Part 12

“No! My head is aching, and you want to take me on a ride and make a show of me to the morbid crowd. I will not tell you--not until later. Later perhaps, but not now!”

“All right,” I answered. “Later.”

Then I decided we had better get our information down on paper in a formal examination.

The meeting convened at once, with Coy, McCahill, a county detective from Mineola, two deputy sheriffs, two patrolmen, a stenographer and myself as board of inquiry. It may serve to describe the fellow’s manner, as well as to bring out what the examination further disclosed, if we make use here of extracts from the proceedings:

_Question._ Where were you born?

_Answer._ Somehow my brain is in such a shape that I can’t remember--Wisconsin, I know. I don’t know what it is that affected me--something inside of me--maybe it is the shock I got from that.

_Q._ You speak with a German accent. Were you born in Germany, or in any of the European countries--tell me the truth.

_A._ Now listen. That has been said before--that I speak with a foreign accent. That is because I speak several languages. I speak French, German, Spanish, and all that. That is the cause of that, you see?

_Q._ We will eliminate the trouble of asking you questions if you will tell us the town or city in which you were born.

_A._ Yes. Now I am trying to think (a pause) I will have to disappoint you.

_Q._ Your memory is very clear on other things.

_A._ As I told you, I have been lying there, thinking, thinking.

I took up the matter of the express receipt found on him:

_Q._ On June 11, 1915, you shipped a box by the American Express Company to D. F. Sensabaugh, 101 South Marsalis Street, Dallas, Texas. What did that box contain?

_A._ It evidently must have been a typewriter. I would not be sure now, I think it was a typewriter.

And then the cartoon, clipped from the Philadelphia paper, brought out a very unexpected fact:

_Q._ How many times have you been in Philadelphia?

_A._ No time.

_Q._ You came to New York from Ithaca?

_A._ Yes.

_Q._ Do you mean to truthfully answer my question by saying that you have not been to Philadelphia at any time since you left Ithaca?

_A._ At no time.

_Q._ You have a clipping of a Philadelphia newspaper in your possession. Where did you get that?

_A._ I think I got that out of a Philadelphia paper of course, that I found lying around. I think it was a cartoon.

_Q._ Were you not in Philadelphia when you purchased that paper?

_A._ I did not purchase that. I saw that lying around somewhere, probably in the Mills Hotel.

_Q._ Where did you sleep last night?

_A._ Now, I will tell you. A reporter from the Associated Press asked me about this Washington business, and he was trying to connect me with that. I suppose that is what you are trying to do.

_Q._ I am not trying to connect you with anything. I want truthful answers. I am very frank and honest with you. I will fairly investigate every answer that you make.

_A._ Yes, I thought that over since he was here, and I think it is just as well to say that I wrote that R. Pearce letter. I was in Washington yesterday and came back on the train. I think it is just as well to say.

Here was news! McCahill slipped out of the room, and sent this telegram to Captain Boardman:

“Holt was in Washington Friday. Will wire full particulars later,” and returned for the particulars, which Holt continued to unfold.

He had gone to Washington early Friday, arriving at 2 P. M., hired a furnished room near the Union Station, and two hours later walked over to the Capitol and found the Senate wing deserted. He placed a bomb near the telephone booth, timed so as to explode in eight hours. He idled away the evening, mailed the R. Pearce letters, took a midnight train to New York, stopped at the Mills Hotel for mail, and took an early train to Glen Cove Saturday morning. What his activities had been since then we well knew. But while the confession of his responsibility for the Washington outrage was a really surprising bit, it did not conclude our work, for he had pointed out several new alleys of possibility which we must search.

By seven o’clock we had, first, a sketch of Holt’s recent career as a teacher. This we proceeded to verify by telephone to New York and by telegraph thence to Ithaca, Dallas, Nashville, and Philadelphia. His account of the Washington bombing Mr. Scull telephoned to Washington, and Major Pullman left at once for Long Island to secure a more complete confession. We had the numbers of his revolvers and were already at work upon that clue. We had no information except the trade-mark of where he had got his dynamite, and knowing the strict city restrictions on its sale, I felt confident that he had accomplices who supplied it to him. The chances were, too, that Holt had more dynamite than the three sticks which he said had made up the Capitol bomb, and the three on his person. We knew he had called at the Mills Hotel, and we sent a man to search his room. We had a wholly unsatisfactory statement of his birthplace, which he had already contradicted once, and which lent color to the Germanic origin of his accent. And finally, Holt had given a description of the methods he used in making his bomb which I cannot detail here for obvious reasons, but which from my acquaintance with explosives I knew to be untrue. By no means all the particulars of his acquaintance with dynamite had been explained, and the fact that this remarkable teacher of foreign languages, a man apparently of fair intellect, had committed one major crime and confessed to another all in the same day, made the motive all the more obscure. But we had learned that he talked freely, and that meant that he would give us more information, either consciously or unconsciously.

