Walkabout: The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, Part 5

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 6 of this story.

The murder trial of William Hooper Young was set to being in February of 1903. Young was accused of killing a woman named Anna Pulitzer of Manhattan. She was the pretty, 24 year old wife of a man named Joseph Pulitzer.

The couple lived in what is now Hell’s Kitchen, on West 47th Street. Anna was known to police as a sometimes prostitute and streetwalker. Her husband was involved with local politics, but didn’t seem to have any other employment.

In spite of that, Anna walked around with diamonds and other jewels, was very well dressed, and was known to love the good life. She picked who she chose to step out with, always wealthy men, and been seen talking to William Young on the street after midnight, the night she disappeared in 1902.

Her body washed up on shore in New Jersey several days after her disappearance.

The evidence against Young was strong. He was identified by several witnesses who saw him with Anna, and later, by those who said that he moved a large heavy trunk the night of the murder, and rented a horse and wagon to take that trunk to a pier in New Jersey.

When police finally identified him and went into his apartment, they found bloodstained towels in a cupboard also filled with blood. They only needed to find William Young.

He was captured in Connecticut and positively identified by Professor Mac Levy, Brooklyn’s most famous physical culturist. Young had worked at the Professor’s health club at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights.

The newspapers made much of Levy’s trip to Connecticut and his conversations with Young and his positive identification. The case was certainly news, and Mac Levy was used to being in the newspapers.

He had built his business through public feats of strength, and the tale of his transformation from a sickly teenager to a physically perfect specimen, a man dubbed by the papers as “the Young Hercules of Brooklyn.”

He had famously been in the newspapers for trouncing a couple of would-be muggers on a Brooklyn street on New Year’s Day. His health and swimming clubs were teaching well-to-do Brooklynites and Long Islanders to swim, and he had rich celebrity clients.

He was one of the prosecutor’s important witnesses in the Young case, so as the trial date approached, so too did the rumors and fears.

Because William Hooper Young was not just an ordinary murder suspect. He was the son of John W. Young, the second son of Brigham Young, the powerful leader of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Mormon Church had always been controversial. Their persecution in New York State, and flight to Utah in the mid-1800s had made them insular and standoffish.

Their beliefs were controversial enough, but it was their practice of polygamy that both fascinated and repelled the rest of America. Because they had been hated and feared, the Mormons had turned around and become extremely rich and powerful.

The leadership of the church had business interests all over the world. William Young’s father John spent part of his year in New York City, dealing with his vast and varied business concerns. The murder had taken place in one of the units in the complex of apartments that he rented near the Plaza Hotel.

The father was not in town at the time. There were many urban legends about the Mormons. A prevailing one was that they would go to any length to protect one of their own, even the wayward, sinful, black sheep grandson of their greatest leader. There was no way they would let him hang for the murder of a prostitute.

In fact, rumors rippled through the tabloid press that the killing had not been an act of passion or an accident. Anna Pulitzer’s death was a Mormon blood ritual, they said, the expiation of sin through the killing of a sinner.

The papers called it “blood atonement;” a ritual where a Mormon man of faith could earn his salvation through the blood of a woman taken in adultery. The press loved it.

The trial was set to proceed, but about a week before it was scheduled, witnesses started to disappear. The first to go was Joseph Pulitzer, the husband of the deceased. He was in the wind, gone without a trace. So too was Alfred Dalby, the floor boy at the apartment house where John Young had let his son live.

Dalby had helped William Young take the heavy trunk downstairs after the murder. Anna’s body had probably been in the trunk at the time. Young Alfred was also in the wind. The press surmised that both of them had been paid to disappear by William’s father or the Church, which was the same thing.

Surprisingly, Professor Mac Levy was also gone. The “Hercules of Brooklyn” was uncharacteristically absent from his establishments, and couldn’t be reached.

His employees did not know where he was, and he and his family were not at their home on Union Street in Cobble Hill. The press and the D.A. both tried to track him down, and the rumor mill reported that he had received threatening letters telling him not to testify.

On February 4th, 1903, the trial was slated to begin. But there was no defendant. He sent word from the Tombs prison that he was too sick to attend. The judge was not pleased, and sent a doctor down to the Tombs. The doctor came back and said that Young was a mental and physical wreck.

The judge sent men to bring Young into the courtroom, and an hour later, he was dragged into court. He was a wreck. He was unkempt and dirty, with long hair and a straggly beard. His eyes wouldn’t stop moving, he was shaking like a leaf, was jumpy and looked like a man who would jump out of his skin, had he been able.

The judge ordered a complete physical examination and Young was led out of the courtroom, back to the jail. Meanwhile, Mac Levy had gotten in touch with the judge.

He was in Atlantic City, he said, recovering from a severe bout of pneumonia. He was only now able to talk to anyone. He had been very sick for three weeks. All he asked for was the opportunity to get well. He sent a telegram to the District Attorney, telling him that he would be in court if necessary, but not any time soon, as he was still recovering.

Long story short, the case really didn’t need Mac Levy. The evidence against William Young was very strong. Before the trial, he had insisted that he did not kill Anna Pulitzer, that his companion at the apartment, the mysterious Charles Simpson Eiling, aka C.S. Eiling, had done it. He had helped dispose of the body, but he had not killed anyone.

The prosecution said that Eiling did not exist. There was no sign of anyone else in the apartment, no one had ever met or heard of a C.S. Eiling, not here, and not in Chicago, where he was supposed to be from. Eiling was a figment of Young’s imagination. Young had killed Anna, no one else.

Young’s lawyer, paid for by his father, had an awful client. He was totally bipolar in court, freaking out and then sullen and unresponsive. As the evidence mounted, and the case for the existence of C. S. Eiling evaporated, Young finally gave up.

About halfway through the trial he had his lawyer talk to the judge. He agreed to plead guilty to second degree murder. The District Attorney accepted the plea. William Hooper Young was sentenced to live in prison. The whole “blood ritual” motive was never proved, although the press still held on to it for years.

William Hooper Young left the Tombs for the last time on February 13th, 1903. He was dressed in a ratty suit, a shirt with no collar, a battered derby hat, and hadn’t shaved or groomed in weeks. He was puffing on the last inch of a cigarette when they shackled him between two large black prisoners.

He said goodbye to the guards, and then stumbled. The two other prisoners picked him up like he weighed nothing, and helped him onto the train, bound for Sing Sing. William Hooper Young’s new life was just beginning.

Meanwhile, Professor Levy’s career was still going strong, and his name continued to be in the news. There was still room for more drama surrounding him, and we’ll conclude his story next time.

(Photo:Sing Sing prisoners, Ossiningdemocrats.com)

The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, Part One
The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, Part Two
The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, Murder Most Foul
The Amazing Professor Mac Levy, More Murder Most Foul