September 15, 2021 • 43 mins
Grace was an attorney and an investigator who did a lot of work to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted, expose corruption, and, in one particularly dramatic case, solve a murder that police had written off as the victim having run away.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today's topic
is somebody that listeners have been asking us to cover
since and that's when the first book about this person
(00:25):
came out. But she really caught my attention about a
year after that when she was depicted on the TV
show Timeless, which is a show I loved a whole lot,
and I know a lot of our listeners did also.
I heard about her again on the podcast Criminal in
and we got listener mail asking for her after both
(00:45):
the Timeless appearance and Criminal And then our colleague Christopher Haciotis,
who clearly has a knack for episode pitches, because this
is the second one we've done recently. That's something he
sent us a note about. He sent us a note
about her earlier this month, and I was finally like, Okay, Universe,
I have received your message. We will do a podcast
on Grace Hommiston's. Grace Hamiston's also known as Mary Grace
(01:10):
Quackenboss depending on what period of her life we're talking about,
was an attorney and an investigator who did a whole
lot of work to exonerate people who were wrongfully convicted,
to expose corruption, and, in one particularly dramatic case, to
solve a murder that the police had written off as
the victim having just run away. That last one earned
(01:32):
her the nickname Mrs Sherlock Holmes, and in her words
though she said quote no, I never read Sherlock Holmes.
In fact, I'm not a believer in deduction. Common sense
and persistence will always solve a mystery. Never need theatricals
nor Dr Watson's if you stick to a case. So
all that sounds pretty cool. At the same time, though,
(01:54):
some of her work was part of a moral panic
over what people were calling white slavery in the early
twinnieth century, and this really hinged on the idea that
white women and girls were being trafficked into sex work
and just staggering numbers. She made some unfounded allegations during
all this in the latter part of her career and
it really tarnished her reputation. And also just a heads up,
(02:17):
there are mentions and discussions of various sex crimes in
this episode, because that was one of the things that
she was investigating so. Grace Hummiston was born Mary Grace
Winterton in New York City on September seventeenth, eighteen sixty nine.
Some accounts described her father, a Donna Ram Judson Winterton,
as a merchant and a lay minister in the Baptist Church.
(02:39):
He also worked as an insurance adjuster, and later in
life Grace talked about accompanying him to court when she
was still a child. Grace attended Hunter College, and after
she graduated in eighteen eighty eight, she spent some time teaching.
On June five, when she was twenty five, she married
a doctor named Henry Forrest quackenba Us. Some accounts of
(03:02):
her life that have been written in the past few
years claimed that they got divorced almost immediately because Grace
found out that Henry was using peep holes to watch
his patients while they were undressing. However, the source for
this allegation seems to be a nine twenty one gossip
column in the New York magazine The Tattler, who's cover
(03:23):
for that issue included the tag movies mirth, merriment, and misinformation.
Not only does The Tattler offer no source for this,
but it also claims that it was Henry who said
that Grace's quote addiction to peep hole practices in his
office had been annoying and embarrassing to him in the
practice of his profession. This is also in the context
(03:45):
of a piece that is extremely disparaging of Homiston's and
her purported inability to keep her husband's happy because she
was too focused on work. There's a lot of layers
to that whole problems, a lot going on here, so
it really none of the should be taken effect. Yeah,
on top of all that other stuff that came out
in nine and that was many, many years after they
(04:08):
had gotten married and divorced. So what question marks about
the Tatler and its gossip columns and how it's made
its way into current discussions of her. In the early
nineteen hundreds, Grace started taking night classes at New York
University Law School, and at first this was mostly about
learning how to protect herself and her investments. But she
(04:30):
really excelled at her studies, and with the help and
encouragement of the law school's dean, she moved into the
day program to the regular law school class. She completed
that in two years rather than three. She graduated with
a Bachelor of Laws in nineteen oh three, and she
ranked seventh in her class. That same year. Grace's mother,
Isabella died, and her father died in nineteen o four.
(04:53):
From that point, Grace dressed only in black except when
she needed some other outfit to blend in during an investigation.
Working under the name Mary Grace Quackenboss, she started working
for the Legal Aid Society, and then she started her
own firm, which was called People's Law Firm. She focused
on hiring and training other women to work with her,
(05:15):
and her clients were mostly poor people and immigrants. Since
she already had this independent income, she didn't really have
to charge very much. She described it as st regious
law at Mills Hotel prices. Her clients basically paid her
what they could, and that could be anything from the
typical fee for legal work to some baked goods or
(05:35):
some handmade clothing or essentially nothing. Um. There's part of
me that enjoys this will work for fresh bread idea.
As often as possible, Grace tried to resolve her client's
needs out of court. Today, their laws in the US
requiring competent courtroom interpreters for deaf people and for people
(05:57):
with limited English proficiency. That was not the case in
the early twentieth century, though out of court settlements were
generally easier for clients who did not speak much English,
as well as being faster and less expensive. A lot
of the cases that she took on her law firm
involved things like wage theft, child support, and predatory landlords
(06:17):
and business owners who were taking advantage of her clients.
She also did a lot of work to just help
immigrants navigate the US legal system. Grace became known by
a number of nicknames, including Sister Mother and Porsha of
the East Side, and people started coming to her for
help with bigger and bigger issues. In one case, an
(06:39):
insurance company had gone out of business without paying roughly
a million dollars in life insurance claims to multiple widows.
Grace pursued this case for more than a year until
the judge took steps to hold the company's former directors accountable.
At one point, she also got another attorney disbarred for
charging clients far more than the ten dollar maximum fee
(07:01):
for filing a deportation appeal. She also got their money
back for the excessive fees that they'd paid. Yeah, he
was charging people like a hundred and fifty dollars a
pop for something that was legally capped at ten dollars.
Just praying on desperation. Yeah. So, as her reputation spread,
students from Wellesley wrote to Quack and Boss asking her
(07:23):
to defend Antoinette Tola, who had shot and killed her
landlord on March fourth of nineteen o four. Tola had
been convicted of the crime and had been sentenced to
death by hanging, but the young women from Wellesley were
convinced that she had been acting in self defense. Even
though Quack and Boss had never argued a murder case before,
(07:44):
she took on this work pro bono because she said
she would quote prefer to take the case without renumera
as woman for woman. In this case, Antinatla had a
lot working against her. She had immigrated from Italy, she
mostly spoke Italian. Her landlord was Joseph Santa, who was
one of the most prominent citizens of King's Lynn, New Jersey.
(08:05):
He had been found murdered in the home that Tola
shared with her husband, Giovanni, and the witnesses at her
murder trial had included Santa's six year old son. On
the stand, he had testified that Tola had sneaked up
behind his father and shot him in the back of
the head. This is obviously very compelling testimony to the jury.
(08:27):
Tola's previous lawyers had already tried to get her a
new case based on evidence that Santa had been armed
when she shot him, but the judge had claimed that
no such weapons seemed to have been found. Quackenboss went
to see the evidence that had been collected from the
crime scene, and she found that yes, Santa's gun was
right there. She reviewed the autopsy report, which showed that
(08:50):
Santa had not been shot in the back of the
head like his son had said on the stand. She
also discovered that Tola's court testimony had been translated by
a student. That student had gotten a lot of basic
facts wrong. In Tallah's account of what happened, Santa had
been pressuring her for sex and physically assaulting her for
(09:10):
at least five months. She had tried to get her
husband to defend her, but he would often just leave
the house when Santa came in. She had gone to
Santa's wife, who had told her to get a gun
and that she could scare him with it. Earlier, on
the day of the murder, Santa had come into her home,
accosted her, and threatened to kill her. She had gotten away,
(09:32):
but when she came back he was still there. When
he grabbed her again, she struggled to get away, and
then she shot him. Over a period of several months,
Grace managed to get the execution postponed several times, but
she ran into one roadblock after another when trying to
get the verdict overturned, or to secure a pardon, or
(09:53):
to get the U. S. Supreme Court involved. After multiple
stays of execution, Antoine A. Tola was scheduled to hang
on March twelfth, nineteen o five. Just three days before that,
Mary Grace Quackenboss finally managed to convince the Board of
Pardons with all this evidence she had gathered, to commute
(10:14):
Tola's sentence to seven and a half years in prison.
This was the first case that really brought Mary Grace
Quackenboss to prominence, but there were definitely others, and we'll
talk about more. After a sponsor break around nineteen oh six,
(10:37):
some of the clients who came to People's Law firm
for help were women who were reporting that their husbands
or their sons had gone missing. They had apparently disappeared
after going to Florida to find work. Even though Mary
Grace Quackenboss wasn't a reporter, she pitched this to McClure's
as a story that she would write for the magazine.
