July 17, 2024 • 55 mins
On this week's episode, the conclusion of a two-parter, Paul and Kate return to 1841 New York City where they hope to shine some light on an unsolved murder of a 21-year-old woman. Following the analysis of the coroner, the body and the crime scene provide lots of theories on how she met her demise.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones. Hi, Kate, Hey, Paul, you're looking
(01:04):
forward to hearing more about the story of Mary Rogers.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I am. I haven't stopped thinking about this case since
the last time we talked about it.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
You haven't stopped thinking about a case from eighteen forty one.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Well, it's just, you know, it's like I want to
know this, this and this, you know, And we got
to the point of Mary's body being recovered. Civilians seeing
a decomposing body floating in the water, which I don't
put a lot of weight on their observations, you know,
That's where I'm really interested to see what the medical
people said happened to Mary in terms of her injuries
(01:39):
and stuff. But also you know where her body's located,
you know, outside of the Sibyl's Cave in the Hudson River,
you know. So I actually did some research, some research
on the tides and Hudson River. You know, started rolling
up my sleeves a little bit.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
I mean, thank goodness, we need you to dig in
sometimes on these details that just you can't let go of.
So that's good. So before we do a quick summary
of the case, I just wanted to give a trigger
warning that we are going to be talking about sexual
assault in this case. So Mary Rogers is twenty one,
it's eighteen forty one. It's in New York City, and
(02:18):
she lives at a boarding house that her mother runs,
along with a slew of lodgers, two of whom she's
been involved with, One who she seems to be in
love with and engaged to. He is described as an
alcoholic but a jovial kind of guy. That's Daniel. There's
another man named Alfred who not so much. He really
(02:41):
pines for Mary, but she has sort of rejected him.
At this point he is very angry. He's left in
a huff. And then a month later, Mary Rogers is found,
as you just mentioned, in the Hudson River in a
particular area, and her body has been in the water
for three days, and we are trying to kind of
(03:02):
figure out the level of decomposition. And it's a hot
summer day when she's discovered, and it is very clear
to everyone that has seen her that she has extensive injuries.
And after I hear about your information about the Hudson
River and where she was found, I'll tell you what
the corner says, which I think is very illuminating.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Part of what I want to do is reconstruct based
off of you know, tides, where Mary likely would have
gone into the water. Now she's been in the water
for three days, I think that's an assumption. So that's
part of truly really digging into what Mary looked like,
her state of decomposition. Is there any cessile marine organisms
(03:47):
that are now on her body that could help indicate
how long she's been in the water, et cetera. But
in terms of the currents and the Hudson River, you know,
where did she go into the water, And this is
where I think it's important because that now, if that
can be somewhat isolated, you know, that indicates because we
know where Mary was she left the boarding house. Now
(04:10):
we don't know for sure she never made it to
her aunt's house, and we don't know if she actually
walked in the direction of her aunt's house. And I
don't even know where the aunts house is, but it's
not too far away from the boarding house I'm looking at. Okay,
the boarding house is roughly by City Hall, and where
Mary's body is found floating, it's about maybe a little
less than two and a half miles straight shot, you know,
(04:31):
so it's a significant distance. But the tides are interesting
in the Hudson River, you know, even though it's a
river and you're thinking, you know, currents are flowing one direction. Well,
it turns out, well, the direction of the water in
the Hudson River is based on the tides itself. So
when the tides are rising, the water flows north, and
when the tides are subsiding, which is of course going
(04:54):
to be a daily cycle, the water's flowing south. So
you can see now where Mary's body is kind of
moving no worth moving south from where you know, ultimately
her point of entry was, so that complicates trying to
really narrow down that origin. It's also going to be Okay,
what time if we assume she was killed on July
twenty fifth, eighteen forty one, within a few hours of
(05:16):
her leaving the boarding house, what tide was it at
that time? And then now talking to the marriytime experts, Okay,
how did these tides shift? And can we at least
narrow down an approximate location where Mary's body likely went
into the water and what is that distance? What route
would the offender and Mary have to take to get
(05:39):
to that spot. That helps build up a timeline, so
to speak.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
And so you've got this timeline. If Daniel and Alfred
both have alibis that night, how would the timeline help.
Would we just say, well, one was in the Bronx
and the other one was in Brooklyn, So it couldn't
have been either one of them because we can kind
of predict where body was. Or does that not make sense?
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well it could, you know, Again, it all depends on
what their statements are. But it also if there is
like a somewhat narrow region where Mary's body went into
the water, then it's going and talking to people who
are in that region at the time, you know, Mary,
likeliest place in the water, What did they see, you know?
So it gives the investigation some potential more information and
(06:24):
maybe some more leads to follow up on.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Let's get to the injuries, because we do have a
coroner from New Jersey named doctor and I want to
emphasize I don't know if we've had a coroner who's
a doctor before doctor Richard Cook, who you're either going
to love or think is silly one or the other.
I think, Okay, I really don't remember the last time
(06:50):
we've had doctor before the name of a coroner, and
we've talked about this before. It's you know, an elected position, right,
so he didn't have to have experience, but he says
he has pretty extensive experience examining people who are victims
of drowning. And he says, after looking at Mary's body,
that is not what happened here. I'm gonna just say
(07:12):
a bunch of words that doctor Cook says, and then
I'll stop and then you tell me because these are
all related to drowning, and you tell me if what
he's saying makes sense. This is in regards to a
drowning and why he doesn't think it's a drowning. He
thinks that her blood is too coagulated, and that her
crossed arms, which are in a stiff position that they
can only be uncrossed using force, are not consistent. Those
(07:37):
crossed arms are not consistent with the form that you'd
expect to see in a drowning victim. A person's arms
would likely be moving around their sides ahead of his
or her death. He says. The face when I examined
it was suffused with blood, bruised blood. There was frothy
blood still issuing from the mouth, but no foam, which
(08:00):
issues from the mouth of persons who die by drowning.
Her face was swollen, the veins were highly distended. If
she had been drowned, there would not have been those
particular appearances that I found in the veins. What is
he saying?
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Okay, Well, what he's saying is is Mary was killed
and left on land for a period of time and
then placed in the water. Her posture in the water
on her back, with the arms crossed, that didn't add
up to me. So he's he is saying, Okay, she's
in rigor. You know at the time he's conducting the autopsy,
(08:37):
and she must have been entering rigor with her arms
in this position when she was placed in the water,
So the arms don't just flop down as what you
typically see when you have, let's say, somebody who has
been freshly killed and put in the water, or somebody
who drowns and now goes limp. So this is important
because now, kind of like I said, we're assuming Mary
(08:58):
was in the water for three days. Doctor Cook, who's
got what sounds like extensive experience because he's dealing with
bodies out of the waterways here in the New York
area all the time, coming through the coroner's office, so
he is an expert, and so I put a lot
of veracity on his observations. So now we have a
(09:19):
larger window of time where Mary walks away from the
boarding house. We don't know what happens, but she runs
across an offender, she's killed, and then there's a time period,
unknown time period in which Mary is not necessarily left,
but she is not in the water for a period
(09:39):
of time to allow rigor to develop and her arms
to be fixed in this cross position. Now, of course,
does he have the expertise to observe potential binding marks
like her arms have been bound and would those be
obscured by being in the water for a period of
time and likely not, you know. But that's where this
(10:01):
gets interesting, because now the offender is either with Mary
for a period of time after she's dead and then
places her in the water, or the offender leaves Mary
in a hidden location and then comes back and moves
her body and dumps it into the water.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
He has a lot of details that I think are
really interesting and they're sort of out of order, but
I want to go back real quick because he says
a lot of phrases that I don't know why they're
relevant to a drowning specifically, So her blood is too coagulated,
What does that have to do with drowning and what
does he mean by that?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Well, this is where you start talking about sort of
the water intrusion into the body, and what he is
noticing is is that there's a lack of the intrusion.
You know, the blood when it gets dilute, doesn't coagulate.
And so he's observing like he's seen all these other
drowning victims who have been in the water. You know,
the water for at least as long as Mary, if
(10:55):
not much longer, and he generally doesn't see the blood
start to thicken up and coagulate inside the body like
what he's seeing with Mary. So he's also drawing that opinion, Yeah,
she's dead before going in now. Of course, you know,
one of the diagnostic aspects of drowning victims is you know,
(11:16):
as they're in the water, still alive, they ultimately breathe
water into their lungs. And he's making an observation that
that's not the case. I don't know if he said
that very clearly, but he's talking about there is bloody foam,
but there isn't the froth that he typically sees in
a drowning victim. You know, you get this bloody purge
(11:38):
when somebody dies and you've got some decomposition going on.
But this froth is what he's kind of keying in on,
going what's coming out of her mouth, her nasal mouth
area is not consistent with what he sees with drowning victims.
You know, where now you have the water that is
mixing with the physiological fluids internally, and then now you
have this foamy material that is now being exuded out
(11:58):
of the oral cavity, out of the nostrils.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Am I dense in thinking? How would frothy material be
anywhere on her body when she's been in the water
for so long, banging against stuff and being washed over.
How is anything frothy or any blood external blood or
anything showing up on her body? Or am I misunderstanding?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
It's after she's pulled out of the water. Oh okay,
you know, so, yeah, for sure, something like that froth
is going to wash away. But after she's taken out
of the water and you've got you know, maybe some
of the some air still within the lung cavity, You've
got gases that are developing as a matter of decomposition
as those are being expressed up through the trachea and
(12:40):
then out of the oral cavity. If there is the
blood or if there is this secretion as a result
of it's almost like an edema. You know, the lungs
they're trying to protect themselves and they get exposed to
the water, and now you have the body reacting and
you've got these proteins and cells, and the air mixes
(13:00):
with that. It creates that froth and so now that's
what happens after she's pulled out of the water.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
You know, we did a tenfold season season eleven, and
I think I might have mentioned this to you. A
woman who dies mysteriously in a fire. When the women
in the village were dressing her, this is in the
sixteen hundreds, were dressing her, there was some blood that
came out of her man I think through her nose
or her ear maybe, And in the sixteen hundreds, that
was a sign of the devil that she had been overtaken.
(13:28):
I know you're smiling, but this was not a funny
matter in the sixteen hundreds. But they didn't understand that.
So I'm glad that you clarified so nobody thinks this
is attached to the devil. I don't know why. I'm
surprised by that that things come out of people's bodies,
you know, after they die. It's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, you know, and that's just a lot of that
is just experience and seeing bodies that are dead, you know.
