The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder
By Daniel Stashower

The crime:

Mary Rogers was a 20-year-old woman, famous for her good looks, who worked in a tobacco store in New York City. Known as the “Beautiful Cigar Girl,” she disappeared on July 25, 1841 and her body was found floating in the Hudson River three days later. Autopsy results indicated she might have been strangled. Various explanations for her death were put forward, including a slightly fictionalized version by Edgar Allan Poe in his story “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” The case, however, remains unsolved.

The book:

The murder of Mary Rogers is famous in the annals of true crime, though I don’t think that’s because of Poe’s story, which isn’t very good. There are two types of unsolved crimes that fascinate us, the ones that everyone has a theory about (Jack the Ripper, JonBenét Ramsey) and the ones that seem to frustrate every theory. The Mary Rogers case falls into the latter category. It’s a conundrum.

The chief explanations that have been put forward fall into the following three categories, and it’s worth noting not just how unlikely they all seem but how different they are from one another. That gives some idea of how much uncertainty there is.

In the first place there is the theory that Rogers was killed by a gang of ruffians. This is the scenario that Poe derides, and it seems unlikely for many of the reasons he gives. Just for starters, when you’re dealing with a group of criminals it’s far harder to cover all of your tracks.

The second theory has it that her fiancé Daniel Payne was the killer. This was reinforced by Payne’s suicide a couple of months later, and the ambiguous note he left behind: “To the World – here I am on the very spot. [His body was found near the spot where Rogers was thought to have been murdered.] May God forgive me for my misspent life.” Unfortunately, Payne had an alibi for the day Rogers was murdered, and he had no clear motive.

The final theory is that Rogers had sought an abortion that had gone wrong somehow, and her body had to be disposed of. There are variations on this, but again while there have been some interesting bits of evidence pointing in this direction it’s a stretch to make it fit with what we know and seems mostly to be an idea driven by a moralistic “wages of sin” political agenda.

I don’t think any of these theories are very good. The murder of Mary Rogers is just one of those cases that throws up roadblocks at every turn. Even the two suspects who were brought in for interrogation (a young sailor named William Kiekuck and the philandering operator of an engraving shop named Joseph Morse) ended up both being conclusively cleared. My own sense is that Rogers was probably killed by someone she knew, on a date that went bad. When she’d left her house the morning of the day she died she’d said she was going to visit her aunt, which she was not. But beyond that I’ve got nothing.

The book is subtitled “the invention of murder,” which was also the title of a book I reviewed back in 2011 by Judith Flanders. Now obviously people had been murdered long before 1841, but what I think Stashower is getting at (and it’s not a point he specifically addresses) is that this was a time when violent crimes were becoming media events, what we can now look back on as the invention of true crime as a genre. To be sure there has always been a lot of public interest in crime. Crime and execution broadsides were wildly popular in England in the 18^th century, to go back just a bit. But in the mid-19^th century things were really taking off. Indeed, as a headline the murder of Mary Rogers would be supplanted quickly by John C. Colt’s murder of Samuel Adams, an even more sensational crime and one that had legs given its well-publicized trial.

Keeping with the period detail, Stashower does a good job evoking a world before the advent of modern policing and the creation of an effective criminal justice system. Until the passage of the Police Reform Act in 1845 (some of whose provisions were made in response to the Rogers case) New York City’s policing could almost be described as medieval. Or, in Stashower’s accounting, law enforcement

had not progressed much beyond the seventeenth-century “rattle watch,” the brigade of uniformed men who patrolled the streets with noisemakers, calling out the hour and the latest weather report. At the time of the Mary Rogers murder, New York did not have a centralized, full-time professional police force. Instead, a pair of constables was assigned to each neighbourhood, together with roundsmen and marshals who cobbled together a living out of court fees and private rewards. Their efforts were supplemented by a patchwork corps of watchmen, made up of moonlighting day laborers and retired servicemen, who patrolled the streets and stood guard outside sentry boxes.

Poorly paid, some officers looked to pick up rewards for the return of stolen property, “which in turn led to charges of collusion between criminals and police over the spoils.” I’m sure something like this was going on, as it probably still is.

