Uncle John’s True Crime (19 page)

CHAPTER ONE: THE BODY

On July 28, 1841, the body of 21-year-old Mary Cecilia Rogers was found floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken, New Jersey. The discovery was shocking, not just because the body was battered beyond recognition (she could be identified only by her clothing and a birthmark on her arm), but because Rogers was famous in New York City. One of America’s first celebrities, she was nicknamed the “beautiful cigar girl.”

Until shortly before her death, Rogers had worked at a huge tobacco and cigar shop on Broadway. She had an unusual job: enticing men into the shop. According to legend, she was so beautiful that men would come inside just to see her, and wouldn’t leave without buying tobacco. Some of those admirers even published poems in local papers, singing of her charms. One besotted “poet” wrote, “She’s picked for her beauty from many a belle / And placed near the window Havanas to sell.” Other patrons were more talented, including New York City newspaper reporters and a writer named Edgar Allan Poe.

CHAPTER TWO: THE DISAPPEARANCE

By July 1841, Rogers had quit her job at the tobacco shop to help her
mother run a boarding house on Nassau Street. She had plenty of admirers there, too, including a sailor named William Kiekuck, clerk Alfred Crommelin, and the dashingly handsome (but hard-drinking) Daniel Payne. To her mother’s dismay, Rogers chose Payne and accepted his marriage proposal, though there were rumors later that the young woman was planning to leave him.

Until David Berkowitz called himself “Son of Sam,” the press called him the “.44 Caliber Killer.”

On Sunday, July 25, Rogers told her fiancé that she was going to visit her aunt, who lived uptown. She never made it. When she hadn’t returned home the next morning, Payne took out a missing-persons ad in the
New York Sun
. Reporters jumped on the story—search teams formed and started combing the city. But Rogers was nowhere to be found...until Wednesday, when her body was pulled from the river.

The coroner found strangulation marks on Rogers’s neck, and part of her dress had been torn off and tied around her mouth and neck with a sailor’s slipknot. Another piece of her dress was missing, and the coroner speculated that it had been used to drag the body to the river. He also noted that Rogers was not pregnant, she had been severely beaten and sexually assaulted, and her body still showed signs of rigor mortis (when a corpse’s limbs go stiff). He concluded that she’d been murdered on Sunday night, just after she left home, and that she may have been killed by more than one assailant, perhaps one of the gangs that plagued New York City’s streets at the time.

CHAPTER THREE: THE INVESTIGATION

The discovery of the beautiful cigar girl’s body launched an intensive inquiry to find out who had killed her. Some people thought she’d drowned accidentally, but that didn’t explain her injuries. One witness claimed to have spotted her on Sunday on the Hoboken Ferry with a “dark-complected man.” Daniel Payne and the other men she knew from the boarding house came under suspicion immediately; newspapers even published libelous stories accusing them of her murder. Payne had to bring witness affidavits to several city newspaper offices to get them to stop calling for his arrest.

About three weeks after Rogers disappeared, a woman named Frederica Loss, who ran a tavern in Hoboken near the spot where Rogers’s body was found, came forward and produced some stained, mildewed pieces of clothing that she said her sons had found nearby. The items looked like
things Rogers had owned—one handkerchief was even monogrammed with the initials “MR.” But no one could say for sure that the items had belonged to Mary Rogers, and there were rumors that the belongings had been planted to lure gawkers. Loss’s tavern had been doing a brisk business serving tourists who came to visit the site of Rogers’s demise.

Using DNA, the Innocence Project has helped free 214 people convicted of crimes they didn’t commit
.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE REVELATION

Despite having several leads, police couldn’t find Rogers’s killer. Every suspect they questioned (including her fiancé, Daniel Payne) had an alibi. But events began to take a strange turn. In October 1841, a few months after Rogers’s death, Payne walked to the thicket near Hoboken where Rogers’s clothes had been found. There, he penned a vague note about his “misspent life” and drank a fatal overdose of laudanum, a liquid form of opium.