Holt was moved about half past seven that night to safer keeping in the county jail at Mineola, and we reconvened there an hour later for further examination. Major Pullman joined us in the course of the evening and took part in the questioning. By that time I had word from New York that a telegram had arrived for Holt at the Mills Hotel signed by D. F. Sensabaugh, and inquiring for particulars. Thinking that this was a clue to possible accomplices I tried, taking several different angles of attack, to find out whether Holt had told Sensabaugh (who he said was his father-in-law), what he was going to do, and why he had written that evening to his wife. The result of this questioning was nil. Then we went over his course in Washington, step by step, and brought out nothing of significance; then returned to the topic of his views on the shipment of munitions, and tried to draw out any talks which he might have had with friends on that subject. His answer to this was:

“I have not talked to my friends about it, because my friends, in my position, they are not the kind of people who would talk on such things. Do you suppose that a university professor would undertake that sort of thing? I think that can be easily figured out that I could not have anybody else with me.”

That was the conclusion which we were being forced to accept. But the mystery of the dynamite purchase was still unsolved. Holt said we could not guess the reason why he was withholding the answer to it. I was inclined to agree with him just then. I couldn’t guess. But he betrayed in one of his replies the real factor which was to solve the mystery. Major Pullman asked:

“Why did you decide to go to the Capitol?”

“Merely,” replied the thin figure in the chair, “to get the most prominent place in the country. You see I wanted to call attention to my appeal.”

In this he had succeeded. The whole country was working on the case. If our feeling that Holt had bought more explosives was no more than a theory at first, it was strengthened when he admitted that he had spent nearly $275 in two weeks, had only six sticks of dynamite to show for it, and was able to account for only $50. He denied that he had ever been in the German Club in New York, reiterated that he was born in the United States, dodged the exact city, then suggested Milwaukee, said that the name of the college he had attended in Texas “wouldn’t come,” and sidestepped cleverly any admission which might allow us to trace the dynamite purchase. Thus ended Saturday, July 3, which had started out as a holiday. I left two men to watch Holt, and went home, tired out, and not at all satisfied.

While we had been busy with the prisoner, the wires to Boston and the trains to Chicago had been carrying out their routine tasks of syndicating news. A police officer in Cambridge in reading the description of Holt which had flashed out to the newspapers detected a familiar ring to the natural phrase “shambling walk” which had been used to describe Holt’s gait. Thousands of men whom we encounter in daily life have shambling walks, but to this officer only one man had a shambling walk in which he was interested, and that man was Erich Muenter, a Harvard instructor, whom he had suspected of wife-murder nine years before. Nine years is a long time, and the average person cannot recall offhand the gait of anyone whom he last saw nine years ago, but those two words had evidently typified to the Cambridge officer the murderer who got away. When the news photographs followed the description to Boston and the Cambridge police saw them, they were not so sure, for Muenter had had a beard, and in his Cambridge days his head was not bandaged. But suspicion had been aroused, and that was enough to issue the news throughout the country during the night. Reporters in Ithaca tried to verify it from Holt’s associates at Cornell, and failed, reporters two thousand miles away in Dallas tried to verify it from Holt’s confused father-in-law, and failed. Dallas, however, supplied the particulars of his previous life so far as anyone seemed to know them, and these particulars were again relayed, verified, and amplified in every city in which Holt had ever been known in recent years.

Sunday morning, Independence Day, I went early to Mineola and questioned Holt again, with little result. Meanwhile the Bomb Squad at work in New York had found one of the shops in Jersey City where Holt had purchased a revolver. He gave his name to the proprietor as “Henderson,” and his address as Syosset, Long Island--a little station not far from Glen Cove. I asked him why he gave this fictitious name and address; he replied he had happened to see Syosset on a timetable, and that the name Henderson popped into his head. We then returned to my favorite subject, dynamite, and Holt finally said that he would tell me on the following Wednesday, July 7, where he had bought it. Why Wednesday, July 7? He would not answer, and no amount of questioning served any end except that of further confusion.

The day was not without developments, however. During the afternoon District Attorney Smith of Nassau County paid a visit to the jail, and identified the wretched Holt as a former acquaintance in Cambridge, Erich Muenter. At almost the same hour the Chicago authorities came into possession of the news photograph of the man mailed from New York the day before. They hurried with it to the home of two spinsters, known to be sisters of the missing Muenter, and obtained from them an unqualified identification: it was their lost brother, and “the news would kill their mother.” This Pearce-Lester-Holt-Henderson-Muenter was becoming more interesting every minute. Wife-poisoner, dynamiter, gunman--what next?

