The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

THE REAL MARIE ROGET by Irving Wallace

The murder of an obscure New York shopgirl, Mary Cecilia Rogers, in 1841 would have been long forgotten but for her fleeting acquaintance with one of America’s most brilliant nineteenth-century writers, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). The reckless and gifted Poe based his Gothic tale The Mystery of Marie Roget on her case. Irving Wallace (1916-90) was a American magazine writer in the 1930s and 1940s, before turning to screenwriting and fiction. Since publishing his first novel in 1959, Wallace has become one of America’s most popular and successful writers. However, his first book was not a novel at all, but a survey of the“lives of extraordinary people who inspired memorable characters in fiction,” published in 1955 as The Fabulous Originals. In it, Wallace related the true stories of the real people who became immortalized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, such as Dr Joseph Bell (whose life inspired Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes) and Deacon Brodie (Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for Dr Henry Jekyll and Mr Edward Hyde). Edgar Allan Poe made no secret of the source of his fictional character Marie Roget; he wrote to friends that his creation was inspired by the unsolved murder of Mary Rogers.

“People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed-a knife-a purse-and a dark lane.”

Thomas de Quincey

For eighteen months during 1837 and 1838, Edgar Allan Poe, after being fired as editor of a Richmond literary magazine for excessive drinking, was a resident of New York City. He dwelt, with his pale, somewhat retarded child-bride, Virginia, and his matronly, possessive aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, in a cheap apartment on Sixth Avenue.

Poe, trying unsuccessfully to freelance for magazines, often restless with despair, became a familiar figure on Broadway. Few persons who saw him forgot him. In his neat, shabby, black swallow-tail coat and mended military cape, striding nervously, briskly along, he had the look of a neurotic peacock. His head, set large on a slender frame, seemed always in the clouds. His hair and scrub moustache were dark brown, his eyes sad and grey, and it was remarked that he had “hands like bird claws”.

His destination in many of these walks, as a few would remember after his death, was John Anderson’s tobacco shop at 319 Broadway, near Thomas Street. This small store was a popular hangout for famous authors like James Fenimore Cooper, as well as for magazine editors, newspaper reporters, and gamblers employed in the vicinity. And here Poe came for gossip and stimulation, and certainly for contacts.

When he had money, which was not often, Poe brought cigars or plugs of tobacco from the beautiful salesgirl behind the counter. She was employed, largely because of her vivacity and comeliness, as a full-time clerk, and her name was Mary Cecilia Rogers. It may be assumed that Poe, through the frequency of his visits and small purchases, knew her fairly well. He could not know, however, how soon Miss Rogers would serve him in another capacity.

By early 1839 the strange, eloquent, self-styled “magazinist” was no longer a regular customer of John Anderson, tobacconist. Poe was established at $800 a year salary-the greatest sum he would ever earn in his life, and considerably more than his total income from the ten books he would write-as managing editor of a periodical in nearby Philadelphia. The periodical was owned by a reformed comedian named William Burton, who eventually sold it to George Graham, a cabinet-maker turned publisher.

Poe was retained as editor of Graham’sMagazine, and he worked doggedly in a third-floor cubicle shared with a Swedish assistant, reading and purchasing manuscripts, laying out new issues, and writing criticism and fiction. In short months his industry and ability helped boom the circulation of Graham’s from 5,000 to 37,000. Occasionally, as his duties demanded it, he made the uncomfortable six-hour train trip to New York City. It may be assumed that on these short visits he looked in on John Anderson’s tobacco shop and renewed his acquaintance with Mary Rogers, the attractive clerk behind the counter.

We do not know the date when Edgar Allan Poe last laid eyes on Mary Rogers. But we do know, approximately, the date when he first saw her name in print. Poe was a habitual reader of the sensational penny papers. Some of his finest fiction was culled from seemingly insignificant news items. Only months before, having read of an escaped orang-utan, he had conceived the world’s first detective story and published it in Graham’s as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Thus it was, in early August of 1841, that Poe consulted his latest batch of New York newspapers and stumbled upon the familiar name of Mary Rogers.

He came across the bald news item on the second page of the New York Sunday Mercury for 1 August. Since it was often filled with errors, he consulted the other papers. James Gordon Bennett’s gaudy New York Herald for 5 August fully substantiated the Mercury’s story. We can believe that what Poe read grieved him deeply. For what he read told him that the pretty girl who so often sold him tobacco in the shop on Broadway had been brutally murdered. According to both accounts, Mary Cecilia Rogers was found floating in the Hudson River off Hoboken on Wednesday, 28 July 1841. She had been beaten and strangled, and was quite dead when fished out of the water.

Poe’s reaction to the crime was no different from that of most decent New Yorkers. True, they were used to murder. Only five years before, at a time when most newspapers thought crime an improper subject to report, James Gordon Bennett, that brash and colourful cross-eyed Scot, had given the New York Herald a circulation of 50,000 with his reporting of the Ellen Jewett case. Miss Jewett, an attractive prostitute, had been bloodily dispatched in a house of ill-fame, and Mr Bennett broke a tradition of journalistic silence on such matters by having a look at the corpse and reporting to all and sundry: “The body looked as white, as full, as polished as the purest Parian marble. The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici.” This story broke the ice, and thereafter the constant reader had gore delivered daily at his breakfast.

Yet, despite this saturation of homicide, the murder of young Mary Rogers affected the citizenry with a shock of dismay. Miss Rogers was not just another anonymous victim. She had been, the woodcuts and columns made plain, a Grecian beauty endowed with every virtue-and virginity besides. She had worked honestly for a living. She had been adored and respected by customers of consequence. She had been the kind of woman one married, or had for sister or daughter. She had been a girl to whom half of New York could be likened. Now she was dead-killed with ferocity, in secret-and now no one was safe.

We have, fortunately, the typical reaction of a New Yorker of the period. Philip Hone, a cultured, wealthy citizen who dabbled in politics and kept voluminous diaries, read the accounts of Miss Rogers’s slaying about the same time as Poe did, and recorded his feelings:

“Friday, 6 Aug-Shocking Murder. The body of a young female named Mary Cecilia Rogers was found on Thursday last in the river near Hoboken, with horrid marks of violation and violence on her person. She was a beautiful girl, an attendant in the cigar shop of John Anderson in Broadway. She left home for a walk on the Sunday previous and was seen near Barclay Street in company with a young man, as if on an excursion to Hoboken; since which no trace of her was found, until the dreadful discovery on Thursday.

“She is said to have been a girl of exceeding good character and behaviour, engaged to be married, and has no doubt fallen victim to the brutal lust of some of the gang of banditti that walk unscathed and violate the laws with impunity in this moral and religious city. No discoveries have yet been made.”

The mystery of Mary Rogers was a nine-week wonder. The leading Manhattan journals, the Herald, the CommercialAdvertiser, the CourierandEnquirer, the Tribune, inspired by the possibilities of record circulation, and the underpaid metropolitan police, inspired by offers of rewards amounting to the unheard-of figure of $1,195, kept the case boiling. Dozens of suspects, including two of Mary’s suitors, a sailor, two abortionists, a wood-engraver, and several Bowery gangs, were closely questioned. Every suspect and every clue led to a dead end. By mid-October another murder, equally savage, had taken over the headlines and the attention of the law, and the hunt for the killer of Mary Rogers was actually, if not technically, abandoned.

But if Mary Rogers was forgotten in New York, she was not forgotten in Philadelphia. From that first day when he had read of Mary’s death, Poe followed every new development in the case. He read as many papers as he could find, but principally a periodical called BrotherJonathan, which gave the case the most complete coverage and often condensed the accounts of rival sheets. Poe’s later knowledge of the details of the crime makes it quite apparent that he filed away every clipping relating to Mary’s death and also made copious notes on the theories prevailing.

The murder fascinated Poe for reasons other than his personal knowledge of the victim. Undoubtedly the crime had particular appeal to Poe because it remained unsolved. This untidy fact made it a puzzle. Quite plainly, the pieces were all there. But they had not been properly put together. Poe was, as we know, a fanatic about puzzles. He enjoyed nothing more than to match his mentality against the most difficult cryptograms, codes, riddles, enigmas. Mary Rogers was such a challenge to his intellect.

He toyed with the idea of a story based on Mary Rogers, but he did not write it for fully six months after news of the crime had died down. When he finally did convert it into his second detective tale, it was created less out of an inner compulsion than out of an outer need for additional finances. Indirectly, it was Virginia Poe who was responsible for Mary Rogers being put to paper.

The weeks when Poe had been following the crime were, relatively, the most peaceful and secure of his entire life. In all the years before, he had never known normality. Orphaned by his actor parents at the age of two, he had spent five years in England with his guardian, a Scotch merchant. Entering the University of Virginia, he caroused and ran up gambling debts amounting to $2,500, and was withdrawn after less than a year’s attendance. Poe enlisted in the army as a private, was bought out by his guardian, then sent to West Point, where he was promptly court-martialled for neglecting roll calls and disobeying his superiors. On a visit to Baltimore, he met his father’s youngest sister, Maria Clemm, and his cousin, a frail child named Virginia, and thereafter he was never apart from them.

