CHAPTER 37 “It Won’t Bring Her Back”
March 15, 1911
Red Bank, New Jersey
Once the third confession was in hand, Carl Neumeister, still in character, told Frank Heidemann what he was desperate to hear—that Joe Springenberg had agreed to bring him along to Honduras. Joe would get the tickets, and Carl and Frank would meet him in New York City the next day.
Meanwhile, one day after hearing Frank’s confession from the bordering hotel room, Ray Schindler took an 8:45 a.m. train from Atlantic City to Red Bank, ten miles north of Asbury Park. There he and Randolph Miller met with John Applegate, Sheriff Hetrick, and Elwood Minugh, the county detective who earlier in the case had grilled Tom Williams in a long interview. The physically formidable Minugh had always been the one to make the difficult arrests.
Now he’d been selected to arrest Frank Heidemann.
Schindler gave the room an update about the confession. Only days earlier he had nearly come to blows with Prosecutor Applegate, but now Schindler had been proven right, and Applegate dropped his resistance. He could not question the validity of the confession, not after so many people besides Schindler had heard it. After clinging for so long to Tom Williams as the killer, he gave up on the theory in an instant. That morning, Applegate petitioned James H. Sickles, a justice in nearby Red Bank, for an arrest warrant for Frank Heidemann.
While that was happening, Carl and Frank had breakfast at Child’s Restaurant in Atlantic City. Afterward, they returned to their rooms to pack for the trip to New York City. They traveled light, with only one small satchel each. They returned to Child’s for lunch and finally checked out of Young’s Hotel at 1:45 p.m. From there they went to the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad station at Missouri and Arkansas Avenues, and boarded the 2:10 Atlantic City Express to New York City.
They found seats in the smoking car, but not together; Frank sat one row behind Carl. He hung his black coat on a hook by the window and draped it partially across his face for cover. He was nervous. He handled the first part of the trip well, but when the train stopped in the town of Lakewood, just twenty miles south of Asbury Park, he panicked.
“By God, this train may go through Asbury Park,” Frank said.
Carl turned around in his seat and told him to calm down.
A few rows behind Frank, Samuel Peterson, one of Schindler’s operatives, watched and waited.
Not long after leaving Lakewood, at 3:52 p.m., the train stopped in the town of Farmingdale. Detective Minugh was on the platform and climbed aboard. He walked down the aisle, past Frank Heidemann, half-hidden behind his coat. Frank saw Minugh and recognized him. He whispered to Carl that they had a problem. Again, Carl shrugged it off.
Detective Minugh calmly took his seat next to Samuel Peterson.
“Where is he?” Minugh asked.
Peterson pointed out the target.
The train rattled up the eastern edge of New Jersey. Minugh got up and slowly walked back up the aisle. The seat next to Frank was open. Minugh sat down in the seat.
“Frank Heidemann,” he said quietly, “you’re under arrest.”
The German’s instinct was to deny he was Heidemann. But he quickly realized it was pointless. He knew Minugh, and it was clear Minugh knew him. He was trapped. This was it. The end of the line.
“He submitted quietly,” the Asbury Park Press reported.
Ray Schindler was waiting at the Red Bank station when the Atlantic City Express arrived at 4:18 p.m.
He watched as Minugh stepped off the train with the prisoner in his grip. Frank Heidemann had been Schindler’s obsession for four months, and here he was, in handcuffs, pale and shrunken. Minugh put Heidemann in a waiting car and drove to Freehold, to the same jail that held Tom Williams. There Heidemann was put in solitary confinement and watched over by guards. His suspenders were confiscated.
Carl Neumeister got off the train, too, and when Minugh drove away with Heidemann, his work for the day was done. He boarded the next train to New York City and slept in his own bed that night.
