The Mystery of Jacques Millere

Next to true crime, I'm a big fan of unsolved mysteries, mainly unusual deaths and unexplained disappearances. One such case that I recently discovered in a book about Newfoundland criminal history was the 101 year old mystery surrounding the death of a Frenchman named Jacques Millere.

Shortly after 4:00 p.m. on March 15, 1909, one Frank Penney came across the cooling corpse of a man on the grounds of a pulp and lumber company near Deer Lake, Newfoundland. He notified the police, who searched the body and found some startling documents crammed in the pockets: astronomical drawings, sketches of aircraft designs, planet descriptions, and an eye-opening treatise on the relationship between man and the planets. What aroused the most comment, however, was a post office receipt issued to one 'Jacques R. Millere' at Summerside, Prince Edward Island, which indicated that Millere had recently sent a registered letter to the Duke of Orleans in Paris (pictured at top right).

The discovery of the body and its cache of extraordinary paperwork unleashed a maelstorm of speculation over to who Jacques Millere really was and what his connection to the Orléanist claimant to the throne of France might be. He was not from the Deer Lake area, so no one could enlighten the police on his antecedents. Some thought he might be a scientific genius or crackpot, while others figured that he was a royalist inventor offering to put his skills at the Duke's service.

The book that briefly outlines the case does not specify how Millere died, or give word-for-word examples of the writing found in his pockets. So to satisfy my own curiousity, I called in a favour owed by a retired Newfoundland police officer friend. He's going to see what can be done about retrieving the archived notes from the original police investigation, as well as copy the contemporary news reports.

When I know more, so will you.

Unknown Does Not Mean Forever

On February 25, 1957, the bruised, naked body of a small boy was found in a cardboard box beside a road in Philadelphia’s rural Fox Chase district. Wrapped in a plaid blanket and seriously underweight, the child appeared malnourished and neglected. Indignant that he had been thrown away like a piece of garbage, investigators from both the medical examiner’s office and the police department initiated a personal crusade to catch his killer and discover his name.

Newspapers all over the country covered the story, and the boy’s photo was even reproduced on gas bills in the hope that someone would recognize him. But he was never identified and is known today as “the Boy in the Box” and “America’s Unknown Child”.

Last weekend I read New York Times reporter David Stout’s book about the case, The Boy in the Box: the Unsolved Case of America’s Unknown Child. Stout interviewed the aging ex-cops originally involved in the investigation, reviewed the boxes of yellowing reports on the still-open case, and turned it all into a book that is one of the best examples of true crime reporting that I have ever encountered.

Like many sensational cases, thousands of leads and theories have poured in over the years. All had to be carefully followed up, but in the end, only two were deemed so viable that both the police and the press took serious notice. The first was that the boy was the illegitimate child of a young woman whose mother and stepfather operated a foster home, and that he was accidentally killed by his exasperated caretakers while misbehaving. The second was that a mentally unstable woman had acquired him from his birth parents and subjected him to years of violent abuse before killing him for vomiting in the bathtub. The latter theory was brought forward in 2002 by a woman who claimed to have witnessed the murder as a young girl. Police investigators, aided in later years by a team of retired cops and profilers known as the Vidocq Society, checked both stories but were forced to abandon them after failing to acquire sufficient evidence.

The case remains officially unsolved, but lack of a ‘happy ending’ does not give The Boy in the Box a hollow ring. Using scenes and dialogue distilled from his research and personal interviews, Stout does a masterful job of revisiting the discovery of the body, the highs and lows of the ongoing investigation, and, most poignantly, the love that the grizzled police veterans gradually developed for the tiny victim. This love drove many of them to continue the quest for justice long after retirement.

And the Oscar for Best Actress of 1824 goes to... Sarah Drew

On October 3rd, 1824, two men were crossing the London Field, near Hackney, when they heard a woman calling for help. Investigating, they found maidservant Sarah Drew standing beside a shallow pond, muddy and wet up to her chest. She exclaimed that she had been accosted, robbed, and thrown into the water. The men escorted her to a nearby pub, where she told a fantastic tale. 

