Grace’s files as an employee of the U.S. government, as well as those of J. J. Kron, may have also been destroyed in a fire on June 23, 1972. Or they may still exist, though under seal by the Espionage Act of 1917, signed by Woodrow Wilson in order to protect the sensitive work of government agents.
This is the path of evidence that led to this book. The story thus remains, like any story about murder, incomplete in that, although we may hope to understand at least some of the facts and conditions of Ruth’s death, we can never completely understand the inconceivability of the very act itself. The only absolute of this story is that Ruth Cruger was murdered. The actions of all the people in this book may then be understood as a collective attempt to reanimate her last days—to communicate with her—in order to find answers, justice, and a hoped-for peace. Or just to say good-bye. Although this is her story, there are an unimaginable number of other cases just as factual as Ruth Cruger’s. That is the only truth of crime.
Earlier in her career, when Grace was juggling dozens of immigration cases, she said that “I could go into these cases very fully and show you the sadness which attached to each individual story.” That was always her methodology: to find the story of a case in order to evoke a response from others. Though Poe introduced the full character of the detective in fiction, the word first appears in Dickens’s Bleak House to describe a Scotland Yard inspector. The new word, created to fit a singular character, was an extension of the word “detect,” or “to discover or identify the presence or existence of something.” Something behind a veil. Or something we don’t understand. Or someone we have lost—and hope to see again.
NOTES
The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
The sources of this story extend across newspaper articles, court documents, magazine exposés, government reports, muckraking stories, gossip, deduction, and the connections among them. In the absence of primary sources from Grace Humiston, I have endeavored to tell the story around that space to show how culture and media shape our understanding of her life. It is perhaps not a usual way of telling a story. She was not a usual person.
Sources are documented using unnumbered endnotes organized by chapter. Notes are keyed to the text using signal phrases or descriptions of the topic covered. When a note documents dialogue, the last few words quoted appear in the note as a key, and the reader can assume the citation includes all preceding quotations. Quotations are unaltered unless indicated with square brackets. Dialogue is presented as is from its various sources. In the very few instances where I use imagined dialogue to advance the narrative, it appears without quotes.
In my attempt to convey visual details and turns of phrase that re-create progressive-era New York, I relied on primary sources, including photographs from the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress, rather than secondary accounts of the era.
Newspapers are a major source of this story’s power. In most cases, I veer toward the “reputable” New York papers, but at times I use less-well-regarded papers to show how the story spread. Sometimes, I use a wire story in a nonregional paper because it was a better, easier-to-read reproduction. Smaller-market papers were often my source for testimony because they could more easily print the full transcripts. Where discrepancies in coverage of cases exist, I note it so that readers can decide for themselves.
That being said, this is a story about the past. Everyone in this story, save one person, is gone. The center of this story is a still space that cannot be wholly filled. It can only be approached. It can only be told from the perspective of others trying to reach it themselves.
PROLOGUE
The main sources for Doyle’s visit to New York are William R. Hunt, Front-Page Detective, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1990, 201; “Will Be Lynched,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 27, 1914, 3; Russell Miller, The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, New York: Thomas Dunne, 2008.
“from general knowledge” (p. 2): “No Mystery in Crime,” Houston Post, December 22, 1912, 29.
“sight of New York” (p. 2): “Conan Doyle Fears,” New York Times, May 31, 1914, 44.
“thunder on their own heads” (p. 3): “Conan Doyle in Gotham,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 27, 1914, 10.
“arrived in New York” (p. 3): “Sir A. Conan Doyle,” New York Times, June 1, 1914, 25.
“football at the age of forty-two” (p. 4): Marguerite Mooers Marshall, “A Woman Can Never Get Anything,” New York Evening World, May 28, 1914, 3.
“place for that” (p. 5): “Sir Arthur Visits Tombs,” New York Evening World, May 28, 1914, 3.
“they’ll bury it” (p. 5): “Two Prophets,” Detroit Free Press, July 12, 1914, 44.
“never been the same since!” (p. 6): “Pilgrims Greet A. Conan Doyle,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 29, 1914, 2.
“Sherlocks over here” (p. 6): William R. Hunt, Front-Page Detective, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State UP, 1990, 201. The phrase is also attributed to Joseph Choate: “Pilgrims Ask Doyle”: The New York Sun, May 29, 1914, 10.
Burns as actor (p. 6): These films were Universal Animated Weekly No. 117, June 3, 1914; Our Mutual Girl: Episode 22, June 15, 1914; The $5,000,000 Counterfeiting Plot, September 1914. Doyle’s cameos mostly involve his visit to America. While filming Our Mutual Girl, Doyle, “leading man Edward Brennan, and famous humorist Irvin S. Cobb got involved in heated discussion on the number of edible sausage,” according to Moving Picture World, vol. 20, April–June 1914, 1598.
“First World War had begun” (p. 6): The onset of the First World War is the major historical event that takes place during the events of this book. I have chosen to keep it on the periphery to mirror what happens in terms of personal focus when someone loses a loved one. The world seems unimportant.
son’s tragic passing (p. 7): Andrew Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes, New York: Free Press, 2007.
“for a sign and a consolation” (p. 7): “There Is No Death,” Indiana Gazette, November 20, 1918, 2.
“evidence in this world” (p. 7): “War Stimulates Interest,” The Index-Journal, April 13, 1919, 9.
“only a veil” (p. 7): “There Is No Death,” Indiana Gazette, November 20, 1918, 2.
1: TRUE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES
The details of this scene are taken from several pulp sources: Julius J. Kron with Isabel Stephen, “The Inside Story of the Ruth Cruger Case,” True Detective, May 1926; Grace Humiston, “Won’t You Help Me Find My Girl?” Actual Detective, May 4, 1938; Dick Halvorsen, “The Hidden Grave,” Master Detective, April 1954.
Call her (p. 10): Grace Humiston with Isabel Stephen, “Won’t You Help Me Find My Girl?” Actual Detective, May 4, 1938.
2: THE MISSING SKATER