The Body Near the Shore
1852 (AP)
On the afternoon of July 28, 1841, a group of men were strolling along the Hudson River’s New Jersey shoreline near an area of Hoboken called Sybil’s Cave — a popular woodsy area and that was close enough to New York City to make for a convenient but brief respite from the daily rigors of the metropolis.
Looking out across the river, one of the men spotted what appeared to be clothing floating in the water. Racing to a nearby dock, the men grabbed a boat and rowed quickly to the bobbing objects. What they found was the body of a young woman. They made several attempts to fish out the body, but eventually they tied a rope under the dead woman’s chin and rowed toward shore.
covering Mary Rogers’
body (American Anti-
quarian Society)
By the time they reached shore, a crowd had gathered, authorities were sent for, and the body was gawked at. One of the first reporters to arrive described the scene: “…she was laying on the bank, on her back, with a rope tied around her…. Her forehead and face appeared to have been battered and butchered, to a mummy. Her features were scarcely visible, so much violence had been done to her…she presented the most horrible spectacle that eye could see.”
The local justice of the Peace gathered information and the names of witnesses and began an inquest into the matter that evening.
The coroner later described the corpse: “…her face was swollen, the veins were highly distended. There was a mark about the size and shape of a man’s thumb on the right side of the neck, near the jugular vein, and two or three marks on the left side resembling the shape of a man’s fingers, which led me to believe she had been throttled and partially choked by a man’s hand. It appeared as if the wrists had been tied together, and as if she had raised her hands to try to tear something from off her mouth and neck, which was choking and strangling her. The dress was much torn in several places…a piece was torn clean out of this garment, about a foot or 18 inches in width…this same piece was tied round her mouth, with a hard knot at the back part of the neck; I think this was done to smother her cries and that it was probably held tight round her mouth by one of her brutal ravishers. Her hat was off her head at the time of the outrage, and that after her violation and murder had been completed, it was tied on.” The doctor concluded that “there was not the slightest trace of pregnancy” and so therefore the woman “had evidently been a person of chastity and correct habits” and that the murder was done by “more than two or three persons.”
The description of the violence done to the woman certainly held the inquiry’s listeners’ attention, but the excitement escalated when a young man named Alfred Crommelin came forward and testified that the battered body was that of his former fiancée, Mary Cecilia Rogers.
Mary Rogers never came home.
On the morning of Sunday, July 25, 1841, 20-year-old Mary left the New York City boarding house owned by her mother and attended church services and then visited briefly with a friend. Back at her mother’s Nassau Street boarding house, Mary spoke with one of the boarders, Daniel Payne, to whom she was engaged. Payne, a corkcutter by trade, later testified that she told him that she was going out for the afternoon to visit her relative Mrs. Downing, and if she did not return in time for supper to come fetch her.
Before evening fell, New York City was hit by a severe thunderstorm, and when Mary did not return, Payne guessed that Mary had decided to wait out the storm at Mrs. Downing’s and would return the following morning.
But Mary Rogers never came home.
By Monday morning, her disappearance had caused concern, if not panic, for Mary’s mother, Daniel Payne, and friend and former fiancé Alfred Crommelin. They searched the city and made inquiries with Mrs. Downing (who hadn’t seen Mary on that Sunday nor had been expecting her to visit) and other likely places Mary might have gone. A small notice was placed in the New York Sun newspaper asking if anyone who had information on “a young lady (wearing) a white dress, black shawl, blue scarf, Leghorn hat, light colored shoes, and parasol light-colored” who was last seen on the morning of the 25th to please inform her mother at the boarding house, as “it is supposed some accident has befallen her.”
This was not the first time Mary had vanished, however. In October 1838, she went missing for several days and when she returned, supposedly after visiting relatives in Brooklyn (but apparently not telling friends or her employer she was going), she was shocked at the amount of curiosity her brief vacation had sparked.
Her 1841 disappearance and the subsequent finding of the battered body on the New Jersey shores of the Hudson River (which the coroner, based on Crommelin’s identification, would officially proclaim to be the remains of Mary Rogers) would probably not have sparked the sensation it did, however, had Mary not recently worked as the sales clerk at John Anderson’s tobacco store.