Over a week ago, she had seen a strange man hovering around the silk manufactory where her master worked, but thought little of it until some valuable silks disappeared. The police took Sarah with them to some known thieves' resorts, but she denied seeing the mysterious stranger in any of them. The officers advised her to follow the man if she saw him again, and find out where he lived or worked so that he could easily be located and arrested.

Sarah attended evening church service on October 3rd, and claimed that she was on her way home when she saw the wanted man walking across London Field. She followed him as directed, but did not get far before she was grabbed by two men (presumably the thief's confederates) and dragged to the pond where she was later found. She said that they stole her purse before heaving her into the water and leaving her to drown.

A local rowdy named Edward 'Kiddy' Harris was eventually identified by Sarah as one of her attackers. Harris had an alibi- his wife and children swore that he had been home all evening on October 3rd. But Sarah told her story so convincingly that a jury convicted him, and he was executed at Newgate in February 1825.

Later that year, Harris' attorney James Harmer published a pamphlet called The Case of Edward Harris, who was executed at Newgate for robbing and ill-treating Sarah Drew. This document, which is available in the Google Books online library, makes a powerful argument for Harris' innocence. Apparently the police officers who took Sarah on a grand tour of the thieves' dens actually pointed him out to her and suggested that he was a bad enough character to be the robber. She looked at him closely but denied that he was the man. Then she somehow ended up in a pond, and accused Harris of being one of the abductors.

Harmer suggests that Sarah Drew might have become a little too adventurous with some young men, and tried to save her reputation afterward by claiming that she had been attacked. When found at the pond, her head  and shoulders were not wet, which they should have been had she been thrown violently in. Her shoes, which she said she had kicked off during the struggle, were neatly positioned when found. To complete the ruse she needed a dyed-on-the-wool villain, and Edward Harris, who had a criminal record, was made to order.

As he was ascending the scaffold steps, Harris bemoaned his fate to reporters. "Oh Gentlemen, tell them (meaning the public) that I die innocent; I am murdered; I am, so help me God! as I am a dying man. I know I have been a wicked man, and a fighting man, and all that, but of this I am innocent."

If he was, then Sarah Drew was not. And in 1820s England, that would have been reason enough for her to concoct a lie so terrible that it sent a man to an early grave.

E-Reader Home Invasion

Don't let the title of this post mislead you. My place wasn't broken into by a legion of self-aware Kindles. But I did consciously invite the e-publishing revolution into my home when I purchased a Sony PRS-300 E-Reader earlier this month.

I will always have a soft spot for books, and never stop buying them. Few things thrill me more than the delivery of a big box from Amazon or Chapters. But now that e-readers have dropped in price, more bibliophiles are taking a chance on them and discovering that they like the option of carrying a virtual library in their pockets and purses. As a working writer, I have to be sensitive to trends that affect publishing, so I bought Sony's basic reader at my local Best Buy and began my new learning curve.

Because I live in Canada, the Sony product was the logical choice for me. Until recently, Amazon's Kindle was not available here. That has since changed, but at a price, so to speak: the device ships from the USA and incurs some hefty customs fees when its value is declared at the border. I opted for economy and convenience.

The PRS-300 is Sony's lowest-priced reader, and doesn't have the bells and whistles that the more expensive models offer, such as a touch screen and audiobook support. That was fine by me; I was primarily interested in the reading experience.

This unit utilizes E Ink screen technology that makes digital pages resemble their paper counterparts. The font size is adjustible, a nice option for those who prefer large print, and the pages are turned via a multidirectional button beneath the screen. The bookmarking feature 'tags' pages for later perusal, and each time the machine powers on, it remembers where you left off during your last reading session.

