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| Roy Harris (The Buffalo Times. April 7, 1921) |
Someone murdered Joseph Elwell, “the whist wizard” of Manhattan, overnight on June 11, 1920.
Elwell’s maid, Marie Larsen, found him in his home at 324 East Fifty-second Street with a bullet in his head. An ambulance took Elwell to Bellevue Hospital, where he died at 11 a.m.
Detectives fixed the time
of the shooting between 7:35 a.m. and 8:15 a.m. They knew that because he was
reading mail; the postman delivered at 7:35, and his maid found him when she
arrived for work at 8:15 a.m.
Oddly enough, the house
was sealed tight. All the doors and windows were locked when the maid found
him. Detectives found thousands of dollars in jewelry and $300 or $400 in cash
in Elwell’s upstairs bedroom, which ruled out robbery as a motive.
The papers reported
Elwell was a high-stakes gambler and often won or lost as much as $30,000 in a
single night playing auction bridge. He made another $25,000 a year teaching
and writing books on bridge-whist.
Elwell had residences in New York, Newport, and Palm Beach. “He kept high-powered motor cars and a string of blue-blooded racing horses in his Kentucky stables. There was a yacht in southern waters, and he had an extensive wardrobe in each house to entrance the women and impress the men he hobnobbed with.”
Elwell bet on the horses
at Belmont Park the day before he died, then motored over to millionaire Walter
Lewisohn’s party at the Ritz Carlton. When that party ended, Elwell went to
another shindig at Ziegfeld’s roof garden, where he danced with two unknown
women.
One woman at the
Lewisohn’s party was the recently divorced Viola Krause. Illustrator Philip
Boileau called her “the most beautiful girl in America.” It was rumored she had
scribbled something on Elwell’s left sleeve that night. The Daily News
speculated that it might have been a broken heart. But was it a motive for
murder?
Elwell’s wife, Helen,
told reporters it might sound strange, but she felt no sorrow over her
husband’s death. The couple had broken up eight years before and had lived in
separate homes. She received a $200 monthly allowance, but that ended with her
husband’s death. She was sure he left her nothing in his will, even though he bequeathed
$200,000 to his 15-year-old son, Richard.
Detectives were stumped.
The murderer could have been a jealous husband or lover. Or a big loser at one
of Elwell’s celebrity-studded card games. Maybe it was a disenchanted love
interest—no one knew.
Newspaper caricature commenting on all the hullabaloo surrounding the death of
celebrity whist player Joseph Elwell (Daily News. June 22, 1920)
The papers connected Elwell to dozens of women in the days following his murder. They printed their pictures, and those of other socialites Elwell likely brushed arms with.
At first, detectives
sought a mysterious woman in gray that Elwell’s maid saw at his residence the
day before his murder, then just as quickly, their attention shifted to a man
in gray. He reportedly took a taxi to Elwell’s home at 2:30 on the morning of
the shooting. Was he the murderer? It turned out he gave the driver the wrong
address, and they moved on down the block.
In June, it came out that
Elwell was part of a bootlegging ring that smuggled vast quantities of whiskey
into the city. Prohibition Enforcement Agent James Shevlin followed the clues
back to Kentucky. That led to a new line of speculation that maybe Elwell
died as part of a liquor deal gone awry.
What it didn’t do was
lead the police any closer to solving the murder. At the end of 1920,
detectives were no closer to arresting the murderer of Joseph Elwell than they
were on the day he died.
For a few days in 1921, it seemed as if the
police had cracked the case.
When detectives in Buffalo, New York,
arrested Roy Harris on a forgery charge in April 1921, they got more than they
bargained for. “That’s old stuff,” said Harris. “I know why you arrested me.
It’s for the Elwell murder in New York, isn’t it?”
Minutes later, Harris was spilling his guts,
telling detectives intimate details of the murder scene.
It seemed an unlikely way to get entangled
in a murder plot. Roy Harris told detectives he was hanging out in front of the
Mills Hotel with his buddy William Dunkin when a limousine pulled up. The
driver asked them to hop in. The passenger in the car, Mrs. Fairchild, looked
them over, leaned close, and whispered, “Boys! I’ve got some real money for you
to kill Joseph Elwell.”
That ended the conversation for that day.
