Don't Lose Your Head

Hey, true weirdos, we've got some bonus content for you at the end of the episode. Stick around if you want. The average human male head weighs about 10 to 12 pounds, give or take. You've maybe rolled a bowling ball heavier than that. And that head, home of the human brain, the seat of the mystery of consciousness, wasn't designed to float, at least not for long.

That's handy, though, because you're trying to get rid of it. It's leaky and gruesome. And if anyone catches you with it, you're in big trouble. That's why you went to the effort of sealing the head in plaster of Paris and wrapping it tightly in oilcloth. The East River has a good spot. Yeah, look, the grim bundle has already vanished, pulled beneath the dark, swift, relentless current. Now you can finally be together. Now she's yours and yours alone. That thick brood is gone and no one will ever learn the truth of why or how he disappeared. But hurry now. She's waiting. And there are more bundles to be disposed of before this night. And this nightmare is over.

It's been nearly 100 years now that Americans have enjoyed running water and indoor plumbing. And buddy, do we ever like it? In the last 50 years, the number of bathrooms per person in America has doubled, and so has the size of our bathrooms. You know what else has doubled in the last decade? The number of houses with 10 or more bathrooms. That's a lot of Charmin people. American bathrooms are increasingly becoming little islands of extreme luxury and indulgence and privacy. How'd we get here? To begin with, we have the space for it. Starter homes in the US are twice the size of starter homes in Europe. And somewhere along the way, your great, great, great grandparents bought into the incorrect notion that sewer gases were a leading cause of disease. That's why American bathrooms feature tub sink toilet in one good sized, well ventilated room. We don't have the WC setup you see abroad. You know, the toilet tucked away in its own little closet. Before we had rain shower heads and bidets and whirlpool tubs and double sinks and heated tile floors and towel warmers, we had chamber pots and public baths. But of course, and not surprisingly, the rich had better versions of both. The rich had household staff to empty and clean their porcelain pots. The rest of us, if we were city dwellers, were tossing the nighttime nasties out the nearest open windows into the always filthy gutters below. And bath time, that was no private soak with Mr. Bubble or Calgon. Tenement housing in New York City typically lacked running water altogether. And the few buildings that did boast the amenity, the pipes were so rusty and the water flow so weak that bathing in it was almost less appealing than drinking it. By the mid to late 19th century when our story takes place, there were more than 14 million people living in New York with only one bathtub for every 79 families on the Lower East Side. Yikes. The first public bath house in New York opened on Mott Street in 1851. It wasn't long before more commercial bath houses popped up all over the city. Still, it was a luxury that was pretty much out of reach for most of the city's low income residents, many of whom were immigrants crammed into overcrowded tenements where diseases like cholera and typhoid easily spread from one person to the next. For a while, city residents took advantage of temporary floating baths along the river. But it took no time at all for pollution to end that practice. Ew. It was a public health crisis so extreme that in April 1895, the New York State Senate passed a law requiring the construction of free public baths in any city with a population greater than 50,000. Which brings us to the Murray Hill baths on West 42nd Street. When construction was completed in spring 1892, it was clear that this five story palace complete with marble mosaic floors, stained glass windows, turquoise carpets was not meant for the poor, the tenement dwellers who had no means of bathing at home. This was a bathhouse for the wealthy, meant to cater to captains of industry and burgeoning tycoons.

The baths were equipped with telephone lines, even gasp, long distance telephone lines, gentlemen guests and make that white gentlemen guests because the Murray Hill baths was a strictly whites only domain, availed themselves of all the luxuries and pleasures and privacies of a true Turkish bath. I'm picturing the banker from the Monopoly game, wearing only his top hat and a towel, moving from the hot room to the plunge room to the shampoo room, to what they called the needle and spray shower room. The lighting is dim, the furnishings tasteful, and any reasonable need on the part of the clientele was anticipated and met by an army of attendants.

One of those attendants was a man named William Guldensuppe. He was employed at the Murray Hill baths as a masseur. Back then the job title was rubber. Guldensuppe must have been truly skilled. He was the best known of all the rubbers at the baths. He was even described by one New York paper as quote, a true knight of the bath. Guldensuppe was a big man for the day, over five foot 11 with broad shoulders and a powerful chest.

Tattooed on that chest was the upper half of a voluptuous woman, a relic of Guldensuppe's days in the German Navy. A fellow rubber at Murray Hill bath, one Mr. McPhee called Guldensuppe, the big Dutchman, a nice enough fellow but skirt crazy. Guldensuppe, whose origins to this day are pretty much unknown, shared an apartment above a drugstore with his common law wife, Augusta Nack. Augusta was employed as a midwife and already had one legal husband. The two had apparently grown good and sick of each other in part at ways, not bothering with a legal divorce, which is damn near impossibility to get anyway. In fact, right up until the 1960s, adultery was the only legal grounds for divorce in New York. Proof was required. This is probably why juicy adulterous divorce cases drew big crowds to courtrooms and even bigger press coverage. Since the state made divorce almost comically difficult, unhappy couples found what loopholes they could and just got on with their lives, which explains why Guldensuppe took up residence in Augusta Nack's flat with her former and still legal husband's indifference, if not his outright blessing. Herman Nack, the husband who was employed delivering bread for a bakery, had this to say of his wife Augusta's choices.