Word of the arrest quickly spread through Asbury Park. The town was struggling with an outbreak of German measles, and officials were considering closing the schools. But when an Asbury Park Press reporter—whom Sheriff Hetrick had allowed to witness the arrest—returned with the news that evening, it seemed no one much cared about measles anymore. The next day “little business was transacted here, for every tradesman, every housewife, nearly everybody else in the town were discussing the arrest of Frank Heidemann,” the New York Times reported. “Never before in the history of the town has popular interest been aroused to its present pitch.”
Before long, Marie’s parents, Peter and Nora Smith, heard the news, too. Though they had a new baby now, little Margaret, born two months after Marie’s body was found, they had not recovered from the nightmare of losing their beautiful daughter Marie.
“It won’t bring her back to me,” Peter said somberly of the arrest, “but we will have justice and that is what we ask for—only the justice the law gives, but that in full.”
A day after the arrest, Carl Neumeister was back on the job. Ray Schindler, it turned out, wasn’t done roping Heidemann yet. He had a solid confession, but he wanted one more thing to bolster his case against Heidemann—the murder weapon. Neumeister, resuming his role as a criminal, visited Heidemann at the Monmouth County Jail and spoke with him through a screened door to his cell. “Subject appeared broken in spirit,” Carl reported, “but relieved when he saw me.”
“What became of the hammer with which you killed the girl,” Carl asked him.
“It must be still in Kruschka’s place.”
“Joe says we have to get that, and he will pose as a reporter and swipe it. Describe the hammer so he can find the right one.”
Carl learned what he could about the weapon, and where it might be found, before Frank became paranoid. He believed a guard spoke German and was listening in on them. Carl promised to send him an attorney, and urged Frank to tell him everything, the whole story.
The attorney would be another Burns operative, Samuel Peterson. The following day, Carl returned to the jail with Peterson and introduced him to Frank. Once again, Frank assembled the grim pieces of the story of how he had murdered Marie Smith. But there were still several unanswered questions—the burn on Marie’s nose; the bloody leaves; the role Max Kruschka played in it all. Peterson pushed for more.
“Come on, this will never do,” he said. “We can’t take a story like that into court—they would laugh at us. Give me the straight story so I can figure out from the facts what arguments would work in your favor.”
Frank turned to his friend Carl.
“What does Joe think of this?” he asked.
“Joe thinks it would be for the best to give the whole facts to the lawyer.”
But there was not much more that Frank could tell them. He couldn’t account for the scattered bloody leaves, because he claimed to have murdered Marie on the spot where she was found. Maybe the wind blew the leaves about. And he didn’t know how Marie got the burn on her nose. He denied having taken her into the greenhouse and down in the furnace pit. Maybe, again, the wind had stirred up burning leaves elsewhere in the woods, and landed one on the child’s face.
As for Max Kruschka, and whether or not he’d been involved in the crime or in covering it up, Heidemann insisted that he hadn’t.
Back in Asbury Park, Kruschka heard about Heidemann’s arrest. The Asbury Park Press reporter delivered a copy of the rushed evening edition to Kruschka at his home. His reaction was shock.
“ ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,’ ” Kruschka repeated over and over, the Press reported. “ ‘Frank never did it, it can’t be. Never, never. I won’t believe it until I hear it from him.’ ”
Ray Schindler visited Kruschka in his home to ask about the hammer. He got nowhere. Schindler then sent Neumeister, posing as a reporter, to push Kruschka harder about where the weapon might be. Kruschka was friendly enough, until, suddenly, he wasn’t.
“He changed to a maniac and told me to leave,” Neumeister wrote. “I walked to the door where he blocked my exit, working himself into a passion and saying, ‘I know what you are after. You want the hammer that fits the wounds, but you won’t get it. You’ve got the wrong man.’ ”
Kruschka punched Neumeister on the side of the nose, and kept swinging at him as he chased him out the front gate.
Meanwhile, Samuel Peterson continued his ruse as Heidemann’s attorney, visiting him in jail and teasing what he could out of him. It seemed that Heidemann, slowly, grudgingly, was coming around to the reality that he might not be able to escape his predicament, that his shrewdness might not keep him out of the electric chair.
