Part 12

About noon Police Commissioner Woods called me to the telephone, told me hurriedly that Mr. Morgan had been “shot by a German,” and told me to get down to Glen Cove as fast as possible. “Find out the man’s motives and any accomplices he had,” the commissioner said. “Keep in touch with me.” And hung up. I found Detective Coy of the Bomb Squad, and a patrolman who knew German in case we should need an interpreter, and after some delay in getting a car, we hastened to the little Glen Cove jail.

Then, at four o’clock, for the first time, I was told the facts as Glen Cove knew them. A search of Holt’s person had disclosed two revolvers, three sticks of dynamite, a number of loose cartridges, a cartoon clipped from a Philadelphia newspaper, an express receipt, and a scrap of paper bearing the names in pencilled handwriting of Mr. Morgan’s children. Frank McCahill, the constable in charge, showed me the statement Holt had made, and supplied the further information that Holt had been identified by some of Mr. Morgan’s employees as a man who had been seen on the estate two days before--on Thursday. Glen Cove had been in a turmoil since the shooting. Newspaper reporters and photographers had flocked to the jail, had taken photographs of the prisoner, and already prints of the photographs were on their way to every large newspaper in the country. His statement, as well as a description of the man, had been telegraphed over the Associated and United Press wires in every direction. So I decided to have a talk with the prisoner himself.

He was brought out of his cell, and we sat in comparative privacy on two camp-stools in the corridor. He was a frail, slight fellow, with deep eye-sockets, a prominent hook-nose, and a retreating chin. His accent was certainly German. His name, he said, was Frank Holt, and he was born in the United States. He told me he was forty years old, that his father and mother had been born in America, although they had both French and German ancestors, and that his wife and two children were in Dallas. For several years, he said, he had taught in Vanderbilt University, and during the year just past had been instructor in German in Cornell University, at Ithaca. He had left Ithaca two weeks before, and had stopped at a Mills Hotel in New York before coming down to Glen Cove.

“What did you try to kill Mr. Morgan for?” I asked.

“I didn’t intend to kill him. I want to persuade him to use his influence to stop the shipment of ammunition to Europe.”

“Well, you chose a pretty strong means of persuading him, didn’t you? What was the dynamite for?”

“I was going to show him what was causing all the trouble--explosives.”

He answered frankly, but not completely. The scrap of paper bearing the names of the Morgan children, he said, was only a memorandum; he had intended to hold them hostage until Mr. Morgan promised to exert himself to stop the export of supplies to the Allies. No amount of questioning would bring an answer as to where he had bought the dynamite, but he readily volunteered the approximate addresses of the shops where he had purchased the revolvers and cartridges. These facts gave me something to work on, and I went outside to a telephone while he was locked up again.

Meanwhile the whole United States had been taking a keen interest in the case. Holt’s statement had reached Washington on the Associated Press wire, and was delivered to Captain Boardman of the Washington Police. Captain Boardman had been busy all morning throwing out lines on the Capitol case, and attempting to trace the author of the R. Pearce letters, which had been mailed in the city about nine o’clock of the previous evening. He read the Pearce letter over several times in search of some clue to the writer. Presently the Holt statement came in. From the two communications these sentences met the Captain’s eyes:

_Pearce_

“We would, of course, not sell to the Germans if they could buy here, and since so far we only sold to the Allies, neither side should object if we stopped.”

_Holt_

“If Germany should be able to buy munitions here we would, of course, positively refuse to sell to her.”

Captain Boardman’s next move was to wire to his chief, Major Pullman, who happened to be in New York to attend that same field day that Coy and I had missed. His message, dated 2 P. M. (while we were on the way to Glen Cove), read:

“Ascertain from F. Holt, in custody at Glen Cove, N. Y., for shooting J. P. Morgan, his whereabouts Thursday and Friday, as he may have placed the bomb in the Capitol here Friday night.”

This message, sent in care of Inspector Faurot, was relayed to us at Glen Cove by Guy Scull, deputy commissioner, but not until after the Associated Press man at the jail had had a tip telegraphed from his Washington office to ask Holt the same question. Holt denied that he had been in Washington, flatly. But McCahill knew he had been in Glen Cove Thursday, so at 5 P. M. he telegraphed Captain Boardman:

“F. Holt was in Glen Cove Thursday, July 1, P. M.”

I telephoned headquarters the numbers of the revolvers, and the neighborhood in which Holt said he had bought them. Several members of the squad started out from headquarters to identify the pawnshops, and to find out what they could of the history of three sticks of dynamite marked “Keystone National Powder Company. 60 per cent. Emporium, Pa.”