We had several children, but they are all dead. Since I left my wife, I have met her several times in stores where I deliver bread. I always spoke to her and we had no quarrels. We were both satisfied to be rid of each other. So now the big Dutchman and the midwife are living together as common law man and wife. And as far as William Guldensuppe knows, they're happy enough. He spends his days mostly naked in the humid luxury of the Murray Hole baths, plying his trade as a rubber. And Augusta Nack stays busy helping to bring new life into the world. Both had stable work and fine professions. But New York then, as now, was an expensive place to live. Maybe that's why they took in a boarder, a barber by the name of Martin Thorn. And what happened next is something no sane person could have predicted, or even imagined.

The workdays at Murray Hole baths are long. The gentlemen social club than a place for the necessities of hygiene. It had a barber shop and a cafe and even rooms for rent, should a tycoon find himself in need of a bed. And hitting the baths was a famous hangover cure. Famous even as far away as Tennessee. The Chattanooga Times called the baths, quote, Gotham's most famous citadel of the hangover.

The story went on to say, it was a soothing haven for the backwash of endurance poker siestas, farewell bachelor dinners and sundry high flings. Men bloated and unsteady, retired to the marble slab depths and were pummeled and sweated into the pink of first class respectability. Rubbers like golden sub did the pummeling all hours of the day and night. And while he was toiling away in those steamy trenches, Augusta Nack was home, but not alone. Now she had company in the flat above the drugstore, the border Martin Thorn. He was an attractive man, dark eyes, dark hair, smaller in stature than golden sub, his opposite in many ways. Thorn's occupation offered more regular hours. And he paid attention to Augusta, attention she craved. Wasn't long before the two began having an affair.

Thorn later bragged, when golden sub was away, Augusta made love to me. Okay, dude, first, ew. Second, maybe it's because I'm a Capricorn or whatever. But who needs this kind of trauma in their life? You're hooking up with your landlady while her giant ex Navy boyfriend who makes his living pounding on other men with his hands is at work. And you don't see how that could be like crazy messy. I mean, I know that lust is one of the seven deadlies, but come on. It's not you're gonna get caught. And it's gonna get ugly. And that's exactly what happened. It was February 1897. When golden sub first confronted his rival for Augusta's affection. According to Thorn, golden sub came home and found Augusta in the barber's room. The revolver went off accidentally according to Martin Thorn.

Golden sub overpowered the barber, wrestling the pistol away and beating him with it and fury. Pistol weapon or not Thorn fought back golden subs co workers at the Murray Hill baths later described seeing the bruises on his body, black and blue marks left by blows that must have been savage. But the badly hurt by golden sub. They had to take himself to the hospital for treatment. And if you're wondering what the heck the neighbors made of all this, well, they heard everything.

Neighbors later told the press that Mrs. Augusta Nack was a most generous landlady understatement, and that her two borders loathe each other to the point of not speaking, or even acknowledging each other when they passed in the halls or on stoop. After that terrible pistol whipping incident, Thorn moved out, but he and Augusta continued to see each other on the sly. And very often, according to the barber, she was so sorry that golden sub had hurt him, begged him to pay no mind to the man and said that all she wanted was to leave him and live quietly somewhere else. Live quietly that is with Martin Thorn at her side. In June of that year, 1897, the lovers hatched a plan. Thorn spotted a newspaper advertisement for a cottage available to rent in Woodside, Long Island. On June 24, he and Augusta Nack toward the property decided to rent it and made a $15 payment to the landlord a month's rent in advance. The couple signed the lease as Mr. And Mrs. Brom. If you're screaming $15 to rent a cottage on Long Island, go ahead and scream. That 15 bucks is worth $552 today, but good luck finding a rental on Long Island for that price. Because now the average rent is more like $3,900 per month, which is insane, but it does come with running water. So there's that. Anyway, the plan went like this. With the cottage rental secured, all Mrs. Nack had to do was bring Guldensuppe to the location.

Thorn assured his lover that he would handle everything else. And by everything else, he meant murder. June 25, 1897, Augusta persuaded Guldensuppe to come with her to see the cottage. What he didn't know was that Martin Thorn was already there, lying in wait. As Nack and Guldensuppe entered the front door, Augusta suggested that he go in ahead of her to see how he liked the arrangement of the rooms while she stepped outside to have a look around. This was the signal Nack and Thorn had agreed upon.

Thorn, concealed in an upstairs closet, cocked his revolver and readied himself to ambush Guldensuppe. Guldensuppe climbed the stairs. Outside, Augusta Nack heard the bark of a single gunshot, the sound punching through the hush of the soft summer morning. She hurried into the cottage as Thorn came down the stairs announcing, It's done. I shot him.

