Law & Disorder Read online

  Some of the murders had been lurid, too. In the winter of 1830, the crew of the merchant ship Vineyard, bound from New Orleans, mutinied, murdered the captain, stole $100,000, and scuttled the ship. They put the money in two separate longboats, but one sank. The men then crowded into one boat and made it to a Long Island shore, where they were captured. On September 4, 1835, two sailors, Richard Jackson and John “Little Jack” Roberts, took a room together at a downtown boardinghouse. The matron of the house, Harriet Shultz, who showed them the room, climbed into one of the two beds there and pretended to be asleep. Another woman arrived and got into bed with Harriet. Roberts joined them and began to have sex with Harriet. Jackson, enraged, pulled out a gun, aimed at Roberts’s head, and fired, point-blank, but missed. He fired again and hit him. Roberts fell dead, blood covering the floor. The Sun jumped on the story. Its star crime reporter, Richard Locke, spent hours talking to Jackson in his cell and then wrote a twelve-part series on the slaying, which occupied Sun readers from November 14 until just after Thanksgiving. The story received only scant notice in the other newspapers, though. The lack of news stories about crimes kept the spotlight off the shoddy work of city constables, whose ability to solve crimes, many charged, was severely limited.2

  All of that changed on Sunday morning, April 10, 1836, when the body of the beautiful, sophisticated prostitute Helen Jewett was discovered, hacked viciously by an ax and charred by a fire, in her room at Rosina Townsend’s upscale brothel at 41 Thomas Street, just off Broadway in the high-end prostitution neighborhood of the city. The high-class whore, who made so much money that she had her own servant, had been killed, allegedly, by Richard Robinson, a client who was deeply in love with her. On the surface, it was just one more brutal act against prostitutes, one more name on the list, but Herald editor James Gordon Bennett, like a hound on the scent of prey in the forest, jumped on the case and quickly turned it into the story of the century.

  It had all the elements necessary to make it a sizzling tabloid story that would be read and discussed not only by all New Yorkers, but by newspaper readers as far west as Texas.

  Helen was no grimy, back-alley fifty-cent street hooker. She was a gorgeous, well-dressed intellectual who had her own library of books in her room, subscribed to literary magazines, and was a regular theatergoer. She had arrived in New York from Maine, via a stint as a hooker in Boston, and represented the new wave of single men and women from far away who had started to call the city their home. Many men in the city knew her and had succumbed to her charms.

  Her assailant was a descendant of a prominent Connecticut political family, the kind of spoiled rich kid who always evaded justice through money and connections. Robinson lived at a boardinghouse in Manhattan, as did so many of the new wave of bachelors who crowded the city, working hard at business during the day and even harder at debauchery at night.

  The apparent killer professed his innocence, and speculation swirled that perhaps another prostitute, or Townsend, jealous of Helen’s popularity and wealth, might have killed her.

  Beyond all of that, though, the slaying represented the bloody end of a new story that was moving through New York like a moralistic tidal wave—what happens to women just trying to make a living, especially the forty thousand or so single women in the city who had to pay all of their own bills? That saga, spread far and wide by all of the moral reform societies and their bands, parades, and banners, and embraced by hundreds of thousands of women, was that women could not get jobs, or if they could find them they were menial and low paying. As an example, streetwalkers earned approximately eight times as much money as garment workers and five times as much as public school teachers. Unable to work, or make enough money to meet their rent, they were forced into prostitution. No woman wanted to be a prostitute, the moral reform leaders argued, and it was society’s failures that forced some women to join the ranks of those who made love for money.3

  Many domestic servants became hookers, but not just because they could make far more money. They crowded into employment offices and argued hard to get jobs. Many failed. Those who did land jobs hated them because they were treated poorly. “The unnatural and degrading position she occupies—forced to beg or even pay for the chance of being selected for somebody’s domestic slave … and often to endure the vulgar insolence of some sister woman who happens to have a house and a husband, only to be told at last, in grating and harsh terms, that ‘she won’t do,’ or her ‘references are not satisfactory,’ or ‘I don’t like your looks’ and to go back … heart-broken to resume her seat on the pine bench of the Intelligence Office, until some other Mrs. Arrogance sends for a servant.… Who can wonder that she thus in time becomes hardened and indifferent,” wrote journalist George Foster, who added that when those girls did get jobs, they hated their employers. Many of them sought out pimps, brothels, steady work, and a lot more money.4

  A report of the reform-oriented New York Magdalen Society said that women’s decisions to enter prostitution and engage in all of its crimes “were the result of sheer necessity, poverty rather than will-consenting.”5

  Women also outnumbered men in New York at a ratio of 120 to 100,6 making it harder for single women to attract husbands or get jobs.