And if you go and see somebody who's overdosed and
you see the froth that is coming out of their mouth,
they've overdosed on something like heroin, now to a suspicious
death that involved a teenage boy that drank way too
much cough suroupe and codeine, and he had all this
(14:07):
froth coming out of his mouth and his nose. You know,
that's just part of the body's physiological response.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Well, let me give you some more information. So it
sounds like, right now, you're a fan of doctor Cook,
it sounds like he knows somewhat what he's doing here,
because so far he's giving you some pretty good details, right.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
You know, for a doctor in eighteen forty one, who
is you know, pulling bodies out of the waterways in
New York all the time, and looking at him, he
has expertise. Yeah, maybe not at the level of a
modern forensic pathologist, but what he is describing and observing
I put far more weight on than anybody that was
(14:47):
on the shore, you know, poking her with a stick
and saying how horrendous she looked.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Right now, he is, of course convinced that she's been murdered.
And I'll tell you why I buried the lead a
little bit. There's two things that lead him to believe
that she died of strangulation, and I think he thinks
it's important to establish specifically how she died. So I'm
going to tell you the less interesting one. He says
that this is a quote, a deep bruise about the
(15:14):
size and shape of a man's thumb on the right
side of her neck, near the jugular vein, and he
found several smaller bruises on the left side resembling the
shape of a man's finger. So really that would be
present still after three days in some decomposition, he would
be able to see those markings that clearly to say
this came from a man.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Well, probably overstating the source of these bruises, but the
observation of those bruises is important, you know. But more
important is did he dissect the neck?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Well, I don't have information on the neck because he's
concentrating on her lower region, and I'll get to that
in a second. Because what he finds that is very
obvious to everybody is that there is a piece of
lace which has been pulled from her underskirt and it
is wrapped around her neck, and somebody made a gag
(16:08):
from her underwear. Okay, so he is saying that he
thinks she has been strangled both with this lace and
gagged and manually strangled and that's what happened to her body,
and of course beaten beyond belief.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, and the duality in terms of the strangulation methods
is relatively common. Oftentimes the offender will start with manual
strangulation and either kills the victim that way or the
victim succumbs goes unconscious, and then a ligature is applied
to the neck afterwards. So that is a sequence that
(16:43):
is often seen and I've talked about this I think
a little bit before on Buried Bones. Is that you know,
many of these offenders they don't know if they've actually
accomplished killing the person through strangulation. They just know the
person is unconscious, and so to ensure that the person
is dead, then they will go ahead and apply a
ligature so that that person actually there's no way that person,
(17:05):
that victim could could recover from that. The offender is
utilizing the victim's own clothing, He's not bringing binding material
with him, so that's that's a significant observation. And the
ligature that is being used is coming from an undergarment,
you know, So this starts to really support that this
is a sexually motivated crime, but it sounds like there's
(17:26):
other observations on her body that you're going to get to.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Quite a few. First of all, she does have ligature
marks on her wrists.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Okay, so binding marks.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
They say ligature, So what's it tell me what the
difference is.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, this is a little bit of a pet peeve
in terms of the use of these these terms. So,
a ligature is a material that encircles a body part
to cut off circulation. Binding is a material that is
applied to the extremities to prevent movement. People often will call,
(17:58):
you know, bindings on the wrist as ligatures. Well, the
offender is not applying this binding material to cut off
circulation to the victim's hands. They're doing it to prevent movement.
When I'm talking to let's say, other experts, and I
see them or hear them misusing those terms, I go, oh, well,
maybe they're not as much of an expert as what
I thought they were. Oh no, So everybody out there
(18:22):
dial in on ligature versus binding.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Okay, So I'm going to get to his speculation in
a minute, but we'll continue on with this autopsy. So
let's talk about the potential sexual assault here. He says
Mary's not pregnant at the time of her death, and
actually that note's going to be important later on. He
does not see evidence that she was pregnant, like as
(18:45):
in a termination of pregnancy. So this is what he finds.
Bruising in abrasions in the quote unquote feminine region, as
well as skin that is rubbed raw on her back
and her shoulders. So he says that he leaves that
she has been laid down on a rough surface and
sexually assaulted. He says, by quote no fewer than three assailants.
(19:10):
I have no idea why. He thinks that it must
have just been the vast amount of injuries that she
had that he just thought one guy is not going
to be able to do this. But he says she
was sexually assaulted before or after she was killed. He
is sure of it.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
So I'm liking doctor Cook's observations. And yes, there are
instances on women's bodies with these types of abrasions on
the buttocks region or the lower back as well as
the upper back during sexual assault and if they've been
on a substrate that is somewhat rough. So he spot
on with that, though you know that can also those
(19:47):
types of abrations can occur from other activities, you know,
a body dragging, movement of body, transport a body. But
this statement about at least three men, no, no way
could he ever make that detail. Basically, we don't know
how many men. I mean, could multiple offenders have sexually
assaulted Mary, absolutely, but the likelihood of that is low
(20:09):
relative to a single offender operating by himself.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
It sounds like he might have been insinuating it was
one of these criminal gangs roaming the streets of New York.
But he's got some more observations. He believes that she
had been undressed and then killed, and then dressed back
in her clothes, including her hat, and then her body
was moved to its dumping spot in the river. I
(20:35):
have never understood why redressing If you're just going to
dump her in the river, Why put her clothes and
including her hat, and she had her gloves onto.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
This is more common than not in terms of the
offender either allowing the victim to redress and then killing
the victim, or you know, kills a victim and then
redresses a victim. It's not an unusual circumstance. Now you
think about in this case, the offender likely is not
sexually assaulting Mary right on the shore you know of
(21:05):
you know, of Sybil's cave or something somewhere else. Now
he has to transport a body. If he's seen, it's
probably a little suspicious that he's got a nude female
body and a bag of clothes versus well, I'm going
to put the clothes on the female's body, and he
might be able to pass her off as having you know,
gone unconscious because she had too much to drink, you know,
or people will just see her, who knows, if there's
(21:28):
a carriage is involved, you know, and she's just propped
up to look like she's asleep. But there's a practical
aspect in this situation. And like I said, as I
believe based on doctor Cook's observations that Mary is not
in the water for a period of time. Don't know
how long that is, But there may be something that
(21:50):
the offender is now redressing Mary knowing well she's going
to be laying at a location while I try to
figure out what I'm going to do with her.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Is the crossing of her arm before rigor and then
you know that's how she ends up. Does that tell
you anything or That wouldn't have been something she would
have done. It would have been him. Does that tell
you anything about the guy? About the person?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
In most instances, when you see arms and legs being
bound up, it's for packaging, okay, it's to make the
body easier to move.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Well, speaking of packaging, this is what doctor Cook says happened.
He said, whoever did this, if there's more than one person,
you know, whoever moved her actually moved her tore off
a piece of her dress and tied it around her
waist after she had been redressed, and used it like
a handle to move her body. He said it wasn't
(22:42):
delicate either, because she's got scratch marks and drag marks
all over herself. I had thought, for a millisecond, would
you really need that? You would need a handle? I
don't know. Is that odd to you?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I've actually I consulted on a case, in fact, one
that I presented with max Eryl McCollum on a crime cruise,
in which it wasn't the woman's own clothing, but the
way that the rope had been used to bind her
up as well as went through the belt loops around
her waist, And it was for the same reason this
(23:15):
was to provide a carrying handle. Even though Mary's petite,
likely she still weighs over one hundred pounds, and you
think about something like picking up a ninety pound bag
of cement that's still heavy for most people. Now you
have a body that has length, a body that possibly
(23:38):
is going to flop around, and now Mary's in rigor,
so some of that flopping is not going to occur.
But this offender sounds like, well, I need to make
my life easier and recognize that there's an article of
clothing with Mary that had the strength to be able
to utilize it as a handle, and it's just the
(24:00):
offender making his life easier.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Well, we now have a series of decisions made that
will affect the way that people view Mary Rogers moving forward,
So it starts really with doctor Cook. He says to
the press that Mary had evidently been a person of
chastity and correct habits. Probably that meant because she wasn't pregnant,
(24:25):
and he didn't find evidence that she had been recently pregnant,
But modern day authors have said it's probably because out
of propriety, he was trying to preserve her dignity, particularly
about the way she was found and it seemed clear
to him that she had been sexually assaulted and this
was not rough sex or you know, consensual in any way,
(24:45):
but because he had to report on the state of
all of her body, it would have been sort of salacious.
And we're also in a time period when people would
have said the woman was asking for it or she
did something, and this is a woman who been in
the society pages, that she must have been promiscuous. Instead,
what happens is the press latches onto this and says, well,
(25:08):
I mean, obviously, based on what your findings are, something
was going on with her, and they start framing him
as incompetent and bumbling essentially, and saying that we don't
think that he actually knows what he's talking about, that
he's sort of fibbing in a way to make Mary
look good, when I think he was just trying to
(25:29):
be a nice man and felt uncomfortable revealing information about
a woman and then having people make assumptions about her.
But this starts framing this whole investigation is being sort
of bumbling a little bit.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
He goes outside of the medical evaluation of Mary. All
he can say is that she's not pregnant at the
time of her death, nor does she have any indications
that she's had a recent abortion. He could not draw
a conclusion about her sexual habits prior to her being killed.
And that's where I think, you know, now, when he
(26:03):
makes that statement, people are recognizing that. You know, they're going, oh,
hold on. But everything that he's done, I mean, he's
made some overstatements, but I think fundamentally, for eighteen forty one,
I'm relatively impressed with what doctor Cook was able to discern.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Well because the jerks and the press make such a
big deal about it. Daniel Stashouer, who is the author
of the book that we've been talking about, says that
Mary's body goes through another exam, but this time with
a corner in New York, and the corner in New
York says it wasn't strangulation. She was strangled, but I
find evidence of drowning, and it just sounds like, you know,
(26:41):
if he had agreed, if he had agreed with doctor Cook,
that the press would have skewed him also. But we
see zero evidence that she had been drowned, and it
doesn't seem like there's even like a scene there. We
will find a scene we think later on where we
think this happened, but it was not on the shore
of the Hudson River.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah, you know, and in these instances, with subsequent autopsies,
and those of course still occur today, you know, the
family will hire a private pathologist to kind of come
in and perform a second autopsy. But they are at
such a disadvantage, you know, if a full autopsy is
conducted on the victim's body. On Mary's body, I mean,
(27:20):
she's completely dissected her organs. You know, the standard thing
is all the organs are placed in a plastic bag
and intermingled and cut up and they're now you know,
put back into her abdominal cavity, chess cavity. And she's
also in a so the second New York pathologist maybe
he's seeing things, you know, that he's interpreting. It's just
(27:45):
that her body is so disrupted. I put far more
weight on doctor Cook's initial autopsy, and when it comes
to the drowning because of doctor Cook's experience, I truly
believe that he if he saw evidence of drowning, he
would be detailing that evidence. And he doesn't. He forms
(28:05):
the opposite conclusion and the other aspects such as the
arms being crossed in rigor support she died on land
and then is placed in the water.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Well, we need to now leave the medical section here.