Yes, replied Augusta. I heard the shot. Some kind of cold blooded, right? Thorn told Augusta to leave and not return until five o'clock that afternoon. Then Thorn turned and headed back upstairs. He dragged Guldensuppe's body into the bathtub and according to police, took out a razor blade and slit the dying man's throat. Then he finished the job by hacking off Guldensuppe's head. He severed the legs from the corpse and sliced the large distinctive tattoo from the chest. As Thorn butchered the body, he congratulated himself on the luck of the cottage having that rarest of amenities, its own bathtub. What he didn't know until long after the bloody business was completed was that the bathtub didn't drain into a municipal sewer system. It drained directly into the backyard. Oops. And with the hot water that Thorn tried to flush the drain with after he finished his ghastly work, he succeeded only in creating a big, bloody puddle, which became in a horrible dark twist, a real attraction for nearby docks.

Thorn then proceeded to pack Guldensuppe's head and plaster of Paris, working until the head resembled a large white block. He later chuckled ruefully about not shaving off Guldensuppe's mustache before commencing, noting that that would have made the man less recognizable should the head be found. Try to picture yourself sitting on the edge of a bathtub in an on air conditioned house and summer, spackling plaster of Paris onto a bloody dismembered human head, the white paste getting all gummed up in the mustache and not losing your entire mind from the horror. Thorn worked the afternoon away, carefully wrapping each butchered body part in oilcloth and tying the bundles tightly with string, probably whistled while he worked, who knows. But by the time Augusta Nack returned, her lover was waiting. The packages that had once been professional bathhouse rubber William Guldensuppe neatly stacked beside him. A separate smaller bundle contained the dead man's clothing, watch and watch chain, all of which Thorn later pawned. The couple first hauled their bundles into a Surrey, that's a little four-wheel carriage, and then boarded a ferry back to Manhattan. Augusta claimed that after boarding, she made her way to the front of the boat, leaving Thorn in the stern. He later told her that he'd thrown one of the bundles overboard. The master of Paris encased head. Saturday, June 26, 1897. Two boys, James McKenna, age 13, and John McGuire, age 14, were swimming in the East River. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon when the boys caught sight of something bright in the water.

Swimming closer, the pair snatched at the object. It looked like a parcel wrapped tightly in oilcloth and carefully tied up with string. There were other kids there that day too, playing on a dock that wasn't in use at the time. A knife was promptly produced and James and John were loudly encouraged to tear open their found prize. But the knife got stuck. And it was only with real effort that the boys got it free. Through the tear in the oilcloth, they saw something terribly white. And the blade of the knife was coated in dark, sticky, viscous fluid.

Man's trunk floats in river, blared the headline. The story that ran below was sympathetic to the poor, frightened boys who'd been made sick by their find. The police officer dispatched to the scene managed with the assistance of some nearby laborers to haul the bundle up onto the dock. As a crowd of onlookers gathered, the officer carefully cut the bundle strings, folded the oilcloth back and revealed the trunk of a man. The neck and head were both gone. The neck severed as cleanly as though it had happened on a dissecting table.

The legs were another matter, crudely sliced off just below the abdomen. Strangely, a large portion of the flesh of the chest was gone. Cut from just below the left breast, all the way to the opposite shoulder. It was clear that the body had not been in the water long, that the victim had been a healthy man in the prime of life. The musculature was pronounced, the arms were powerful, with fingers that suggested he had not been a manual laborer. But the index finger on the left hand did sport a distinctive scar. It was the clean removal of the head and neck that prompted the first theory of the case. Police suggested that perhaps the torso had been chucked into the river by some medical students studying anatomy. Pretty much no one bought this. One paper said all indications pointed to atrocious murder. Another confidently declared that there wasn't a chance in a million that the victim would ever be identified. One story suggested that the torso belonged to a Spaniard caught spying on Cuban gunrunners. Another quoted the police denying the man could have ever been a sailor on the grounds that there were calluses on the dead man's hands. Yet another story declared that this was a Sicilian mafia killing.

And the bright oilcloth was the proof since didn't those Italians love their bright colors? While all of this feverish speculation swirled around the discovery of the butchered torso? Where was Martin Thorn? Confessing every filthy detail to a friend that's where he was a fellow barber by the name of John Gotha. Thorn slipped into the chair at the barbershop where Gotha worked asking for a shave. We stood up to leave he slipped a note into Gotha's hand. The note read, meet me tonight at Mount Morris Park. Gotha later recounted the meeting first to his wife then to police. Gotha said that Thorn described the bad blood between he and Golden Sup the beating the petty humiliations. He said that he and Augusta Nack had planned together how best to eliminate Golden Sup. Thorn told Gotha that he waited for Augusta to arrive at the cottage with Golden Sup that he stripped down to just an undershirt and socks not wanting to ruin his clothing with bloodstains. He went into detail on the butchering of the body, how heavy the parts were, and how anxious Augusta was to get it all over with. He told of sending her to the shop to purchase the oil cloth of the care he took in sealing Golden Sup's decapitated head in plaster of Paris. Thorn declared that it was Augusta who arranged for the Surrey to take the pair and their grim cargo to the ferry. Gotha wept as he told his wife the story. But his wife horrified as she was recognized that her husband now risked real trouble. Her own brother was a police officer.

