Woman taught boys in blue a lesson
Book reopens the file on Gotham’s ‘Mrs. Sherlock Holmes’
RUTH Cruger, 18, pretty, popular, stepped out to run errands one February afternoon in 1917. But the hours ticked by and the day grew late, and Ruth was still not back at her Harlem home. Her family grew worried. Night came, but Ruth did not. Nor would she the next day, or the day after that, or the week after that.
Cruger’s disappearance was chronicled in a news article that called Gotham “the Gobbler of Girls.” Her case anguished her family, baffled the NYPD and captured the attention of tabloid readers around the country. How could a vivacious young woman simply disappear, especially in her own neighborhood, in the middle of the day?
With police searches proving fruitless, Ruth’s family turned to the one person who might help find their daughter, a figure wellknown in New York’s legal world, someone with a tenacious knack for uncovering the truth, a person whose resourcefulness was legendary.
They called on the woman in black.
IN his new book “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes” (St. Martin’s Press), author Brad Ricca recounts the remarkable true adventures of Mrs. Grace Humiston, a blackclad legal crusader whose feats of investigation a century ago earned her comparisons to Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective.
Wealthy by birth and a lawyer by training at a time when there were only roughly a thousand female attorneys in the United States, Humiston dedicated the better part of her career to rooting out injustice and defending the defenseless — especially women and immigrants.
Her rates were low to free, but she was incredibly effective. A veritable one-woman Legal Aid Society, Humiston wasn’t content simply to push paper and file briefs in court. If the case demanded it — and often it did — she would conduct her own research: interviewing witnesses, poking around crime scenes, examining evidence, even hunting down potential perps.
While Humiston’s successes earned her the sobriquet “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes” in the popular press, it hardly seems fair to compare this real-life Gotham gumshoe to the denizen of 221B Baker Street. Where Sherlock effortlessly deduced a dossier of information by glancing at, say, a person’s boot, Grace practiced a different kind of detection.
“I am not a believer in deduction,” she told reporters. “Common sense and persistence will always solve a mystery. You never need theatricals, nor Dr. Watson, if you stick to a case.”
Humiston would dig and dig to find the facts of a case. In the matter of Ruth Cruger, the digging was literal.
Following a hunch, Humiston and her assistants zeroed in on a motorcycle-repair shop, owned by an Italian immigrant named Alfredo Cocchi, in the vicinity of Ruth’s disappearance,
Just days after Ruth was reported missing, Cocchi decamped suddenly for his native Bologna, leaving behind his wife and children.
But Cocchi was also popular with the motorcycle police whose bikes he fixed, which may have explained why he was passed over as a suspect.
Police investigators increasingly believed that Ruth Cruger
had eloped or been kidnapped by a white-slavery ring. But Humiston smelled a rat with Cocchi.
Over the objections of Cocchi’s hostile wife, she finagled her way into exploring the shop’s cellar. She found nothing. But Humiston kept prodding and searching, and after several weeks, her team ultimately discovered what they were looking for: a recently dug subbasement. It was there that they discovered Ruth’s body, brutally folded in two.
The mutilated corpse bore the slashed markings of a Ripper-style killing, but the folding was also a favorite arrangement of the Black Hand, a shadowy criminal organization with ties to the country’s new Italian immigrants who terrorized Little Italy and Harlem.
Humiston got her man. In an age before surveillance cameras and DNA testing, the evidence was enough to indict Cocchi. In a frustrating footnote to Humis- ton’s success, Cocchi stood trial in Italy.
There, he was convicted — but given a sentence lighter than what he might have received in New York. T HE Ruth Cruger case was Humiston’s most celebrated triumph, but it was not her only one.
Early in her career, she championed the cause of Antoinette Tolla, an Italian immigrant sen- tenced to hang for the killing of a sexual assailant. Humiston uncovered new evidence and incredibly shoddy police work to prove that Tolla acted in self-defense. Tolla’s sentence was commuted.
In another headline-grabbing case, Humiston and her team raced against time to prove the innocence of Charlie Stielow, an upstate farm laborer set to fry in Sing Sing.
She also went undercover to ex- pose slavery-like conditions among immigrant laborers at a crooked Arkansas plantation.
And that is to mention but a few of this extraordinary woman’s adventures.
After his daughter was found, Henry Cruger, Ruth’s father, declared “the much boasted efficiency of the Police Department was proved to be a hollow mockery by the persistent work of a woman.”
I’m not a believer in deduction. Common sense and persistence will always solve a mystery. You never need theatricals, nor Dr. Watson, if you stick to a case.. — GraceGrac Humiston