A True Christmas Murder Mystery, Part Four
The verdict is in, and our story draws to a close.
If you’re only tuning in just now, spoilers lie ahead, so you should first catch up on Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Otherwise, read on for the conclusion to this sordid tale…
By the time Theodore Whitmore was summoned to take the stand in his own murder trial, public interest in the case had surged. The courtroom in Jersey City overflowed with journalists and spectators. Many more thronged the courthouse, where some two-thousand people gathered outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of the accused as police escorted him to and from the jail.
On Thursday, May 28, 1908, defense attorney Alexander Simpson trotted out an array of witnesses before calling Whitmore. The most promising of these, Margaret O’Neill, a lodger in the Whitmore household on Adams Street in Brooklyn, gave the defendant an alibi.
“I am positive that I saw Mr. Whitmore turning out the lights in his apartments at 10:30 on Christmas Night,” said the woman, whose husband, Daniel O’Neill, was friendly with the defendant.
In another win for Simpson, a train dispatcher testified that Theodore had shortly thereafter checked in at his place of work. “As he went out,” the dispatcher said, “I looked at the clock and saw that it was 11:30.”
Whitmore’s own testimony, unsurprisingly, proved to be the most stirring of all. Simpson had laid the groundwork in his opening remarks, arguing that while his client lacked “any high moral character,” nor was Lena Whitmore “the woman that a wife should be.” She’d returned to the Adams Street house on Christmas morning, Simpson said, only to retrieve the dog “she thought more of … than she did her husband.” She then left Theodore alone, under the impression that his wife had gone to be with her family in Schenectady. It was true he’d wasted no time entertaining Georgie Dickinson in the marital bed. But feeling certain his wife had deserted him, why shouldn’t he have?
“As I say,” Simpson continued, “they were not high moral people, they were not raised that way, but that does not make this man a murderer.”
Having sufficiently shamed the victim, Simpson called Whitmore to the stand. The defendant swore on a bible, sat down, and relayed his story to the rapt courtroom, insisting he had never set foot in Harrison and that he had never so much as heard of the Lamp Black Swamp.
“I met my wife at Concord and Adams street the afternoon of Christmas,” Whitmore began. “We had been separated several days, after a quarrel. We had had many quarrels. I wished her a merry Christmas, and she seemed quite pleasant. I asked her to go home with me, and she said she would. She seemed to be on the point of crying, and said she was lonesome and blue. When we got in the hallway of our house, she dropped her purse accidentally and I stooped to pick it up. It was dark and she stooped at the same time and fell over me. There was no fight, as has been testified. Both of us laughed, and as I gave her the purse, she said, rather sadly, ‘There isn’t much in it.’
“We went into the parlor and laid down together,” the witness continued. “She put her arm on my shoulder and seemed very affectionate. She cried and said she was lonesome, that there were no children there. We had always had my nephews and nieces there with us on Christmas, and I told her I would give her the money to go to Schenectady to visit. I gave her $19 and told her what train to take. Then I went out to a corner saloon with [Daniel] O’Neill.
“When we came back an hour later, my wife was gone, and then I supposed she had gone to Schenectady. But later I discovered she had taken no clothing, and then I was sure she had taken the money from me to give to Harry Hendrickson. She had always paid his room rent, and I felt that she had made a sucker of me again. I was mad. … These thoughts made me angry, and I went down to Raymond’s saloon to see if anyone had seen her. There I met a man who said he had seen her with Harry Hendrickson a little farther over on Adams Street, and only a short time before. Then I was practically certain that she had gotten the money from me to give to Hendrickson, and that she did not intend to go to Schenectady.
“I went back to the house and packed up her clothes, or a few of them, and wrote the [telegram] to her sister and decided to send them to the sister’s house. … There was a chance that she might be over at Lilly Heidel’s house, and I thought if she was there I would give her one more chance and take her back. So I went over there. It was about nine o’clock Christmas night. She was not there, but I heard that she and Harry Hendrickson had been seen together. I went back to my house about ten o’clock and turned out the lights in the hall, and then started for the train dispatcher’s office at the other end of the bridge, to see if my run on the elevated train had been covered.
“I got over to the dispatcher’s office just at 11:30 p.m., and found that my train had been taken out by a substitute. I had a frightful cold, and went down to McDonald’s restaurant in Park Row. McDonald told me I better go home and go to bed, or I would have pneumonia.”
It was a neat and tidy tale, bolstered by a witness who’d testified to seeing Theodore turn off the lights around the time he said he did. Maybe it wasn’t so implausible that Lena could have absconded with the money and been lured by some unknown means to Harrison, where she was murdered by an individual other than her husband. The defense, at least, believed this to be so.
“She went to New Jersey with someone not yet revealed,” Simpson posited in his closing arguments. “That someone can tell who killed her.”