  They were all victims, and Helen Jewett represented them. Her death symbolized the deaths of any of them and those deaths represented the death of the American dream. It was a powerful argument. Some men were just as angry about women forced into prostitution as the prostitutes themselves. George Templeton Strong read in the Herald that a man in Maine had seduced Helen, sending her into a career in prostitution. “He deserves hanging as much or more than her murderer,” said Strong.7

  The woes of prostitutes put forth by some citizens did not make prostitution a subject for loud public debate, though. James Gordon Bennett did that. The Herald editor, always sniffing about city streets for a story, found out about this one from a tipster on the morning after it happened. Bennett went to the brothel at 41 Thomas Street, still smoking from the fire on the second floor started the night before, and walked into the parlor on the first floor where women partied happily with johns before going to their bedrooms with them for sex. There Bennett met all of the prostitutes in the house as well as the madam, Rosina Townsend, well dressed as always. To his surprise, he also met New York mayor Cornelius Lawrence, in the middle of a reelection campaign. The mayor said he was there out of concern over crime in the city (it was rumored that Lawrence had been a client of Townsend’s brothel).

  Bennett then decided, for the first time in American journalism history, to interview them all. He saw, right away, that he had a great story and that the interviews, full of drama and color, would bring it to life. He realized, too, and quickly, that this kind of a torrid, sexy story could be strung along in his paper for months, until the trial and verdict, whenever that was, selling more and more copies of it each day, breaking city, state, and national circulation sales records. It was the story for which he had been looking for years, the story that would make his newspaper the most important in the city, perhaps in the nation itself.8

  It was a story, too, that underscored editor Bennett’s loathing for the city’s constable force, which he had often criticized for its weak record on preventing crime or making arrests when the law was broken. Indeed, the city’s lazy police force was criticized by everyone, and that chorus grew louder throughout the Jewett case as the press and public learned how dim-witted the constables were.

  The next morning, the newsboys who hawked the Herald stood on top of their wooden boxes and shouted out the headline about the murder of the lovely young prostitute. Readers found not the usual one-paragraph item about the killing but a huge story, full of interviews, and were, on the spot, completely mesmerized by the bloody, sordid tale.

  “Our city was disgraced on Sunday by one of the most foul and premeditated murders that ever fell to our lot to record,” the story began, and with each paragraph and each sentence, all drippi
ng in tawdry sex and violence, it soared.

  Bennett wrote that according to madam Rosina Townsend and several prostitutes, the handsome Richard Robinson, one of the slender, busty whore’s clients, went to see her with an ax concealed under his cloak. He tried to talk her into giving up her other clients and staying only with him, and she refused. He demanded that she return to him love letters and presents, and she again refused. Furious, Bennett wrote, Robinson then pulled the ax from under his cape and hit Helen across the back of the head. She fell to the floor, and blood started to ooze from the rear of her skull. Then an enraged Robinson took the ax and slammed it against her skull two more times. In a hurry to cover up the crime, he pulled Helen’s body over to her bed, rolled it onto the mattress, and set the sheets around her on fire. The blaze began, and thick black smoke rolled out of her window as Robinson fled down the back stairs and through the small yard at the rear of the brothel.

  Townsend, who had earlier brought the pair a bottle of wine, noticed in a late-night inspection that the back door of the establishment was unlocked. She went to Helen’s room to check on her because Robinson had been a late arrival. The door was ajar, and she opened it, falling back when billows of thick smoke belched through the doorway. Townsend ran back to her own room, opened her window, and looked out into the streets for one of the town’s constables but found none. Upset, the madam then screamed for one. None came. Not until she shouted numerous times did a policeman finally emerge from the darkness of the streets. It was a “horrible” crime, Bennett wrote. He said that Robinson’s “conduct upon this occasion must stamp him as a villain of too black a die for mortal. Of this there can be no doubt.”

  The police who investigated the case went no farther than the backyard of Townsend’s brothel, where Robinson’s cape and his ax were found conveniently lying on the ground near each other. It never dawned on any of the constables that Robinson might have been framed. They never considered another suspect, and never started a second investigation. They had their man, even though the case had seemed far too easy to solve. The constables would look like fools in a few weeks. Robinson was arrested and, Bennett said, was clearly guilty.

  The journalist was just getting started. On the second day, he wrote another, longer story filled with interviews and anecdotes that gave New Yorkers a behind-the-scenes look inside the bawdy house and explained where everybody lived and how business was conducted. Bennett was, of course, the hero of the story, walking from room to room with the constables to dig up information for his eager readers to devour.

  He wrote gushingly of Helen, as one might have written of Helen of Troy. He chose to overlook the fact that her head had been cracked open by three blows from an ax and that a medical examiner had already opened up sections of her body for examination and then sewed the skin back together, badly disfiguring the appearance of the girl. Bennett instead used his pen to scribble an outline of pristine glamour, a vision of beauty. He wrote that “the body looked as white, as full, as polished, as the purest Parian marble. The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all surpassed, in every respect, the Venus de Medici.”

  Then Bennett looked about the room and described it to readers, carefully chronicling all of the lovely dresses, the books, and a picture of the poet Lord Byron in an exquisite frame on the wall. His story went on and on. Bennett talked about the “mob” that he said surrounded the bawdy house and threatened to attack it. He wrote of all the handsome young men, the best of the city, whom he found lurking, half dressed, in the rooms of 41 Thomas Street with the prostitutes. “In what a horrible condition is a portion of the young men of this devoted city,” he said.

