A True Christmas Murder Mystery, Part One
Setting: New Jersey and Brooklyn, 1907
I hope you don’t mind a seasonally appropriate, old-timey true crime yarn from the turn of the century, because that’s precisely what I’ll be bringing to your inbox over the coming week or so, in a handful of serialized installments. It’s about a 1907 Christmas murder, which became a newspaper sensation of its day but has more or less been forgotten to time. (No Wikipedia entry for this one.) I decided to start digging into the so-called Lamp Black Swamp mystery last month, after stumbling upon it a couple of times over the years. My account largely draws on historical newspaper reports and various public records. I’ll shut up now and let you get to it. Hope you enjoy!
It could have been a good day for ice-skating, or so thought Irving Webster Crane, a brown-eyed seventeen-year-old out for a walk on the clear winter morning of December 26, 1907.
The residents of Newark, where Crane lived with his mother on Broad Street, had been blessed with a brilliant Christmas. Abundant sunshine drew thousands into the streets, where they ambled about the city’s bustling commercial district, strolling past Hahne’s department store and taking in the Gothic splendor of the Prudential building.
It was still relatively warm the following morning, about forty degrees. But a light northwesterly wind nipped the air. Crane wondered if there remained any ice thick enough for skating in the vicinity of the Lamp Black Swamp, a dreary expanse of backwater south of New Jersey’s Meadowlands, where the Passaic River begins to contort itself into Newark Bay.
Crane worked in a boathouse on the eastern bank of the Passaic, in the town of Harrison, which would earn its nickname several years later when William Howard Taft extolled it as a “hive of industry.” There, from an embankment of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the young boatman walked north along the edge of the swamp, a catboat bobbing in the river beside him. Before long, something caught his attention. Jutting out of the dark, oozy water, about thirty yards from the river, Crane saw two bare feet. Probably a discarded tailor’s mannequin, he thought, his curiosity piqued as he trudged through the soft earth toward the appendages. When Crane came within a few yards of his discovery, his curiosity turned to horror: the feet were undoubtedly human.
Crane got back onto solid ground and ran over to the shoreline near the anchored catboat, named the Idle Hour, where he found two men smoking cigarettes in the cuddy. They listened as Crane blurted out what he’d just seen, and then accompanied him to the site of the body. Together, they tugged the corpse from a shallow pond formed by overflow from the nearby river.
The three men peered down at the sight of a dead woman, probably between thirty and forty years of age, later described as “full and shapely.” She couldn’t have been submerged for very long, based on the relatively unspoiled state of her body, nor were there any obvious signs of fatal violence. But this was a grisly sight all the same, the woman’s cold, naked torso and limbs covered in the filth of the swamp. Crane composed himself and set off to alert the police.
A short while later, officials arrived to inspect the crime scene. Dr. Henry Allers, the deputy county physician, looked closely at the body. The woman measured roughly five-foot-four to five-foot-six, with a fair complexion, brown eyes matching her gray-tinged hair, and well-kept hands that appeared unaccustomed to manual labor. Allers found no significant wounds on the body, which couldn’t have been in the water more than twelve hours, he surmised. He harbored no doubt the woman had been murdered, but saw none of the external characteristics that would raise suspicion of poisoning. If Allers had to guess, strangulation was more likely. Scratches on the woman’s face, breast, knees, and elbows suggested that her body had been dragged by the feet, face down, over rough ground for a short distance, before it was shoved over a bank into the pond.
While Allers made his inspection, detectives rowed up and down the Passaic, examining the river banks and visiting boats moored along the shore. Some distance from the pond, they found a torn red coat trimmed with black velvet, bearing the name of Oppenheim, Collins & Co., a department store on Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn. Closer to the catboat lay a fur muff, a garter, and a scarf. Police questioned the boat’s captain, Albert Thompson, who laughed at the suggestion that he’d had anything to do with the woman’s death. He said that he and his crewman, Frederick Kirkman, had gone down into the cabin around six o’clock the previous evening, and didn’t open the hatch again until the following morning.
“It is ridiculous to say that I murdered the woman,” Thompson snarled. The police arrested him anyway, along with Kirkman, and brought them down to the station in Harrison, where they were held as suspicious persons.
As police canvassed the area, locals filled the authorities’ ears with potential leads. Mary Johnson, employed as a singer in a vaudeville house, said she and her sister had heard the cries of a woman late on Christmas night, emanating from the area of the swamp where the body was later found: “Oh, my God! Don’t!” “Spare me!” “Help!” A night watchman named Peter Coogan said he’d seen a woman that night matching the description of the dead woman, red coat and all. She’d been walking beside a short man with a black mustache, whom Coogan later saw walking alone with a bundle of clothing under his arm. These accounts were intriguing, but whether they bore any relevance to the matter at hand had yet to be determined.
In the meantime, as police hauled the body away to Walsh’s morgue for an autopsy, questions hung heavy in the fetid air of the swamp. Was the woman a resident of Brooklyn, as the label on the red coat might suggest? Had she met her death at some Christmas party thrown by local boatmen? Had her killer, or killers, murdered her elsewhere and simply disposed of her body in the lonely pond near the river? Did the imprisoned duo from the catboat, Thompson and Kirkman, have anything to do with it?
And, above all, who was she?
THE DAY AFTER the mystery-woman’s body was found, seekers of missing loved ones began to arrive in Walsh’s morgue, where the corpse now awaited an autopsy. One by one they shuffled into the back room of the small undertaker’s shop in Harrison, “husbands in search of runaway wives,” as a reporter observed, “mothers who hesitated to glance under the white sheet for fear that the face of a daughter might be discovered, brothers looking for a sister, detectives and swarms of the morbidly curious.”
They studied the dead woman’s ghostly countenance, perhaps wincing at the bloody scratches that had disfigured her cheeks. Among the procession was a cuckold whose wife had left him several weeks prior. Gazing upon the woman’s features, he said, “No, it is not my luck. I was in hopes of finding my wife here. Then I would have looked for the man she went away with.”
Another visitor arrived at Walsh’s in search of a friend not seen for several weeks. She entered in the presence of a newspaperman who had brought her to Harrison from Manhattan. Exiting the mortuary, she shook her head and confirmed, “It is not my friend.” The woman was nevertheless encouraged to go back inside and have another look, just to be sure. Emerging from Walsh’s a second time, apparently vexed, she declined comment other than to cooly remark, “I am doing this for a newspaper.”
The newspapers of the day, no doubt attuned to the commercial triumphs of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst’s yellow journals, loved a juicy murder yarn, especially if it involved an attractive woman of means, as the victim pulled from the swamp appeared to be. Editors and reporters salivated over the prospect that the current mystery might prove as captivating as that of Jennie Bosschieter, a 17-year-old Dutch girl from Paterson who’d succumbed, seven years earlier, to a fatal dose of chloral hydrate (an early date rape drug) furtively slipped into her absinthe frappe. The Bosschieter case, which touched on thorny issues of class, gender, and immigration, transfixed America from coast to coast, supplying the broadsheets with an endless drip of copy to titillate their readers. Jersey City’s Evening Journal suggested that the swamp murder “practically duplicates the notorious Bosschieter crime and … may yet develop into as remarkable a sensation.”
As the morgue filled up with corpse-viewers, police searched for the short, stout, black-mustached man said to have been seen with a woman resembling the dead woman on Christmas night. They also pulled from the river additional pieces of clothing that matched the victim’s attire, including a dark red skirt that had been slit up the back just like the recovered jacket.
Amid these discoveries, suspicion fell on Frederick Kirkman, the boatman who’d been arrested with Albert Thompson, captain of the Idle Hour. Shortly before Christmas, it turned out, Kirkman had spent four days in Brooklyn, where police believed the woman had lived, at least if the label affixed to her tailor-made red coat was any indication. “Kirkman could have met the woman there,” reported the Newark Evening Star, “and brought her to this city or Harrison, or he could have induced her to come out by appointment.”
Imprisoned in the Harrison police station, Kirkman professed his innocence. “I never saw the woman before,” he insisted, “and we never had a woman on the boat.” Kirkman harbored his own suspicions, which he relayed to an officer through the bars of his cell. “When you arrested me,” he said, “I asked why you didn’t arrest Crane, the young fellow who told me about finding the body. I asked you what he was doing near the creek, and you told me he was looking for a place to skate. Any sane man knows there was no place to skate around here [the morning after] Christmas Day!”