At the same time, maybe it wasn’t so implausible that Theodore could have taken Lena to Harrison, killed her, dragged her into the swamp, and made it back to his workplace by 11:30, where he would be seen by a colleague who could later vouch for his presence in court. Or that he could have simply arranged for someone else to carry out the murder for him.
“Somebody killed that woman,” George Vickers countered in the prosecution’s final remarks. “I have given to you the stories of reputable witnesses, and the only conclusion at which you can safely arrive is that the man sitting there is the murderer.”
The jury had much to consider.
ON SATURDAY, May 30, the Newark Evening Star brought news of the trial’s outcome:
After eighteen ballots, over the course of twenty-one hours and five minutes of deliberations, the jury had deadlocked. In the end, three jurors remained steadfast in their opinion that Whitmore should be convicted of murder, and the majority was unable to sway them otherwise. Learning of the jury’s inability to reach a verdict, Theodore Whitmore broke down and wept.
“Now I have a chance for my life,” he exclaimed, as he was led back to the jail to await a re-trial. “I will be acquitted!”
Whitmore’s second courtroom showdown, several months later in October, proceeded more favorably than the first. Frederick Elliott, the key witness who earlier testified about forging the letters to Lena’s sister, had gone missing, and therefore did not relay this evidence to the new jury. In an even more propitious turn of events, Alexander Simpson succeeded in casting suspicion on “Gold Tooth” Billy Bartlett, the dodgy scoundrel who’d testified about being hired by Theodore to spy on Lena and her lover. The nightwatchman Peter Coogan now said that Bartlett resembled the man he saw near the swamp on Christmas night. Better still, Simpson found a witness to testify that he’d seen Bartlett, in the early hours of December 26, on a train car in Newark, with scratches and abrasions on his face that “bore every resemblance to one who had just been engaged in a fight.”
That Bartlett may have been commissioned by Theodore to dispose of Lena apparently didn’t register with the jurors: this time, they returned a verdict of “not guilty,” and the state pursued no further inquiries into Bartlett’s potential involvement in the crime. The Lamp Black Swamp mystery, as the Star put it, was destined to enter the “category of great unsolved tragedies.”
Lena Whitmore left no will, and even so, her personal property did not exceed five-hundred dollars. On November 12, 1908, the Surrogates Court of Kings County named Theodore the administrator of this small estate, which apparently was not enough to satisfy his financial ambitions.
Just a year after escaping the noose, Theodore was charged with grand larceny and declared by a judge to be “an habitual criminal.” He served two years in prison before being discharged in July 1911, after which he more or less faded from the historical record. As the Daily News observed in a 1924 article revisiting the case, “His prison term was a short stretch. Justice exacted no fitting penalty for the tragic Christmas night that Lena Whitmore spent at the Lamp black swamp.”
ON A CRYSTAL CLEAR DECEMBER MORNING, I drove to the area of Harrison, New Jersey, where Lena Whitmore had been murdered 116 years earlier, approximating the coordinates as accurately as possible based on geographical descriptions from the newspapers.
Today, it’s an industrial neighborhood where the grit is offset by a chic luxury apartment complex built in 2021. I parked in front of the building and followed a promenade that hugs the Passaic River, where Albert Thompson once anchored his infamous catboat. Beside the building sits a swath of grubby meadowlands, obscured on its northern border by a tall wooden fence, and on its eastern side by a chain link fence of equal height.
Peeking through the wooden slats, I saw small pools of shallow water and tried to envision a woman’s legs poking out of them. I wondered if this was the very spot where Lena had met her tragic end. There’s nothing I could find to mark the historical significance of this precinct. (The Lamp Black Swamp barely registers in a Google search.) Lena Whitmore has, essentially, been forgotten to time. But for a few minutes on that bright almost-Christmas morning, as I strolled along the edge of the marsh, rays of sun skimming its surface, she was remembered.
Thanks for joining me on this brief experiment in serialized Substack-ing. I hope you enjoyed the mystery, for which you can find my sources below (as well as a little stocking stuffer). See you in the New Year!
Newspapers: the Newark Evening Star; the Jersey City Evening Journal; The Brooklyn Daily Eagle; The Sun; The New York Times; the New York Evening World; the New York Tribune; the New York Daily News; the Albany Argus; the Camden Post-Telegram; The Bayonne Times; The Bergen Evening Record; The Observer of Hudson County.
Public Records: 1880 United States Federal Census; 1900 United States Federal Census; 1910 United States Federal Census; New York State Census, 1875; New York State Census, 1905; New York Wills and Probate Records, 1659-1999; Sing Sing Prison Admission Registers, 1865-1939; Auburn Prison Records, 1816-1942.
Misc: Newark; The Poisoned Glass; Blood & Ink; townofharrison.com; Brooklyn Visual Heritage Project.