On her head she wore a bonnet—light gloves on her hands, with the long watery fingers peering out—her dress was torn in various portions— her shoes were on her feet—and altogether she presented the most horrible spectacle that the eye could see.
And so it was, the body of Mary Cecilia Rogers, the Beautiful Segar Girl. It almost made our heart sick, and we hurried from the scene, while a rude youth was raising her leg, which hung in the water, and making unfeeling remarks on her dress.
Bennett demanded nothing less than immediate and full-scale action leading to an arrest.
A CALL TO ALL CITIZENS!
A murder of such atrocious character must be taken from the realm of
mere police report so that especial attention will be paid, and our young
women protected.
After reading this, Hays remained silent for some seconds before wondering of his daughter, “Do you feel like you need protection, Olga?”
“I feel so sorry for her, Papa,” she admitted. They were in the kitchen together. “I am beginning to fear in this city all young women—all women—need protection.”
If anything, his daughter was too much like himself. When he first told her of Mary’s murder, her first concern had been for how much she, the victim, must have suffered.
“Has Balboa arrived yet?” Hays asked her.
“No, Papa, not here yet.”
“Then do me the good service, Olga. Run to the news hut and buy the gamut of newsprints.”
“All?”
“The Commercial Advertiser, the Mercury, the Times, Greeley’s Trib, the Sentinel, the Sun. Whatever you can lay hands on. Whatever the boys are hawking.”
“Certainly, Papa. But I don’t think the Tribune will be in yet. It’s an afternoon paper.”
“No matter. Whatever is available. Take some coins from my pocket purse.”
The newspaper shed, two blocks northwest from their home on Lispenard, stood at the corner of Church and Canal. She returned less than fifteen minutes later carrying eleven papers.
The high constable by this time was fully dressed for the day’s demands, and waiting for her. “Do you mind, dear, would you thumb through these with me and see if there is any further mention?”
She undertook the eleven sheets with him, although nothing more was to be found. The only mention proved the one in the Herald.
“Mark me on this,” Hays told her, putting down the large magnifying glass that more and more enabled him to discern the newspapers’ small typesets, “the other prints will be on the topic soon enough.”
It was at this point that Balboa arrived. Olga pressed upon him a cup of coffee, for which he thanked her, and drank, unsweetened, straight down.
As Hays predicted, by late afternoon, making quick note of increased Herald sales, the other public prints, in rapid succession, took up the crime.
All were full of the death of the segar store girl, many in extra editions with enriched, lurid detail. Particularly, the Sun now advanced Mary had been abducted, raped, and strangled in a display of hideous violence performed by diabolical, unrepentant gangsters. Mentioned as possible culprits were several papist Irish groups including the Dead Rabbits, Kerryonians, Roach Guards, and Plug Uglies.
Rather than the Irish, the native gangs, the Bowery Butcher Boys and their brethren, were implicated in the Mercury: “no matter how loudly the latter group of rapscallions might deny their culpability in like cases of murder and rape.”
Other suspects, these mentioned in the Evening Journal, were the Chichesters, Five Pointers, and the Charlton Street Gang, river pirates by profession, and known to own a rowboat.
“Three hundred and fifty thousand souls live in this city,” opined Walter Whitman, a young reporter recently come to the Brooklyn Eagle from the Argus. “And of these some thirty thousand we might humbly deem as ruffians. Ergo, we as citizens should never knowingly negate the possibility of their participation in crimes of this horrid and sordid nature.”
Speculation of all sorts raged for ten days.
The Commercial Advertiser now alleged it was not Mary’s body at all that had been discovered, but the body of some other unfortunate creature. The real Mary, the Advertiser conjectured, was hidden, out of public view. For whatever reason, remained unexplained.
Thrice during this period High Constable Hays sought out Acting Mayor Elijah Purdy, still sitting stead for unwell Mayor Morris, in vain attempts to elicit the acting mayor’s approval in order to commence his investigation.
But Purdy declined the first time and the second, and on the third attempt refused to even meet with High Constable Hays.
Throughout the city, citizens continued to thrill to the story. Newspaper sales soared to previously unrecorded heights. A young woman who had experienced both the freedom and perils of the city, ending up the way Mary Rogers had, enthralled and frightened all. Many young women refused to leave their homes alone on any errand for fear they would be the next victim.
Hays’ thoughts deferred to the murder and Mary Rogers at the expense of all other constabulary concerns, frustrating his days, which then ended with sleepless nights wherein he found himself worrying about his own daughter. Without the endorsement of the mayor’s office, however, the high constable remained powerless.
In the Herald of August 9, Bennett reiterated the charge that it had been gangsters who killed Mary Rogers. But this time he pointed his rather bent finger at a band of Negroes.
That evening the Evening Signal published an account claiming a witness who swore to having seen Mary Rogers on the Sunday morning of her disappearance in Theatre Alley with a gentleman with whom she seemed quite intimate.
Next morning over breakfast Olga pointed out to Hays an additional report in the New York Mercury wherein Mary was said to have been spotted later that same Sunday after the incident in Theatre Alley at the foot of the Barkley Street pier, boarding the Hoboken ferry with a “dark-complexioned man.”
Eyewitnesses reportedly thought him a naval or army officer. For some reason again remaining unexplained, the Mercury charged, this military gentleman later choked Mary to death.
At that point, having little firsthand knowledge, Olga, rather, calling his attention to various leads and information after reading of the events related in the prints, the high constable took it upon himself to steam-ferry to Hoboken to have further word with Dr. Cook.
As in his own city, in Jersey’s Hudson County no investigation of any consequence had yet to begin, limited, like the high constable, by the recalcitrance of local authorities.
Hays asked the medical examiner if there was any merit to the New York Mercury’s assertion that Mary had been murdered not by a gang, but by an individual.
Dr. Cook coughed, said there might be that possibility, the body arranged in such manner to mislead investigators, but he would have to reexamine the remains to ascertain for sure. “This will not happen at present, however, High Constable,” Dr. Cook said. “As you well know, my superiors are locked in a game of wills with your superiors. Both hang on the other, awaiting the other’s lead, and as result nothing is done.”
In the rising tide of old age, Hays was finding his patience wearing thinner and thinner. “You said Mary was chaste at the time of her death, Doctor. Do you stick to that assertion?”
Cook