(10:58):
Magazine paid her expenses for a seven week trip that
she took to investigate what was happening. What she found
was a widespread system of debt. Peonage men were being
recruited to work in several industries, including mines, railroads, and lumber,
but especially in turpentine processing. Employers charged money for everything
(11:19):
from workers passage south to housing and equipment once they
got there, so soon people were trapped in a debt
to their employers that they just could not pay off.
This practice had been outlawed in eighteen sixty seven, but
it was still rampant and many of its victims were
immigrants and black people. Okay, this is one of the
(11:39):
highly exploitative systems of labor that evolved after slavery was abolished.
In October of nineteen oh six, quacka Boss took all
the evidence that she had gathered to Attorney General William
Henry Moody, who appointed her special Assistant United States Attorney
for the Southern Strict of New York. To continue with
(12:02):
this investigation, he dispatched Assistant Attorney General Charles W. Russell
to the area as well, and together they started building
cases to shut down businesses that were running these peonage
schemes and to indict the people that were running them.
At one point, Grace needed to deal with an employment
agency that was run by Hungarians. Since she didn't speak
(12:23):
the language, the Department of Justice assigned a Hungarian agent
named Julius J. Crone to work with her, and she
and Kron worked together for years. After this investigation was over,
in nine seven, the Italian ambassador to the United States
asked Quack and Boss to investigate what looked like a
similar scheme at Sunnyside Plantation in Mississippi. The ambassador had
(12:46):
gotten some really alarming letters from Italians who were working there.
You wanted Grace to look into it. Before the US
Civil War, Sunnyside had been a slave labor camp. After
the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery except in punishment,
for a crime. Sunnysides owners had replaced its workforce of
enslaved Africans with incarcerated men from a prison in Alabama,
(13:10):
and then started working with agents in Italy to recruit
immigrant workers. These agents would loan workers the money for
their passage across the Atlantic, so they arrived from Italy
already in debt, and then from there they were made
to live and really squalid housing. The cost of that
housing was deducted from their pay. Workers were also charged
(13:32):
for the mules that they needed to work the land,
and for jenning and bailing the cotton that they grew
and harvested, basically everything they needed to do their jobs
and to just survive. They were also paid, at least
partly in script that could only be used at the
company's store. Once the workers debts were paid off, they
were allowed to sell part of their cotton crop for
(13:55):
their own profit, but the vast majority simply could not
pay off their debts. Grace also interviewed people who had
escaped the plantation and then been forced to return at gunpoint.
Grace's investigation pitted her against some of the wealthiest and
most powerful people in the area. These included O. B. Crittenden,
Leroy Percy, and Morris Rosenstock. Together they had established the O. B.
(14:19):
Crittenden Company to lease several cotton farms in the area,
including Sunnyside. They were operating all of these farms. Among
other things. Percy was friends with US President Teddy Roosevelt.
Grace had gone undercover for her investigations in Florida, but
that practice backfired in Mississippi when one of the Italian
(14:41):
speaking investigators on her team was arrested for trespassing and jailed.
So she went to the acting governor xenofon Pendall, who
wrote to the Crittenden Company asking for her to be
allowed onto the property. Although the partners agreed, they tried
to prevent her from ever speaking to the workers without
someone from the company present. Quackenboss tried and succeeded to
(15:03):
negotiate better contracts with more protections for the workers at
Sunnyside while also building a case for federal prosecution. And
the more work she did that was related to the
federal charges, the more resistance and harassment she faced from
the partners of this company. Soon local newspapers were calling
(15:24):
her a socialist agitator. And the Crittenden partners were trying
to undermine and threaten her. At one point, someone broke
into her room and they stole all of her notes
and evidence, but then one of Percy's cronies returned them
to her, claiming they had been confiscated from a known felon.
This was both Uh, it was terrifying somebody had come
(15:48):
into a room and stolen Oliver stuff. Um. And then
also she had just written a letter summarizing Oliver findings.
But she was like, my whole investigation is lost if
I don't actually have that evidence to back it all up.
Yeah that I'm only laughing at the confiscation claim. It's
like going, my dog tried to eat your homework, and
then I saved it from him. I saved it from
(16:09):
the dog's mouth. Yeah, exactly, it is. Although Quackenboss managed
to get Obie Crittenden arrested during all of this, Percy
went to the President to get him to intervene. Percy
essentially argued that he wouldn't get in the way of
the charges against his partner as long as Quackenboss was
recalled to Washington, which she was. Percy did not keep
(16:30):
up his end of the bargain, though, and successfully prevented
Crittenden from being indicted. Percy was elected to the U. S.
Senate in Grace's work in both Florida and Mississippi had
been deeply unpopular among landowners, officials, basically any other wealthy
people in the area. Over the course of these investigations,
(16:52):
she was undermined, threatened, vilified as a hysterical woman, and
even shot at. And although she unearthed clear your evidence
of wrongdoing, what happened with that evidence was largely out
of her hands. A major peonage case that followed her
investigation in Florida ended with an acquittal, and laws against
peonage continued to just be ignored for decades after she
(17:15):
left the South. However, it does appear that her work
led to a big reduction in cases of debt peonage
involving immigrants to the US. Other people were still being victimized,
but the trafficking of immigrants seems to have dropped for
this purpose. After this, and after her investigation at Sunnyside,
Quackenboss went abroad for a year to investigate the European
(17:39):
end of this whole peonage scheme. She testified during congressional
hearings on peonage in nineteen That same year, she also
wrote to the House of Governors also known as the
Governor's Conference, about overcrowding in the spread of tuberculosis, particularly
in New York City, and how it might be alleviated
if more immigrants to the US resettled into more rural areas.
(18:02):
She noted that many people who arrived in the United
States from Europe were farmers or farm laborers, but then
wound up living in cities that already had established immigrant
populations from those same regions. She argued that establishing immigrant
communities in more rural areas would help everyone involved. This
is a counterpoint to people who were trying to just
(18:23):
curtail the rate of immigration overall. She was more like, no,
immigrants bring a lot to this country. Maybe should not
be just densely packed into cities where people are having
trouble finding work. On June eighth, nineteen eleven, Mary Grace
Quackenboss married Howard Donald Humiston, who was also a lawyer.
We know basically nothing about their marriage. Grace Humiston's opposed
(18:47):
the death penalty, and she worked to overturn the death
sentences of people who had been wrongfully convicted or had
been sentenced to death in spite of mitigating factors in
the crime. In nineteen sixteen, while It's sing Sing Prison
investigating another case, Deputy Warden Spencer Miller Jr. Suggested that
she look into the conviction of Charles Frederick Steelo. Stelo
(19:10):
and his brother in law Nelson Green had both confessed
to murdering Charles B. Phelps and his housekeeper, Margaret Walcott.
Phelps had been killed in his home, which was across
the street from Steelo's house, and Walcott had been found
dead on Steelo's doorstep. Steelo and Green had been tried separately,
and after Steelo was convicted of first degree murder and
(19:33):
sentenced to death, Green struck a plea deal. He pleaded
guilty to second degree murder and was sentenced to life
in prison. The two men's confessions were the only thing
linking them to the murder, but Humiston found that those
confessions had been coerced. Steelo's wife had just had a baby,
and an agency detective had told him that he would
(19:55):
be able to see them if he said that Green
had done it. Then the detective told Green that Stelo
had implicated him. Homiston also found forensic evidence that a
gun that Stilo owned could not have been the murder weapon.
After speaking to Stilo and reading his signed confession, Homiston
also concluded he just could not have written it himself.
(20:17):
The confession was written with a much larger vocabulary than
he actually used in conversation. Multiple other investigators and activists
were part of this effort to try to get them
a new trial or clear their names, but as had
happened in the Antoinette Tole case, they just ran into
obstacle after obstacle. Every time they got a stay of execution,
(20:39):
Stilo was once again sentenced to death afterward, and this
happened seven times. That included after another man named Irwin
King said that he and Clarence O'Connell had killed Phelps
in a robbery attempt. One of these last minute stays
happened after Grace's team took evidence to a judge at
(20:59):
about four were in the morning, when the execution was
just over an hour away. There was a nineteen eighteen
right up of all this and good Housekeeping detailing this
whole very dramatic effort to exonerate Steelo, and it was
titled Where there are women, There's a Way, and they
will take It. One of the activists involved in this
(21:20):
effort was labor lawyer and suffragist Inez mil Holland, who
died after collapsing on a speaking tour in nineteen sixteen.
