Killer Colt Read online

  Shortly after 3:00 p.m. on September 17, the City Hall clerk John Johnson, having completed an errand at the Rotunda, was emerging from the building when he spotted Samuel Adams walking briskly up Centre Street toward Broadway. Johnson had already seen and spoken to the printer twice that day, first at Adams’s shop, then at the Board of Foreign Missions office. This time Adams “took no notice” of the clerk. A look of grim determination on his face, the printer strode toward the corner of Broadway and Chambers.

  “I turned and looked after him,” Johnson later said, describing the last time he ever set eyes on Samuel Adams. “He kept on.”6

  22

  Almost certainly, the noise that Asa Wheeler and his pupil heard from the neighboring room did not sound precisely as they later described it: “like the clashing of foils, as if persons were fencing.”1 Though a lethal weapon was involved, the noise was generated by the impact of blade against bone, not metal on metal.

  There are good reasons why the two men might have been mistaken. Immersed in their lesson, they were not paying close attention to the goings-on next door. The intervening wall would also have distorted the sound. And though it was a cold and drizzly day, the Broadway-facing windows of Wheeler’s office had been raised, filling the room with the ceaseless clamor of the great thoroughfare and obscuring any noise from next door.

  Still, while it might not have sounded exactly like the striking of swords, the sound was sufficiently jarring to startle them from their work.

  “What was that?” said Wheeler, looking up from the sheet of ruled paper on which he had been inscribing a basic bookkeeping exercise for his student.

  Seated beside him on the bench, Wheeler’s student—a sixteen-year-old named Arzac Seignette, who was there for his first day of lessons—replied that he had no idea.

  Rising from the bench, Wheeler crossed his room and stepped into the hallway, Seignette following close behind. The time was around 3:15 p.m., Friday, September 17.

  With his ear pressed to Colt’s door, Wheeler listened intently. Silence. Kneeling, he put his eye to the keyhole, but the drop was down on the inside of the door. In his right hand, he still clutched the steel pen he had been using when he and Seignette were interrupted by the strange noise. Inserting the tip of the pen into the keyhole, he slid the drop aside and peered into Colt’s room.

  From his highly restricted viewpoint, he could make out “a man with his coat off bent over a person who was lying on the floor.” According to his later accounts, he watched for a full ten minutes, until the stooping figure straightened up and moved to a table “on which there were two men’s hats.”2

  Quickly, Wheeler rose and—instructing Seignette to keep a close eye on Colt’s door—hurried up to the top floor, where he knocked on the door of the landlord, Charles Wood. Receiving no response, Wheeler tried the doors of several other occupants, but no one was in, “it being the dinner hour.”

  As he was descending the stairs, he encountered Law Octon. An elderly African-American fellow who resided on the third floor with his wife, Mercy, Octon worked as the building superintendent and served as a deacon in the Zion Baptist Church.3 At Wheeler’s urging, Octon accompanied him to Colt’s office and—using the pen to open the drop—looked through the keyhole. Octon, however, could see nothing and, after a few fruitless minutes of peeping, returned to his apartment.

  Convinced that Colt was inside, Wheeler tiptoed down the flight of stairs, then returned with a heavy tromp and rapped sharply on Colt’s door—a ploy, as he subsequently explained, “to make Colt think he had a caller and open the door.” The stratagem did not work. No one answered.

  By then several more of Wheeler’s students had shown up, along with John Delnous, a twenty-six-year-old bookkeeper who was interested in renting Wheeler’s second room at the end of Colt’s tenancy. Wheeler immediately explained what had happened. At first, Delnous laughed off his suspicions. True, there had evidently been a strange commotion in Colt’s room, followed by a peculiar, prolonged silence. Still, there might be an innocent explanation. Wheeler was so convinced that something was seriously amiss, however, that when he asked Delnous to go find a police officer, the younger man agreed.

