The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (5 page)

“
A butcher may have done it,” Coroner Tuthill mused aloud. “Or, perhaps, a carpenter.”

Yet the scalding seemed to favor a butcher, and reporters and morgue employees alike could hardly keep from thinking of the Luetgert case—
a recent Chicago murder where a local sausage maker dropped his wife into one of his factory’s vats. Luetgert’s case was a peculiar one, since there was no witness and no victim left to produce. But this Manhattan mystery provided a horrifying and neatly packaged clue—a body with skin, a
Herald
reporter marveled, that was “
as white as marble.” That, the coroner explained, was because “the body had been washed, and the blood removed before it was wrapped up.”

But who would do such a thing? The victim might not have been drinking, a
Press
reporter suggested, but the killer surely had been. Not just to commit the deed, mind you, but to steel himself to venture into the Bronx woods at night. “His nerves must be of iron,” he speculated, “and probably he fortified himself with liquor for the ordeal.” Even just the sawing would have been exhausting, awkward work. On this the coroner spoke from some experience, after all—in cutting through the trunk, he explained, you’d need somebody to hold the arms so that they wouldn’t keep getting in the way. And that meant an accomplice.

Or, perhaps, an entire gang.

The
World
knew just the man to ask about the case: Andrew Drummond, the former head of the U.S. Secret Service.

These days he was running a detective bureau at the foot of Newspaper Row, and he’d been following the case closely. “I believe that this most atrocious murder was committed by a foreigner,” he huffed to a
World
reporter. Its ferocity, he deemed, was the work of men hailing from warm and lusty climes. “The murderer is a Sicilian, or possibly a Spaniard or Cuban. Maybe a Spanish spy has been put out of the way by the Cubans. The most likely one is that it is the result of a family feud among Sicilians. I know the ways of the Mafia.”

To Drummond, the clincher was the oilcloth. What murderer would call attention to his deed by wrapping it in lurid red cloth? Ah, but attention was the
point
with a Mafia hit. And of course, as Drummond reminded readers—“Sicilians love bright colors.”

Even as
scores of reporters were fanning out across the city, beating the bushes and shadowing the police along the riverbanks and in the Bronx woods, Drummond was sure of one thing: Whether the head was burned, buried, or sunk in the river, they wouldn’t like what they’d find. “When the head is found,” he warned, “it will be seen to be horribly disfigured.”

But where some saw horror, others sensed opportunity.

EVERY DAY OR SO
for the last couple of years on Newspaper Row, a mob of mustachioed, derby-hatted men would come tumbling out of a low brick building, the first of them saddling up onto their squeaking bicycles even as they ran, and then careening wildly past City Hall; then a second group, more raggedly bohemian with their leather portfolios and wooden camera tripods, would clamber aboard carriages and go clattering madly after the bicycles. Behind them, editor Sam Chamberlain could be heard roaring from his desk.

“Get excited.
God damn it,
get excited
!”

This was the Wrecking Crew.

The appearance of the Wrecking Crew meant just one thing: that a splendid story—a lover gunning his society sweetheart down on Broadway, a passenger ferry upending itself, or a rollicking downtown building collapse—was to appear in the next edition of the
New York Journal
.

You could tell when New York was having a peaceful day, it was said by friends, by how despondent
Journal
publisher William Randolph Hearst looked. But give him a murdered lad or tragic maiden, and Hearst joyfully revived. And a man dying at the hands of a maniac who scattered parts all around the city? He was ecstatic.

For their newly created
Evening Journal
edition—meant to be even saucier and more shameless than the morning
Journal
—it was pure homicide gold. What a way to launch! And so the word came down from the top: Do whatever it takes. Hearst editors
sent reporters off to tail detectives and swipe evidence from the scene if necessary, the better to run it in the
Evening Journal
first. Photograph the Meyer boys, map the spot where they found it, show the twine and the knots and the pattern of the oilcloth around the torso. Get diagrams of the nude body. Get graphics and put it on page 1. That morning the Wrecking Crew seemed to be rushing in and out of the
Journal
almost nonstop; it was like nothing anybody had seen before.