Journalists Sophie Irene Loebe, who was both working on and
covering the case, told New York Governor Charles Seymour Whitman
that mil Holland's last wish had been for him to
hear Steelo's appeal for clemency. Whitman finally commuted steelo sentence
(21:43):
in November of nineteen sixteen, four days after mill Holland's death,
and he pardoned both Steelo and Green on May eighth,
nineteen eighteen. It does not appear that King and O'Connell
were ever tried for this. King repeatedly repudiated his confession
and only to then give a different, contradictory confession later on.
(22:05):
At one point, a grand jury refused to indict the
two of them because Stelo and Green were already imprisoned
for the murder by the time Stelo and Green were
exonerated and released O'Connell was incarcerated for another crime, and
King had disappeared. We've got more, including Grace Thomaston's most
famous case. After a sponsor break on February nineteen seventeen,
(22:38):
eighteen year old Ruth Krueger told her sister she was
gonna go run some errands. One of those errands was
getting her ice skates sharpened at a motorcycle shop that
was owned by Alfredo Cochi. When she did not come home,
her sister went looking for her. When Ruth's sister talked
to Coachy, his behavior was just un nerving and strange
(23:00):
to her. She told the police about her suspicions. When
the family reported that Ruth was missing, police questioned Coachi,
who said that Ruth had dropped off her skates to
be sharpened and then picked him up later and left.
Police searched the shop and found nothing. Then a few
days after Ruth's disappearance, Alfredo's wife, Maria, reported her husband missing.
(23:23):
Ruth's disappearance attracted a ton of media attention. She was
a pretty white teenager described by her family as a
good student and a good girl who taught Sunday school.
They asked for help in finding her, and they offered
a reward. Investigators were just flooded with hundreds of tips,
none of which panned out, but police focused on one
(23:46):
in particular. That was a cab driver who reported that
he had taken Ruth and a much older man as
passengers together on the day that she disappeared. Police also
talked to a couple of college students who Ruth had
gone out on dates with. Based on all of this,
a little over two weeks after Ruth disappeared, police concluded
(24:06):
that she had run away or eloped with a boyfriend
and they closed the case. But her family insisted this
was impossible, and they hired Grace Humiston. Homiston immediately focused
on Alfredo Coachy. In addition to what Ruth's sister had described,
he had inexplicably closed his shop for several hours on
(24:27):
the day of Ruth's disappearance. Hamiston got Julius Crone to
go undercover as a repair man in Coachy's shop, which
they needed a repairman since Alfredo himself had gone missing.
He didn't know how to repair bikes and motorcycles, so
he sort of made it seem like he was always
about a day behind so he could research how to
fix problems at night and then come back to the
(24:49):
shop the next day and take care of the actual repair.
I love him for this. I love him for this.
I love his fake it till you make an approach
to it, and that he really intended to fix bikes.
He was there while he was also trying to do
undercover work to find evidence of Ruth Krueger. Yeah, like
people need their bikes fixed. Um Maria Coachy became suspicious
(25:09):
of Crone and she fired him after he spent too
long in the basement one day, so then they had
to find another way to look for evidence. They eventually
discovered a coal shoot adjacent to the building, and they
got permission to excavate under the sidewalk. Although they eventually
found a corset cover, some newspapers from just after Ruth disappeared,
(25:30):
and bones, the corset cover was not Ruth's and the
bones were not human bones. Meanwhile, Alfredo Coachy was found
in Bologna, Italy, on May thirty one, nineteen seventeen. He
claimed that he had gone to Italy because he was
sick of his wife, and he said that he had
learned about Ruth's disappearance only after arriving in the country,
(25:52):
Allegations surface that Coachy had been luring girls and young
women into his shop for trysts with himself or his customers.
The girls families hadn't gone to the police because they
were afraid of scandal. A woman known as Consuelo LaRue,
who gave a series of increasingly fantastic statements during all
of this, claimed that two men attacked her after giving
(26:15):
Humiston information about the case. Yeah, um, Consuelo LaRue was
like a very public presence in all of this. She
made a lot of statements about the case. Uh some
of them appear to have come from a novel. A
lawyer who was representing Maria Coachy filed a whole series
of complaints about the digging around the coal shoot and
(26:38):
how much dirt was being brought up to the sidewalk.
But then someone convinced Maria to sell the building. She
had already been planning to sell the bike business after
her husband disappeared. That someone was one of Grace Hemmiston's assistants,
and when the building was listed for sale, Humiston bought
it so her team could search however they wanted. On
(27:01):
June eighteen, Grace Humiston's crew found Ruth Krueger's body. It
was in a pit concealed under a workbench in the
basement of Alfredo Cocchi's shop. She had a fractured skull
and a stab wound in the abdomen, and her bloodstained
ice skates were found nearby. Later, Humiston said, of all
this quote, I've noticed that some folks are saying I
(27:24):
found the body because I followed my intuition. Every time
a woman does make a discovery, someone pipes up intuition.
Let me say that in this instance, it was just
plane everyday common sense by Crone and myself, backed by
a determination to keep going until the case had cleared up.
This discovery sparked an enormous scandal for the New York
(27:45):
City Police Department. The Mayor personally apologized to the Krueger
family for how the investigation had been handled. Since police
said they had searched the shop's basement two different times,
an investigation was launched to figure out how they had
missed that her body was hidden there. Investigators also started
digging up basements in other locations around the city where
(28:07):
other young women had been reported missing. These internal investigations
that followed at the NYPD unearthed a lot of wrongdoing
within the police force. That turned out that Coachy and
several motorcycle officers had been running a kickback scheme. An
officer would write somebody a ticket, and then a third
(28:27):
party would tell that person that if they visited Coachy's shop,
he could make their ticket go away. Once that person
got to the shop, they would either pay him cash
or they would buy some extremely overpriced merchandise. Coachy and
the officer would split that money and the officer would
erase the record of the ticket. One officer had also
given Coachy assigned card that said please take care of
(28:51):
Alfredo Coachy. He's okay. He could present that card if
he was ever pulled over or stopped by the police.
Multiple officers face charges for their part in this scheme,
and one of the detectives that had been assigned to
the case, John Lagerin, was convicted of dereliction of duty
and fined. The other detective, Frank McGhee, faced the same charge,
(29:11):
but he was acquitted. Charges that were filed against the
head of the New York Police Department's detective branch were
ultimately dropped. Reforms that followed included the establishment of a
dedicated Bureau of Missing Persons at the NYPD. Alfredo Cocchi
was still in Italy and although he confessed to the murder,
his confession was pretty muddled. He kept changing his story.
(29:34):
Italian authorities determined that he was still considered an Italian citizen.
Was illegal to extradite Italian citizens to other countries, so
they refused to extradite him to the United States, but
they did put him on trial for attempted rape, murder
and giving false information while trying to enter the country.
Humiston provided Italian authorities with everything that she had on
(29:58):
the case. Coaches trial began on June nineteen nine, and
he changed his story again, saying his wife had committed
the murder in a jealous rage. As the proceedings were underway,
authorities in Italy received a letter from J. J. Lynch
that claimed Ruth had been targeted by sex traffickers and
that Coachy was part of a vast international white slaving network.
(30:22):
Lynch really had no evidence to substantiate any of this,
but his daughter had been killed and he believed that
sex traffickers had done it, and that Ruth had been
the victim of the same people. Coach's trial had to
be adjourned so that Italian authorities could investigate Lynch's claims.
Proceedings resumed on October twenty five, nineteen twenty, and he
(30:44):
was found guilty on October twenty nine. He was sentenced
to twenty seven years in prison, and after going on
a hunger strike, was sentenced to ten years of solitary confinement.
He was released from prison in ninety seven. Hamiston's next
high profile investor stigation started a couple of months after
Ruth Krueger's body was found. Lattie May Brandon was found
(31:06):
dead in her home in Annapolis, Maryland, on August eight, nineteen.
Brandon was white, and witnesses said that they saw John Snowden,
a black man, come out of the Brandon home. A
reverend who lived next door said no one had come
out of the house, but if Snowdon was there, he
had a reason to be. He worked delivering ice, and
(31:27):
there was a block of ice melting on the front
step when the police arrived. Although Washington Times hired Humiston's
to investigate this crime and to write about it, and
based on the crime scene and what looked like small
finger marks, and pictures of Brandon's body. Humiston thought she
had been killed by someone she knew, possibly another woman.
(31:50):
She recommended exhuming the body to look for more evidence.
While the doctor who examined the exhumed body was not
able to make any determination about the possible finger marks,
he found what he said was black skin under Lottie's fingernails.