When Poe was twenty-four, he married Virginia, who was thirteen. It is thought that their marriage of twelve years was never consummated. We know that Maria Clemm encouraged the marriage. Whether it was because she wanted a provider, as some critics have insisted, or because she wanted a son, we shall never be certain. Of Poe’s union with Virginia, Montagu Slater has observed: “He married Virginia and lived under Maria Clemm’s apron because for some reason he dare not live with a normal woman, he was afraid of sex and afraid of life. Why? Oscar Wilde included him in a list of celebrated homosexuals.”

Poe’s sex life, or rather his lack of it, as well as his excessive drinking, made him a cadaver upon which psychiatric amateurs, and professionals as well, have fed since the advent of Freud. Since no analyst ever met or treated him, there is no means by which the accuracy of their guesses may be estimated. One analyst, Marie Bonaparte, who put the known facts of Poe’s life on the literary couch some years ago, thought he drank “to fly from the dire and unconscious temptations evoked in him by the dying Virginia”. Other psychiatrists have concluded that he loved Virginia and hated her, that he wanted her dead and feared she would die. Whatever his real torments and fears about facing reality, his admirer Baudelaire sensed that his greatest torture was that he had to make money-in a world for which he was unequipped.

But in 1842, in Philadelphia, Poe was briefly making his way for the first time. He was not drinking, and he was less moody than ever. To supplement his meagre earnings on Graham’s he often wrote stories at night in the downstairs front parlour of the three-storey brick house he had rented on the Schuylkill River. Life was difficult but well knit when suddenly, during an evening in January 1842, the whole thing unravelled-forever.

On that fateful evening Virginia was playing the harp and singing. Suddenly she “ruptured a blood vessel”. From that moment until her death five years later, she was an invalid, consumptive and haemorrhaging. And Poe came apart. He drank and he took opium and he destroyed every small opportunity. In four months he was finished as editor of Graham’s.

Soon his financial situation became desperate. He tried to obtain a federal job in Washington, but ruined the chance when he made his appearance drunk and wearing his clothes inside out. In Philadelphia every new day was a threat. Maria Clemm, though she pawned Poe’s books, had only molasses and bread to serve for meals. The ailing Virginia kept warm in bed by encouraging her pet cat, Catarina, to curl upon her bosom. In desperation, Poe turned his torn brain back to the subject of freelance fiction. And at once he remembered Mary Cecilia Rogers.

He wrote her story in May of 1842, seated before the cold fireplace of his Philadelphia parlour, scribbling steadily “on rolls of blue paper meticulously pasted together”. He employed, for reference, the clippings he had saved on the actual crime, and his thinly fictionalized story quoted many of the Mary Rogers news stories word for word. “ ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity,” he explained later, “and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded. Thus much escaped the writer of which he could have availed himself had he been upon the spot and visited the localities.” The manuscript, completed, ran to over twenty thousand words in length.

On 4 June 1842, Poe wrote an inquiry to George Roberts, editor of the popular BostonTimes and NotionMagazine:

My Dear Sir.

It is just possible that you may have seen a tale of mine entitled “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and published, originally, in Graham’sMagazine for April, 1841. Its theme was the exercise of ingenuity in the detection of a murderer. I have just completed a similar article, which I shall entitle “The Mystery of Marie Roget-a Sequel to the Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

The story is based upon the assassination of Mary Cecilia Rogers, which created so vast an excitement, some months ago, in New York. I have, however, handled my design in a manner altogether novel in literature. I have imagined a series of nearly exact coincidences occurring in Paris. A young grisette, one Marie Roget, had been murdered under precisely similar circumstances with Mary Rogers. Thus, under pretence of showing how Dupin (the hero of The Rue Morgue) unravelled the mystery of Marie’s assassination, I, in reality enter into a very long and rigorous analysis of the New York tragedy. No point is omitted. I examine, each by each, the opinions and arguments of the press upon the subject, and show that this subject has been, hitherto, un-approached. In fact, I believe not only that I have demonstrated the fallacy of the general idea-that the girl was the victim of a gang of ruffians-but have indicatedtheassassin in a manner which will give renewed impetus to investigation.

My main object, nevertheless, as you will readily understand, is an analysis of the true principles which should direct inquiry in similar cases. From the nature of the subject, I feel convinced that the article will excite attention, and it has occurred to me that you would be willing to purchase it for the forthcoming Mammoth Notion. It will make 25 pages of Graham’s Magazine; and, at the usual price, would be worth to me $100. For reasons, however, which I need not specify, I am desirous of having this tale printed in Boston, and, if you like it, I will say $50. Will you please write me upon this point?-by return mail, if possible.

Yours very truly,

Edgar A. Poe

Having completed this letter, Poe wrote two more, with similar contents, to other editors. One was to a friend, Dr Joseph Evans Snodgrass, of the Baltimore Sunday Visitor. In this letter Poe said: “I am desirous of publishing it in Baltimore… Of course I could not afford to make you an absolute present of it-but if you are willing to take it, I will say $40.” The third letter was to T.W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.

All three editors turned down the suggested story. Poe then sold it to the most unlikely market of all-Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion of New York, a periodical which the author contemptuously regarded as “the ne plus ultra of ill-taste, impudence and vulgar humbuggery”. Snowden’s ran “The Mystery of Marie Roget” as a three-part serial in their issues of November and December 1842 and February 1843.

In the very opening paragraphs Poe gives full credit to Mary Rogers for inspiring the creation of Marie Roget. Then, for the second time in his fiction, Poe introduces the world’s first imaginary detective, the eccentric Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin who dwells in the Faubourg Saint-Germain with his friend, companion, and sounding-board, the unnamed narrator of the story. Ever since his solution of the killing of a mother and daughter at the hands of an ape in a sealed room in the Rue Morgue, Dupin has “relapsed into his old habits of moody revery”. In fact, he is so deeply “engaged in researches” that he has not left his shuttered rooms for a month, and is therefore unaware of a murder that is creating great agitation throughout Paris.

The body of Marie Roget has been found floating in the Seine. Though the Sûreté has offered a reward of thirty thousand francs, there has been no break in the case. At last, in desperation, Prefect G of the Sûreté calls upon Dupin and offers him a proposition (presumably a sum of cash) if he will undertake the case and save the Prefect’s reputation. Dupin agrees to investigate.

After obtaining the Sûreté evidence and back copies of the Paris newspapers, Dupin expounds on all the theories extant. Some sources believe Marie Roget is still alive; others, that she was killed by one of her suitors, Jacques St. Eustache or Beauvais, or by a gang. Dupin rejects all these theories, demolishing each with logic. He feels that the real murderer can be found by a closer study of “the public prints”. After a week he has six newspaper “extracts” that indicate the killer. These reveal that, three and a half years before, Marie Roget mysteriously left her job at Le Blanc’s perfumery and was thought to have eloped with a young naval officer “much noted for his debaucheries”. Dupin reasons that this naval officer returned, made love to Marie, and when she became pregnant he murdered her or saw her die under an abortionist’s instrument. He then disposed of her body in the Seine.

Dupin points to the clues that will expose the killer. Letters to the press, trying to throw suspicion on others, must be compared with those written by the naval officer. The abortionist, Mme Deluc, and others, must be questioned. The boat which the officer used to dispose of Marie’s body must be found. “This boat shall guide us,” says Dupin, “with a rapidity which will surprise even ourselves, to him who employed it in the midnight of the fatal Sabbath. Corroboration will rise upon corroboration, and the murderer will be traced.”

But in concluding his story Poe neglects to show Dupin catching and exposing the murderer. Instead, Poe concludes abruptly, using the trick of an inserted editorial note which announces: “We feel it advisable only to state, in brief, that the result desired was brought to pass; and that the Prefect fulfilled punctually, although with reluctance, the terms of his compact with the Chevalier.”

There was no immediate discernible reaction to the magazine publication of “The Mystery of Marie Roget”. It was not until almost four years later, when the story appeared again as part of a collection of Poe’s fiction, that it made any impression at all. In July 1845 the publishing firm of Wiley and Putnam selected “Marie Roget” and eleven others of Poe’s narratives, out of the seventy-two he had written, for reprinting in book form. Before publication, however, Poe took great care to revise this story, as well as several others.

In a series of factual footnotes Poe explained that “the lapse of several years since the tragedy upon which the tale is based” made the notes and revisions necessary. “A young girl, Mary Cecilia Rogers, was murdered in the vicinity of New York,” he explained, “and although her death occasioned an intense and long-enduring excitement, the mystery attending it had remained unsolved at the period when the present paper was written and published (November 1842). Herein, under pretence of relating the fate of a Parisian grisette, the author has followed, in minute detail, the essential, while merely parallelling the inessential facts of the real murder of Mary Rogers. Thus all argument founded upon the fiction is applicable to the truth: and the investigation of the truth was the object… The confessions of two persons (one of them Madame Deluc of the narrative) made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed, in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which that conclusion was attained.”

Wiley and Putnam’s 228-page pamphlet Tales by Edgar A. Poe appeared as Number XI of the firm’s Library of American Books, priced at fifty cents per copy, of which eight cents went in royalties to the impoverished author. Upon its appearance in the bookshops, it was heavily outsold by two competing imports from abroad: The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas, and The Wandering Jew, by Eugène Sue. Nevertheless, it did attain a moderate sale.