“If all else fails to get me free, and it’s certain I’ll be convicted and executed, tell Carl to bring poison to my cell,” he said to Peterson. “I will take my own life.”
Yet he wasn’t quite finished looking for a way out. He suggested his friend Carl could bribe the guards, or eliminate the big witnesses against him, Emma Davison and Grace Foster. “He doesn’t appear to care what means are adopted to get rid of them,” Peterson wrote. Even his friend Max Kruschka could be made to disappear.
“He will drink whiskey with anyone who will pay for it,” Heidemann said. “When you get him drunk you can do as you please with him. Anything to get him out of the way.”
Heidemann also expressed the rage he felt against Ray Schindler and his detectives. “I’d like to crack their heads,” he said, “and I will do so if I ever get the chance.”
The roping of Frank Heidemann had now gone on for seventy-seven days. It could have gone on for many more, if it had needed to. But Ray Schindler knew the time had come to end it.
There had been a kind of cruelty to it, especially now that Heidemann was a broken figure in a jail cell—but then the pursuit of justice, Schindler reasoned, wasn’t always a pretty thing. Most thought of someone like Heidemann as a monster, deserving of not a single drop of mercy or pity. But Schindler did not see Heidemann as a monster. He saw him as a man who had tipped over to the dark side. Monsters have no interest in redemption. Men do. Men, Ray Schindler believed, want to, need to, be brought back into the fold.
Heidemann did not yet know that he’d been so thoroughly deceived by a Burns detective. Schindler wanted him to learn it directly from him. He wanted to be there when it dawned on Heidemann that he’d been outsmarted, that his every last hope of wriggling out of his reckoning had been extinguished. In that moment of extreme and awful vulnerability, Schindler hoped, he might be able to get what he’d been seeking for so long—the unburdening of Frank Heidemann’s soul.
So, on March 25, Schindler traveled to Freehold, to the Monmouth County Jail, to the cell where his target would be waiting for him.
Schindler brought Carl Neumeister with him. The two men were taken to Heidemann’s solitary cell and led inside. Heidemann looked up at them and, in an instant, realized the deception that had ensnared him.
“He was overcome,” Schindler would write.
One newspaper was more descriptive. It reported that Heidemann, realizing Neumeister was working with Schindler, lost all composure and let out a wail of anguish and despair. “It was pitiable,” went the report.
Schindler allowed the horrible reality to wash over Heidemann and fully consume him. When he could, he refocused Heidemann on the events of November 9, 1910, the day he murdered Marie Smith.
Heidemann did not resist. He knew now that he was trapped. He admitted that everything he had told Carl Neumeister, and Joe Springenberg, and his attorney, Detective Samuel Peterson, was true. Schindler asked him to lay out the details of the crime once more, this time directly to him. The priest taking confession, the sinner baring all. Whatever he divulged, Schindler warned, could be used against him at his trial.
Frank Heidemann did as he was asked. He confessed again.
“Well,” he explained, “I’ll go to the chair anyhow.”
All told, it was the eleventh partial or complete confession that Schindler had pulled from him.
Five days later, Schindler returned to Heidemann’s cell with a typewritten statement. This would be Heidemann’s official, final confession. The statement was read to Heidemann, and he was handed a pen. The prisoner signed it, with Schindler and Edward Taylor, a county clerk officer, as witnesses. The roping was over. There was no need for any further deception now.
Freehold, New Jersey
March 30, 1911
I, Frank Heidemann, do hereby voluntarily make the following statement:
On November 9, 1910, I was employed by Max Kruschka, florist, as helper, and was residing at the residence of Max Kruschka situated on the northwest corner of Asbury Avenue and Whitesville Road, Asbury Park, N.J.
