SMITH AND JONES hustled to get their stories and pictures out, and the other reporters followed hard on their heels. While the Evening Telegram announced MARTIN THORN GOES CALMLY TO HIS DEATH, and the New York Sun chimed in with THORN MET DEATH CALMLY, Herald readers were treated to a different execution altogether: MARTIN THORN DIES IN ABJECT TERROR. The World, always solicitous of its female readership, declared WOMAN MEDIUM COMMUNES WITH THORN JUST AS HIS SPIRIT WINGS ITS FLIGHT.
“It was all for thy sake, Augusta,” they reported him calling out from the astral plane, “but I have forgiven and I died happy.”
One man, though, was not so sure of that. As the reporters quickly exited the stifling death chamber, a different sort of witness pressed past them to the front of the room. Dr. Joseph Alan O’Neill was a surgeon with the New York School of Clinical Medicine, and he looked keenly at the lifeless body still slumped in the chair. It smelled of singed flesh, for one of the saltwater sponges had dried out, causing a burn hole nearly an inch deep under the electrode on Thorn’s right calf. The body was still warm from the departed electrical current.
O’Neill opened his medical bag, revealing syringes and a ready supply of restoratives: nitroglycerin, strychnine, and brandy.
Shall I administer them? Dr. O’Neill asked the warden.
No, the prison official shot back. You may not. The law, the warden insisted, did not allow for resuscitation measures, but if Dr. O’Neill insisted on ascertaining that the patient was indeed dead, there was no language in the statute against that.
Then I will, Dr. O’Neill replied, and produced a stethoscope from his bag.
It was a tense moment. O’Neill was raising a delicate matter that few of the doctors still lingering in the room wished to acknowledge: that nobody was quite sure whether the electric chair actually worked. It had been introduced with great fanfare by the State of New York just eight years earlier, promising a new era of humane and instantaneous execution. But on the chair’s first use, condemned prisoner William Kemmler had been left still breathing, with brown froth pouring from his mouth; some said he’d also caught fire. The nine-minute ordeal left witnesses so shaken that one deputy sheriff emerged in tears. Thorn, only the twenty-seventh man to go to Sing Sing’s chair, faced a procedure that had hardly been perfected yet.
O’Neill bent over and rested the stethoscope on Thorn’s skin. There was a motion underneath—a faint thrill in the carotid artery. That, he suspected, might just be blood draining from the head down to the trunk. But there were other disturbing signs. With swift and practiced movements, the doctor examined the cremasteric reflex, which retracted or loosened the testes; it was still working. O’Neill then lit his ophthalmoscope and pulled back Thorn’s left eyelid; the pupil contracted beneath the blaze of light.
“If required, I should be very reluctant to sign his death certificate,” the surgeon announced.
It was an admission many physicians made in utmost privacy after these executions—but not in front of the public. The prison doctor pointedly ignored O’Neill and directed two attendants to carry the body to an autopsy room. Thorn’s skull and chest were quickly opened to reveal little of note.
Aghast, Dr. O’Neill fired off a dispatch titled “Who’s the Executioner?” to the Atlantic Medical Weekly. “The law requires post-mortem mutilation,” he noted. “It is, in fact, part of the penalty; for, as it reveals no cause of death and teaches nothing of interest to science, it is evident that its purpose is to complete the killing.”
Thorn suffered nothing less than a modern drawing and quartering, the surgeon charged, and another medical journal scorned the autopsy as “the prostitution of science.” But the debate remained a quiet disagreement among colleagues. Reading the afternoon papers, one might never have guessed this most appalling irony of the case: that carried into an autopsy room and cut apart while faintly alive, Martin Thorn had met the same fate at Sing Sing that William Guldensuppe once suffered in a Woodside bathtub.
THE EVENING JOURNAL lavished attention that night on the execution, right down to helpful anatomical close-ups of Thorn’s “Degenerate Ear” and “Pugnacious Nose.” It was the end of an affair that had been very good to them: The Guldensuppe case had pushed Hearst’s circulation past the World’s. He’d capitalized on this success with front-page attacks on crooked dealings in local trolley and gas franchises, stoked his paper’s capacity even further with a baroquely engineered Hoe dectuple multi-color half-tone electrotype web perfecting press, and then trumpeted the serial debut of “the most startling and interesting novel of modern times”—something called The War of the Worlds. But it was freeing the comely Evangelina Cisneros that had shown William Randolph Hearst that Journal readers needed more than just Martian invaders to root against. They needed a real war.
