CHAPTER 7 19½ Atkins Avenue
November 1910
Asbury Park, New Jersey
Tom Williams fell under suspicion almost from the start. Not by police, who had been on the case for only a few hours, but by a young reporter who got the jump on them: Alvin B. Cliver.
It happened that Cliver and his wife, Belva, lived across the street from the Bradley School, in a home at 1203 Third Avenue that Cliver built himself. Early on Thursday, November 10, Belva looked out her window and saw a desperate Nora Smith searching the faces of children in front of the school. Later that morning, she asked Nora to come in for hot coffee, and she listened to the story of Marie’s disappearance. Alvin Cliver heard it, too, and set out to investigate.
Most of his life, Cliver had been more than he seemed. He was small and slender, just five feet and 115 pounds, yet he had strength and speed. Nicknamed “the Bantam,” he ran for two touchdowns against a team of U.S. Marines playing his Oreo Athletic Club. He was good at basketball and tennis, too. As a cub reporter at the Asbury Park Press in 1901, covering the arrival of notables at hotels and summer homes, he became the first reporter in the paper’s history to turn in typewritten copy, using a new, open-faced Munson typewriter with nickel-plated parts and a rubber striker that belonged to the publisher, J. Lyle Kinmonth, and that scared off the older beat writers.
That Thursday morning, after hearing Nora’s story, Cliver walked the streets and roads of Asbury Park, asking people if they had seen the girl. One of the first men he talked to, at 8:30 a.m., was Tom Williams. He found him chopping wood at the house of Delia Jackson, Marie Smith’s aunt.
Where were you yesterday morning? Cliver asked him.
Williams, according to Cliver, did not seem anxious to talk. But he gave his whereabouts anyway: he had been at the barroom at Griffin’s in the morning, before leaving to finish painting a house in nearby Oakhurst. After that, he walked to Delia Jackson’s Asbury Avenue home to resume chopping up a tree for her.
When did you get to Delia Jackson’s house? Cliver asked.
Williams said he got there at quarter to noon.
What about the rest of the day?
Williams said he spent most of the day sitting on the front porch of Jackson’s next-door neighbor, Mollie Williams, talking politics, and chopping the tree next door.
Cliver didn’t believe him. Something about Black Diamond’s story didn’t seem right. He set out to do more digging.
Tom Williams knew the Smith family, and he knew Marie Smith.
After the Smiths were evicted from a home in Whitesville for not paying rent, they temporarily moved in with Delia Jackson in her home on Asbury Avenue. At that time, Tom Williams and another contractor, James Wright, were doing repair work on Jackson’s home. Most days, Delia and Nora’s children ran and frolicked outside the house as Williams did his work. “Marie was running around all the time, the same as my children were,” Delia would say. This is how Williams came to know her.
Marie’s mother, Nora, confirmed that her family was acquainted with Williams. “I would know him when he came into the yard,” she said. “He would say, ‘Good morning,’ and I would answer back.” Her three children came to be familiar with Williams, too. “They were friendly,” Nora said. “Marie knew him.”
In fact, Nora Smith was friendly enough with Williams to ask him to buy beer for her, which, apparently, he did. When Peter Smith found out about it, he sternly let Williams know not to do it again. That, in the eyes of some, amounted to a history between Williams and the Smiths. And the fact that Marie knew Williams suggested he could have more easily coaxed her to go with him than a stranger could have. Alvin Cliver had learned of this connection, and his suspicions about Williams were growing.
Yet Marie’s parents had no reason to believe Williams was involved. On Friday, November 11—with Marie missing for two days now—Peter Smith ran into Williams on the street and asked for his help searching a dumping ground off Springwood Avenue that evening. Williams agreed to go. Just a few hours later, Peter Smith got a tip that Marie had been spotted near the lake not far from Griffin’s barroom. He found Williams and changed their plan.
“Diamond, I ain’t going with you, can you go alone?” he said.
“All right,” Williams said, “I’ll go alone.”