The real success of the Tales, on the heels of “The Raven”, which had been published six months earlier, was not financial but critical. The Boston Courier pronounced it “thrilling” and the New York Post recommended it as “a rare treat”. In London, the Literary Gazette considered its author a genius, and in Paris, Baudelaire was honoured to translate it into French. Of the twelve tales, “Marie Roget” created the greatest divergence of opinion. And, in the century since, the novelette has continued to divide its readers. Edmund Pearson thought it “rather tedious” and Howard Haycraft felt that it had “no life-blood”. Russel Crouse disagreed. “It is a brilliant study in the repudiation of false clues,” he said, “a fascinating document in the field of pseudo-criminology.”

Whatever its actual literary merit, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” attained early immortality as one of the three tales-preceded by “The Rue Morgue” in 1841 and followed by “The Purloined Letter” in 1844-responsible for the founding of the modern detective story. Scholars have variously credited Herodotus, the Bible, and the Arabian Nights with this honour. Their erudition must be rejected as utter nonsense. As George Bates has remarked: “The cause of Chaucer’s silence on the subject of aeroplanes was because he had never seen one. You cannot write about policemen before policemen exist to be written of.”

Organized crime-detection was in its infancy when Edgar Allan Poe created the character of Dupin. The mystery story was an unheard-of art form when Poe became, in the words of Willard Huntington Wright, “the authentic father of the detective novel as we know it today”. In “Marie Roget”, and in his two other crime stories, Poe prepared the mould for the first eccentric amateur sleuth and his thick-witted foil, a mould which a thousand authors have used in the years since. In these stories, too, Poe introduced the first of a legion of stupid police officers, red herrings, perfect crimes, and psychological deductions.

After Poe, of course, came the deluge. But in his lifetime he had no idea of what he had wrought. His detective tales, as startling innovations, profited him little. With Virginia’s death, he buried Dupin. He dwelt in an alcoholic daze. He became engaged to several wealthy women, but married none. In Baltimore, bleary with drink, drugs, and insanity, he stumbled into the chaos of a Congressional election and was led by hoodlums from poll to poll to vote over and over again as a repeater. Left in a gutter without his clothes or his senses, he was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he groaned: “I wish to God somebody would blow my damned brains out.” It was on a Sunday’s dawn that he died murmuring: “God help my poor soul.”

But seven years before, when he first wrote “Marie Roget”, he saw himself as something better. The character of C. Auguste Dupin was Poe’s idealization of himself, “a cool, infallible thinking machine that brought the power of reason to bear on all of life’s problems”. The name Dupin he had found in an article on the French Sûreté in Burton’s Magazine. This was probably André Dupin, a French politician who wrote on criminal procedures and died in 1865.

The character of the blundering Prefect G was undoubtedly drawn from the very real, if quite improbable, François Vidocq, a French baker’s son who was sent to the galleys for thievery, and who later served as head of the Sûreté for eighteen years. Poe read Vidocq’s fanciful four-volume Mémoires, which contained the detective’s boast that he had placed twenty thousand criminals in jail. Poe was not impressed. He thought Vidocq “a good guesser” and a man who “erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close.”

But the most important character in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” was the unhappy victim. And she, as Poe had told us, was Mary Cecilia Rogers.

Despite her subsequent notoriety, Mary Rogers’s beginnings remain as enigmatic as her sudden end. For all the columns of copy published in the days following her death, Mary Rogers continues a shadowy, forever tantalizing figure of a young woman. She was born in New York City during 1820. There was, apparently, an older brother, who went to sea in his youth and engaged in a variety of speculative enterprises abroad. We know nothing of Mary’s father, except what Poe wrote of her fictional counterpart, Marie Roget: “The father had died during the child’s infancy, and from the period of his death… the mother and daughter had dwelt together.” As Mary grew up, her widowed mother, ill, nervous, harried by debt, sought some means of making a livelihood. This problem was solved by Mary’s seafaring brother, who returned from South America with profits gained from an obscure business venture. He presented a portion of these profits to mother and sister, then signed on a ship and sailed out of our story.

Mrs Rogers wisely invested her windfall in a boarding-house at 126 Nassau Street in New York City. While the house gave Mary and her mother a roof over their heads, it gave them little else. At no time did it entertain more than two or three male boarders, and these were usually struggling clerks or labourers.

To supplement the meagre income of the boarding-house, Mary Rogers decided to seek outside employment. This was in 1837, when she was seventeen. All accounts agree that she was beautiful. Crude contemporary prints depict her as a dark-eyed brunette, who wore her hair fashionably bunned. She had a complexion without blemish and an aquiline nose, and was much admired for her “dark smile”. She was favoured, too, with a full, firm bosom, a slender figure, and a manner of great vivacity. She did not have to look far for employment. Her beauty came to the attention of one John Anderson, a snuff-manufacturer who ran a tobacco shop at 319 Broadway, near Thomas Street. Aware that “her good looks and vivacity” would be an asset to a business which catered to male trade, Anderson installed Mary behind his counter. The store was already a popular hangout for gamblers, sporty bachelors, newspaper reporters, and magazine editors. With the appearance of Mary Rogers, the clientèle grew and improved.

We know that during 1837 and 1838 Edgar Allan Poe frequented the tobacconist’s and was impressed with Mary Rogers. But there were other author customers, more prosperous and better known, who were equally impressed. Fitz-Greene Halleck, the somewhat forbidding, partially deaf, middle-aged poet, who had once served as secretary to John Jacob Astor, often appeared carrying his familiar green cotton umbrella. He was, it is said, sufficiently enchanted by Mary to write a poem rhapsodizing her beauty.

James Fenimore Cooper, on his frequent trips to New York from Cooperstown, was another regular at John Anderson’s. He was a breezy, frank, pugnacious man, who had already published The Spy and spent a fortune instigating libel suits against reviewers who called his writings “garbage”. Cooper was uninhibited in his opinions, and highly vocal, and there can be little doubt he often sounded off to Mary on the money-madness of America and the provincialism of New York.

The most famous customer, however, was fifty-four-year-old Washington Irving. He dwelt alone in a small stone Dutch cottage on the Hudson, and was known everywhere for his creation of Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle. A stout, genial, unaffected man, Irving must have entranced Mary Rogers with anecdotes of his youth. As a lawyer he had helped defend Aaron Burr. And he counted among his friends Dolly Madison, John Howard Payne, and Mary Godwin Shelley.

Few of the customers attended Mary Rogers after shop hours. At her mother’s insistence, the proprietor, when he could, escorted her home at dusk. For New York was shot through with rowdyism. At nightfall the gangs, the Bowery Boys and the Dead Rabbits, rose out of the slums to molest, to maim, and to murder with butcher knives. It was estimated that in the waterfront area alone over fifteen thousand sailors were robbed of two million dollars in a single year.

Though there was much that was unlovely in New York-Dickens disliked the spittoons as much as the slums, and Cooper objected to the pigs in the red-brick streets-there was also much that held attraction for a young lady. There were beer gardens that seated a thousand persons, and behind the wrought-iron fences of the great homes couples danced the polka and the waltz, and to the north of the city were vast green picnic grounds and glistening ponds for boating. There is every reason to believe that Mary Rogers enjoyed these pleasures.

While she may not have dated her customers, there is evidence that Mary Rogers was a gay girl. After her death, much was made of her chastity. Dr Richard Cook, of Hoboken, who performed the autopsy, announced that Mary had been “a good girl”. He reaffirmed to the New York Herald “that previous to this shocking outrage, she had evidently been a person of chastity and correct habits”. Surely the good doctor’s diagnosis was more sentimental than scientific. From the number and variety of the young men who were interrogated after her death and who seemed to know her intimately, it is unlikely that Mary Rogers was a virgin.

Especially she seemed to have great affection for numerous of her mother’s boarding-house guests. William Keekuck, a young sailor who had boarded with Mrs Rogers in 1840, had occasionally dated Mary, as had his older brother before him. Alfred Crommelin, for whom she left a rose on the last day of her life, was a handsome boarder characterized by the press as her “former suitor”. Daniel Payne, a cork-cutter and an alcoholic, lived under the same roof as Mary, dated her regularly, and intended to marry her. These were three escorts known by name. There were probably many more. In the light of her environment, it is surprising that Mary’s reputation was not worse. She had grown to maturity without paternal discipline, without family life, without security. Her beauty had marked her as a perpetual target for adventurous men-about-town. Her job, in a shop patronized solely by males, made her sophisticated beyond her years. Her oppressive financial status and her confinement to a rundown boarding-house, coupled with a lively personality, encouraged her to accept nocturnal escape with any attractive gallant.

In October of 1838, when she was only eighteen, there occurred a curious interlude in the life of Mary Rogers. On the morning of Thursday, 4 October, she failed to appear for work at the cigar store. The same day, her distressed mother found a note from Mary on her bedroom table. The contents of the note, which Mrs Rogers turned over to the city coroner’s office, were never divulged. Three and a half years later, at the time of her death, the New York Herald told its readers: “This young girl, Mary Rogers, was missing from Anderson’s store… for two weeks. It is asserted that she was then seduced by an officer of the US Navy, and kept at Hoboken for two weeks. His name is well known on board his ship.”

The reporters who frequented the cigar store, and knew Mary, quickly filed stories on her disappearance. With one exception, they all suspected foul play. The one exception was an anonymous cynic on the Commercial Advertiser who thought that the young lady had gone “into concealment that it might be believed she had been abducted, in order to help the sale of the goods of her employer”.