Irving
Anderson’s Liberty Street store was a popular haunt for writers. According to New York chief of police George Walling, literary notables such as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe were all “acquainted with the dainty figure and pretty face where they bought their cigars.”
can Antiquarian Society)
More importantly, however, Mary was well-known to reporters and editors for the many New York City newspapers. Known as the “Beautiful Cigar Girl,” Mary had waited on many of them during her employment at Anderson’s, and those same newspapermen quickly turned Mary’s death into a media spectacle such as New York City had never seen, as every aspect of the case was proclaimed in bold headlines that pushed national and international news off the front page.
Rogers
Historian Amy Gilman Srebnick states that Mary’s death came at a perfect time for the new “penny press” newspapers, which were bought by both the city’s upper classes and the common people. The story’s lurid details sold countless papers, and Srebnick says that the editors eagerly reported (or imaginatively invented) clues and suspects. The various newspapers competed to cover a story that they had largely created — theorizing about the case, accusing various men with committing the deed, whipping the public into a panic, and calling for more action by police and other government officials.
Almost immediately after Mary’s body was found, various newspapers cast suspicion on Daniel Payne — and wondered about the veracity of the official statements he had given to police about his alleged visit with his brother and his appearance at restaurants and bars on the day Mary vanished. Payne quickly brought in sworn affidavits from witnesses of his whereabouts to the offices of The New York Times and Evening Star, who then pronounced that the documents proved that Payne “stands exonerated from even a shadow of suspicion.”
Under the editorial leadership of James Gordon Bennett, the New York Herald determined that Mary had been done in by one of the gangs of “fire rowdies, butcher boys, soap locks, and all sorts of notorious miscreants” that had been committing much crime in the New York City area. Bennett would quickly form a citizen’s committee to gripe about what Bennett felt was lethargy on the part of the police and government officials, and to offer a reward for information and arrests pertaining to the case.
(Library of Congress)
William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post went further and named a certain James Finnegan, “a rowdy of confirmed rascality,” as part of the gang involved in the murder and said that he was seen wearing “a ring which is said to have been…one belonging to Mary Rogers.” Nothing came of the Finnegan story, and the ring detail was probably invented, but the Post undoubtedly sold a few more papers.
Taking a different approach, Benjamin H. Day’s Evening Tattler questioned whether Mary was dead at all. Day questioned Crommelin’s ability identification of the body as Mary’s, considering its decomposed state, and also stated that a body thrown into the Hudson on a Sunday would not have risen by the following Wednesday, but would have taken “six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the top of the water,” a scientific “fact” that was later proved inaccurate.
The newspapers reported on possible leads, the arrests and subsequent releases of suspects, and other aspects of the Mary Rogers case for several weeks, although by mid-August, with no new concrete information to report, the story began to fade.
It would be revived almost immediately, however, by the dubious “discovery” of the site of Mary Rogers’ murder.
Mrs. Frederica Loss ran a tavern called Nick Moore’s House in the woodlands near Hoboken, New Jersey, not far from where Mary Roger’s body had been brought to shore. Mrs. Loss’s business savvy had turned the tavern into a success and she had been able to buy several plots of land nearby and raised her three sons in relative comfort.
On August 25, 1841, two of her boys were collecting sassafras bark for their mother when they entered a thicket and found various articles of women’s clothing, including a handkerchief monogrammed M. R.
After her boys brought her the clothes,. Loss held onto them for a few days before alerting authorities, possibly unsure what the clothes meant to the ongoing investigation.
Once known, this development re-ignited the story in the newspapers, and soon reporters and curious onlookers were coming across the Hudson in droves to see the thicket and to take refreshment at Mrs. Loss’s tavern.
The Herald reported: “(the clothes) had all evidently been there at least three or four weeks. They were all mildewed down hard…the grass had grown around and over some of them. (The scarf) and the petticoat were crumpled up as if in a struggle.”