She knew full well that friendship or not, Gotha could not keep Thorn's secret. She urged him to go immediately to the police. And when he couldn't leave work the next day to do so, she went in his place. She told the police that her husband had plans to meet Thorn that very night on 125th Street. At eight o'clock p.m. Tuesday, July 6, 1897, Thorn strolled down 125th Street toward his friend, only to be immediately arrested by police officers posing as street sweepers. Within hours he was in a cell. Though he had no way of knowing it at the time. He was under the same roof as his lover and accomplice. Augusta Nack had been arrested at six o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, June 30. Detectives confiscated a pistol, a knife and a saw from her rooms. And later that very same day, Golden Sup's dismembered legs were found floating near a dock at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Another search of Nack's apartment just two days later, yielded eight sheets of oilcloth identical to that used to wrap up Golden Sup's body parts. So how exactly did police go from guessing and speculation to identifying the body parts and making not one arrest, but two? There was a newspaper feud at the time between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. And that feud is the key that helped unlock this whole mystery. Because as fate would have it, it was a journalist and not a detective who figured it all out. And this was one murder case where the victim was identified without any help at all from his face. Ned Brown was a medical student turned novice reporter who was struck by many of the unusual details of this mysterious floating torso. It was Brown's lowly status in the newsroom coupled with his knowledge of anatomy, and his frequent visits to the public baths that helped him break the case. See, Brown's usual shift ran from 2pm till midnight, though he often worked later.

There were many nights where he just couldn't face the long commute to his home in Flatbush, an elevated train, a trolley, then a solitary walk in utter darkness. On those nights, he'd head for the Murray Hill baths. For just 50 cents, Brown got a bed in the baths dormitory, a scrubbing, a steam and a plunge. A few cents more bought an invigorating massage with a dime tip going to the rubber. Brown enjoyed chatting up the rubbers in attendance. Often they had an anecdote or two that he could transform into a print worthy tale. Sometimes they shared a bit of gossip that he filed away for later use as background. Brown ruminated on the coroner's findings, his torso. The man was bigger than average, taller, the powerful arms, the hands workman like but lacking calluses, the nails carefully trimmed close, the tips of the fingers ever so slightly crinkled. The skin so remarkably smooth and clear. When an oilcloth package containing a man's dismembered legs was found, Brown's editor at the world hustled him off to the morgue.

And if there was one thing former med student Ned Brown knew his way around, it was a cadaver. Brown described the way the legs fit the torso as neatly as any jigsaw puzzle. Ragged flesh slotting into ragged tears. And speaking of ragged, one look at the gaping ends of the blood vessels in the neck where the head had been removed, and at the upper thighs where the victim's legs have been severed. And Brown knew the man had still been alive as he was butchered, and must surely have lost a tremendous amount of blood before dying. Yikes. Headless though the body was, Brown was suddenly struck by an idea. The remains on the slab before him looked in some way familiar.

Brown didn't recognize the individual who'd met such a terrible fate. But he had a hunch about the victim's occupation. Brown left the morgue and immediately headed for the nearest bathhouse. The crinkled skin on the fingertips of the gentleman named Bill McPhee, who happened to be employed as a rubber at the Murray Hill Baths. Brown had once asked McPhee after a particularly vigorous alcohol rubbed out, if all the soap and hot water had permanently wrinkled the skin on his fingers. McPhee answered that no, after a few days or maybe a week of not working, the rubbers noticed that the crinkles on their skin smoothed out. It was all adding up fast for the novice reporter. The pronounced muscle development seen in the torso, massaging male bodies for 12 hours a day is a workout. The neatly trimmed nails, the absence of calluses, the ultra clean, clear white skin. Wouldn't a bathhouse be the cleanest possible workspace? And a workplace where you could be sure of getting no sun exposure? Brown was now convinced that the murdered man must surely have been a bath house rubber. He spilled this theory to his editor, who refused to go to either the police or a more senior reporter for fear that their hated rival, the Hearst organization, would steal a scoop. He told Brown to follow his hunch and take all the baths he needed to on the paper's dime. Now, though he was a regular at the Murray Hill baths, it wasn't his first stop.

Brown visited four other establishments before finally rolling into Murray Hill, as scrubbed and shiny and pink as Peppa Pig. Luck was on his side. And there was Bill McPhee. Brown wondered aloud if the baths weren't a little bit shorthanded that evening, or so it seemed to him. McPhee, kind of grouchy by nature, couldn't agree fast enough.

Bill Guldensuppe, the big Dutchman, you know, took a day off and hasn't shown up for work ever since. Boss says he's fired. Poor Ned Brown, now midway through his fifth intense scrubbing in his many hours, bless his heart, fiend ignorance. Big Dutchman? How big, he wondered. McPhee gave the particulars. About five foot eleven, and surely Brown had noticed the huge tattoo of a curvy woman on the man's chest.

She couldn't miss it. Brown, thinking of the large swath of flesh excised from the chest of the corpse, could hardly breathe. He casually wondered aloud to McPhee. Suppose anything had happened to Guldensuppe. Would you be able to identify his body? The rubber's reply was an instant. Brown went on. But what if the head was gone?

McPhee answered. In our business, we get so used to seeing the naked bodies of the rubbers that we never look at their faces. When I see William coming down the room, I know it is he without looking up by the feet and the legs. Jackpot. Ned Brown tipped McPhee, toweled off, put his clothes on and wheedled an address from the bath's receptionist.

