The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins Page B

man was a real-life Sherlock Holmes, and a Sorbonne scholar. Witthaus could discourse on book collecting while detecting cyanide hidden in some mail-order patent-medicine stomach salts, or a fatal dose of arsenic and antimony in the moldering exhumed remains of a dead husband. The author of the standard text
Medical Jurisprudence
, Witthaus had quite literally written the book on science and crime. And yet he owed much to his fictional counterpart; it was the immense popularity over the previous decade of Holmes and Watson, after all, that had nudged the public into expecting some scientific acumen in modern policing.
    A trip to Witthaus was as good as a new Conan Doyle story, though, and detectives already knew his work well. Long before tracking down the oilcloth used to bundle Guldensuppe, DetectiveCarey had collared a physician suspected of poisoning his wealthy wife to feed his brothel-and-gambling habit. It was Professor Witthaus who’d gotten the goods on that one. He’d deduced that the wily doctor hadpoisoned his wife with morphine, and then applied atropine to her eyes to cover up the telltale dilation of her pupils.
    But the professor was also, well … peculiar.
    An ardent art and book collector, he was well known for possessing such gems as theoriginal handwritten manuscript of Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
. The story might well have been his own.Witthaus, it was whispered, could be a bit of a Mr. Hyde himself. Even as the detectives delivered their Woodside samples to the professor, Witthaus was battling an allegation of attempted murder. His wife was demanding a divorce because, she claimed, he’d been poisoning her. A bottle of malaria medicine he’d prepared for her was the damning proof: Under analysis, it had been found to contain a massively toxic concentration of quinine—a poison, as it happened, on which Professor Witthaus was the world’s greatest authority.
    But he was the best expert in the art of murder they had, even if he was a little
too
expert. They’d already brought him some suspected murder weapons the day before, and for starters, he could tell them that O’Brien had been going at it all wrong with his interrogations.
    This is not blood
.
    The pistol, saw, and knife found at Mrs. Nack’s flat on Ninth Avenue?There wasn’t a speck of blood on them, he determined. Thesaw and knife weren’t even the right fit for the cuts made on the body. It was no wonder that she had been so unimpressed when O’Brien made her sit in a room with the “evidence”: He’d laid out the wrong weapons. He might as well have tried to frighten her with tea cozies.
    The scrapings taken from under Mrs. Nack’s fingernails might prove useful, though; thatstrategy had secured a conviction six years earlier in the East River Hotel disembowelment of Carrie Brown, a Bard-quoting prostitute nicknamed “Shakespeare.” The case remained controversial. InspectorByrnes had publicly dared Jack the Ripper to set foot in his precincts, and some suspected that the fellow had crossed the Atlantic to take up his challenge. With his career on the line, Byrnes roped in a hapless Algerian sailor nicknamed “Frenchy” and had his scrapings and clothing analyzed.They revealed thetelltale viscera of dismemberment—bile from the small intestine, tyrosol from the liver—plus roundworm eggs, blood, and stomach matter resembling the corned beef and cabbage that the victim had eaten earlier in a hotel bar. Frenchy was sent to Sing Sing for life, though more than a few observers had been left unconvinced by Byrnes’s ulterior motives in using this strange new form of evidence. This time, though, there was less doubt; nobody was blaming the new inspector for this murder, and along with the mud and wood shavings from the Woodside house, such evidence might look convincing indeed.
    Still, they’d have to wait for results, and the warm summer air and firecrackers outside hinted at why: An