(Nathan MacDicken)
Loss’s memory was apparently much improved by her sudden notoriety, as she suddenly remembered Mary on her last day alive and was soon giving statements about her now-clear recollections. Loss stated that Mary and a man of “dark complexion” came into her inn about 4:00 on the afternoon of Sunday, July 25, and the landlady served them refreshments: liquor for the man and lemonade for Mary. After finishing their drinks, the couple left arm in arm (Mary first bowing respectfully to Loss) and walked off into the dusk.
Sometime later that evening, Loss heard a scream from nearby and, thinking it was one of her sons in trouble, ran off to fetch him from a neighbor’s house, where she found him safe and unharmed. She apparently forgot about that scream until the furor about the found clothing (and the sharp increase in her tavern’s revenue) refreshed her memory.
The Herald proclaimed this as proof that Mary had been murdered by a gang, while the Evening Tattler argued the opposite, calling into question Loss’s convenient recollection of Mary at her tavern — and declaring the thicket where the clothing was found to be “the depository of the garments, by interested hands, long after the disappearance of Mary C. Rogers.” The Tattler additionally found it hard to believe that those garments went undiscovered for a month. Because a pair of lady’s gloves was found among the clothing — but Mary’s hands already had gloves on them when her body was taken from the Hudson – historian Raymond Paul would later conclude that the clothes had indeed been planted after Mary’s murder by somebody who didn’t remember or didn’t know of this suspicious duplicity.
For several weeks the newspapers reported on the clothing, the lack of leads in the case, and the sudden celebrity of Frederica Loss. But her fame was short-lived and, although she would be front page material once again a year later, she would first have to give the spotlight to another bizarre death connected to the Mary Rogers case.
Raymond Paul states that Mary’s fiancé Daniel Payne had, according to the young man’s brother, plunged into a deep grief after his sweetheart’s death. The already alcoholic corkcutter drank even more heavily and his brother even feared that Daniel was slowly going insane.
In the weeks following Mary’s death, Payne had endured the initial suspicion in her death and had to undergo the trauma of identifying her remains at a second inquest (possibly sparked by the Tattler’s repeated assertions that the body taken from the Hudson was not Mary Rogers). It was also reported that Payne had been visited by Mary’s ghost.
On the morning of October 7, 1841, Payne left his New York City lodgings (he had moved from the boarding house run by Mary’s mother soon after Mary’s death) and proceeded to drink excessively at various bars in his neighborhood, stopping briefly in a store to purchase a small bottle of the poison laudanum.
He caught an afternoon ferry for Hoboken, and his first stop in New Jersey was Loss’s tavern. There he drank brandy and possibly got directions to the infamous thicket where his lost love’s clothing had been found. Sitting next to the thicket, he took out a piece of paper and wrote: “To the World – here I am on the very spot. May God forgive me for my misspent life.” Putting the note into his pocket, he then quickly consumed the poison and staggered off.
The laudanum took some time to work painfully through Payne’s system, leaving the dying man enough time to stop at other taverns for more liquor. He finally stumbled back to the place where Mary’s body had been brought ashore. He lay down on a bench there and died.
His suicide brought the Mary Rogers tale back to the headlines, although his cryptic note would not be seen as an admission of guilt — his iron-tight alibi and numerous witnesses for the infamous Sunday remained above questioning — and he was generally viewed as a love-struck romantic who could not bear life without his Mary.
(Nathan MacDicken)
Interest waned in the Mary Roger’s murder after Payne’s suicide until October 1842, when, apparently by accident, innkeeper Frederica Loss was shot by one of her sons. For more than two weeks she lay on her deathbed, sometimes incoherent and sometimes shouting that the ghost of a young woman floated near her bed (Mary’s ghost was also rumored to have visited former employer John Anderson in his final years). In her last moments, according to various newspapers, Ross confessed that Mary Rogers and a young “dark and tall” doctor arrived at her inn on that fatal Sunday and an abortion was performed, from which Mary died of complications. Her body was “taken at night by the son of Loss and sunk in the river where it would be found. Mary’s clothes were first … sunk in a pond on the land of (a neighbor); but it was afterwards thought that they were not safe there, and they were accordingly taken and scattered through the woods as they were found.”
