Grace Winterton was born on September 17, 1869, in Greenwich Village, New York, to Isabella and Adoniram Judson Winterton. Her father, who was named after the famous Baptist missionary, was an insurance claims adjuster. He was not a lawyer, but he very often appeared in high-level court, testifying and providing judgment on claim cases. Grace told reporters that he would sometimes take her to court with him and that she worshipped at his knee. Grace had two sisters, Jessie and Nelly, and a brother, Adoniram Judson Winterton Jr. Their family had deeper claims to fame and history. Grace’s grand-uncle was Admiral Hull, who fought on the U.S.S. Constitution in the War of 1812. Her grandfather was Henry S. Hull, a brief, onetime partner of the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
After primary school, Grace attended Hunter College. In her early twenties, she taught at the Collegiate School, an all-boys school on the Upper West Side. She married Dr. Henry Forest Quackenbos on June 5, 1895, when she was twenty-three. At the turn of the century, Grace enrolled in the night class at NYU law school; she and Henry divorced soon after. In 1906, Grace attended her ex-husband’s second wedding as a guest. A gossip magazine later said they split when he was caught engaging in “peephole practices” with his female patients at work.
Grace’s mother passed away on June 29, 1903, in Manhattan at the age of sixty-six. Almost a year later, Grace’s father died on February 26, 1904, at the age of seventy-one. The cause of death was pneumonia. Soon after, Grace began wearing her signature black wardrobe.
On June 8, 1911, while in Lima, Peru, Grace married Howard Donald Humiston, a Yale lawyer and partner at Humiston, Olcott & Hincks. He had worked with Grace before at the People’s Law Firm. Rumors said that when she heard he was in Peru, she followed him and proposed to him directly. She was forty-two. In November 1921, the Tatler claimed that Grace and Howard were “living apart” and that he was “in a habitat in Greenwich Village.” He had also “sought companionship elsewhere.” Experts claimed they split because of Howard’s alleged excessive drinking. Howard lived most of the year in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Cod with friends and acquaintances in a white three-story house. He died in bed of capillary bronchitis on July 21, 1943, at the age of sixty-five. His ashes were interred in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston. Grace was buried in New York.
Grace’s brother, Adoniram, died on December 22, 1929, at Flower Hospital on Fifth Avenue. Grace had previously told reporters that he had died years earlier.
Grace’s sister Jessie outlived her, dying on February 27, 1953. Jessie’s grandson remembered seeing his auntie Grace when she would come to the apartment on Sundays. He couldn’t remember much, other than that she was tall. He was the only person I could find who had actually met her. After our discussion, largely about the grandeur of old New York, he got back in touch with me. He remembered another detail that he was wary of sharing. He remembered overhearing his relatives refer to Grace, behind her back, as “Auntie Disgrace.”
On January 15, 1906, Grace wrote a letter to Edward C. Stokes, the governor of New Jersey, as she attempted to sway him about the Antoinette Tolla case.
I hope you are not influenced by any newspaper notoriety which I seem to have received. It is all so intensely distasteful to me that I have been forced to take a room in Newark where I can escape in the day time from Yellow Journal reporters who are only combing for secusation. I beg you to believe that whatever items of news they have gleaned for their papers, they have not received them from me.
After the Cruger case, the New York Police Department’s apparatus for finding missing people went from unofficial assignments in a branch house to an evolving, centralized system of integrated police work that would come to be known as the Bureau of Missing Persons and, later, the Missing Persons Squad. Presently, there is no twenty-four-hour delay after victims are reported. In fact, victims of crimes are acted on immediately. But if the victim is eighteen or older, according to Joseph Giacalone, a former sergeant with the NYPD, “we just file paperwork.” In 2014, thirteen thousand people were reported missing in New York City. The year before, eight thousand of that number were children. Before Grace, girls who were labeled “wayward” or “lost” were given a moral and categorical distinction that stopped most people from looking for them. Grace, whose given first name was Mary, felt differently. When she spoke about her career late in life, it was with wisdom gained at great cost: “I want to tell you just a little about my girls,” Grace said, “for they are all mine; each and every one of them, of all the thousands I know well, has a particular place in my heart.
“It is the unfortunate truth,” Grace said, “that too often the attitude of the official police of the United States is the girl was bad to begin with. It is because the search for the missing girl is so often conducted upon the basis of this utterly false possibility that so many cases, in my opinion, are annually dropped from the police department as ‘unsolved’ and the hopes of so many parents crushed to the ground.”
“Ruth was not a willful girl who left her home voluntarily,” Grace said, “as every police official connected with the search assured me that she was. They had no proof—none of them had a single fact against her—but they all said that she could not possibly have been abducted. They admitted that a little child might be overpowered and made away with in a store like Cocchi’s, situated on a busy street, but a girl eighteen years old—never. They pitied me for my faith in girl nature and, wisely shaking their heads, insisted that she must have gone off of her own will—the old, sad story.
“But I have proved that she didn’t leave home that way. I have proved that she was a brave, good girl and that she died in an effort to shield her honor. It was not the ‘old, old story’ that the police harp on when a girl disappears and detectives fail to trace her. It was a murder.
“It is convenient, or course,” Grace continued, “to assemble meager evidence that the girl was seen boarding such and such a train or taking a certain mysterious taxicab in company with a young man, always unknown. This promptly curtails the searching activities. This exceeding proneness to put the entire burden of responsibility upon the shoulders of the missing girl herself is a great evil. Occasional crimes against womanhood by degenerates must always figure as one of the horrible possibilities of community existence. But the wholesale sacrifice of young womanhood upon the altar of ignorance and vicious conspiracy can be checked.”
Grace’s point, as always, was simple and practical, but it still sounded radical. “Just because girls bob their hair, wear short skirts, dance crazy dances and look a little more sophisticated than girls of the last two generations looked, does not indicate with absolute certainty—as many of our public figures have announced in bold print—that the younger generation is on the road to ruin,” she said.