The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath

In the summer of 1915, the British public experienced a temporary, if morbid, diversion from the horrors of World War I. George Smith, a middle-aged serial bigamist who was accused of drowning three wives for their money between 1912 and 1914, stood trial for murder. The Fleet Street dailies christened it the Brides in the Bath case.

Smith targeted spinsters who were considered past marriageable age. Their gratitude at finding a husband in a world unfriendly to single women weakened their instincts and made them willingly give him control of their assets. After marrying Bessie Mundy (1912), Alice Burnham (1913), and Margaret Lofty (1914), he rented lodgings with a bath and had each wife make out a will and purchase life insurance, in both instances naming him as the beneficiary. Once all papers were signed, he convinced them that they were ill enough to see a doctor. Then Smith allegedly drowned them while they were soaking in the tub, using the recent doctor’s visit to suggest that the women had fainted from ill-health and died accidentally.

The inquests on all three women each absolved Smith of wrongdoing, but his use of the same modus operandi –a bathtub drowning in a boarding house- finally aroused the suspicion of Alice Burnham’s father. But Smith’s conviction was not guaranteed, especially since three inquest juries had seen fit to turn him loose. The Crown turned to eminent forensic scientist Bernard Spilsbury, whose talent for collecting and accurately assessing post-mortem evidence was unparalleled. His testimony withstood the barrages of the eminent Sir Edward Marshall Hall, who represented the defendant, and sent Smith to the gallows in August 1915.

The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath skilfully intertwines the new century’s most sensational domestic murder case to date and the evolution of scientific principles in murder investigations. Spilsbury asserted that George Smith had murdered the three women by suddenly grabbing and lifting their legs, forcing their heads under water and preventing any outcry that other lodgers might hear. His medico-legal testimony at the trial likened him to the deductive literary hero Sherlock Holmes, and the awestruck jury found Smith guilty.

But was he?

Author Jane Robins points out that Smith was an undisputed bigamist, but was he actually a murderer? He had married several women between 1908 and 1914, some of whom testified at the trial, and while he maltreated and robbed all of them, only three died. While the powerful similarity between the deaths of Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham, and Margaret Lofty make his guilt probable, Robins debates whether he would have been executed if tried today. It’s an interesting question- perhaps a skilled defense lawyer would have raised enough reasonable doubt in a modern courtroom to gain Smith a lesser sentence.

RIP Rick Mattix

On October 27, 2010, the true crime community lost one of its greatest minds, strongest supporters, and best friends. I’m talking about Rick ‘Mad Dog’ Mattix.

I haven’t fully accepted the fact that there will be no more wryly humorous e-mails from Rick, discussing his current projects and encouraging me to persist with a good idea. Even if he was having a bad day, he could reframe all the aggravating people and incidents in a way that made me tell him more than once that he should write skits for Saturday Night Live.

In 2003 Bill Helmer encouraged me to turn my long-time fascination with Dean O’Banion into a book. Rick soon took up that cause, complaining that if he saw another Al Capone biography come out, he’d apply for a bonfire permit. I soon caved in to such hilarious determination and assembled my collection of notes and photocopies into a book, Guns and Roses. When I wrote The Man Who Got Away and The Starker, Rick sent me material, suggestions, and corrections for both titles and graciously agreed to provide the forward for the former. I like to think that they are much better books because of his input.

Like Bill, Rick warmly greeted newcomers to the field of true crime writing. Some forums are zealously (or maybe jealously is a better word) guarded by gatekeepers who regard any new blood as a threat to their standing. Rick thought that was bullshit. He believed that we all stood to learn from one another. He’s right. “Today’s newbies will probably be one of your favorite authors tomorrow,” he told me once. Right again.

Rick, you’re probably having a great time right now and wondering what we’re all fussing about down here, but until we all meet again, please know the following:

Many an aching heart continues to beat for you
and many an eye continues to pay tribute
Too solemn for words.

The Missing Corpse

The theft of Manhattan millionaire Alexander T. Stewart’s corpse from its ornate vault on November 7, 1878 shocked Gilded Age New York. It triggered one of the biggest police investigations in the NYPD’s history, and inspired Mark Twain’s satiric short story, The Stolen White Elephant. But because the body was never recovered, the public soon lost interest and the case became a grotesque footnote in the city’s wilder past.