I think we are done with doctor Cook and any
kind of controversy that his very honest autopsy turned up. Instead,
we need to kind of go back to victimology slash profiling.
So investigators, and I think I use that term loosely.
In eighteen thirties New York investigators start focusing in on
(28:38):
Daniel Payne. Even more importantly, the press starts focusing in
on him. There are all kinds of theory swirling around
in the Penny papers about what his potential motive would be.
This is all speculation and probably bs that she was
probably going to leave him, that just before the disappearance
(28:59):
Marian her mom had fought over the relationship that Mary
had with Daniel in their upcoming marriage. Phoebe is not
saying anything one way or the other about this, It's
just speculation. And then of course the thing I mentioned,
the press goes okay. Either Mary was doing something behind
Daniel's back and lying about going to her aunt's house,
or Daniel lied about it because he killed her one
(29:22):
way or the other. Daniel does not come off looking
very well in the press because they're really thinking who
else would this be. In the meantime, Alfred is continuing
to really emphasize how proper Mary was and just sort
of this angelic, wonderful woman. So you two men who
are having very different experiences.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, Now, how many times does a woman end up
dead and the spouse or boyfriend are immediately thought to
be the killer. This right now is a wide open investigation.
Daniel and Alfred are suspects. I use that term. Everybody
kind of assumes that when somebody uses a term suspect, well,
(30:07):
this person, there's a strong case against the person. No,
they're just something suspicious about the person. We have weak suspects.
We have strong suspects Daniel and Alfred because of their
relationship with Mary and because of some of the you know,
this lover's triangle or pseudo lover's triangle situation. Of course
(30:28):
they're going to be under suspicion. But let's take Daniel's
statements of what Mary said she was going to do.
She's going to go walk to her aunt's house. The
suspect pool is anybody. In this case, she could have
run across a serial predator she never met before, and
what's done to her is very much akin to that
type of stranger, fantasy motivated offender. So that is just
(30:51):
as strong of a possibility, and in my mind stronger
possibility with the information that you've told me now, because
I know there's probably going to be more Goatchi's coming down,
But I have to consider a stranger did this to Mary,
or she had a secret life, and whoever she was
meeting up with went off on her, you know, So
(31:11):
all of that is wide open in this case right
now in my mind.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Okay, well, let's talk more about Daniel, who for right
now is the press's prime suspect. Not necessarily investigators, they
want to know more information, but he is so disturbed
by this public campaign against him that he requests this
is welcome to eighteen hundreds seven sworn statements from his brother,
(31:37):
as well as a bunch of bar owners, restaurant owners
that account for his whereabouts that day. He had alibi,
He had various people who saw him pretty much to
the minute, you know, with the exception of the discussion
he had with Mary about meeting her somewhere account for
his day, and he says to Mary's mom, will you
(31:57):
write me a letter that says I looked for your
I wanted to find her. I am not acting weird.
I loved her. I wanted to marry her. And he
turns all of these letters over to the newspaper because
even Phoebe says, okay, I'll write you this letter, and
they finally back off. But he has been what he
describes as basically terrorized by the local press over this story.
(32:22):
I will say, my dad's you know, as I've told you,
started the actual innocence clinic at the University of Texas.
And one of his attorneys who helped him with the
clinic was a guy named Bill Allison, who represented Michael Morton,
who was the man who spent more than twenty years
might have been twenty years exactly twenty years in prison
for murdering his wife in Texas. And you know, he
(32:43):
was exonerated and the real person was found using DNA evidence,
and Bill Allison, my dad's friend, Michael Morton's attorney, said
that when he put Michael Morton on the stand, he
was an awful witness. He said, the innocent man is
an awful witness because they don't know any thing. All
he can say is I don't know what happened. I
just know where I was. I can't give you any details.
(33:06):
And he said people didn't believe him, and that was that.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
This is a scenario that plays itself out over and
over and over again in the pre DNA era, where
now based on circumstantial evidence, suspicious behaviors by the spouse
or the boyfriend, even making statements or confessions, you know,
under the duress of you know, professional interrogators if you will,
by law enforcement, and then DNA has shown no, they
(33:31):
were innocent. And that's where in this case Daniel and Alfred, yes,
they have to be considered. But the other possibilities I
mentioned before, serial predator, secret lover right now, they're all
on the even playing field as far as a you know,
being suspects.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
With Mary's death, Yeah, I mean that is she has
a very big world between the tobacco shop and the
boarding house and just walking through and we've talked about
this with other stories where people disappear after leaving, there's
that whole other world. Well, Daniel has an incredibly difficult
time and for whatever reason, whether he's her killer or
(34:09):
a bereaved you know, fiance. He is tortured over this,
and he has a very sad ending. Probably about three
months or so, I would say, three months after she
has found he goes to New Jersey around the Hoboken area.
He goes to a couple of taverns and says, can
you tell me where the Sibyl's cave is? And not
(34:31):
long after that he is found dead. He had ingested
a fatal amount of laudanum, and this is the note
in his pocket. And I think it's important just because
there's a lot of speculation about it. He says to
the world, here I am on the spot. God forgive
me for my misfortune in my misspent life. And so
(34:54):
of course you've got people who say, well, he was
an awful grief and it was so symbolic that he
did it there where she was found. And then of
course other people said, well, he of course had a
guilty conscience for butchering his fiance. What do you think
about that note?
Speaker 2 (35:08):
No, well, it could go either way. Yeah, there isn't
enough specific information. It's very obtuse. Is that the right word.
It's a little vague it's very vague. I can see
it going both ways, you know, you know, fundamentally it
comes down to, you know, in my mind, with Daniel. Okay,
let's see where the investigation goes. You know, could Daniel
(35:31):
have done this under what we know with Mary being strangled,
sexually assaulted, laying at a location for a period of time,
and then transported and being dumped into the river. Did
he have the means, the opportunity to be able to
accomplish the crime. It doesn't sound like the people that
were involved with the investigation knew how to truly lock
(35:56):
Daniel in one way or the other, you know, with
with the information you know, from his set of circumstances
in this day and age, In all likelihood, there was
seeman evidence with Mary, and this probably would have been
even though she's floating in the Hudson River. Most likely
would be a relatively easy case to solve.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Well, it's funny because all of these rumors that float
around in little bits of information all lead the Penny
Press down some odd roads. Let's talk about Alfred, because
that's whom I was interested in because he seemed like
such a jealous jerk. Yeah, he is never under investigation,
you know, by the police or whatever organized group there
was that was investigating this, but the Penny Press thought
(36:41):
he could be responsible. He says that while there's a
theory in the press that Alfred maybe knew that Mary
had been alive and left town and you know, maybe
he was hiding her away and she was safe. But
this woman posed and the river and he says, oh,
(37:02):
that's Mary Rogers. So they're kind of saying Mary is
actually in like a safe harbor somewhere, like she wanted
to run away from Daniel. That's wild, the speculation was,
even though both Daniel and Mary's mother also identified the
body later on. The idea was that, you know, Alfred
is protecting her and she wanted to flee, and then
(37:22):
he pins her identity on some random woman found in
the Hudson River, which just seems stupid to me.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, I'm not buying that, you know, I did find
that it was curious that Alfred shows up. Yeah, at
the time that that Mary's body is pulled to shore.
It's almost as if, you know, we see this with
offenders who insert themselves into the investigation. They get there,
they're you're kind of walking around the crime scene, or
they're talking to law enforcement trying to get a sense
(37:50):
for his law enforcement onto me. You know, yeah, that
is suspicious as well as just Alfred's jealousy of Daniel
and Mary's relationship. That type of relationship can lead to violence.
So Alfred's got a couple of knocks against him. But
again it's like, okay, where was he that night? You know,
(38:12):
we got to lock his statement in, have to investigate him.
And you know, I think if he was not investigated
by law enforcement back in eighteen forty one, then they
dropped the ball, and that these tabloid reporters, they were
right and at least questioning whether or not Alfred could
be involved. But of course you don't want to see
that type of investigation being conducted in a tabloid.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
So right, and that's what was happening. So, you know,
Alfred keeps going on and on about how virginal she was,
She was not promiscuous. I don't know why he keeps
bringing it up, except to think that maybe he really
did love her and he was very concerned about all
of these details coming out, and again, living in the
era of she must have done something. This is what
(38:56):
happens when you go out by yourself and you're a
young woman, and you're unaccompanied need and you're unmarried. I mean,
that must have been his motivation if he is not
her killer, but he is now. I don't understand him.
He is now suggesting that Mary had been carried off
to a house of ill repute and murdered there. He
keeps inserting himself in this investigation, so I think it's
(39:19):
confusing to the press. Why does he keep saying weird
stuff like that? And I don't understand his motive behind
that either, But what do you think knowing that any
sexual anything, whether it was consensual or not, would have
just ruined her reputation in death.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Also, it seems like everybody surrounding Mary is kind of
saying the same thing about Mary. She's, you know, in essence,
a good girl relative to the standards at the time,
and that was important for these people to say that.
With Alfred, you know, his continued insertion into the investigation
gives me a little bit of pause. You know this
(39:58):
she was, you know, taken to this house of ill
repute and that's where she was killed. Well, is there
some truth to that statement?
Speaker 1 (40:04):
You know?
Speaker 2 (40:05):
And where would that house be It's like, okay, Alfred,
you know what house of ill repute? And now there's
potential witnesses there, you know, is there a crime scene there?
You know. I don't know what to make of Alfred
with the information that we have. I think in some
ways relative to Daniel, I think he's elevated in my
(40:25):
mind as a suspect. But still I'm completely unconvinced of
Alfred's role in Mary's death, Daniel's role in Mary's death.
It could be somebody that we would never ever be
able to identify, you know. Maybe here you are, you know,
(40:46):
eighteen forties and could be somebody that there's no information
on in this day and age that happened to see
Mary walking alone and took advantage of a victim of opportunity.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Well, we'll go through a list of what people in
eighteen forty one predicted who could have done this, who
had the capacity and the motivation to do this. One was,
of course a violent gang. We're in criminal gang activity
time period in Manhattan. In early August of eighteen forty one,
the Penny Papers are running reports that she was seen
(41:20):
in the company of several young men ahead of her death.
This is not the last time that we will hear that.
And then it's conflicting reports. They're saying that this must
have been a gang and of course, remember I told
you the little details from the earlier part of the
investigation I think are twisted. I think they get that
maybe from doctor Cook's report, that at least three men
(41:43):
must have sexually assaulted her, and so they started investigating
gang leaders. Of course they look at the sailor who
she had been with. Everybody's got alibis, so they're really
grasping at straws. But it's not investigators. It's a penny
press that's doing this, not the investigators.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Yeah, everybody's throwing darts. Yeah, is anybody hitting the bull's eye.
