A True Christmas Murder Mystery, Part Two

“You killed her at last, didn’t you?!”

If you’re just joining us, click here to catch up on Part One. Otherwise, read on…

For the authorities investigating New Jersey’s Christmas swamp murder of 1907, a wrench was thrown into the case with yet another bodily identification. A young woman named Hattie Hull, from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, claimed that the dead woman was not the maid known as Annie Nevins/Agenes O’Keefe, but one Agnes Young, also of Brooklyn, a friend of Hull’s who had supposedly traveled to Newark on the twenty-fifth. For a moment, it seemed as if this could lead to a significant break, but Hull’s story quickly unraveled.

“I’m not dead,” Agnes Young declared on New Year’s Eve, furious that her supposed friend—apparently “craving newspaper notoriety”—had dragged her name into the sensation. “I have not been near Harrison, New Jersey. I was certainly nowhere in that vicinity on Christmas Day.”

In the absence of legitimate progress, reporters busied themselves with scuttlebutt concerning Albert Thompson, the riverboat captain still held on suspicion. It came to light that Thompson had failed to mention his estranged wife back in England, as well as a son he’d attempted to gain custody of at various points over the years. Whether these revelations bore any significance to the murder probe was unclear, but they made for scurrilous newspaper copy.

Across the Passaic River, the City of Newark rang in the New Year with boisterous revelry. “All day the streets were crowded with a moving, rollicking, laughing, good-natured throng,” reported the Newark Evening Star. “The theatres, restaurants, cafes and other public places were crowded all day and far into the night, and while hilarity was rampant, the day passed without any outside friction or obnoxious incidents.”

Crowds emerged again the following day, when spectators on both sides of the river watched a professional diver descend into the murky waters of the Passaic, in search of the dead woman’s shoes. Her body was to remain in Walsh’s morgue for another eight days, awaiting an identification beyond the shadow of a doubt. If none were made, the body would be transported to a potter’s field for burial. “The case,” posited the Evening Star, “is practically as far from being solved as it was when the murder came to light just one week ago.”

Little did the Star know that detectives had finally made a breakthrough. It involved the one clue that held any promise: the label attached to the victim’s tailor-made red coat, bearing the name of the downtown Brooklyn department store Oppenheim, Collins & Co. Reports of Oppenheim’s lax record-keeping were apparently overstated—detectives managed to trace the sale of the garment to November 12, 1906, when a woman had purchased it for thirty-five dollars, ten of those payable upon delivery. She was thirty-three years old, five-foot four inches in height, and roughly 150 pounds, with hair dyed brown to conceal encroaching strands of gray. Her name was Lena Whitmore.  

Detectives wasted no time visiting the Whitmore residence on Adams Street in Brooklyn, where they learned that Mrs. Whitmore had not been seen since Christmas Day, according to her husband, Theodore Whitmore. Mr. Whitmore, a motorman on the Third Avenue Railway, did not offer a sufficient explanation as to where his wife might be, claiming only that she may have gone to visit relatives in Schenectady. But he agreed to accompany the police to the morgue in Harrison. When he looked at the body, he said that while some features resembled his missing spouse, he did not believe it was her.

This was not what officials wanted to hear. Each day without an unequivocal identification brought mounting pressure, as well as mockery in the press. “About the only fact that has not got away from them is that the woman is dead,” snarled The Sun. Police needed to confirm the woman’s name, and fast. 

The crucial moment came on Friday, January 3, when a woman named Bessie Schmitter traveled to the morgue from her home in the Bronx. Accompanied by her husband to the backroom of Walsh’s, where so many others had already made the morbid pilgrimage, Bessie looked down at the body resting peacefully on the mortuary table. Then she fainted.

After Bessie regained her senses, she told detectives, without the faintest hint of doubt, that the dead woman was her sister—none other than the owner of the famous red coat, Lena Whitmore.

“Ever since poor Lena married,” the heartbroken woman lamented, “her life has been miserable.”

According to Bessie, Lena sought refuge a few days before Christmas at the Schmitters’ home in the Bronx, after a quarrel in which her husband had struck her. Bessie said Theodore Whitmore came looking for his wife, pleading with her to return home. Lena agreed, but said she would return to see Bessie on Christmas Day. It was the last time Bessie saw her sister alive.

Bessie’s identification was corroborated by a second witness, a twenty-six-year-old coremaker and Harrison resident named Frank Englert. He said he’d met Lena a year earlier, when he worked at a foundry in Brooklyn, and that the two had become friends. He recalled that, at the time of their acquaintance, she’d been fashioning a muff out of an old sealskin coat; it matched the muff found near the crime scene. Englert also echoed Bessie’s allegations of marital discord. “He said Mrs. Whitmore had difficulties with her husband frequently,” the Evening Star reported.

At last, the authorities had a promising suspect in their crosshairs. They arrested Theodore Whitmore at once and brought him in for questioning. He had a lot of explaining to do.  

THEODORE WHITMORE WAS BORN in 1871 and grew up in Albany, where his father supported their family of four (plus Theodore’s grandmother) as a laborer. Lena Whimtore, nee Salter, was born in 1873 in Connecticut and also grew up in Albany, where her British-born father supported their family of eight as a shoemaker. The young couple married in 1893 and faced tragedy just a year later when their baby—the only one they would bring into this world—died at eight months old. They lived in Albany, then Upper Manhattan, then Downtown Brooklyn, where they rented a three-story brick house at 236 Adams Street and let-out furnished rooms for extra money. 

