Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Mary Cecilia Rogers


Mary Cecilia Rogers
           
On July 28, 1841, two men spotted what they thought was a bundle of clothing floating in the river. On closer inspection, it was discovered to be a beautiful young girl. She was brought to shore and the coroner was called. He saw finger marks on the girl’s throat. An ex-boyfriend, who had seen the news in the paper that Mary Rogers was missing happened to come to the shore of the river and unidentified the body as Mary Cecilia Rogers.
             Mary Rogers was a 20-year-old girl who lived in a boarding house run by her mother. She
worked in the cigar store Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium owned by Joe Anderson. It was a popular place for authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allen Poe. She was hired as a salesgirl, but her real talent was drawing men into the shop with her beauty and charm. The shop was crowded every day with young men who wanted to converse with the pretty girl and perhaps get themselves a date, but Mary was never interested.
She became a Manhattan celebrity, so when she disappeared the first time and failed to appear for work, it was front-page headlines. Her mother said she had found a suicide note. The coroner saw the note and said Mary was “fixed and unalterable determination to destroy herself.” But she returned, saying she had gone to visit friends and did not know what all the fuss had been about. The Sun was accused of manufacturing the story to sell papers, and John Anderson was accused of developing the scheme as a publicity stunt. Shortly after, she left the Emporium to go help her mother with the boarding house. While at the boarding house, she met a cigar cutter named Daniel Payne. The two developed a romantic relationship and finally got engaged.
One night in 1841, she told Daniel she was going to visit her aunt. There was an arrangement that he would come to pick her up, but that night there was a terrible thunderstorm and Daniel thought Mary would not want to go out in that weather and decided he would get her in the morning. Now there were no telephones or text messages at that time, so Mary had no idea he was not coming to get her. The next morning Daniel and Mary’s mother found out that not only wasn’t Mary at the aunt’s, but she had not even been expected. Where had she really gone?
  A group of men were walking by the river in Hoboken near Sybil’s Cave, a local tourist attraction, not an isolated location, when they saw a bundle in the river. They borrowed a boat and dragged from the river a lovely young woman. When they reached the shore, they called for the authorities, and the coroner said she had been strangled. Her clothes were torn, and her body looked beaten. It just so happened that one of Mary’s ex-boyfriends was looking for her and came upon the group surrounding her body and recognized her as Mary Cecilia Rogers. Solving this crime became a local obsession, and it ran on the front pages of all the papers. These newspaper editors knew Mary and wanted her murder solved, but they also saw headlines that sold papers.

A few days later, two boys found the rest of Mary’s clothing in a pile in the grasses. It was suspected that the clothing had been put there after the search had been done of the area. It had already been searched thoroughly and carefully by the investigators. White gloves were found in the pile, but they couldn’t be Mary’s because she was wearing white gloves when she was fished out of the river.
The police believed that a “roaming gang of thieves” could be the culprits, but they also took a very close look at the fiancĂ©. The couple had been arguing lately, and Mary had threatened to call off the wedding. But he had an alibi.
Frederica Loss, mother of the boys who had found the clothing, had her own tale to tell. She said that Mary and an unknown man had checked into the Nick Moore House that night. They had both gone out but had never returned. Later she heard screams from the woods. Why didn’t she tell the police her story sooner?
The papers made sure to keep the crime on the pages daily. They criticized the investigators and publicized the $750 reward posted by the Governor. The press even warned parents about letting their daughters come into the city, using Mary as an example of what can happen to them. These papers had at least one avid reader. Edgar Allen Poe devoured every word he could read on the death of Mary Rogers.
            On November 6, 1842, Frederica Loss was accidentally shot by one of her sons and lingered in pain, hallucinating for days. She told a slightly different story about what happened to Mary Rogers. Mary had come with a doctor who performed an abortion on Mary, but Mary died during the operation. Loss’s sons dumped the body in the river and later scattered her clothing in the area around the river. The sons were briefly charged, but there was not enough evidence to bring them to trial.
            One night, Daniel Payne sat on a bench near the spot Mary’s body had been found and took poison. He wrote a note saying, “To the World, I am on the very spot. May God forgive me for a misspent life.” Was this a confession? Was he on the spot where he had killed her? What did God need to forgive him for? The police would have been convinced that this was a confession and their mystery had been solved, except Daniel had an airtight alibi, so they were still left with questions with no answers.
           
Edgar Allen Poe’s obsession with the story led him to write “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” set in Paris where a naval officer was the killer. He wrote,” the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world.” 
            It was then suggested that John Anderson killed her and had paid Edgar Allen Poe $5,000 to write his story to take the suspicion away from John. John claimed to be haunted by the ghost of Mary Rogers.
            The death of Mary Cecilia Rogers was never solved. The New York Herald published a poem about Mary:
                                                She moved amid the bland perfume’
That breathes of heaven’s balmiest isle;
Her eyes had starlight’s azure gloom
And a glimpse of heaven – her smile.


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