I'm not convinced at all how Mary was killed, you know,
sexually motivated crime. Did she meet up with somebody and
he wanted sex and she said no, and then he
forced you know, sex on her and killed her. That's
(42:19):
an absolute possibility.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Well, one little bit of information that's sort of new
for us. About a month after Mary's murder, two young men,
two brothers, found some woman's clothing in a thicket in
Weehawk in New Jersey, which is pretty close to Hoboken,
which is where she was found. The articles of clothing
included a petticoat, a scarf, and a handkerchief. The handkerchief
(42:42):
had Mr embroidered on it, and the clothing was reportedly
mild dude down hard, and the grass had grown around it.
One of the newspapers estimated it had been there for
several weeks. The historical crime detective reported that the ground
was torn up and the shrubbery trampled if the spot
had been the scene of a terrific struggle. Leading out
(43:03):
of the thicket was a broad track, such as might
have been made by dragging the body through bushes. And
this is where they believe that Mary had been murdered.
And I'll tell you about someone hearing a scream on
this night that she was murdered in a minute. But
would all of this stuff still be present? I mean,
I guess it's at the end of the summer. Maybe
(43:25):
there was no rain over a month.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Well, I think that's a distinct possibility. Was Mam able
to identify this clothing as Mary's clothing?
Speaker 1 (43:33):
I believe so, yes, Okay.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
And it sounds like due to the disruption of the shrubbery.
This isn't just where an offender is disposing of the clothing,
but it sounds like there's an interaction happening. So yeah,
this very well could be the homicide scene. Curious about
this broad drag mark because that also could create some
of these abrasions that doctor Cook observed on her back.
(44:00):
They lead to do they lead to a roadside does
not say.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Okay, a broad track that might have been dragging a
body through bushes. So investigators say this is where they
think Mary was murdered. And the boys go home and
tell their mother, who is a woman named Frederica Loss.
She becomes a center of attention pretty quickly. She owns
a tavern. She said that that night that Mary was
(44:24):
last seen, she saw someone who fit Mary's description in
her tavern, in the company of a young man with
a swarthy complexion. They had lemonade that doesn't seem on
brand for a young man with a swarthy complexion, that maybe,
and then she said she heard what sounded like a
scream coming from the direction of this thicket, which was
close to the tavern, and she just thought it was
(44:46):
an animal or a kid or something goofing off, or
one of her own kids. But after the clothing was
discovered the next month, she thought, oh, I wonder if
it was Mary Rogers crying up for help. But you know,
all of this is vague and we don't know.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
I'm putting weight on the mom identifying Mary's clothing, the
initials MR on this clothing. Now, it's going to be
tough to truly assess. Was it actually Mary inside this
tavern with this unknown male? But the scenario kind of
I proposed after hearing what Daniel said Mary told him
she was doing that night about going to the aunt's house.
(45:22):
But Aunt said nope, there was no arrangement like that,
and that Mary may may have been using the aunt's
house as a way to be able to escape and
meet up with somebody. Well that matches this. Did Mary
meet up with a man at this tavern? And then
is this man her killer? Or did she start walking back?
(45:43):
That seems like a long ways to walk from Weehawken
back to the boarding house. I don't know what kind
of mass transit was in effect in the eighteen forties,
but or you know, on her way back, did she
run into somebody else? But wee Hawken is an interesting
location relative to where Mary's body is found, because Mary's
(46:07):
body is not too far away in the Hudson River
from where we Hawken is, you know, so that kind
of adds up in my mind.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Okay, well, one or two more little twists here. There
is a woman named Anne Trout Lohman who I had
read about. She was better known as Madame Restell. She
was a very famous abortionist. She went on trial for
essentially killing one of her patients during an abortion, which
was not uncommon at all. So Daniel Stashoward, the author,
(46:39):
says that her trial, this woman's trial, and the murder
of Mary Rogers are covered at the newspapers at the
same time, and they sort of start to conflate, and
the Penny Press wonders if Mary, she snuck away from Daniel,
used the aunt as an excuse to get an abortion,
and that's how she died, and it was an accidental thing.
(47:01):
Maybe Alfred when he said Mary, I'll help you no
matter what you need, helped procure this abortion, which is
why he was so passionate about saying she was a
good person. She was a good person, and maybe this
wasn't a sexual assault but a you know, abortion gone wrong.
Termination of pregnancy gone wrong and then the body dumped.
(47:21):
But you can tell me because I think you're going
to bring up the underwear and the other stuff that
points to something very different.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Yeah, no, no, no, you know, first, you know, start
with the autopsy. You know, when I'm starting to assess
any case, I always start with the autopsy. And in
this case, doctor Cook explicitly looks for evidence of pregnancy
as well as evidence of abortion. Imagine the barbarity of
(47:47):
how abortions were conducted back in the eighteen forties. I
believe a medical professional like doctor Cook would be able
to discern that there would have been the types of injuries,
if you will, and how thorough would Mary's would the
fetal aspects you know, inside of Mary's body without getting
(48:09):
too gruesome, you know, how thorough is this process back
in the eighteen forties. So I put a lot of
weight on doctor Cook's observations on that front. And then
everything about what happened to Mary, with the ligature being
placed from her own clothing, a gig being shoved into
her mouth, her dress is torn, the evidence, you know,
(48:33):
even though they're trying to say, you know, the bruising
and the abrasions to Mary's genital areas and surrounding area
is related to the abortion. Well no, I mean this
very well could be from the sexual So everything about
this is this is a sexually motivated crime. This is
not a death due to an abortion. And now Mary's
(48:55):
body is being dumped in the river. I don't buy
that at all.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Well, let's just tie this silliness up, because this is
really what Mary Rogers is known for, is a botched abortion.
What happened to her? The big mystery. Nobody goes on
trial for it. Frederica, the woman who owns the tavern
who heard the scream, who saw Mary with a mystery
man a year later, is accidentally shot by one of
those sons with a shotgun. He was cleaning a shotgun
(49:23):
and he shoots her. She is dying, and she says reportedly,
and I say that very loosely. In the penny presses
close to death, she says she actually knows the man
that Mary was with at her tavern. He was a
young physician who was going to terminate her pregnancy. Now
this is Frederica saying this, and this are the newspapers
(49:45):
reporting this, and all of this should be taken obviously
with a grain of salt. There's no evidence of any
of this. But now the press after Fredrika died is
saying it must have happened at her tavern and she
must have been the one that facilla this. And you know,
all of this is to say that the readers of
these newspapers in New York were so desperate to have
(50:09):
this story be done what happened, They wanted something and
that was one of the very last theories that sort
of landed, and that was that I agree with you,
that doesn't sound right to me at all.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Well, you know, first this is people latching onto what
is these essentially conspiracy theories. You know, this is where
the high profile nature of Mary's death. You know, these
these penny tabloids, I'm sure they're they're putting out all
sorts of junk information that that has no basis in fact,
just go right back to the core of the case,
(50:44):
what happened to Mary. Nothing about the actual evidence in
the case supports this theory, the idea of a botched abortion.
Mary is a victim of a sexually motivated crime. It's
just who did it. Somebody who knew her, A stranger,
a secret lover, a businessman that she ran across, you know,
(51:04):
at the tobacco shop, and then became obsessed with her
and was following her around. Who knows, you know, it
could be any of that, but I don't buy anything
about a botched abortion. In this case.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
There was, as I said earlier, no trial, no indictments,
no really formal suspects whatsoever. And then Edgar Allen Poe
gets involved. He used to go buy I mean, I know,
good old Edgar Allan Poe, he used to go buy
that tobacco shop. He looked like had been a little
enamored with Mary himself. He eventually writes a story called
(51:36):
The Mystery of Marie Roja, and it is essentially Mary's story,
but puts her in Paris. He incorporates a lot of
facts of the case. But then, of course, because he's
a fiction author, as I would too, takes a lot
of liberties. And because of that, you know, you're conflating
these this fictional account with the real account, And people
(51:57):
don't do the correct research when they're reading penny papers
that are inaccurate. And so now Mary's story, really, the
real story, has been lost in history, and it's been
completely morphed into something else. And that's why we're telling
it here to try to get the real information in.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
Well, I trust you are giving me the real information.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Well, it's such a sad story because there's no justice
for her. It's a big mystery. She is zero control
over how her life was framed. It's in the newspapers.
It sounds like before this even happened, she was popping
up in the newspapers. This is a foreshadowing when she
disappeared for those few days and said I can do
what I want, don't follow me around, and the press
(52:41):
reported and speculated that was a foreshadowing for what was
going to happen. And now, almost two hundred years later,
you've got still misinformation out there. So there you go.
Paul Hols, don't say I never tried to illuminate things
for you from the eighteen hundreds, but these stories deserve
to be framed correctly.
Speaker 2 (52:59):
I think, Well, for sure, this is a fascinating case.
It's unfortunate that it's just going to remain a mystery,
you know, unless unless the authorities can find some evidence
from the eighteen forties, which is unlikely.
Speaker 1 (53:11):
I'll get right on that, Paul well, a really good
two parter and such a good time period to be
in in a really sad case, and I learned a lot.
I will say, my big takeaway here is there were
corners in the eighteen hundreds who you thought knew their stuff,
and doctor Cook was one of them. And I'm really
(53:31):
glad to introduce you to a corner who actually knew
what he was doing and were saying words that made
sense to you.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
At least up to a point. He knew what he
was doing, except.
Speaker 1 (53:42):
When he said she was moral and tried to go
above his pay grade, and then they really ridiculed him
for it.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
Yeah, absolutely, well.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
And this is where you know it is important just
to underscore whether he had medical training or not, he
had experience, and through experience you get a level of
expertise for sure. So even if he didn't have the
medical degree or the doctor in front of his name,
the fact that he has seen many bodies coming out
(54:11):
of the waterways here, you know, that's that's important. And
that's where you know, I put a lot of weight
on his observations. It's obvious where he overstates, but his
observations to me are the core of understanding what happened
to Mary. I have a good sense of what happened
to Mary. I just don't know who did it.
Speaker 1 (54:30):
To her, and we'll never know, most likely, but boy,
the possibilities were endless. Next week I will try to
bring you a corner or a medical examiner who knows
what they're doing. But I'm going to tell you the
odds are against us, Paul against us. But thank goodness,
we have one in this one. So we'll see what
(54:51):
happens next week.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
Okay, sounds good. I'll try not to be too judgmental.