“
Events seem to indicate that men, like dogs, go mad at certain seasons,” Hearst mused as he surveyed the day’s news. There were
race riots in Key West, idiots
stealing electricity off high-voltage streetcar lines in Ohio, and two millionaires fighting over a
$15 dog here in New York. But this story,
this
was something more than ordinary madness. It was already getting picked up by the wires and running across the country. And so the order came from Hearst’s offices:
Hire four launches, and set them to dragging the bottom of the East River—immediately.

Find that head
, the chief wrecker commanded.

CAPTAIN O’BRIEN COULDN’T
ward it off anymore, not with every newspaper headline on his way in to the Mulberry Street headquarters yelling at him. After two days of hopeless stalling by the police, several detectives were sent trudging over to the morgue in the early-morning hours to take down names and addresses.

They had a long day ahead of them. The steps and wooden porch leading into the death house were
crowded with bereaved families—scores of people, all convinced their lost loved ones were inside—as
well as local curiosity seekers, lounging surgeons from the neighboring hospital, and legions of reporters. The detectives and the coroner
could barely make their way inside. The first two visitors to squeeze in gave their names to a detective as
John Johnson and Adolph Carlson of 333 East Twenty-Eighth Street. They were fellow boarders with Max Weineke. As men living in close quarters, they’d seen Max nude a number of times; there was a mole on his shoulder, they said. There wasn’t one on the body, so that settled that.

But then, marveled a
Herald
reporter, three “
Japanese—or at any rate, Orientals” pressed their way to the front and were led to the slab. They announced that it
was
Weineke. Who were they, and how did the three of them know a Danish scrap-metal dealer? They wouldn’t say. Another mysterious visitor correctly described, sight unseen, a surgical scar on the abdomen; the fact had not been announced to the public, and he was quickly led to the slab. He identified the body as Weineke; but the fellow wouldn’t identify
himself
, and promptly melted back into the crowd. So now they had five positive identifications of Weineke—four by men who refused to name themselves—and three negative identifications of the very same body.

The morning had only just begun at the morgue.

Next came the
presumptive widow of Mr. Robert Wood. She was regal in her floral-decked hat and dark mourning dress, waiting with her attending minister amid all the tumult and weeping outside. Wood, it seemed, was a Long Island City butcher who had gone missing after leaving his shop with a $150 bankroll in his pocket, and his empty wagon had been found abandoned in front of a Greenpoint saloon. His description, the location, the motive—they all matched the body pretty well. Mrs. Wood and the minister were led inside, and the headless and legless body—further decomposed and sliced into by two autopsies—was revealed to her. She fell into a dead faint.

It was too much—too much. She slumped into her minister’s arms and was carried into a morgue office and revived. She wanted to try again. There was a scar on his left hand, she recalled, and so the morgue attendants covered up the remains, leaving only the forearm and hand undraped on the table. Mrs. Wood and the minister
approached quietly, while the crowd inside kept keen watch from a close but respectful distance. She held the cold, lifeless hand in her own and examined the nails of the man she believed to be her husband—and a man with a distinctive scar on his middle finger. This body also had a scar on its finger … the index finger.

It is not him
, Mrs. Wood announced.

It was also not missing Mafia murder witness Agguzzo Baldasano; neither was it a missing young Mr. Levaire of 106th Street, nor the
Brooklyn gas engineer Charles Russell. But it
was
Brooklyn
bartender John Otten, or Brooklyn
printer John Livingston, or perhaps New Jersey carpenter Edward Leunhelt. The body also, apparently, belonged to a
Manhattan bricklayer.

“It is surely George,” his brother assured the morgue attendants.

On and on the identifications came, all day, like an endless handkerchief pulled from a magician’s pocket. Watching outside was a young man dandling an infant; when asked by a
World
reporter what he was doing there,
he refused to talk; all questions for him had to go through the gentlemen over
there
. The reporter turned to find himself face-to-face with the assembled forces of the
Evening Journal
. They were a formidable sight. Hearst was fond of giving his reporters bicycles, so that his crew were like another regiment of “scorchers”—the lunatics who barreled through city traffic on Sylph cycles, Lunol racers, and greased Crackajack bikes, their futuristic bronze headlights ablaze and slopping kerosene. There were enough of these wildmen riding up the sidewalks and getting horsewhipped by irritated carriage teamsters that Hearst retained a specially designated “
bicycle attorney” on the paper’s staff.