Holt had proved obstinate to all questions of the source of his supply of dynamite. The man was getting tired: he had had a hard day, had been considerably battered, had been interviewed, photographed, harried with questions, his ankles and wrists ached, his head throbbed, and his mind, which though alert and active, was none too stable, was showing signs of exhaustion. His condition suggested that he might be in a mood to supply some of the further information we needed, so I suggested that we take an automobile ride and he could show me where he had been the day before. He protested at once.

“No! My head is aching, and you want to take me on a ride and make a show of me to the morbid crowd. I will not tell you--not until later. Later perhaps, but not now!”

“All right,” I answered. “Later.”

Then I decided we had better get our information down on paper in a formal examination.

The meeting convened at once, with Coy, McCahill, a county detective from Mineola, two deputy sheriffs, two patrolmen, a stenographer and myself as board of inquiry. It may serve to describe the fellow’s manner, as well as to bring out what the examination further disclosed, if we make use here of extracts from the proceedings:

_Question._ Where were you born?

_Answer._ Somehow my brain is in such a shape that I can’t remember--Wisconsin, I know. I don’t know what it is that affected me--something inside of me--maybe it is the shock I got from that.

_Q._ You speak with a German accent. Were you born in Germany, or in any of the European countries--tell me the truth.

_A._ Now listen. That has been said before--that I speak with a foreign accent. That is because I speak several languages. I speak French, German, Spanish, and all that. That is the cause of that, you see?

_Q._ We will eliminate the trouble of asking you questions if you will tell us the town or city in which you were born.

_A._ Yes. Now I am trying to think (a pause) I will have to disappoint you.

_Q._ Your memory is very clear on other things.

_A._ As I told you, I have been lying there, thinking, thinking.

I took up the matter of the express receipt found on him:

_Q._ On June 11, 1915, you shipped a box by the American Express Company to D. F. Sensabaugh, 101 South Marsalis Street, Dallas, Texas. What did that box contain?

_A._ It evidently must have been a typewriter. I would not be sure now, I think it was a typewriter.

And then the cartoon, clipped from the Philadelphia paper, brought out a very unexpected fact:

_Q._ How many times have you been in Philadelphia?

_A._ No time.

_Q._ You came to New York from Ithaca?

_A._ Yes.

_Q._ Do you mean to truthfully answer my question by saying that you have not been to Philadelphia at any time since you left Ithaca?

_A._ At no time.

_Q._ You have a clipping of a Philadelphia newspaper in your possession. Where did you get that?

_A._ I think I got that out of a Philadelphia paper of course, that I found lying around. I think it was a cartoon.

_Q._ Were you not in Philadelphia when you purchased that paper?

_A._ I did not purchase that. I saw that lying around somewhere, probably in the Mills Hotel.

_Q._ Where did you sleep last night?

_A._ Now, I will tell you. A reporter from the Associated Press asked me about this Washington business, and he was trying to connect me with that. I suppose that is what you are trying to do.

_Q._ I am not trying to connect you with anything. I want truthful answers. I am very frank and honest with you. I will fairly investigate every answer that you make.

_A._ Yes, I thought that over since he was here, and I think it is just as well to say that I wrote that R. Pearce letter. I was in Washington yesterday and came back on the train. I think it is just as well to say.

Here was news! McCahill slipped out of the room, and sent this telegram to Captain Boardman:

“Holt was in Washington Friday. Will wire full particulars later,” and returned for the particulars, which Holt continued to unfold.

He had gone to Washington early Friday, arriving at 2 P. M., hired a furnished room near the Union Station, and two hours later walked over to the Capitol and found the Senate wing deserted. He placed a bomb near the telephone booth, timed so as to explode in eight hours. He idled away the evening, mailed the R. Pearce letters, took a midnight train to New York, stopped at the Mills Hotel for mail, and took an early train to Glen Cove Saturday morning. What his activities had been since then we well knew. But while the confession of his responsibility for the Washington outrage was a really surprising bit, it did not conclude our work, for he had pointed out several new alleys of possibility which we must search.