Speaker 1 (54:54):
Oh, thank you, thank you. Okay, you'll see you next week.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Sounds good. Fine.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
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and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot com slash Buried
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Speaker 2 (55:13):
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Speaker 2 (55:34):
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the criminal mind, is available now
Speaker 1 (55:41):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, my life solving America's
cold cases, is also available now
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried Bones. Hi, Kate, Hey, Paul, you're looking
(01:04):
forward to hearing more about the story of Mary Rogers.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
I am. I haven't stopped thinking about this case since
the last time we talked about it.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
You haven't stopped thinking about a case from eighteen forty one.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Well, it's just, you know, it's like I want to
know this, this and this, you know, And we got
to the point of Mary's body being recovered. Civilians seeing
a decomposing body floating in the water, which I don't
put a lot of weight on their observations, you know,
That's where I'm really interested to see what the medical
people said happened to Mary in terms of her injuries
(01:39):
and stuff. But also you know where her body's located,
you know, outside of the Sibyl's Cave in the Hudson River,
you know. So I actually did some research, some research
on the tides and Hudson River. You know, started rolling
up my sleeves a little bit.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
I mean, thank goodness, we need you to dig in
sometimes on these details that just you can't let go of.
So that's good. So before we do a quick summary
of the case, I just wanted to give a trigger
warning that we are going to be talking about sexual
assault in this case. So Mary Rogers is twenty one,
it's eighteen forty one. It's in New York City, and
(02:18):
she lives at a boarding house that her mother runs,
along with a slew of lodgers, two of whom she's
been involved with, One who she seems to be in
love with and engaged to. He is described as an
alcoholic but a jovial kind of guy. That's Daniel. There's
another man named Alfred who not so much. He really
(02:41):
pines for Mary, but she has sort of rejected him.
At this point he is very angry. He's left in
a huff. And then a month later, Mary Rogers is found,
as you just mentioned, in the Hudson River in a
particular area, and her body has been in the water
for three days, and we are trying to kind of
(03:02):
figure out the level of decomposition. And it's a hot
summer day when she's discovered, and it is very clear
to everyone that has seen her that she has extensive injuries.
And after I hear about your information about the Hudson
River and where she was found, I'll tell you what
the corner says, which I think is very illuminating.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Part of what I want to do is reconstruct based
off of you know, tides, where Mary likely would have
gone into the water. Now she's been in the water
for three days, I think that's an assumption. So that's
part of truly really digging into what Mary looked like,
her state of decomposition. Is there any cessile marine organisms
(03:47):
that are now on her body that could help indicate
how long she's been in the water, et cetera. But
in terms of the currents and the Hudson River, you know,
where did she go into the water, And this is
where I think it's important because that now, if that
can be somewhat isolated, you know, that indicates because we
know where Mary was she left the boarding house. Now
(04:10):
we don't know for sure she never made it to
her aunt's house, and we don't know if she actually
walked in the direction of her aunt's house. And I
don't even know where the aunts house is, but it's
not too far away from the boarding house I'm looking at. Okay,
the boarding house is roughly by City Hall, and where
Mary's body is found floating, it's about maybe a little
less than two and a half miles straight shot, you know,
(04:31):
so it's a significant distance. But the tides are interesting
in the Hudson River, you know, even though it's a
river and you're thinking, you know, currents are flowing one direction. Well,
it turns out, well, the direction of the water in
the Hudson River is based on the tides itself. So
when the tides are rising, the water flows north, and
when the tides are subsiding, which is of course going
(04:54):
to be a daily cycle, the water's flowing south. So
you can see now where Mary's body is kind of
moving no worth moving south from where you know, ultimately
her point of entry was, so that complicates trying to
really narrow down that origin. It's also going to be Okay,
what time if we assume she was killed on July
twenty fifth, eighteen forty one, within a few hours of
(05:16):
her leaving the boarding house, what tide was it at
that time? And then now talking to the marriytime experts, Okay,
how did these tides shift? And can we at least
narrow down an approximate location where Mary's body likely went
into the water and what is that distance? What route
would the offender and Mary have to take to get
(05:39):
to that spot. That helps build up a timeline, so
to speak.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
And so you've got this timeline. If Daniel and Alfred
both have alibis that night, how would the timeline help.
Would we just say, well, one was in the Bronx
and the other one was in Brooklyn, So it couldn't
have been either one of them because we can kind
of predict where body was. Or does that not make sense?
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well it could, you know, Again, it all depends on
what their statements are. But it also if there is
like a somewhat narrow region where Mary's body went into
the water, then it's going and talking to people who
are in that region at the time, you know, Mary,
likeliest place in the water, What did they see, you know?
So it gives the investigation some potential more information and
(06:24):
maybe some more leads to follow up on.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Let's get to the injuries, because we do have a
coroner from New Jersey named doctor and I want to
emphasize I don't know if we've had a coroner who's
a doctor before doctor Richard Cook, who you're either going
to love or think is silly one or the other.
I think, Okay, I really don't remember the last time
(06:50):
we've had doctor before the name of a coroner, and
we've talked about this before. It's you know, an elected position, right,
so he didn't have to have experience, but he says
he has pretty extensive experience examining people who are victims
of drowning. And he says, after looking at Mary's body,
that is not what happened here. I'm gonna just say
(07:12):
a bunch of words that doctor Cook says, and then
I'll stop and then you tell me because these are
all related to drowning, and you tell me if what
he's saying makes sense. This is in regards to a
drowning and why he doesn't think it's a drowning. He
thinks that her blood is too coagulated, and that her
crossed arms, which are in a stiff position that they
can only be uncrossed using force, are not consistent. Those
(07:37):
crossed arms are not consistent with the form that you'd
expect to see in a drowning victim. A person's arms
would likely be moving around their sides ahead of his
or her death. He says. The face when I examined
it was suffused with blood, bruised blood. There was frothy
blood still issuing from the mouth, but no foam, which
(08:00):
issues from the mouth of persons who die by drowning.
Her face was swollen, the veins were highly distended. If
she had been drowned, there would not have been those
particular appearances that I found in the veins. What is
he saying?
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Okay, Well, what he's saying is is Mary was killed
and left on land for a period of time and
then placed in the water. Her posture in the water
on her back, with the arms crossed, that didn't add
up to me. So he's he is saying, Okay, she's
in rigor. You know at the time he's conducting the autopsy,
(08:37):
and she must have been entering rigor with her arms
in this position when she was placed in the water,
So the arms don't just flop down as what you
typically see when you have, let's say, somebody who has
been freshly killed and put in the water, or somebody
who drowns and now goes limp. So this is important
because now, kind of like I said, we're assuming Mary
(08:58):
was in the water for three days. Doctor Cook, who's
got what sounds like extensive experience because he's dealing with
bodies out of the waterways here in the New York
area all the time, coming through the coroner's office, so
he is an expert, and so I put a lot
of veracity on his observations. So now we have a
(09:19):
larger window of time where Mary walks away from the
boarding house. We don't know what happens, but she runs
across an offender, she's killed, and then there's a time period,
unknown time period in which Mary is not necessarily left,
but she is not in the water for a period
(09:39):
of time to allow rigor to develop and her arms
to be fixed in this cross position. Now, of course,
does he have the expertise to observe potential binding marks
like her arms have been bound and would those be
obscured by being in the water for a period of
time and likely not, you know. But that's where this
(10:01):
gets interesting, because now the offender is either with Mary
for a period of time after she's dead and then
places her in the water, or the offender leaves Mary
in a hidden location and then comes back and moves
her body and dumps it into the water.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
He has a lot of details that I think are
really interesting and they're sort of out of order, but
I want to go back real quick because he says
a lot of phrases that I don't know why they're
relevant to a drowning specifically, So her blood is too coagulated,
What does that have to do with drowning and what
does he mean by that?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Well, this is where you start talking about sort of
the water intrusion into the body, and what he is
noticing is is that there's a lack of the intrusion.
You know, the blood when it gets dilute, doesn't coagulate.
And so he's observing like he's seen all these other
drowning victims who have been in the water. You know,
the water for at least as long as Mary, if
(10:55):
not much longer, and he generally doesn't see the blood
start to thicken up and coagulate inside the body like
what he's seeing with Mary. So he's also drawing that opinion, Yeah,
she's dead before going in now. Of course, you know,
one of the diagnostic aspects of drowning victims is you know,
(11:16):
as they're in the water, still alive, they ultimately breathe
water into their lungs. And he's making an observation that
that's not the case. I don't know if he said
that very clearly, but he's talking about there is bloody foam,
but there isn't the froth that he typically sees in
a drowning victim. You know, you get this bloody purge
(11:38):
when somebody dies and you've got some decomposition going on.
But this froth is what he's kind of keying in on,
going what's coming out of her mouth, her nasal mouth
area is not consistent with what he sees with drowning victims.
You know, where now you have the water that is
mixing with the physiological fluids internally, and then now you
have this foamy material that is now being exuded out
(11:58):
of the oral cavity, out of the nostrils.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Am I dense in thinking? How would frothy material be
anywhere on her body when she's been in the water
for so long, banging against stuff and being washed over.
How is anything frothy or any blood external blood or
anything showing up on her body? Or am I misunderstanding?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
It's after she's pulled out of the water. Oh okay,
you know, so, yeah, for sure, something like that froth
is going to wash away. But after she's taken out
of the water and you've got you know, maybe some
of the some air still within the lung cavity, You've
got gases that are developing as a matter of decomposition
as those are being expressed up through the trachea and
(12:40):
then out of the oral cavity. If there is the
blood or if there is this secretion as a result
of it's almost like an edema. You know, the lungs
they're trying to protect themselves and they get exposed to
the water, and now you have the body reacting and
you've got these proteins and cells, and the air mixes
(13:00):
with that. It creates that froth and so now that's
what happens after she's pulled out of the water.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
You know, we did a tenfold season season eleven, and
I think I might have mentioned this to you. A
woman who dies mysteriously in a fire. When the women
in the village were dressing her, this is in the
sixteen hundreds, were dressing her, there was some blood that
came out of her man I think through her nose
or her ear maybe, And in the sixteen hundreds, that
was a sign of the devil that she had been overtaken.
(13:28):
I know you're smiling, but this was not a funny
matter in the sixteen hundreds. But they didn't understand that.
So I'm glad that you clarified so nobody thinks this
is attached to the devil. I don't know why. I'm
surprised by that that things come out of people's bodies,
you know, after they die. It's really interesting.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
Yeah, you know, and that's just a lot of that
is just experience and seeing bodies that are dead, you know.
And if you go and see somebody who's overdosed and
you see the froth that is coming out of their mouth,
they've overdosed on something like heroin, now to a suspicious
death that involved a teenage boy that drank way too
much cough suroupe and codeine, and he had all this
(14:07):
froth coming out of his mouth and his nose. You know,
that's just part of the body's physiological response.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Well, let me give you some more information. So it
sounds like, right now, you're a fan of doctor Cook,
it sounds like he knows somewhat what he's doing here,
because so far he's giving you some pretty good details, right.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
You know, for a doctor in eighteen forty one, who
is you know, pulling bodies out of the waterways in
New York all the time, and looking at him, he
has expertise. Yeah, maybe not at the level of a
modern forensic pathologist, but what he is describing and observing
I put far more weight on than anybody that was
(14:47):
on the shore, you know, poking her with a stick
and saying how horrendous she looked.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Right now, he is, of course convinced that she's been murdered.
