When the baggage handlers finally forced the lid open, they found the young woman inside curled like a sleeping child, knees drawn to her chest. The doctors who examined her later reached a conclusion so grim that some newspapers refused to print it plainly: the stiffness that held her in that position had set in before she was placed inside the trunk. If they were right, someone had folded her into that cramped space and closed the lid while she was still alive. Inside the trunk there was nothing to say who she was.
No letters, no cards, no name sewn into anything. For four days she lay nameless, known only by a number and a smell that emptied the room, while a slow line of strangers filed past her face, unable to return her to anyone who loved her. Alice Augusta Bowlsby was a dressmaker from Paterson, New Jersey. A quiet young woman, she had been shipped as freight on a train bound for Chicago, and it would take a candy seller and a small-town dentist to give her back her name when the entire New York police force could not.
The city would remember her forever as the girl at the center of the Great Trunk Mystery. To understand how Alice died, one must first understand the city that swallowed her. In 1871, New York was the loudest, richest, and most crowded city in America, still swelling from the war that had ended only six years earlier. Its harbor teemed with ships, and its streets were packed with newcomers chasing something better.
This was Boss Tweed’s New York, a city ruled by a political machine that operated like a second government, taking its cut from nearly everything and shielding much that operated beyond the law. One of those things was abortion. On paper, the state permitted abortion until the moment of quickening, when a mother first felt the child move, and forbade it afterward. In practice, the line was rarely enforced.
The business operated in plain daylight. Practitioners bought soft advertisements promising help to women in trouble, printed just a column or two away from the shipping notices in the morning papers, and the newspapers that printed those ads grew rich on their fees. That spring, The New York Times threw a torch into that world. The paper ran a long investigative series with a headline that made its stance unmistakable, calling abortion the evil of the age.
A reporter and a female companion, posing as a couple in trouble, went door to door recording names, faces, and prices. Among the people they wrote about was a man who kept chambers in the fashionable part of the city and called himself Doctor Ascher. The Times had its own reasons for the crusade, deeper than simple decency. The paper was in the middle of a long war to bring down Boss Tweed, and it had come to believe that his ring quietly protected the abortion trade as it did everything else.
The regular physicians of America’s young and ambitious profession also joined the fight, happy to support any campaign that might drive their irregular competitors out of business. The reporter who did the legwork was named Augustus Steller, and the list of names and houses he brought back soon began to sound like a roll call of the accused. Remember his name. It will cross the story again.
Life across the river in Paterson was smaller and harder. Alice Bowlsby lived with her mother Caroline and her sisters in a rented house on West Street. Caroline’s husband, an alcoholic, had abandoned them, and she had raised her daughters alone, training each one to cut, sew, and finish dresses well enough that someone would pay for the work. Alice was the eldest, and by all accounts the prettiest of them, with golden hair and a slender figure, and neighbors loved her for her open, friendly nature.
On Sundays she taught at the local Sunday school. On the other days she worked in a dressmaking shop. It was there she met Walter Conklin, a young man from a respectable family, the son of a Paterson alderman, employed as a clerk in one of the city’s silk mills. What began as an acquaintance deepened into a relationship that lasted for months.
Caroline, who wanted to see her daughter well established, was pleased. Whether Walter’s family knew how far the affair had gone is harder to say. For nearly a year something had been between the two of them, and in Caroline’s mind it was surely the normal prelude to marriage. A proud mother may never have imagined it could ruin her daughter.
By August, Alice was pregnant. For a respectable young woman in a small New Jersey town in 1871, few words weighed heavier, and there was no future that did not end quietly in disgrace. So a story was arranged. Alice and her mother were staying with relatives in Newark, and from there Alice announced she was going into Manhattan for a short shopping trip, a day or two, nothing remarkable.