They met the next day at the subway station at Seventy-seventh Street and
Broadway to lay their plans. When they finished, Mrs. Fairchild handed each of
them fifty dollars and told them to meet her the next night, June 11, 1920, in
front of the Marie Antoinette Hotel.
Jackie Harris, the wife of Roy Harris
(Buffalo Commercial. August 8, 1921)
“Before we went to Elwell’s place, Dunkin gave me a .32 gun,” said Harris. “He had a big army pistol. I was scared stiff. Dunkin called me yellow and said, ‘If you back out now, it’ll be you and not Elwell that ends up dead.’”
They went to Elwell’s house and waited
around inside until 3 a.m. for him to get home. Dunkin put a bullet in Elwell’s
brain while he slept in the living room chair.
They jumped into the limousine at
Seventy-seventh Street and West Central Park and met Mrs. Fairchild at the Van
Cortlandt Street subway station. She gave them another $450 each and said she
would meet them back there in three days to pay them the rest of the money, but
she never showed up. The thousand dollars she gave them were far from the five
thousand she promised.
Detectives doubted the 23-year-old’s story.
They would have laughed him out of the station, except he grabbed a notepad and
drew an accurate sketch of the interior of Elwell’s house. Detective William
Sherwood of the Burns Detective Agency said the plans “were nearly as perfect
as can be drawn.”
Harris described Mrs. Fairchild as a striking blonde of medium build, decked out in jewels and diamond rings. He thought he had seen her picture in the papers a few days after the murder, but he could not be sure now. Detectives kept showing him photos, but none of them seemed right.
“Gee, I feel better now,” said Harris after
telling his tale. “I couldn’t sleep day or night with that Elwell murder secret
weighing on my mind.”
“I didn’t go to the Elwell house with murder
in my heart, head, or anywhere else,” said Harris. He had planned to take the
money and run without killing Elwell. He tried to talk Dunkin into leaving when
they were in the house, waiting for Elwell to come home, but Dunkin balled him
out. “Although I had the gun in my hand and was cowering in the shadow of the
stairs,” said Harris. “I was frightened and knew that if it came to a showdown,
I’d drop the gun.”
Detectives were skeptical.
Neither Harris, Douglas, nor Mrs. Fairchild
ever figured in the case. A check of Harris’s background showed he had been
arrested for forgery in 1913 when he was just fifteen. The court sentenced him
to a year in the George Junior Republic in Litchfield, followed by a year’s
probation. To their knowledge, he had not been in trouble with the law since
then.
A William Duncan was arrested in December
1919 and had done time in the reformatory at Cheshire, but he did not match
Harris’s description of the man, so that proved a dead end.
“The police were at first inclined to take
the confession of Harris as a joke,” reported the Daily News. But
more investigation showed his confession was both “possible and
probable.”
Harris’s wife tried to protect him. She said
he whispered to her that his story was all “fiction.” She told detectives her
husband was a nervous type, “subject to fainting spells and queer
streaks.”
The police had him checked out by a string
of alienists (psychiatrists), and they all agreed that he was sane. “I’d say
that Harris is not lying,” said Dr. Putnam, “but I would not say he does not
lie.” For example, he would not say Harris “wasn’t lying when he said he did
not fire the shot.”
On April 11, 1921, Roy Harris threw a wrench
in the works and repudiated his confession, saying it was all a story—part of
an unpublished manuscript that he had been shopping around to New York
publishers without success.
There was no Dunkin, Jerry the chauffeur, or
Mrs. Fairchild. They were all figments of his imagination. “He had never
murdered anything more human than the English language,” reported the Daily
News.
His wife cracked the case before the
detectives could. She told the papers her husband was “innocent and plumb
crazy.” June 13 was her husband’s birthday, so she knew where he was then. They
went out to eat the day before, so it would have been impossible for him to
meet with Bill Duncan, as he claimed.
When detectives confronted Harris with the
facts, he scratched his head and smiled. “Oh, well. I might as well tell you
fellows the truth. It was all a lie. I don’t know anything about it [meaning
the murder of Joseph Elwell].”
That same day, the Daily News printed
the first and only chapter of Roy Harris’s novel. His confession made a much
better story.
When it was over, Justice Dudley of the New
York Supreme Court set Harris free after admonishing him that there was nothing
in the law he could be charged with. His advice was to “stop faking murder
stories in the future and make a turn-about face and support your family in an
honest way.”
The case remains unsolved.
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