Not bad. But what what I really appreciated was access to thousands of public domain books in Google's database, digitized in a reader-compatible format and available for free download through Sony's online store. Many of these are vintage crime stories like those I have blogged about in the past. Another portal on the Sony site lets me log into my local library account and check out e-books from the hundreds of available titles. 512 MB of onboard memory permits the storage of up to 300 books at a time, making it possible for me carry a wealth of reading and research material in my purse. I love it.

A week and a half has passed, and I don't regret my purchase. It has added a whole new dimension to the literary experience, and judging from the fact that e-reader sales continue to climb, they are no  longer a fad item. Some will decry the threat, however weak, to the beloved physical book, but as a writer I'm happy to see that the love of reading is alive and well in the Digital Age.

Scotch Pebbles for Lovesick Girls

This weekend I found another true crime gem in the Internet Archive’s Open Source Books collection: The Tryal of Mary Blandy, Spinster: For the Murder of her Father, Francis Blandy, Gentleman. Years ago I read about Miss Blandy in an anthology about murderous women, but until now had never come across any primary documents about the case.

Born in 1720 to solicitor Francis Blandy and his wife in Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, Mary enjoyed advantages seldom available to women at that time: her doting father saw to it that she was well educated and did not want for anything . When her mother died and Francis Blandy did not remarry, Mary, an only child, became the sole heiress to a small fortune. Although she was intelligent, articulate, and modestly attractive, it was probably her future inheritance that attracted Captain William Henry Cranstoun in 1746 and made him propose marriage even though he already had a wife back in Scotland.

Cranstoun promised to have his marriage annulled, but Francis Blandy suspected that he was merely a fortune-hunter and objected to the match. Soon Mary received a present of Scotch pebbles (agates) from Cranstoun, along with a powder supposedly for use in cleaning them. This powder, however, ended up in Francis Blandy’s food in gradually increasing doses.

As she worked on eliminating the one obstacle to her imagined happiness, Mary was not as subtle as she thought. The servants saw her stirring something into her ill father’s tea and gruel, and observed a gritty white substance in the leftovers. They reported their suspicions to the neighbors and even Blandy himself. The aging lawyer’s response was surprisingly sympathetic: he referred to his daughter as a “poor lovesick girl” and added, “I forgive her—I always thought there was mischief in those cursed Scotch pebbles.” When he finally died on August 14, 1751, the authorities moved in and placed Mary Blandy on trial for parricide.

The trial testimony was published in pamphlet form, and is available for download. Medical authorities such as Dr. Anthony Addington (father of future Prime Minister Henry Addington) believed that Blandy had died from arsenic poisoning. When the servants testified that they had seen Mary adding a white substance to her father’s food, she and her lawyers knew that denial would be useless. So she admitted that she had done so, but argued that what she had administered was not arsenic, but a love powder intended to make Francis Blandy regard Cranstoun in a more favorable light. Cranstoun had sent it to her, she said, and if it HAD been poison, she was completely unaware of the fact.

The jury did not believe her. They agreed with the prosecution, which pointed out that even after the ‘love powder’ made her father dangerously ill, Mary did not stop mixing it in his food. While she was under house arrest pending her removal to Oxford Castle prison, she had also hinted to the servants that she was planning to flee the area, which an innocent person would not have done.

While awaiting execution, Mary wrote her own account of the tragic affair, titled Miss Mary Blandy's Own Account of the Affair between her and Mr. Cranstoun. She also exchanged letters with another condemned woman, Elizabeth Jeffries, who had killed her master with help from her lover. When a respectable matron visited Mary in her cell and gently chided her for corresponding with such a depraved person, she accepted the rebuke in polite silence but said afterward, "I can't bear these over virtuous women. I believe that if ever the devil picks a bone it is one of theirs."

On Easter Monday 1752, Mary Blandy was hanged outside of Oxford Castle prison. One of her last requests was that she not be hanged too high off the ground, “for the sake of decency.” Although most hanging victims died via slow strangulation, Mary apparently lost consciousness soon after being turned off the ladder and died without a struggle.