She packed a small trunk. She told them she would be back soon, and then she crossed the river alone, carrying a secret and an address. The address came from a newspaper, somewhere in the medical columns of the Herald, folded among ordinary notices, printed in exactly the kind of soothing language the reformers had raged against for months. It promised immediate, certain, and safe relief, no fee unless the patient was fully satisfied, and it was signed Doctor Ascher of Amity Place.
Behind that prim alias stood a man named Jacob Rosenzweig, who was not a doctor in any meaningful sense. He had run a beer saloon before discovering that more money could be made in abortion than in serving drinks, and he had built the new trade into a chain of establishments across the city. In the last full week of August, Alice went to one of his houses on Second Avenue. To a man like Rosenzweig, she was not an approaching tragedy but a transaction, one more frightened young woman among many.
The procedure went wrong. An infection spread through her body, rapid and merciless, and within days the healthy young woman who had crossed the river with a small trunk and a fabricated story was dead. The man who had taken her fee now faced a problem. His solution was a trunk and a train.
On a hot afternoon, August 26, at the Hudson River Railroad depot on Thirtieth Street, a trunk waited among the freight for Chicago. It was small and strangely heavy, and as the afternoon wore on, it began to announce itself in the only way such a thing can, with a smell that first drew attention and then turned stomachs. The baggage master, Robert Vanderwort, had handled other people’s belongings for years and knew in one glance that the weight was wrong. He ordered it opened, and when the men pulled back the blanket and saw the naked body of a young woman with golden hair, the cold calculation of the thing pressed down on them.
Whoever had packed her had checked her as ordinary freight and sent her to a city a thousand miles away. There was no return address on the trunk, no name of the sender, nothing on it or inside it that said who the young woman was or in whose hands she had come to be there. The plan was to slip her out of New York on the evening train and lose her somewhere along the Chicago line, unclaimed baggage with no trail leading back to anyone. It was, by design, an almost flawless disappearance, and it very nearly worked.
By nightfall the story was in the papers, and they gave it a name that stuck. They called it the Great Trunk Mystery. The police had a corpse, a trunk, and no loose thread to pull, except one. A twelve-year-old boy named Alexander Potots, though everyone around the depot called him Paddy, sold newspapers and candy on the platform and carried light bags for passengers for pocket change, and he had a sharp young eye for the faces that passed him.
He remembered a woman in a plain calico dress who wanted to check a trunk but did not understand that she needed to buy a ticket first. Paddy himself had walked her to the counter and watched her buy a ticket to Chicago. He also remembered that when the man delivered the trunk, the woman shook his hand before she left, a strange gesture for a piece of luggage, even to a boy. When the trunk arrived on its separate wagon and he helped move it, he never forgot it, because although it was only two and a half feet long, the thing was impossibly heavy.
He also remembered that the wagon had a name painted on its side: Tripp. Within hours the police had rousted a driver named Tripp from his bed and dragged him to the central office. Paddy took one look and told them they had the wrong man. They had chased a rhyme rather than a fact, but the embarrassment that should have followed had already happened.
The train for Chicago had not waited. Despite the discovery of the body, the train left on schedule, and someone rode Alice’s own ticket north, at least as far as Albany, and vanished into the crowd forever. The remains went to the dead room at Bellevue Hospital, where a surgeon named Doctor Cushman examined her and revealed the rest of the truth. She was young, healthy, and until very recently alive in the fullest sense.
She had been pregnant and had died of peritonitis, a fatal infection caused by a botched operation. The coroner’s inquest ruled the cause of death a failed abortion. Even in ruin, Cushman could see she had been beautiful, her skin white as marble, her face frozen in what he noted with horror seemed the final posture of a cry. Now the police knew the manner of death but still had no name to attach to it.
So they did what was done in those years. They put her on public display, hoping someone in the vast city would recognize her face. And they came. More curious than grieving, hundreds of people filed slowly past, handkerchiefs pressed to their noses, many of them soaked in carbolic acid so the living could bear the company of the dead.
A few came forward with names that led nowhere. Most came just to look. Day after day she lay there in the August heat, a beautiful unknown woman silently decaying while the whole city walked past, not one of them able to tell her mother where she was. The breakthrough came through guilt and a morning newspaper.
