No. 600
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
March 30, 2023

Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes.

March 4, 2012
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Via Newspapers.comThis week, we visit a haunted house that has a bit of Mystery Blood thrown in.  The "Glen Elder Sentinel," August 20, 1903:A remarkable ghost sensation is disturbing the serenity of St. Peter Port, Guernsey, where a local photographer has just vacated his residence on the ground that he and members of his family have been terrified by supernatural visitations. The photographer
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Strange Company - 3/29/2023
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When Patrick  H. Doherty joined the Fall River Police Department in 1885, he might have been astounded to learn that he would be involved one day in two notorious murder cases- both involving hatchets and axes.  Patrick Doherty was born in Peoria, Illinois on August 10, 1859 to John and Mary Walsh Doherty.  Later the family moved east to Fall River, and we find Patrick Doherty living at 104 Columbia St. (off South Main) and working as a laborer for a time employed by Fall River Iron Works and the Fall River Line steamboat company.  He married Honora (Nora) E. Coughlin on April 25, 1887 at the age of 28, when he was employed at the Fall River Police Department as a patrolman.  The couple would have seven children:  Charles T., Frank., Grace, Robert, Helene, Margaret (called Marguerite), and John. Doherty, (as were several other patrolmen), was promoted to the rank of captain after their work in the case of the century, the Borden Murders of 1892.  Doherty had arrived at #92 after George Allen on the morning of the murders, and was very quickly in the thick of the action, questioning Lizzie upstairs, looking at the bodies with Dr. Dolan, running down to Smith’s pharmacy with Officer Harrington  to question Eli Bence, prowling the cellar for weapons with Medley, Fleet and Dr. Bowen, and making note of Lizzie’s dress.  Doherty stayed on the job on watch at the Borden house until he was relieved at 9 p.m.  When it came time for the inquest, it was Doherty who slipped down to 95 Division St. to collect Bridget, who had been staying with her cousin, Patrick Harrington after the murders.  He would testify at the Preliminary and the 1893 trial in New Bedford. In the midst of the excitement in New Bedford as Lizzie’s trial was about to get underway, yet another hatchet killing took over the front page, the murder of Bertha Manchester on May 30th.  It was a brutal attack to rival the Borden’s with the weapon being most likely a short-handled axe or possibly a hatchet. Doherty went out to the Manchester place with Marshal Hilliard, Captains Desmond, and Connors and Inspector Perron  on June 6th with the  suspect, Jose Correa de Mello, who revealed his hiding place for the stolen  watch taken from the victim and her purse at that time.  De Mello served time and then was sent back to the Azores, banned from stepping upon U.S. soil again. The Dohertys moved to 1007 Rock St. in 1897 and Patrick was pleased to walk his daughter Margaret (Marguerite) down the aisle in 1913. Patrick Doherty retired from the force in 1915 and succumbed to interstitial nephritis on June 28, 1915.. He, and some of his children are buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Fall River. Resources: Ancestry.com, Parallel Lives,: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and her Fall River, Find-a-Grave.com. and Yesterday in Old Fall River: A Lizzie Borden Companion Fall River Globe June 28, 1915
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 3/3/2023
Bernard Gussow was born in Russia in 1881. But by 1900 he’d made it to the Lower East Side, where he was described as an “East Side artist” in a New York Times article about paintings he displayed at an art show at the Educational Alliance settlement house on East Broadway. [“Subway Steps”] Gussow would […]
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Ephemeral New York - 3/27/2023
An article I recently wrote for the British online magazine, New Politic, is now available online. The article, “The Criminal Origins of the United States of America,” is about British convict transportation to America, which took place between the years 1718 and 1775, and is the subject of my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: […]
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Early American Crime - 12/17/2021
 17-year-old James E. Nowlin murdered George Codman in a Massachusetts stable in January 1887. Then he took an axe and chopped Codman’s body into pieces. As he traveled home in a sleigh, he threw the pieces into the snow along the road.Read the full story here: Massachusetts Butchery.
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Murder By Gaslight - 3/25/2023
Roped-inOmaha Daily BeeJune 25, 1884(Click image to enlarge)  OSSIBLE VICTIM OF THE JEFFERSON R. SMITH GANG.  Omaha Daily Bee June 25, 1884 COLORADO. Col. Fletcher, a tourist from Boston, was roped-in by the bunko men of Denver and relieved of $1,000. NOTES: $1,000.00 in 1884 is the equivalent of $33,472.95 in 2023. According to the Rocky Mountain News there were at least two,
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 3/12/2023
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately engaged as a carrier of wine, because he and his brother, with the help of […]
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
Being Initiated. | Their Name a Misnomer.

Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes.

Third Degree

Thomas Byrnes and his men giving a suspect the "third degree."

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The nineteenth century saw the rise of the professional detective, both public and private, as a leading figure in the fight against crime. On a city police force, it was no longer sufficient for an officer to grab a ne’er-do-well off the street and throw him into jail, he must also gather the evidence and testimony needed to convict the perpetrator. The force needed men—and sometimes women—with the ability to read clues and follow the trails of a criminal class growing ever more sophisticated at eluding detection. In the private sector as well, agencies sprang up to provide these services to those who, for whatever their reason, were not interested in making their investigations public.

The National Night Stick begins a series of post on The Great Detectives, with New York City Police Inspector Thomas F. Byrnes, who, almost singlehandedly transformed the department from a collection of club wielding thugs to a modern, efficient crime fighting organization. Under Byrnes’s leadership, police procedures were standardized and criminal information was stored systematically; the New York City Police became the model for police departments throughout the country.

Thomas Byrnes became a police patrolman in 1863, and that same year he distinguished himself during the New York City draft riots.  He rose through the ranks on the strength of his outstanding arrest records and in 1872 became Captain of the Fifteenth Precinct. During this period, Thomas Byrnes led the investigations of a number of famous New York City crimes: the murder of Jim Fisk, the murder of Maud Merrill, the Manhattan Savings Institution robbery. When the first detective bureau of the New York City Police Department was established, Thomas Byrne was made chief inspector.

Rogues Gallery
"Rogues Gallery"

The core of Byrnes’s crime solving success was the employment of extreme interrogation methods, known as “the third degree,” to extract information. With two of his men holding the suspect, Byrnes would put on a leather glove and beat the man—in places where the bruise would not show—until he revealed the required information. He would also employ deception and run undercover operations, sometimes using ex-prostitutes to obtain information. No criminal passed through the New York Police Department without being photographed, and Inspector Byrnes maintained a "Rogues Gallery" of mug shots, and a private museum of burglary tools and weapons.

Thomas F. Byrnes

Thomas Byrnes was also a master of self-promotion. In 1886 he published the photographs of more than 200 criminals along with brief biographies of each and explanations of various criminal techniques in his book Professional Criminals of America. The book was ostensibly for the benefit of police departments throughout America, but it became popular with the public and has been reprinted numerous times. (Now in public domain, the book is the source of the material in The National Night Stick’s Rogue’s Corner.”) Some of Byrnes cases were romanticized in books such as A Tragic Mystery, The Great Bank Robbery, and The Fatal Letter. Purported to be “From the Diary of Inspector Byrnes;” the books were written by journalist/author, Julian Hawthorne, son of novelist Nathanial Hawthorne.

But not everyone was impressed with Thomas Byrnes. The ethics behind his methods, which were often no better than those of his rivals, put him at odds with reformers and journalists. In a rush to find the killer of East Side prostitute Carrie Brown—whose murder was being compared by the press to those of London’s Jack the Ripper—he railroaded Ameer Bin Ali, convicting him on tampered evidence. Journalists Jacob Riis and Charles Edward Russell campaigned to have the verdict overturned, and eleven years later they succeeded.

Cases like this one, along with Byrnes close association with Tammany Hall, began to tarnish his image. He was never able to satisfactorily explain how he had amassed a personal fortune of $350,000 on a salary of $5,000 per year. In 1895, when reform-minded Theodore Roosevelt was appointed Police Commissioner, Thomas Byrne was forced to resign. In spite of his flaws, Thomas Byrne left a lasting imprint on American law enforcement as was truly one of The Great Detectives.

 



Sources:

  • Byrnes, Thomas. Professional criminals of America. New York, N.Y: Cassel, 1886.
  • Conway, J. North. The big policeman: the rise and fall of America's first, most ruthless, and greatest detective. Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2010.
  • Defenders and offenders. New York: D. Buchner & Co., 1888.
  • Hawthorne, Julian. A tragic mystery from the diary of Inspector Byrnes. New York: Cassell, 1887.