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Creators: This episode was created by Smith College students Arielle Dede, Jess Buslewicz, Keely Clifford, and Clare McElhaney.
Transcript:
[City Sounds]
Claire McElhaney: Extra! Extra! Read all about it: the late murder of a girl at Hoboken. It is now well ascertained that the unfortunate girl,named Mary Rogers, who three years ago lived with Anderson, the cigar man, has been cruelly murdered at Hoboken. The police have no trace as yet of the murdered of the ill-fated Miss Rogers of Hoboken.
*Spooky Sounds*
*Electric Sounds*
Jess Buslewicz: Welcome to Forgotten Scandals. I’m Jess Buslewicz.
Keely Clifford: And I’m Keely Clifford. Today we’re going to be talking about Mary Cecilia Rogers, an infamous New York beauty who was called the beautiful cigar girl who was murdered in 1841 and whose case is still unsolved.
JB: Although we will be talking about her murder we will be focusing much more on her as an individual and as a person–not as a murder victim. Her murder was highly sensationizled in the media and thus a lot of her humanity was lost in the popularitzation of her story. Did this have to do with her gruesome death? Or with her beauty and sexuality as she lived? We will explore this and more in this episode of forgotten scandals.
KC: Just as a warning, we will be talking about murder, sexuality, and possible rape and abortion in this eipisode. We would like to acknowledge the sources that made this possible: The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers by Amy Gillman Srebnick, The Mystery of Marie Roget by Poe, and The Beautiful Cigar Girl by Daniel Stashowe.
*Music*
CM: The mother of Mary kept a respectable boarding house for the last two years at 126 nassau street. Mary lived here ever since the house was opened and was the mainstay of her mother.
KC: So it’s important to underscore that Mary Rogers came from an affluent and important family in Lyme CT and this was a community where everyone really knew each other. However the affluence and importance of this family wasn’t exactly in the highest esteem once Mary was born.
JB: The woman identified as Mary’s mother, Phoebe Waite, a widow who remarried and lost her elite status in Lyme is often contested as some believe that she may actually be Mary’s grandmother. This is partially due to Mary most likely being the bastard daughter of Phoebe’s daughter, other Phoebe who was unmarried when Mary was born in 1820. Therefore, Phoebe would have moved with Mary away from the community who likely scorned the family and not associated with them after premarital sex scandals. In short, Mary’s life was scandalous from the very day she was born.
KC: So it’s important to remind ourselves at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th c, rates of illegitmacy and premarital sex and consequently pregnancy increased dramatically. Phoebe A. Mather daughter of Phoebe and Ezra would have been 21 in 1821 and not married which leads us to what we said before which is that Mary Rogers is actually the illegitimate daughter [of Phoebe]. So Mary Rogers is already born into scandal and there her life becomes more tragic. Her [presumed] father died in a shipping accident which lead her mother and her to fall onto some really hard, financial times. So, what they did was.
JB: They moved to New York City, the two of them which was a growing metropolis at the time, especially for the lower class, especially women, who were moving from secluded living to much more freedom and more job opportunities in such a populated area. Her mother opened up a boarding house in New York City when they arrived with the money from her son and Mary found work elsewhere, which we will learn was the cigar store. The move to New York City in the early nineteenth century is representative of a growing shift of urbanization in the United States writ large and there was much more opportunity, economically speaking in these cities.
KC: Mary’s famed beauty got her a job as a cigar girl at Anderson’s famed cigar shop where she became to be known as a familiar face to the customers and eventually Anderson’s romantic partner as well. It should be underscored that being in this role and in this job, where she was basically required to flirt with her customers, was not a respectable job at the time and really highlighted what many would go on to see as her sexual promiscuousness. One of her customers even wrote a poem that was published in the New York Herald in 1838 as well.
*Bells*
CM: She moved among the bland perfume
The breaths of heaven’s balmiest isle
Her eyes had starlight’s azure gloom
And a glimpse of heaven–her smile.