Two days after the trunk was opened, a truckman named William Pickett walked into the Eighteenth Precinct station house and said he thought he had been the one to carry it. He had read the accounts, he said, and the more he read, the stronger his belief grew. A woman had hired him to pick up a trunk from a house on Second Avenue and take it to the depot. It had been a small job, done quickly and forgotten, but without warning it had become the most talked-about event in the city.
When Paddy Potots was brought to see him, the boy nodded. This was the man. The moment Pickett described the house and the woman who had come to the door, a police sergeant named Rooney understood instantly whose house it was. It belonged to Jacob Rosenzweig.
The police had circled him since the scandal first broke but had never been able to put the trunk at his doorstep. Now, in a single sentence born of guilt, the last gap closed. They raided the house and arrested him. He denied everything, the girl, the trunk, even the business itself, with the wounded astonishment of an honest man wrongly accused.
No one believed him. The press called him the Fiend of Second Avenue, and the city’s anger rose so fast and so hot that a crowd gathered outside his house and threatened to tear him apart in the street. The fury was sharpened by a cruel coincidence. In those same terrible days, the bodies of three more women who had died in the same trade were found in another part of the city.
Someone associated with him quietly removed the sign from outside the office, hoping to thin the crowd. The crowd only grew. When officers searched the house a second time, they found a handkerchief folded among the laundry. Held up to the light, stitched into the corner in small letters, were the initials A.
A. B. That handkerchief gave the police a name to verify. Confirmation came from across the river, from the very town she had left.
A Paterson physician, Doctor Theodore Kenney, had read the same reports as everyone else and could not shake a dread growing in his chest. He came to Bellevue, looked once at the body, and left deeply disturbed, then returned a second time. This time he did not come alone. He brought a dentist, Doctor Joseph Parker, who worked in the same building.
Together they were as certain as they could be. Kenney knew her as his patient, and he recognized her by a small, distinct mark that no stranger on earth could have copied: a vaccination scar on the arm just below the left elbow. Parker recognized his own work inside her mouth, the fillings he had placed, the tooth he had extracted, the traces of an old injury he had treated. Where a mother’s grieving eyes might be doubted in court, the quiet testimony of a scar and a filling could not, and a mother was not asked to make that journey.
When word reached Caroline Bowlsby in Paterson that her daughter Alice was missing not on a shopping trip but in all of this, she could not bring herself to look at her child. She sent the doctor and the dentist in her place. There was one more witness whose account fit like a key turning in a lock. The reporter who had walked those houses searching for the evil of the age remembered a small, fair young woman he had seen at Doctor Ascher’s that summer.
Now he looked at the corpse and swore it was the same one. The unknown girl in the trunk had a name again. She was Alice. There is another death in this story, and it belongs to the young man who set the first one in motion.
Walter Conklin was twenty-two years old, an alderman’s son, a promising clerk in the silk mill, the suitor Caroline had been so pleased to see beside her daughter. When Alice’s name appeared in the papers and it became clear that he would be called to testify in open court about their relationship before all of Paterson, something inside him broke. On an ordinary workday, while the other clerks were out at lunch, he went into the silk storage room, put a pistol to his head, and fired. He left a few lines behind.
His view of life had always been a sickly one, he wrote, and being forced to testify and cause discomfort for his family was more than life was worth. Goodbye to his dear father, mother, brothers, and sisters. There is nothing more to add. He was never charged with killing the girl.
He could not bear the shame of being the reason she had gone to that house. The trial began on October 26, 1871, before Recorder John Hackett in the Court of General Sessions. The district attorney, Samuel Garvin, told the jury plainly that taking the life of an unborn child was murder and should be punished by hanging, though in nearly the same breath he admitted the law allowed him to ask for no more than seven years. The distance between what he believed the crime was and what the law permitted would haunt the entire case.