The Ayers tip turned out to be nothing. The next morning, Friday November 11, Peter Smith went looking for Williams to learn about his search of the dumping ground. He couldn’t find him. Neither could Alvin Cliver, who had more questions for him. Cliver went to the police with his suspicions, and Chief Smith put an officer on Williams’s trail. The officer couldn’t find him, either. Police asked Peter Smith if he knew where Williams lived. He said he didn’t. No one did. Williams just came and went, and it hadn’t matter to anyone where he went when he left.
Now, it mattered.
While the search for Marie Smith continued, nearly three full days after she vanished, a new search, for Tom Williams, began.
That no one could find him only increased suspicions about him. Word spread that he was missing, and that brought out two new witnesses. They were John C. Conover and William Taylor, who told police they were sitting on an embankment on Ridge Avenue the morning of November 9. They remembered seeing Tom Williams leave Griffin’s barroom at about 10:30 a.m., and head in a direction that could have taken him to the very street corner where Marie Smith was spotted by Emma Davison, the last known person to see Marie alive.
Conover and Taylor put Williams in the area of Marie’s disappearance, at precisely the time she disappeared.
Now it was imperative for police to find him. Friday, November 11, passed with no sighting of Williams, and the next day was no different. Black Diamond hadn’t been seen in more than two days.
One day later, on Sunday, William Benson made his awful discovery in the woods.
That same evening, it was Alvin Cliver who finally tracked down Williams.
Cliver didn’t reveal how he found him; instead, he decided to bring Williams in himself. The reporter in him wouldn’t allow for turning the tip over to police and losing the scoop. Cliver telephoned a detective he knew, David Hankinson, and Hankinson called Randolph Miller, who owned the Flavel rendering plant where Marie’s father, Peter, worked. Miller agreed to drive them to the location.
Randolph Miller was playing a large role in the Marie Smith case. Fit and trim and tireless, he was one of the most influential businessmen in town. Besides owning the Flavel plant, he was a director of the Seacoast National Bank, the most important financial institution in Asbury Park. When Marie disappeared, Miller immediately gave Peter Smith time off with pay, and spent countless hours personally searching for her and making phone calls to neighboring police departments, asking for reinforcements and search dogs.
“I have a little girl of my own, about the same age as little Marie,” he later explained. “I am eager to bring the guilty man to justice.”
With Cliver’s tip, here was his chance.
On Sunday night, Cliver and Hankinson climbed into Miller’s sleek gray Packard. They picked up Peter Smith, who insisted on going along. The four men drove into the part of town known as “the colored colony,” on the western outskirts of Asbury Park. Cliver steered them to an address—a boardinghouse at 19½ Atkins Avenue. Miller pulled the Packard in front of a house that looked to be coming apart at the hinges. Peter Smith waited by the car while the other men headed into the home.
Inside, it was dark. There was no one in the front, no sign anyone was there at all. In a back room, they saw a man—a black man. When he stood up, they could tell it wasn’t Tom Williams. His name was William Wynn, and he was much older than Williams. The old man pointed down the hall, toward the rear of the home. The men made their way into the deepest part of the house.
Finally, they came to another small room. A man lay on an old couch in the dark, half dressed, half asleep. He saw the men and grumbled about the pain in his back. Here was Tom Williams.
The detective got him up, handcuffed him, and marched him out of the house. When Williams spotted Peter Smith out front, he said, incongruously, “Hey, Pete, how’s your health?”
“Hello, Diamond,” Smith said. “What are you doing here?”
Before they took Williams to police headquarters, the men searched the dilapidated house. Inside a barrel, near where they got Williams, they found a shirt, underdrawers, and a pair of overalls.
The shirt had stains on it that looked like blood.
They also found a towel and a blanket stuffed inside the barrel. These items, too, appeared to be stained with blood.
Evidence.
Then the short drive across town to the police station on Mattison Avenue, Tom Williams in his handcuffs, Peter Smith still numb with shock, Alvin Cliver already crafting a dispatch in his head, and the rough wheels turning, the process of justice begun.