The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (2 page)

On the rocks before them was a human arm. Two arms, in fact. Two arms attached to a muscular chest—and nothing more.

THE POLICE KNEW
just who to blame.

Medical students
, they muttered as they examined the sawn-off torso. The riverside boys had dithered for half an hour over the grisly and headless find, deciding what to do—though Jack had hastily tossed his knife into the river, afraid of catching any blame. But there was no real cause for alarm; a patrolman arrived and dragged the parcel up onto the dry pier, followed by two detectives from the Union Market station. In no great hurry, they eventually put in a call to the coroner’s office to note that the med students were up to their usual pranks. The city had
five schools that were allowed to use cadavers, and parts of them showed up in the unlikeliest places: You’d find legs in doorways, fingers in cigar boxes, that kind of nonsense. By the time the coroner bothered to pick up the parcel, it had been on the East Eleventh Street pier for three hours, exposed to the curious stares of the entire neighborhood. Meanwhile, boys had eagerly taken to diving into the water trying to find, as one observer put it, “every floating object that might by any possibility be part of a human body.” They gleefully dragged waterlogged casks, boxes, and smashed timbers onto the pier, but alas, nothing more.

The morgue driver finally arrived. He wrapped the cloth back around their gruesome find, tossed the whole package aboard his wagon, and trundled it away with a signal to his horse.
The city had yet to buy its first horseless carriages; it had been only two years since the first one had been seen in New York, and they remained such a rare sight that Manhattan still hadn’t even recorded its first auto fatality. Every other kind of fatality, though, ended up where this one did, fifteen blocks north in Midtown, at the morgue’s squat brick building on Twenty-Sixth Street.

They all came here: any skipping child struck by a dairy wagon, any organ grinder downed by apoplexy in the middle of Central Park, any wino found expired in a Bowery gutter, any sporting gentleman
stabbed in a saloon. The Bellevue morgue was the haunt of the dead and the deadlined; newsmen were always around, because with about twenty unclaimed bodies a day thudding in—more during a good cold snap or a heat wave—you were always guaranteed some column inches for the late edition.

Even before the latest heat wave, Bellevue had been especially rich in news; its old
morgue keeper had been arrested after twenty-seven years of illegally selling bodies to the local med schools at $5 a pop—selling so many, in fact, that he’d accumulated a $100,000 fortune on his morgue salary of $60 a month. The lowlier attendants were more cheaply bribed. A cigar or a pouch of shag
tobacco would get a reporter the run of a windowless building some sixty by eighty feet wide, lined along one side with marble slabs, the other with chest-high tiers of cooled body drawers.

To wander through this library of corpses was a dubious privilege. The dead room’s only respite from the gloom came from a single skylight, and the occasional nudge from a
resident tomcat. There were no fans, and flies buzzed constantly over the marble slabs where the latest deliveries reposed naked, awaiting identification. A thin mist of icy water was kept running over the slabs in an ineffectual attempt to keep the bodies fresh and to shoo the flies away. The effect was that of a dark, dripping cave filled with the broken bodies of Manhattan. It was, by universal assent, the most miserable place in the city. Worst of all were the mangled and bloated remains of bridge jumpers and failed swimmers pulled daily from the river.

“
That horrible place—God!” novelist Theodore Dreiser would later recall of his days there as a
World
reporter. “Daily from the ever-flowing waters of New York there were recaptured and washed up in all stages and degrees of decomposition the flotsam and jetsam of the great city—its offal, its victims, its
what
?”

The
who
and
what
were always the questions for these nameless corpses. But the source of the oilcloth-covered bundle that had arrived that evening was not so hard to guess at.

“Medical students,” an attendant seconded, noting its arrival in the ledger.

