She sighed. “I have been utterly tired out by my work on poor Ruth,” Grace admitted. “Let the public show that it wants something of that sort, however, and I am willing to drop everything and begin the work.”
“Why couldn’t the police have found the same thing?” someone asked.
“I don’t know,” was Grace’s reply. “I don’t know why they didn’t. Something told me to keep on digging and I just couldn’t stop, although they told me that I was foolish. I was told that there might be a civil suit. I was not to be dissuaded by that.
“You put two and two together,” Grace said, simply. “That is, you do if you are a woman. If you are a man you don’t, or you get the addition wrong. ‘She ran away with the dago;’ ‘they quarreled with her at home;’ ‘girls won’t stand for strict parents’ were some of the theories put forward by members of the city’s police and detectives. And all the time the child’s body lay buried beneath Cocchi’s cellar, and someone helped Cocchi to escape.”
When a reporter asked, “Do you still believe capital punishment ought to be abolished?” the reporter wrote that Mrs. Humiston declined to answer. “It hurt her,” the reporter wrote.
The long article published in the New York Sun after the interview built Grace up like one of the new Gotham skyscrapers. The accompanying photograph featured the smiling face of the woman, clad in black, who had found Ruth Cruger. Mrs. Humiston was now the mystery confronting readers. Who was this woman who solved the crime that had so baffled the police? And how did she accomplish it? “She never gives up on anything,” the reporter said. “She shuts her teeth and goes on and on, no matter what happens. Trying to stop her is like flashing a red flag in a bull’s face.”
“She would have made a detective,” the article observed. “Indeed she is a detective.”
But she wasn’t in it for fame, it seemed. “It may well be,” reported the Sun, “that she does not care a rap for her own gain or her own reputation in all this. You feel that when you are talking to her that she is above self.” After all, “she is a born and bred New Yorker,” the reporter said.
This was not the same Grace Humiston with ebony hair who darted about the South in disguises and rode mules over Italian mountaintops. Grace now had more wrinkles and, after the Cruger case, clearly needed some rest. But that was all just appearance. At forty-eight years old, her words—and what was behind them—commanded more authority than ever. The reporters in that room now understood why. The nation could hear it, too. After the articles came out, Grace’s mailbox was soon flooded with requests by desperate parents begging her to look for their lost daughters. The New York American, a staunch supporter of Grace, even hired a “missing-girl editor” to keep up with the topic. Grace was even reported as having signed an exclusive contract with the Hearst family of newspapers to only speak to them.
A laudatory tribute to Grace appeared in the New-York Tribune in the form of a poem, “Lines to Mrs. Humiston,” written by Alice Duer Miller. “Lines to Mrs. Humiston” was certainly complimentary, but it had a wickedly sarcastic tone of warning to it:
Oh, Mrs. Humiston, oh, Mrs. Grace
Humiston, can it be you have not heard
The last, the master-word?
You haven’t without doubt,
Or else you’d not be out
Milling about
Doing man’s work, when home is woman’s place.
A woman’s duty is to praise and please,
To make men feel proud, competent and strong.
Never to hint by word or deed or glance
That not all men have qualities like these:
That’s very, very wrong.
Besides, it kills romance.
Oh, strange it seems to me,
You do not see
That deeds like yours imply a criticism,
And criticism vexes,
And makes antagonism
Between the sexes.
I know, of course, what you will say,
The thoughtless, weak excuse that you will make–
You wished to help young girls. A great mistake!
For in the end,
My friend,
You’ll find the only way.
The gentle, charming, yielding best of ways
Is to stay home and praise
All men,
And all they do,
However strange;
And to condemn
Women, and all things new–
Ay, any change.
*
New York faced a hot summer: many days reached ninety-six degrees, and by midsummer 142 people had already died from the heat. A man living in the Pennsylvania countryside claimed he had found the body of Satan himself, petrified near a riverbank. Cocchi was in jail, and Ruth was being mourned, but the trail of evidence connecting Cocchi to her murder was similarly hazy. Authorities had Cocchi’s confession but very little else. The La Rue story was being pressed by Inspector Faurot and his band of diggers. Meanwhile, William J. Flynn, chief of the Secret Service, had identified a new suspect in the case named Jose A. Del Campo. This man had been inquiring about La Rue’s condition and had recently given her a large sum of money. When questioned about La Rue, Del Campo would only say that “she comes from one of the best families in Argentina.” With the aid of the police, Flynn was investigating a larger South American white slavery ring that stretched all the way to Buenos Aires. The police were now convinced that “Cocchi and his associates systematically plotted the ruin of young school girls … planning to ship them to Latin-American countries after they had been disgraced.”
In the grand jury hearings, the heat was making the long days feel even longer. When Assistant District Attorney Talley began his questioning of witnesses at the end of July, it was with the same old questions: Where were you on February 14? What did you see or hear? In late July, the person answering those questions had his legs dangled beneath him under the chair. Arturo, Alfredo Cocchi’s young son, called Athos by his father, told Talley that he was in his father’s shop after three o’clock on the afternoon of February 13 and that he heard his father and one or two other men talking in the cellar. This was the day of Ruth’s death and was several hours before her disappearance was reported by her family.
Athos was sure of the date because it was the day after Lincoln’s birthday. He knew the time because it occurred when he came home from school, when he would usually go down to the shop to play. The current police theory was that Ruth was killed at two in the afternoon. Her watch had stopped at two thirty.
“Papa was not in the shop when I got there,” Athos said. “But through the hole in the floor where the heat comes up, I heard him and other men talking in the cellar. I started to go down stairs, but Papa met me and made me go back. The back room of the shop was locked.”