After Mary was convicted, William Cranstoun escaped to the European mainland, and died in Flanders on 2nd December 1752.

Mary Blandy killed for love. In the end, she also died for it.

Before the year is out....

This morning I awoke at five, and was at my desk by five-thirty. I've always been an early riser, especially during the week, but weekends I usually doze until at least six-thirty. Maybe this is a sign that 2010 will be so packed with writing projects that a 5:00 a.m. wakeup call will become the norm.

2009 certainly ended on an auspicious note. In October I started a new job as a technical writer for a large engineering company. This position strengthened a habit that I've been cultivating for a long time: producing quality copy on demand, without yielding to the vagaries of mood or personal drama. Let's hope that by performing well at my day job, I'll increase and improve my writing output in other areas.

I'm working on a few projects at the moment. One is an article for Rick Mattix's On The Spot Journal about William Howe and Abe Hummel, the legal 'dream team' of the New York underworld from 1869 until 1907, when the District Attorney succeeded in shutting their firm down. Gangsters, showgirls, prizefighters, and philandering bluebloods kept Howe and Hummel on retainer as an operating expense. Some of the stunts they pulled are unbelievable even by today's standards: Hummel once discovered an error in procedure that liberated 240 of Blackwell Island's 300 inmates in a single day. Howe, representing a gangster who had murdered another thug and dumped the dismembered body in the East River, convinced the jury that his client's seven year old girl had actually done the bloody deed. They're so gloriously bad that I'll be sorry to see the research end.

The Dopey Benny Fein project is still in progress. Geoff Fein, Benny's grandson, has been wonderful to work with, but the  research itself is taking time because I'm focusing on primary sources, and the requisite legwork is considerable. Benny's activities during the 1920s remain a mystery, although I've come across a few references to drug-related arrests. If anyone reading this blog has additional information, please contact me.

I'm still working with Franklin Abrams on the Our Gotham project. Some new webisode scenes have been filmed, namely the tense confrontation between Kid Twist Zweifach and the Bottler, who is determined to prevent Twist from seizing the profits of his popular stuss game. I've posted two screen shots below: the first shows Zweifach (played by Franklin) in profile, while the second is a re-enactment of Twist's first, menacing visit to the Bottler's den. Franklin is a first-rate actor who practically summons the spirit of these early gang leaders whenever he steps in front of the camera.

Expect some interesting trips to old New York in the coming year! And more on the Dope!

 

R.I.P. Monk Eastman

Shortly after 5:00 a.m. on December 26, 1920, two New York City patrolmen found a middle-aged, rough-looking man lying outside the BMT subway entrance near 14th Street and Fourth Avenue. One of them rolled him over, reached inside his coat, and felt his chest, which was sticky with blood. Upon detecting a faint heartbeat, they summoned an ambulance to hurry him to nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

The man had been shot in the chest, stomach, and arms, each 32 calibre bullet shattering a bone or puncturing a vital organ. (The weapon itself was later found on the steps of the Union Square subway entrance.) His pockets contained $140 in cash, ruling out robbery as a murder motive. An autopsy revealed huge quantities of ethyl alcohol in his system, suggesting that he’d been killed in a drunken fight instead. The man was clearly a brawler: scars covered his broad face and short but muscular body, and both his ears and nose were disfigured by abuse. But who was he? And who had shot him?

Attendants at the city morgue found no means of identification save a label on the inside coat pocket that read “E. Eastman. Oct. 22, 1919. No. 17434 WB”. The tag was traced to Witty Brothers Tailors, a well-known men’s suit manufacturer. When the owner confirmed over the telephone that he had made the suit in question for one Edward ‘Monk’ Eastman, extras began flying off the presses at lightning speed.