After two weeks the erratic Mary returned to her mother and her job. She had no explanation to offer, beyond remarking that she had “felt tired” and gone to rest with some friends in Brooklyn. When she was shown a copy of the Commercial Advertiser, with its snide suspicions of hoax, she became furious. “She felt so annoyed at such a report having got abroad during her temporary absence on a country excursion,” said the Journal of Commerce, “that she positively refused ever to return to the store.” It is not known for certain, however, if she actually left John Anderson’s because her honesty was impugned by the customers, or if she left simply because her mother, ailing and infirm, required her assistance to help maintain the boarding-house. But leave she did, in 1839, some months after returning from her mysterious holiday.

Her activities in the three years following are unknown. It is to be presumed that she spent her days cleaning and cooking in her mother’s boarding-house, and her nights supplying diversion for her mother’s paid-up roomers. We know that one boarder, Alfred Crommelin, ardently pursued her and was rejected. Her lack of interest determined him to remove his person from the boarding-house. However, he made it clear that if she had a change of heart, he might still be available. Another roomer, the convivial cork-cutter Daniel Payne, had more success. Though a man of limited means, he found ways to entertain Mary and became her most frequent escort. They soon reached an understanding, and Mary began to refuse all outside engagements. Payne was under the impression that they were engaged to be married. But before a date could be determined, another date occurred of more historic importance in the annals of crime.

Sometime on Saturday morning, 24 July 1841, Mary Rogers visited the office of her rejected suitor, Alfred Crommelin. He was out to an early lunch and his business quarters were closed. From his door, as was the custom, he had hung a slate for messages. On this slate Mary engimatically scribbled her mother’s name. Then she inserted a rose in the keyhole of the door and departed. Crommelin discovered both the signature on the slate and the red rose shortly after lunch, but, as far as we know, did nothing about them. Perhaps he was occupied with his business. Perhaps he was not satisfied with the show of affection. Or perhaps he visited her after all and never confessed it.

The following morning-the now famous morning of Sunday, 25 July 1841-broke hot and humid. It was, the press duly reported, ninety-three degrees in the shade. Many New Yorkers went to church. Many more New Yorkers fled the furnace of the metropolis for the greener pastures of New Jersey and Connecticut. Mary Rogers, too, decided to escape the heat of the city’s centre. It was ten o’clock in the morning when she rapped on Daniel Payne’s bedroom door. He was busy shaving. She called to him that she was going to spend the day at the home of a cousin, Mrs Downing, whom she frequently visited. Payne, occupied with his beard, called back that he would meet her when she descended from the stage at Broadway and Ann Street at seven o’clock that evening. This was agreeable to Mary, and she promptly left for her cousin’s residence on Jane Street two miles away.

Late in the afternoon Payne bestirred himself, went into the city, and dallied at several grog shops where he was well known. When he emerged shortly before seven to keep his rendezvous, he noticed that heavy clouds hung low overhead. There were rumblings of thunder and flashes of lightning. Certain that rain was in store, and aware of Mary’s habits, he decided that she would probably spend the night with her relative. He did not bother to go to Broadway and Ann Street. Instead, he returned directly to Mrs Rogers’s boarding-house and went to bed.

When Payne came down to breakfast in the morning, Mary had not yet appeared. Since it had poured the night before, and since the hour was still early, her absence was not unusual. But when Payne made his way back to the house for lunch and found that Mary had still not appeared, he was disturbed. Mrs Rogers was also disturbed. She was heard by her coloured maid to remark that “she feared she would never see Mary again”.

Immediately after lunch Payne set out for Mrs Downing’s place in Jane Street. Upon his arrival he was surprised and agitated to learn that Mary was not there. Nor had she been there the previous day. She had been expected, but had not appeared. Mrs Downing had not seen her for over a week.

By nightfall Payne and Mrs Rogers had contacted all of Mary’s relatives and friends in the vicinity. None had seen her. None had heard from her. She had disappeared completely. Payne and Mrs Rogers were now sufficiently alarmed to try other means of inquiry. Payne went to the offices of the New York Sun, the most widely read of the cheaper newspapers, and placed an advertisement asking for information about Mary Cecilia Rogers.

The advertisement appeared in the Sun on 27 July. Among its many readers was Alfred Crommelin, the rejected suitor who had so recently received a rose from Mary. He, too, was troubled by her curious disappearance, her second such in three and a half years. Crommelin promptly appointed himself a search party of one. He assumed that Payne and Mrs Rogers had thoroughly scoured the city. He determined to try the outskirts. On Wednesday morning he made his way towards Hoboken, New Jersey. What sent him so far afield, yet with such unerring accuracy, we must deduce for ourselves.

It was a sweltering morning when Crommelin reached Hoboken. He was about to make inquiries after Mary, when he noticed a group of people gathering on the Hudson at a site where spring water was sold for a penny a glass. This site, a cool retreat on the water, was known as Sybil’s Cave. Crommelin joined the crowd, and then became aware for the first time of what they were watching. All eyes were on a rowing-boat, manned by two men, being pulled towards the shore, dragging behind it a body attached to a rope.

What had occurred, only minutes before, was that two sightseers, James M. Boulard and Henry Mallin, while strolling beside the water, had noticed a human form floating in midstream. The pair had immediately requisitioned the rowing-boat and headed for the body. Almost simultaneously three men in a sailing-boat, John Bertram, William Waller, and someone named Luther, had also seen the body, which they had at first thought to be a bag of clothing, and started towards it. The rowing-boat got there first. The body was that of a disfigured, fully dressed young female. Boulard and Mallin hastily secured a rope to her and pulled her in.

When the unfortunate female at last lay on the beach, Crommelin pressed forward with the others for a better view. Crommelin recognized the corpse at once. “It’s Mary Rogers!” he exclaimed. “This blow may kill her mother!”

She was still wearing the costume she had worn four days earlier-flowered bonnet, its ribbon tied under her chin, blue dress, petticoat, pantalettes, stockings, and garters. Her face had been badly bashed, and her body bore bruises of violence. From the condition of her corpse, there was every evidence of foul play. Mary’s wrists were tightly tied with hemp, and about her throat was wound a strip of lace torn from her petticoat. Edgar Allan Poe, in his graphic account, made it clear that death was caused by strangulation, not by drowning. “The flesh of the neck was much swollen,” he wrote. “There were no cuts apparent, or bruises which appeared the effect of blows. A piece of lace was found tied so tightly round the neck as to be hidden from sight; it was completely buried in the flesh… The knot by which the strings of the bonnet were fastened was not a lady’s, but a slip or sailor’s knot.”

Upon the arrival of the Hudson County authorities, the body was promptly transferred from the beach to the small village of Hoboken. There, Dr Richard F. Cook, serving as county coroner, hastily performed the autopsy. By nine o’clock that evening the formal inquest began. Crommelin once more identified the corpse as that of Mary Rogers. He spoke of her reputation for “truthfulness, and modesty and discretion”, and theorized that she had probably been lured to the Hoboken area by some man. Dr Cook then testified as to the results of his autopsy. She had been murdered, he stated. She had also been subjected to sexual intercourse, most likely raped, possibly once, possibly many times.

When the witnesses at the inquest had concluded their testimony, the coroner’s jury deliberated briefly, then announced that the victim’s death had been caused by “violence committed by some person or persons”. And thus the mystery of Mary Rogers was officially embarked upon its journey into history.

Mary’s mother and Daniel Payne had been notified of the tragedy earlier in the day. The news was brought to them by the man named Luther, who had witnessed from his sailing-boat the recovery of the body. The day following the inquest, Alfred Crommelin appeared at the boarding-house to confirm the identification of Mary. He had secured from the Hoboken morgue a flower from Mary’s hat, a curl from her hair, a strip of her pantalettes, and a garter. These he displayed to the bereaved mother. Mary had been buried hours before. The speedy interment was made necessary by the rapid decomposition of her body due to excessive exposure to water and hot weather.

Though Mary Rogers had vanished on 25 July 1841, and had been found on 28 July, no New York newspaper mentioned her murder until 1 August. After that, for more than two months she was rarely off the front pages of the popular press.

The sensational publicity accorded the case created wide and feverish interest. Despite this, the police made only desultory efforts to solve it. There was an immediate dispute over the matter of jurisdiction. New Jersey authorities tried to lay the investigation in the lap of the New York police, arguing that Mary had been killed in New York and dumped into the Hudson, and had drifted into the New Jersey area by sheerest accident. The New York police, on the other hand, replied that Mary had been slain off Hoboken, had been discovered near that community and buried there, and that therefore the problem was plainly a responsibility of the New Jersey authorities.

While both states wrangled, the Manhattan press helped resolve the issue by accusing the New York police of shirking their duty, pointing out that Mary Rogers, no matter where she was killed, had been a resident and citizen of New York. At last New York City officialdom bowed to this pressure and reluctantly undertook the case. On Wednesday, 11 August, Mary Rogers was exhumed from her Hoboken grave and removed to the Dead House at City Hall Park in New York City. Mrs Rogers and several relatives were brought to the Dead House, where they positively identified various articles of clothing that had belonged to Mary.

The New York police now had the enigma in their hands. They were neither equipped to solve it, nor, it must be admitted, were they terribly interested. The High Constable of the force, a squat, bald-headed old man named Jacob Hays, was capable enough. He had solved many crimes during his career, and had introduced the techniques of shadowing and the third degree to America. But at the time he was handed the portfolio of the Mary Rogers case he was sixty-nine years old and approaching retirement. Hays, therefore, turned the case over to his handfull of Leatherheads-so-called after the heavy leather helmets they wore-and assigned its perusal to a Sergeant McArdel.

