Judge Bagnoli roared for order. He instructed the prisoner to finish his story.
“Not I, but my wife, in an excess of furious jealousy, killed Miss Cruger,” Cocchi said, his hand on his chest. “I had accused myself in order to save the mother of my children Athos and Georgette, but as I knew from the documents of the lawsuit that she is very adverse to me, I thought it would be better to tell the truth. And as an action was brought against her in America for this murder, I wish to know how she could escape the condemnation.”
The prosecutor asked what happened next.
“I took the body,” said Cocchi, “and tried to conceal it in the cellar but the door was not large enough.” The prosecutor asked, pointedly, how he made her fit. Cocchi paused. “I sawed the body in two,” he said.
As the room again erupted into loud shouting and finger-pointing, the judge kept his eye on Cocchi, who had the same steady stare that he always did. As order was called, the prosecutor shouted, “Was she already dead?”
“Yes,” said Cocchi. “Yes.”
When the room quieted down, Cocchi produced a new laundry list of witnesses that he wished the prosecution to investigate. A number of them were known to prosecutors, but a number of them were not.
The next day as court began, Signor Venturini, now seventy-seven years old, stood before the judge. His client, Cocchi, stood on the prisoner’s platform, quiet and remote. He was on full view for anyone who dared risk eye contact with him. Everyone in the room was still thinking of yesterday. Prosecutor Mancuso said that Cocchi’s display had ruined any sort of sympathetic angle. “He gained nothing by his dramatic presentation,” Mancuso told the press. “Of course, it is certainly his plan to have his trial postponed again and again so that he will be entitled to receive his friends and his meals in prison instead of suffering solitary confinement. Cocchi knows that he is a doomed man. That is why he is playing for delay.”
Venturini approached the bench with a letter. He explained to the judge that he had received this some time ago and had thought it the work of a crank. But recently, he had been in contact with the writer, who confirmed that every word was true. Venturini thought it might be important to share with the court now, especially in the wake of yesterday. The judge wondered how much of a surprise that was to Venturini.
The judge took the letter in his hands. It had a postmark from New York. He looked at it, and his expression changed. He handed the letter back and asked Venturini to read it. The old man held it up, adjusting it to his eyes.
Room 850 Municipal Building
New York City
August 18, 1917
EXCELLENCY:—However much I may desire the extradition of Alfred Cocchi, and the meting out to the monster of the extreme penalty for his crime in the country of its committal, I think it would be a great and grievous mistake to deliver him to the American authorities for the present.…
I, for one, do not believe that Cocchi’s confession is the truth—at least not the whole truth. There is not one iota of proof how, when, where, why, or by whom, the Cruger girl was slain. There is no certainty as to whether her body was buried in the cellar before or after Cocchi’s flight. It is almost a moral certainty that Cocchi’s shop was one of the stations of the White Slave System: that the Cruger girl had fallen into the hands of the slavers while at school; and that her death resulted from attempted abortion. I take no stock in the findings of an autopsy or post-mortem on a decayed body over four months in the grave and especially if the autopsy be performed by an employee of the prosecutor, and there is proof that the prosecutor is a shielder and shelterer of White Slavers.
I lost a fine girl, 21 years of age, and, like the Cruger girl, a student, but at Hunter College, not at Wadleigh High School. I live in 115th Street, about forty feet across the street from the Wadleigh. My girl died at her home on the 1st day of October, 1916. The unaccountable suddenness of her death, and the attitude of certain people in the locality, led me to make an investigation which resulted in the discovery of a complete branch or district of the White Slave System, headed by a manager named Lawrence, whom, I am credibly informed, is the financial backer of a chain of dives and saloons, and a particular personal friend of Edward Swann, District Attorney of New York County. The various quarters of this system are located two blocks from the Wadleigh School. My girl fell a victim to the fiends, and died as the result of abortion, after suffering about a year of unimaginable agony of body and mind. I got all the evidence, with over a score of witnesses, to present the case to the Grand Jury; but Swann refused to prosecute—refused to do anything in the matter. On December 1st I appealed to the Governor, and was promised that my case would be considered, but although I have renewed this application twice since then, nothing has been done—and nothing will be done.
Now, Ruth Cruger passed these slave dives twice a day, going to and from school. Is it likely or credible that she had sufficient self-control to escape the allurements of the slavers? The ways of these fiends are too insinuating and seductive for an unsophisticated school-girl to resist them. There is the dance-hall, the suave exquisitely dressed dude, the sympathetic soda-water and ice-cream dispenser, the handy capsule of chloral hydrate in the soda-water—and the sleep! Even an automobile was not lacking as part of the apparatus of this slave gang for whisking the victims about the city—the very mobile so often seen in Cocchi’s shop. The Cocchi-Cruger case is, of course, no concern of mine; but if my surmise is correct, that both girls were victim of the same gang, it is of prime importance to me that Cocchi be preserved alive in Italy until he is exhaustively examined by the Italian authorities regarding the matters here disclosed, and until my case gets an open hearing in New York.
There has been a regular campaign of noisy hysterics worked up by a lot of shady self-promoters in regard to the Cruger murder, and Swann was not slow to take advantage of the confession and switch the murder matter, with the adroitness of a juggler, into a police “graft” inquiry.
Your Excellency’s most obedient servant,
J. J. LYNCH
P.S.—Further and fuller details will be forthcoming if desired.