Monk Eastman was a name that New Yorkers recognized immediately, even in 1920. Before his 1904 downfall and imprisonment, Eastman had been the most feared and storied gangster in the city, maybe even the country. In its Big Town Biography series, the Daily News recalled, “In his glory, Monk … commanded an army of 1,200 of the city's meanest thugs, a grimy bunch of safecrackers, pickpockets and general ruffians from dangerous dives with names like the Flea Bag, the Bucket of Blood and Suicide Hall.” He stood barely five foot six, but he was pure muscle and as ferocious as a bulldog in battle. When he strolled throughout his fiefdom, a derby perched carelessly on his head and stubby features crinkled in a scowl, even the beat cops eyed him with trepidation. For years he was as much a part of the Lower East Side cityscape as the crumbling tenements, raucous Bowery, and Chinatown.

That all changed in April 1904, when Eastman was sentenced to ten years in prison for first degree assault. He was paroled in 1909 and returned to his old stomping grounds, but his power had faded and he did not attempt to regain his former notoriety. Instead, he undertook a lower profile livelihood as a dope peddler. Because of his infamous past, however, the New York police kept hunting him down whenever major crimes took place. Eastman sought an escape by joining the army when the United States entered World War I. He served with valor in France, the Manhattan gang wars having prepared him well for the European battlefields, and came home a decorated war hero. He told reporters that he was “going straight” but by 1919 he was working for Arnold Rothstein as a loan collector and preparing to go into bootlegging once Prohibition became law. Now he was dead, murdered just as the Volstead Act was on the verge of turning gangsters into millionaires.

Newsmen tracked down and interviewed Charley Jones, a former Eastman gangster who now sold automobiles. Jones said that as far as he knew, his former boss had gone straight and opened a pet store on Broadway. The aging ex-thug did suggest that “young squirt gunmen” might have spotted Eastman on the street and, trying to make a name for themselves, shot down a legend in cold blood.

Three days before New Year's, over four thousand spectators assembled in the cold to watch a local legend be laid to rest. Eastman’s army comrades exchanged fond, teary memories with grizzled veterans of the 1902-03 Manhattan gang wars. The latter took one last look at their former boss, a now-peaceful figure dressed in full military regalia, and watched with lowered heads as he was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Queens.

Unlike most gangland murders, Eastman’s was ultimately solved. On January 4, 1921, a shady Prohibition agent named Jerry W. Bohan turned himself in.

Bohan claimed that he had killed the one-time gang lord in self-defense. On Christmas night, he, Eastman and some friends went to the Blue Bird Café, a basement speakeasy on Fourteenth Street, and drank bootleg liquor for hours. At around 4:00 am, they began arguing. According to Bohan, the dispute was over how much to tip the staff, but since he and Eastman were partners in a bootlegging enterprise, they probably clashed over how much they, not the waiter, had coming to them.

Bohan said that he tried to leave the café when tempers became dangerously high, but Eastman chased him outside and accused him of having been a “rat” ever since he became a Prohibition agent. The gangster then allegedly reached into his coat pocket as if going for a weapon. The dry agent drew his gun, fired several times, and jumped into a cab heading north on Fourth Avenue.

The jury at Bohan’s trial listened to his version of events with scepticism, knowing that his past was not exactly spotless. In 1911 he had killed Brooklyn stevedore ‘Joe the Bear’ Faulkner under questionable circumstances and been acquitted, but this jury was not so gullible. They found him guilty of manslaughter, and the judge sentenced him to three to ten years in Sing Sing. He was paroled the following June, his minimum term having been reduced for good behavior.

According to the promotional literature accompanying the Our Gotham film project, “The life and crimes of Monk Eastman faded for awhile from public memory as the Twenties progressed and millionaire gangsters like Al Capone and Bugs Moran assumed the cachet of movie stars. But sooner or later, antiquity becomes modernity, and Eastman has been resurrected time and again in literature and film…. Today, Monk Eastman lives on in the popular imagination as the archetypical early New York gangster. His name is not always remembered, but with his harsh ‘Noo Yawk’ accent, battle-ravaged features, and multi-notched club, (he) remains an integral part of Manhattan mythology.”