matter? Have you quarreled?’ She said, ‘No.’ Between 1 and 2 p.m. on Sunday Mrs. Nack came to Buck’s.… We were all at dinner when she came in and Mr. Buck invited her to join us. We all asked her did she hear anything from Willie. She said: ‘No, not since Friday.’ ”

O’Brien was triumphant; he’d caught Nack in another lie. Better still, Sophie Miller knew the real name of the mysterious boarder called Fred. A lurking
Journal
reporter caught it, a scoop so close to press time that
Hearst’s print room hastily jammed the two crucial words into the one remaining opening in the layout—the front-page headline:

THERE WAS NOBODY
that night who needed a shave less than O’Brien’s old partner, Detective James McCauley. The new inspector’s right-hand man had
spent the afternoon working barbershops for leads on Thorn, and barbers being the kind of fellows they were,
the best way to really get them to talk was over a shave. By the time he reached Vogel’s Barbershop on Forty-Seventh and Sixth, Mac had taken so many straight-edge shaves around Midtown that his face was raw with razor burn.

He took a deep breath and got into the barber’s chair once again.

Vogel’s was the sort of men’s sanctuary one expected in a good Manhattan barbershop. It was redolent of cigars and bay rum, with leather-covered barber’s chairs and a wall of long mirrors. The counter before them was well stocked with the myriad tools of the trade: Diamondine straight razors, Sanasack strops, tubes of Benitz’s Waxine, bottles of Rezo Hair Tonic, jars of sweet-clover pomade, and heliotrope brilliantine. Nearby a shelf held dozens of enameled shaving mugs, elaborately emblazoned with customers’ names and insignias of their professions: firefighters, bartenders, butchers. There were ruffled copies of the daily papers and the inevitable barbershop bible—the illustrated weekly
Police Gazette
—always full to bursting with boxing, murder, and cat-fighting dance-hall girls.