Some questioned the genuineness of this alleged deathbed declaration, as it contradicted some of the known facts of the case – particularly the thumb and finger marks the coroner had found around Mary’s neck and the same coroner’s assertion that Mary had “been a person of chastity” – but the story would become the generally accepted one, partly because of a famous tale by Edgar Allen Poe.
The fact that the murder of Mary Rogers is still remembered today has much to do with Edgar Allen Poe. Poe biographer Jeffrey Meyers notes that in the second of his mystery stories involving the detective Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, Poe neatly transported Mary and the surrounding characters from New York City to Paris and presented Dupin’s solution to the crime in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” via three magazine installments. Dupin/Poe believed the murderer to have been a naval officer of dark complexion who had previously attempted to elope with Mary/Marie (thus explaining her first disappearance in 1838) and who killed her the second time she ran off with him. Loss’s deathbed confession came to light before the last installment had been published, but Poe managed to hint at a bungled abortion in the final episode, and later added footnotes that further brought his fictional story into line with the known facts of Mary’s case.
After Poe, other writers and criminologists would attempt to “solve” Mary’s murder. In 1904, Will M. Clemens proclaimed that both Mary and the man of dark complexion had been robbed and murdered inside Loss’s tavern. A man’s body (although not matching Loss’s description) had been pulled from the East River on August 3, 1841, but nobody other than Clemens seems to have considered a connection between the two corpses.
Several decades later, Samuel Worthen theorized that Mary’s abortion had been paid for by her former employer John Anderson and took place at Loss’s tavern. Mary died during the procedure and the “tall, dark” abortionist who had been seen with Mary that day panicked and threw her body into the Hudson River.
In Irving Wallace’s “The Fabulous Originals,” the author suggests three possible killers: Crommelin, who Wallace believes was the father of the baby whose abortion caused her death; Mrs. Rogers, who possibly offered up Mary as a prostitute at the boarding house and had arranged for an abortion that accidentally turned fatal; and, without any evidence to back it up, Wallace names Poe himself as a possible candidate – referring to the possibility that Poe knew Mary from Anderson’s tobacco store and Anderson’s later claim that Poe had discussed Mary’s murder with him while the writer was researching his story.
And finally, author Raymond Paul presented in the early 1970s his theory that Daniel Payne did indeed murder Mary, but not on the Sunday she disappeared (for which Payne had a solid alibi), but on the following Tuesday. Paul argues that Mary did go to Loss’s for an abortion on that Sunday and survived it, then stayed to recuperate for a couple of days at the inn. While Mary’s family and friends searched for her the next day, Payne couldn’t admit to where she really was – so he stalled for time and pretended to look for her, knowing that he was to meet Mary on Tuesday and bring her home. Paul points out that Payne’s own statements show him to have been in Hoboken on that Tuesday “searching” for the lost Mary. But when he met her, Paul theorizes, Mary informed him that she was breaking her engagement to him, and Payne strangled her in a fit of anger, dumped her in the river and later retrieved some of Mary’s clothes (including the second pair of gloves) and planted them in the thicket near Loss’s inn to add credence to the “gang” theory. Paul’s main evidence consists of the fact that when Mary’s body was taken ashore on Wednesday afternoon the body was, according to the coroner’s report, in a state of rigor mortis that clearly indicated to Paul that she had not been murdered on Sunday — because rigor mortis passes within 24 hours of death and, Paul contends, the Hudson’s waters in July would not have been cold enough to slow down the rigor mortis process. Paul thus concludes that the stiffness of her body proves that she was killed no earlier than Tuesday, when Payne was known to have been in the area.
Whether done in by a gang of ruffians, strangled by a jilted lover, or killed at the hands of the man who would later write a fictionalized account of her death, the murder of the “beautiful cigar girl” is undoubtedly one of the pioneer instances of the media celebrating a gruesome crime. Yet despite the intense media interest and immortalization of a sort by Poe, the crime remains one of the most puzzling unsolved murders of New York City.