John Snowden had reportedly had scratches on his face when
police questioned him. He had also bought a drink at
(32:13):
a bar with a dollar, and Lottie May's husband said
he left her a dollar when he went to work
that day. Police tortured John Snowden while questioning him, but
he steadfastly maintained his innocence, and in the end he
was tried and convicted of murder. But Hamiston was really
not convinced that he was guilty, and she felt responsible
(32:35):
for having suggested the exclamation. She tried unsuccessfully to secure
an appeal. People really started to question whether Snowdon was
guilty or not, and as his execution date approached, all
the jurors that had voted to convict him signed a
petition asking for his release. Even so, he was hanged
on February twenty eight of nineteen nineteen, and he was
(32:57):
posthumously pardoned in two thousand one. Grace Hummiston's last high
profile investigation wound up really damaging her reputation and her career.
Her work on the Ruth Krueger case and the public
response to it had been threaded through with the idea
of white slavery, and after Ruth's body was found, that
(33:17):
is what Hummiston really focused on. So for context and
the years after the abolition of slavery in the US
and in the British colonies, the term white slavery was
used in the context of labor rights to describe low
paying jobs with poor or dangerous working conditions, jobs that
were being worked by people who really had no other options.
(33:40):
But over time the term picked up connotations of women
who were forced into sex work. There were absolutely women
and girls who were victims of sex trafficking, but the
specter of white slavery went way beyond that. In the
minds of progressive era reformers, all sex workers were victims
(34:00):
who needed to be rescued. Campaigns against white slavery were
connected to general anti vice activity and the breaking up
of Red Lake districts that had previously been legal or
at least tolerated. All of this was really focused specifically
on the purity and safety of white women, with sex
traffickers often being framed as immigrant, Jewish or Black men
(34:23):
who were forcing or deceiving white women into a life
of crime. This whole idea was threaded through, of course,
with racism, classism, nativism, and a focus on white racial purity.
This idea of white slavery was the subject of sensational
novels and movies, including Trafficking Souls, which came out in
(34:44):
nineteen thirteen. Anti trafficking and anti sex work laws were
passed in both the US and the UK, and the
United States it was the White Slave Traffic Act, also
known as the Man Act, which was pasted in nineteen ten.
As series of international treaties were also negotiated starting in
nineteen o four, although to be clear, international trafficking of
(35:08):
laborers and sex workers was far more prevalent than the
trafficking of white women within the United States, which was
just the big focus of this whole moral panic. In
the wake of her work on the Ruth Kruger case,
Humiston established the Morality League of America, The New York
Police Department hired her as a special investigator. They hired
(35:30):
Crone as well, and Crone and Humiston focused on missing
women and girls. The Grace Hummiston League was established with
the goal of raising a million dollars for quote, endowing
a nationwide organization for the protection of womanhood. Hearing her
work in all of this, Humiston alleged that there was
a vast sex trafficking operation at work involving soldiers at
(35:53):
Camp Upton, which had been built on Long Island as
a departure point for US troops headed to Europe during
World War One. She claimed that there were six hundred unmarried,
pregnant women living in and around the camp. She also
said that seven had been killed, including two underage girls,
(36:13):
and while it's likely or even certain that crimes were
committed in and around the base, she really had nothing
to back up such a broad accusation. The U. S
Army vehemently denied it, and an inquiry ruled the allegations
of a huge white slavery ring were unfounded. Rumors of
two girls being killed actually dated back to while the
(36:34):
camp was still being built, before soldiers started arriving and
there was also no evidence of anybody's being found. Humiston
was simultaneously extremely vocal about all this and hard to
find when reporters and authorities tried to reach her with
questions about it. She claimed that the Army had hired
her to investigate this sex trafficking network in secret, which
(36:57):
the Army denied. She continued to make allegations without backing
them up. The NYPD stripped both her and Crone of
their badges. The Grace Hummiston League cut ties with her.
The Mayor of New York City had appointed a committee
to work with her on her anti white slavery campaign.
The committee went to the New York Bar Association to
(37:18):
try to have her compelled to turn over whatever evidence
she did have. The bar refused, and the committee members
all resigned. At the end of nineteen seventeen. Humiston told
reporters that she had already been planning to resign from
her work with the City of New York because of
the upcoming change in mayoral administrations. This didn't look genuine
(37:40):
to people, who were like, you're really just saying you
were planning to quit when they fired you. Uh. In
early nineteen eighteen, a young man of about seventeen came
to Humiston's office and threatened to kill her. Humiston was
not actually there at the time, but this man assaulted
Crone and other staff before police arrived. Humiston blamed the
(38:02):
attack on all of this fallout and on the loss
of her police badge in nine Humiston's still thought that
police were targeting her because of all of this, and
because of her exposure of so much corruption within the
New York Police Department during and after the Ruth Krueger case.
That year, she opened the Manhattanville be Kind Club, which
(38:24):
was supposed to be a gathering place for women and
a daycare. Police shut it down, charging her with operating
a dance hall without a license, even though she had
checked ahead of time and was told she did not
need a license. A court later agreed with her. On
March fourteenth of Humiston was on her way to court
(38:44):
when she was hit by a truck at the corner
of fifty nine and third. The driver of the truck,
William H. Heck, didn't stop when the traffic officer signaled
and blew his whistle so people could cross. Heck said
that he thought he had the right of way and
didn't see her. She had a compound fracture in her foot,
so she's pretty seriously injured and far as far as
(39:06):
her life, was not threatened by this injury, but it
was a long time of recovering. Holliston seems to have
largely withdrawn from public appearance after all of this. She
died on July sixty eight at the age of seventy six.
That book that we mentioned at the top of the
show is by Brad Rica and it is called Mrs
(39:27):
Sherlock Holmes, The True Story of New York City's greatest
female detective in the nineteen seventeen Missing Girl case that
captivated a nation. Tracy, do you have a listener mail
that is maybe slightly less violent? I do. It's not
violent at all. This is from Melissa, and Melissa wrote, Hi,
Tracy and Holly. I just got back from a quick
(39:49):
trip to Chicago, which I took with my husband, who
had some work meetings there last week. While he was
occupied with work, I spent an afternoon in the Chicago
Institute of Art. It was my first time at that
museum and it was wonderful and it contains a pretty
big collection of Impressionist artwork, as I was doubling back
through the Impressionist gallery to take a break outside. I
(40:10):
read the captions on some Menaise and in Morris So
just as I walked past. About twenty seconds later, as
I sat down to rest, I turned on one of
your episodes that I had downloaded for my trip. It
was Bart moriss So. I quickly ran back into the
exhibit to look more closely at the painting I had
just walked past. It was a hilarious and wonderful ends
(40:31):
to my track around the museum. I loved learning about
her sinse as you noted, she isn't very widely known
or taught, and I didn't know about her role in
the whole movement. Thanks. I'm still smiling about that moment.
Take care, Melissa Um. And then Melissa sent us a
second email the following day that said, oh my gosh, Holly,
(40:51):
I've just started Josephine Nivison Hopper and you were there
at the Chicago Institute of Art too. Ha. I love it.
Thanks for the art episodes lately, Melissa Um. I delighted
the story. Delighted so much I had to immediately go
see what what B. Moris So things are on exhibit
(41:12):
at the Art Institute of Chicago. And one of them
is a really lovely painting of UM, somebody like putting
her hair up in front of her mirror. She shown
from behind, uh, and it just is a very like
blue white kind of color palette. The other one is
a woman sitting in a garden in a blue dress.
(41:33):
And I don't know which of these the one that
Melissa saw, but both of them, I was like, Oh,
I'm going to take some time this morning look at
this art on the Art Institute of Chicago website. UM.
I don't think I saw either of these while we
were there a couple of years back, because we were
doing a special event and I was hanging out in
a different part of the museum. Yeah, there's a that
(41:55):
museum is expansive and also wonderful. I legitimately love it there,
and I love the staff there because they're just delightful
and helpful and kind. UM. And I feel since we
have this opportunity that I have to give a shout
out to one of the people that works here named
Darlene King, who um is just an amazing person. She
(42:18):
was like a greeting people when we first walked in
and then later in the day I asked her for
restaurant recommendations and she was hilarious and delightful to talk
to you. So, Darlene, on the off chance you hear this,
you made my day and we're wonderful. Yeah, that's great.