The Leatherheads, who wore no uniforms and carried no firearms, were divided into two groups. The daytime force consisted of two constables from each city ward and a half-dozen marshals. The night force, called the Night Watch, consisted of 146 men. The latter group worked as labourers during the day, then supplemented their salaries by becoming policemen at night. Their pay, as part-time law-enforcement officers, was eighty-seven cents an evening.

Naturally, since they were overworked and underpaid, the Leatherheads had little interest in any new crime that might require extra exertion. Furthermore, many resented any intrusion upon their routine activities, which had been so organized as to give them bonuses above their meager police pay. For, since the city would not raise their wages, a great number of police bolstered their incomes by secretly allying themselves with professional criminals. The standard practice was for thieves to ransack a shop while the Leatherheads turned their backs. Then, when the shopkeepers offered cash rewards for the return of their merchandise, the Leatherheads miraculously recovered the loot, though rarely the looters. Upon collecting the rewards, the Leatherheads split the money with the criminals. Theft was a paying business; murder, unless there was a reward involved, was not. The Mary Rogers case, then, was little more than an unprofitable nuisance.

For almost two weeks after the murder, the police remained inert, while the press fumed and the public boiled. On the day Mary Rogers’s corpse was transferred to New York, a committee of angry citizens acted. They sponsored an open meeting and collected $455, to be given as a reward to anyone who apprehended the killer. Shortly after, Governor Seward of New York added an official reward of $750, and the guarantee of a full pardon to any accomplice willing to turn informant.

Now, at last, there was sufficient bounty to spur Sergeant McArdel and his Leatherheads into action. Quickly a long list of suspects was summoned to police headquarters and interrogated. Foremost among these was Daniel Payne. He had known Mary Rogers best, and spoken to her last, before her disappearance. It was felt that he had acted in a suspiciously “unloverlike” manner, presumably because he had not troubled to wait for her at Broadway and Ann Street as he had promised. The police theorized that she might have left him for another, and that he, in a drunken rage, might have killed her out of jealousy. But Payne, in a detailed statement, was able to account for every hour of the critical Sunday.

Alfred Crommelin was the next to be questioned. The police, remembering the rose in the keyhole, felt that “there was still some slight tendresse betwixt him and the young lady”. Also, Crommelin had been curiously anxious to halt the police investigation. Earlier, he had begged McArdel to drop the case, since a continued inquiry, with its attendant notoriety, might be seriously damaging to Mrs Rogers’s health. Yet Crommelin, like Payne, had an acceptable alibi.

Another of Mrs Rogers’s boarders remained suspect. Dr Cook had indicated that the bonnet string about Mary’s chin had been tied in a sailor’s knot, and that there was a sailor’s hitch behind her dress, by means of which she had been lifted and dropped into the Hudson. It appeared that, the year before, a young man named William Keekuck had roomed with Mrs Rogers. Keekuck was now an ordinary sailor in the United States Navy. He was at sea, on the USS North Carolina when the authorities sent for him. The moment his ship docked at Norfolk, Virginia, Keekuck was taken off and hustled to New York for cross-examination. There was indeed some evidence against the frightened sailor. He had boarded his vessel in a great hurry, and very late, the night of 25 July. His trousers had been stained, though it was no longer possible to prove that these had been bloodstains. Keekuck admitted that he had dwelt with Mrs Rogers, and had known Mary, but insisted that he had been only an acquaintance. It was his brother who had been a suitor. Though in New York City on shore leave during 25 July, he had not seen Mary Rogers. In fact, he had not seen her since 3 July, and was able to substantiate this to the temporary satisfaction of the police; but before he was finally dismissed William Keekuck was three times hauled off the North Carolina for questioning.

Meanwhile, the police were bringing in other promising suspects. Great hopes were held, briefly, over the apprehension of one Joseph M. Morse, a rotund and bewhiskered wood-engraver, who lived in Nassau Street near Mrs Rogers’s boarding-house. On the Sunday of Mary Rogers’s disappearance, Morse had been seen travelling to Staten Island with an attractive young lady who was not his wife. On the morning Mary was removed from the Hudson, Morse heard about it, left his business at midday, returned home in a frenzied state, had an argument with his wife, beat her up, and departed the metropolis for parts unknown. The authorities were swiftly on his trail. They found him in Worcester, Massachusetts. He had shaved off his beard, purposely lost weight, and was hiding under an assumed name. His prospects, to say the least, were dismal.

Morse was brought back to New York City under guard. There were street mutterings of lynching. Morse quickly admitted that he had picked up a comely young lady on the Sunday in question and escorted her to Staten Island. His purpose was not homicidal, but carnal. He had, in fact, shown some ingenuity. He had set his watch back in order to miss the last ferry home. The ruse was successful. Morse then suggested to the young lady that they adjourn to a hotel. She proved amenable. They rented rooms, whereupon Morse made amorous advances, as planned. These advances, he remarked unhappily, were rejected. He slept the night alone, and returned on the morning ferry to his family hearth and his wood-engraving business. Shortly after, he heard from neighbours of Mary Rogers’s Sunday disappearance and death. At once he worried that his attractive companion might have been Mary Rogers. Though he had left her defiant and healthy, he realized that she might have been murdered after his departure, and that he would be discovered and blamed. Without further ado, he fled the suddenly oppressive climate of New York City for Massachusetts.

While the police weighed the veracity of Mr Morse’s little adventure, the penny press publicized it. And luckily for Mr Morse. For, shortly after, the young lady Morse had abandoned on Staten Island came forward to identify herself and to corroborate his story and her own virginity. The police promptly turned the Sunday Lothario over to the custody and further cross-examination of his waiting spouse.

But the mystery of Mary Rogers still remained unsolved. McArdel and his Leatherheads now abandoned Mrs Rogers’s boarders and the other obvious suspects to concentrate on a line of investigation that had been too long neglected. The police asked themselves the following questions: What had been Mary Rogers’s movements after she left the boarding-house for her cousin’s residence? Since she had left at ten o’clock in the morning, while church was out and the streets were filled, who had seen her? And whom had she been seen with? In what direction was she headed? And by what means of transport? These questions, much to the gratification of McArdel, speedily produced an entirely new net of suspects and theories.

A stage-driver named Adam Wall was found who thought he had picked up Mary Rogers at the Bull’s Head ferry and driven her to a picnic area near Hoboken. Wall said she was accompanied by “a tall dark man”, perhaps twenty-six years of age.

Others quickly appeared to support the assumption that Mary had visited Hoboken with a stranger or strangers. In fact, two men told the authorities that they had been walking along the shore, approaching Sybil’s Cave, on 25 July, when they observed a rowing-boat with six young males and a girl. The girl was attractive enough to hold their attention. Minutes after the girl ran off into the near-by woods with her bevy of admirers, another rowing-boat, containing three anxious gentlemen, drew up. Its occupants inquired of the two visitors if they had seen six men and a girl in the vicinity. When the visitors admitted they had seen just such a group head into the woods, the occupants of the rowing-boat inquired if the girl had gone willingly or by force. Upon learning that she had gone willingly, the occupants took to their oars and slid away.

Next, several witnesses came forward with the recollection of seeing Mary strolling that Sunday morning towards Barclay Street in Manhattan. At Theatre Alley, a short lane off Ann Street which once led to the stage door of the Park Theatre, she had been met by a young man “with whom she was apparently acquainted”. From the direction she took thereafter, it was thought she could have gone to the Hoboken ferry-or entered the infamous residence of Mrs Ann Lohman, a notorious and busy abortionist who was known to the carriage trade as Mme Restell.

Actually, there was no direct evidence to connect Mary Rogers’s murder with Mme Restell’s illegal practices. But whenever there occurred an untimely death in New York, especially one involving a fashionable or beautiful female, there were immediate whisperings against the portly and wealthy English-born Madame. Her record, to be sure, was unsavory. She had been an immigrant dressmaker, had wedded a dispenser of quack medicines named Lohman, and, it was thought, had disposed of him for the inheritance. Thereafter she had lent her talents to birth-control.

Mme Restell’s mansion of Greenwich Street was visited by a steady stream of unmarried expectant women, many the mistresses of millionaires and Congressman. At the time of Mary Rogers’s death, the Madame’s shuttered establishment, nick-named “the mansion built on baby skulls”, had netted her earnings upwards of one million dollars. Shortly after Mary’s burial, public feeling against Mme Restell ran so high that crowds gathered about her doorway shouting: “Haul her out! Where’s the thousand children murdered in this house? Who murdered Mary Rogers?” On that occasion, violence was prevented only by the quick intervention of the police, who undoubtedly found the mammoth Madame too lucrative a source of income to trouble with such trifles as the corpse of a onetime cigar-counter employee.

The police had just about exhausted their inquiry into Mary Rogers’s movements when a new and sensational bit of evidence suddenly came to light. Two young men, the sons of a Mrs Frederica Loss, who kept a public inn a mile above Hoboken, were beating about the bush near Weehawken on 25 August. In the thicket they found a small opening that led into a cramped tunnel or cave. They explored further, and discovered inside the cave four stones built into a seat. Draped on and about the seat were a silk scarf, a white petticoat, a parasol, a pocket-book, a pair of gloves, and a mildewed linen handkerchief initialled in silk “M.R.”.

