On July 28, 1841, fisherman casting nets off Castle Point in Hoboken, New Jersey spotted a body floating in the water. After police were notified, the body was recovered for examination and even veteran police officers were horrified by its condition. Although the corpse was recognizable as a young woman, the face had been completely destroyed by repeated blows with a blunt instrument. A stout cord was wrapped around the waist and attached to a heavy stone. There were signs of strangulation with a piece of lace from a woman's dress tied around the neck as well as deep marks on both wrists where her hands had been tied. Her clothing was torn and disordered but she still had light gloves on both hands and a bonnet still secured to her neck. A medical examination showed that she had been sexually assaulted and beaten before her death, possibly by more than one assailant. Although the forensic science was relatively crude, police had no difficulty identifying the victim as the missing Mary Cecilia Rogers.
Believed to be born in 1820, Mary Rogers was a beautiful and vivacious woman who grew up as the only child of her widowed mother. Until the age of twenty, Mary lived in the boarding house run by her mother although her amazing beauty made her the talk of the neighbourhood. In 1840, John Anderson, a prosperous tobacco merchant, offered Mary a job in his New York tobacco store where she could help attract customers. Within months, she had become famous as the "prety cigar girl" with customers coming to the store specifically to see her behind the counter. Although Mary was careful not to encourage any of the customers, many of the prominent young men in that part of New York City often spent hours in the store just to exchange "teasing glances" with her. By all accounts, she did well at her job and enjoyed dealing with customers.
Until her first disappearance...
On October 5, 1838 Mary Rogers was reported missing from her home. Her mother claimed to have found a suicide note in Mary's room which, according to a coroner, showed a "fixed and unalterable determination to destroy herself". While newspapers were initially sympathetic, they became increasingly skeptical about Mary's disappearance (and even suggested it had been a publicity stunt concocted by her employer). Rumoured sightings of the "cigar girl" described her as being in the company of a "tall, well-dressed man of dark complexion". When Mary finally reappeared, a week after her disappearance, she claimed to have gone off to visit friends in the country. Within a week of her return, Mary quit her job and went home to help her mother run the boarding house. Not long afterward, she became engaged to be married to Daniel Payne, a clerk who was one of her mother's boarders. Once the "pretty cigar girl" was gone from the store, she faded from public attention.
The actual circumstances of Mary Rogers' death are mostly conjecture based on limited information. She was last seen alive on Sunday, July 25, 1841. After knocking on her fiance's door, she told him that she would be spending the day with a Mrs. Downing in Bleecker Street. Although Payne told her that he would pick her up later that afternoon, a fierce thunderstorm made him change his plans. In a decision that would later haunt him, Daniel Payne decided to wait until morning assuming that Mary would prefer to stay with her friend overnight. He left for work the next morning as usual without checking on Mary's whereabouts. It was only when Mary's mother realized that Mary never came home that she became alarmed. After Payne came home and found out that Mary was missing, he went to the Downing house and was told that Mary had never been there on Sunday. The police were called and a general search was launched. Mary's disappearance became widespread news.
After the body was found, police issued a proclamation asking for anyone with information on the murder to come forward. Two days later, the coroner received an anonymous note stating that Mary had been seen in a boat with six "rough-looking men". They were then met by three "handsomely-dressed gentlemen" and disappeared into the woods together. Later investigation turned up a roadhouse where Mary was seen with a "tall, well-dressed man of dark complexion". The innkeeper, a Mrs. Loss, reported that the two of them then went into the woods together and later hearing a woman's scream (which wasn't investigated). The spot where Mary had likely died was found near the same roadhouse two months after her death. Various articles of clothing identified as belonging to the dead woman Mary were found at the scene. Although police tried to find the "dark-complexioned" man who had been seen with Mary, no trace of him was ever found. Police also questioned Daniel Payne, John Anderson, and virtually every other man she had ever been associated with.
Despite the media frenzy surrounding the murder and rewards offered for information, no clues were found and media attention turned to new crimes. Daniel Payne never recovered from Mary Rogers' death and his own feelings of guilt. On October 7, 1841, he was found dead of an overdose of laudanum. A hastily scribbled suicide note by his side asked for God's forgiveness for his "misspent life". Since Payne was not considered a suspect in his fiancee's murder, the suicide was attributed to guilt and grief over her death. One final twist to the story involved the innkeeper, Mrs. Loss, who, in 1842, made a deathbed confession that Mary had actually come to the inn for an abortion and that the "well-dressed man" was the abortionist. When the botched operation caused Mary to bleed to death, Mrs. Loss had one of her sons toss Mary's body into the river. Given that Mrs. Loss had been questioned by the police several times before and gave contradictory statements, authorities doubted her deathbed confession. Still, many newspapers carried the story despite the fact that it didn't match the details of the coroner's report.
For all the intense interest the story generated at the time, it would have been quickly forgotten except for Edgar Allen Poe. Having taken an interest in Mary Rogers' case, Poe decided to base his next detective story on it. He had already made a name for himself with his 1841 detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morge". The story, featuring his French detective C. August Dupin, virtually invented the genre of detective fiction. In his new story, "The Mystery of Marie Roget", Poe based it on the Mary Rogers murder as closely as possible (except for being set in Paris). Although Poe defended his use of the Rogers case as an "analysis of the true principles which should direct inquiry in similar cases", he obviously hoped that capitalizing on the media interest in Mary Rogers' murder would sell magazines (and pay his rent). At the same time, the story represented an attempt by Poe to solve Mary Rogers' murder. Not only did he follow all of the media details of the story intensely, he even went over the scene of the crime to try to discover a solution. In one of his personal letters, he would state that "Under pretence of showing how Dupin unravelled the mystery of Marie's assassination, I, in fact, enter into a very rigorous analysis of the real tragedy in New York". Since the story was printed in Snowden's Ladies' Companion in three installments, Poe had time to make subtle changes as new facts about the Mary Rogers case came out. He also included the abortion subplot although he delayed the third installment. When the story was rereleased in 1845, Poe changed it to the final form by which it known today (and which helped reinforce the abortion story in Mary Rogers' case).
While not as famous as his other two Dupin stories, Poe's Marie Roget story was modestly successful. Although his detective stories never brought Poe the prosperity for which he was hoped (his time in New York was the financial low point of his career), they quickly inspired imitators. Among these imitators was Arthur Conan Doyle whose Sherlock Holmes stories were partially based on Dupin. In generating interest in Mary Rogers' case, Poe helped keep her name in the public eye and, to some extent, reminded the world that she never received the justice she deserved.
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