  He returned to say that the “officers were all presently engaged but one of them, named Bowyer, promised to come within a half hour.”4

  In those days, before the creation of a professional police department, the city was “inadequately protected” by an “archaic system” that had barely evolved since colonial times. Thirty-one constables and a hundred city marshals made up the bulk of the daytime force. At night, the policing of the city fell to a “patchwork corps” of watchmen, made up of moonlighting day laborers—stevedores, mechanics, teamsters, and the like. These part-time defenders of the public order—who patrolled the streets after dark and stood guard in sentry boxes—wore no uniforms. Besides a thirty-three-inch wooden club, their only badge of office was a distinctive leather helmet resembling a fireman’s old-fashioned headgear and varnished to the hardness of iron. While not precisely laughingstocks, these amateur lawmen were, as one early historian puts it, not held “in especial reverence or dread” by the city’s criminal element, who derisively referred to them as “Leatherheads” and made them the butt of assorted pranks. A favorite was “upsetting a watch-box with a snoring Leatherhead inside it or lassoing the sentry-box with a stout rope and dragging it along with the imprisoned occupant inside it.”5

  Along with Delnous and a pair of students named Riley and Wood, Wheeler waited in his office for Bowyer’s arrival. Given the dismal state of law enforcement at that period, however, it is no surprise that Officer Bowyer never showed up.

  When dusk fell, Wheeler tried again, sending the two students out into the streets in search of a policeman. They returned a short time later with a message from the neighborhood officers, who explained that they had no authority to enter Colt’s room and suggested that Wheeler continue to keep watch. Soon after, Riley and Wood left for the night. Delnous went out to refresh himself with a cup of tea, returning at around 7:30 p.m.

  He and Wheeler sat together in the office until 9:00, at which point the exhausted older man took his leave. About a half hour later, Delnous, who had promised to keep vigil all night if necessary, was suddenly roused to attention by a sound from the hallway. As he would eventually describe it, he

  heard someone unlock Mr. Colt’s door from the inside, come out, lock it again, and go away. The person returned in about five minutes, and in about five minutes more, I heard someone in Mr. Colt’s room tearing something resembling cotton cloth. The next sound was the rattling of water—after that, some person scrubbing the floor, continually putting his cloth in the water and rinsing it.6

  Afterward, all was silence again in Colt’s room. Delnous continued to listen closely until weariness overcame him. Stretching out on the bench by Wheeler’s worktable, he promptly fell asleep.

  • • •

  Normally, John Colt was back at the boardinghouse room he shared with his mistress Caroline Henshaw by 10:00 p.m. On the night of September 17, however, he was later than usual. Tired of waiting up for him, the pregnant Caroline went to bed.

  She woke up to see him standing at the foot of the bed, slipping on his nightshirt.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “A little after eleven,” he said.

  “Why are you home so late?”

  “I was with a friend from Philadelphia,” said John. “He leaves by boat tomorrow morning. I should go see him off.”

  A short time later, he blew out the candle and slipped into bed. By then, Caroline had already fallen back to sleep.

  When she opened her eyes the next morning, John was already dressed and about to leave. Through the lace-curtained window, she saw that it was still dark outside. Peering at the clock that stood upon the bed table, she saw that it was not quite 5:30.

  “Where are you going so early?” she asked.

  “To the boat,” he
said. “I might be back soon, or I might not.”

  When breakfast was served downstairs several hours later, however, John had still not returned.7

  • • •

  In his later testimony, John Delnous could not say whether the sound he heard issuing from the neighboring room at around 6:00 in the morning of Saturday, September 18, was “the first noise I heard after I awoke, or the noise that awakened me.” He had no doubt, however, about its source.

  The noise from John Colt’s office, Delnous would state, was “as of someone nailing a wooden box, which sounded as if it was full.”8

  23

  Around daybreak that Saturday, the rain began to fall.