Against him stood one of the most formidable lawyers in the country. Rosenzweig had retained the firm of Howe and Hummel, and William Howe was a showman of rare talent, a huge, loud, diamond-studded actor who had talked countless guilty men out of prison. He did not try to make his client look like a saint. He simply picked at every link in the chain.
The district attorney re-called the witnesses from the inquest, the boy from the depot, the truckmen, the two careful men from Paterson, and weaved from them a web of circumstance that no prosecutor could have bettered. Was the body even Alice Bowlsby’s? Howe asked. Why had her own mother never identified it, leaving the duty to a hired dentist and a hired physician?
As for the fatal handkerchief, he produced a woman from Brooklyn named Ann Bowlsby who swore it was hers and that she had left it at the house herself. And if a murderer was being sought, was not young Conklin as likely a candidate as anyone, a man who had shot himself rather than face this very court? The jury believed none of it. After only a few hours behind closed doors, they filed back in and convicted Jacob Rosenzweig.
But the law itself did what all of Howe’s cleverness could not. The most serious charge under the abortion statute was manslaughter in the second degree, and the maximum penalty was exactly seven years, the sentence the district attorney had warned them about. The Fiend of Second Avenue was sent to Sing Sing, and most of New York felt that justice, however weak, had finally been done. It did not hold.
Howe appealed, and he won. He argued that the prosecution should never have put a former patient named Nellie Willis on the stand to describe her own abortion, dragging in an old and separate crime for which Rosenzweig had never been charged. The higher court agreed and ordered a new trial. Then came the cruel twist no one had planned.
In the spring of 1872, while public feeling still ran high, the legislature passed a strict new abortion law, and in passing it, repealed the old one under which Rosenzweig had been convicted. His crime had been committed before the new law took effect, so he could not be tried under it, and the old law was now gone, so he could not be tried under that one either. Suddenly the state had no law left under which to hold him. The man walked free.
His wife, his daughter, and a circle of friends surrounded him in the courtroom, shaking his hand and congratulating him on his good fortune. The Fiend of Second Avenue stepped out onto the street a free man and nearly vanished from the historical record. The outrage over Alice Bowlsby did not fade. It took a more lasting form.
The reformers and newspapers who had called the trade the evil of the age now had a face and a name to hold up: a beautiful, ordinary girl from a New Jersey dress shop. The reform that followed was real. The strict new abortion law of 1872 closed old loopholes, increased penalties, and moved against the public advertisements that had first led Alice to that door. Within two years, a young crusader named Anthony Comstock and his allies founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and pushed through Congress a sweeping federal statute, the Comstock Act of 1873, which placed abortion and its advertising in a vast new category of the banned and made it a crime to send such material through the mail.
The very kind of advertisement that had led Alice to Doctor Ascher would soon be considered obscene in the eyes of the law. Her death could not save her. But slowly, incompletely, and far too late, it helped change the thing that killed her. Alice herself finally went home.
When the summer heat broke, her family took her quietly out of the city, across the river, and buried her in the family plot near Paripony, ten miles from the Paterson streets she had known. Beyond the reach of the crowds and the pamphlets, one of which had the audacity to call itself the only reliable account of the whole horror, she was laid to rest away from the strangers who had turned her worst moment into cheap entertainment. Rosenzweig, after that afternoon in court, disappeared almost entirely. One account has it that he left the country without a trace.
He was the most hated man in New York for a single season, in a city already familiar with the trade, having watched the famous Madame Restell grow rich on it for nearly forty years. Yet his name and that small, heavy trunk were what the public could not let go. And this is its shape: a quiet young woman with a small trunk and a fabricated story, a boy who remembered a name painted on a wagon, a scar below the elbow that told the truth when the whole city could not, a young man who could not live with the part he had played, and a criminal who escaped on the accident of a few dates. The Great Trunk Mystery was solved almost immediately.
But what it uncovered took much longer to answer, and when the answer came, it was written in the name of Alice Bowlsby.