KC: However, like any twenty-something Mary’s love life wasn’t always easy or straightforward. She had boyfriends who were on again off again, however at the time of her death her fiance was Daniel Payne, a cork cutter. This didn’t make her exes, Alfred Cromlin and Arthur any less jealous however. In fact they both went on searches for her body [after she died].
*Bells*
CM: “On Sunday, she left her mother’s purposing to go to church with the children of her aunt, who lives in Greenwich street. As all the family were out of town, the aunt does not know whether she called there or not. The next time she was heard of was on Wednesday last, when she was found dead.”
JB: We will now be discussing the circumstances of Mary’s death. Three men in a rowboat found her body by Sybil’s cave in Hoboken, New Jersey on July 28th. They dragged the body to shore and it continued to decompose in the heat for about an hour until the coroner arrived. The coroner determined she had been strangled and possibly sexually assaulted. It’s important to mention that at this point there were throngs of people gathering around her body to see spectacle.
KC: So. Who were the suspects and who could have done this to such a beautiful, young woman who was so popular in New York?Well, one of the first theories was that well, oh, Mary had just gone missing again. Mary had done this earlier and people thought that after a couple days she’d come back. But once they found the body, they knew she was not coming back. So, one of the primary suspects was Daniel Payne who ended up killing himself at the very same spot, Sybil’s Cave. His suicide note read “To the World – here I am on the very spot. May God forgive me for my misspent life.” Another theory was promoted about four months later by Fredrica Loss, a woman who owned a tavern and an inn. After Loss was shot, accidentally by one of her sons, she ended up babbling in a German-English mixture that Mary had come to her hotel, died of a failed abortiona attempt, and her body was dragged to Sybil’s Cave. So that’s also a theory. However, this theory was dismissed by the police and the case still remains unsolved.
JB: I think one thing to add about Fredrica Loss is that she claimed she found two of Mary’s gloves in a portion of her backyard that had a bench or her sons found it and the police quickly figured out these could not have been Mary’s gloves as she had been wearing gloves when the body was found and it would not have made much sense for a woman, especially of Mary’s economic status, to have two pairs of gloves, let alone on her at the same time.
KC: Absolutely.
*Bells*
CM: “The atrocity of this murder, (for it was at once evident that murder had been committed,) the youth and beauty of the victim, and, above all, her previous notoriety, conspired to produce intense excitement in the minds of the sensitive Parisians.”
KC: So, her representation in media, it really played up her beauty in contrast to the gruesomeness of this horrible, horrible murder andit should be underscored here that there was a marked interest in Mary due to her unknown sexual past. There was also an interest in Mary due to humanitarianism at the time. Humanitarianism became a growing movement, as we read in The Pornography of Violence, and it really lead to people to believe that there was an intolerance towards pain and suffering and this lead people to have an almost sadist view towards pain and suffering where they were obsessed with it they couldn’t get enough of it and in the working class papers that published accounts of Mary’s death, these gruesome details were really hyped up and were really put to the highest level in order to sell the most newspapers as possible.
JB: And this was also in combination of the fears of New Yorkers in the 1840s regarding gang violence and immigration. So there was heightened nativism and nationalism and people were very averse to immigrants coming into the City and moving in and there were high population and this combined with humanitarianism, which lead people to be more obsessed with violence, gave reason for people to to fear immigrants, not founded of course, but that’s what the pattern was at the time.
KC: So newspapers took one of two routes: they emphasized the threat of gang violence and contrasted it to Mary’s perceived sexual naivieté and purity which is something that we see again and again which is when we see a young, white, conventionally attractive woman is made the pillar of a cause and is looked at as something that needs to be protected and we see this over and over and over again in history. Or the newspapers turned her into a representation of the city itself. She was seen as immoral and promiscuous–she had multiple boyfriends and she was flirting with a lot of the guys at the cigar shop and this really fits into the classic seduction narrative that was very, very popular at this time in the nineteenth century and the seduction urban narrative is essentially that a young woman’s morals would be corrupted by the moral degradation of urban environments, like New York City.