So thanks Melissa for sending this note. Thanks for giving
me an excuse to look at some paintings this morning
(42:39):
while I was getting my list or mail ready. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at I heart
radio dot com and we're all over social media app
Missed in History. That's why you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the I heart Radio app and really anywhere if you
(43:00):
want to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(43:20):
H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today's topic
is somebody that listeners have been asking us to cover
since and that's when the first book about this person
(00:25):
came out. But she really caught my attention about a
year after that when she was depicted on the TV
show Timeless, which is a show I loved a whole lot,
and I know a lot of our listeners did also.
I heard about her again on the podcast Criminal in
and we got listener mail asking for her after both
(00:45):
the Timeless appearance and Criminal And then our colleague Christopher Haciotis,
who clearly has a knack for episode pitches, because this
is the second one we've done recently. That's something he
sent us a note about. He sent us a note
about her earlier this month, and I was finally like, Okay, Universe,
I have received your message. We will do a podcast
on Grace Hommiston's. Grace Hamiston's also known as Mary Grace
(01:10):
Quackenboss depending on what period of her life we're talking about,
was an attorney and an investigator who did a whole
lot of work to exonerate people who were wrongfully convicted,
to expose corruption, and, in one particularly dramatic case, to
solve a murder that the police had written off as
the victim having just run away. That last one earned
(01:32):
her the nickname Mrs Sherlock Holmes, and in her words
though she said quote no, I never read Sherlock Holmes.
In fact, I'm not a believer in deduction. Common sense
and persistence will always solve a mystery. Never need theatricals
nor Dr Watson's if you stick to a case. So
all that sounds pretty cool. At the same time, though,
(01:54):
some of her work was part of a moral panic
over what people were calling white slavery in the early
twinnieth century, and this really hinged on the idea that
white women and girls were being trafficked into sex work
and just staggering numbers. She made some unfounded allegations during
all this in the latter part of her career and
it really tarnished her reputation. And also just a heads up,
(02:17):
there are mentions and discussions of various sex crimes in
this episode, because that was one of the things that
she was investigating so. Grace Hummiston was born Mary Grace
Winterton in New York City on September seventeenth, eighteen sixty nine.
Some accounts described her father, a Donna Ram Judson Winterton,
as a merchant and a lay minister in the Baptist Church.
(02:39):
He also worked as an insurance adjuster, and later in
life Grace talked about accompanying him to court when she
was still a child. Grace attended Hunter College, and after
she graduated in eighteen eighty eight, she spent some time teaching.
On June five, when she was twenty five, she married
a doctor named Henry Forrest quackenba Us. Some accounts of
(03:02):
her life that have been written in the past few
years claimed that they got divorced almost immediately because Grace
found out that Henry was using peep holes to watch
his patients while they were undressing. However, the source for
this allegation seems to be a nine twenty one gossip
column in the New York magazine The Tattler, who's cover
(03:23):
for that issue included the tag movies mirth, merriment, and misinformation.
Not only does The Tattler offer no source for this,
but it also claims that it was Henry who said
that Grace's quote addiction to peep hole practices in his
office had been annoying and embarrassing to him in the
practice of his profession. This is also in the context
(03:45):
of a piece that is extremely disparaging of Homiston's and
her purported inability to keep her husband's happy because she
was too focused on work. There's a lot of layers
to that whole problems, a lot going on here, so
it really none of the should be taken effect. Yeah,
on top of all that other stuff that came out
in nine and that was many, many years after they
(04:08):
had gotten married and divorced. So what question marks about
the Tatler and its gossip columns and how it's made
its way into current discussions of her. In the early
nineteen hundreds, Grace started taking night classes at New York
University Law School, and at first this was mostly about
learning how to protect herself and her investments. But she
(04:30):
really excelled at her studies, and with the help and
encouragement of the law school's dean, she moved into the
day program to the regular law school class. She completed
that in two years rather than three. She graduated with
a Bachelor of Laws in nineteen oh three, and she
ranked seventh in her class. That same year. Grace's mother,
Isabella died, and her father died in nineteen o four.
(04:53):
From that point, Grace dressed only in black except when
she needed some other outfit to blend in during an investigation.
Working under the name Mary Grace Quackenboss, she started working
for the Legal Aid Society, and then she started her
own firm, which was called People's Law Firm. She focused
on hiring and training other women to work with her,
(05:15):
and her clients were mostly poor people and immigrants. Since
she already had this independent income, she didn't really have
to charge very much. She described it as st regious
law at Mills Hotel prices. Her clients basically paid her
what they could, and that could be anything from the
typical fee for legal work to some baked goods or
(05:35):
some handmade clothing or essentially nothing. Um. There's part of
me that enjoys this will work for fresh bread idea.
As often as possible, Grace tried to resolve her client's
needs out of court. Today, their laws in the US
requiring competent courtroom interpreters for deaf people and for people
(05:57):
with limited English proficiency. That was not the case in
the early twentieth century, though out of court settlements were
generally easier for clients who did not speak much English,
as well as being faster and less expensive. A lot
of the cases that she took on her law firm
involved things like wage theft, child support, and predatory landlords
(06:17):
and business owners who were taking advantage of her clients.
She also did a lot of work to just help
immigrants navigate the US legal system. Grace became known by
a number of nicknames, including Sister Mother and Porsha of
the East Side, and people started coming to her for
help with bigger and bigger issues. In one case, an
(06:39):
insurance company had gone out of business without paying roughly
a million dollars in life insurance claims to multiple widows.
Grace pursued this case for more than a year until
the judge took steps to hold the company's former directors accountable.
At one point, she also got another attorney disbarred for
charging clients far more than the ten dollar maximum fee
(07:01):
for filing a deportation appeal. She also got their money
back for the excessive fees that they'd paid. Yeah, he
was charging people like a hundred and fifty dollars a
pop for something that was legally capped at ten dollars.
Just praying on desperation. Yeah. So, as her reputation spread,
students from Wellesley wrote to Quack and Boss asking her
(07:23):
to defend Antoinette Tola, who had shot and killed her
landlord on March fourth of nineteen o four. Tola had
been convicted of the crime and had been sentenced to
death by hanging, but the young women from Wellesley were
convinced that she had been acting in self defense. Even
though Quack and Boss had never argued a murder case before,
(07:44):
she took on this work pro bono because she said
she would quote prefer to take the case without renumera
as woman for woman. In this case, Antinatla had a
lot working against her. She had immigrated from Italy, she
mostly spoke Italian. Her landlord was Joseph Santa, who was
one of the most prominent citizens of King's Lynn, New Jersey.
(08:05):
He had been found murdered in the home that Tola
shared with her husband, Giovanni, and the witnesses at her
murder trial had included Santa's six year old son. On
the stand, he had testified that Tola had sneaked up
behind his father and shot him in the back of
the head. This is obviously very compelling testimony to the jury.
(08:27):
Tola's previous lawyers had already tried to get her a
new case based on evidence that Santa had been armed
when she shot him, but the judge had claimed that
no such weapons seemed to have been found. Quackenboss went
to see the evidence that had been collected from the
crime scene, and she found that yes, Santa's gun was
right there. She reviewed the autopsy report, which showed that
(08:50):
Santa had not been shot in the back of the
head like his son had said on the stand. She
also discovered that Tola's court testimony had been translated by
a student. That student had gotten a lot of basic
facts wrong. In Tallah's account of what happened, Santa had
been pressuring her for sex and physically assaulting her for
(09:10):
at least five months. She had tried to get her
husband to defend her, but he would often just leave
the house when Santa came in. She had gone to
Santa's wife, who had told her to get a gun
and that she could scare him with it. Earlier, on
the day of the murder, Santa had come into her home,
accosted her, and threatened to kill her. She had gotten away,
(09:32):
but when she came back he was still there. When
he grabbed her again, she struggled to get away, and
then she shot him. Over a period of several months,
Grace managed to get the execution postponed several times, but
she ran into one roadblock after another when trying to
get the verdict overturned, or to secure a pardon, or
(09:53):
to get the U. S. Supreme Court involved. After multiple
stays of execution, Antoine A. Tola was scheduled to hang
on March twelfth, nineteen o five. Just three days before that,
Mary Grace Quackenboss finally managed to convince the Board of
Pardons with all this evidence she had gathered, to commute
(10:14):
Tola's sentence to seven and a half years in prison.
This was the first case that really brought Mary Grace
Quackenboss to prominence, but there were definitely others, and we'll
talk about more. After a sponsor break around nineteen oh six,
(10:37):
some of the clients who came to People's Law firm
for help were women who were reporting that their husbands
or their sons had gone missing. They had apparently disappeared
after going to Florida to find work. Even though Mary
Grace Quackenboss wasn't a reporter, she pitched this to McClure's
as a story that she would write for the magazine.