And I'll tell you why I buried the lead a
little bit. There's two things that lead him to believe
that she died of strangulation, and I think he thinks
it's important to establish specifically how she died. So I'm
going to tell you the less interesting one. He says
that this is a quote, a deep bruise about the
(15:14):
size and shape of a man's thumb on the right
side of her neck, near the jugular vein, and he
found several smaller bruises on the left side resembling the
shape of a man's finger. So really that would be
present still after three days in some decomposition, he would
be able to see those markings that clearly to say
this came from a man.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Well, probably overstating the source of these bruises, but the
observation of those bruises is important, you know. But more
important is did he dissect the neck?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Well, I don't have information on the neck because he's
concentrating on her lower region, and I'll get to that
in a second. Because what he finds that is very
obvious to everybody is that there is a piece of
lace which has been pulled from her underskirt and it
is wrapped around her neck, and somebody made a gag
(16:08):
from her underwear. Okay, so he is saying that he
thinks she has been strangled both with this lace and
gagged and manually strangled and that's what happened to her body,
and of course beaten beyond belief.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, and the duality in terms of the strangulation methods
is relatively common. Oftentimes the offender will start with manual
strangulation and either kills the victim that way or the
victim succumbs goes unconscious, and then a ligature is applied
to the neck afterwards. So that is a sequence that
(16:43):
is often seen and I've talked about this I think
a little bit before on Buried Bones. Is that you know,
many of these offenders they don't know if they've actually
accomplished killing the person through strangulation. They just know the
person is unconscious, and so to ensure that the person
is dead, then they will go ahead and apply a
ligature so that that person actually there's no way that person,
(17:05):
that victim could could recover from that. The offender is
utilizing the victim's own clothing, He's not bringing binding material
with him, so that's that's a significant observation. And the
ligature that is being used is coming from an undergarment,
you know, So this starts to really support that this
is a sexually motivated crime, but it sounds like there's
(17:26):
other observations on her body that you're going to get to.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Quite a few. First of all, she does have ligature
marks on her wrists.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Okay, so binding marks.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
They say ligature, So what's it tell me what the
difference is.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, this is a little bit of a pet peeve
in terms of the use of these these terms. So,
a ligature is a material that encircles a body part
to cut off circulation. Binding is a material that is
applied to the extremities to prevent movement. People often will call,
(17:58):
you know, bindings on the wrist as ligatures. Well, the
offender is not applying this binding material to cut off
circulation to the victim's hands. They're doing it to prevent movement.
When I'm talking to let's say, other experts, and I
see them or hear them misusing those terms, I go, oh, well,
maybe they're not as much of an expert as what
I thought they were. Oh no, So everybody out there
(18:22):
dial in on ligature versus binding.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Okay, So I'm going to get to his speculation in
a minute, but we'll continue on with this autopsy. So
let's talk about the potential sexual assault here. He says
Mary's not pregnant at the time of her death, and
actually that note's going to be important later on. He
does not see evidence that she was pregnant, like as
(18:45):
in a termination of pregnancy. So this is what he finds.
Bruising in abrasions in the quote unquote feminine region, as
well as skin that is rubbed raw on her back
and her shoulders. So he says that he leaves that
she has been laid down on a rough surface and
sexually assaulted. He says, by quote no fewer than three assailants.
(19:10):
I have no idea why. He thinks that it must
have just been the vast amount of injuries that she
had that he just thought one guy is not going
to be able to do this. But he says she
was sexually assaulted before or after she was killed. He
is sure of it.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
So I'm liking doctor Cook's observations. And yes, there are
instances on women's bodies with these types of abrasions on
the buttocks region or the lower back as well as
the upper back during sexual assault and if they've been
on a substrate that is somewhat rough. So he spot
on with that, though you know that can also those
(19:47):
types of abrations can occur from other activities, you know,
a body dragging, movement of body, transport a body. But
this statement about at least three men, no, no way
could he ever make that detail. Basically, we don't know
how many men. I mean, could multiple offenders have sexually
assaulted Mary, absolutely, but the likelihood of that is low
(20:09):
relative to a single offender operating by himself.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
It sounds like he might have been insinuating it was
one of these criminal gangs roaming the streets of New York.
But he's got some more observations. He believes that she
had been undressed and then killed, and then dressed back
in her clothes, including her hat, and then her body
was moved to its dumping spot in the river. I
(20:35):
have never understood why redressing If you're just going to
dump her in the river, Why put her clothes and
including her hat, and she had her gloves onto.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
This is more common than not in terms of the
offender either allowing the victim to redress and then killing
the victim, or you know, kills a victim and then
redresses a victim. It's not an unusual circumstance. Now you
think about in this case, the offender likely is not
sexually assaulting Mary right on the shore you know of
(21:05):
you know, of Sybil's cave or something somewhere else. Now
he has to transport a body. If he's seen, it's
probably a little suspicious that he's got a nude female
body and a bag of clothes versus well, I'm going
to put the clothes on the female's body, and he
might be able to pass her off as having you know,
gone unconscious because she had too much to drink, you know,
or people will just see her, who knows, if there's
(21:28):
a carriage is involved, you know, and she's just propped
up to look like she's asleep. But there's a practical
aspect in this situation. And like I said, as I
believe based on doctor Cook's observations that Mary is not
in the water for a period of time. Don't know
how long that is, But there may be something that
(21:50):
the offender is now redressing Mary knowing well she's going
to be laying at a location while I try to
figure out what I'm going to do with her.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Is the crossing of her arm before rigor and then
you know that's how she ends up. Does that tell
you anything or That wouldn't have been something she would
have done. It would have been him. Does that tell
you anything about the guy? About the person?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
In most instances, when you see arms and legs being
bound up, it's for packaging, okay, it's to make the
body easier to move.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Well, speaking of packaging, this is what doctor Cook says happened.
He said, whoever did this, if there's more than one person,
you know, whoever moved her actually moved her tore off
a piece of her dress and tied it around her
waist after she had been redressed, and used it like
a handle to move her body. He said it wasn't
(22:42):
delicate either, because she's got scratch marks and drag marks
all over herself. I had thought, for a millisecond, would
you really need that? You would need a handle? I
don't know. Is that odd to you?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
I've actually I consulted on a case, in fact, one
that I presented with max Eryl McCollum on a crime cruise,
in which it wasn't the woman's own clothing, but the
way that the rope had been used to bind her
up as well as went through the belt loops around
her waist, And it was for the same reason this
(23:15):
was to provide a carrying handle. Even though Mary's petite,
likely she still weighs over one hundred pounds, and you
think about something like picking up a ninety pound bag
of cement that's still heavy for most people. Now you
have a body that has length, a body that possibly
(23:38):
is going to flop around, and now Mary's in rigor,
so some of that flopping is not going to occur.
But this offender sounds like, well, I need to make
my life easier and recognize that there's an article of
clothing with Mary that had the strength to be able
to utilize it as a handle, and it's just the
(24:00):
offender making his life easier.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Well, we now have a series of decisions made that
will affect the way that people view Mary Rogers moving forward,
So it starts really with doctor Cook. He says to
the press that Mary had evidently been a person of
chastity and correct habits. Probably that meant because she wasn't pregnant,
(24:25):
and he didn't find evidence that she had been recently pregnant,
But modern day authors have said it's probably because out
of propriety, he was trying to preserve her dignity, particularly
about the way she was found and it seemed clear
to him that she had been sexually assaulted and this
was not rough sex or you know, consensual in any way,
(24:45):
but because he had to report on the state of
all of her body, it would have been sort of salacious.
And we're also in a time period when people would
have said the woman was asking for it or she
did something, and this is a woman who been in
the society pages, that she must have been promiscuous. Instead,
what happens is the press latches onto this and says, well,
(25:08):
I mean, obviously, based on what your findings are, something
was going on with her, and they start framing him
as incompetent and bumbling essentially, and saying that we don't
think that he actually knows what he's talking about, that
he's sort of fibbing in a way to make Mary
look good, when I think he was just trying to
(25:29):
be a nice man and felt uncomfortable revealing information about
a woman and then having people make assumptions about her.
But this starts framing this whole investigation is being sort
of bumbling a little bit.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
He goes outside of the medical evaluation of Mary. All
he can say is that she's not pregnant at the
time of her death, nor does she have any indications
that she's had a recent abortion. He could not draw
a conclusion about her sexual habits prior to her being killed.
And that's where I think, you know, now, when he
(26:03):
makes that statement, people are recognizing that. You know, they're going, oh,
hold on. But everything that he's done, I mean, he's
made some overstatements, but I think fundamentally, for eighteen forty one,
I'm relatively impressed with what doctor Cook was able to discern.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Well because the jerks and the press make such a
big deal about it. Daniel Stashouer, who is the author
of the book that we've been talking about, says that
Mary's body goes through another exam, but this time with
a corner in New York, and the corner in New
York says it wasn't strangulation. She was strangled, but I
find evidence of drowning, and it just sounds like, you know,
(26:41):
if he had agreed, if he had agreed with doctor Cook,
that the press would have skewed him also. But we
see zero evidence that she had been drowned, and it
doesn't seem like there's even like a scene there. We
will find a scene we think later on where we
think this happened, but it was not on the shore
of the Hudson River.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah, you know, and in these instances, with subsequent autopsies,
and those of course still occur today, you know, the
family will hire a private pathologist to kind of come
in and perform a second autopsy. But they are at
such a disadvantage, you know, if a full autopsy is
conducted on the victim's body. On Mary's body, I mean,
(27:20):
she's completely dissected her organs. You know, the standard thing
is all the organs are placed in a plastic bag
and intermingled and cut up and they're now you know,
put back into her abdominal cavity, chess cavity. And she's
also in a so the second New York pathologist maybe
he's seeing things, you know, that he's interpreting. It's just
(27:45):
that her body is so disrupted. I put far more
weight on doctor Cook's initial autopsy, and when it comes
to the drowning because of doctor Cook's experience, I truly
believe that he if he saw evidence of drowning, he
would be detailing that evidence. And he doesn't. He forms
(28:05):
the opposite conclusion and the other aspects such as the
arms being crossed in rigor support she died on land
and then is placed in the water.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Well, we need to now leave the medical section here.
I think we are done with doctor Cook and any
kind of controversy that his very honest autopsy turned up. Instead,
we need to kind of go back to victimology slash profiling.
So investigators, and I think I use that term loosely.
In eighteen thirties New York investigators start focusing in on
(28:38):
Daniel Payne. Even more importantly, the press starts focusing in
on him. There are all kinds of theory swirling around
in the Penny papers about what his potential motive would be.
