A stenographic record was made of the stories told by Richard Butler and Seymour Many and turned over to an expert to examine for inconsistencies. The results were inconclusive. The district attorney said they had another man under surveillance for several days who was “not a college student.” They said this man met Ruth several times without the knowledge of her parents. One paper reported that Ruth forsook her normal route home from school along Morningside Park—which she had followed for three years—to meet someone in secret.
Another man who said he understood ciphers claimed that a secret communication was going on in the newspapers between the men responsible for Ruth’s disappearance. As police tracked down these new leads, it was revealed that Richard Butler had been on a trip to Wellesley College to see a girl he had fallen for over the Christmas holidays.
*
A cop in a dark blue uniform stepped cautiously onto the tar-paper floor of the rooftop. His gun was drawn. The sky was gray and spotted. Below, at the front door, a pile of policemen put their shoulders to the front door and caved it in as if it were cardboard. They ran up the carpeted stairs.
In an ornate room above, the man with the whip paused. He could hear the commotion on the stairs. In front of him, strapped to a chair, was a beautiful young woman with black hair. She was alive, but her head was rolling awkwardly to one side. The man threw the whip down and ran into the hallway. Seeing the police coming up the stairs, he pulled a pistol and fired twice. His gun, made of wood and metal, kicked back with small clouds of white smoke. The man ran up the next flight of stairs as the cops burst into the room. They freed the woman and covered her in a policeman’s coat. She didn’t seem to know what was happening. The police looked upward, hearing more gunfire. The slaver had been trapped and lay shot, dead, on the roof under the gray sky.
The police captain took a good look at the woman’s face. She smiled as her eyes grew peaked. She had obviously been drugged. But it was really her. Her sister had been right this whole time. She—and the girl’s heartbroken father—would find this welcome news, indeed. The man took the girl to the hospital in a fast-moving police car. Her father and family met her there.
The girl died in the hospital. It had all been too much for her. As her father wept over her, she looked like an angel lit by white light.
By the time the movie ended and “directed by George Loane Tucker” appeared on the screen, audience members were stunned. Traffic in Souls was a remarkable film, not only because of its edgy subject matter but also because it was an unprecedented ninety minutes long. When it premiered in 1913 at Joe Weber’s Theatre—an eight-hundred-person venue—more than one thousand people were turned away on the first night alone. In its first week, twenty-five thousand New Yorkers saw it. The audiences who bought their tickets from the small white cupola at ten cents each were largely male, some of them seeing multiple showings per day. Sitting in the sea of chairs propped up on thin, iron legs, they watched the story of Mary Barton, a pretty girl who worked in a candy shop with her sister Lorna, who was flighty and always late to work. One day, Lorna went out to lunch with a handsome, mysterious man who drugged her and forced her into working at a brothel. The pimp worked by day as the founder of the International Purity and Reform League, campaigning against white slavery with a haranguing fist as a public cover for his unspeakable crimes. Traffic in Souls was such a sensation that at one point it was playing in twenty theaters in New York City alone. The film was the nation’s first legitimate blockbuster.
After the lights came up and the long rows of eyes blinked back to life, people wandered out into Times Square in a daze, thinking about the dangers depicted in the film, which now felt so bracingly real. Once Ruth disappeared, newspapers reminded readers:
NEW YORK SEES FIGHT TO VANQUISH SYSTEM THAT GOBBLES GIRLS!
Search Begun for one Thousand Girls Who have Disappeared in Three years—“Port of Missing Maidens” Combed!
Gotham, the Gobbler of Girls, is to see a great spring drive against the port of missing maidens, in which society will attempt to salvage 1000 girls who have disappeared from their homes in the past three years and never have been found!
So serious has this problem of the metropolis become police and pulpit are about to unite in a mighty effort to kill the system that is dragging young women away from their families and friends. 3500 are reported missing fully 800 never are found. Fully half those permanently missing are girls. In 1916, the DA office successfully prosecuted five white slavers.
All across the boroughs, doors closed in hallways and dead bolts clicked in wobbly locks. Fathers watched their daughters, even during the day.
What the papers called white slavery filled every parent with dread. Almost every day there were stories in the papers of girls being stolen, drugged, and sold into lives of prostitution by evil men, both local and abroad. The papers never said the word itself, the word for girls being sold and trafficked for their bodies without agency, but everyone knew what it was. Books like Reginald Wright Kaufman’s The House of Bondage—which was an immediate bestseller in 1910 and a source for Traffic in Souls—were understood quite well by readers without having to be explicit. The Times reported that “1,000 to 1,500 Girls Disappear Yearly in New York.” In the shadow of such towering numbers, it was easy for the police to say that Ruth Cruger’s case was, unfortunately, not very remarkable.
In 1914 in New York, there were 4,035 people reported missing, of whom 3,240 were found and returned to their homes or otherwise accounted for. In 1915, 1,439 women and girls went lost. At the end of that year, 1,229 of this number had been accounted for. A detective who was familiar with searches for missing persons opined that most of those who disappeared were persons who “wanted to be lost.” “In the case of missing girls,” he said, “it has been found by the police that many of them left home after slight disagreements and went to live with relatives or friends in some other place.” By “other place,” he meant with men.
Henry Cruger, though of a heavy visage, refused to believe that his daughter was one of these numbers of women lost to an invisible system. But he couldn’t help the thought from appearing in his mind. He could see her there, clear as day, and it filled him with great rage.
On January 4, 1910, John D. Rockefeller Jr. walked up the stairs of the Criminal Courts Building in New York City. He had been asked to head a grand jury investigation into white slavery. He hesitated in agreeing to do so but soon began the process of abandoning his post at the mighty Standard Oil, his father’s company, and J. P. Morgan Steel, in an effort to “purify” his philanthropic efforts from corporate interests.