(10:58):
Magazine paid her expenses for a seven week trip that
she took to investigate what was happening. What she found
was a widespread system of debt. Peonage men were being
recruited to work in several industries, including mines, railroads, and lumber,
but especially in turpentine processing. Employers charged money for everything
(11:19):
from workers passage south to housing and equipment once they
got there, so soon people were trapped in a debt
to their employers that they just could not pay off.
This practice had been outlawed in eighteen sixty seven, but
it was still rampant and many of its victims were
immigrants and black people. Okay, this is one of the
(11:39):
highly exploitative systems of labor that evolved after slavery was abolished.
In October of nineteen oh six, quacka Boss took all
the evidence that she had gathered to Attorney General William
Henry Moody, who appointed her special Assistant United States Attorney
for the Southern Strict of New York. To continue with
(12:02):
this investigation, he dispatched Assistant Attorney General Charles W. Russell
to the area as well, and together they started building
cases to shut down businesses that were running these peonage
schemes and to indict the people that were running them.
At one point, Grace needed to deal with an employment
agency that was run by Hungarians. Since she didn't speak
(12:23):
the language, the Department of Justice assigned a Hungarian agent
named Julius J. Crone to work with her, and she
and Kron worked together for years. After this investigation was over,
in nine seven, the Italian ambassador to the United States
asked Quack and Boss to investigate what looked like a
similar scheme at Sunnyside Plantation in Mississippi. The ambassador had
(12:46):
gotten some really alarming letters from Italians who were working there.
You wanted Grace to look into it. Before the US
Civil War, Sunnyside had been a slave labor camp. After
the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery except in punishment,
for a crime. Sunnysides owners had replaced its workforce of
enslaved Africans with incarcerated men from a prison in Alabama,
(13:10):
and then started working with agents in Italy to recruit
immigrant workers. These agents would loan workers the money for
their passage across the Atlantic, so they arrived from Italy
already in debt, and then from there they were made
to live and really squalid housing. The cost of that
housing was deducted from their pay. Workers were also charged
(13:32):
for the mules that they needed to work the land,
and for jenning and bailing the cotton that they grew
and harvested, basically everything they needed to do their jobs
and to just survive. They were also paid, at least
partly in script that could only be used at the
company's store. Once the workers debts were paid off, they
were allowed to sell part of their cotton crop for
(13:55):
their own profit, but the vast majority simply could not
pay off their debts. Grace also interviewed people who had
escaped the plantation and then been forced to return at gunpoint.
Grace's investigation pitted her against some of the wealthiest and
most powerful people in the area. These included O. B. Crittenden,
Leroy Percy, and Morris Rosenstock. Together they had established the O. B.
(14:19):
Crittenden Company to lease several cotton farms in the area,
including Sunnyside. They were operating all of these farms. Among
other things. Percy was friends with US President Teddy Roosevelt.
Grace had gone undercover for her investigations in Florida, but
that practice backfired in Mississippi when one of the Italian
(14:41):
speaking investigators on her team was arrested for trespassing and jailed.
So she went to the acting governor xenofon Pendall, who
wrote to the Crittenden Company asking for her to be
allowed onto the property. Although the partners agreed, they tried
to prevent her from ever speaking to the workers without
someone from the company present. Quackenboss tried and succeeded to
(15:03):
negotiate better contracts with more protections for the workers at
Sunnyside while also building a case for federal prosecution. And
the more work she did that was related to the
federal charges, the more resistance and harassment she faced from
the partners of this company. Soon local newspapers were calling
(15:24):
her a socialist agitator. And the Crittenden partners were trying
to undermine and threaten her. At one point, someone broke
into her room and they stole all of her notes
and evidence, but then one of Percy's cronies returned them
to her, claiming they had been confiscated from a known felon.
This was both Uh, it was terrifying somebody had come
(15:48):
into a room and stolen Oliver stuff. Um. And then
also she had just written a letter summarizing Oliver findings.
But she was like, my whole investigation is lost if
I don't actually have that evidence to back it all up.
Yeah that I'm only laughing at the confiscation claim. It's
like going, my dog tried to eat your homework, and
then I saved it from him. I saved it from
(16:09):
the dog's mouth. Yeah, exactly, it is. Although Quackenboss managed
to get Obie Crittenden arrested during all of this, Percy
went to the President to get him to intervene. Percy
essentially argued that he wouldn't get in the way of
the charges against his partner as long as Quackenboss was
recalled to Washington, which she was. Percy did not keep
(16:30):
up his end of the bargain, though, and successfully prevented
Crittenden from being indicted. Percy was elected to the U. S.
Senate in Grace's work in both Florida and Mississippi had
been deeply unpopular among landowners, officials, basically any other wealthy
people in the area. Over the course of these investigations,
(16:52):
she was undermined, threatened, vilified as a hysterical woman, and
even shot at. And although she unearthed clear your evidence
of wrongdoing, what happened with that evidence was largely out
of her hands. A major peonage case that followed her
investigation in Florida ended with an acquittal, and laws against
peonage continued to just be ignored for decades after she
(17:15):
left the South. However, it does appear that her work
led to a big reduction in cases of debt peonage
involving immigrants to the US. Other people were still being victimized,
but the trafficking of immigrants seems to have dropped for
this purpose. After this, and after her investigation at Sunnyside,
Quackenboss went abroad for a year to investigate the European
(17:39):
end of this whole peonage scheme. She testified during congressional
hearings on peonage in nineteen That same year, she also
wrote to the House of Governors also known as the
Governor's Conference, about overcrowding in the spread of tuberculosis, particularly
in New York City, and how it might be alleviated
if more immigrants to the US resettled into more rural areas.
(18:02):
She noted that many people who arrived in the United
States from Europe were farmers or farm laborers, but then
wound up living in cities that already had established immigrant
populations from those same regions. She argued that establishing immigrant
communities in more rural areas would help everyone involved. This
is a counterpoint to people who were trying to just
(18:23):
curtail the rate of immigration overall. She was more like, no,
immigrants bring a lot to this country. Maybe should not
be just densely packed into cities where people are having
trouble finding work. On June eighth, nineteen eleven, Mary Grace
Quackenboss married Howard Donald Humiston, who was also a lawyer.
We know basically nothing about their marriage. Grace Humiston's opposed
(18:47):
the death penalty, and she worked to overturn the death
sentences of people who had been wrongfully convicted or had
been sentenced to death in spite of mitigating factors in
the crime. In nineteen sixteen, while It's sing Sing Prison
investigating another case, Deputy Warden Spencer Miller Jr. Suggested that
she look into the conviction of Charles Frederick Steelo. Stelo
(19:10):
and his brother in law Nelson Green had both confessed
to murdering Charles B. Phelps and his housekeeper, Margaret Walcott.
Phelps had been killed in his home, which was across
the street from Steelo's house, and Walcott had been found
dead on Steelo's doorstep. Steelo and Green had been tried separately,
and after Steelo was convicted of first degree murder and
(19:33):
sentenced to death, Green struck a plea deal. He pleaded
guilty to second degree murder and was sentenced to life
in prison. The two men's confessions were the only thing
linking them to the murder, but Humiston found that those
confessions had been coerced. Steelo's wife had just had a baby,
and an agency detective had told him that he would
(19:55):
be able to see them if he said that Green
had done it. Then the detective told Green that Stelo
had implicated him. Homiston also found forensic evidence that a
gun that Stilo owned could not have been the murder weapon.
After speaking to Stilo and reading his signed confession, Homiston
also concluded he just could not have written it himself.
(20:17):
The confession was written with a much larger vocabulary than
he actually used in conversation. Multiple other investigators and activists
were part of this effort to try to get them
a new trial or clear their names, but as had
happened in the Antoinette Tole case, they just ran into
obstacle after obstacle. Every time they got a stay of execution,
(20:39):
Stilo was once again sentenced to death afterward, and this
happened seven times. That included after another man named Irwin
King said that he and Clarence O'Connell had killed Phelps
in a robbery attempt. One of these last minute stays
happened after Grace's team took evidence to a judge at
(20:59):
about four were in the morning, when the execution was
just over an hour away. There was a nineteen eighteen
right up of all this and good Housekeeping detailing this
whole very dramatic effort to exonerate Steelo, and it was
titled Where there are women, There's a Way, and they
will take It. One of the activists involved in this
(21:20):
effort was labor lawyer and suffragist Inez mil Holland, who
died after collapsing on a speaking tour in nineteen sixteen.