The Missing Corpse: Grave Robbing a Gilded Age Tycoon is about a crime that does not initially seem substantial enough to warrant a book. No one was murdered: the ‘victim’ was already dead. Because the police bungled the investigation and the body snatchers were never caught, the whole affair in retrospect seems like life imitating vaudeville. But attorney Wayne Fanebust’s absorbing account of Stewart’s post-mortem abduction reminds us why the case was a public and media sensation in 1878.

When A.T. Stewart, who was widely known as the ‘Merchant Prince of Manhattan’, died in 1876, he was worth an estimated $40-50 million. Although his wealth put him on a par with Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and other Gilded Age tycoons, New York high society snubbed him because of his common origins and he was a lonely, isolated figure. Because he and his wife failed to have children, he dedicated himself to the building of a Long Island suburb, where he wanted to be eventually buried. Pending the completion of this final resting place, his remains were interred in St. Mark’s churchyard in Manhattan. When they disappeared in November 1878, the press and public went into a speculative frenzy: would there be a fabulous ransom demanded, or was the stunt a backlash against often-tyrannical Stewart personally?

A.T. Stewart's Fifth Avenue mansion circa 1869 (Library of Congress)

Grave robbery was appalling but common in nineteenth century America, as medical schools needed cadavers to experiment on and paid well for them. The theft of a millionaire’s bones dragged the practice from its traditional arena of police blotters and private shame and put it on front pages everywhere.

The Missing Corpse: Grave Robbing a Gilded Age Tycoon is more than just an account of New York’s most macabre ‘missing persons’ case. It’s also a journey into the shadows of nineteenth century America, where ostracized millionaires, body snatchers, phoney clairvoyants, and other misfits wallowed and occasionally made history.

Hot Time in the Old Town

Summer was pretty mild in my neck of the woods this year, but I’ve lived through enough scorchers to know how debilitating hot temperatures can be. Edward P. Kohn’s Hot Time in the Old Town: the Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt is an intense narration of a killer heat wave that tortured New York City for ten days in August 1896. By the time it lifted, an estimated 1300 people were dead, along with William Jennings Bryan’s shot at the presidency.

New York turned into an inferno on August 5th. When temperatures rose to 100-plus degrees, working men and horses dropped dead in the streets and tenement dwellers broiled in their badly ventilated apartments. At night suffering city dwellers clustered on rooftops and along the piers, trying to suck cooler air into their overheated lungs. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt stepped in where city officials would not, hosing down the reeking streets to lower the temperatures and raise the sanitation levels, and campaigning to provide free life-saving ice to the poor.

Small boys cooling their heads in a public fountain

Horses being cooled off in summertime New York

As this fight for life reached its zenith, William Jennings Bryan, populist from Nebraska and Democratic presidential nominee, came into town to convince the citizens of New York that they should elect him instead of Republican candidate William McKinley. But he was so wilted by a long, hot train trip across the country that he read his Madison Square Garden speech from a paper instead of giving the same type of oratory fireworks that secured him the Democratic nomination in the first place. The heat also proved too oppressive for his audience, which left in droves.

Edward Kohn takes a well-rounded approach to this history of a forgotten natural disaster. His descriptions of a city under siege are unsettling in their specificity. He uses statistics when warranted, but prefers to put a human face on the disaster. We could forget a label like ‘victim number one’ but not the story of fifteen-month old Hyman Goldman, who had arrived with his parents from Russia nine months before and died from "exhaustion" on the heat wave's first day. Another tiny victim, Annie Botchkiss was born on August 6 in a rear tenement, and succumbed to the heat only five days later.

On the surface, a book that combines a killer heat wave and an electoral contest appears to be trying to mix literary apples with oranges. But Edward Kohn proves that not even a presidential candidate was immune to the heat’s negative impact.

Death of an Overseer

While browsing the true crime offerings in the Sony e-book store, I discovered an Oxford University Press publication titled Death of an Overseer. The synopsis described it as a cultural and sociological re-interpretation of an 1857 murder in Adams County, Mississippi. I enjoy crime books that aren’t limited to a basic narrative so I bought it, despite its unusually high price for an e-book.

In May 1857 the battered corpse of Duncan Skinner, an overseer on a plantation owned by wealthy widow Clarissa Sharpe, was found in a wooded area near the estate. The original investigators concluded that he’d been killed by an accidental fall from his horse, but the dead man’s brother and other sceptical locals dug deeper and found evidence of murder. Three of Mrs. Sharpe’s slaves confessed to killing Skinner, whose harsh treatment of them was notorious, and were hanged after a brief and sensational trial.