In Kirkman’s favor, the authorities in Kings County didn’t regard the red coat as evidence that the woman was a Brooklynite. Even if she herself had purchased the coat from Oppenheim, Collins & Co. on Fulton Street, she could have bought it while visiting the borough, or even ordered it by mail. It didn’t help matters that Oppenheim, Collins & Co. reportedly had no sales records on hand, making it “impossible,” as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted, “for anyone in the store to identify anyone who had bought such a coat as the murdered woman.” Put simply, “The police of Brooklyn do not believe the woman whose nude body was found in the Lampblack swamp at Harrison, N.J., was a Brooklyn woman.”
On the contrary, the dead woman was about to be identified as just that.
WITH FEW DEFINITIVE LEADS and two seemingly dubious suspects in custody, the police decided to take action. With a warrant in hand, they arrived at the boarding house where the riverman Frederick Kirkman had taken up residence, prior to his employment on the catboat of fellow suspect Albert Thompson. Under suspicion for having spent several days prior to the murder in Brooklyn, where police believed the still-unidentified dead woman resided, Kirkman maintained his innocence. But the authorities were nonetheless keen to inspect his most recent dwelling at 242 Grove Street, Jersey City. Of particular interest was the trunk Kirkman had left behind as security for a $2.10 balance owed to the landlady. Alas, when detectives opened the trunk, it contained only a folded piece of paper. “Nothing was written on it,” a reporter relayed, “nor was there anything about the trunk to make it of any value in the case.”
The case against Thompson, whom Kirkman had first met in their native England, appeared just as feeble. Other than the several articles of women’s clothing found within a stone’s throw of his catboat—moored in the Passaic River near the crime scene—there existed nothing to suggest Thompson was involved in the murder. “You may be very sure of one thing,” he told a visitor to the jail. “No woman ever put her foot in that boat. That’s why I say the police are silly in keeping me here. I have very little use for women, anyway.”
If Thompson intended to clear his name, there was a woman who could in fact be of great use to him. Her name was Margaret Wright, the proprietor of an employment agency on Bloomfield Avenue in nearby Montclair. She paid a visit to the morgue on Saturday, December 28, after reading newspaper accounts of the victim’s physical appearance and clothing. The published descriptions matched those of a woman who had visited her employment agency on December 17 to apply for a housekeeping job.
A county detective escorted Wright to the corpse, still awaiting an autopsy. Wright looked at the body and exclaimed, “That is the woman!” Elaborating, she continued, “She told me her name was Annie Nevins, and that she had been keeping house for two men in Brooklyn for two years, but had grown tired of the job and wanted employment elsewhere. She refused to tell me her address, but said she was stopping in Newark until she found employment which suited her. … I distinctly remember the red shirt and coat.”
The plot thickened when a detective from East Orange paid a visit to the morgue. He, too, claimed to recognize the dead woman. Her name, he said, was not Annie Nevins, but Agnes O’Keefe, once a housekeeper for the late Thomas Nevins, a contractor whose family had lived in East Orange before returning to Ireland. Ms. O’Keefe, it appeared, had adopted a new identity using her former employer’s surname.
In the midst of these developments, a team of physicians set about the task of determining how the woman had died. At two-thirty in the afternoon on Sunday, December 30, they shoved their way through a large crowd gathered outside Walsh’s morgue and began the autopsy, which carried on past five. Examining the body, they quickly discovered two bruises slightly below the woman’s right ear, which had gone unnoticed until now.
A picture of the crime began to emerge. On Christmas night, she had been hit on the back of the head with a force strong enough to fracture the skull, rupture a cerebral artery, and form a blood clot at the base of her brain. Molar imprints on her tongue suggested she had either been speaking or crying out at the moment of the blow. Her clothes were stripped and she was dragged some distance over dirt, ash, and cinder, pieces of which filled her throat. The amount of water in her lungs indicated she was alive but unconscious when the killer tossed her into a pool of muddy water, which had formed in the depression of an ash heap. The icy water likely restored the victim to consciousness, but she would have been too weak to struggle against death. As someone present at the autopsy put it, “The examination disclosed positively that it was a case of murder.”
But who had been murdered? Two unconnected witnesses believed that the housekeeper alternately known as Annie Nevins and Agness O’Keefe lay dead in the morgue. And yet, as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted, the dead woman’s soft hands “showed no traces of rough work of any kind.” Moreover, the undertaker’s shop continued to fill up with individuals desperately searching for missing loved ones.
One of them had an altogether different claim about the victim’s identity, and this would produce yet another bewildering twist.
Stay tuned for Part Two in the coming days…