Journalists Sophie Irene Loebe, who was both working on and
covering the case, told New York Governor Charles Seymour Whitman
that mil Holland's last wish had been for him to
hear Steelo's appeal for clemency. Whitman finally commuted steelo sentence
(21:43):
in November of nineteen sixteen, four days after mill Holland's death,
and he pardoned both Steelo and Green on May eighth,
nineteen eighteen. It does not appear that King and O'Connell
were ever tried for this. King repeatedly repudiated his confession
and only to then give a different, contradictory confession later on.
(22:05):
At one point, a grand jury refused to indict the
two of them because Stelo and Green were already imprisoned
for the murder by the time Stelo and Green were
exonerated and released O'Connell was incarcerated for another crime, and
King had disappeared. We've got more, including Grace Thomaston's most
famous case. After a sponsor break on February nineteen seventeen,
(22:38):
eighteen year old Ruth Krueger told her sister she was
gonna go run some errands. One of those errands was
getting her ice skates sharpened at a motorcycle shop that
was owned by Alfredo Cochi. When she did not come home,
her sister went looking for her. When Ruth's sister talked
to Coachy, his behavior was just un nerving and strange
(23:00):
to her. She told the police about her suspicions. When
the family reported that Ruth was missing, police questioned Coachi,
who said that Ruth had dropped off her skates to
be sharpened and then picked him up later and left.
Police searched the shop and found nothing. Then a few
days after Ruth's disappearance, Alfredo's wife, Maria, reported her husband missing.
(23:23):
Ruth's disappearance attracted a ton of media attention. She was
a pretty white teenager described by her family as a
good student and a good girl who taught Sunday school.
They asked for help in finding her, and they offered
a reward. Investigators were just flooded with hundreds of tips,
none of which panned out, but police focused on one
(23:46):
in particular. That was a cab driver who reported that
he had taken Ruth and a much older man as
passengers together on the day that she disappeared. Police also
talked to a couple of college students who Ruth had
gone out on dates with. Based on all of this,
a little over two weeks after Ruth disappeared, police concluded
(24:06):
that she had run away or eloped with a boyfriend
and they closed the case. But her family insisted this
was impossible, and they hired Grace Humiston. Homiston immediately focused
on Alfredo Coachy. In addition to what Ruth's sister had described,
he had inexplicably closed his shop for several hours on
(24:27):
the day of Ruth's disappearance. Hamiston got Julius Crone to
go undercover as a repair man in Coachy's shop, which
they needed a repairman since Alfredo himself had gone missing.
He didn't know how to repair bikes and motorcycles, so
he sort of made it seem like he was always
about a day behind so he could research how to
fix problems at night and then come back to the
(24:49):
shop the next day and take care of the actual repair.
I love him for this. I love him for this.
I love his fake it till you make an approach
to it, and that he really intended to fix bikes.
He was there while he was also trying to do
undercover work to find evidence of Ruth Krueger. Yeah, like
people need their bikes fixed. Um Maria Coachy became suspicious
(25:09):
of Crone and she fired him after he spent too
long in the basement one day, so then they had
to find another way to look for evidence. They eventually
discovered a coal shoot adjacent to the building, and they
got permission to excavate under the sidewalk. Although they eventually
found a corset cover, some newspapers from just after Ruth disappeared,
(25:30):
and bones, the corset cover was not Ruth's and the
bones were not human bones. Meanwhile, Alfredo Coachy was found
in Bologna, Italy, on May thirty one, nineteen seventeen. He
claimed that he had gone to Italy because he was
sick of his wife, and he said that he had
learned about Ruth's disappearance only after arriving in the country,
(25:52):
Allegations surface that Coachy had been luring girls and young
women into his shop for trysts with himself or his customers.
The girls families hadn't gone to the police because they
were afraid of scandal. A woman known as Consuelo LaRue,
who gave a series of increasingly fantastic statements during all
of this, claimed that two men attacked her after giving
(26:15):
Humiston information about the case. Yeah, um, Consuelo LaRue was
like a very public presence in all of this. She
made a lot of statements about the case. Uh some
of them appear to have come from a novel. A
lawyer who was representing Maria Coachy filed a whole series
of complaints about the digging around the coal shoot and
(26:38):
how much dirt was being brought up to the sidewalk.
But then someone convinced Maria to sell the building. She
had already been planning to sell the bike business after
her husband disappeared. That someone was one of Grace Hemmiston's assistants,
and when the building was listed for sale, Humiston bought
it so her team could search however they wanted. On
(27:01):
June eighteen, Grace Humiston's crew found Ruth Krueger's body. It
was in a pit concealed under a workbench in the
basement of Alfredo Cocchi's shop. She had a fractured skull
and a stab wound in the abdomen, and her bloodstained
ice skates were found nearby. Later, Humiston said, of all
this quote, I've noticed that some folks are saying I
(27:24):
found the body because I followed my intuition. Every time
a woman does make a discovery, someone pipes up intuition.
Let me say that in this instance, it was just
plane everyday common sense by Crone and myself, backed by
a determination to keep going until the case had cleared up.
This discovery sparked an enormous scandal for the New York
(27:45):
City Police Department. The Mayor personally apologized to the Krueger
family for how the investigation had been handled. Since police
said they had searched the shop's basement two different times,
an investigation was launched to figure out how they had
missed that her body was hidden there. Investigators also started
digging up basements in other locations around the city where
(28:07):
other young women had been reported missing. These internal investigations
that followed at the NYPD unearthed a lot of wrongdoing
within the police force. That turned out that Coachy and
several motorcycle officers had been running a kickback scheme. An
officer would write somebody a ticket, and then a third
(28:27):
party would tell that person that if they visited Coachy's shop,
he could make their ticket go away. Once that person
got to the shop, they would either pay him cash
or they would buy some extremely overpriced merchandise. Coachy and
the officer would split that money and the officer would
erase the record of the ticket. One officer had also
given Coachy assigned card that said please take care of
(28:51):
Alfredo Coachy. He's okay. He could present that card if
he was ever pulled over or stopped by the police.
Multiple officers face charges for their part in this scheme,
and one of the detectives that had been assigned to
the case, John Lagerin, was convicted of dereliction of duty
and fined. The other detective, Frank McGhee, faced the same charge,
(29:11):
but he was acquitted. Charges that were filed against the
head of the New York Police Department's detective branch were
ultimately dropped. Reforms that followed included the establishment of a
dedicated Bureau of Missing Persons at the NYPD. Alfredo Cocchi
was still in Italy and although he confessed to the murder,
his confession was pretty muddled. He kept changing his story.
(29:34):
Italian authorities determined that he was still considered an Italian citizen.
Was illegal to extradite Italian citizens to other countries, so
they refused to extradite him to the United States, but
they did put him on trial for attempted rape, murder
and giving false information while trying to enter the country.
Humiston provided Italian authorities with everything that she had on
(29:58):
the case. Coaches trial began on June nineteen nine, and
he changed his story again, saying his wife had committed
the murder in a jealous rage. As the proceedings were underway,
authorities in Italy received a letter from J. J. Lynch
that claimed Ruth had been targeted by sex traffickers and
that Coachy was part of a vast international white slaving network.
(30:22):
Lynch really had no evidence to substantiate any of this,
but his daughter had been killed and he believed that
sex traffickers had done it, and that Ruth had been
the victim of the same people. Coach's trial had to
be adjourned so that Italian authorities could investigate Lynch's claims.
Proceedings resumed on October twenty five, nineteen twenty, and he
(30:44):
was found guilty on October twenty nine. He was sentenced
to twenty seven years in prison, and after going on
a hunger strike, was sentenced to ten years of solitary confinement.
He was released from prison in ninety seven. Hamiston's next
high profile investor stigation started a couple of months after
Ruth Krueger's body was found. Lattie May Brandon was found
(31:06):
dead in her home in Annapolis, Maryland, on August eight, nineteen.
Brandon was white, and witnesses said that they saw John Snowden,
a black man, come out of the Brandon home. A
reverend who lived next door said no one had come
out of the house, but if Snowdon was there, he
had a reason to be. He worked delivering ice, and
(31:27):
there was a block of ice melting on the front
step when the police arrived. Although Washington Times hired Humiston's
to investigate this crime and to write about it, and
based on the crime scene and what looked like small
finger marks, and pictures of Brandon's body. Humiston thought she
had been killed by someone she knew, possibly another woman.
(31:50):
She recommended exhuming the body to look for more evidence.
While the doctor who examined the exhumed body was not
able to make any determination about the possible finger marks,
he found what he said was black skin under Lottie's fingernails.