Paid a visit to Augusta Nack, where he found her surrounded by luggage. Packing, she said, to go home to Germany. That's how close she came to getting away with it all. It's thanks to reporter Ned Brown that Martin Thorn and Augusta Nack were arrested, charged, indicted and made to stand trial for the savage killing of William Guldensuppe.

They called it a trial of the century, which is an overused phrase that means, holy crap, but the media is making a ton of money off this. So let's report about nothing else for as long as we can possibly get away with it. Make stuff up if you have to. But above all else, get there first. The Guldensuppe murder trial was slow pitch for both the Pulitzer and the Hearst news operations.

There was a seedy love triangle. And with Augusta still married to Herman Nack, score bonus points for double adultery. Plus the whole Jezebel angle that the public always eats up. There were body parts turning up in the woods and in the river and a whole stream of witnesses absolutely confident in their ability to identify the victim without his head because they saw him naked six days a week at work.

Now, that's the kind of story that sells newspapers. When the trial began on November 8th, 1897, the storyline was already a breathless. He said, she said, Guldensuppe bled situation. Coworkers from the baths testified to the scar on the index finger, the crooked toes, the mole under one arm, all features that enabled their identification of the headless remains. A former employee of the morgue admitted under oath that a Dr. O'Hanlon had taken it upon himself to carve away some of the flesh on one dismembered leg to give it a more artistic appearance.

What? Even young John McGuire, one of the boys who found the bundle containing Guldensuppe's upper torso, bravely took the stand. And once on the stand themselves, Thorn and Nack turned on each other. But you're not surprised to hear that, are you? Thorn tried hard to pin the murder and the disposal of the body on Augusta.

But there was that whole detailed confession to his friend John Gotha that was awfully hard for Thorn to talk his way around. Sloppy, sloppy. If you're going to kill people and dismember them, you have to keep the story to yourself. If you can't live with the backs of your own savagery, then you don't have what it takes to get away with murder.

On November 10, 1897, Augusta Nack turned state's evidence and in a confession supplied by her lawyer, placed all responsibility for Guldensuppe's death on Martin Thorn. She testified under oath that Thorn told her, quote, woman, I love you. Then he went on to vow that he intended to kill Guldensuppe and put his body in a trunk and send it away.

Nack claimed that she begged, no, don't please. But the prosecution was skillful, ruthless. On cross-examination, Nack confessed that it was she who lured Guldensuppe to the cottage on Long Island where Thorn lay in wait. She who purchased the oilcloth used to wrap the dead man's body parts. She who admitted shedding not one tear over any of it, denying that she'd ever had feelings for the victim, declaring that the only man she had ever loved was her husband, Herman Nack, that poor bastard in his bread wagon who probably couldn't fathom his own bad fortune in all of this.

Gustin Nack testified to seeing only the bundles of Guldensuppe butchered body parts, not the actual killing. She admitted to seeing a little blood on the bathroom floor of the cottage, but like Thorn, she had no idea that the bathtub drained directly into the yard. No idea that the evidence of their crime had pooled in the fresh grass just outside.

A fact that barely registered on the drama meter in this trial. There were so many bigger moments, all of which made headline after headline. There was the jaw-dropping revelation that midwife Augusta Nack had kept the bodies of two stillborn infants preserved in jars in her apartment. What? Then there was the incident in court worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster when the prosecutor whirled on Augusta and thundered.

Mrs. Nack, was it not you who shot Guldensuppe, you who cut him up? Augusta firmly denied her guilt. And why did you play any part in these tragic events? The prosecution demanded to know. Her answer came down to fear. She described how Thorn had once choked her until blood ran from her nose, how he threatened her with a syringe containing some substance that would destroy her eyesight.

She said that she'd given Thorn all the money she had in an attempt to appease him, swore that everything she'd done was at his command and that she'd complied in terror for her own safety. On Saturday, November 27th, 1897, days before he was due to take the stand in his own defense, newspapers printed a letter by Martin Thorn.

In it, he declared the following. Martin Thorn is just a man with vices and virtues like any other and with the love of life just as strong within him as any of those who say he sinned because he loved an unworthy woman, loved, trusted and shielded her until he was in the very shadow of the electric chair, loved her until she swore away his very existence to save her own.

Augusta Nack planned and accomplished the murder of William Golden Sopp. OK, listen, can you even imagine this kind of thing happening today? Oh, hell no. Even OJ Simpson waited till 2007 to publish If I Did It Confessions of the Killer, a full 12 years after being found not guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

Apparently, lawyers didn't force their clients to STFU until well into the 20th century. Anyhow, the day finally came when Martin Thorn placed his right hand on the Bible and swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but. He started by confessing that his surname was actually Perswisky, that Nack had told him that Golden Sopp was her cousin, not her lover.

Thorn claimed that he himself loved Augusta desperately right up until the moment she turned state's evidence and pinned all the blame for the murder on him. That is, he described the pistol whipping he'd received at the hands of the so-called Big Dutch Man and then to a spellbound courtroom. Thorn recounted meeting Augusta at the cottage on Long Island.

