Grace had also interviewed the Brandons’ neighbor, Mrs. King, who was certain that there had been another man in Lottie’s life. Mrs. King told Grace that Lottie had confided in her about a man she had been engaged to for three years before she met Val. The man was tall and dark, but Lottie would never say his name. Not out loud. “That other fellow thought a lot of her,” Mrs. King whispered. Lottie, according to Mrs. King, had to break it off because of her parents’ objections to his religion. Lottie kept a photograph of him somewhere in the house, Mrs. King said. She also told Grace that Val was always jealous of his wife. He would not let her dance “because he could not bear to see another man’s arm around her waist.”
Since coming to Washington, Grace had been working for twenty-four hours straight. She was trying to absorb the particulars of the case before all the fiends ran and hid in the dark. Grace noticed that the house itself had many blind spots, leading her to believe that Lottie had been in the kitchen when the murderer approached her from behind. Grace guessed that the assailant entered while Lottie was washing dishes, partially choked her, dragged her into the other room, threw her onto the bed, and afterward hit her on the forehead. Grace also noticed something on the photographs of the body. There were small, crescent-shaped marks on Lottie’s neck. Grace thought these might be fingerprint marks, possibly of a woman assailant.
On the same day of Grace’s first article, Lottie May Brandon was laid to rest in her hometown of Baltimore. Her husband accompanied her body on the train. In her article two days later, Grace recommended that Lottie’s body be exhumed so that a more scientific, methodical study could be done of the marks on her neck. Grace knew this was a bombshell request, but there was so little physical evidence at the site—none, really—and the eyewitnesses were faulty at best, so she felt as if she had no other choice. “Let us work from the beginning and in a scientific manner,” Grace wrote in her column. “We cannot have fallen premises from which to work.”
As Grace continued her investigation, the Annapolis, Washington, and Baltimore police were busy picking up threads from all sorts of directions. Everyone had a theory. Church sermons titled “A Mysterious Murder or Who Killed Lottie Brandon?” were delivered to bursting congregations. The police, under the direction of Marshal Carter, thought they had identified a primary suspect. On the day Lottie was killed, “two colored girls” saw a man wearing a pink shirt escape the Brandon home, but they were deathly afraid to come forward. The girls consulted their mother, then a minister, before going to the authorities. The man they saw was a worker at the ice plant of Parlett and Parlett, they said. When Lottie died, the police found a half block of ice melting on the Brandon front steps.
When Val Brandon left his wife that fateful morning, he gave her a one-dollar bill that he left on the buffet. That afternoon, the suspect was seen at Martin’s Bar, watching people play pool and drinking beer, where he changed a dollar bill for drinks. The suspect claimed he had won it playing craps. An inveterate drinker and gambler, “Scoop” (his nickname) lived with a woman just around the back of the Brandon home. The police tracked him down and arrested him. His face was badly scratched. They brought him into the sheriff’s office. They locked the door and slowly circled the suspect, who sat chained to a chair. His name was John Snowden, age thirty-four. He was “unusually black,” according to the papers.
At the sheriff’s, Snowden’s chair was up right close to the table. Marshal Carter and his men presented all of this evidence to his face. One of the men then hit Snowden in the head. Carter took out his gun. It hovered at Snowden’s temple. Carter threatened to shoot him. A bottle of whiskey was brought in. Carter ordered Snowden to drink it all. The pistol was still there. Snowden choked down the brown liquid. Carter then told the prisoner to take his clothes off. The men pulled the chair back. Marshal Carter asked him if he had killed Mrs. Brandon.
“No sir, no sir,” said Snowden.
Carter nodded and his men pulled back John Snowden’s arms and tipped the chair back farther. Carter turned the gun around in his hand and brought it down hard, crushing John Snowden’s balls down to nothing. Snowden’s eyes went blank and he vomited. Then he screamed.
He did not confess.
Carter and his men knew that all of their evidence, no matter how many papers it sold, was circumstantial. So the various offices and factions finally listened to Grace, and on a rainy night, they set aside the withered garland and dug up the casket of Lottie May Brandon. Val was kept away from the gravesite, but they let him walk outside Emergency Hospital, where they conducted their exam. He walked around and around.
During this second autopsy, the fingernail marks on her neck were found to be inconclusive. But the chief doctor, Dr. Walton Hopkins, looked under Lottie’s own fingernails and found what he proclaimed was black skin. Dr. Hopkins also said that someone had assaulted her. When they finished, the men took her back to the Sardo funeral home, then back to Glenwood cemetery. When they placed Lottie May back in the earth, they replaced the flowers as carefully as possible. Val did not stay to attend this second ceremony. One was enough.
Ella Rush Murray was married to the pastor whose advice the two girl witnesses had sought. A local columnist, she had read Grace’s reports and was profoundly affected by them, especially by the exhumation of Lottie’s body. Murray wrote in the Washington Times:
Only a woman knows just how precious to her is her own body. Only a woman knows that to a woman the chief horror of a violent death is the fact that autopsies are involved; that all the care a woman has exercised to keep her body sacred and inviolate is forgotten, and the alien hands of everyone investigating the case are privileged to examine.
And today when they lay her away for this second and last time; when Mrs. Lottie Brandon as a tangible thing passes out for all time from this murder investigation, may it not be possible that the mental image of Lottie Brandon as he last saw her, smiling up into his face, kissing him good-by, with the light in her eyes telling of the great hope that she was cherishing—may it not be that that image will so persist that Val Brandon will never rest.
Grace had been right again. Her suspicion to reexamine Lottie’s body had resulted in new evidence, though in a slightly different direction. Grace wasn’t sure about that. There were other new theories now, including Lottie’s having sudden-onset eclampsia, which had killed her cold in her bed. But that skin under her nails, and this man who lived outside the backyard, were questions that couldn’t be dismissed. One of Lottie’s shoes was in the living room, not the bedroom. And her underclothes had been taken off. These were only pieces of a still-incomplete puzzle, but Grace had helped find them. The Baltimore police, who had still failed to get a confession out of Snowden, weren’t as pleased. Detective Dougherty of the Baltimore police said that Grace was only an “amateur detective” who was in D.C. representing the New York Police Department. She was a carpetbagger.