“Ruth was a good girl,” Grace said again, sitting below her painting of the Madonna.
Grace put up her glasses and very professionally went over the rough timeline of the case: “We eliminated every clue that led outside New York City. I searched morgues, cemeteries, and hospitals. I became convinced the girl had been murdered and Cocchi could solve the mystery. We investigated the cellar and found the police search of the place had been superficial. We subjected the man’s record to the closest sort of scrutiny. For more than five weeks we clung to our investigation without having a single clue to work on. We were simply convinced that sooner or later we would find the body, and, although there were times when the task grew heavy our little band managed to keep cheerful. We went after Cocchi just because that was the common sense thing to go after we had established his horrible reputation.”
Grace moved up in her chair. There were papers piled off to the side with names scratched in ink on their spines. “I’ve noticed that some folks are saying that I found the body because I followed my intuition. Every time a women does make a discovery somebody pipes, ‘Intuition!’ Let me say that, in this instance it was just plain everyday common sense on the part of Kron and myself, backed by a determination to keep going until the case had cleared up.”
She added, “There never was a time when we felt like giving up. We knew that Ruth was a model girl, that she had disappeared, that she had been murdered, and we intended to prove to others—yes, the police among them—that we had the correct view. There was only one unpleasant feature in connection with the search and that was the vile slanders about Ruth that kept cropping up again and again. It may be interesting some time to ascertain just where they all came from.”
Grace took in a breath. “That day we started to dig I knew that our search was ended. Hole after hole was made and although nothing came to light, we were convinced that every time a shovel went into the earth, it might disclose what we sought. What happened … you know.”
Reporters could sense that the topic should be altered. A reporter asked her about the new nickname that the papers had been using for her: Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.
“No, I never read Sherlock Holmes,” responded Grace, laughing. “In fact, I am not a believer in deduction. Common sense and persistence will always solve a mystery. You never need theatricals, nor Dr. Watsons, if you stick to a case.”
Another asked her views on the women’s vote. Grace thought of her friend Inez. When they worked on the Stielow case together, Grace had dreams of bringing Inez on as a full legal partner when it was all over. She never had the chance.
“I am not a suffragette,” Grace said. “But I certainly am not an anti-. If giving the vote to women could abolish white slavery or the other nefarious practices, if it could make better the lot of womankind then by all means let us vote. As a matter of fact, I’m much too busy to ally myself with any organization for or against suffrage.”
Lastly, someone asked if she preferred life as a detective to life at home.
“As between a professional career and home?” Grace asked, surprised, her eyes lighting up. “Assuredly, I prefer home—possibly that sounds old-fashioned. Well, to me there’s nothing like my home.” She smiled, and everyone laughed, if only in release. Their questions, even light ones, could not mask the deep occasion of this story’s end. There was silence again. But Grace found more fire. Though Ruth had been found, Grace vowed to get to the root of the problem rather than endlessly toil in its wake.
“Vice conditions here in the city are astounding,” Grace said. “The ‘good people’ of New York are as much asleep to the nastiness of their city as the nation appears to be to the seriousness of our war. The records of the police department show hundreds of girls disappear every year. There must be many whose vanishing is not reported to the authorities because of the notoriety.”
She continued. “There are little, harmless looking shops scattered all around some of the high school and public schools,” Grace said, her voice rising. “Loungers of the most depraved type infest these places and watch the girls going to and from school. When a girl is insulted in one of these places, she usually broods over the horror of it. Never could she tell her parents, for she feels she is partly to blame. Little by little her seducers batter down her moral stamina and soon another girl is ‘missing.’”
Grace observed, “New York does not yet realize how systematic the danger is for the girls who live in it. The public readily says, when a girl disappears it was as much her fault as the man’s.
“I know better,” Grace said.
The woman in black had a plan. “What I think is needed is a bureau, supported by voluntary contributions that would prevent girls from getting into the hands of these beasts, rescue them if they were already snared, and then cure them of their moral ailment. Why, had I the power, I would cause to be inserted in the laws of every state an act that would make the tempting of a girl a serious offense, punishable by an adequate penalty, I would call such practice ‘criminal persuasion’ and I think that if the white slaver knew he violated the law at the beginning of his ‘trade’ there would be fewer girls in the underworld.”
She added, “I would have agents throughout the city, but the headquarters of the organization would be out of town—on a farm, best of all. Once the girls were rescued I would send them out to the farm, where their environment would be entirely different. Secluded there even from their own kind with light work to do, placed where nobody except the attendants—all women—would know of their past, the girl would start life anew. If funds are provided, I think the best plan would be not to have the bureau part of the police department but, of course, to work in full sympathetic co-operation with it. If this bureau is made powerful enough it can do something the police and public sentiment have as yet failed to do—wipe out immorality in this city.”
The reporters were struggling to keep up.
“In one year,” Grace said, “828 persons disappeared from the streets. In three of the five boroughs there were 244 murders. These conditions indicate either that New York is the most criminal city in the world or the police force is inefficient.” Grace said that in her three-month investigation, she found twenty-two cellars where girls were made victims of men. But she couldn’t do what was needed. Even her hunt of Ruth Cruger was incredibly difficult, she admitted, far more so than it should have been. She paused and dropped her voice a bit.
“I found myself blocked by some mysterious person at every step,” Grace said.