THE WORST INSULT TO THE UNITED STATES IN ITS HISTORY, his paper had declared after obtaining a leaked letter from a Spanish diplomat that described President McKinley as weak and easily led. “A good war,” the newspaper thundered, “might free Cuba, wipe out Spain, frighten to death the meanest tribe of money-worshipping parasites that has ever disgraced a decent nation.” But a good war needed a good excuse, and early in 1898 Hearst had gotten it: a mysterious explosion that ripped open the USS Maine while docked in Cuba, sending the battleship and most of its men to the bottom of Havana Harbor.
“Have you put anything else on the front page?” Hearst demanded in a dawn phone call to his newsroom.
“Only the other big news—” his editor began.
“There is no other big news,” Hearst replied. “This means war.”
WAR! SURE! MAINE DESTROYED BY SPANISH, the Journal announced. Neither war nor the culprit was a sure thing—many suspected a coal fire belowdecks had doomed the ship—but Hearst was not to be deterred. THE WHOLE COUNTRY THRILLS WITH WAR FEVER, his paper insisted, and he proudly coined a national rallying cry: “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” When McKinley finally declared war that spring, Hearst and his headlines left no doubts about their proud role in the matter:
William Randolph Hearst liked it very much indeed. Having already issued his Murder Squad badges to pursue Thorn, he thought nothing of the next logical step: He offered the U.S. military $500,000 to raise a Journal-sponsored army regiment. His offer spurned, Hearst spent the money anyway: the Wrecking Crew poured out of his Park Row offices, this time headed for the next boats to Cuba. The paper’s circulation, already the highest in the country when it had hit 300,000, now rocketed up to a dizzying half million, then a million, and then a million and a half.
It was now the greatest newspaper juggernaut the world had ever known.
Pulitzer was obliged to keep up, of course; he duly matched Hearst star Frederic Remington with his own Stephen Crane. The World charged that the Journal’s “war news was written by fools for fools.” The Journal jeered that the World was so jealous that it stole the Journal’s wire reports. To prove it, the Evening Journal ran news of the death of one Colonel Reflipe W. Thenuz; the next morning’s World ran a similar story on the ill-fated officer. Hearst’s editors gleefully revealed that there was no Colonel Thenuz; reversing the colonel’s first name and middle initial, though, revealed this message inadvertently run by the World “in cold type—in its own columns”:
We Pilfer the News
Hearst had yet another humiliating trump card, which he knew the frail and nervous Pulitzer could not match: He sent himself. Soon the U.S. Navy was treated to the sight of the newspaper publisher tearing around Havana Harbor in a convoy of chartered yachts.
MUST FIND THAT FLEET! he roared in giant front-page headlines draped in patriotic red, white, and blue bunting, while inside, his paper offered up summer dessert tips for homemakers that included such “warlike dainties” as Ice Cream Soldiers and Lemon Ice Cannons. (“You will swallow bullets—of chocolate,” it promised.) Hearst himself took to dodging actual bullets; after blithely ignoring press restrictions and taking some Spanish prisoners of war, the young publisher was spotted at the Battle of El Caney. A Journal correspondent, struck to the ground by a bullet to the shoulder, opened his eyes to see his own boss leaning over him, a ribboned straw hat on his head and a revolver strapped to his belt.
“I’m sorry you’re hurt,” Hearst beamed as the enemy rounds whistled past them. “But wasn’t it a splendid fight? We must beat every paper in the world.”
BACK IN NEW YORK, the Eden Musée was busy adding a score of patriotic new waxworks of Rough Rider charges and Manila Bay victories, and setting up pride of place for the latest in entertainment: the cinematograph. It had been scarcely a year since the first public cinema screenings in Paris and New York; not only did the Musée now have one of its own, its sign also announced the most eagerly awaited films of all: CINEMATOGRAPH WAR SCENES. While the war scenes were moved and spooled into place, other Musée staffers prepared a more familiar mannequin for a new scene down in its Chamber of Horrors. The Musée’s old star wax attraction would now be seated in an oak chair festooned with ominous wiring and leather restraints convincingly riveted to its frame. The exhibit bore a stark caption: “The Electrocution of Martin Thorn.”
Not many blocks away, the Empire Limited pulled in to Grand Central Depot bearing the genuine article; its baggage car disgorged a plain pine box, and handlers quickly moved it to a side entrance of the station, all under the watchful eye of a detective. There were worries that freak-show promoters might try stealing the remains, but so far the arrival of Martin Thorn had passed unnoticed and unannounced.