By seven o’clock we had, first, a sketch of Holt’s recent career as a teacher. This we proceeded to verify by telephone to New York and by telegraph thence to Ithaca, Dallas, Nashville, and Philadelphia. His account of the Washington bombing Mr. Scull telephoned to Washington, and Major Pullman left at once for Long Island to secure a more complete confession. We had the numbers of his revolvers and were already at work upon that clue. We had no information except the trade-mark of where he had got his dynamite, and knowing the strict city restrictions on its sale, I felt confident that he had accomplices who supplied it to him. The chances were, too, that Holt had more dynamite than the three sticks which he said had made up the Capitol bomb, and the three on his person. We knew he had called at the Mills Hotel, and we sent a man to search his room. We had a wholly unsatisfactory statement of his birthplace, which he had already contradicted once, and which lent color to the Germanic origin of his accent. And finally, Holt had given a description of the methods he used in making his bomb which I cannot detail here for obvious reasons, but which from my acquaintance with explosives I knew to be untrue. By no means all the particulars of his acquaintance with dynamite had been explained, and the fact that this remarkable teacher of foreign languages, a man apparently of fair intellect, had committed one major crime and confessed to another all in the same day, made the motive all the more obscure. But we had learned that he talked freely, and that meant that he would give us more information, either consciously or unconsciously.

Holt was moved about half past seven that night to safer keeping in the county jail at Mineola, and we reconvened there an hour later for further examination. Major Pullman joined us in the course of the evening and took part in the questioning. By that time I had word from New York that a telegram had arrived for Holt at the Mills Hotel signed by D. F. Sensabaugh, and inquiring for particulars. Thinking that this was a clue to possible accomplices I tried, taking several different angles of attack, to find out whether Holt had told Sensabaugh (who he said was his father-in-law), what he was going to do, and why he had written that evening to his wife. The result of this questioning was nil. Then we went over his course in Washington, step by step, and brought out nothing of significance; then returned to the topic of his views on the shipment of munitions, and tried to draw out any talks which he might have had with friends on that subject. His answer to this was:

“I have not talked to my friends about it, because my friends, in my position, they are not the kind of people who would talk on such things. Do you suppose that a university professor would undertake that sort of thing? I think that can be easily figured out that I could not have anybody else with me.”

That was the conclusion which we were being forced to accept. But the mystery of the dynamite purchase was still unsolved. Holt said we could not guess the reason why he was withholding the answer to it. I was inclined to agree with him just then. I couldn’t guess. But he betrayed in one of his replies the real factor which was to solve the mystery. Major Pullman asked:

“Why did you decide to go to the Capitol?”

“Merely,” replied the thin figure in the chair, “to get the most prominent place in the country. You see I wanted to call attention to my appeal.”

In this he had succeeded. The whole country was working on the case. If our feeling that Holt had bought more explosives was no more than a theory at first, it was strengthened when he admitted that he had spent nearly $275 in two weeks, had only six sticks of dynamite to show for it, and was able to account for only $50. He denied that he had ever been in the German Club in New York, reiterated that he was born in the United States, dodged the exact city, then suggested Milwaukee, said that the name of the college he had attended in Texas “wouldn’t come,” and sidestepped cleverly any admission which might allow us to trace the dynamite purchase. Thus ended Saturday, July 3, which had started out as a holiday. I left two men to watch Holt, and went home, tired out, and not at all satisfied.

While we had been busy with the prisoner, the wires to Boston and the trains to Chicago had been carrying out their routine tasks of syndicating news. A police officer in Cambridge in reading the description of Holt which had flashed out to the newspapers detected a familiar ring to the natural phrase “shambling walk” which had been used to describe Holt’s gait. Thousands of men whom we encounter in daily life have shambling walks, but to this officer only one man had a shambling walk in which he was interested, and that man was Erich Muenter, a Harvard instructor, whom he had suspected of wife-murder nine years before. Nine years is a long time, and the average person cannot recall offhand the gait of anyone whom he last saw nine years ago, but those two words had evidently typified to the Cambridge officer the murderer who got away. When the news photographs followed the description to Boston and the Cambridge police saw them, they were not so sure, for Muenter had had a beard, and in his Cambridge days his head was not bandaged. But suspicion had been aroused, and that was enough to issue the news throughout the country during the night. Reporters in Ithaca tried to verify it from Holt’s associates at Cornell, and failed, reporters two thousand miles away in Dallas tried to verify it from Holt’s confused father-in-law, and failed. Dallas, however, supplied the particulars of his previous life so far as anyone seemed to know them, and these particulars were again relayed, verified, and amplified in every city in which Holt had ever been known in recent years.

Sunday morning, Independence Day, I went early to Mineola and questioned Holt again, with little result. Meanwhile the Bomb Squad at work in New York had found one of the shops in Jersey City where Holt had purchased a revolver. He gave his name to the proprietor as “Henderson,” and his address as Syosset, Long Island--a little station not far from Glen Cove. I asked him why he gave this fictitious name and address; he replied he had happened to see Syosset on a timetable, and that the name Henderson popped into his head. We then returned to my favorite subject, dynamite, and Holt finally said that he would tell me on the following Wednesday, July 7, where he had bought it. Why Wednesday, July 7? He would not answer, and no amount of questioning served any end except that of further confusion.

