The Woman Sherlock Holmes Who Has Shaken New York
The Woman Sherlock Holmes Who Has Shaken New York is an article written by Ethel Thurston published in The Sunday Oregonian on 14 october 1917.
The article is about Mrs. Grace Humiston, a real amateur sleuth in New York.
Article
- The Police Had Missed the Vital Clews to the Murderers of Ruth Humiston's Genius Traced Them Out.
- In the finding of lost girls and in savings the unfortunate, Mrs. Humiston is performing a great work.
- Mrs. Humiston, trained as a lawyer, is a master of detail, to whom broken-hearted fathers and mothers flock for aid in finding their missing daughters, and who might well be envied by any "efficiency" expert in the country.
- The Police are working in full co-operation with "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes."
Remarkable rise of Mrs. Grace Humiston, who traced the murderer of Ruth Cruger, and is now the busiest sleuth in the Metropolis
Mrs. Grace Humiston is now one of the busiest persons in New York with unlimited resources and the co-operation of the Police behind her great work as a modern Sherlock Holmes.
BY ETHEL THURSTON.
Mrs. Sherlock Holmes has taken possession of the popular fancy in New York City, to say nothing of other cities which have crops of mysteries that need solving. The New York woman who fills this role is no character of fancy like the queer person that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made world famous.
She is a "regular" woman, actually in the flesh and, when not engaged in untangling some mysterious crime, devotes herself to the ordinary feminine occupation of trying to guess where a perfectly good husband has left the elusive collar button, or of trying to decide which one of the winter hats will look best on her shapely head.
Mrs. Sherlock Holmes is better known as Mrs. Grace Humiston. She is a Lawyer by grace of that change in the affairs of men that has brought the vote to woman, the right to work and to earn equally with men and the transition from the state of being property to the condition of owning it. Mrs. Humiston does not work as a matter of need. Her husband is a lawyer of ability and they have enough means to keep a flock of Russian wolves of the kind that barked after Napoleon as he .ran away from Moscow at a safe distance from the dumb-waiter.
Mrs. Humiston had developed a strong bent for picking to pieces criminal cases long before her finding of the body of Ruth Cruger, buried under the cellar where the pretty girl had been murdered, gave her nation-wide fame.
Her first important case did not bring her any large amount of public tribute, although it probably involved a vast amount more toil than the Cruger murder. An old man and his house-keeper had been murdered in a small place far up New York state, In the regular course of country police events an ignorant farm hand and his cousin were arrested for the murder. Both were convicted and one of them was sent to the death house in Sing Sing prison to wait for the arrival of the day when he would be strapped in the huge oaken chair and electrocuted.
Saves Condemned Man.
Mrs. Humiston took an interest in the case through the agency of a society of humanitarians whose members had reached the conclusion that there was not enough evidence to warrant killing the ignorant rustic. She made several pilgrimages to the place where the murder had been committed and then one day she proclaimed her belief in the innocence of the condemned man.
Everybody laughed, but Mrs. Sherlock Holmes had something behind her claim. She produced a perfectly good confession from another man admitting the murder of the old couple. The confession was fought by all of the officials who had brought about the original conviction and there came a hot struggle over the case. The confession was repudiated, and reasserted, but when the smoke all blew over the poor wretch in Sing Sing, Stielow, was saved. The Governor commuted the death sentence as a result of Mrs. Sherlock Holmes' untiring efforts to clear her client of the charge of murder.
The public had lost sight of the activities of the woman who picks cases to bits and then puts the pieces together again on the basis of logical deduction until there suddenly came a flare of headlines one day saying that the body of Ruth Cruger had been found in a cellar.
Ruth Cruger was a young and attractive high school girl. She left her home in Washington Heights, New York City, one afternoon for a skating trip and stopped at a bicycle repair shop nearby to have her skates sharpened. Nobody ever heard of her after she entered the repair shop. It was conducted by a man named Cocchi, who had much work for the motorcycle policemen that patrolled that section.
The police held to the idea that Ruth Cruger had eloped with some man. They scouted the idea of murder. Even when Cocchi, the man who owned the shop, fled to Italy, they did not make any mental connection between the flight of the man and the disappearance of the girl.
And then, enter Mrs. Sherlock Holmes. She took a force of men over the protest of the police, and dug up the Cocchi cellar. In a corner she found the body of the girl and the glaring, unmistakable evidence that she had been murdered in the shop.
Finds Herself Famous.
Cocchi, found in Italy, confessed the murder, and a crime much worse. The laws of Italy, which do not permit the extradition of a citizen of Italy to the first report of her success in the another country to be tried for crime, prevented his going brought to New York for trial, but he will be tried for murder in Italy under the Italian laws.
With the sensational exposure of this crime, and the criminal carelessness of the police in handling the investigation, Mrs. Sherlock Holmes suddenly found herself famous. Official investigations were held by the city authorities to see what was wrong with the police department. Several policemen were indicted and the department got the worst shakeup it had known since the day when Charles Becker, the one-time leader of the strong arm squad, was unmasked as a master grafter and assistant to murder.
The storm of indignation that followed the exposure of the murder of Ruth Cruger brought a strange and pathetic sequence. Hundreds of girls are lost in New York every year. Each day finds some new report of a child who has failed to come home to a waiting mother. In many, many of these cases nothing is ever heard of them.
Some mysterious force whisks the girl away, the city hears a brief statement of the case — and forgets. In many of the disappearances the police are correct in assuming that the girls are lured from home with more or less complicity in the luring, but in a large number of instances there is nothing to show for a minute that the lost girl is anything worse than the victim of a crime.
The fame of discovering Ruth Cruger brought to the door of Mrs. Sherlock Holmes hundreds of white-faced, broken-hearted fathers and mothers who begged, her aid in searching for their daughters. No such procession of Les Miserables has ever been seen in New York as that which came to seek the feminine Sherlock Holmes as soon as the first report of her success in the Cruger case reached the public.
It was from her success un this case that Mrs. Humiston began her work of saving girls. The city police authorities, contrite over their Cruger mess, sends daily ten policemen who report to Mrs. Humiston. They take orders from her and go out to seek missing girls under such directions as the woman's analysis of the case may suggest.
Society Is Now Her Aid.
And the big sisters of the poor little girls who have gone have come trooping to aid. Many of the most prominent women in society, aiding with both purse and personal effort, are to be found working in her new cause. A Ruth Cruger home for reclaimed girls is in sight and a $1,000,000 organization is now being put under way to keep the big job going.
Mrs. Adolph Ladenburg, one of the most prominent women of the Long Island set, is the daily occupant of a desk in the office of Mrs. Sherlock Holmes. She talks with the young women who come to seek advice and help and has charge of the vocational bureau that has been started to provide some practical help for the girls who come back.
Mrs. Nana Genovese, a leader in Italian society, was one of those who took up the cudgels for Mrs. Humiston after the finding of the body of Ruth Cruger. She is now making plans to spend some time each day looking after the little Italian girls and in helping Mrs. Humiston.
One of the famous hotels in New York has given an entire suite for offices for the organization that is going to capitalize Mrs. Sherlock Holmes' energy and ability for a million dollars. That is more than the original Sherlock Holmes could ever accomplish. The best he ever did was to become one of the best sellers.