Many Adams County residents believed that a fourth party should have joined them on the gallows: a white Irish laborer named John McCallin. During the investigation, several plantation slaves claimed that McCallin had actively incited the murder by telling them that if Skinner were dead, his way would be free to marry Clarissa Sharpe and give them all “better times.” But in 1857 Mississippi law forbade blacks from testifying against whites, and McCallin escaped arrest. He did not go unpunished, however: the plantation aristocrats ordered him out of the community. His intention to marry a social superior seemed to anger them more than his alleged crime.

Author Michael Wayne, a professor of American history, questions McCallin’s guilt. He analyzes the customs and prejudices of the antebellum South as well as the crime and its racially-biased investigation, and concludes that the Irishman may have been a scapegoat. This approach makes Death of an Overseer a detective story in some parts, a history and sociology lesson in others.

I was pleased to see that Wayne reproduced most of his primary sources verbatim and showed in painstaking detail how and why he reached a particular conclusion. He freely admits that the evidence is open to alternative interpretations and encourages the reader to play armchair detective by placing his voluminous research material at their disposal. (The book’s website at www.deathofanoverseer.com actively solicits new evidence and alternative theories.) This approach is a refreshing respite from the slew of authors who sprout fangs and claws when their ‘definitive’ accounts are questioned.

Bugs Moran vs. Al Capone: the informed approach

While visiting my local bookstore, I saw (yet another) Al Capone bio in the True Crime section. I picked it up and began flipping the pages.

I've lost count of how many versions of the Capone story I've read, but if a person's life fascinates me enough, I can always enjoy a new book on the subject. Unless it's written from a myopic perspective, as this one was. Five minutes later I put it back on the shelf and bought a novel instead.

According to the author, George 'Bugs' Moran was dimwitted. He lost his gang and his North Side territory because he was too stupid to protect either from the intellectually superior Capone's invasion. When a writer presents that argument, I know that they haven't done their homework, and thankfully, so does anyone else who has a decent understanding of the Chicago beer wars.

When researching and writing The Man Who Got Away, I spoke to recognized experts such as Mario Gomes, John Binder, Rick Mattix, and Bill Helmer; interviewed elderly individuals who knew George Moran, and spent years examining FBI reports, court and prison records, and files retained by the Chicago Crime Commission. I soon understood that Moran did not lose the war with Capone because of poor leadership, mental fallibility, or any reason typically offered by those who don't want to do the work it takes to put the bigger picture together. Moran lost because he was up against a stronger mob, one that predated the North Side gang by at least twenty years.

The genesis of the Capone syndicate was the vice ring organized during the early 1900s by Big Jim Colosimo, a flesh trader and political precinct captain. Big Jim stuffed enough dirty money into the pockets of his ward aldermen and the local cops to operate with impunity. His organization was still going strong at the time of his May 1920 assassination, and when his successor Johnny Torrio added bootlegging to the business roster, the resulting riches made it nearly invincible.

Moran's North Siders, on the other hand, sprang into existence at the dawn of Prohibition, along with hip flasks, speakeasies, and bobbed hair. Dean O'Banion, the gang's sly and charismatic founder, was a brilliant businessman who invested his money in breweries and his charm in favorable partnerships, and by 1921 he controlled all bootlegging north of Madison Street. But when he crossed Johnny Torrio in 1924, he was shot to death in the flower shop that he operated as a sideline. His murder began the six year gang war that killed over six hundred men and disgraced Chicago for all time.

O'Banion's successor, Earl 'Hymie' Weiss, (see photo, provided courtesy of Mario Gomes) was a brainy dynamo who chased Torrio out of Chicago and gave the newly ascended Al Capone nightmares until  October 1926, when a machine gun fusillade mowed him down outside Holy Name Cathedral on State Street.  Vincent Drucci then took over, but his uneventful leadership was cut short in April 1927, when he cursed a temperamental cop and was shot in the back of a police vehicle.

After Drucci's funeral, Moran inherited the dwindling remnants of a mob that had been gradually decimated by the ongoing battle with the much larger Capone syndicate. By that point there was no way he could have emerged the victor, although a former judge recalled in his memoirs that many Chicagoans who had been following the war from the safety of their newspapers were rooting for Moran to win. He did make successful inroads into labor racketeering and dog racing, suggesting that if he had been able to direct the gang's fortunes during peacetime, history might have remembered him differently.