Given how amateur policing was, it’s no surprise that a general public not raised on CSI and Law and Order had a more relaxed attitude toward the importance of securing a crime scene. This helps explain the shocking – to a modern understanding – behaviour of the three men (Henry Mallin, James Boulard, and H. G. Luther) who discovered Rogers’ body floating in the Hudson:

Reluctant to touch the corpse, Mallin and Boulard snatched up a wooden plank from the bottom of the boat and attempted to use it as a hook to tow the body back to shore. After several attempts they managed only to strike a series of flailing blows, tearing at the white fabric of the dead woman’s dress. Tossing the plank aside, they managed at last to fix a length of rope under the corpse’s chin. The two men then rowed back to shore, trailing the body behind the boat. Unwilling to risk contact with the rotting flesh, they declined to drag their cargo out of the water. Instead they fastened their towrope to a heavy boulder and anchored the body to the shore, so it would not float back out into the river. This done, the pair spent several moments watching the battered corpse bob up and down at the end of its tether. After half an hour or so, Mallin and Boulard decided that there was nothing more to be done. Leaving the body anchored to the boulder, they rejoined their friends and wandered off along the water’s edge.

After a “large crowd” gathered along the shoreline to gawk at the floating corpse “a pair of stouthearted bystanders screwed up their courage and waded into the water to pull the body onto land.” But that wasn’t to be the end of things, as one reporter on the scene observed:

On shore, the body suffered further indignities as a long line of morbidly curious bystanders filed past. Some of them prodded the corpse with their feet while others poked at it with sticks. One “rude youth” went so far as to reach down and lift one of the legs, offering “unfeeling remarks” to his companions.

The local coroner appeared on the scene within an hour, but because he had to wait for the arrival of a justice of the peace before he could do anything with the body, it could only be removed from the water and placed in the hot sun, where it rotted away at an accelerated pace until after 7 o’clock that night. All things considered, it seems as though the coroner did a pretty good job with what he had to work with.

Stashower does a good job too with telling the story. Normally I’d be a little wary of the literary crossover; it turned out well in Margalit Fox’s Conan Doyle for the Defense but was made a hash of in Casey Sherman’s Hell Town. It mostly works here because Poe took such an interest in the case and it’s interesting to see what he made of it. Poe was a genuinely odd fellow, and that’s probably putting it far too mildly, but I never thought his detective Dupin’s method of ratiocination amounted to much and it doesn’t seem to have worked here. Basically Dupin just reads the same newspaper reports that Poe himself was reading, so what he came up with was a bit of armchair sleuthing and a set of conclusions that had to constantly be revised in the light of further evidence.

Poe is widely credited with having invented the detective story, and one of the curious things Stashower points out is that contemporary reviewers complained “that there could be no great skill in presenting a solution to a mystery of the author’s own devising.” What’s even more surprising is that Poe took this criticism to heart, and thought such stories only led, in his words, to the reader confounding “the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.” This is one of the things that inspired him to have a go at the Rogers case. Of course, nobody thinks like that today, and the only ingenuity that a reader will attribute to a writer of detective fiction is their ability to create a clever and complicated plot.

Noted in passing:

When Poe attended the University of Viriginia in 1826 he “had to contend with the hardships of the university’s ongoing construction, including crowded, unheated buildings and questionable sanitation. There were, however, numerous compensations. Thomas Jefferson, then eighty-three, was very much in evidence as the university’s first rector. Poe would have dined with him on several occasions, and would have been among the mourners when the former president died on July 4 of that year.”

I’m no big fan of today’s resort-style university campuses, but I really don’t see how having an elderly celebrity like Jefferson hanging around on campus for part of the school year offers much in the way of compensation for the other shortcomings mentioned. How big a plus was it to get to mourn at Jefferson’s funeral, if Poe indeed did? And did Poe ever actually dine “with him,” or was he just sometimes in the dining hall at the same time?

It’s not entirely clear whether Payne was a suicide or if he mistakenly overdosed on laudanum. Or even if the laudanum he took was the exact cause of his death. The jury at the inquest delivered a verdict that was a true masterpiece of saying everything and nothing, declaring that death had occurred owing to “congestion of the brain, supposed to be brought about by exposure and irregularity of living, incident to aberration of mind.”

Takeaways:

Was C. Auguste Dupin not just the first detective (a word that might not have been in use before this time), but also the first fan of true crime writing? Poe was imagining his audience into being.

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