“Next” was Monday. The second revolvershop had been discovered, and again the use of the alias Henderson and the address Syosset. Holt, when I called on him in the morning, repeated only what he had told the day before, and reiterated, “Wednesday I will tell you,” until it became almost a refrain. He denied that he was Muenter, and that he had ever heard the name. I returned to New York to spend the rest of the daylight in investigation among the explosives’ manufacturers. From the records of the Ætna Company, of which the Keystone was a subsidiary, we learned during the afternoon that one Henderson had telephoned an order for 200 sticks of dynamite to be delivered at Syosset. I was just ready to start for Syosset with Commissioner Scull when, as if we had not already had enough to interest us, our friends the anarchists exploded a bomb in Police Headquarters itself. Curiously enough, although it was a delay, this did not prove the disturbing incident which one might believe. We had had anonymous threats of it some weeks before; it was one year and a day after the accidental death of the anarchist Berg, who was killed making a bomb, and it seemed to have no connection whatever with the Holt case. No one was injured, and after steps had been taken to follow the case, I went home to sleep what was left of the night.

Tuesday arrived.

I went to Syosset, and interviewed the station agent, George D. Carnes. Carnes said he knew a man named Henderson. Henderson had seen him first about three weeks before when he came to the little station to claim a new trunk which had been shipped down from New York, apparently empty, as it weighed only thirty-six pounds. Henderson had signed for the trunk, and gone away. He reappeared some days later and asked Carnes whether he had received two boxes of dynamite and two boxes of fuses and detonating caps--he had to blow up some stumps and he expected the explosives. They had not arrived. Henderson made inquiries for several days, and when the boxes came, claimed them, signed the name of Frank Hendrix to the receipt, and drove away in a Ford. At last we seemed to be on the right trail.

He had received the material, we knew, but where was it? In the trunk, perhaps. Had the trunk been shipped out of Syosset? No, Carnes said. We telephoned several stations in the vicinity, and finally at Central Park, a few miles west, we struck the trail again. The baggage records there revealed that a Henderson had checked a trunk to the Pennsylvania station, New York, on July 2--Friday. That was enough to take us to Central Park.

The check number I telephoned to New York for detectives to trace from the station if they could. Information of a stranger is freely offered in a village, and we found shortly that Holt had employed a small boy with a wheelbarrow to convey his trunk from a shanty in the woods to the station, and to the shanty we went. Near it lay a charred dynamite-box, and there were a few wax-paper wrappers from sticks of dynamite which the weather had left for our information. No explosive was to be seen, but there was evidence that he had burned some of it nearby.

If he had not burned it all, the balance of those two hundred sticks were in the trunk. The day was growing old. Carnes and I sped back to Mineola, and the station agent identified Holt as the dynamite man. I repeated my questions; Holt replied, “I will tell you Wednesday.”

“Look here,” I said. “I have the number of that check. That dynamite is in the trunk. It’s liable to go off any minute and kill a lot of people. I can trace that check, but it will take time, and you better tell me quick where you left the trunk.”

“All right,” Holt answered, and said that he had sent it to a storage warehouse whose office was somewhere near 40th Street and Seventh Avenue. Two minutes later Lieut. Barnitz and I were out of the jail and in a motor bound for New York.

It took just 28 minutes to cover the 20 miles to Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, and we turned south to the section around Fortieth Street. We found the office of the storage company--empty. The warehouse itself was at 342 West 38th Street, and we hurried over there, arriving simultaneously with the detectives who had been tracing the check number from the Pennsylvania station. An old watchman was in charge who knew nothing whatever of the records of the office, but who turned bright green when we told him what we were after. While Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Murphy, Sterett, Walsh and Fenelly went up into the recesses of the warehouse to hunt for the trunk, I called headquarters.

“Commissioner Woods just called and wants you to call him at the Harvard Club,” the office said. I did so, and reported our progress.

“Get that trunk as fast you can and find out exactly what’s in it,” said the Commissioner. “Washington just called me to say that Governor Colquitt down in Dallas just wired them. He says Holt’s wife got a letter from Holt dated July 2 saying that he’s put dynamite on a ship now at sea, and that it will sink on the seventh!”