Golden Sopp is here, she told him dead. I shot him. Thorn claimed he helped Augusta butcher, wrap and dispose of Golden Sopp's body out of love for her and fear for the both of them. And the confession to his friend, John Gotha, easily explained, said Thorn. He admitted to telling Gotha of the murder, but he said his friend changed the story.

Thorn claimed he told Gotha that Augusta committed the crime and that he had every intention of going to the police himself. It was John Gotha who begged him to wait. The prosecution presented a letter written by Thorn to Augusta while both were in jail awaiting trial. The letter had been seized before being sent. So Augusta heard its contents right along with everyone else in the courtroom. In it, he wrote that he'd managed to get a prescription from a fellow prisoner and that if it could be filled, the medication would end his life.

He was, he testified, prepared to die if it will be enough to set Augusta free. Very sweet and all, but before you get all aww about it, remember that his testimony also threw his lady right under the bus. What would the jury make of all this? And given the extraordinary and relentless press coverage, was there any chance that the jury wasn't swayed, persuaded, even duped by that highly sensationalized and downright speculative coverage?

It took that jury just a few hours to arrive at their verdict, a verdict they agreed upon unanimously, but one they were visibly uncomfortable sharing in court. It's no small thing to condemn a man to death, even when that man has been found guilty of taking a life. As the last juror was pulled by the judge, the word guilty ringing out in the hushed courtroom, Martin Thorn swayed and collapsed into his seat.

It was over. But Thorn had one last surprise up his sleeve. As he was led back to his cell to await sentencing, Thorn confessed to a police captain named Methvin that he was content with the verdict. Thorn told the captain, it was I who killed Golden Sup and I cut up his body. Every word Mrs. Nack said upon the stand was substantially correct.

When I was on the stand, I lied to clear myself. I am guilty and I am convicted. It is what I expected and what I suppose people think I deserve, and perhaps I do. For her part, Augusta Nack had managed to cut a deal. In exchange for her testimony on behalf of the prosecution, she entered a plea of guilty of manslaughter in the first degree. And while both she and Thorn filed appeals that went all the way to the state Supreme Court, both their convictions were upheld.

As for William Golden Sup, of whom so little is really known even today, he was finally laid to rest on Saturday, December 4th, 1897. Enormous crowds gathered, but not so much to pay their respects as to gape at his remains. It was an event open to the public, and there was an open casket, an open casket, but his body was chopped into pieces and had no head.

Oh, my God. Why were the people of the olden times such bloodthirsty monsters? An open casket. And inside that open casket oak with a sliding glass top, Golden Sup's body parts were tucked into a suit, the right arm draped over the breast, where the dead man's head ought to have been was instead a photograph, a thoughtful touch for sure, but one that only called attention to that terrible vacancy.

The funeral had been arranged by two of the lodges that Golden Sup belonged to, and though there was no ceremony, just a seemingly endless parade of the morbidly curious, his remains were interred at All Faith Cemetery. And here's a fun fact. The murdered rubber of the Murray Hill Baths shares his final resting place with at least five winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor, a Brigadier General on the Union side of the Civil War, William G. Menck, and a handful of Trumps, including the former president's grandparents, mother, and brother, Fred.

Not long after what was left of William Golden Sup was consigned to the earth, Augustine Menck was sentenced to 15 years in Martin Thorn was sent to Sing Sing, where on August 1st, 1898, he was executed by electric chair. And Ned Brown, the medical student turned reporter who solved the case, he never went back to med school.

He enjoyed a long career in journalism, all of a sudden he spent at the only newspaper he ever worked for, The World. Sports fans, well, boxing fans might even recognize his name. He was the paper's boxing writer up until it shut down in 1931. He served as biographer and ghostwriter to boxing legend, Jack Dempsey. Ned Brown died at a nursing home in Los Angeles in April 1976 at age 94.

The New York Times noted that Brown's unusual career began with the discovery of a dismembered cadaver found floating in the East River back in 1897. And that whole Pulitzer-Hearst news feud, how'd that story end? Well, profitably, very profitably. The Golden Sup murder commanded more print space and sold more newspapers than a much more famous and even more gruesome crime that unlike the poor butchered Dutchman, everyone has heard of, Jack the Ripper.

Why did Martin Thorn do it? Remember, this was no simple crime of passion. It was plotted, a carefully orchestrated act of violence, an afternoon spent up to the elbows in blood and gore, staring into the dead eyes of his victim as he spackled the cooling flesh with plaster. Was it rage? Wounded pride? Jealousy? And Augustine Mack?

Why did she agree to help? Was it fear? A desire to be rid of a lover she no longer wanted? Maybe they were a pair of sociopaths, devoid of conscience or remorse. Or maybe there's no pathology that explains it. Maybe they were just terrible people. Selfish, thin-skinned, indifferent to anything but their own immediate desires.

We always look for a reason for an explanation in stories like this. But you know what? Sometimes there isn't a reason. People are the most unpredictable animals of all. Things can just happen. Emotions flare. Logic and reason flee. An impulse overwhelms. An action is taken. And the consequences turn out to be deadly.