Probably cut from one of their own bodies here in the morgue,
maybe off a cadaver sold just a day or two earlier. Well, now whoever it was had come back. They’d wait the
obligatory seventy-two hours, of course, and then send it on to
the coffin room, where another attendant hammered together cheap plank boxes. Anyone left unclaimed for three days went there—the body photographed, the clothes stored for laggardly friends or relatives to make a later identification, any money or jewelry on the body quietly pocketed—and then the newly filled coffins were disgorged out the back of the building onto the pier. Each day a dead-boat pulled up for a final stygian journey up the East River to a waiting trench in the potter’s field on Hart Island.

That, no doubt, is where this misbegotten parcel would go, and nobody would ever hear of it again.

BY THE TIME
Bellevue superintendent Dr. Thomas Murphy and city medical examiner Dr. George Dow arrived on their evening rounds, there were reporters from the
World
, the
Herald
, and the
Evening Telegram
all gathered in the morgue, waiting for their day’s quota of Dreadful Cases and Awful Tragedies. They’d already gotten a good one out of Bellevue that day when Diamond Jim
Brady forcibly checked his mother in to the insane ward next door. But the reporters could always hope for more, and as the two doctors made their obligatory check of the day’s casualties, they froze before the river parcel, exchanging significant looks.

Dr. Murphy closely examined the oilcloth-wrapped package: the well-muscled chest and shoulders of a white man, its arms folded across in an X with the hands lying on its shoulders. The head, wherever it was now, had been rather raggedly hacked off at the larynx, while down below, the torso had been cleanly cut under the fifth rib.

“
There is a mystery here,” Dr. Murphy muttered cryptically.

Dr. Dow nodded. He felt the tone of the body’s skin, and lifted the arms to reveal that an irregular horseshoe-shaped chunk had been sliced away from the chest. But it was the saw marks at the neck that most immediately caught his eye.

“No medical student would have done this,” he announced. It was simple, Dr. Dow explained to the reporters: This body was no
more a med-school cadaver than you or I. “A saw, and not a knife, was used to sever the head and the body,” he explained. That was the mark of the untutored; professionals saw bone and slice flesh.

“I am pretty familiar with the methods employed by the different colleges,” agreed Bellevue’s superintendent. “None of them does this kind of work. The removal of the flesh from the breast has a very suspicious look.” It might have been done, he ventured, to dispose of a telltale tattoo. But without a head or an identifying mark on the body, how could they describe it?

“Let me see …” Dr. Murphy brightened. “The height of the average man is that of arms extended and measuring from the tips of the fingers.” He turned to a morgue assistant. “Measure the arms and fingers.”

The assembled men watched as the orderly eased the headless trunk down from its drawer and laid it out at full length on the floor, then ran the measuring tape along the arms.

“Five foot eleven,” the assistant announced.

Dr. Dow continued to examine the body and added his own guess. “I would not want to be quoted as expressing a positive opinion,” he warned the reporters, “but I should think the man when alive weighed 190 pounds.”

The muscular body the oilcloth enclosed, the
Herald
’s reporter wrote in some admiration, showed “a man of magnificent physical development.” The hands were remarkably soft and uncalloused—genteel, even, with the nails carefully manicured. Dr. Dow pressed on the flesh of the arms and found it still soft and supple; he moved the fingers back and forth, and they yielded and straightened easily. Rigor mortis had not even set in.

Word spread quickly among the Bellevue buildings; a dozen physicians from the hospital piled into the morgue, each wanting to poke and prod the mysterious cadaver. The city’s coroner was roused from his house. But as for Dr. Dow, he’d already seen enough. The medical examiner stood over the severed trunk and rendered his professional judgment.

“The man of which this formed a part,” he informed the startled room, “was alive twenty-four hours ago.”

IT WAS A GLORIOUS
Sunday morning. Julius Meyer was home in
his Harlem tenement on 127th Street, enjoying a day off from his job as a mechanic.

