“Be calm,” she said. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m going to kill Mrs. Humiston,” he said. “But I’ll kill you first.” The boy lunged forward with the chair, throwing it at Kron. The detective dove behind a desk as Geisinger sped into the secretary’s office, locking it behind her. As the young man banged on the door, she and four other young women took shelter under the desks. Josephine pulled the phone with her under a desk and demanded to be connected to the West Thirtieth Street police station.
By this time, Samuel Bustwick, another private detective who was in the back of the office, ran in and squared himself up against the assassin. The boy eyed him before he pulled an eight-inch blade out of his shirtsleeve. Behind a desk, Kron palmed a small object from an inner pocket. Bustwick pointed at the boy’s knife. “You better put that up,” he said. The boy grabbed a chair with his other hand and chased after Bustwick, striking a glancing blow on his head. Bustwick staggered back. At the same time, Kron stuck his head out the window and blew the police whistle he had retrieved from his person.
Private detective John Goudart, who worked at another firm on the third floor, was in the hallway when he heard the whistle. He saw the hat and coat outside the door and ran in. On the street, a traffic policeman named McCarthy looked up and saw Kron pulling on the whistle. Taking a moment to count the floors and windows, McCarthy took off for the front entrance.
When McCarthy entered the room, the boy was advancing on the detectives. The knife was on the floor, and he had pulled an eight-inch cast iron stove lifter out of his hip pocket. He raised it to pound down on Kron’s head. The boy turned around, and policeman McCarthy floored him with his right fist.
The assassin was charged with felonious assault. His name was George Toomey, seventeen, of Tompkinsville on Staten Island. He was sent to Bellevue for observation. Grace returned a half hour later to a very messy office. When she saw Toomey down at the police station, she recognized him. He had visited her office a few days before.
“He said I was talking about him behind his back,” Grace said.
Grace admitted that since her police badge had been taken from her, she had received many threatening letters, and she intimated that she wouldn’t feel safe until she got it back again.
The police made a statement saying that they had received an anonymous telephone message that a murderer was going to call on Mrs. Humiston at six P.M. The police sent a detective to her office to check it out. The detective had arrived at six, waited until seven, and then left. There was no one there. Grace declared that she knew nothing of the message or of this detective.
In the press, Grace was now being portrayed as faded in both appearance and power. “She isn’t even pretty,” one paper reported. “Almost middle-aged—wears her hair parted in the middle, and she doesn’t frivol.” Her office was still “besieged by countless parents” even though “a fashion display had the power to lure her quite as easily” as a real crime. This type of pigeonholed thinking toward middle-aged women was widespread. Newspapers ran advertisements for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, “especially adapted to help women” through the critical time “between the years of 45 and 55 … often beset with annoying symptoms such as nervousness, irritability, melancholia, heat flashes which produce headache and dizziness, and a sense of suffocation.” That was how some people saw her.
A year after Ruth’s disappearance and murder, the motorcycle squad had been completely revamped and the Fourth Branch had been reorganized. William Eynon, Willard A. Helms, Thomas Kerrigan, and John Ochsenhirt, all motorcycle men attached to traffic squad C, were found by the courts to be in violation of rule 39, which covered the issuance and returns of tickets.
On February 22, Detective Lagarenne was finally convicted, after an eight-day trial, of dereliction of duty in the Cruger case. The jury concluded that Lagarenne had failed to adequately search the cellar and had not given Cocchi the focus he deserved. It didn’t help his case that Lagarenne not only called Cocchi “Al” but also told Henry Cruger that Cocchi was a respectable man in the neighborhood. The conclusion was that Cocchi was a man who serviced police bikes and was a favorite with cops. The jury deliberated for four hours before handing their decision to Justice Goff.
During the trial, attorney Frank Aranow, representing Lagarenne, made the point that “the finding of Ruth Cruger’s body in the cellar of Cocchi’s bicycle repair shop was entirely due to Lagarenne and his brother officer, Frank McGee, and no one else. Mrs. Grace Humiston, who took all the credit for the finding of the girl’s body, was not there at the time it was discovered, nor had anything to do with the unearthing of it.”
Frank McGee’s trial was next. Following special prosecutor James Osborne’s lead, Lagarenne even testified against his longtime partner by identifying his signature on some reports. The court found gross negligence not in the way the case was investigated by McGee but in the way Ruth’s disappearance was initially reported. After the first call from Henry came in, the lieutenant on the desk, William Brown, failed to accurately record the call, leaving a fourteen-hour gap between Henry’s desperate call and the assigning of the case to Lagarenne and McGee. Unlike his former partner, Frank McGee was acquitted, but not without incident. During summation, McGee’s attorney, Aranow, had strong words for Prosecutor Osborne.
“Would that I had the power in my hand to indict officials for neglect of duty,” said Aranow, “I would have indicted Mr. Osborne for neglect of duty because he said things to this man (he pointed to McGee) in front of the Grand Jury which he knows is a lie. I don’t make any mistake in that.” At the end of the long table in front of the jury, Osborne rose to his feet.
“Do you mean to say that I lied?” Osborne shouted. He rushed across the room and tried to land a right hook at Aranow, but it weakly sailed past him through thin air. Osborne slowly fell on his own elbow. As the judge banged his gavel and officials jumped in to separate the two, one of the bailiffs snickered, calling Osborne’s punch “a Mary Ann upper cut.” When order was restored, Osborne approached the bench, his head bowed in shame.