As a carriage bore the coffin toward Christian Herrlich’s funeral parlor off Eighty-Third and First Avenue, though, word raced ahead: He’s here. A thousand disappointed spectators had appeared at Herrlich Brothers’ doors the night before, only to find that Thorn hadn’t arrived yet. Even as the hearse drew quickly up the street, hundreds of onlookers were already gathering again. A dozen policemen from the Twenty-Seventh Precinct station house labored mightily to clear a path into the funeral home.
Out of the way! they yelled as the coffin passed through. Move along.
The undertaker barred the door to the surging crowd. Inside, sitting in the cool and darkened funeral parlor, was Martin Thorn’s sister with her daughter and husband; alongside them stood three barbers from Thorn’s old shop. They’d raised the money for their coworker’s burial, and Thorn was quickly moved from his prison-issued pine box into a more respectable casket with silver handles. Beneath his dark curls, his head still bore red electrode marks; his young niece wept at the sight, and bent over to kiss his face.
After a few minutes, the brother-in-law leaned over for a word in the undertaker’s ear. Herrlich open the door, and a boisterous line of New Yorkers poured in to view the executed man. As much as his exposed face, though, they gawked at the massive and luxuriant display of lilies of the valley decorating one end of the bier. It was a $45 delivery order—hardly the sort of expense the family or the barbers could have paid for. Who, then, had arranged for it to be delivered?
“Probably a woman,” theorized a Journal reporter.
The undertaker just smiled, and an explanation became clear.
“Mrs. Nack?” a Herald reporter ventured.
“I will neither affirm,” the undertaker replied, “nor deny your question.”
And then he smiled again.
MRS. NACK had been busy indeed. As inmate #269 at Auburn Prison, she woke up each morning at seven sharp to find herself alone in a cell that was secured not with the usual iron bars but instead with a three-inch-thick oak door with a peephole—for the building still bore some touches of its origins as a hospital for the insane. After dressing in a blue-and-white-striped uniform of coarse awning cloth, the former midwife then spent her day in the prison’s sewing room, where she labored quietly with other prisoners on a huge government order for 6,000 haversacks. She’d been a model prisoner, and for good reason: Soon she’d be able to earn the privilege of a bedside rug on her cell floor.
Word was leaking out, though, that while Thorn in his final days hadn’t wanted to talk about his crime, he did admit one thing: Mr. Nack’s wild charges about Gussie were true. She really had been disposing of fetuses in a kitchen stove and then dumping remains down a chute into the sewer system.
“He added,” a reporter noted, “that it was very profitable. It was practically all profit.”
A week after Thorn’s burial, the Journal pounced on a damning discovery: Augusta Nack was quietly trying to arrange from behind bars the sale of two parcels of land in Cliffside, New Jersey. It was hardly the work of a poor midwife who had claimed to have only $300 to her name.
“Detectives have always believed that Mrs. Nack burned the bodies of babies,” Hearst’s paper charged. “Now, after Thorn’s execution, like a confirmation of his charges, comes proof that Mrs. Nack is a woman of means.” The imprisoned midwife maintained a stony silence, though not before another newspaper wittily nominated her for a Hall of Fame statue under the sardonic inscription of AUGUSTA NACK, SURGEON.
Some, though, were studying Nack and Thorn’s methods more seriously. Mutilation murders now occurred with such alarming frequency that one medical journal declared that the Guldensuppe case had induced “Epidemic Hypnotic Criminal Suggestion.” When a sawn-off trunk bobbed up in the East River the summer after Thorn’s execution, the Times headline SECOND GULDENSUPPE CASE hardly covered it; there were also third, fourth, and fifth Guldensuppe cases. Still another trunk appeared on October 8, 1899: That morning, a woman’s leg was found carefully wrapped in recent issues of the World and the Journal and tossed into the gutter in front of 160 West Seventeenth Street. Soon her midriff bumped up against the Thirtieth Street pier, and her chest washed ashore on Staten Island, where it was discovered by a boy out gathering driftwood.
Station houses around the city emptied out as the NYPD threw 200 detectives on the case. The discovery of coal dust on the wrappings quickly led to a house-to-house rifling of coal cellars.
“Everybody that shows the slightest hesitancy will regret it,” one officer barked to a Sun reporter. “I will kick the door in and search every house on the block.”
