CHAPTER 12 The Secret Plan
November 1910
Asbury Park, New Jersey
A day after Fred Farry carried the body of Marie Smith to police headquarters, the undertaker moved her again, this time to the home of her grieving parents on West Monroe Avenue.
It was the first time Peter Smith and his wife, Nora, had been reunited with their daughter in their home since she walked out the door and set off for school six days earlier.
There would be no service or memorial for Marie in Asbury Park, just a small wake, for friends and family only, in the Smiths’ home. Father Thomas A. Roche, of the Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit, presided over the wake. Nora Smith remained in a terrible state, barely eating or sleeping, but somehow she made it through the speeches and prayers. Afterward, she collapsed. A doctor examined her and said she was in “a precarious condition from shock.” He expressed a fear she might die.
The next day, Peter Smith got on a train and accompanied his daughter’s body from Asbury Park to New York City. He chose the 7:17 a.m. train to avoid crowds at the station. His wife did not make the trip.
In New York City, Smith went to a brief 10:00 a.m. requiem mass in St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in the Hamilton section of Brooklyn, where the Smiths lived before moving to Asbury Park. Smith’s father and mother were there. The next day, the Smith family crossed under the arched stone gates of the Holy Cross Cemetery in Flatbush. They stood in a line and watched as caretakers lowered Marie into Plot 23 in row D, off to the side of a small white chapel on the western edge of the cemetery, not far from the section where the city’s paupers were buried in graves dug hastily three feet down.
Marie’s casket was set atop the small casket that already occupied the plot. That casket held the remains of Marie’s brother John, dead at eighteen months from poisoning. The caretakers shoveled dirt over both wooden boxes, and the simple ceremony was done.
The Smiths were too poor to afford any kind of marker or stone, so Plot 23 remained a bare patch of earth.
The mood in Asbury Park, among police, merchants, and families, was anxious and grim. It was a town on edge. Just three weeks before Marie disappeared, the area had seen another terrifying crime involving a young girl—the kidnapping of four-year-old Mamie Patillo, snatched from the front porch of her family’s home in Red Bank, just north of Asbury Park. Elwood Minugh, Tom Williams’s interrogator, was the lead detective on the Patillo case as well, but her disappearance remained unsolved for two months, until the day she mysteriously reappeared on the same porch from which she was taken, with a broken front tooth and no information about her abductors.
In just one month, two local girls taken and no one made to pay. Townspeople locked their doors and windows for the first time. Mothers walked their children to and from school. The pressure was on the authorities to catch the killer, and an editorial in the Press sought “Swift Justice” for Marie Smith: “This case is one that calls aloud for vengeance. The honor of Asbury Park is at stake, and the public safety demands that the murderer be brought to justice.”
The task of swiftly bringing such justice fell mainly to a team of four—Police Chief William Smith; Robert Purdy, the coroner; John S. Applegate Jr., the Monmouth County prosecutor; and the clean-cut, genial county sheriff, Clarence E. F. Hetrick.
Hetrick grew up in Asbury Park and played right halfback on the town’s football squad. He looked sturdy and stalwart, like a sheriff should, but by nature he was a politician. He’d been elected and appointed up the career ladder, and in 1908, at the age of thirty-five, he won the office of county sheriff. Many considered him a crass opportunist. As sheriff, he was accused of plotting to charge the state thirty-five cents for every prisoner housed in city jails, rather than the customary ten cents. He escaped prosecution only because the plan fell through.
The county prosecutor, John S. Applegate Jr., had his own scandals. His father, John Applegate Sr., had held several state and county offices, and John Jr., with his neatly trimmed dark hair, unsmiling mouth, and serious stare, looked every bit the part of his father’s political heir. Then, in 1906, on the day of an election for Red Bank assemblyman, a witness claimed to see Applegate Jr. hand a thick wad of bills to the Republican candidate, Frank J. Manson, who in turn handed it to an associate, who then handed it out to voters. Applegate Jr. survived the accusation, and two years later assumed the office of county prosecutor.
Clarence Hetrick and John Applegate Jr. knew each other, having served together on the Red Bank Republican County Convention Committee. They were insiders, career men, and together managed law enforcement in all of Monmouth County, which covered the Jersey shore towns of Red Bank, Long Branch, and Asbury Park. Early on in the Marie Smith investigation, they both believed—as did Chief Smith—that Tom Williams was guilty. But five days into the case, newspapers began criticizing them for not having any other suspects besides Williams.
