A Prostitute, A Denizen, A Murder

(Originally published 11/1/06.)

by Andrew Bast

Every murder’s worth a story, but few stories are worth retelling. Sure, the story of a Ukranian mail-order bride plugging her banker husband in their Park Avenue penthouse could be resuscitated for a Law and Order episode, but the truth is that a crime has to be a real doozy to be remembered.

So, in the spirit of Halloween, The Inquirer teamed up with Eric Robinson from the New York Historical Society to re-assemble three of New York City’s most gnarly, ghastly, and ghoulish murders on record. Interestingly enough, each involved a prostitute and a denizen, one corrupted by boss-run Tammany Hall (oh, the outrage!).

Helen Jewett, the Highbrow Hustler

Helen Jewett was gorgeous and known for traipsing down Wall Street in a green silk dress adorned with jewels. She was also known by the upper echelons of early 19th Century New York society as a high-minded call girl who tended to the businessmen passing through town.

In the spring of 1836, Jewett was murdered with a hatchet, and was found slow-roasting in her elegant mahogany bed, which had been set aflame. Richard P. Robinson, an 18-year-old client (so we’ll call him) was duly arrested, and newspapers across the country went wild with the story—one of the first times mass-media hysteria exploited such a horrifying tale. Sounds a lot like the Post.

The bloody hatchet and personal squabbles seemed to demonstrate Robinson’s guilt, but he was acquitted. Here’s where it gets funny. Jewett loved literature. She read literary journals. And as her memory was dragged through the mud, the nation’s media machine took aim. According to a pamphleteer at the time, the moral of the story was, “Avoid the perusal of novels…it is impossible to read them without injury.”

That also sounds like the Post.

Evelyn Nesbit, the Minx of Madison Square Garden

Evelyn Nesbit wasn’t murdered, but she was at the heart of one of the city’s most unforgettable homicides. In January of 1906, high atop the roof of Madison Square Garden—then at 26th and Madison and actually known as MSGII—Nesbit watched her husband Harry Kendall Thaw gun down Sanford White, her lover.

What’s unbelievable is that White actually designed that incarnation of MSG, complete with a tower apartment where he often spent quality time with the nymphet Nesbit, watching her sway across the room in a red velvet swing.

Thaw was convicted of White’s murder after an initial mistrial and incarcerated. After all the drama, it turned out that Nesbit was hardly of a fit mind (surprise!) and tried repeatedly to kill herself. She failed, and danced at the Moulin Rouge Café in Chicago (almost as bad), before moving back to Northfield, New Jersey, where she died in 1967.

Judge Crater: Dead and Buried

You thought Coney Island was dirty? Wait until you hear this one.

The details of the disappearance of State Supreme Court justice Joseph Force Crater on the night of August 6, 1930 are unclear. We know that he ate at Bill Haas’s chophouse on West 45th Street in Manhattan, hopped in a cap, and was never seen again. Crater was acknowledged as an insider with the crooked Tammany Hall establishment and his case even coined the phrase “pulled a Crater” for someone who vanishes, as in, “Yeah, we were a man short at the poker game last night because Chris pulled a Crater.”

It’s rumored that Crater dropped in on some showgirls—as he was wont to do—and that was that until just last summer, when 91-year-old Stella Ferrucci-Good died in Bellerose, Queens, leaving notes to her family that revealed the supposed truth of the story.

Her husband heard from one of the killers that Crater was taken out to 8th Street in Brooklyn, murdered, and then buried under the boardwalk in Coney Island.

Ewwwww.

Detectives say that no bodies were ever found, and considering that the land was excavated in the 1950’s to build the New York Aquarium, it’s a tough story for us reporters to swallow. Maybe not so for the fish.

And then there’s the prostitute story. According to Richard Tofel, who wrote a book about the Crater case, Crater left the steakhouse to visit one of his dancing girls and then on to a brothel run by the big-time madam, Polly Adler, where he took his own life.

But that’s pretty boring, isn’t it?

(Burning bed by Inquirer illustrator Dustin Glick, and the second incarnation of Madison Square Garden, designed by White himself, from Wikipedia.)