Mrs Loss’s sons immediately gathered up the feminine apparel and brought the find to their mother. She went directly to the Hoboken police, who excitedly contacted their colleagues in New York City. At once the press was filled with woodcuts and stories of Mrs Loss, her inn, and two of her three sons who had made the discovery, and the opening in the thicket near the cliffs of Weehawken.

This publicity flushed forth a new witness. A stage-driver came forward. He dimly remembered transporting a girl of Mary Rogers’s description and a tall “swarthy” man to Mrs Loss’s inn on 25 July. This recollection succeeded in stirring Mrs Loss’s own memory. She vaguely remembered the couple. They had had cakes and drinks. Then Mary, or someone like her, and the “swarthy” man had gone off together into the nearby woods overlooking the river. Some minutes later Mrs Loss had heard a woman’s scream from the vicinity of the woods. She had paid no attention. On Sundays the area was filled with gangs of rowdies and loose young ladies who were often vocal.

With the find at Weehawken, all the tangible clues were in. Since the case had not been broken in fact, it could only be solved on paper. Police authorities and amateur sleuths of the city room were soon busy formulating and publishing theories. The overwhelming majority were in accord on Weehawken as the site of the crime. But on the subject of the criminal’s identity there was a great passionate diversity of opinion.

Who killed Mary Rogers? In the months after her death, almost every literature contemporary was certain he knew. The authorities seemed to lean towards Mrs Loss and her three sons. Justice Gilbert Merritt, of New Jersey, devoted much time to questioning Mrs Loss. He believed that she practised abortion, or permitted her inn to be employed by physicians for that purpose and that Mary Rogers had died during an operation in one of her back rooms and had been disposed of in the Hudson by her sons. The effects in the thicket, he felt, were only a red herring to divert suspicion. “The murder of the said Mary C. Rogers was perpetrated in a house at Weehawken,” Justice Merritt announced, “then kept by one Frederica Loss, alias Kellenbarack, and her three sons, all three of whom this deponent has reason to believe are worthless and profligate characters.”

Sergeant McArdel, of the New York Leatherheads, interrogated only the three sons, and found them as undelightful as had Justice Merritt. They were sullen and they were contradictory. But they steadfastly denied that their mother had practised abortion. When one of them was asked if visitors ever paid their mother fifty dollars for any purpose, he replied: “I never have known any sick person brought to my mother’s house to be attended upon.” McArdel, too, concluded that Mrs Loss was guilty of manslaughter, and that her sons were her accomplices in removing the body.

Of all the authorities, Dr Richard F. Cook held most heartily to his original theory that Mary had been gang-raped and then brutally killed. Again and again he told the press that he was “confident” she had been “violated by six, or possibly eight ruffians; of that fact, he had ocular proof, but which is unfit for publication.”

The majority on newspaper row supported Dr Cook’s theory. Murder after murder had been committed by roving bands of rowdies in the New York metropolitan area and among the outing-sites of New Jersey. The weekly Saturday Evening Post saw signs of gang violence in the disorder of the thicket, and the Journal of Commerce saw the handiwork of street ruffians in the fact that no men’s handkerchiefs had been used to strangle Mary. “A piece of one of the unfortunate girl’s petticoats was torn out and tied under her chin, and around the back of her head, probably to prevent screams,” remarked the Journal of Commerce. “This was done by fellows who had no pocket-handkerchiefs.”

For weeks the New York Herald, which had been crusading against vandals and butcher boys, also championed the gang-rape notion. The Herald theorized that Mary and her “swarthy” escort had indeed visited Mrs Loss’s inn for refreshment, and then proceeded to the woods for further refreshment. In the brush they had been set upon by a waiting gang of roughnecks. Mary’s escort had been assassinated immediately, and Mary herself slain after she had been attacked. Then both bodies had been shoved into the river. But if this held any probability, what happened to the remains of the “swarthy” escort? As a matter of fact, the body of an unidentified man was found floating in the Hudson five days after Mary’s body was recovered. But the man was neither tall nor dark.

The New York Herald flirted with one other intriguing possibility. It recalled Mary’s first disappearance, three and a half years before the murder. “It is well known that, during the week of her absence… she was in the company of a young naval officer much noted for his debaucheries. A quarrel, it is supposed, providentially led to her return home. We have the name of the Lothario in question… but for obvious reasons forbear to make it public.” The New York Herald was suspecting someone Mary had met through young Keekuck, possibly a superior on the USS North Carolina. Or possibly it was still making allusions to Keekuck himself.

Brother Jonathan was the first of several journals to subscribe to the idea that Mary Rogers had not been murdered at all. Its editors argued that a body in the water only three days, or less, would not be “so soon afloat” and that it would not be “so far decomposed”. The corpse fished out of the Hudson at Sybil’s Cave must have been in the water “not three days merely, but, at least, five times three days”. Therefore, the body could not have been that of Mary Rogers.

On the other hand, if the body had actually been that of Mary Rogers, then Brother Jonathan’s choice for the murderer was Alfred Crommelin. “For some reason,” said the journal, “he determined that nobody shall have anything to do with the proceedings but himself, and he has elbowed the male relatives out of the way, according to their representations, in a very singular manner. He seems to have been very much averse to permitting the relatives to see the body.”

Daniel Payne fared better than his rival boarder. While there were murmurings about his motives, and about his addiction to drink, all sources agreed that his affidavit concerning his activities on the fateful Sunday was foolproof. Though, as a matter of fact, no original suspect completely escaped judgment in the press. Even the unlucky Joseph Morse, wood-engraver and commuter to Staten Island, had his backers. The New York Courier and Inquirer had received anonymous letters which made its editors regard Morse as quite capable of “the late atrocity”.

Only one publication advocated Mme Restell as a candidate for the Tombs. The National Police Gazette doggedly waged a campaign against her. As late as February 1846 the Police Gazette was editorializing: “The wretched girl was last seen in the direction of Madame Restell’s house. The dreadfully lacerated body at Weehawken Bluff bore the marks of no ordinary violation. The hat found near the spot, the day after the location of the body, was dry though it had rained the night before! These are strange but strong facts, and when taken in consideration with the other fact that the recently convicted Madame Costello kept an abortion house in Hoboken at that very time, and was acting as an agent of Restell, it challenges our minds for the most horrible suspicions.”

There was yet one more theory to be put forth. And this, appearing more than a year after the crime, proved to be the most widely publicized and controversial of them all. It was, of course, the theory advanced by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” which he expected would give “renewed impetus to investigation”.

In his thinly disguised novelette-he used French names in the body of the story, but identified each character, newspaper, and site with factual footnotes relating to the Mary Rogers case-Poe began by attempting to demolish the pet theories promoted by his predecessors. “Our first step should be the determination of the identity of the corpse,” Poe stated, obviously referring to Brother Jonathan’s conjecture that Mary Rogers still lived. At great length, and with questionable scientific accuracy, Poe pointed out that a body immersed in water less than three days could still float. “It may be said that very few human bodies will sink at all, even in fresh water, of their own accord.” As to the impossibility of decomposition in less than three days: “All experience does not show that ‘drowned bodies’ require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place.” In short, Poe had no doubt that the body recovered at Sybil’s Cave was that of Mary Cecilia Rogers.

However, as to the exact scene of the crime Poe was less certain. That the thicket at Weehawken “was the scene, I may or I may not believe-but there was excellent reason for doubt”. Poe set down his doubts in detail. If the articles of clothing had been in the thicket the entire four weeks after the murder, they would have been discovered earlier. The mildew on the parasol and handkerchief could have appeared on the objects overnight. Most important, “Let me beg your notice to the highly artificial arrangement of the articles. On the upper stone lay a white petticoat; on the second, a silk scarf; scattered around, were a parasol, gloves, and a pocket-handkerchief… Here is just such an arrangement as would naturally be made by a not-over-acute person wishing to dispose the articles naturally. But it is by no means a really natural arrangement. I should rather have looked to see the things all lying on the ground and trampled under foot. In the narrow limits of that bower, it would have been scarcely possible that the petticoat and scarf should have retained a position upon the stones, when subjected to the brushing to and fro of many struggling persons.” Yet, after all these observations against the Weehawken thicket as the scene of the crime, Poe, in the end, concluded that Mary Rogers must have met her end there, after all.

In studying the roll of suspects, Poe felt that there was no evidence whatsoever against Mme Restell or against Morse. He felt that Daniel Payne’s deposition to the police vindicated him entirely. As to Crommelin: “He is a busybody, with much of romance and little of wit. Any one so constituted will readily so conduct himself, upon occasion of real excitement, as to render himself liable to suspicion.” Brother Jonathan’s editors had selected Crommelin as the murderer, said Poe, because, resenting their implications that he had not properly identified the corpse, Crommelin had gone in and brashly insulted the journal’s editors. Mrs Loss was a possibility, but, from her actions, Poe felt that she had played only a secondary part in the crime.

Poe refuted most strongly the popular theory of gang murder. The thicket displayed signs of violent struggle, yet several men would have overcome a frail girl quickly and without struggle. There were evidences that the body had been dragged to the river. One killer might have dragged Mary’s corpse, but for several, it would have been easier and quicker to carry her. Nor would a number of assailants have overlooked an initialled handkerchief. Finally: “I shall add but one to the arguments against a gang; but this one has, to my own understanding at least, a weight altogether irresistible. Under the circumstances of large reward offered, and full pardon to any king’s evidence, it is not to be imagined for a moment, that some member of a gang of low ruffians, or of any body of men, would not long ago have betrayed his accomplices… That the secret has not been divulged is the very best proof that it is, in fact, a secret. The horrors of this dark deed are known only to one.”