“Police Lack Conclusive Evidence Directly Linking Williams With Crime,” read an Asbury Park Press headline, likely written by Alvin Cliver. “Facts in possession of the coroner and police are now reported to be insufficient to warrant the continued holding of the negro suspect.”
In fact, the evidence against Tom Williams was entirely circumstantial. Williams couldn’t account for his whereabouts at the time of the crime, but neither had anyone spotted him near Third Avenue, where Marie Smith was last seen. The stains on the towel found where he was staying, and on his suspenders, had not yet been proven to be blood. There was no murder weapon, and no motive. Even Peter Smith could not bring himself to suspect Williams. Smith “had no quarrel with Williams at any time, and could conceive of no reason why he should do such a thing,” the Press reported. Even after police told Smith the murder was a crime of assault, not revenge, he didn’t believe Williams had done it.
There were also the bloody leaves found by Peter Smith and his boss, Randolph Miller, on one of their many searches of the woods. They said they picked up a trail of bloodstained leaves leading to the murder site, and the physician and part-time coroner Joseph Ackerman confirmed the blood on the leaves was human. That opened up the possibility that Marie Smith had been murdered elsewhere and dragged into the woods.
As a theory, this made more sense than the accepted thinking that Marie was killed where she was found, considering that teams of police officers and schoolboys had scoured that very spot more than once before the body was discovered. And if Marie had been killed elsewhere, that meant she had to have been hidden away for three full days, most likely in a house or barn or shed. If that were true, then Tom Williams, known to be itinerant, was less likely to be the murderer.
Finally, there was the suspect himself, who in several harsh interrogations had never wavered in declaring his innocence.
“His repeated assertions and the way he has borne up strengthen the conviction that he is guiltless,” the New York Tribune declared. The Camden Courier-Post wrote “Williams has told his story over and over again and been contradicted only on one material point”—whether he left Griffin’s bar at noon, as he insisted, or closer to 10:30 a.m., as two witnesses claimed. “Everything else he told us,” Police Chief Smith was quoted as saying, “has been substantiated.”
While there were no other official suspects, there were other leads and theories and people worth looking at. Some suspected Henry Litman, who owned the home in Whitesville where the Smith family had lived before he put them out for not paying rent. Witnesses had seen Litman and Peter Smith quarreling more than once, suggesting some kind of feud, but police learned Litman had a good alibi—he was carting ashes from the Hotel Ormond in Ocean Grove at the time Marie went missing.
Two other possible suspects were Max Kruschka and Frank Heidemann, who lived in the house at the corner of Third and Asbury Avenues—the spot where Marie Smith was last seen. Kruschka was a florist who had several greenhouses on his property, and Heidemann was the young assistant he hired just a month before Marie disappeared.
The men, both German-born, had different reasons for falling under suspicion. Heidemann lived on the second floor of Kruschka’s house, and had been on the property at the time of Marie’s disappearance. And Kruschka, fifty-one, was a known drinker with a history of violence. In 1904 he was jailed for chasing his wife from her bedroom while she was “in scant attire and barefooted at the point of a revolver,” reported the Asbury Park Press. The day after his arrest, Kruschka’s twenty-year-old daughter, Adelaide, told police her father had tried to rape her.
Police questioned both men and accepted that neither knew anything of the crime.
The biggest problem for Hetrick and Applegate was the lack of physical evidence implicating anyone. They needed to start over and re-canvass Asbury Park. Somewhere, something was waiting to be found. But Police Chief Smith simply lacked the manpower to conduct a more thorough investigation. Like most small-town police forces, Smith’s handful of officers was already overburdened by other crimes and duties. They often received help from county detectives like Elwood Minugh, but now, under increasing pressure, they would need even more help.
Five days after Marie was found, the team agreed that the prosecutor’s office would hire two detectives from outside the county. Applegate turned to the Greater New York Detective Agency, headquartered in Greenwich Village in downtown New York City.
The field of detective work was roughly one hundred years old, dating back to a French ex-convict, Eugène Vidocq, who started the first detective agency, the Brigade de la Sûreté, in Paris in 1811. The Greater New York Detective Agency, founded in 1900 by a secretive figure named John E. McKenna, was one of only fifteen detective agencies licensed by the state of New York. One classified ad described their services this way: “Reliable, daily habits of suspected persons ascertained; private matters confidentially conducted; operatives sent to all points; terms reasonable.” The agency also offered bodyguards, and ran ads looking for “Big Men.”