John Snowden had reportedly had scratches on his face when
police questioned him. He had also bought a drink at
(32:13):
a bar with a dollar, and Lottie May's husband said
he left her a dollar when he went to work
that day. Police tortured John Snowden while questioning him, but
he steadfastly maintained his innocence, and in the end he
was tried and convicted of murder. But Hamiston was really
not convinced that he was guilty, and she felt responsible
(32:35):
for having suggested the exclamation. She tried unsuccessfully to secure
an appeal. People really started to question whether Snowdon was
guilty or not, and as his execution date approached, all
the jurors that had voted to convict him signed a
petition asking for his release. Even so, he was hanged
on February twenty eight of nineteen nineteen, and he was
(32:57):
posthumously pardoned in two thousand one. Grace Hummiston's last high
profile investigation wound up really damaging her reputation and her career.
Her work on the Ruth Krueger case and the public
response to it had been threaded through with the idea
of white slavery, and after Ruth's body was found, that
(33:17):
is what Hummiston really focused on. So for context and
the years after the abolition of slavery in the US
and in the British colonies, the term white slavery was
used in the context of labor rights to describe low
paying jobs with poor or dangerous working conditions, jobs that
were being worked by people who really had no other options.
(33:40):
But over time the term picked up connotations of women
who were forced into sex work. There were absolutely women
and girls who were victims of sex trafficking, but the
specter of white slavery went way beyond that. In the
minds of progressive era reformers, all sex workers were victims
(34:00):
who needed to be rescued. Campaigns against white slavery were
connected to general anti vice activity and the breaking up
of Red Lake districts that had previously been legal or
at least tolerated. All of this was really focused specifically
on the purity and safety of white women, with sex
traffickers often being framed as immigrant, Jewish or Black men
(34:23):
who were forcing or deceiving white women into a life
of crime. This whole idea was threaded through, of course,
with racism, classism, nativism, and a focus on white racial purity.
This idea of white slavery was the subject of sensational
novels and movies, including Trafficking Souls, which came out in
(34:44):
nineteen thirteen. Anti trafficking and anti sex work laws were
passed in both the US and the UK, and the
United States it was the White Slave Traffic Act, also
known as the Man Act, which was pasted in nineteen ten.
As series of international treaties were also negotiated starting in
nineteen o four, although to be clear, international trafficking of
(35:08):
laborers and sex workers was far more prevalent than the
trafficking of white women within the United States, which was
just the big focus of this whole moral panic. In
the wake of her work on the Ruth Kruger case,
Humiston established the Morality League of America, The New York
Police Department hired her as a special investigator. They hired
(35:30):
Crone as well, and Crone and Humiston focused on missing
women and girls. The Grace Hummiston League was established with
the goal of raising a million dollars for quote, endowing
a nationwide organization for the protection of womanhood. Hearing her
work in all of this, Humiston alleged that there was
a vast sex trafficking operation at work involving soldiers at
(35:53):
Camp Upton, which had been built on Long Island as
a departure point for US troops headed to Europe during
World War One. She claimed that there were six hundred unmarried,
pregnant women living in and around the camp. She also
said that seven had been killed, including two underage girls,
(36:13):
and while it's likely or even certain that crimes were
committed in and around the base, she really had nothing
to back up such a broad accusation. The U. S
Army vehemently denied it, and an inquiry ruled the allegations
of a huge white slavery ring were unfounded. Rumors of
two girls being killed actually dated back to while the
(36:34):
camp was still being built, before soldiers started arriving and
there was also no evidence of anybody's being found. Humiston
was simultaneously extremely vocal about all this and hard to
find when reporters and authorities tried to reach her with
questions about it. She claimed that the Army had hired
her to investigate this sex trafficking network in secret, which
(36:57):
the Army denied. She continued to make allegations without backing
them up. The NYPD stripped both her and Crone of
their badges. The Grace Hummiston League cut ties with her.
The Mayor of New York City had appointed a committee
to work with her on her anti white slavery campaign.
The committee went to the New York Bar Association to
(37:18):
try to have her compelled to turn over whatever evidence
she did have. The bar refused, and the committee members
all resigned. At the end of nineteen seventeen. Humiston told
reporters that she had already been planning to resign from
her work with the City of New York because of
the upcoming change in mayoral administrations. This didn't look genuine
(37:40):
to people, who were like, you're really just saying you
were planning to quit when they fired you. Uh. In
early nineteen eighteen, a young man of about seventeen came
to Humiston's office and threatened to kill her. Humiston was
not actually there at the time, but this man assaulted
Crone and other staff before police arrived. Humiston blamed the
(38:02):
attack on all of this fallout and on the loss
of her police badge in nine Humiston's still thought that
police were targeting her because of all of this, and
because of her exposure of so much corruption within the
New York Police Department during and after the Ruth Krueger case.
That year, she opened the Manhattanville be Kind Club, which
(38:24):
was supposed to be a gathering place for women and
a daycare. Police shut it down, charging her with operating
a dance hall without a license, even though she had
checked ahead of time and was told she did not
need a license. A court later agreed with her. On
March fourteenth of Humiston was on her way to court
(38:44):
when she was hit by a truck at the corner
of fifty nine and third. The driver of the truck,
William H. Heck, didn't stop when the traffic officer signaled
and blew his whistle so people could cross. Heck said
that he thought he had the right of way and
didn't see her. She had a compound fracture in her foot,
so she's pretty seriously injured and far as far as
(39:06):
her life, was not threatened by this injury, but it
was a long time of recovering. Holliston seems to have
largely withdrawn from public appearance after all of this. She
died on July sixty eight at the age of seventy six.
That book that we mentioned at the top of the
show is by Brad Rica and it is called Mrs
(39:27):
Sherlock Holmes, The True Story of New York City's greatest
female detective in the nineteen seventeen Missing Girl case that
captivated a nation. Tracy, do you have a listener mail
that is maybe slightly less violent? I do. It's not
violent at all. This is from Melissa, and Melissa wrote, Hi,
Tracy and Holly. I just got back from a quick
(39:49):
trip to Chicago, which I took with my husband, who
had some work meetings there last week. While he was
occupied with work, I spent an afternoon in the Chicago
Institute of Art. It was my first time at that
museum and it was wonderful and it contains a pretty
big collection of Impressionist artwork, as I was doubling back
through the Impressionist gallery to take a break outside. I
(40:10):
read the captions on some Menaise and in Morris So
just as I walked past. About twenty seconds later, as
I sat down to rest, I turned on one of
your episodes that I had downloaded for my trip. It
was Bart moriss So. I quickly ran back into the
exhibit to look more closely at the painting I had
just walked past. It was a hilarious and wonderful ends
(40:31):
to my track around the museum. I loved learning about
her sinse as you noted, she isn't very widely known
or taught, and I didn't know about her role in
the whole movement. Thanks. I'm still smiling about that moment.
Take care, Melissa Um. And then Melissa sent us a
second email the following day that said, oh my gosh, Holly,
(40:51):
I've just started Josephine Nivison Hopper and you were there
at the Chicago Institute of Art too. Ha. I love it.
Thanks for the art episodes lately, Melissa Um. I delighted
the story. Delighted so much I had to immediately go
see what what B. Moris So things are on exhibit
(41:12):
at the Art Institute of Chicago. And one of them
is a really lovely painting of UM, somebody like putting
her hair up in front of her mirror. She shown
from behind, uh, and it just is a very like
blue white kind of color palette. The other one is
a woman sitting in a garden in a blue dress.
(41:33):
And I don't know which of these the one that
Melissa saw, but both of them, I was like, Oh,
I'm going to take some time this morning look at
this art on the Art Institute of Chicago website. UM.
I don't think I saw either of these while we
were there a couple of years back, because we were
doing a special event and I was hanging out in
a different part of the museum. Yeah, there's a that
(41:55):
museum is expansive and also wonderful. I legitimately love it there,
and I love the staff there because they're just delightful
and helpful and kind. UM. And I feel since we
have this opportunity that I have to give a shout
out to one of the people that works here named
Darlene King, who um is just an amazing person. She
(42:18):
was like a greeting people when we first walked in
and then later in the day I asked her for
restaurant recommendations and she was hilarious and delightful to talk
to you. So, Darlene, on the off chance you hear this,
you made my day and we're wonderful. Yeah, that's great.
So thanks Melissa for sending this note. Thanks for giving
me an excuse to look at some paintings this morning
(42:39):
while I was getting my list or mail ready. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast, we're at History Podcast at I heart
radio dot com and we're all over social media app
Missed in History. That's why you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the I heart Radio app and really anywhere if you
(43:00):
want to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(43:20):
H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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