This, then, was the essence of Poe’s theory. The crime, he insisted, had been committed by a single individual in the thicket at Weehawken. Carefully he reconstructed the murder:

“An individual has committed the murder. He is alone with the ghost of the departed. He is appalled by what lies motionless before him. The fury of his passion is over, and there is abundant room in his heart for the natural awe of the deed. His is none of that confidence which the presence of numbers inevitably inspires. He is alone with the dead. He trembles and is bewildered. Yet there is a necessity for disposing of the corpse. He bears it to the river, and leaves behind him the other evidences of his guilt; for it is difficult, if not impossible to carry all the burthen at once, and it will be easy to return for what is left. But in his toilsome journey to the water his fears redouble within him. The sounds of life encompass his path. A dozen times he hears or fancies he hears the step of an observer. Even the very lights from the city bewilder him. Yet, in time, and by long and frequent pauses of deep agony, he reaches the river’s brink, and disposes of his ghastly charge-perhaps through the medium of a boat. But now what treasure does the world hold-what threat of vengeance could it hold out-which would have power to urge the return of that lonely murderer over that toilsome and perilous path, to the thicket and its blood-chilling recollections? He returns not, let the consequences be what they may.”

And who was this murderer?

He was, Poe decided, an earlier lover. He was the young man who had eloped with Mary Rogers on her first disappearance from the cigar store. Three and a half years later he returned and proposed again. “And here let me call your attention to the fact, that the time elapsing between the first ascertained and the second supposed elopement is a few months more than the general period of the cruises of our men-of-war.” He was, then, a navy man on shore leave, the very officer the New York Herald stated she had gone off with. When he came back to New York, he interrupted Mary’s engagement to Payne. She began to see him secretly. But why did he kill her? Possibly he seduced her and she became pregnant. He took her to Mrs Loss’s for an abortion, and she died accidentally. Or possibly he failed to seduce her, and, on an outing to Weehawken, he finally raped her. Then, fearing the consequences of the act, he was forced to kill. At any rate, concluded Poe: “This associate is of swarthy complexion. This complexion, the ‘hitch’ in the bandage, and the ‘sailor’s knot’ with which the bonnet-ribbon is tied, point to a seaman. His companionship with the deceased-a gay but not an abject young girl-designates him as above the grade of the common sailor.”

Poe, like the New York Herald before him, claimed to know the name of this navy officer. On 4 January 1848, in a letter to an admirer, a young medical student in Maine named George Eveleth, Poe disclosed: “Nothing was omitted in ‘Marie Roget’ but what I omitted myself-all that is mystification. The story was originally published in Snowden’sLadies’ Companion. The ‘naval officer’ who committed the murder (or rather the accidental death arising from an attempt at abortion) confessed it, and the whole matter is now well understood-but, for the sake of relatives, this is a topic on which I must not speak further.”

In 1880 John H. Ingram published a biography of Poe. In it he revealed the name of Poe’s suspected “naval officer”. The name of the murderer, said Ingram, was Spencer. He did not know his first name, or explain where he had learned his second name. Based on this bit of name-dropping, William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr, of Yale University, in an investigation of Poe’s deductive prowess, attempted to track down the elusive Spencer. He learned that at the time of Mary Rogers’s death in 1841 there were only three officers in the United States Navy named Spencer. One was in Ohio at the time Mary vanished in New York; another was infirm; the third was active, and a definite and fascinating possibility. He was eighteen-year-old Philip Spencer, the problem son of Secretary of War John Canfield Spencer. In short, his family was sufficiently influential to hush up any bit of unpremeditated homicide and sufficiently impressive to make Poe admit that “for the sake of relatives, this is a topic on which I must not speak further”. Philip Spencer, it might be added, was quite capable of carrying on an affair with Mary and seeing her to an abortionist, or of killing her under different circumstances. Three months before the murder he had been expelled from his third school, Geneva College (now Hobart College), for “moral delinquency”. He drank too much and he absented himself from classes too often. Where did he spend his time of truancy? In New York, and with Mary? We do not know. But we do know that in the year following her death he was caught and convicted of planning, and almost executing, the only mutiny in American naval history. Returning from a training cruise to Africa aboard the brig Somers, Acting Midshipman Philip Spencer chafed at the conditions on the vessel. He conspired with two subordinates, Boatswain’s Mate Samuel Cromwell and Seaman Elisha Small, to kill his superiors and convert the Somers into a pirate ship. His plot-though the seriousness of his intention later became a matter of great controversy-was exposed in time by Captain Alexander Mackenzie, and young Spencer, hooded and manacled, was hanged from the main yard-arm with his unfortunate companions.

While the publication of Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget” created a brief flurry of interest in Mary Rogers, it must be remarked that this interest was confined largely to readers of Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion. By 1842 the Leatherheads had given up their hope of obtaining the cash reward and had reverted to their old, less complex practice of restoring stolen merchandise. By 1844 the Leatherheads had been replaced by the more efficient, better-paid Municipal Police, and High Constable Jacob Hays was in retirement. As for the press, it had turned to matters of more topical interest. With each passing month, as the Mary Rogers case receded in time, the chances for its solution became more difficult. For one thing, popular interest, always fickle, had subsided, and with it the pressure that stimulated police activity. For another, the mortality rate among the suspects had mounted in rapidity-and violence.

On Friday, 8 October 1841, Daniel Payne followed his betrothed to an early grave. On that morning a boatman, walking down a path to the Hudson River at Weehawken, passed the much-publicized thicket. He saw a man stretched on the ground. The man was Daniel Payne. Beside him was an empty bottle of laudanum. He was alive when the boatman reached him, but lapsed unconscious and never recovered. Two days later a coroner’s jury agreed that he had committed suicide, but decided that his death might also be attributed to “congestion of the brain, brought about by irregular living, exposure, aberration of the mind”. His friends announced that from the day he learned of Mary’s death Payne had lived almost exclusively on a diet of rum, and had probably drunk himself to death.

A month later Mrs Loss was also dead. One of her sons had been tampering with a loaded gun, when it accidentally discharged. The bullet struck her. As she lay dying, she summoned Justice Gilbert Merritt. She said she had a statement to make concerning the fate of Mary Rogers. According to the New York Tribune, Mrs Loss had the following deathbed confession:

“On the Sunday of Miss Rogers’s disappearance she came to her house from this city in company with a young physician, who undertook to procure for her a premature delivery. While in the hands of the physician she died, and a consultation was then held as to the disposal of her body. It was finally taken at night by the son of Mrs Loss and sunk in the river… Her clothes were first tied up in a bundle and sunk in a pond… but it was afterwards thought that they were not safe there, and they were accordingly taken and scattered through the woods as they were found.”

After Mrs Loss’s death, her sons were closely questioned. They refused to confirm their mother’s confession. The authorities also discredited it, and it was soon forgotten.

On April Fool’s Day 1878 Mme Restell, hounded by Anthony Comstock and fearing a jail sentence (she had once served a year on Blackwell’s Island), donned a diamond-studded nightgown and stepped into her bathtub. Minutes later she was dead by her own hand. She had cut her throat. “A bloody ending to a bloody life,” was Comstock’s epitaph. The Police Gazette only regretted that she had expired without a word about Mary Rogers.

In the more than one hundred years that have passed since the death of Mary Rogers, every other suspect went to his grave in silence. Yet no one was permitted to rest in peace. For the mystery of Mary Rogers provided too fascinating and gruesome a game to be affected by any time limit. Though the $1,195 cash reward may have long since expired, the pursuit of a solution continued to hold rewards of its own. The reason is plain: a solved crime is a mere spectator sport, but an unsolved one remains an invitation to participate.

“There is no more stimulating activity than that of the mind, and there is no more exciting adventure than that of the intellect,” Willard Huntington Wright once remarked. “Mankind has always received keen enjoyment from the mental gymnastics required in solving a riddle.” Few unsolved crimes, it is true, have possessed those elements of murder most foul, yet complex, with clues and suspects sufficient, yet bizarre and simple, to provide riddles of enduring quality. But there have been a handful that managed to meet all specifications. The destruction of Andrew and Abby Borden, in Fall River, Massachusetts, was such a riddle. The shooting of Joseph Bowne Elwell, the bridge expert, in his New York apartment, was another. The discovery of Starr Faithfull on a Long Island beach fulfilled the stringent requirements. And certainly the savage slaying of Julia Wallace in a Liverpool suburb while her husband, William Herbert Wallace, searched, or pretended to search, for an insurance prospect at the non-existent Menlove Gardens East has, in a few decades, become “the perfect scientific puzzle”.

However, the mystery of Mary Rogers, more than most, has stood the test of time as a mental exercise because it offers a challenge provided by only a few other unsolved murders. While it had the standard ingredients-the beautiful victim known to celebrities, the provocative clues from sailor’s knot to the arrangement of apparel at Weehawken, the colourful collection of suspects ranging from lovers to abortionists-it also had the genius of Edgar Allan Poe. Thus, when we transport ourselves in time back to that sweltering July morning in 1841 and begin the game and the hunt, we not only compete with the police and press of the period, but we challenge the analysis and deduction of the world’s first great detective-story writer. In short, we have the added excitement of pitting ourselves against Poe.