Most famously, the coal and railroad baron Harry Thaw, who suspected his chorus girl wife, Evelyn Nesbit, of having an affair with the famed architect Stanford White, hired the agency to provide twenty-four-hour surveillance of White for more than two years. White figured out he was being tailed and spent $6,000 to hire detectives of his own to follow the detectives hounding him. In the end, McKenna’s operatives found nothing to implicate White—which didn’t stop Thaw from shooting and killing White in the Madison Square Roof Garden restaurant in 1906.
Prosecutor John Applegate Jr. arranged for two Greater New York detectives—B. F. Johnson and George W. Cunningham—to come to Asbury Park at an eventual cost to the county of $1,289.48. The men arrived in town at 2:20 p.m. on Tuesday, November 15, six days after Marie disappeared. They met with Police Chief Smith and Detective Minugh for a briefing, then visited the woods where Marie’s body was found, and later the boardinghouse where Tom Williams was arrested. They reinterviewed Max Kruschka and Frank Heidemann but found nothing new. Kruschka had an alibi: he was away in New York City the morning Marie disappeared. As for Heidemann, one paper said, the detectives “have failed to pick any flaws in his story.”
Johnson and Cunningham also interrogated Tom Williams in his cell, waking him at 2:00 a.m. and lying that someone had implicated him. Williams told them what he told Police Chief Smith and his men.
“I swear by all my hope for the future that I did not kill this poor little girl,” Williams pleaded in his cell. “I knew her and liked her. I am only a poor black man that earned my living by chopping wood and doing odd work. My past record don’t show that I could be guilty of this crime.”
The detectives didn’t buy it. Just a few days into their stay in Asbury Park, one of them made it clear who he believed killed Marie. “Just so positive am I that the negro Thomas Williams is the murderer of Marie Smith,” he told a reporter, “that if he declared in the gallows that he was innocent of this crime, I would still believe him guilty.”
The detectives devoted the bulk of their time to searching the woods and the area around Griffin’s roadhouse, looking for the one thing they felt they needed to pin the crime on Williams—the murder weapon. “We have enough circumstantial evidence against the negro ‘D.W,’ ” they wrote in a report, “but must get some weapon, or someone who actually saw him in company with the girl.”
Were the detectives merely parroting the suspicions of the men who hired them—in effect, working backward from the assumption that Williams was guilty? There is no evidence they developed any other serious suspect in their time in Asbury Park. This focus on Williams did not sit well with at least one prominent person in Asbury Park.
Randolph Miller, owner of the rendering plant where Marie’s father, Peter, worked, had thrown himself into finding Marie’s killer as heartily as anyone else on the case. He spent hours personally searching the woods, and, after Marie’s body was found, hours going over all the evidence. He’d given Peter Smith time off with pay, and provided other comforts to the family. What bothered Miller most was that—despite some pushback in the press about police having no other suspects—the case against Williams continued to fall neatly into place. It all seemed too easy, too pat. Was he to accept that Williams was the killer simply because, as Police Chief Smith put it, Marie’s murder was “a Negro’s crime,” or because Williams had a bad reputation?
One bit of evidence, in particular, gnawed away at Miller—the mysterious burn marks on Marie’s nose and left ear.
What had caused them? Who had caused them? Could they simply be ignored as evidence? After studying the scars, the coroner, Robert Purdy, described “corrugation marks on the burn on the left ear, faint as the threads in a bank note. These marks correspond to the tracery on asbestos materials covering boilers and pipes.”
This convinced Miller that the burn marks on Marie’s nose and ear were a key piece of evidence. “It seems to me that these corrugation marks on the ear indicate that the body was placed for a time at least near a boiler or steam heating apparatus,” Miller told the Camden Courier-Post. “This would make it appear that the body was kept for a time in the basement of a factory or in a private house.”
It was more than a hunch, but less than a lead. Even so, Miller was determined to follow it. To do that, he knew he couldn’t rely on just Police Chief Smith and his men, or even on the two detectives from New York City. He had to bring in someone new.
Miller asked for a meeting with Smith, Purdy, and Hetrick. The prosecutor, John Applegate—who among all the men on the case was most convinced of Tom Williams’s guilt—was kept out of the meeting.
Miller made his case and said he would put up three thousand dollars of his own money to hire another detective. But, he insisted, this detective had to be independent. He had to be free to follow the evidence without any guidance from interested parties. Miller was persuasive. Under pressure to solve the case, Smith, Purdy, and Hetrick accepted Miller’s offer, and Hetrick even promised to contribute funds of his own. They agreed to keep the plan secret, both from the press and the prosecutor. No one but them would know about the new investigator.
Two days later, a slender, well-dressed detective named Raymond Schindler arrived in Asbury Park. He was twenty-eight, and he had never worked a murder case before.