This is all speculation and probably bs that she was
probably going to leave him, that just before the disappearance
(28:59):
Marian her mom had fought over the relationship that Mary
had with Daniel in their upcoming marriage. Phoebe is not
saying anything one way or the other about this, It's
just speculation. And then of course the thing I mentioned,
the press goes okay. Either Mary was doing something behind
Daniel's back and lying about going to her aunt's house,
or Daniel lied about it because he killed her one
(29:22):
way or the other. Daniel does not come off looking
very well in the press because they're really thinking who
else would this be. In the meantime, Alfred is continuing
to really emphasize how proper Mary was and just sort
of this angelic, wonderful woman. So you two men who
are having very different experiences.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Yeah, Now, how many times does a woman end up
dead and the spouse or boyfriend are immediately thought to
be the killer. This right now is a wide open investigation.
Daniel and Alfred are suspects. I use that term. Everybody
kind of assumes that when somebody uses a term suspect, well,
(30:07):
this person, there's a strong case against the person. No,
they're just something suspicious about the person. We have weak suspects.
We have strong suspects Daniel and Alfred because of their
relationship with Mary and because of some of the you know,
this lover's triangle or pseudo lover's triangle situation. Of course
(30:28):
they're going to be under suspicion. But let's take Daniel's
statements of what Mary said she was going to do.
She's going to go walk to her aunt's house. The
suspect pool is anybody. In this case, she could have
run across a serial predator she never met before, and
what's done to her is very much akin to that
type of stranger, fantasy motivated offender. So that is just
(30:51):
as strong of a possibility, and in my mind stronger
possibility with the information that you've told me now, because
I know there's probably going to be more Goatchi's coming down,
But I have to consider a stranger did this to Mary,
or she had a secret life, and whoever she was
meeting up with went off on her, you know, So
(31:11):
all of that is wide open in this case right
now in my mind.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Okay, well, let's talk more about Daniel, who for right
now is the press's prime suspect. Not necessarily investigators, they
want to know more information, but he is so disturbed
by this public campaign against him that he requests this
is welcome to eighteen hundreds seven sworn statements from his brother,
(31:37):
as well as a bunch of bar owners, restaurant owners
that account for his whereabouts that day. He had alibi,
He had various people who saw him pretty much to
the minute, you know, with the exception of the discussion
he had with Mary about meeting her somewhere account for
his day, and he says to Mary's mom, will you
(31:57):
write me a letter that says I looked for your
I wanted to find her. I am not acting weird.
I loved her. I wanted to marry her. And he
turns all of these letters over to the newspaper because
even Phoebe says, okay, I'll write you this letter, and
they finally back off. But he has been what he
describes as basically terrorized by the local press over this story.
(32:22):
I will say, my dad's you know, as I've told you,
started the actual innocence clinic at the University of Texas.
And one of his attorneys who helped him with the
clinic was a guy named Bill Allison, who represented Michael Morton,
who was the man who spent more than twenty years
might have been twenty years exactly twenty years in prison
for murdering his wife in Texas. And you know, he
(32:43):
was exonerated and the real person was found using DNA evidence,
and Bill Allison, my dad's friend, Michael Morton's attorney, said
that when he put Michael Morton on the stand, he
was an awful witness. He said, the innocent man is
an awful witness because they don't know any thing. All
he can say is I don't know what happened. I
just know where I was. I can't give you any details.
(33:06):
And he said people didn't believe him, and that was that.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
This is a scenario that plays itself out over and
over and over again in the pre DNA era, where
now based on circumstantial evidence, suspicious behaviors by the spouse
or the boyfriend, even making statements or confessions, you know,
under the duress of you know, professional interrogators if you will,
by law enforcement, and then DNA has shown no, they
(33:31):
were innocent. And that's where in this case Daniel and Alfred, yes,
they have to be considered. But the other possibilities I
mentioned before, serial predator, secret lover right now, they're all
on the even playing field as far as a you know,
being suspects.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
With Mary's death, Yeah, I mean that is she has
a very big world between the tobacco shop and the
boarding house and just walking through and we've talked about
this with other stories where people disappear after leaving, there's
that whole other world. Well, Daniel has an incredibly difficult
time and for whatever reason, whether he's her killer or
(34:09):
a bereaved you know, fiance. He is tortured over this,
and he has a very sad ending. Probably about three
months or so, I would say, three months after she
has found he goes to New Jersey around the Hoboken area.
He goes to a couple of taverns and says, can
you tell me where the Sibyl's cave is? And not
(34:31):
long after that he is found dead. He had ingested
a fatal amount of laudanum, and this is the note
in his pocket. And I think it's important just because
there's a lot of speculation about it. He says to
the world, here I am on the spot. God forgive
me for my misfortune in my misspent life. And so
(34:54):
of course you've got people who say, well, he was
an awful grief and it was so symbolic that he
did it there where she was found. And then of
course other people said, well, he of course had a
guilty conscience for butchering his fiance. What do you think
about that note?
Speaker 2 (35:08):
No, well, it could go either way. Yeah, there isn't
enough specific information. It's very obtuse. Is that the right word.
It's a little vague it's very vague. I can see
it going both ways, you know, you know, fundamentally it
comes down to, you know, in my mind, with Daniel. Okay,
let's see where the investigation goes. You know, could Daniel
(35:31):
have done this under what we know with Mary being strangled,
sexually assaulted, laying at a location for a period of time,
and then transported and being dumped into the river. Did
he have the means, the opportunity to be able to
accomplish the crime. It doesn't sound like the people that
were involved with the investigation knew how to truly lock
(35:56):
Daniel in one way or the other, you know, with
with the information you know, from his set of circumstances
in this day and age, In all likelihood, there was
seeman evidence with Mary, and this probably would have been
even though she's floating in the Hudson River. Most likely
would be a relatively easy case to solve.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Well, it's funny because all of these rumors that float
around in little bits of information all lead the Penny
Press down some odd roads. Let's talk about Alfred, because
that's whom I was interested in because he seemed like
such a jealous jerk. Yeah, he is never under investigation,
you know, by the police or whatever organized group there
was that was investigating this, but the Penny Press thought
(36:41):
he could be responsible. He says that while there's a
theory in the press that Alfred maybe knew that Mary
had been alive and left town and you know, maybe
he was hiding her away and she was safe. But
this woman posed and the river and he says, oh,
(37:02):
that's Mary Rogers. So they're kind of saying Mary is
actually in like a safe harbor somewhere, like she wanted
to run away from Daniel. That's wild, the speculation was,
even though both Daniel and Mary's mother also identified the
body later on. The idea was that, you know, Alfred
is protecting her and she wanted to flee, and then
(37:22):
he pins her identity on some random woman found in
the Hudson River, which just seems stupid to me.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, I'm not buying that, you know, I did find
that it was curious that Alfred shows up. Yeah, at
the time that that Mary's body is pulled to shore.
It's almost as if, you know, we see this with
offenders who insert themselves into the investigation. They get there,
they're you're kind of walking around the crime scene, or
they're talking to law enforcement trying to get a sense
(37:50):
for his law enforcement onto me. You know, yeah, that
is suspicious as well as just Alfred's jealousy of Daniel
and Mary's relationship. That type of relationship can lead to violence.
So Alfred's got a couple of knocks against him. But
again it's like, okay, where was he that night? You know,
(38:12):
we got to lock his statement in, have to investigate him.
And you know, I think if he was not investigated
by law enforcement back in eighteen forty one, then they
dropped the ball, and that these tabloid reporters, they were
right and at least questioning whether or not Alfred could
be involved. But of course you don't want to see
that type of investigation being conducted in a tabloid.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
So right, and that's what was happening. So, you know,
Alfred keeps going on and on about how virginal she was,
She was not promiscuous. I don't know why he keeps
bringing it up, except to think that maybe he really
did love her and he was very concerned about all
of these details coming out, and again, living in the
era of she must have done something. This is what
(38:56):
happens when you go out by yourself and you're a
young woman, and you're unaccompanied need and you're unmarried. I mean,
that must have been his motivation if he is not
her killer, but he is now. I don't understand him.
He is now suggesting that Mary had been carried off
to a house of ill repute and murdered there. He
keeps inserting himself in this investigation, so I think it's
(39:19):
confusing to the press. Why does he keep saying weird
stuff like that? And I don't understand his motive behind
that either, But what do you think knowing that any
sexual anything, whether it was consensual or not, would have
just ruined her reputation in death.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Also, it seems like everybody surrounding Mary is kind of
saying the same thing about Mary. She's, you know, in essence,
a good girl relative to the standards at the time,
and that was important for these people to say that.
With Alfred, you know, his continued insertion into the investigation
gives me a little bit of pause. You know this
(39:58):
she was, you know, taken to this house of ill
repute and that's where she was killed. Well, is there
some truth to that statement?
Speaker 1 (40:04):
You know?
Speaker 2 (40:05):
And where would that house be It's like, okay, Alfred,
you know what house of ill repute? And now there's
potential witnesses there, you know, is there a crime scene there?
You know. I don't know what to make of Alfred
with the information that we have. I think in some
ways relative to Daniel, I think he's elevated in my
(40:25):
mind as a suspect. But still I'm completely unconvinced of
Alfred's role in Mary's death, Daniel's role in Mary's death.
It could be somebody that we would never ever be
able to identify, you know. Maybe here you are, you know,
(40:46):
eighteen forties and could be somebody that there's no information
on in this day and age that happened to see
Mary walking alone and took advantage of a victim of opportunity.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Well, we'll go through a list of what people in
eighteen forty one predicted who could have done this, who
had the capacity and the motivation to do this. One was,
of course a violent gang. We're in criminal gang activity
time period in Manhattan. In early August of eighteen forty one,
the Penny Papers are running reports that she was seen
(41:20):
in the company of several young men ahead of her death.
This is not the last time that we will hear that.
And then it's conflicting reports. They're saying that this must
have been a gang and of course, remember I told
you the little details from the earlier part of the
investigation I think are twisted. I think they get that
maybe from doctor Cook's report, that at least three men
(41:43):
must have sexually assaulted her, and so they started investigating
gang leaders. Of course they look at the sailor who
she had been with. Everybody's got alibis, so they're really
grasping at straws. But it's not investigators. It's a penny
press that's doing this, not the investigators.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
Yeah, everybody's throwing darts. Yeah, is anybody hitting the bull's eye.
I'm not convinced at all how Mary was killed, you know,
sexually motivated crime. Did she meet up with somebody and
he wanted sex and she said no, and then he
forced you know, sex on her and killed her. That's
(42:19):
an absolute possibility.
Speaker 1 (42:21):
Well, one little bit of information that's sort of new
for us. About a month after Mary's murder, two young men,
two brothers, found some woman's clothing in a thicket in
Weehawk in New Jersey, which is pretty close to Hoboken,
which is where she was found. The articles of clothing
included a petticoat, a scarf, and a handkerchief. The handkerchief
(42:42):
had Mr embroidered on it, and the clothing was reportedly
mild dude down hard, and the grass had grown around it.