The day was not without developments, however. During the afternoon District Attorney Smith of Nassau County paid a visit to the jail, and identified the wretched Holt as a former acquaintance in Cambridge, Erich Muenter. At almost the same hour the Chicago authorities came into possession of the news photograph of the man mailed from New York the day before. They hurried with it to the home of two spinsters, known to be sisters of the missing Muenter, and obtained from them an unqualified identification: it was their lost brother, and “the news would kill their mother.” This Pearce-Lester-Holt-Henderson-Muenter was becoming more interesting every minute. Wife-poisoner, dynamiter, gunman--what next?

“Next” was Monday. The second revolvershop had been discovered, and again the use of the alias Henderson and the address Syosset. Holt, when I called on him in the morning, repeated only what he had told the day before, and reiterated, “Wednesday I will tell you,” until it became almost a refrain. He denied that he was Muenter, and that he had ever heard the name. I returned to New York to spend the rest of the daylight in investigation among the explosives’ manufacturers. From the records of the Ætna Company, of which the Keystone was a subsidiary, we learned during the afternoon that one Henderson had telephoned an order for 200 sticks of dynamite to be delivered at Syosset. I was just ready to start for Syosset with Commissioner Scull when, as if we had not already had enough to interest us, our friends the anarchists exploded a bomb in Police Headquarters itself. Curiously enough, although it was a delay, this did not prove the disturbing incident which one might believe. We had had anonymous threats of it some weeks before; it was one year and a day after the accidental death of the anarchist Berg, who was killed making a bomb, and it seemed to have no connection whatever with the Holt case. No one was injured, and after steps had been taken to follow the case, I went home to sleep what was left of the night.

Tuesday arrived.

I went to Syosset, and interviewed the station agent, George D. Carnes. Carnes said he knew a man named Henderson. Henderson had seen him first about three weeks before when he came to the little station to claim a new trunk which had been shipped down from New York, apparently empty, as it weighed only thirty-six pounds. Henderson had signed for the trunk, and gone away. He reappeared some days later and asked Carnes whether he had received two boxes of dynamite and two boxes of fuses and detonating caps--he had to blow up some stumps and he expected the explosives. They had not arrived. Henderson made inquiries for several days, and when the boxes came, claimed them, signed the name of Frank Hendrix to the receipt, and drove away in a Ford. At last we seemed to be on the right trail.

He had received the material, we knew, but where was it? In the trunk, perhaps. Had the trunk been shipped out of Syosset? No, Carnes said. We telephoned several stations in the vicinity, and finally at Central Park, a few miles west, we struck the trail again. The baggage records there revealed that a Henderson had checked a trunk to the Pennsylvania station, New York, on July 2--Friday. That was enough to take us to Central Park.

The check number I telephoned to New York for detectives to trace from the station if they could. Information of a stranger is freely offered in a village, and we found shortly that Holt had employed a small boy with a wheelbarrow to convey his trunk from a shanty in the woods to the station, and to the shanty we went. Near it lay a charred dynamite-box, and there were a few wax-paper wrappers from sticks of dynamite which the weather had left for our information. No explosive was to be seen, but there was evidence that he had burned some of it nearby.

[Illustration: Mrs. Holt’s Mysterious Letter

The First Word from Texas]

If he had not burned it all, the balance of those two hundred sticks were in the trunk. The day was growing old. Carnes and I sped back to Mineola, and the station agent identified Holt as the dynamite man. I repeated my questions; Holt replied, “I will tell you Wednesday.”

“Look here,” I said. “I have the number of that check. That dynamite is in the trunk. It’s liable to go off any minute and kill a lot of people. I can trace that check, but it will take time, and you better tell me quick where you left the trunk.”

“All right,” Holt answered, and said that he had sent it to a storage warehouse whose office was somewhere near 40th Street and Seventh Avenue. Two minutes later Lieut. Barnitz and I were out of the jail and in a motor bound for New York.

It took just 28 minutes to cover the 20 miles to Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, and we turned south to the section around Fortieth Street. We found the office of the storage company--empty. The warehouse itself was at 342 West 38th Street, and we hurried over there, arriving simultaneously with the detectives who had been tracing the check number from the Pennsylvania station. An old watchman was in charge who knew nothing whatever of the records of the office, but who turned bright green when we told him what we were after. While Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Murphy, Sterett, Walsh and Fenelly went up into the recesses of the warehouse to hunt for the trunk, I called headquarters.

“Commissioner Woods just called and wants you to call him at the Harvard Club,” the office said. I did so, and reported our progress.