Cycles tossed aside, the Wrecking Crew pushed their way in. Their witnesses, they told detectives, were the nephew and niece of one Louis Lutz, a cabinetmaker who had disappeared from his Upper East Side home on Wednesday. His namesake nephew examined the left hand for a scar.

“
I feel sure it is my uncle’s body,” he proclaimed.

The attending detective wasn’t impressed.

“They are too willing,” he muttered.

“The finger of the dead man looks like my uncle’s marked finger,” young Lutz insisted—whereupon a morgue attendant leaned in and wiped away the scar with a rag. It had been a streak of dirt.
Now
was Lutz sure?

He wasn’t so sure.

As the Lutzes filed out, a hysterical woman passed them on the way in.

“
Oh, Dick! Oh, Dick, why did you go away and leave me?” she wailed, and was led sobbing over to the body. It was her husband, she moaned—Richard Meggs, a retired liquor dealer of West Fifty-Second Street. He’d left on Thursday for a card game with $500 in his pocket, never to return. When shown the scarred finger on the left hand, she broke down again. “Dick had a scar right there,” she sniffled.

The detectives and coroner’s assistants weren’t quite convinced. Did her husband have any other unique characteristics? Why yes, she recalled. Her husband had a very distinct scar on his groin. The attendants dutifully displayed it to Mrs. Meggs’s full view.

It was not Dick.

IN THE DOORWAY
of a redwood-paneled office at the
New York Journal
, a dapper young man could be seen
dancing a little jig. Then, as page proofs were laid out over the floor of the war room, he’d indulge in another little dance—tapping over the day’s stories, snapping his fingers like castanets. He might well dance: He was becoming the most powerful publisher in New York.

LOUIS A. LUTZ THE VICTIM?
his evening edition demanded. Lutz wasn’t, of course, but that hardly mattered. The important thing was that the
Journal
had a great story. “
The public,” he reminded his staff, “likes entertainment better than it likes information.”

A generation younger than Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst represented everything his Park Row neighbor was not: He was young, native-born, and the scion of a California senator and mining baron. Hearst seemed to have careless wealth written upon him, right down
to the
$20 gold piece he used for a tiepin. At Harvard he’d shown more interest in newsrooms than in his studies, and after presenting his professors with
piss pots emblazoned with their portraits, he was booted out of the school. But no matter; he slummed around as a freelancer for the newly launched
World
, carefully observing the business. Pulitzer, he believed, had invented a whole new way to make a fortune from journalism.

“
I am possessed of the weakness which at some time or other of their lives possesses most men,” he wrote to his father. “I am convinced that I could run a newspaper successfully.”

A decade later, he’d lifted Pulitzer’s ideas to remake the scrawny
San Francisco Examiner
into the country’s fourth-largest paper and bought the near-worthless
New York Journal
—“the
chambermaid’s delight,” some called it—to turn it into a juggernaut of high-speed presses and color graphics and sensational headlines. He mocked rivals as doddering dinosaurs stuck “
in the Silurian era.” His comics pages were blazingly ornate and complicated print jobs; perfecting them chewed through equipment, though demolishing new presses was a price that Hearst was happy to pay. “
Smash as many as you have to, George,” he instructed his printer. Now Hearst had the best color Sunday supplement in the country—page after page of
The Yellow Kid
, the adventures of
The Katzenjammer Kids
, and
Happy Hooligan
—“eight pages of iridescent
polychromous effervescence,” his paper boasted, “that makes the rainbow look like lead pipe.”

His headlines were equally colorful, especially for the wilder
Evening Journal
edition.
THE
MAN WITH THE MUSICAL STOMACH
, proclaimed one, while a particularly fine science story announced that
A GENIUS HAS CONCEIVED A PLAN FOR A MACHINE THAT WILL KILL EVERYBODY IN SIGHT
. A good headline could always be ginned up; even a bizarre old 1856 French undertaker’s patent for the “Application of Galvanoplating to the Human Flesh” might yield the splendid
DROP DEAD AND HAVE YOURSELF PLATED
. It wasn’t the best quality journalism, granted, but it was the best
quantity
journalism. At an unheard-of cover price of one cent, the paper could proudly display its motto: “You Can’t Get More News; You Can’t Pay Less Than One Cent.”