VIII
MR. HOLT’S FOUR DAYS
The facts were apparently unrelated to each other. Only a flight of imagination would have connected them, and imagination, though it is often valuable in speculating on what probably happened, is not court evidence of what did happen. In the order of their occurrence, the facts were these:
1. On April 16, 1906, Leone Krembs Muenter, wife of Erich Muenter, an instructor in German in Harvard College, died, soon after the birth of her second baby. The circumstances of her death were suspicious, and the Coroner directed that the stomach of the body be taken to the Harvard Medical School for examination. Dr. Muenter, on the following day, requested that he be allowed to escort the remains from Cambridge to Chicago for burial, and this permission was granted. With the children he made the gloomy pilgrimage west. The body of the dead wife was cremated. Dr. Muenter wrote at once from Chicago to the New York Life Insurance Company directing that the policy on his wife’s life be made payable to her sister, instead of to himself. The examination of the lining of the stomach had indicated slow arsenical poisoning and a warrant was issued at once for the husband. But it reached Chicago to find him gone—no one knew where.
2. In a corridor of the main floor of the Senate wing of the United States Capitol at Washington used to stand a telephone switchboard. On the night of Friday, July 2, 1915, an explosion near it blew fragments of the board through the walls of the telephone booths adjoining. No one was about, which was lucky, for the wrecked switchboard was not the only damage done: plaster rained from the walls and ceilings, every door nearby was blown open (one was a door into the Vice-President’s office which had not been in use for forty years), the east reception room was wrecked, a gaping hole was torn in the stonework of the wall, and fragments of windows, mirrors, crystal chandeliers and telephone apparatus flew in every direction.
3. In his country home on East Island, where Long Island reaches out into the Sound to form Glen Cove, John Pierpont Morgan was having breakfast on the morning of Saturday, July 3, 1915. It was nearly half past nine, and the members of his family, together with several holiday guests, were in the breakfast room, which is on the eastern side of the house. An automobile drove up to the front door, and the butler was confronted by a man of dingy appearance who asked, in an accent suggesting German, to see Mr. Morgan. He presented a card bearing the legend “Society Summer Directory: represented by Thomas C. Lester.” The butler wanted better credentials and asked for them. The stranger pulled a revolver from his pocket, covered the butler with it and stepping inside the door demanded, “Where is Morgan?”
With good presence of mind the butler answered, “In the library,”—the library being in the west wing of the house, and away from the breakfast room—and stepped toward the library door. Unfortunately it was open, and the intruder, who was following with his gun aimed, saw that the room was empty, and that the butler had lied. At the same moment Physick, the butler, realized that his ruse had not worked. He shouted, “Upstairs, Mr. Morgan! Upstairs!” hoping by the urgency of his cry to convey to the banker a warning that something was distinctly wrong and at the same time to get him out of range. Mr. Morgan at once hurried up a rear stairway and began to search for the trouble. A moment later Mrs. Morgan joined him. They proceeded from one room to another, found nothing, and asked a nurse what was wrong. As the little search party reached the head of the main staircase, with Mrs. Morgan in the lead, she caught sight of a strange man with a revolver in each hand. Lester had come up the front staircase. Mr. Morgan saw his wife between himself and the guns, brushed her aside, and charged. The man fired twice as the two went to the floor, grappling, and the hammer of his revolver clicked twice more on caps that did not explode. Two wounds, one in the front of the abdomen, and the other in the left thigh, did not prevent Mr. Morgan, from overpowering his assailant: he lay with the full weight of his 220 pounds on the man’s body, pinning down the revolvers to the floor. One of the guns Mrs. Morgan and the nurse wrenched from the man’s hand; the other Mr. Morgan captured. Physick had meanwhile roused the servants, and he stunned the intruder with a lump of coal as he lay on the floor. Lester’s unconscious form was then trussed up and taken to the Glen Cove jail.
There, briefly, were the facts. The Morgan shooting I have recounted in some detail to show the desperation with which the stranger trespassed, and attempted murder. It was not an affair which suggested a motive of robbery, but apparently a cold attempt at assassination. The Capitol explosion had been fruitless in its results so far as the loss of human life was concerned, and its origin was at that time a complete mystery. The Muenter affair had long since passed out of my memory. How to get evidence to establish motives for the crimes, fix the entire responsibility, and punish the offenders?
Never, probably, has long-distance communication played a swifter or more helpful part in a case. In order to show just how a nation which has been called to the hunt can enter into the pursuit, let us follow the developments in their strict chronological order.
At seven o’clock Saturday morning, before Lester had appeared at the door of the Morgan house, the newspapers in Washington received a typewritten form letter, signed “R. Pearce,” protesting in excited terms against the shipment of munitions to the nations at war. Its second paragraph read: