Free The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins Page A

upstairs, asmall trapdoor in the ground floor of the stairwell. It led to a basement, where their torches shone upon a motley assortment of barrels and stray wooden planks; against the wall stood a large wooden display cabinet, one of its doors fallen off onto the floor, filled inside with an array of bottles. An eerie spot, perhaps, and yet there was no particular sign of any scuffle or recent activity.
    Upstairs was a different matter.Neighbors watched from the adjacent buildings to see a hatch atop Werner’s roof thrown aside. Then, climbing a ladder from the top of the stairwell, officers and reporters emerged onto the roof, blinking in the sunlight. Normally the only noteworthy attraction up there was a small Werner’s Drug Store billboard, but on this day a more humble object caught their attention: an overturned tub. It was exactly what one might need to boil a body. They grabbed it as evidence, though not before Hearst artists ran up a sketch of the suspicious tin hulk for the paper.
    Looking down from the rooftop, they could see anavenue that was turning increasingly chaotic; word had gotten out, and police were holding back more than just competing reporters now. But in the neighboring tenements and stores, resourceful newsmen from the
World
, the
Times
, and the
Herald
were all conducting their own searches—and finding plenty. An undertaker’s assistant up the block, GeorgeVockroth, had rented a horse and surrey to Nack on Saturday morning; she’d come by at ten a.m. to arrange it, and then a mustachioed German stopped by at three thirty p.m. to pick it up. It wasn’t Guldensuppe, though; this fellow was shorter, moodier, and darker-haired. Mrs. Nack’s other neighbors had a notion of who that mightbe. They murmured that
another
boarder had lived in the apartment for while—a mysterious German barber known only as Fred, though that wasn’t thought to be his real name. Mrs. Nack had been more than friendly with
both
of her boarders, until backin February when Guldensuppe had beaten his rival so badly that the barber was left with a black eye. He had moved out after that.
    But if “Fred” was back, why was he picking up carriages on behalf of Mrs. Nack? Back inside her kitchen, the detectives had a good guess. One of them reached into the recesses of a cupboard and found that it was not empty. His hands emerged holding a butcher’sknife, a broken saw, and then a revolver. And held up to the light, by the hammer of the pistol there appeared to be a dried spray of blood.
    WORLD
REPORTERS WERE TAUNTED all the way to Mulberry Street by Augusta Nack’s visage staring out from belowthat evening’s
Journal
headline:
    MURDER MYSTERY SOLVED BY THE JOURNAL
Mrs. Nack, Murderess!
    Crowds of commuters swarmed the pint-sized newsboys to grab precious copies of the
Evening Journal
. The paper, ginning up the publicity, ostentatiouslysent out beefy guards to tamp down any riots by customers. To complement four full pages breaking open the case and the sensational find of the legs that afternoon, Hearst also whipped up portraits of everyone from Augusta and Herman Nack to William Guldensuppe and the oilcloth seller Mrs. Riger. That night he’d outdone the police, he’d outdone the
World
, and he’d very nearly outdone himself.
    “When patting oneself on the back for a recent achievement, it is a reprehensible thing to boast,” the tycoon began modestly. “But in an instance like an overwhelming victory over its rivals in the Guldensuppe murder case, the
Journal
comes to the front, sweeps the curtain away from the mass of doubt connected with the case, and exposes almost every detail of the crime.” If his neighbors onNewspaper Row still didn’t get the message, Hearst was happy to elucidate: “All this was done, of course, with the main purpose of exhibiting the
Journal
’s superiority over its rivals.”
    Inside police headquarters, evidence kept piling up. The telegram in Mrs. Nack’s apartment, dated from