‘Dumpy, little woman’ in a Jazz Age crime of passion captivates the city
As the central figure in a Jazz Age crime of passion, Marie Vetter, 24, was an unlikely femme fatale.
A “dumpy, little woman, who has no claim to beauty” was how the Daily News described her at the opening of her trial in December 1923.
Then there was her voice.
“Marie Vetter shrieked like a banshee over a moor. Her wails shocked the crowd in Judge Burt. J. Humphrey’s courtroom in Long Island City, Queens, halted the trial of the woman and her supposed husband, Ernest Vetter, frightened her father into insensibility and were hushed only when she too fell limp and unconscious,” wrote Julia Harpman, a star crime reporter for The News.
Since the trial’s opening 10 days earlier, Harpman noted that Vetter had been in a state of weepy hysterics, with “only occasional intervals of composure.”
The events that brought Vetter to this hall of justice started about 2 a.m. on May 12, 1923, when patrolmen stopped a young woman and a gray-haired man driving aimlessly around Howard Beach, Queens.
The man, Ernest Vetter, 47, said Marie was his wife and that they were lost. The officers directed him to the only street out of Howard Beach.
Minutes later, the patrolmen again spotted the car meandering through the same neighborhood. They decided to take a closer look.
In the back seat, they found an infant in a hanging basket. A loaded .38 revolver was tucked beneath the sleeping child.
Vetter was arrested and charged with illegal gun possession. He raised bail and went home to his wife and baby.
The incident seemed minor until 12 hours later when a man fishing in Jamaica Bay spotted a strange bundle on the shore. It was two burlap sacks stitched together containing a male corpse. He had 15 knife and hatchet wounds in his upper body.
A laundry mark on his shirt led to an identification — Alonzo J. Storey, 35, a telegrapher from Glendale, Queens. It did not take long to connect Storey to the couple lost in the middle of the night.
Ernest denied knowing anything. Marie, however, held nothing back. Through wails and sobs, she told a tale of sex, jealousy and murder.
“MRS. VETTER CALLED SIREN LURE IN KILLING,” trumpeted The News’ headline on May 14, 1923.
Marie said she met Storey in 1918 when they both worked in the telegraph office. She was unmarried and lived with her parents — Frederick and Emma Brunnemer. Eventually, Storey moved in as a boarder in the Brunnemer home, and romance blossomed. One night, “she succumbed to his demands,” noted The News. Matrimony, she thought, was the natural next step.
But Storey was honest about his vision for their future. Neither marriage nor fidelity were in the picture.
Three years passed with no change. Then Marie met Ernest Vetter, 45, stable, well-heeled, and eager to pop the question. Her parents approved. Even her boyfriend thought it was a good idea.
“We can go on just the same,” Storey told her.
The Vetters were approaching their first anniversary, and had a 2-month-old daughter, when Marie decided to bare her soul to her husband. She admitted she had been intimate with Storey before their marriage, and that she sometimes saw her old boyfriend because he still lived in her parents’ home.
This did not sit well with Ernest. “Marie,” she recalled him saying, “I distrust you and I doubt that baby.”
So she hatched a scheme to prove that she and Storey were through. The idea was to lure her former flame to the house and get him to say that she had not cheated on her
husband. Ernest, hiding in another room, would eavesdrop on the conversation.
On May 11, she met Storey at the train station as he returned from work around midnight and invited him to her home to talk. The plan immediately careened out of control. “He grabbed hold of me and tried to force me to him,” she said.
She used an iron bar to fend off his attacks. Then Ernest leaped from his hiding place to defend her. Marie gave her husband a knife, and moments later, Storey lay dead on the rug in their parlor. Then the killers went into the kitchen and had coffee before going to sleep.
The next morning, they stuffed the corpse into burlap bags and stored it in the bedroom. Late that night, they dumped their gruesome parcel in Jamaica Bay. It quickly floated to shore.
The Vetters’ attorneys tried to build a case of self-defense, but both were found guilty of first-degree manslaughter. “Mrs. Vetter covered her face with her hands and fell back limp in her chair, as one shrill scream resounded through the courtroom and the corridor outside,” The News reported.
“Oh, Ernie,” she wailed, “why don’t they believe us?”
Marie was uncharacteristically calm during sentencing, in which the judge gave both 8 to 15 years. When the judge asked if she’d like to make a statement, she shook her head in silence.
She was also silent in January 1927 as she stood in the snow at the grave of her husband, who died behind bars.
Marie was released within seven years and soon found a new spouse. But by 1937, she was in court again. Her new husband, Edward Monahan, said she had “moon mania” during which she would attack him using knives, fists and her “sharp French heels.” He was living in fear for his life and wanted a divorce.
After hearing both sides, Justice of the Peace Peter S. Beck said, “I’ll do all in my power to keep these two separated.”