Then, in the fall of 1842, one of Frederica Loss’ sons accidentally shot her. On her deathbed, a delirious Loss confessed that on that fateful Sunday, Mary Rogers and a doctor had rented a room in the tavern. Rogers was pregnant, Loss said, and she died in the rented room from complications after the doctor performed an abortion.

That story appeared in all of New York City’s major newspapers and churned up reader interest again. Police found nothing to corroborate the confession, but the case was back in the spotlight. Questions abounded: A botched abortion contradicted the coroner’s report that Rogers had died of strangulation. Had the coroner been lying? Or had the mysterious doctor tried to cover the whole thing up by beating Rogers’s body, simulating a strangulation, and dumping her in the river? Could the wounds from the abortion have looked to the coroner like sexual assault? Maybe Mary Rogers was planning to leave Daniel Payne after all, and when he found out about that and the abortion, he killed her in a fit of rage. Or was Frederica Loss simply a delusional dying woman still trying to drum up business for her tavern? No one knew, and no one ever figured it out. To this day, Mary Rogers’s murder remains unsolved.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE DETECTIVE STORY

In 1841 Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t yet the legend he is today, but he was an up-and-coming writer. He’d held jobs at various literary magazines and had published several short stories, including “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue,” starring that early fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin. Poe had always been attracted to stories of supernatural melancholy and horror, and Mary Rogers’s murder caught his attention. He decided to try to solve the case in fictional form, and to write a compelling story in the process. The result was “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” a three-part serial that appeared in a magazine called
Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion
in late 1842 and early ’43. Poe wrote later, “Under the pretense of showing how Dupin...unraveled the mystery of Marie’s assassination, I, in fact, enter into a very rigorous analysis of the real tragedy in New York.”

Poe’s story went like this: The body of a young woman named Marie Rogêt was pulled out of the Seine River in Paris. The young perfume-shop worker had been brutally beaten and died as the result of some kind of “accident.” Part of her dress had been removed and tied in a sailor’s knot, which was used to drag the body to the river. In the story, Dupin essentially “solved” the crime by implying that Rogêt had been killed by a “naval officer with [a] dark complexion.” But Poe never named names.

“The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was a hit for Poe, and so was the final Dupin story, “The Purloined Letter,” published in 1845. It also spawned an entirely new fictional genre: the detective novel, which turned crime-solving into literature.

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Defendant:
John Cracken, a Texas personal injury lawyer

The Crime:
Flaunting his wealth in public

Background:
In 1991 Cracken represented a disabled widow in a lawsuit against her husband’s employer, the Rock-Tenn Company. Rock-Tenn was a recycling company, and the man was killed in a baling machine. Cracken sued for $25 million, but Rock-Tenn’s case was so weak that there was talk that the jury might award as much as $60 million. Shortly before deliberations were to begin, however, some of the jurors happened to spot Cracken in the courthouse parking garage, driving a brand-new red Porsche 911.

The Sentence:
The jury awarded Cracken’s client only $5 million. Why so little? One juror explained, “There was no way I’m going to buy that lawyer another fancy car.”

Odds that someone caught shoplifting is a teenager: 50%
.

Since 1986 there have been 11 helicopter-assisted jailbreaks from French prisons. Three of them involved the same man
.

B
ACKGROUND:
Pascal Payet, a.k.a. “Kalashnikov Pat,” is one of France’s most notorious criminals. In 1997 he was arrested for armed robbery and murder after an attack on an armored truck, during which he shot a guard 14 times. Payet was sent to Luynes Prison in southeast France to await trial.

ESCAPE!
On October 12, 2001, a helicopter appeared above the prison exercise yard. A rope ladder was lowered, Pascal and one on other inmate climbed it, and the chopper flew off. The daring escape shocked French authorities and made headlines worldwide.