Newspapers roared to life again with offers of reward money, and Bellevue’s morgue filled with would-be relatives; newspapers ran lists of missing women, and papers leapt at the clue that one of the newspaper wrappers had borne the small pencil notation of 16c. That traced the paper to a dealer named Moses Cohen, the “C” newspaper concession on Sixteenth Street. Another witness, the captain of the barge Knickerbocker, reported a chillingly familiar sort of suspect fleeing the scene near the Thirtieth Street pier: a German male, aged about thirty-five. It was looking like the efforts of the police and the newspapers would bust open an insoluble case once again.
“The methods are largely those which would have appealed to Sherlock Holmes,” the Brooklyn Eagle exulted. “The killers of Guldensuppe have paid the penalty for their crime and it is probable that within a few days we shall know who killed this woman.”
The comparison was turning startlingly apt, for it looked like another German midwife might be the accomplice. The Prospect Place coal cellar of Alma Lundberg was found filled with bloody rags and quicklime, and she’d abandoned the house hurriedly after the first clues were found—perhaps running from a botched abortion. But the lead went nowhere, and other clues proved to be the usual nonsense—an overexcited servant girl, a missing beauty who turned up alive in Scranton, and an encore appearance by “the Great American Identifier,” who this time gravely informed the police that the crime had been committed by two women.
There was also a more troubling development in the case. Examining the body, Deputy Coroner O’Hanlon determined that the cuts precisely matched those on Guldensuppe. Whoever had done this, he theorized, had been one of the many who had gawked at Guldensuppe’s body in the Bellevue morgue.
“I believe that the persons who committed this murder saw the body of Guldensuppe more than once,” the doctor warned. “The cutting up of this body is identical. These murderers copied Mrs. Nack and Thorn in everything.”
OTHER CURIOUS REMEMBRANCES of the crime surfaced in the years after Thorn’s execution. One of the first was a novel, Three Men and a Woman: A Story of Life in New York, by none other than the Reverend Robert Parker Miles, the minister whose young child had inspired the jail-cell confession of Augusta Nack. Along with the rushed-out Guldensuppe Mystery and the dime novel The Headless Body Murder Mystery, this became the third book on the case. Now living in Iowa, Miles restyled the crime a bit for his version; in his novel, the hard-drinking delivery driver Herman Nack became an earnest Viennese physician. But the story of a faithless wife who “plunges into a sea of gaiety” and then murder remained perfectly recognizable.
The real Herman Nack, though, was suffering even more than his fictional counterpart. “The death of Guldensuppe preyed upon his mind,” one reporter noted; he found it hard to hold down delivery jobs whenever his name was recognized. In 1903, almost six years to the day after Guldensuppe’s murder, Nack calmly abandoned his delivery wagon at the foot of Canal Street and drowned himself in the Hudson River.
The Woodside cottage proved nearly as ill starred. The modest home at 346 Second Street sat vacant for years after the last visit of the jury during Thorn’s trial, for the building’s reputation was so fearsome that the hapless Bualas were unable to rent it to anyone. The old bedroom upstairs where Guldensuppe was shot never quite recovered from the crime, either, for the district attorney had carelessly thrown the Bualas’ baseboards into a bonfire during a fit of evidence-room housecleaning—though not before saving the two extracted bullets for himself and turning them into a jaunty pair of scarf pins.
At least one other man was determined to remain unfazed by the house.
“We have already put one haunted house out of business,” Bill Offerman boasted to a Tribune reporter. As the president of the Brooklyn Society for the Extermination of Ghosts and Dispelling of Haunted House Illusions, Offerman and his fellow members—“thirty young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three”—had already rented and then camped out in a vacant Brooklyn home where a butcher had committed suicide. Armed with revolvers and lanterns, the Society held a weeklong stakeout to prove to fearful locals that the butcher did not, in fact, return each night to slit his own throat. Toward the end of the vigil, the bored debunkers amused themselves by testing out some new recruits.
“A skeleton in the dark hall, rigged up on wires, with electric lights for eyes, was enough to demonstrate that one young man was unfit for membership,” Offerman noted drolly.
Now, he declared, his tried and tested group was ready to take on the infamous Woodside cottage. Their efforts did not rid the house of its reputation for bad luck: A few years later, a new tenant set up a pet shop in the house, only to die of rabies from a dog bite. A wine seller named Peter Piernot had fared little better after preserving the bathroom upstairs “as it was on the day of the murder” for curious customers. In the dead of a November night, Piernot ran half-naked and screaming from the premises and leaped aboard the next train out of Woodside. Before being placed in an insane asylum, Piernot babbled in horror to the police.
He was running, he told them, from the ghost of William Guldensuppe.