  Shortly after 8:00 a.m., Law Octon returned to the Granite Building from an early morning errand. As he approached the staircase, he looked up and saw, standing on its end at the top of the first-floor landing, a pine box measuring roughly three feet long and two feet in height and width. A moment later, John Colt emerged from his office, “laid hold of the box,” lowered it onto its side, and—with his face toward the crate and his back to Octon—began grappling it down the stairs, “placing his shoulder against the box to prevent it from going too fast.” Octon waited at the foot of the staircase until Colt made it all the way down with his burden, then headed up to begin his custodial chores for the day.1

  • • •

  At the same time, a young man named John B. Hasty arrived at the Granite Building. Hasty lodged at a rooming house whose proprietress, in addition to her duties as landlady, managed “the business of carving, gilding, and making picture frames.” He had come to deliver a message on her behalf to one of the artists who rented studio space in the building, a portrait painter by the name of Verbruyck.

  As Hasty stepped from the street into the entranceway, he saw, as he later recalled, a man in his shirtsleeves taking a large wooden box down the first flight of stairs “with his back towards the street and supporting the box as it came downstairs.” Hasty waited until “the man had got the box downstairs and placed it on the right side of the entryway,” near a door belonging to a corner drugstore called Slocum’s. Hasty then climbed to the fourth floor and knocked on Verbruyck’s door. When no one answered, he went back downstairs, passing Law Octon—“an elderly light colored man” in Hasty’s description—who was sweeping the hallway of the second floor.

  When he reached street level, Hasty saw the shirt-sleeved gentleman still standing in the entry beside the crate. Hasty “asked the man if he knew where Mr. Verbruyck was.” The man gave a brusque reply, saying “that he did not live in the building.” As Hasty made his exit, he glanced down at the box and “observed that it was marked on the outside with blue ink.”2

  • • •

  A few minutes later, Law Octon came downstairs again and saw the box “in the entryway of the first floor, between the banister of the stairs and the apothecary’s store.” Colt, standing there with “no coat or vest,” was searching the street through the open doorway. He seemed, Octon said afterward, “to be looking out for a cartman.”3

  • • •

  Long before the advent of truckers and moving vans, the job of hauling goods from one place to another in old New York was handled by professional cartmen. Members of this trade, numbering about three thousand in 1841, were licensed by the city council, which set the rates they were allowed to charge and fixed the size and shape of carts “in order to insure standard loads.”

  Cartmen who specialized in household moves required spring carts and other equipment “suitable for transporting furnishings, pictures, looking-glasses and other valuables.” The ordinary “catch cartman,” however—who waited at a curbside cart-stand or roamed the streets ready “to grab the first job that was offered”—drove a more rudimentary vehicle: little more than a seatless wooden sled mounted on a pair of wagon wheels and hitched to a dray horse. Standing atop their carts in their long white frock coats, heavy black boots, and broad-brimmed hats, these hardy workingmen—“a cross between the cab driver and teamster of today”—were a common sight in nineteenth-century New York.4

  At approximately 8:45 a.m. on that raw, drizzly Saturday, Richard Barstow, a thirty-four-year-old licensed cartman, was driving east on Chambers Street when he spotted a man—hatless, in shirtsleeves—beckoning to him from the doorway of the Granite Building. As Barstow pulled his dray horse to a halt, the man hurried over.

  “Are you busy?” he asked. According to the cartman’s subsequent testimony, he was a slender gentleman of approximately Barstow’s age with thick curly hair and dark whiskers.

  “Not particularly,” said Barstow. “Why?”

  The man explained that he wanted to have a crate delivered to a ship docked at the foot of Maiden Lane. Since Barstow was headed in that direction anyway, he agreed to take it.

  Another cart was already parked lengthways at the curb in front of the building. It belonged to a fellow carter named Thomas Russell, who regularly hauled paintings to and from the Granite Building for the Apollo Association. Backing his own cart in front of Russell’s horse, Barstow dismounted and followed the shirtsleeved gentleman into the Chambers Street entrance of the building.

