Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 1, September 17, 1927

ON THE REAR FENCE WAS THE MARK OF A BLOODY HAND, AS IF THE PERPETRATOR OF THE DEED HAD LEANED BACK TO VIEW HIS WORK WITH SATISFACTION

Dr. Walter Wilkins had led a blameless life up to the time the three men in gray walked into his house and lay in wait to attack him.

He looked forward to a comfortable old age; for if his wife died before him, it seemed certain, so devoted was she, that he would benefit by her will. And if she outlived him there was an equal certainty that her loving devotion would continue.

The two were looked upon as an exemplary pair, a marriage which, in its twilight, was as full of romance and love as at its dawn. Dr. Wilkins was not well at sixty-seven, he suffered a chronic ailment of the digestive system, to which his wife administered with care and concern.

He needed his wife, that was plain from many an angle — and had William J. Burns not got into the case the crime of her death would have been set down probably as the work of the three mysterious men in gray.

Dr. Wilkins had been married twice earlier in life; it was Mrs. Wilkins’s second marriage. They lived in New York in a large house in Sixty-Fifth Street, but they preferred the smaller summer home in Long Beach, and frequently spent the winter months there as well, leaving the town house, which was partly let to roomers, in the care of their housekeeper.

After awhile, however, Dr. Wilkins began asking these roomers to find other accommodations, giving the excuse that he did not care to have cooking done in his rooms.

But in February, 1919, the Wilkinses were living at Long Beach and journeying back and forth into town for dinner, or for the theater sometimes twice or thrice a week.

They spent this particular week-end in the deserted Sixty-Fifth Street house, and on the 27th of February, Sunday, started back to the beach by the train which would allow them to reach Long Beach at 9.06.

It was not far to their home in Olive Street, the air was mild for February, and they walked, thinking the stroll might do them good.

“I Want What You Have”

At about ten o’clock a frantic ringing on the bell of one of their neighbors, Max Mayer, a glove manufacturer, showed Dr. Wilkins in great dishevelment and much agitation, standing on the porch. His derby hat had been dented and broken, his overcoat slit from its pocket. Mr. Mayer rather wondered why, if he had been beaten, as all signs indicated, there were no marks on his face or head.

And it appeared that Dr. Wilkins had been beaten.

By the mysterious three men in gray!

“Just as we reached the house one of these men attacked me and knocked me down,” he gasped as he confronted Mr. Mayer in the doorway. “I called to my wife to get help; then the other two rushed after her and felled her. She is lying in a pool of blood. For God’s sake get help!”

But it happened that Mr. Mayer had no phone, as Dr. Wilkins, in any other calmer moment would have recalled. So he hurried back with the doctor to Mrs. Wilkins, while the stricken man went to another house, that of Cassius Coleman, justice of peace, to summon police aid and to notify the hospital.

The unconscious woman, with her skull fractured and her face pitifully bruised, was taken to the Nassau Hotel, which had recently been made over into a hospital for soldiers. Then the doctor told his story.

“As I walked in the gate I observed that the vestibule door was open, and I told my wife to stay behind while I investigated.

“The inner door, however, was closed; I opened this with my key. I stepped in and at once a tall man in gray rushed at me and beat me over the head with a blunt instrument. The only thing which saved me from a cracked skull was my derby, which remained on.

“ ‘I’ve a gun here,’ the man told me, ‘but I am not going to shoot. I want what you have on you.’ ”

Then, as Dr. Wilkins handed him his wallet, stickpin, watch and chain, the robber sent his companions outside to attend to Mrs. Wilkins, “to stop her infernal noise,” Dr. Wilkins quoted them.

She had been hit over the head with a small hammer, which lay beside the dying woman when she was found.

The house looked as if the three men in gray, who had of course disappeared, had been in it for hours. There were cigarette ashes, soiled dishes on the table, places set for three, food lying about. On the buffet was a half empty brandy bottle with three glasses standing near. And, funniest of all, a remarkably well filled purse close beside it!

“Odd they dealt with you so much more gently than with your wife,” one of the police detectives remarked after a little.

Mrs. Wilkins Dies

“It is odd,” agreed the doctor, but, after all, it was an oddity in his favor, and he could not take offense at the slight.

“Odd that the robbers overlooked this purse,” the detective continued, holding it up.

“It is very odd.”