At about 10:45 a.m. on November 9, 1910, I was at work potting some plants and had stepped inside the entrance of the greenhouse to fix a flower box when I heard the dog bark, and placing the hammer which I was using in my pocket, I stepped over the hot beds until I reached a point on the driveway at the front of the residence near Asbury Avenue. While walking up the driveway, I noticed Mrs. Davison pass the Kruschka residence and she was still in sight walking west on Asbury Avenue when I reached the front of the house. I called the little dog back and as he crawled through the hedge, I noticed a little girl, whom I later learned was Marie Smith, at the point on the Whitesville Road near the first telegraph pole south of Asbury Avenue.
Prior to this occasion, I had never before seen Marie Smith, but when I did, I admired her and made up my mind to get her.
Hearing the dog bark, she turned around and looked back and when I beckoned, she retraced her steps until she reached a point on Asbury Avenue, west of Whitesville Road several feet.
Here I talked to her through the hedge which surrounds the Kruschka property.
I asked her if she wanted to take some flowers home to her father; she replied that she did, and as she turned to enter the yard by the driveway, I told her to go around the corner on Whitesville Road and that I would meet her at the back of the yard. I walked through the yard and met her in the roadway at the rear of the Kruschka property.
I told her I had lost my knife while cutting flowers in the woods and asked her if she would help me look for it.
I took the left hand of Marie Smith in my right hand, and she willingly came along with me.
We walked north on Whitesville Road to Ridge Avenue; crossed the street, and entered the woods at the junction of Ridge Avenue and Whitesville Road [top of Third Avenue].
We walked through the brush some distance, crossing a drift road.
Selecting a spot a short distance from the drift road, I asked Marie to lie down.
As soon as I had unbuttoned her drawers which were of a heavy material, and after turning them down in front, I ran my fingers over the legs and body.
As Marie was sobbing I placed her handkerchief in her mouth. She finally forced the handkerchief out of her mouth as I placed her stocking cap over her mouth, and tied her hair-ribbon tightly around her neck.
I then inserted my index finger into her vagina but as the opening was small I knew I would have some difficulty getting my penis into her vagina, so I took it in my right hand, and while moving my finger around in her vagina, I “spent” on the ground.
During this time I was in a kneeling position, but after taking my finger out and wiping the blood on the front of my sweater, I got up and as Marie was still struggling I grabbed her by the neck and choked her.
I then kicked her in the head, I believe it was the left side, and after turning the body over (face downward) I reached into my hip pocket, took out the hammer, and hit her twice on the head, crushing her skull.
When I left the body the head was towards the drift road and the feet towards Deal Lake. I walked toward the drift road (carrying the hammer in my hand, the handle hanging down between my fingers), turned to the right until I reached Ridge Avenue, thence to Whitesville Road [Third Avenue hill], and entered the Kruschka property from the rear.
After washing the hammer and my hands in the wooden half barrel which stands in the yard, and in which the goldfish are kept, I walked between the house and the barn and entered the greenhouse, where I placed the hammer back in the rack. I do not figure that I was absent from the Kruschka premises for more than twenty minutes.
After returning I went about my work as usual, and at lunchtime I ate with the housekeeper and Mrs. Jackson. There was no one else present as Mr. Kruschka and his son were in New York and Mrs. Kruschka was in Asbury Park at Mrs. Kruschka’s store.
I noticed that Marie Smith was dressed in a greenish colored dress, wore a brown overcoat and black stockings. She was slender and not well developed. I do not remember seeing any gloves belonging to her.
The scratches reported to have been on her hands and face must have been caused while she lay struggling on the ground.
I did not aid in the search for the body of Marie Smith at any time nor did I see it again after leaving the body on November 9th, although I went to the spot where it was found on Sunday.
A blanket was over the body, but I noticed it was in the same spot that I had left her after killing her.
Signed, Frank Heidemann
Ray Schindler had one final question for Heidemann, before he left with his signed confession.
“Why did you do it?” he asked.
Heidemann’s answer was simple.
“I don’t know.”