  There between the staircase and a door opening into Slocum’s pharmacy sat a big pine crate. Assisted by Russell, Barstow loaded the box—which weighed, according to his estimate, “from one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds”—onto his cart. As he did, he noticed that the box “was directed to the care of some person at New Orleans.”

  Stepping back to the doorway where the coatless gentleman had watched the proceedings in silence, Barstow asked him “to what ship I was to carry the box.” The man replied that “he did not know the name of the vessel” but would follow Barstow and point it out to him.

  Stepping onto his cart, Barstow took hold of the reins and began to drive slowly toward Maiden Lane. From time to time, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the gentleman walking behind him beneath a green umbrella.5

  On the bustling wharf at the foot of Maiden Lane, where tall-masted merchant ships from every port lay at anchor, Barstow came to a halt beneath the jutting bowsprit of a New Orleans–bound packet named the Kalamazoo. All around, men “swarmed from the warehouses to the boats with cargo of all descriptions, each box, bale, and barrel identified by its fragrance—rum, leather, coffee, tea, tar, hemp, spices.”6 Barstow, as he stated a few days later, “pointed to the vessel to know if that was the one, and the gentleman nodded assent.”

  Backing up his cart, Barstow took hold of the box and dropped it onto the wharf, “the same as I would a box of sugar.” The gentleman then reached into his pocket, extracted some coins, and handed them wordlessly to Barstow, who, glancing down at his palm, saw that the money amounted to two shillings and sixpence. Barstow had intended to ask for three shillings but something about the look on the gentleman’s face told the carter that haggling would be “more trouble than it was worth.” With a flick of his reins, Barstow “cleared out,” leaving the man standing beside the crate on the wharf.7

  • • •

  At around 9:30 a.m., just as Barstow was driving his cart away from the wharf, Asa Wheeler arrived at the Granite Building. Up in his office, he spoke to John Delnous, who had heard Colt wrestling the crate downstairs and—peering down from the first-floor landing—had seen him leave with the cartman.

  Hurrying to the top floor, Wheeler rapped on the door of the landlord, Charles Wood. This time, Wood was home. Explaining what had transpired the previous day, Wheeler proposed that they search Colt’s room. Wood was reluctant to take such a drastic step, advising “that it was a very delicate subject to meddle with.” At Wheeler’s urging, however, Wood handed over his master key.

  Back downstairs before Colt’s door, Wheeler listened for any sounds from within. Satisfied that Colt was still gone, he opened the lock, “stepped one foot in and looked around.” He saw at once that the packing box that normally sat in the office was missing. He also noticed that
the floor looked freshly scrubbed, particularly around the area where he’d seen the kneeling figure. And there were strange marks he had never seen before—“oil and ink spilled around the base of the floor and thrown in spots on the wall.”

  Stepping back into the hallway, he locked the door, returned the key to Wood, then retired to his office.8

  • • •

  He was seated at his worktable a half hour later when someone knocked on his door. Opening it, Wheeler found himself face-to-face with John Colt.

  Colt surprised him with an unexpected question. Did Wheeler’s key fit his door? he wanted to know.

  “I’m not sure,” Wheeler said. “Why?”

  Colt said something about leaving his own key at home. Could he try Wheeler’s?

  Wheeler handed him the key and watched as Colt crossed to his door and tried the lock.

  Satisfied that the key didn’t work, Colt returned it to Wheeler, then stepped into the latter’s office and began to chat “about bookkeeping and writing.” He seemed, as Wheeler said later, “very talkative indeed”—unnaturally so for a man who was often rather standoffish. It took a while before Wheeler managed to get a word in. “Mr. Colt,” he finally asked, “what was that noise in your room yesterday?”

  Colt’s expression seemed to harden for a moment before he arranged his features into a puzzled look. “You must be mistaken,” he said. “I was out all afternoon.”