Missing from the hearings was Grace Humiston, who would not make her evidence public. “That evidence has,” she said, “in part, been turned over to Commissioner Woods by me. I shall give the remainder to the authorities as soon as I consider it wise to do so.” But just as Grace seemed to be willing to retreat into the background, another detective stepped forward to trash the police work on the Cruger case. William J. Burns was still the most popular detective in America. His detective agencies bore his name with a shield and eagle, and he boasted offices in “the principal cities of the world.” He was also a successful author of several dime-store versions of his most famous cases. He was still being referred to as the American Sherlock Holmes.
Burns blustered accusations against the district attorney, claiming negligence and inefficiency equal only to the police department itself. Burns declared that District Attorney Swann’s staff refused to listen to his own (correct, he said) theory of the murder, which sounded, to the reporters, much like the theory put forward months earlier by Grace Humiston. Burns claimed that the DA’s office told him months ago to back off, presumably to stall his correct conclusion. When reached for comment, Swann shook his head. “I had nothing to do with having him removed,” Swann said. “These statements are false. It is not true that I was urged to dig up the cellar by Burns.”
“I was retained by the Cruger family when the girl vanished,” Burns revealed. “We traced Cocchi to West New York and had evidence which we believed connected him indubitably with the disappearance of Miss Cruger. One thing we firmly established was that Ruth Cruger never left Cocchi’s shop. We even asked for a permit to search it, which was denied. He told us to lay off. Soon afterward we were put off the case.”
Burns detective James Downing said they had found a neighbor, a Miss Goldberg, who went to hire a motorcycle from Cocchi. She went to a small back office to sign a receipt. Once there, Cocchi became greatly excited. His eyes gleamed, and he grasped her around the waist. She screamed and struggled, but he held her fast. With a quick upward movement of her hand, she struck him under the chin and then twisted his nose and face. She then got away. When reporters finally asked Henry Cruger about Burns’s role in the case, Henry said that he fired him within a week because he failed to do anything other than cash his checks.
As the testimony was winding down for the day, more whispering could be heard among the crowd, causing Wallstein to look toward the back row disapprovingly. Information was spotty, but it seemed that a series of cables from the United Press station in Rome said that Alfredo Cocchi had finally been arrested in Bologna and was being held on the charge of murder. Earlier that month, Maria Cocchi had written a letter to her brother in Italy, asking that he deliver it to her husband.
“Tell Al,” she wrote, “that when he went away I was penniless. I struggled along the best I knew how until I sold the shop. Then I was beginning to be happy. Then they found the girl’s body and since then I have been a prisoner and my babies have been taken from me.
“Get from Al all he knows about the murder,” his wife wrote. “Tell him to send me everything, particularly the names of anyone who was in it with him. Ask him who aided him in escaping, who gave him the money to go back to Italy, and for the new clothes he wore. Please tell him to give me everything he knows so as to clear his conscience and also the names of his babies and their mother. If Al does this they will let me return to my babies.”
After Maria wrote the letter, Judge Wadhams in the Court of General Sessions issued an order transferring her from the Harlem prison she was in to an institution where her one-year-old baby girl, Georgette, had been cared for since Maria’s arrest. The baby was ill, and Mrs. Cocchi, who was very worried over the child’s condition, was approaching a state of nervous collapse.
Back in the hearing, the rumor was confirmed. The Italians had arrested Cocchi.
*
At the end of the long stone corridor, cell 68 felt very far away from the rest of the world, and not just because it was in Bologna. Monks had lived here once, in this tower of darkness, but coming down the hall now were Italian detectives. When they reached the cell, they looked through the bars. The prisoner was huddled in the corner, seemingly asleep. He was still, just like the bars set in the powdery stone. When the guard let them in, the prisoner’s legs suddenly began to scramble. He struggled and kicked as the men pushed him up against the rough, cold wall. There was shouting and moving as the men pushed their faces in front of him, spitting fast questions. Fists and arms moved in the darkness. When they were done, they let him sink to the floor. The men would return many times that very same night, often only minutes apart, to repeat their interrogations.
At daybreak, Alfredo Cocchi, Prisoner 15,372, weakly asked for a physician. His eyes were red, and he was shaking. The physician examined him and said he was fine. A guard gave Cocchi some bread. He ate it quickly.
When Cocchi first arrived at the prison of San Giovanni at Monte, they scratched his name in ink across one of the pages of its thick books. They first put him in cell number 5, up in the tower itself. Cocchi had a cellmate there who asked questions during the hot days and nights. But Cocchi wouldn’t speak. After the other prisoner disappeared, Cocchi was moved to a solitary cell somewhere belowground. A church stood at the foot of the tower. Inside the church was a colorful painting of Saint Cecilia, her head looking up as she listened to invisible music. Somewhere on the altar was a relic, a white knucklebone belonging to Cecilia herself, who, once married, asked her husband to respect her holy virginity. When Cecilia was later martyred, she survived for three days after being struck three times in the neck by a sword.
In his dungeon cell, Cocchi knew he was beneath all of these things. One day, hours after the detectives left, someone else made their way to talk to Cocchi. His steps were slower and heavier. Judge Zucconi, the assigned magistrate for Cocchi’s case, nodded at the guard to open the cell so that he and his law clerk could enter.
The judge was determined that this trial go according to the Italian way. Cocchi, sitting down in the corner, tried to compose himself as a gentleman. He ran his hand over his dry hair and straightened up. Cocchi’s eyes looked as if they had been hollowed out. The judge asked Cocchi about his life in America.
“My machine shop gave me a satisfactory position,” Cocchi said, slowly. “I earned sometimes $100 a week.” Cocchi spoke very matter-of-factly. The clerk transcribed his words.
The judge then asked what happened on the day in question in New York. Cocchi said that his wife and he had quarreled, but that was it. “I had never seen Ruth Cruger before she came to my shop to have her skates sharpened,” he said.
On the second day the judge came in, Cocchi looked even more pitiful. Cocchi reiterated that all he did was sharpen this poor girl’s skates. He mumbled something about some Italians in the store when she was there, but, when pressed, he didn’t repeat it. Cocchi was always looking elsewhere. No one had gotten a really good look at him yet.