It's easy, too easy to lose your head. Next time on True Weird Stuff. Is it really cannibalism? If someone asks you to cook them and eat them? And what if they want you to take whatever's left and turn it into art? Farmer to fork on the next True Weird Stuff. I don't know what it says about either one of us. But with all of the gruesome details in this story, Max and I were both like, what?

A glass-topped coffin. With no head but a picture. Oh, really? This wasn't that long ago. I know, you know, honest to God. Like, this wasn't that long ago. Your parents were born a couple of years after this thing happened, Max. I mean, this this was not all that long ago. There are so many aspects of this case that are fascinating when you look at them through modern eyes.

For starters, nothing really is known about the victim. Like today. We've talked about this before. Today, you know, the approach to solving a crime like this starts with victimology. We learn everything there is to know about the victim. And then in the course of that process, we begin teasing out potential suspects and motives and all of that.

I know where William Guldensuppe is buried, you know, but people are uncertain. Was he born in Germany? Was he born in the Netherlands? Did he serve in the Dutch Navy? Did he serve in the German Navy? His date of birth is confusing. So that's one thing we've improved on, I would have to say in media and forensics. Would you not agree?

Yeah. The other thing that interests me about this, and it shows where we are now, you need certain things in order to make a conviction. Because if you look at this, you say, oh, well, it's obvious that this is what happened. The two of them conspired or the two of them knew about it or something. And you can sort of connect the dots.

But there is enough reasonable doubt in this that perhaps if you tried this today, they wouldn't have gotten convictions because the bar is much higher on proof. Oh, heck, yeah. And think about Martin Thorn was found guilty of first degree murder in like December 1897. And they electrocuted him in August of 1898. They wasted no time in the day following through on a death penalty conviction.

And so, of course, today that sounds insane. What about the process of appeal? You know, we have to give the convicted every chance, right? Oh, not back in the day. Newspapers, you would think that no one back then had a first name. It's so difficult to like make like when you're when you're going back and double checking and triple checking this person is this person like the officer that Morton Martin Thorn confessed to the police captain method.

No first name. So many of the characters that show up in newspapers until fairly recently, it was just so half it was half assed. I'm just going to say it. I think we've come a long way. I know a lot of people hate the media. But if you hate the media today, please do not look at a newspaper from 100 years. Yeah, so there was a lot, you know, they questioned whether or not Augusta Nack was insane.

And there's a whole dimension of this story around her being a midwife. That's fascinating. She did have a couple of stillborn babies preserved. I guess and formaldehyde or alcohol or whatever they have back then in her apartment. But there was an attempt to, you know, cast her as a baby murderer that that didn't really play out.

And then they they analyzed her sanity. And I have a section here from the Philadelphia Times on July 5th, 1897. And here's one of the ways they evaluated a person's sanity back then. They looked at their features. So this doctor, this doctor said he was asked the y'all bear with me. So this doctor is on the stand and he's asked by the prosecutor, quote, would you call her a degenerate?

And the doctor replied, I don't know that this much abuse term would be entirely appropriate to her. Yet there are indications the ears are her most animal features. The lobes are of the short, stumpy, fleshy variety. And when she turns her back, they give you the only unpleasant reminder of what one so often sees in state prisons and penitentiaries.

Her hands are remarkable for their breadth. So they measured her the size of her hands and the dimensions of her fingertips and found that her wrists exceed the average male measurement yet. And I'm reading again from the newspaper. Degeneracy is not shown in the hand, except in the abnormal length of the fingers, the peculiarities of their union and the shortness of the thumb.

Her hand may be called a mixture of the masculine and feminine. This type of hand is frequently found among the hard working peasantry of Bavaria. This is a sanity evaluation, Max, but they used to do a lot of that stuff. They would as far as psychological conditions to they would they would they would they would take your physical features and make determinations based on that.

So let's get listen to this. I was much struck by the conformation of her neck. It is massive and bull like her expression was one of the dull and heavy surprise. And they go on and on and on about, you know, the coarseness of her lips and the heaviness of her brow and the animal nature of her demeanor. And we have come a long way, maybe not as far, definitely, as we need to go.

But holy smokes, right? I did see her picture that was from the front page of one of these newspapers, and perhaps the lighting was bad. But I was surprised at how she appeared. I'm just surprised. I thought she would have been a little bit, a little bit more of a femme fatale. You got all these men murdering for you.

You know, you're thinking an Angelina Jolie and a crinoline. And yeah, I I went I went looking for William Golden Subscribe, William Golden Subscribe, which I found in the same cemetery where, you know, the Trump ancestors are buried. Right. He was born. They're unsure in 1855 or maybe the year before, maybe the year after, which means he was only maybe 41 or 42 years old when he was murdered.

And his his entire life story has been boiled down to William Golden Sub is a murder victim whose discovery of whose remains led to a competition between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst to sell newspapers. Well, that is appalling. Can we agree? That is appalling to boil that man's life down to that. And, you know, they never found his head.

That was that was the other thing that I wondered if they had they put a picture casket. They never found his head. I would have loved to have seen this. I shall now read to you from the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer on the 16th of November, 1897. Mrs. Nack is a woman of course, fiber of large muscular frame and masculine attributes.