It was no secret that strife sometimes reared its head in the Whitmore household. Neighbors gossiped about the contretemps, which at times turned violent. A little more than a year before her murder, Lena brought an assault charge against Theodore (who had served time for assault twelve years earlier at Dannemora prison outside of Plattsburgh). He was arrested and scheduled to answer for the alleged battery in court, but Theodore’s attorney managed a detente between the spouses, and Lena withdrew the complaint. 

The couple’s tempestuous conjugal history did not look good for Theodore, now imprisoned on suspicion of murdering his wife on Christmas night and hurling her body into the boggy meadowlands outside of Newark. Clean-shaven and tidy, with “lines on his face that would come to a man whose business exposed him constantly to wind and weather,” as one observer noted, the thirty-four-year-old train operator for Manhattan’s elevated rail system told a story he hoped would soften his reputation as a volatile and abusive husband. Lena, he said, was having an affair.     

“Five years ago Lena and I had our first trouble,” Theodore told police and reporters at the jail. “She began to neglect our home. I heard of this man Harry then. I hoped to win her back. Only recently I had her followed to a hotel. When I arrived she was alone and she went back home with me. Some days later I met her and the man and threatened to kill him. A night or two afterward he appeared [at] the Chatham Square station and told me he would go out of my life. He begged my forgiveness. He said he needed money to leave town and asked me for funds. I refused to give him any money.”

Theodore continued: “Lena and I had a row the day before Christmas. It was one of the bitterest we ever had. Then she left the house. I was returning from work Christmas morning when I passed her on the corner. I begged her to come back home. I told her it was no day for quarreling, that it was Christmas and I was willing to forget and forgive. She went to the house with me. It had been the custom to have the children of my wife’s sister at our house every Christmas, but this year we disagreed so much we decided to cut out the festivities. I told my wife to go to her sister’s for a pleasant Christmas. Then I gave her $15 of the $18 I had. I told her also to call on me if she needed more money. We seemed to have made up all differences and I was most happy. I went out to buy some tobacco. I was gone only a few minutes, but when I returned my wife had left. I haven’t seen her since, unless the body in the Harrison morgue is hers.”

Already a sensation for the newspapers, whose front pages carried splashy headlines about the murder day after day, the Lamp Black Swamp mystery now seemed all the more salacious. It also became all the more puzzling. 

“Christmas evening,” Lena’s sister Bessie Schmitter told reporters, “I received a telegram from Brooklyn reading as follows: ‘Don’t expect me tonight. Lena.’ Two days later came a letter purporting to be from Lena, in which she was made to say that she was going to Schenecdaty to visit our sister. … The writer made Lena say … she was getting her things out of the house, and that as soon as she got all of them out, she was going to go upstate.” 

The letter purportedly from Lena, rendered in handwriting that appeared to be a man’s, also stated: “He is trying to be awful good now, but I will not trust him anymore. … I hope everything will be alright next week.”

Who had written these words in Lena’s voice, after she was already dead, indicating she was headed to Schenecdaty—just as Theodore had suggested in his first meeting with detectives? Theodore claimed ignorance of the letter when subjected to what one reporter described as “a severe fire of cross questioning” in the Harrison police station. He stuck to his story, reiterating that during the time Lena’s body sat in the morgue for a week on end, he’d assumed she was visiting relatives upstate. He admitted that he and Lena often came to blows, sometimes quite literally, but as for her murder on Christmas night, he swore he had nothing to do with it.

Officials weren’t satisfied. In the coming days, they continued the inquisition of their primary suspect, who began to show signs of emotional and mental distress. He moaned and cried and refused to eat, though he accepted whiskey and sedatives to calm his nerves. Late in the evening on January 3, police escorted Bessie Schmitter to her brother-in-law’s cell.

“You killed her at last, didn’t you?!” she exclaimed.

“I did not.”

“Yes, you did! You know you did!”  

While Theodore endured the third degree, reasons to distrust him began to accumulate. The mother of Lena’s supposed paramour, Harry Hendrickson, confirmed he had been home on Christmas night; Hendrickson himself said he knew nothing more than what he had read in the newspapers, and swore he had not set foot in New Jersey since the previous July. Lodgers in the Whitmore household contradicted Theodore’s timeline of his whereabouts on Christmas, and they recalled seeing him around the house in the days afterward with a woman named Georgie. Also in the days after the murder, Brooklyn police discovered that Theodore had placed his wife’s jewelry in the safe of a local saloon keeper, contrary to Theodore’s assertions that she had left home with the valuables. 

A handwriting expert, meanwhile, examined the forged letters to Lena’s sister Bessie, determining it was likely Theodore had penned them. Theodore wouldn’t admit to writing the letters, but he did admit, without any sensible explanation, that he had faked a telegram from Lena to Bessie. It didn’t help that certain details in Theodore’s discussions with police kept shifting. “Since he was put under fire,” The Sun observed, “he has made a dozen remarkably contradictory statements.”

Still, some aspects of the case against Theodore didn’t add up. If he was the killer, why and how would he have managed to lure his wife across state lines to such a lonely place as the Lamp Black Swamp? (Could he have been working with an accomplice?) Moreover, Theodore didn’t look like the short, stout, mystery man seen in the vicinity on Christmas night with a woman resembling Lena. (Maybe the woman hadn’t been Lena after all?)

Whatever the case, on Tuesday, January 7, prosecutors formally charged the suspect. The two jailed boatmen, Albert Thompson and Frederick Kirkman, were finally off the hook: Theodore Whitmore would stand trial for the murder of his wife.

Coming up in Part Three, we’ll reconvene in Jersey City’s Court of Oyer and Terminer to consider Theodore’s fate. Stay tuned…