TRAGIC ROMANCE
Lonely spinster finds love, then disappears
Agnes Tufverson put down the phone in her Manhattan apartment, cracked a wide smile and did an impromptu jitterbug, suddenly feeling like she was the star of her own MGM romantic musical.
It had been several months since she heard from the exciting young man she’d met on her first-ever trip to Europe, but on an otherwise bleak day in November 1933, the dashing former Yugoslavian Army captain brought sunshine and hope into the lonely spinster’s life.
Ivan Poderjay, a self-made millionaire inventor with an enchanting accent, thicket of wavy black hair and warm, gap-toothed smile, had called to tell her he was in the city on business — and dying to see her again.
A buttoned-up, hardworking corporate lawyer who’d never had a serious relationship, the 43-year-old Tufverson had been wined and dined during her stay in London by the debonair Poderjay. Like a scene out of a movie, they’d met on a moonlight boat ride along the Thames and become instantly smitten with each other as he regaled her with his adventures in the military and his dreams of selling a patent for a lock he’d invented.
The ex-officer, eight years younger than Tufverson, had been a perfect gentleman throughout their whirlwind romance, and he vowed to look her up on his next trip to the States.
Two weeks after Poderjay resumed his courtship in New York, the couple exchanged wedding vows at the historic Little Church Around the Corner at E. 29th St and Madison Ave., a few blocks from Tufverson’s luxurious apartment.
Tufverson was ecstatic over the way her humdrum existence had taken a sudden, thrilling turn for the better. She told her family back home in Grand Rapids, Mich., that the couple planned to enjoy an extended honeymoon in Europe before settling in England to live at Poderjay’s country estate. The successful, well-off lawyer had even quit her lucrative job.
Six months later, Tufverson was the subject of an international mystery that captivated newspaper readers across two continents when her worried family told authorities she hadn’t been seen alive since Dec. 22, 1933 — two days after she and Poderjay were supposed to cross the Atlantic on a luxury liner.
Tufverson’s three younger sisters had traveled to New York in May 1934 and persuaded detectives in the NYPD’s Missing Persons Bureau to look into their older sibling’s disappearance. Agnes, they told police, was hardly the type to simply vanish on a whim. She was straitlaced and sober, and she had helped raise and support her younger sisters after their mother died young.
The sisters had no doubt who was responsible for her strange disappearance — Poderjay, of whom they knew nothing except that Tufverson’s short and swarthy new spouse had apparently put their beloved sibling under a Svengali-like spell, if not something far more sinister.
What the New York detectives soon discovered chilled the Midwest-bred young Tufverson sisters to their very core.
The fresh blush of wedded bliss hadn’t lasted long. Two weeks into their marriage, the happy newlyweds had a horrific quarrel after Tufverson and Poderjay went to a Hudson River pier to embark on their cruise to Europe — only for her to discover Poderjay had never bothered to book the trip.
The cabbie who took them home told cops they had a bitter argument in the taxi. Tufverson’s maid recounted how upset her employer had been after that, and how Poderjay had ordered the maid to go home and take a couple of days off in what seemed an attempt to keep her away from the apartment.
The woman never saw Tufverson again.
Poderjay then went on a shopping spree and picked up several items that puzzled investigators. He bought 200 shaving razors for $10, a bottle of sedatives — and a new steamer trunk large enough to fit a body.
By then, Tufverson had cleaned out her savings account of $25,000 and sold a huge amount of stock at Poderjay’s behest.
But most intriguing to cops was the fact that Poderjay set sail to England a couple of days after the couple argued at the pier. He had booked passage on a liner named the Olympic — without his new wife. Oddly, Poderjay listed himself as being single on his passport.
Crew members recalled to cops how Poderjay came aboard with half a dozen trunks and suitcases, yet never let the largest trunk leave his sight. He kept it in his cabin throughout the weeklong voyage while the others were stored below. He also never left the cramped cabin with a large porthole.
New York police soon enlisted the help of Scotland Yard, who knew all about Poderjay. The urbane bon vivant was in fact a known fraudster, bigamist and gigolo with “an incurable tendency to love, rob and leave women,” wrote a Daily News reporter.
He was no army captain, but he had joined the French Foreign Legion, which he soon deserted. His first marriage ended when he tried to wed another woman — while conning his wife out of $10,000. He married a second woman in the spring of 1933, a Frenchwoman named Marguerite Bertrand, and was still legally wed to her when he tied the knot with Tufverson nine months later.
There had also been a string of other lonely and lovelorn women across Europe he courted and conned.
Poderjay was living in Vienna with Bertrand — who was gallivanting about town in Tufverson’s clothes and jewelry — when he was extradited to New York and held as a suspect in Tufverson’s likely murder.
Investigators theorized he had sedated his wife and killed her in the apartment, dismembered her and cut away her skin and tissue with the razors. He then disposed of the parts in the building’s incinerator and dumped the bones — hidden in the trunk — through the porthole while at sea.
The other theory was that Poderjay killed her in the apartment, perhaps through a forced overdose of sedatives, hid her body in the trunk, then pushed it through the porthole somewhere in the Atlantic.
Forensic investigations of the apartment and ship cabin failed to turn up any traces of blood or telltale signs of murder. Without a body, prosecutors were only able to nail Poderjay for bigamy. The smirking swindler was universally thought to have gotten away with murder — he was given a five-year sentence.
He was released in 1940 from Auburn prison in New York — minus a left eye and eight teeth he lost in a brutal prison beatdown — and promptly deported to Vienna.
Like Tufverson, his fate remains a decadeslong mystery.
He would soon disappear from view as Europe was ravaged by World War II.
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