Now the Wilkinses had two dogs, and the police asked what had become of them. They searched and found that one had been rather brutally stabbed, but the other, closed up in the cellar, set up a fine how-do-do when he saw his master.

Dr. Wilkins, happy that the second pet had escaped the fate of the first, who, though not dead, was dying, took the dog out for a walk before following his wife to the hospital. And when he arrived, he found that she was dead.

“She kept putting her hands over her face and moaning, ‘Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!’ ” the hotel keeper told Dr. Wilkins as he returned to the house after his sad vigil.

A detective spent the night at the house, and the doctor insisted that he share the same room. Neither slept for the moaning of the wounded dog, and the doctor’s own restlessness and nervousness further prevented any tranquillity in the chamber.

When morning came Dr. Wilkins stopped suddenly in his dressing, buried his head in his arms and cried for nearly twenty minutes.

“I have lost my best friend,” he sobbed, controlling himself with difficulty.

The Unwitnessed Will

There were no clews save his own description — the three men had been young and had worn gray caps. Just how they had escaped so completely remained a mystery.

Two women living near-by insisted that they had heard the sounds of a departing automobile, yet the police proved to their entire satisfaction that no such auto had crossed the bridge leading from the island to the long road through the marshes.

Nor had the robbers departed by boat — none had heard the sound of a motor, and the channel gave up no evidence in the way of a drifting craft which the three might have used to reach the mainland and then abandoned.

The police decided that the men had a safe rendezvous in the heart of town from which they operated. The empty house near the Wilkins home was suspected, and Max Mayer’s young niece aided this theory when she recalled the evening of the tragedy.

“When Uncle Max was talking to the doctor at the door,” she told them, “I was in my room undressing for bed. I saw lights wafting up and down stairs in that empty house across the way, lights which disappeared when Dr. Wilkins and Uncle Max rushed back to the scene of the murder.”

On the fence in the rear of the house was the mark of a bloody hand as if the perpetrator of the deed leaned back to view his work with satisfaction, grasping the fence to give himself support after the ardor of his labors.

There were finger-prints on the brandy bottles and on the glasses on the buffet. There were finger-prints on the hammer with which Mrs. Wilkins had been struck.

The police scattered copies of the fingerprints throughout the country for comparison with those of known criminals, but to no purpose. They did not resemble any in the files of the police elsewhere or here.

Mrs. Wilkins, whose estate bordered on sixty-five thousand dollars, left a will which was not, after all, in her devoted husband’s favor, but divided her effects among several charitable institutions. This had been made in 1903, before she had married Dr. Wilkins, and it was thought at first that she had merely neglected remaking the will to suit her present situation.

And then a diligent search disclosed a second will, made in Dr. Wilkins’s favor and quite recently, too, but unwitnessed and therefore invalid.

“Strange that she did not make this legal,” some one said who understood the love Mrs. Wilkins bore the doctor.

The Piece of Newspaper

“It is strange,” the doctor said, but he would say nothing further, as if unwilling to cast even this small reflection on the deceased.

He seemed willing enough, however, to discuss all details of the tragedy with any one who suggested it. Detectives, spurred on by the disgust of Long Beach in general, repeatedly tried to solve this mystery, in which they made no headway at all, and consulted Dr. Wilkins constantly.

Newspaper men haunted the place, eagerly searching for some valuable clew overlooked by the authorities. And then they began to notice several things. Dr. Wilkins, although he made no show of unwillingness in discussions, frequently, little by little, began to change his tale.

His wife was struck down with a blunt instrument, a lead pipe, a hammer, a bludgeon, a blackjack, according to varying reports. Whatever it had been, it was, at any rate, wrapped in a piece of newspaper which concealed it, a newspaper which was carefully preserved as Exhibit A, gruesomely stained with the dead woman’s blood.

Then an enterprising young reporter discovered another bit of that very newspaper in the pocket of the suit the doctor had worn that fatal night! Detectives and newspaper men had searched the house several times, when, quite unaccountably, a later unexpected search brought to light the very jewelry the doctor reported stolen — the watch in the springs of a couch, the loveknot pin in the lining of an overcoat on a hidden closet shelf, and the wallet, containing money, beneath the mattress in the dog kennel!

The Doctor Disappears

In the attic they found the typewriter on which the second will had been made — and it was proved that Mrs. Wilkins could not operate such a machine.

The town house gave up a piece of lead pipe stuffed with some more of the incriminating paper, and three knives blotched with what proved to be dog’s blood!

