The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins Page A
Authors: Paul Collins
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a week earlier.
“I clean my windows every Friday afternoon,” recalled Mrs. Nunnheimer, “and somewheres about three o’clock, I noticed while at this work the trolley car stop at our corner. I turned my head and saw a nicely dressed man get off. He held his hand out and received a small yellow hand bag from the lady who sat next to him, and then he gave her his hand and helped her down. What fixes it in my mind is that he was so polite and nice about it.
“In
fact,
” she added chidingly to her husband, “I said to my
husband
that night when he came home that I was jealous of such niceness and that I wished he had such
elegant
ways.”
Another neighbor said she’d seen a second dapper gentleman enter the house the previous Friday, well before the couple arrived.So
two
men had gone in there. Now that she thought of it, that seemed like a strange thing.
She’d only seen one come out.
WORLD WIDE HUNT FOR MARTIN THORN , the
Evening Journal
declared from the sidewalks as the detectives made their way back to the city. While they were gone, Inspector O’Brien had cabled Washington and asked the State Department to put out an alert for Thorn in all U.S. and foreign ports. Newspaper readers worldwide had been deputized into the dragnet:
WANTED —For the murder of William Guldensuppe, Martin Thorn, whose right name is Martin Torzewski. Born in Posen, Germany; thirty-three to thirty-four years old; about 5 foot eight inches in height, weighs about 155 pounds, has blue-gray eyes, very dark hair, red cheeks, very light-brown moustache, thick, and curled at the ends; slightly stooped shoulders, small scar on the forehead, and red blotches around the lower part of the neck. He is a barber by trade. Speaks with a slight German accent. Wore, when last seen, a dark-blue suit of clothing, a dark-brown derby hat, and russet shoes; is an expert pinochle player and a first-class barber.
Suspicious that Thorn had already fled the country, the inspector had his eye on two ships in particular.
“Cable dispatches have been sent to Europe this afternoon,” he explained, “for authorities to intercept the arrival of passengers on the steamers
City of Paris
at Southampton, and the
Majestic
at Liverpool, in order to cause the arrest of Martin Thorn, if by any chance he should have sailed.”
But the detectives had a different destination that night: the hulking five-story building at 410 East Twenty-Sixth Street, whereNYU maintained its newly built Loomis Laboratory. True, most police only resorted to a place like this when the third degree failed; tweezers were for the evidence that a nightstick couldn’t reach. Butthe forensics lab represented the future. Thefirst guide to preserving crime-scene evidence had been issued in Austria just a few years earlier, andthe first book on cadaver fauna—the hatching of maggots and other bugs on a body—was issued not long afterward in Paris. New spectroscopes could find arsenic in blood, and high-powered optics couldmatch the microscopic shells on a dead man’s muddy boot with a specific ditch.A careful practitioner might even extract the wadding from a gunshot wound—that is, the paper used in a cartridge to tamp down the powder—for if some old incriminating scrap had been reused to pack a homemade cartridge, he could read the writing on it.
For reporters and cops alike, the Loomis Lab was an intoxicating blend of theoretical science and visceral practice. It was the kind of place that, crammed with the latest instruments of pathology and detection, alsofeatured asphalt floors for easy hosing down after especially bloody cases. And for the expert on those cases, the detectives knew just where to take their evidence: the second-floor office of Dr. Rudolph Witthaus, professor of chemistry and toxicology.
With his round spectacles and an immense white mustache that drooped like tusks, he embodied one
World
reporter’s judgment of him: “Witthaus looks like a sea-lion.” But the
“I clean my windows every Friday afternoon,” recalled Mrs. Nunnheimer, “and somewheres about three o’clock, I noticed while at this work the trolley car stop at our corner. I turned my head and saw a nicely dressed man get off. He held his hand out and received a small yellow hand bag from the lady who sat next to him, and then he gave her his hand and helped her down. What fixes it in my mind is that he was so polite and nice about it.
“In
fact,
” she added chidingly to her husband, “I said to my
husband
that night when he came home that I was jealous of such niceness and that I wished he had such
elegant
ways.”
Another neighbor said she’d seen a second dapper gentleman enter the house the previous Friday, well before the couple arrived.So
two
men had gone in there. Now that she thought of it, that seemed like a strange thing.
She’d only seen one come out.
WORLD WIDE HUNT FOR MARTIN THORN , the
Evening Journal
declared from the sidewalks as the detectives made their way back to the city. While they were gone, Inspector O’Brien had cabled Washington and asked the State Department to put out an alert for Thorn in all U.S. and foreign ports. Newspaper readers worldwide had been deputized into the dragnet:
WANTED —For the murder of William Guldensuppe, Martin Thorn, whose right name is Martin Torzewski. Born in Posen, Germany; thirty-three to thirty-four years old; about 5 foot eight inches in height, weighs about 155 pounds, has blue-gray eyes, very dark hair, red cheeks, very light-brown moustache, thick, and curled at the ends; slightly stooped shoulders, small scar on the forehead, and red blotches around the lower part of the neck. He is a barber by trade. Speaks with a slight German accent. Wore, when last seen, a dark-blue suit of clothing, a dark-brown derby hat, and russet shoes; is an expert pinochle player and a first-class barber.
Suspicious that Thorn had already fled the country, the inspector had his eye on two ships in particular.
“Cable dispatches have been sent to Europe this afternoon,” he explained, “for authorities to intercept the arrival of passengers on the steamers
City of Paris
at Southampton, and the
Majestic
at Liverpool, in order to cause the arrest of Martin Thorn, if by any chance he should have sailed.”
But the detectives had a different destination that night: the hulking five-story building at 410 East Twenty-Sixth Street, whereNYU maintained its newly built Loomis Laboratory. True, most police only resorted to a place like this when the third degree failed; tweezers were for the evidence that a nightstick couldn’t reach. Butthe forensics lab represented the future. Thefirst guide to preserving crime-scene evidence had been issued in Austria just a few years earlier, andthe first book on cadaver fauna—the hatching of maggots and other bugs on a body—was issued not long afterward in Paris. New spectroscopes could find arsenic in blood, and high-powered optics couldmatch the microscopic shells on a dead man’s muddy boot with a specific ditch.A careful practitioner might even extract the wadding from a gunshot wound—that is, the paper used in a cartridge to tamp down the powder—for if some old incriminating scrap had been reused to pack a homemade cartridge, he could read the writing on it.
For reporters and cops alike, the Loomis Lab was an intoxicating blend of theoretical science and visceral practice. It was the kind of place that, crammed with the latest instruments of pathology and detection, alsofeatured asphalt floors for easy hosing down after especially bloody cases. And for the expert on those cases, the detectives knew just where to take their evidence: the second-floor office of Dr. Rudolph Witthaus, professor of chemistry and toxicology.
With his round spectacles and an immense white mustache that drooped like tusks, he embodied one
World
reporter’s judgment of him: “Witthaus looks like a sea-lion.” But the
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