JB: So in essence, Mary became a portrait of the city’s fears and problems including the ones Keely just mentioned–degradation of morals and destruction of conventional beauty which is a common theme in the Second Great Awakening, a religious awakening in the United States which was around its peak in the 1840s and this could also have lead to the representation of Mary in the media as not as much a person, but rather a character and a figure.
CM: Alright, so one of the most famous people to write about Mary actually came a few decades after her death. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a mystery about her death called The Mystery of Marie Roget in 1870 and it really didn’t focus a lot on her murder it kind of focused on the investiagtion instead of her self. It was remarkable because Poe’s characters wrote about how the simple girl had become this media sensation. The main character, Dupin, emphasized how the newspapers contradicted themselves and had different facts because as Keely said the media at the time was taking one of two routes which ended up contradicting each other when they tried to come to terms. So Poe’s story really highlighted how the media around Mary really came to a head and didn’t really focus on her as a person, but rather created a version of her that wasn’t really herself.
JB: So I found the pornography of violence reading very interesting because I saw it really reflected a lot of the things I’m really interested in which I think Mary’s death, in some ways, really allowed to come to the public eye. Crime wasn’t always so much represented in newspapers and media at the time and Mary’s was one of the first that did so especially for lower class audiences. And people who wouldn’t be subscribed to something like the New York Times equivalent of today and I saw this very representative of the Jon Benet Ramsey case. I find Jon Benet represents one side of the Mary case–that she was a pure, chaste girl and Jon Benet was this young pageant who represented total femininity and she was pure and innocent and her death was still blown and you can still go to the grocery store today and see headlines on tabloids and I think Mary was really the Jon Benet of the time in that was one narrative that was being pushed at the time that she as pure and chaste and the city was corrupting that.
KC: Absolutely, Jess. And on the other side of that this case reminded me of the Nicole Brown SImpson case where we see this white woman and it brings up national fears of race relations, nativism, we see this white woman who become a figure of other people’s causes and issues and prejudices and wrongdoings and her murder and her story and her life essentially beome forgotten. I think it’s both Mary, Jon Benet, and Nicoel Brown Simpson all lead very tragic lives and I think the most heartbreaking thing of all is that all of their stories were forgotten in service to other people’s agenda and motives.
JB: Yeah I totally agree with that. I think the three women that we have mentioned all became characters in a way more so than actual people. You see about Nicole Brown Simpson and once we read this Mary Rogers case, it seemed in some ways that we were reading a fiction story and that her tragic background was just about character development and it added to the mystery and everything, but really you have to remember that a mother lost her daughter, a family lost her a sister, a niece, her fiance of course suffered greatly because of this, he ended up losing his own life which is tragic in its own sense.So we really do forget that these people really do have agency over their own lives and they’re not just characters in a book that youre reading.
KC: Absolutely. I also think that one thing that really struck me was that I’m almost Mary’s age.
JB: Yeah! That’s crazy.
KC: Which really struck me and really hit home for me and reading about how there was potentially an abortion attempt and she obviously didn’t have access to birth control and she had gone through breakups. I was like it sounds like she was a kid and her life ended really tragically and it was really heartbreaking to me.
JB: Yeah, and clearly she was a beautiful woman and that gave her in the time different opportunities for employment, she was doing well at Anderson’s cigar shop and that was all ended so abruptly and we still don’t why or what the reasoning was, there is still the abortion sepculation but that has not been confirmed, so it’s hard to say if that played role but even just thinking about that and adding that to that part of her story–it gives her some humanity back and I think that’s really important to do.
KC: Well thank you for listening to this episode of Forgotten Scandals. I’m Keely Clifford.
JB: And I’m Jess Buslewicz.
KC: And we hope you tune in next week.
*Music*
References
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and Other Tales. London: Chatto and Windus, 1870.
Srebnick, Amy Gilman. The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Stashower, Daniel. The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder. New York, NY: Berkley Books, 2007.