Dr. Wilkins had, further, sent a gray suit with green and white penciled stripes to be cleaned of blood spots shortly after the tragedy.

“I didn’t think anything of that.” the tailor affirmed. “Doctors are always more or less spotted with blood. But it was his suit all right.”

And though dozens of people could swear that they had seen him wear it, Dr. Wilkins committed the grave error of insisting that the suit was not his. Circumstantial evidence closed about him.

He engaged a lawyer. And then William J. Burns got into the case.

The first thing Burns did was to fingerprint Wilkins. He was not arrested as a suspect, but this was done, Burns said, as a matter of form. And they found that the finger-prints on the hammer with which Mrs. Wilkins had been killed were those of her own husband.

“I picked up the hammer, yes.” the doctor admitted. “I have told you that.”

“You told us that you handled it lightly,” Burns replied. “These prints are the sort made by grasping very firmly indeed.”

Still there was no arrest, but there were several rather warm talks between the doctor and his attorney, who objected to his client’s affable willingness to converse on his affairs so readily.

“Talk too much and you will hang yourself,” he told the bereaved man exasperatedly, when he believed himself out of earshot of the reporters.

The Burns bill for March was just twelve hundred and fifty-six dollars seventy-four cents, which paid for several things. First he called attention to the fact that the doctor’s hat was spattered with blood underneath its brim; second that though he spoke of being beaten over the head and felled to earth, he bore no signs of such rough handling other than torn clothes; and, lastly, that when he entered the house he carefully, though guessing the presence of robbers, shut the vestibule door and thus shut out any possible help.

“Strange,” said Burns to the district attorney as he pointed these things out. “Damned queer!” was the reply.

Dr. Wilkins, too, began thinking how queer it was. But he had not been arrested. And on March 18 he committed his worst if not initial mistake — he disappeared.

Surrender at Last

That Sunday morning he stood in a telephone booth in the Long Island station and phoned his lawyer, who asked him to call at his house.

“I’ll leave on the eleven thirteen train,” Wilkins promised. But he failed to do so. Instead he went to Baltimore, shaved his beard and registered under another name at a quiet hotel.

He was held as a fugitive from justice pending arrest by the Nassau County authorities.

No one knew where he had gone — every avenue of escape was covered, his bank the railroads and steamship lines. And his daughter by another marriage also was watched.

Still he was not found.

“Has he committed suicide?” people began to inquire.

The district attorney snorted. “Not he,” was his cryptic reply:

And then, just as he had been last heard from in a phone booth, so was he found within one, not a stone’s throw from the first booth from which he had talked to his lawyer before he disappeared.

Arriving in the Pennsylvania Station, he called the authorities, but happened to be arrested as he stepped from a telephone booth, and as detectives met him a look of almost relief spread over his shaven countenance.

“I had just then given myself up,” he said.

Antics in the Jury Room

He did not know, he told them, just why he had run away. He knew that he was suspected, although he had been treated considerately and had not been arrested. But the idea of arrest was odious; it preyed upon his mind. Well, here he was back again. He would soon prove that he was not guilty of this crime.

In his cell, though he had been composed when examined, he paced the floor and sobbed aloud.

It took seven days to get a jury, while the doctor became more and more restless and nervous. On the stand he crossed and recrossed his legs, shuffled about, but stuck in the main to his story.

He loved his wife, he would not harm a hair of her head. And he pointed out, what could her death profit him in the face of the unwitnessed will?

The State, however, worked on the theory that either the doctor was not aware that it would be invalid without witnesses or else that he had forgotten that this detail had not been attended to in full.

Many people testified that his relations with his wife were cordial and loving. His lawyer pointed out the unmistakable fact of other robberies in Long Beach that night and on the nights previous to Mrs. Wilkins’s death. But the defense lost ground as it proceeded. Step by step the built up story was attacked, disproved, and substituted for sounder theories which damned the doctor, who did little to aid himself on the stand.

At sixty-seven he made a pitiable figure fighting in his own defense. He touched the sympathies of his jury to whom the judge said: “Don’t be swayed by sentimentality. A man not too old to commit a crime is not too old to suffer for it.”

He told the jury that it was not necessary for them to consider a motive if the evidence seemed to them to be conclusive of guilt.

On June 26 at five eighteen the jury retired. They were placed in a room directly over that occupied by the doctor and his guard through the tedious hours of waiting. It was a high paneled room with windows flung open to the warm, balmy air.