Mario Gomes, Capone expert and webmaster of the encyclopedic My Al Capone Museum website, says, "Though greatly outnumbered by the Capone gang, the North Siders held the fort for many years thanks to the leadership of George Moran. Moran and his men had to constantly out-think and stay one step ahead of the Capone boys in order to survive. (The North Side) was very lucrative, so no wonder it was the last bastion Capone craved so badly. Moran has earned double the respect I have for Big Al."

George Moran may not have been an ingenius strategist like Johnny Torrio or Dean O'Banion, but neither was he the over-muscled dolt of popular lore. He was a hands-on leader, taking the same chances his underlings did, but in the Chicago of his day, that elicited respect, not derision. Even if he had been more proactive than reactionary, he lacked the manpower to beat Capone.

The St. Valentine's Day Massacre on February 14, 1929 marked the end of Moran's reign over the North Side. For over a year, the shaken gangster debated the feasibility of continuing the fight, briefly partnering with minor league Capone rivals like renegade Sicilian Joe Aiello and pimp Jack Zuta. In late 1930 he finally conceded defeat. But he did not slink away in disgrace. The door had closed in Chicago, but he found windows of opportunity elsewhere.

He retained control of his dog racing and labor racketeering interests, both of which remained profitable. On the bootlegging front, Moran moved his breweries outside the Chicago city limits and used his Canadian connections to supply liquor to the Chain O' Lakes area in northern Illinois, a district that soaked up booze like a sponge during the summer months. Having heard good things about the West Coast from a former North Sider who moved there in 1925, he sent  emissaries to Los Angeles. Their reports were so favorable that Moran moved in, building breweries and terrorizing the local underworld so thoroughly that the LA County sheriff told newsmen about tough hoodlums literally "begging for protection from Bugs Moran gangsters." If Repeal had not interrupted the invasion, Moran might eventually have taken over the city's liquor distribution and been remembered as a successful booze baron in his own right.

In closing, George Moran was not a bulb with low wattage. He was outmanned and outgunned in Chicago, but when given the opportunity to start over elsewhere, he met instant success. Unfortunately for writers only interested in the quick buck, the truth can take time to uncover, so an entertaining fiction is often substituted. That does not bode well for the future of history.

The Man Who Killed Houdini

Harry Houdini’s egregious demise has been covered so extensively in books and movies that the very subject reminded me of a nineteenth century crime scene: so many writers have visited that territory, coming away with sensational theories the way Victorian era gawkers scurried off with bloody souvenirs, that nothing new remained to be discovered. Or so I thought.

In The Man Who Killed Houdini, Don Bell focuses on J. Gordon Whitehead, the McGill University student who fatally punched Houdini in the magician’s Montreal dressing room on October 22, 1926. Whitehead later swore in an affidavit that he had pummeled Houdini in the abdomen at the latter’s invitation to prove that his stomach muscles were strong enough to withstand any blow. Days later, the legendary magician died of a ruptured appendix that was assumed to be the result of that demonstration.

Whitehead disappeared from the public eye after the ensuing investigation died down, and no writer or researcher could discover what happened to him. Conspiracy theorists surmised that he might have been the deadly tool of the spiritualist community, whose mediums Houdini had delighted in exposing as frauds. Less imaginative minds dismissed the whole tragedy as an unfortunate accident. Sensing that Whitehead was the key to unlocking the truth, Don Bell embarked on a quest that lasted twenty years and took him all over Canada and the United Kingdom.

The Man Who Killed Houdini is investigative journalism at its finest. Bell tracked down and interviewed former McGill students Sam Smiley and Jacques Price, who had been present in the dressing room when Houdini was struck. (Price recalled that the punching was so violent that he actually pulled Whitehead off, shouting, “For God’s sake, stop!!” Smiley thought that the tall, gangly student behaved too strangely for the affair to be an accident.) Bell also contacted Whitehead’s former girlfriend and younger brother, both of whom proved to be defensive interview subjects, as well as the mysterious puncher’s former neighbors, who were more forthcoming with what they knew. The end result is a book that sets the record straight on who J. Gordon Whitehead really was and what his life was like in the aftermath of Houdini’s death.

Be forewarned: The Man Who Killed Houdini does not validate any conspiracy theories. Bell does not prove that vindictive mediums used Whitehead to stop Houdini’s anti-spiritualist investigations. But Whitehead’s final years leave the reader with a nagging suspicion that the magician’s death was not a mere accident either.