The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (25 page)

“Now it is claimed”—Howe lifted his fingers—“that on the first finger of the left hand there is a scar left by a felon. You have seen it?”

“Yes.”

Howe considered this for a moment. “By the way,” he said offhandedly, “have
you
ever had a felon?”

“Yes,” the morgue keeper replied innocently.

“Show it to me,” Howe commanded.

Newton held out his hand from the witness stand, and the towering defense counsel took it in a curiously courtly gesture.

“Now, isn’t that strange!” Howe eyed the morgue keeper’s hand and turned triumphantly to the jury.
“Your felon was on the same finger of the same hand!”

There was a gasp in the courtroom, then incredulous laughter as spectators considered their own hands. Why, some of them also had those scars on their fingers!

“No doubt,” Howe boomed delightedly, “there are thousands of cases
precisely
similar.”

The district attorney jumped up quickly to stem the courtroom’s laughter. “You have other bodies with such strange features as twisted toes, or moles in certain spots or scars in other spots, or possibly one of the five peculiarities you mention. But did you”—Youngs paused dramatically—“did you ever see a body
bearing all five marks
?”

“No,” Newton said plainly.

“That’s all.” Youngs smirked at Howe.

“One moment!”
Howe bellowed as Newton stood up. The morgue keeper sank back down dejectedly. The defense counsel leveled his gaze at the official, and took his most serious tone. “
Do you remember the case of … Aimee Smith?”

Newton recoiled slightly, as if struck. “Yes,” he said, and swallowed hard.

It was an infamous local scandal: Back in March, a young woman had been left to die of a sudden illness in a Third Avenue hotel, but the “Mr. Everett” who signed the hotel register as her husband was nowhere to be found. After days passed, “Mrs. Everett” proved to be the pretty young Hackensack Sunday-school teacher Aimee Smith—and “Mr. Everett” was identified by a porter as her married Sunday-school headmaster, Nelson Weeks. Fearing scandal, he’d fled the hotel and left her to become a Jane Doe in the Bellevue morgue.

“How often was
she
falsely identified?”

“Not at all.” The morgue keeper bristled. “I identified her as soon as I saw her.”

Bring back Isaac Newton tomorrow
, Howe demanded as the court let out for the day. He wasn’t finished with him just yet.

AS THE COURTHOUSE EMPTIED OUT
,
Journal
pigeon posts fluttered past the windows—the
first four pages of tonight’s issue would be devoted to the case, shoving aside every other national and international
story, including a
Spanish overture to President McKinley, a nearly unanimous
vote by the Georgia legislature to ban the “brutal” sport of football, and word that infamous outlaw “
Dynamite Dick” had been gunned down by lawmen in the wilds of the Indian Territory. With tomorrow’s witnesses slated to be a parade of doctors and professors, the capital circumstantial case was turning historic.

“
Interest in the case is not wholly that of a passing sensation,” a
Brooklyn Eagle
reporter admitted. “The legal aspects of it are scientific and important, and may be cited for precedents in many trials of the future.”

Howe, sparkling at the defense table, was quick to assure everyone that it would also be a historic
victory
. “
We will disprove nearly all of the prosecutor’s testimony,” he announced flatly.

It wasn’t just bluster, either: A
Herald
reporter had good word that
betting on Thorn now ran at roughly even odds. Sure, the evidence looked bad for him, but Howe had an impeccable reputation for beating the rap. Yet as they left the courtroom, there was another presence—up in the gallery—that was altogether more surprising.

Maria Barberi?

The ranks of reporters crowded around her. Barberi had been the first woman ever sentenced to die in the electric chair—and just a year ago, she’d been at the defense table herself, appealing a murder conviction. But she’d been freed by reason of insanity, since Maria slit her lover’s throat with a straight razor in what her lawyer argued was a “psychic epileptic fit”—a curiously selective fit, it must be said. The case was so sensational that it had
already been turned into a Broadway play. And now Barberi was a free woman, sitting in the gallery right beside the lawyer who had saved her from the chair: none other than Manny Friend, who was now representing Mrs. Nack.

In her round spectacles and a white floral hat tied under her chin with a wide bow, Maria looked for all the world like a schoolmistress. “I did not see the use of showing those awful pieces of cloth so many times,” she complained to the
Evening Journal
. It made her feel especially sorry for Thorn. “Every time they were held up my heart thumped, and I know that his did.”

Sitting in the courtroom with Barberi was cheap advertising for
Manny, and the message about Mrs. Nack’s case was clear:
If I got
Barberi off the hook, I can get Nack off, too
. William F. Howe was less impressed as he walked over and, towering over his fellow lawyer, sized up Manny Friend.

“
What are you
doing
here, anyway?” he asked.

It was a good question—and when the answer came later that night, the case would be turned upside down.

MANNY FRIEND SIMPLY HAD
no time for drama that night.

He’d tried. Shadowed on the Long Island Rail Road by reporters,
Mrs. Nack’s lawyer was followed into the city and to the Harlem Opera House. As rain and wind whipped outside the theater, Mr. Friend and his pursuers strode down 125th Street, past Hurtig & Seamon’s music hall, and then disappeared under a marquee reading
THE FIRST BORN
.

It was
a melodrama set in Chinatown—a tragedy of honor and revenge—but as the houselights dimmed, Friend fretted about the real revenge tragedy that had just played out before him back at the jail. The reporters out in the ornate lobby were surprised to see
Friend walking purposefully away, leaving before the show had even really started; his face was flushed, his movements nervous, his affect that of a man who simply couldn’t stay still.

Is it true?
they yelled as they ran after him.
Has she confessed?