ESCAPE II!
In May 2003, Payet was still on the loose when he and some associates decided to go
back
to Luynes Prison (in a hijacked helicopter) to pick up a few friends. Two of the men belayed commando-style down to the steel net that had been put over the exercise yard after Payet’s previous escape, sawed a hole in it and dropped a ladder through, and three inmates, all cohorts of Payet, climbed up. The helicopter landed in a nearby sports stadium, and the men left in a waiting car. The three friends were recaptured a week later; Payet, some months later. In 2005 he was sentenced to 30 years in Grasse Prison in southeast France.

ESCAPE III!
On July 14, 2007, Payet escaped again—and again it was with a helicopter. This one was hijacked in the nearby seaside resort town of Cannes; it landed on the roof of a building at Grasse Prison half an hour later. Three armed men jumped out and overtook the guards, went straight to Payet’s cell, took him back to the chopper, and flew away. The chopper eventually landed at a local hospital’s heliport, and the men all disappeared. Payet was arrested in Spain two months later and is currently serving a lengthy sentence in a French prison. Where is the prison? Cautious French authorities refuse to disclose its location.

The FBI was created by Napoleon Bonaparte’s great-nephew
.

A few famous folks that got a bad wrap
.

J
OHN WILKES BOOTH (aka John St. Helen)

After he shot Lincoln, Booth was a fugitive for 12 days. The U.S. government announced that federal troops had tracked him down and shot him in a Virginia tobacco barn. Then, to prevent his gravesite from becoming a Confederate shrine, they quickly buried him in an unmarked grave at the Washington Arsenal. But this made people suspicious. Why so fast—were they hiding something? Was the man they buried really Booth...or had the assassin escaped?

Over the years, more than 40 people made deathbed “confessions” claiming they were Booth. One of these was John St. Helen. In 1877, thinking he was about to die, St. Helen confessed to a man named Finis L. Bates that he was Lincoln’s assassin.

St. Helen actually survived and lived until 1903. When he finally died, Bates had St. Helen’s body mummified and moved to his basement, where it was stored for the next 20 years. Then, when Bates died in 1923, his wife sold the mummy. It ended up in the hands of carnival operators who exhibited it as Booth until the mid-1970s. It then disappeared, and hasn’t been seen since.

ELMER J. MCCURDY

In 1976 an episode of TV’s
The Six Million Dollar Man
was filmed at the Nu-Pike amusement park in Long Beach, California. There was a dummy hanging from a fake gallows in the fun house; when a technician tried to move it out of the way, its arm came off at the elbow...exposing human bones. It was a mummy, not a dummy!

The film crew was horrified. The mummy’s face had been painted and shellacked so many times that the amusement park owners thought it was made of
wax
. But who was the mummy? And how did it wind up in the park?

There is a robbery in London every 4.5 minutes
.

The L.A. County coroner had one clue: The mummy’s mouth was stuffed with carnival ticket stubs. They were traced to Oklahoma, and, working with Oklahoma historians, the coroner finally identified the
body as Elmer J. McCurdy, a long-forgotten bandit. According to a 1993
Wall Street Journal
article:

The town of Guthrie, Oklahoma, paid for McCurdy’s trip back to the state and gave him a Christian burial. His grave (which has been sealed in concrete to ensure that it is his final resting place) is now the town’s biggest tourist attraction.

EVA “EVITA” PERÓN

Juan Perón was the president of Argentina from 1948 to ’54. His wife, Eva, a former actress and a crusader for the poor, was extremely popular. When she died of cancer in 1952 at age 33, Perón had her mummified and put on public display. The procedure took about a year and cost $100,000. Peron fell from power while his wife was still lying in state, and went into exile in Spain before he could arrange for her burial. Evita was put in storage in Buenos Aires. Then her body disappeared.

It turned out that anti-Perónists—making sure the body was never again used as a pro-Perón political symbol—had stolen the coffin, sealed it in a packing crate, and eventually buried it in a Milan cemetary. In 1971—19 years later—a sympathetic Spanish intelligence officer told Perón where his wife was buried. Perón had her exhumed and brought to Spain. When the ex-dictator pried open the coffin, his wife was so well preserved that he cried out, “She is not dead, she is only sleeping!”