Killer Colt by Harold Schechter

second mate, Bill Blanck, who had been taken to the Tombs earlier in the day. There, he had identified John Colt as the “man with the swarthy face, black side whiskers, and piercing black eyes” who had left the crate at the ship. 4
    Far and away the most shocking testimony came from Dr. Gilman. His summation of the autopsy was rendered all the more disturbing by his tone of bland clinical detachment—particularly his insistence on referring to the savaged victim as “it.”
    “It was a man rather under the middle size, stout rather than fat,” Gilman began. “It measured five-feet-nine-and-a-half inches in height. It was very considerably decayed in all its parts. I should think it had been dead seven or eight days. Its head was so much decayed that the scalp could be pushed off by the rub of a finger.”
    Before the corpse was stuffed into the box, Gilman explained, it had been “tied with a rope around the knees and carried to the head. The thighs were strongly bent up and the head a little bent forward.” Gilman then offereda graphic description of the fatal injuries, all of which had been inflicted on the victim’s head:
    The skull was fractured in several different places. The right side of the forehead, the socket of the eye, and a part of the cheekbone were broken in. On the left side the fracture was higher up. The brow had escaped, but above that the forehead was beaten in. The two fractures communicated on the center of the forehead, so that the whole of the forehead was beaten in, also the right eye and a part of the right cheek. On the other side of the head, directly above the ear, there was a fracture, with depression of the bone—it was not detached, it was dented in. This fracture was quite small. There was also a fracture on the left side of the head, a little behind and above the ear, in which there was a round, clean hole, as if made by a musket ball, so that you might put your finger through it. There was no fracture on the back part of the head. When I examined the cavity of the skull, I found some pieces of bone, about the size of a half dollar, beaten in and entirely loose among the pulpy mass, which was the brain. The lower jaw was also fractured.
    Apart from a shirt—which had been “ripped up and was hanging like a gown from the arms”—the body was unclothed. Whoever had perpetrated the atrocity, however, had overlooked one telltale piece of evidence that Gilman had removed from the corpse and now displayed to the jurors: “a small plain ring on the little finger of the left hand.” 5
    The ring—along with some scraps of clothing that had been stuffed inside the crate—was identified by the final witness of the day, Emeline Adams, who was also shown the gold watch discovered in John Colt’s trunk. She confirmed that her husband possessed a watch “precisely like it—that he had gotten it for a debt very lately.” He was carrying it, she declared, “when he left home after dinner” on the day he disappeared. 6
    It was late in the evening when the coroner’s jury returned their verdict: “that the body was that of Mr. Samuel Adams and that, in their belief, he came to his death by blows inflicted by John C. Colt.” 7

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    T hough the Mary Rogers case was still the city’s biggest crime story in the days leading up to John Colt’s arrest, it was far from the only one. Murders, rapes, assaults—some of startling brutality—were regularly reported in the penny press.
    In Hempstead, Long Island, a woman named Hall was killed by her African-American gardener, Alexander Beck, who fractured her skull with a shovel in an apparent fit of religious delirium. Another Long Island resident, a boat builder named Jesse Ryerson, had his throat cut by a journeyman worker named Smith, who dumped the victim’s body into Hempstead Bay.
    A few days later—in what the
Herald
immediately trumpeted as “Another Mary Rogers Case”—the corpse of a “good-looking young girl about twenty