“Papa,
let’s go cherrying!” pleaded his eight-year-old son. He could hardly say no, and so the father and his two boys—little Edgar and strapping teenaged Herbert—made their way up toward Ogden’s Woods. Getting there meant a forty-block train ride north to the Highbridge station, and then a ten-block walk into the northern reaches of the borough—out toward the Bronx, that drowsy region of farms, apple orchards, and placid dairies.

Up here, between a densely wooded crescent bounded by Undercliff Avenue and the Harlem River on one side, 170th Street and the Washington Bridge on the other, one could forget the city altogether. These were the hinterlands, thick with pines and huckleberries and cherries but scarce in people; you could stand on Undercliff Avenue for an hour or more without seeing another soul.
Just one house was visible along this lonely stretch of road, with nary another shack for a quarter mile around. As Julius and the boys wended their way into the woods—a good twelve-foot drop from the main road—it was as if they’d shimmied down into another country.

While Julius and Herbert pressed forward through the swatting tree limbs and the thick brambles, Edgar was able to snake through
the tangled brush and scamper ahead of them—too far, almost. They’d entered down by
Sedgwick and 170th Avenue, but Edgar, an ebullient boy, was charging into wild and thorny depths, far from any entrance.

Julius could no longer see his boy.

“Edgar!”
he called out. “Edgar?”

SUNDAY AT
the Highbridge station house was neither challenging nor especially rewarding police work—at least not for someone like Detective Arthur Carey. Once a rising star at HQ, he’d been caught in a department power struggle, knocked down a couple of pay grades, and exiled to the sticks. For two years Carey had been deprived of the murder cases he’d once landed downtown; testifying to packed courtrooms and seeing his name in the paper weren’t part of his job in Highbridge. “
I was walking a post,” he’d explain without irony, “where, according to police tradition, a patrolman helped tend the goats.”

That’s what
everyone in the department called it: Goatsville. It wasn’t on any map, but every officer knew where it was. Goatsville was where you got sent when you shook down a gambling house too hard, or busted a local ward boss in a brothel, or when your service revolver discharged in an unfortunate direction. For Carey, it was for hitching himself to the wrong star; a few years earlier, a corruption scandal meant that some heads had to roll. Carey hadn’t been implicated, but his mentor—the mighty Inspector Thomas Byrnes, the most famous police detective in America at the time—had stepped down, and another faction took over the Detective Bureau at the police headquarters on Mulberry Street.
Carey had been in Goatsville ever since.

Inside his station were Julius Meyer, his sons, and the parcel they’d accompanied on the police wagon. It was turning into quite the Sunday adventure for the two boys.

Detective Carey listened carefully to their story. Little Edgar, they recounted, had yelled back excitedly to his father from the foot
of Undercliff Avenue’s steep retaining wall. He’d found a peddler’s pack. There, on a small shaded ledge that jutted out just before the forest sloped away, was a tightly bound bundle, the sort that a linen or notions dealer might waddle under from one house to another, ready to untie it to lay out his wares. But it was heavy—
easily a hundred pounds. A tug on one end had drawn out a putrescent waft. Meyer didn’t know what it was, but he knew something was amiss. He left his boys to guard the find while he flagged down some mounted policemen. They’d needed a stretcher and towing ropes just to hoist the mass up from the ravine.

Detective Carey and Captain Thomas Killilea carefully appraised the package. The station
captain was another Byrnes appointee sent up to Goatsville. He’d been on the force since the Lincoln administration and held a double claim to the precinct: He was also tangled in yet another corruption fiasco just a year earlier, accused of renting out on-duty police to work as security guards at football games. The former police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt had tried pushing Killilea and his cronies out altogether, getting so many top officers under indictment one year that
the annual police parade was canceled. Still, even an old-timer like Killilea retained enough of a fondness for his old downtown beat to read of the latest doings beyond Goatsville. And to him, the red-and-gold-patterned oilcloth already looked plenty familiar; in fact, the captain knew exactly where he’d spotted it before. He’d seen it, he explained,
in that morning’s
New York Herald
.