Soon, Isabel was working for the McClure Syndicate and writing for real magazines. She had an office with a typewriter. She also wrote for United Press. Her name was appearing under stories all across the country. She specialized in writing about women. But Isabel also wrote secret things. There was a new type of magazine on the stands these days. Featuring lush painted covers and lots of indiscriminate type, these magazines had covers of wide-eyed women with bright flesh and bared knives. They had names like Clue, Mystery, and True Detective.
Isabel wrote for the McFadden mags that were long, in-depth summaries of crimes bolstered by photographs, diagrams, and drama. McFadden paid by the word. That was part of their value now. To find stories, Isabel scoured old newspapers. There were stories she remembered, too. Then she would go down to the police station and look at the old records. Then she would try to track down the arresting officer or detective. McFadden insisted on it. This was not fiction. But it was never wholly the truth, either. These were mysteries, after all.
So by the time Isabel Stephen sat in Grace Humiston’s apartment, it was with some awe. She knew what this woman had accomplished. Isabel looked down at her notes that all of a sudden had become messy. As Grace spoke, her eye glittering, Isabel was already seeing it come together in her head. She had to start with the facts she could get and try to reconcile them with what the newspapers had said. Isabel could see the basement as she started to think it back into the world. She looked at one of the photos. “A single electric bulb” might work. But Isabel knew her readers wanted justice and vengeance and atmosphere, too. And murder. Maybe that was part of the problem. But Grace’s eyes were kind, Isabel thought. Sad, but kind. Isabel then realized that the woman in front of her had actually seen this and lived it. That was a big, impossible difference. Isabel knew she could not capture that eye, but she was still going to try.
Grace told Isabel to look up a man named Julius Kron since he might have some stories for her. The detectives—the great ones—sold their stories, or at least the germ of them, to magazine writers, who would add a little flair to them. Not only to sell magazines, but to add a level of drama that had long since passed from the story itself. Good stories, like people, grew after they ended. Isabel was seeing another reason for that kind of storytelling, too. People needed to listen.
Isabel wrote up this story—“as told to”—for True Detective Mysteries. This was a cooperative effort to at least get closer to the truth. And to tell a good story. Or the parody of one. And to sell some mystery magazines. That’s what got the story read at all. So Isabel kept writing, using evidence to detect presences and support connections. She wrote a few stories on the exploits of Grace and Kron. Readers ate them up. Then she moved on.
Lois Weber’s 1916 film about Charlie Stielow allegedly featured a female detective. But only three reels are known to survive. In 1939, the syndicated newspaper feature “Lessons from Historic Crimes,” by Captain Eugene de Beck and Dr. Carleton Simon, featured the Ruth Cruger mystery. Grace was mentioned, but only briefly. The writers gave the moment of the case’s solution to Solan. In 1956, a very short syndicated newspaper story titled “The Case of the Frightened Eyes” details the Cruger case but does not mention Grace at all, though it mentions a male detective in passing.
On December 8, 1962, there was no news in New York City. There were births, deaths, sports scores, crimes, and murders, but none of it went reported by the usually endless roll of city newspapers. After weeks of posturing, the International Typographical Union, Local No. 6, ordered all of its members to strike. They were mostly Italian or Irish, second-generation New Yorkers, faced with the onset of new printing technology that they feared would render their workers’ skills with a Linotype machine obsolete.
When the strike was finally settled 114 days later, they had reached an agreement, but it only led the way to greater debt. The strike killed papers in a town that in the 1920s had nineteen dailies. By 1970, there was only the Times, the Daily News, and the New York Post. Writers scattered to literary outlets and television. The records of the old papers ended up in libraries and archives, commonly called morgues.
In 1973, the New York Police Department officially closed their central headquarters on 240 Centre Street, moving its operations to the monolithic 1 Police Plaza. Instead of relocating their past records to the new location, the department instead filed fifty years’ worth of police records—full of the names of the guilty, the innocent, the lost, and the victimized—directly into the East River. The heavier files sank while the smaller ones fluttered on the surface as they smeared out and floated into nothingness. The old headquarters was later converted into a luxury apartment building.
A book of 1978 student essays designed to use crime to teach the research paper had an entry called “Grace Humiston: The First Woman Detective,” by Tim McCarl. There are some great academic articles on Sunny Side by Randolph Boehm and others that have appeared in history publications. Grace’s story appeared in an article by Karen Abbott on the Web site for Smithsonian Magazine and in a novel, Grace Humiston and the Vanishing, by Charles Kelly. I found her by chance when I stumbled onto her 1917 interview in the New York Sun while researching the Black Hand.
After an exhaustive search of New York libraries, law schools, and private archives, no concentrated gravity of Grace Humiston’s personal papers seems to have survived. Some very early financial records of the People’s Law Firm are held at the New York Public Library, and the odd letter or two can be found in archives here and there. Everything else is scattered among stories told by others in newspaper articles, magazines, court records, congressional testimony, and the circular lines of history. There is plenty of dialogue from all of these sources; it is quoted here as it was originally published, left alone in its original state. The reader must, as those of the time had to, consider each individual source. That is part of the story, too. And while the larger events here have been investigated and presented as truth, there are still connections that had to be imagined—small gestures, moments, and emotions—that are laid over an infrastructure of facts. This is a story about real people, not just their vital statistics.
Grace’s files might have been taken by the Bureau of Missing Persons (and later destroyed) when she was fired by Woods. Or perhaps she simply had nowhere to store them once her practice was shuttered. Or maybe she had just had enough. Very surprisingly for a lawyer, she also died without a will. Her very small savings was claimed by her sister Jessie. Most of the court records of Alfredo Cocchi’s trial in Italy were destroyed in a fire. All that remains is a brief summary of his final trial in a heavy, handwritten book on a dusty shelf in Bologna.