Friend stopped in the lobby, stunned; but on second thought, it shouldn’t have been any surprise at all. Of course the jail staff couldn’t keep their mouths shut.

“She has made a full confession,” Friend stammered, looking deeply ill at ease. “I shall go home, disconnect my phone, and refuse to see any one or answer any questions. She has made a full confession. That’s all I can say.”

Within minutes on Newspaper Row, reporters from the
Times
, the
Herald
, the
Journal
, and the
World
were jumping onto streetcars to
wake up everyone from Captain O’Brien
to Sheriff Doht for reaction quotes. When reporters descended on William Howe’s house on Boston Avenue, though, they found it darkened and quiet; he wasn’t home.

But the
Herald
knew where to find him. Howe was still in his pajamas and nightcap when the
Herald
arrived at the lawyer’s room in the Park Avenue Hotel. Howe had allies at the paper—including, it was said,
a reporter secretly on his payroll—and they knew that during big cases he worked out of the Park Avenue. The luxury hotel off Thirty-Third was an
immense cast-iron castle painted a blinding white and lit up at night—precisely where one would expect William F. Howe to hold court. The imperial-sized lawyer waved the reporters into his suite, then paused to draw out a metal flask from his luggage.

“Yes, I’ve heard the news,” he sighed. “We got the message from Friend. I was in bed and asleep—dreaming of the ultimate acquittal of Thorn—when I was awakened by a boy pounding on the door. There is no doubt about it. Look at this.” He passed a
Herald
reporter a note sent up by the hotel’s phone operator:
Mrs. Nack has confessed and will be a witness for the state
.

Another knock came at the door—this time it was a
World
reporter, scarcely seconds behind his rivals. Stirred by his growing audience, Howe passed around the flask, lit a cigar, and soliloquized to the reporters.

“
I had the
most perfect case
that was ever worked up for a jury. Only today I had Dr. Huebner, a medical expert, go to the Woodside cottage and take the measurements of that bathtub. The doctor found that the tub was only two-thirds as long as the body of the murdered man
—if
he was murdered. Had he been placed there, only an expert in anatomy could have cut up the body.”

And there was his coup de grâce: Howe had quietly been serving, it just so happened, as
counsel … 
for Nelson Weeks
. The disgraced Sunday-school supervisor was up on a manslaughter charge, and Howe happened to know that morgue keeper Isaac Newton was a
friend
of Weeks’s. The body in the Aimee Smith case had
not
been quickly
identified by
Newton; it was identified by two detectives based on a notebook in the
body’s possession. It was assumed to be stolen until they visited Smith’s family, found the daughter absent, and matched the family’s photos to the unclaimed body at Bellevue. So when the morgue keeper said that he immediately identified Aimee Smith—his fugitive friend’s dead mistress—Howe knew the man was lying under oath. And if he could discredit Newton, then Howe could discredit
all
the physical evidence in the morgue keeper’s possession, for he had cannily established
during cross-examination that Newton was in direct charge of the Thorn case’s body parts.

Tomorrow, at one swipe, he’d have knocked the legs right out from under the prosecution—
if only Manny Friend had been patient
.

“
I cannot understand one thing.” Howe shook his head, after a long pause. “And that is how a lawyer who has a client with so little against her could permit his client to make a confession.”

“Were you surprised when you received the news?” a
Herald
reporter asked.

“I had a suspicion she might tell a pack of lies to save her own neck,” Howe replied grimly.

There was a stir at the door, and in staggered
Howe’s assistant, Frank Moss, disheveled from a nighttime sprint to the hotel; he’d been bowling down on Seventeenth Street when he got the news. A glance at the reporters in the room told him everything.

“Well,” Moss panted, “I suppose you have heard.”

“Yes.” Howe regarded his cigar thoughtfully. “What are we going to do?”

But it seemed a mere formality to even ask. Even as the sounds of the night ebbed away outside, the old lawyer was already working out his next move.

HOWE AND HIS TEAM
arrived at the courthouse the next morning amid a mad rush for seats; the confession was all over the papers. The wire services had picked it up, so that
Californians and even Londoners woke that morning to the news about Mrs. Nack. Spectators were pressing to get in, and when the doors were finally thrown open,
the
men in the crowd sprinted for the best seats, in the Right Gallery; fashionably attired women, slowed by their long skirts, took the Left Gallery.
Reporters and artists gawked at these “specimens of womanhood”—many of them being, a reporter noted dryly, “young … and not ill-looking.” Some had brought their opera glasses, and one beaming pair of beauties wore identical plaid frocks for the occasion. Their gallery bloomed with so many fancy hats that a
World
reporter dubbed it the Flower Garden.

Whispers flew around the women’s gallery that a heartbroken Thorn had committed suicide overnight, but this romantic rumor was dashed when the young barber was led in. Only Martin Thorn, in all the courtroom, had not yet heard the news; as he sat down at the defense table, Howe wordlessly handed him the
World
, opened to that morning’s front-page headline:

Thorn went pale and stiffly passed the newspaper back.

“
Augusta Nack,” announced the court clerk.

A roar rose over the courtroom as the side door opened.

“Augusta Nack!”
the clerk yelled over the commotion, and the star witness was guided through the packed room’s maze of chairs and tables. Mrs. Nack swept by Thorn without a glance,
smoothing her skirt as she sat down in the witness chair. She was clad in black—black dress, black lace, black straw hat, black ostrich feather—with sleek apple-green banding and silk gloves.
Her appearance, the
Times
sniffed, was “cheap and tawdry”—and yet, it confessed, “strong and sensual.”

“State your name,” the prosecutor began.

“
My name is Augusta Nack,” she said in accented English, and verified that she was a German immigrant married to one Herman Nack.

“Were you living with Herman Nack in June?”