One of the newspapers estimated it had been there for
several weeks. The historical crime detective reported that the ground
was torn up and the shrubbery trampled if the spot
had been the scene of a terrific struggle. Leading out
(43:03):
of the thicket was a broad track, such as might
have been made by dragging the body through bushes. And
this is where they believe that Mary had been murdered.
And I'll tell you about someone hearing a scream on
this night that she was murdered in a minute. But
would all of this stuff still be present? I mean,
I guess it's at the end of the summer. Maybe
(43:25):
there was no rain over a month.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
Well, I think that's a distinct possibility. Was Mam able
to identify this clothing as Mary's clothing?
Speaker 1 (43:33):
I believe so, yes, Okay.
Speaker 2 (43:36):
And it sounds like due to the disruption of the shrubbery.
This isn't just where an offender is disposing of the clothing,
but it sounds like there's an interaction happening. So yeah,
this very well could be the homicide scene. Curious about
this broad drag mark because that also could create some
of these abrasions that doctor Cook observed on her back.
(44:00):
They lead to do they lead to a roadside does
not say.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Okay, a broad track that might have been dragging a
body through bushes. So investigators say this is where they
think Mary was murdered. And the boys go home and
tell their mother, who is a woman named Frederica Loss.
She becomes a center of attention pretty quickly. She owns
a tavern. She said that that night that Mary was
(44:24):
last seen, she saw someone who fit Mary's description in
her tavern, in the company of a young man with
a swarthy complexion. They had lemonade that doesn't seem on
brand for a young man with a swarthy complexion, that maybe,
and then she said she heard what sounded like a
scream coming from the direction of this thicket, which was
close to the tavern, and she just thought it was
(44:46):
an animal or a kid or something goofing off, or
one of her own kids. But after the clothing was
discovered the next month, she thought, oh, I wonder if
it was Mary Rogers crying up for help. But you know,
all of this is vague and we don't know.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
I'm putting weight on the mom identifying Mary's clothing, the
initials MR on this clothing. Now, it's going to be
tough to truly assess. Was it actually Mary inside this
tavern with this unknown male? But the scenario kind of
I proposed after hearing what Daniel said Mary told him
she was doing that night about going to the aunt's house.
(45:22):
But Aunt said nope, there was no arrangement like that,
and that Mary may may have been using the aunt's
house as a way to be able to escape and
meet up with somebody. Well that matches this. Did Mary
meet up with a man at this tavern? And then
is this man her killer? Or did she start walking back?
(45:43):
That seems like a long ways to walk from Weehawken
back to the boarding house. I don't know what kind
of mass transit was in effect in the eighteen forties,
but or you know, on her way back, did she
run into somebody else? But wee Hawken is an interesting
location relative to where Mary's body is found, because Mary's
(46:07):
body is not too far away in the Hudson River
from where we Hawken is, you know, so that kind
of adds up in my mind.
Speaker 1 (46:15):
Okay, well, one or two more little twists here. There
is a woman named Anne Trout Lohman who I had
read about. She was better known as Madame Restell. She
was a very famous abortionist. She went on trial for
essentially killing one of her patients during an abortion, which
was not uncommon at all. So Daniel Stashoward, the author,
(46:39):
says that her trial, this woman's trial, and the murder
of Mary Rogers are covered at the newspapers at the
same time, and they sort of start to conflate, and
the Penny Press wonders if Mary, she snuck away from Daniel,
used the aunt as an excuse to get an abortion,
and that's how she died, and it was an accidental thing.
(47:01):
Maybe Alfred when he said Mary, I'll help you no
matter what you need, helped procure this abortion, which is
why he was so passionate about saying she was a
good person. She was a good person, and maybe this
wasn't a sexual assault but a you know, abortion gone wrong.
Termination of pregnancy gone wrong and then the body dumped.
(47:21):
But you can tell me because I think you're going
to bring up the underwear and the other stuff that
points to something very different.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
Yeah, no, no, no, you know, first, you know, start
with the autopsy. You know, when I'm starting to assess
any case, I always start with the autopsy. And in
this case, doctor Cook explicitly looks for evidence of pregnancy
as well as evidence of abortion. Imagine the barbarity of
(47:47):
how abortions were conducted back in the eighteen forties. I
believe a medical professional like doctor Cook would be able
to discern that there would have been the types of injuries,
if you will, and how thorough would Mary's would the
fetal aspects you know, inside of Mary's body without getting
(48:09):
too gruesome, you know, how thorough is this process back
in the eighteen forties. So I put a lot of
weight on doctor Cook's observations on that front. And then
everything about what happened to Mary, with the ligature being
placed from her own clothing, a gig being shoved into
her mouth, her dress is torn, the evidence, you know,
(48:33):
even though they're trying to say, you know, the bruising
and the abrasions to Mary's genital areas and surrounding area
is related to the abortion. Well no, I mean this
very well could be from the sexual So everything about
this is this is a sexually motivated crime. This is
not a death due to an abortion. And now Mary's
(48:55):
body is being dumped in the river. I don't buy
that at all.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Well, let's just tie this silliness up, because this is
really what Mary Rogers is known for, is a botched abortion.
What happened to her? The big mystery. Nobody goes on
trial for it. Frederica, the woman who owns the tavern
who heard the scream, who saw Mary with a mystery
man a year later, is accidentally shot by one of
those sons with a shotgun. He was cleaning a shotgun
(49:23):
and he shoots her. She is dying, and she says reportedly,
and I say that very loosely. In the penny presses
close to death, she says she actually knows the man
that Mary was with at her tavern. He was a
young physician who was going to terminate her pregnancy. Now
this is Frederica saying this, and this are the newspapers
(49:45):
reporting this, and all of this should be taken obviously
with a grain of salt. There's no evidence of any
of this. But now the press after Fredrika died is
saying it must have happened at her tavern and she
must have been the one that facilla this. And you know,
all of this is to say that the readers of
these newspapers in New York were so desperate to have
(50:09):
this story be done what happened, They wanted something and
that was one of the very last theories that sort
of landed, and that was that I agree with you,
that doesn't sound right to me at all.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Well, you know, first this is people latching onto what
is these essentially conspiracy theories. You know, this is where
the high profile nature of Mary's death. You know, these
these penny tabloids, I'm sure they're they're putting out all
sorts of junk information that that has no basis in fact,
just go right back to the core of the case,
(50:44):
what happened to Mary. Nothing about the actual evidence in
the case supports this theory, the idea of a botched abortion.
Mary is a victim of a sexually motivated crime. It's
just who did it. Somebody who knew her, A stranger,
a secret lover, a businessman that she ran across, you know,
(51:04):
at the tobacco shop, and then became obsessed with her
and was following her around. Who knows, you know, it
could be any of that, but I don't buy anything
about a botched abortion. In this case.
Speaker 1 (51:15):
There was, as I said earlier, no trial, no indictments,
no really formal suspects whatsoever. And then Edgar Allen Poe
gets involved. He used to go buy I mean, I know,
good old Edgar Allan Poe, he used to go buy
that tobacco shop. He looked like had been a little
enamored with Mary himself. He eventually writes a story called
(51:36):
The Mystery of Marie Roja, and it is essentially Mary's story,
but puts her in Paris. He incorporates a lot of
facts of the case. But then, of course, because he's
a fiction author, as I would too, takes a lot
of liberties. And because of that, you know, you're conflating
these this fictional account with the real account, And people
(51:57):
don't do the correct research when they're reading penny papers
that are inaccurate. And so now Mary's story, really, the
real story, has been lost in history, and it's been
completely morphed into something else. And that's why we're telling
it here to try to get the real information in.
Speaker 2 (52:16):
Well, I trust you are giving me the real information.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
Well, it's such a sad story because there's no justice
for her. It's a big mystery. She is zero control
over how her life was framed. It's in the newspapers.
It sounds like before this even happened, she was popping
up in the newspapers. This is a foreshadowing when she
disappeared for those few days and said I can do
what I want, don't follow me around, and the press
(52:41):
reported and speculated that was a foreshadowing for what was
going to happen. And now, almost two hundred years later,
you've got still misinformation out there. So there you go.
Paul Hols, don't say I never tried to illuminate things
for you from the eighteen hundreds, but these stories deserve
to be framed correctly.
Speaker 2 (52:59):
I think, Well, for sure, this is a fascinating case.
It's unfortunate that it's just going to remain a mystery,
you know, unless unless the authorities can find some evidence
from the eighteen forties, which is unlikely.
Speaker 1 (53:11):
I'll get right on that, Paul well, a really good
two parter and such a good time period to be
in in a really sad case, and I learned a lot.
I will say, my big takeaway here is there were
corners in the eighteen hundreds who you thought knew their stuff,
and doctor Cook was one of them. And I'm really
(53:31):
glad to introduce you to a corner who actually knew
what he was doing and were saying words that made
sense to you.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
At least up to a point. He knew what he
was doing, except.
Speaker 1 (53:42):
When he said she was moral and tried to go
above his pay grade, and then they really ridiculed him
for it.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
Yeah, absolutely, well.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
And this is where you know it is important just
to underscore whether he had medical training or not, he
had experience, and through experience you get a level of
expertise for sure. So even if he didn't have the
medical degree or the doctor in front of his name,
the fact that he has seen many bodies coming out
(54:11):
of the waterways here, you know, that's that's important. And
that's where you know, I put a lot of weight
on his observations. It's obvious where he overstates, but his
observations to me are the core of understanding what happened
to Mary. I have a good sense of what happened
to Mary. I just don't know who did it.
Speaker 1 (54:30):
To her, and we'll never know, most likely, but boy,
the possibilities were endless. Next week I will try to
bring you a corner or a medical examiner who knows
what they're doing. But I'm going to tell you the
odds are against us, Paul against us. But thank goodness,
we have one in this one. So we'll see what
(54:51):
happens next week.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
Okay, sounds good. I'll try not to be too judgmental.
Speaker 1 (54:54):
Oh, thank you, thank you. Okay, you'll see you next week.
Speaker 2 (54:57):
Sounds good. Fine.
Speaker 1 (55:02):
This has been an exactly right production for our sources
and show notes go to exactlyrightmedia dot com slash Buried
Bones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.
Speaker 2 (55:13):
Research by Maren mcclashan, Ali Elkin and Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 1 (55:18):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.
Speaker 1 (55:23):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.
Speaker 2 (55:25):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgarriff, Georgia hard Stark and Danielle Kramer.
Speaker 1 (55:29):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at
Barry Bones.
Speaker 2 (55:34):
Pod Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a
Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode
the criminal mind, is available now
Speaker 1 (55:41):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, my life solving America's
cold cases, is also available now
Hosts And Creators
Kate Winkler Dawson
Paul Holes
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