On the fifth floor of the great dark barn they discovered the trunk, with a dozen others on top of it. There were no lights, and it was necessary to roll it over, haul it out, snake it across other piles, and carry it down four flights of steep stairs in the dark to the office. Barnitz picked up an axe and hacked the lock away. He lifted the cover, and there we found one hundred and thirty-four sticks of dynamite--one hundred in their original box, and the rest packed in small spaces between hammers, nails, bolts, and other tools, several bottles of sulphuric and nitric acid, and 197 detonating caps--a pretty package to trundle down four flights of dark stairs and open with an axe!

Fifty sticks of the original 200 were unaccounted for. I telephoned the report to the Commissioner, and followed it to the Harvard Club, in 44th Street, while Barnitz telephoned for the inspector of combustibles to come and take possession of the explosives. The Commissioner, with Guy Scull, were sitting in the lounge, and I was reporting in greater detail when the Commissioner was called to the telephone. He returned a moment later, and his first remark was this:

“_Holt is dead at Mineola!_”

And there went our case.

The first wild report from Mineola had it that Holt had been shot by a German. The international consequences of the case, which had been hovering just out of reach for the past four days, now seemed certain. A nation which was still bitterly angry over the recent _Lusitania_ sinking would certainly not brook the violation of its Capitol and the attempted assassination of one of its chief figures by a German agent, and if Holt had been shot by a German, it was more than likely that he had been killed to prevent a further confession which would implicate the Imperial German Government. These thoughts passed through our minds as we motored back across the Queensboro Bridge, and retraced the route Barnitz and I had just traveled.

Holt was not shot by a German. Holt was not shot at all. An aged guard had been left to watch him that evening, just after Barnitz and I had left, for the prisoner, despairing over the Muenter identification, had already made one attempt with a bit of tin from a lead pencil to cut the arteries of his wrists, and we did not want him to try again. The old bailiff who sat outside the cell cage had not only left the cage door unlocked, but had been careless enough to leave Holt’s cell door ajar. The prisoner seemed quiet enough, and the bailiff fell asleep. He woke to find Holt’s body in a twisted heap in the center of the floor of the cell corridor. Holt had evidently been feigning sleep and while the bailiff dozed had crept out, climbed to the top of the cage, and dived headforemost to the concrete floor.

There we found him. The man’s skull was crushed from the impact of his dive. Rumors that he was shot by a mysterious rifle bullet from outside notwithstanding, Holt bore no wound except the bruise Physick gave him with the lump of coal, and the wound which was the result of his fall. If Holt was a German agent, he died with his secret.

We had no time to analyze the question. We knew that Holt had written his wife he had placed dynamite aboard a ship which was at sea, and that July 7, the date on which he had promised an explosion, was less than two hours away. On the theory that he might have shipped an express parcel containing a bomb overseas from some nearby station, Mr. Scull and I spent the night in an exhaustive canvass by telephone and motor of every station in Nassau County. Many of the station agents were asleep, but we woke them, and searched until dawn. The net result was record of two shipments to Europe since the day Holt received the dynamite: One from Syosset the other from Oyster Bay. Back to New York again we raced, and at the office of the Adams Express Company found the Syosset package, opened it, and found--no dynamite at all. The Oyster Bay package had already been shipped to Europe; we telephoned the consignor, and learned that it contained clothes for a poor relative in England.

Apparently Holt had not shipped a bomb. While we were opening his trunk at the warehouse the night before, the government was issuing from Washington a wireless bulletin to all ships at sea, warning them to search the cargo thoroughly for a bomb. One by one the vessels which had sailed during the past week reported that they had investigated with no result, and as these reports came in we began to rest easier in our minds. Yet he had so persistently refused to tell us of the dynamite “until Wednesday” that we could not ignore the prophecy he had made to his wife--“With God’s help, a ship that sailed from New York July 3 will sink on July 7.” At noon, of Wednesday, July 7, an explosion occurred in the hold of the steamship _Minnehaha_, in mid-ocean, so strong as to blow out a section of the upper decks. The _Minnehaha_ had left New York on July 3. Happily there was no loss of life, and she reached port safely.

Two and two make four, but we must not add them for a moment. Holt--or Muenter, as he was fully and finally identified--may have placed a bomb in the _Minnehaha_. His promise may have been valid, but there is another possible origin for that explosion, namely, the activities of Paul Koenig’s little group. He may have placed a bomb on the _Minnehaha_ which was exploded by a bomb placed there by another. He may have placed a bomb on quite another ship--which did not explode, and which may have traveled harmless to its consignee in England. That consignee may have been fictitious, or he may have been an accomplice; if an accomplice he may have been German. We must not add two and two until we have gathered up the loose threads as they were gathered up during those last active days, and begin to sort them out.