“I never heard such a riot,” the guards told Dr. Wilkins, as those open windows gave forth the sounds from the room. The jury was shouting, jumping about and, it seemed, flinging its members onto the floor, against walls and generally engaging in rather unusual activities.

“Do they always act that way?” Dr. Wilkins asked.

The guard laughed.

“I bet there is a couple of black eyes already,” he said.

The Smuggled Rope

The conduct in the jury room was, it appears, to say the least, a bit unseemly. Immediately upon filing into the court room, a very small, determined and apparently provoked little man asked the judge if he might report an incident in the jury room.

The judge silenced him. “I am not interested in anything which went on in that room,” he remarked. “You bring your verdict to me; not your complaints.”

The verdict was “Guilty,” but with a strong recommendation to mercy because of the age of the convicted man.

The judge turned to them, far more in sorrow than in anger.

“It pains me that I cannot comply with your request for mercy,” he said, “but first degree murder carries with it an automatic penalty of death. The only clemency in this case can be obtained from the Governor.”

Dr. Wilkins was stunned and sat down heavily after hearing the verdict. But he stood straight later as he answered the necessary questions, then, with an unfaltering step, left the court room.

“My faith in his innocence is unshaken,” his lawyer said in a statement. “The jury was browbeaten. I intend to call singly on every man there and find out just what undue pressure was brought to bear.”

But this act was unnecessary. Dr. Wilkins took matters into his own hands. First he made a statement.

“I am absolutely innocent of this crime,” he wrote. “There was never anything but love in our house. I would not harm a hair of my wife’s head. The jury could not have understood the law when they rendered the verdict with recommendation to mercy. I am stunned.”

But for a man in his desperate situation, the guards remarked, he was in an unusually happy frame of mind. He sat in his cell awaiting sentence, reading and writing. Guards were doubled; every possible article which might do him harm, belt buckle, even lead pencils were taken from him; yet so cheerful was he that this seemed absurd.

The guards passing his cell every ten minutes did not, however, glance over his shoulder one evening as he sat writing three notes in plain view.

“I am going to be my own executioner,” he confided in a letter to his attorney.

“By so doing it will save myself from being taken across the State, and I want to save the judge from looking me in the eye and saying that I had a fair trial.”

He wrote a letter to the sheriff inclosing fifty dollars and asking that he be cremated.

Then he wrote a third letter giving instructions for his cats and dog.

At twenty minutes to eight the guard, as was his wont, passed the doorway. The doctor looked up and said something pleasant about the cooling shower which they had just enjoyed.

The cell door was open and the bathroom to which the prisoner might proceed without interference lay a few feet from the cell.

With catlike steps the doctor hastened within and closed the door. Ten minutes later the guard rushed in. There was the old man, hanging by a rope tossed over the waterpipe, his feet but an inch or so off the floor, his neck broken, his body cooling. He was quite beyond help.

For so old a man Dr. Wilkins had worked expertly and without bungling. Some one had smuggled him a rope, which he had tied together at each end, flung over the pipe, slipped into a noose which, by standing on the waste can, he had fitted about his neck. He must have jumped off the can with much force, for although the drop was hardly two feet his neck had been broken instantly.

Fifteen minutes later he was officially pronounced dead.

“I rather anticipated this,” his lawyer said in a statement; “the doctor, in all events, had not long to live; and with death so near at hand in any case he did not wish to die under a cloud.”

Who smuggled the rope inside the jail to Dr. Wilkins?

That was the question which was agitated for some time in the daily press, but the culprit was never found.

“This is the jail,” one of the papers wrote, “in which four years earlier Erich Meunter committed suicide in a similar fashion.

“What is there about this jail which facilitates these suicides? Are there no men to watch the prisoners and what sort of men are they? It is time a searching investigation is made!”

The rope would have made a bulky parcel. Who smuggled it in? And who was failing to watch while he also tore a sheet into ropes and tied them end to end.

A writer of that day commented thus on the guilty man: “Dr. Wilkins, when in command of himself, was a cool and audacious criminal. There were times, however, when he lost his head, such as when he shaved and disguised himself and disappeared. He quickly repaired that error in returning to give himself up, it is true, and by remaining on the whole bold and cool.

“It was an error, nevertheless, and it was that error alone which made it impossible for the jury, no matter how much dust was thrown into its eyes, to acquit him.”