38 years of age. She had behind her a past marred by low intrigues at which she was no pains to conceal or deny her moral position in regard to her manner of life. Summed up in the brazen impudence of quote, What are you going to do about it? Augusta is a repulsive woman at first sight, yet one who exerts a strong fascination, fascination for a brutal class of men of this golden sub thorn type fighting men free to talk of revenge and of their successes with miserable woman.

Above all, she is a woman with little money and then it goes on and on and on and on and on. Her personality is repulsive. Her demeanor is offensive. She thinks only of herself. She has a coarse face lacking self-sacrifice brutal enough to kill but selfish enough to save herself no matter what cost. Casey Anthony, who arguably was a worse defendant than this, did not get this kind of treatment.

So the other part of this story, which could have been, we could have made this whole episode just about this race to sell newspapers and at what cost, right? At the utter dehumanization of people whose lives had been snatched from them. Look at Herman Nack, the husband, the bread wagon driver. His life never recovered from this.

All of it just to sell paper, sell paper, sell papers. And in that regard, nothing's changed. Everything now is designed to drive clicks and clicks and clicks and not to sound like a nutcase, but the media is larded with lies and half-truths and omissions designed to get you to click through, subscribe, read whatever.

And it's a really disappointing thing to see that as far as we've come, we haven't really moved at all. No, that's because of human nature. My favorite part of this, this is very Sheri Lynch because Sherry's the daughter of a criminal. So I love this because only you could have written this. If you're going to kill people and dismember them, you have to keep the story to yourself.

If you can't live with the facts of your own savagery, then you don't have what it takes to get away with murder. You don't. Yeah. I mean, you know how disappointed I am by sloppy criminals. It's like, oh, for crying out loud, you want to get caught, right? Why else? What is it about people? Is it the last thing inside us that is worthy of redemption that even in our darkest, most profane moments, we can't live with it?

Is that ultimately the single greatest virtue of a human being that as bad as we can be, we cannot make peace with it? What do you think? Yeah, but you know, there are a lot of people who commit terrible crimes who kind of move on with their lives and, you know, they may not necessarily be sociopaths. There's a great thing at the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is a Woody Allen movie where this man has had his lover offed by his criminal brother because she's about to reveal everything and he is a prestigious doctor.

And at the end of the movie, he has a conversation. It's played by Martin Landau with Woody Allen at the end of it, and he basically says something about, yeah, you know, something about a murder and, you know, time passes and you just kind of forget. And the murder was attributed to a drifter and somebody else. You just kind of move on with your life.

And it made me realize that there is an awful lot of people that walk among us who you wouldn't classify as sociopathic, psychopathic, none of those things, who have this capacity for being able to do this and then move on with their lives without any thought. Now, I think a majority of us would, but I think there's a certain class of people who sort of are in a murky little area who are able to do this sort of thing and move on and justify it all.

I think those are the people that we could put under the umbrella of sociopath. Because I think that that lack of conscience does enable you to keep skating. I don't think Martin Thorn was a sociopath. Jury's out for me on Augusta Nack, if we're being honest. I think Martin Thorn was not a sociopath. I think Martin Thorn was a damaged, narcissistic man whose anger was his guiding light.

But the fact that he confessed everything the next day to John Gotha tells you that he couldn't just keep on keeping on. Either he couldn't or he wanted to brag about it. It's one or the other. Which is, yeah, an interesting. I'm such a, oh my God, I'm such a softy. I'm over here like, oh, poor thing, couldn't live with it.

Although when you picture him sitting on the edge of the like, excuse me, but that is just one of the foulest things I can imagine. Could you do that? I couldn't. I couldn't. Man, I capture bugs and take them outside. I don't even want to step on them the same way. So the last thing that I want to say about this, I mean, I was shocked that this story moved the needle more than Jack the Ripper did.

Everybody's heard of Jack the Ripper. Everybody. And nobody's ever heard of William Golden Sub, who, you know, his life was taken from him. And we don't know anything about him. And there are certain faiths that believe this. And I've always thought this was a beautiful idea that a person is alive in the next plane, whatever that is, right?

As long as somebody on Earth remembers them. And William Golden Sub was forgotten almost as soon as his head splashed into the East River. But by saying his name and telling his story, everyone who hears this is giving him back a little bit of what was taken from him, at least on the spiritual side. The equation. And that's kind of a comforting thought.

Yeah. So, folks, I know y'all love each other and you can't wait to tear each other's clothes off. But I can promise you ain't nothing worth murder about. And the fact that those ducks were walking around the neighborhood leaving big, bloody, duck-shaped footprints. There's so many aspects of this that'll keep you awake at night.

But William Golden Sub deserves to have us say his name. But Sherry, as long as there's a show called Dateline, they haven't run out of cases yet, have they? That are kind of like this? They just haven't. You know, the choir director and the minister who conspired to kill the parishioner that hadn't done anything wrong to I mean, you know.

People, y'all need to act right. That's all we can say. Act right. Not kill each other. OK, just act right. Just break off. Oh, it's ugly. They're mad. They, you know, whatever. Don't be killing each other and dismembering each other in bathtubs, especially bathtubs that drain directly into the backyard. Thanks for listening to this episode of True Weird Stuff.

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