  In a beautifully written story, filled with tension, he explained how the murder had stunned all. “This extraordinary murder has caused a sensation in this city never before felt or known,” wrote Bennett.9

  Bennett tried to produce as many newspapers as possible, anticipating the public’s lust for stories about the grisly murder. “We could have sold 30,000 copies yesterday,” he told a worker.10

  The mystery grew. Helen Jewett was not Helen Jewett at all, but originally Dorcas Doyen (reported as Dorrance by Bennett). She changed her name to Helen Mar when she moved to Boston and then to Jewett when she arrived in New York. Tidbits of information on her mysterious background were fed to the public each day as circulation climbed and the clamor for news about the slaying intensified.

  • She had lived with different men in the city, including a Kentuckian in disguise.

  • She had been the star of parties at which large groups of young men gathered.

  • It was she whom everyone remembered as the strikingly beautiful young woman who paraded up and down Wall Street the previous summer.

  • Richard Robinson often wrote her letters under the code name of “Frank Rivers.”

  Bennett also went to great lengths to paint a portrait of her as an intellectual and a philosopher. He wrote that police found a hardbound and elegant copy of Lady Blessington’s The Flowers of Loveliness lying between the bloodied sheets of her bed. In another article, he wrote that police found a cache of some seventy letters between her and dignified men of New York and other cities. All of the letters were of the highest moral tone, and there was not a word on sex in them, showing that Helen really was a splendid, high-class woman, cut down in the prime of her youth by a deranged suitor.

  “Her way of life in New York has corresponded with the terrible state of society in this city,” Bennett wrote.11

  Day after day, somewhere in his story, Bennett would proclaim that Helen was the victim of a city full of crime and sin that had run amok. Her death was “the natural result of a state of society and morals which ought to be reformed altogether in unhappy New York,” he wrote in one of his stories that week.12

  The circulation of the Herald tripled that week, even despite the surprise early-April snowstorm, and continued to climb even higher the next. The other editors in New York, of mainstream papers and penny sheets alike, all jumped on the story. Every editor in the city realized that this was not the typical monstrous, inebriated men grabbing, raping, and killing a ragamuffin street whore, but the passionate, romantic killing by a social playboy of an intelligent courtesan.

  * * *

  The Sun understood why the killing was a sensation right away. “The excitement throughout the city in relation to this melancholy business continues unabated,” its editor wrote of the “cold blooded, deliberate and savage … massacre” of Jewett.13

  That someone as debonair as Robinson, who came from such a fine suburban background and was an employee of the prestigious Hoxie store, could commit a murder, much less the murder of a prostitute, was impossible for many New Yorkers to believe. Within a week, pro-Robinson “fan clubs” started forming, and hundreds of his supporters began to wear special “Robinson hats” to signify their belief in his innocence.

  Pretty soon, letters turned up revealing that Helen had had many lovers with whom she kept in touch regularly. Could one of them have killed her?

  Then there was the evidence. The watchmen found a cloak that appeared to belong to Robinson at the crime scene. They also found the ax, the murder weapon, covered in dirt, in the backyard of Townsend’s establishment. A piece of twine used with buttons on his cloak was attached to the ax. Robinson’s attorney asked all in the courtroom why a man who had just murdered someone—whose miniature portrait, by the way, was in his possession—would leave his cape and the weapon behind, in a spot where they would be found near each other, and right away. Had he been framed? Why did the watchmen finish their investigation and make an arrest so quickly?

  Could one of the hookers have killed her out of jealousy? Had one of the prostitutes, or Townsend, been having a lesbian affair with her and killed her in a jealous rage?

  And was she really so refined after all? The Boston newspapers began printing stories about her, using sources in her hometown in Maine, that s
aid she rarely read books at all and did not appreciate the theater. She was, like so many other young women, a tramp who sold her body to make money and live well. Who was right?14

  The crime caused the circulation of the Sun, the Daily Transcript, and all the other New York papers to soar. Other newspapers throughout the country copied Herald stories and ran them in their own pages. Shopkeepers in New York, and throughout America, spent hours each day talking about the case to their customers, as did bartenders and casino bosses. “Everyone talking about the murder committed on Saturday night,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary. Strong, like so many others, promptly walked over to 41 Thomas Street, stood across the street from the brothel, and gawked, tracking all of the watchmen and hookers coming in and out of the building.15

  At the end of the week, Bennett began to think that Robinson might not be the culprit after all. Then he easily pointed the finger of guilt at Townsend, claiming that an odd painting on the wall of the living room showed someone with an ax, and that meant Townsend was the killer. This assertion started a whole new spate of stories, and circulation grew even more.

  Bennett then pressured Townsend to tell him her side of the story, which he reported in a long news article filled with direct quotes from the madam. It was loaded with color and detail, and Bennett wrote it like a great detective writer. The story was published on April 17. At the end, he told readers that Townsend was owed money by Jewett and indirectly suggested that she might have killed Helen in an argument over it. Bennett said Jewett had owned a lot of jewels, which had all disappeared. Who else but Townsend, who ran the house of ill repute and had the keys to each room, could have taken them?