Ever since Poe’s death in 1849, armchair amateurs at detection have begun the game by attempting to discredit the master’s theories before proceeding with their own. Will M. Clemens, who visited Sybil’s Cave and the Weehawken thicket in 1904 for Era Magazine, decided that “the confessions mentioned by Poe are of doubtful authenticity”. Edmund Pearson after studying contemporary accounts, concluded that “Poe, in writing fiction about the case, was in the position of being able to depart from fact when he liked, and adhere to it when it suited his purpose; that he was first and last a romancer, and a devotee of the hoax; and that the theory that he actually solved the mystery of the death of the real Mary Rogers is not proven, and is very doubtful.” Russel Crouse, after pondering “The Mystery of Marie Roget”, stated: “As an actual aid in the solution of the crime it is of no more use than the less literary contributions of the stupid and bungling police of the day. For Poe’s ratiocination stems from untrustworthy and highly controvertible rumour rather than from fact.”

Several other commentators on crime have been less harsh with Poe. They have seen some merit in his deductions, and allowed for the possibility of his being proved right in the future. A quarter of a century ago Winthrop D. Lane reopened the case for Collier’s magazine. He announced that if Mrs Loss’s deathbed confession was correct, it vindicated Poe completely. “He absolved Payne and Crommelin of complicity,” said Lane. “He said no gang did the murder. He advanced the idea of a fatal accident under Mrs Loss’s roof (though he had no idea of the nature of the accident)-and here he made an extraordinarily shrewd guess. He thought the articles of clothing might have been placed in the thicket to divert attention from the real scene-and here he was exactly and uncannily correct.”

William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr, after his own probings into the case, doubted that it would ever be solved. But he had no doubt that if new evidence were uncovered, it would be evidence generally in support of Poe’s theories. “We shall know the truth only if it was somewhat as Poe and Ingram say, if there was a confession by a man of influential family, if this was known as an inside story, and if someone on the inside wrote the secret down in a document which survives and is to come to light.” If this document revealed the murderer as a naval officer, possibly the son of a Secretary of War, then Poe would have triumphed entirely over his critics. “For all his idle argument about bodies in the water,” wrote Wimsatt, “his laboured inconsistency about the thicket and the gang, for all his borrowing of newspaper ideas, or (where it suited him) indifference to newspaper evidence, despite the fact that he was so largely wrong and had to change his mind, he did fasten on the naval officer.”

But if not Poe’s naval officer, then who else?

As early as 1869 a mystic and lecturer, Andrew Jackson Davis, who had been acquainted with Poe, presented his own solution to the Mary Rogers case in the form of a novel called Tale of a Physician. Davis thought Mary had become pregnant by a wealthy lover, who then took her to a New York City abortionist, probably Mme Restell. When Mary died on the table, the lover paid off and fled to Texas.

In 1904 Will M. Clemens still had the opportunity to interview several of Mary’s contemporaries about Hoboken. Most of these elders felt that Mary and her “swarthy” escort had both been murdered inside Mrs Loss’s inn by her three unrestrained sons, for purposes of either rape or robbery. In 1927 Allan Nevins thought that the responsibility for the death of Mary Rogers “was not the work of Payne but of another lover”. Nevins believed that Mary had been seduced, and had died of an illegal operation. In 1930 Winthrop D. Lane discovered the original records of Mary Rogers’s inquest in the dusty basement of the Hudson County Courthouse. After reading these and pursuing other evidence, Lane pointed the finger of guilt at Mrs Loss. He regarded her dying confession of the crime as the truth.

“Mrs Loss’s confession,” wrote Lane, “has had a curious history. It seems to have failed to get itself accepted as the truthful explanation of the affair… And yet it is the most likely explanation. Why should she make such a confession if it were not true? She was on her deathbed-and had nothing to gain unless it was a clear conscience. A mother is not likely to implicate her son in so serious an affair unless there is some powerful reason. It is less likely that she lied than that the others, for reasons entirely unknown to us, failed to make use of the confession.”

The reason, perhaps, that the confession was not fully acted upon was that its existence was of doubtful authenticity. After the New York Tribune reported Mrs Loss’s dying statement to Justice Merritt, the Justice promptly wrote an open letter to the Courier and Enquirer denying the confession and stating that the Tribune’s story was “entirely incorrect, as no such examination took place, nor could it, from the deranged state of Mrs Loss’s mind”. The Tribune replied that it had obtained its story from two of Justice Merritt’s magistrates. The Herald challenged the Tribune to print the names of the magistrates. The Tribune retreated into hurt silence.

Like all the others who have studied the facts of the case, I, too, have played the game. Among the major suspects, my choice for the most suspicious is Alfred Crommelin. I believe that Mary Rogers was his mistress at the time she was engaged to marry Payne. Why, then, the rose in his keyhole? Because she wished to tell him, before aborting his child, that she still loved him. And how, then, his fortuitous arrival at Sybil’s Cave? Because he knew where her body had been disposed of by the abortionist, and he knew where it might be found, and wished to be immediately on hand to identify it and see that it received Christian burial. But how, then, did Crommelin have an alibi for the Sunday? Quite logically because he was not present when Mary died, but with friends, who established his alibi.

To my mind, the most stimulating aspect of the Mary Rogers affair is the broad scope of possible suspicion. A damaging indictment can be constructed against almost anyone remotely connected with Mary Rogers. There is no limit to the boundaries of one’s fancy or surmise. Consider the oft-overlooked John Anderson, tobacconist, who was Mary’s employer. He was beside her for long hours each day. He walked her home. He had, surely, an eye for a well-turned ankle. It was thought, on newspaper row, that he had encouraged her first disappearance. Had he perhaps encouraged her second also?

In 1887 the New York Tribune reported that John Anderson had hired Edgar Allan Poe, whom he had long known as a customer, to write “The Mystery of Marie Roget” in order to divert suspicion from himself. While this titbit opens up delightful possibilities, its veracity is certainly to be questioned. It appears that Anderson lived on to a senile old age. After his death in 1881, his will was contested on the grounds of legal insanity. The fight was still in the New York courts during 1901, when Mary Rogers made a ghostly appearance before the bar. In the tug-of-war involving Appleton v. New York Life Insurance Company, it was revealed that old Anderson had claimed he knew who killed Mary Rogers. He knew, he told relatives, because she told him. She had often appeared before him as a nightly apparition, and during one such nocturnal tête-à-tête she had revealed the name of her murderer. Unfortunately, Anderson kept the name “a spiritual secret”.

Among other peripheral suspects, in a category with the Broadway tobacconist, I would be inclined to include the seemingly harassed Mrs Rogers, proprietress of the historic rooming house on Nassau Street. An impoverished old woman, to be sure, and ailing, of course. Yet how did she manage to maintain her house? The boarders seem to have been so very few and far between. Certainly there must have been another steady source of income. The son in South America? Possibly. Or Mary?

Does it strike a blow at motherhood and country to suggest that Mrs Rogers, out of fear of bankruptcy, employed the beautiful cigar girl for the pleasure of her guests-and of visitors to her vacant rooms? Assuming this premise, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Mary was trapped in pregnancy, and that her mother took her to an abortionist, under whose instruments Mary expired. Then it would have been Mrs Rogers, grief-stricken, who disposed of the body with the aid of Crommelin or another.

Or was the secret murderer of Mary Cecilia Rogers one of the most illustrious names in literature? Was the murderer Edgar Allan Poe himself?

Poe knew Mary Rogers when he dwelt in New York City, and in the half-year before her death he frequently travelled from Philadelphia to New York. Might he not have seen her again? Not at the boarding-house, not he, a married man. But at cafés or hotels-or on outings to New Jersey. She was beautiful and gay, and would have served as a welcome escape from the neuter Virginia and the dominating Maria Clemm and the hounding Graham. And of course he would have attracted her. He had some social station; he was published; he was brooding and brilliant.

Might not Poe have been the “swarthy” gentleman who accompanied Mary to Weehawken? And there, in the thicket, in one ofhis drunken, narcotic rages, might he not impotently haveattempted rape, or even actually raped her, and then been forced to silence her forever? His record of alcoholic rage with women is well known. It is a fact that in July 1842, bleary with drink, he took a ferry to New Jersey to see his old Baltimore sweetheart, Mary Devereaux, who was then a married woman. Poe, his eyes bloodshot, his stock under his ear, was already in Mary Devereaux’s house, waiting, when she returned from a shopping-trip with her sister-most fortunately with her sister. Poe fell upon her, screaming: “So you have married that cursed--! Do you love him truly! Did you marry him for love?”

Mary Devereaux held firm. “That’s nobody’s business; that is between my husband and myself.”

But Poe pressed after her. “You don’t love him. You do love me. You know you do.”

While, on this occasion, Poe was finally pacified and sent packing, he may not have left Mary Rogers so easily.

But all of this, I confess, is speculation. As to actual evidence that Edgar Allan Poe murdered Mary Rogers? I can only repeat once more that we are playing a game…

After Mary Cecilia Rogers was removed from the Dead House in mid-August of 1841, she was buried in the New York City metropolitan area. No one knows today the exact position of her final resting-place-except that she may be found still in the pages of “The Mystery of Marie Roget”.