It is my pleasure and
privilege to welcome one of my favorite people, writers and storytellers to
Triple P. My dear friend Undine, who
long time Brethren will know from her insightful and delightful World of Edgar Allan Poe blog, as today’s anniversary guest
blogger. You can also follow her on Twitter. Don’t miss a word of today's post; they’re all
worth savoring.
For an
Edgar Allan Poe devotee such as myself, the strange and bloody goings-on aboard
the good ship “Glendower” have an irresistible fascination. Here we have a murder claustrophobic enough
to unsettle Hitchcock, strange enough to make Dame Christie throw up her hands,
and impenetrable enough to baffle Poe’s M. Dupin. It resembles the Lizzie Borden case, in the
sense that we think we “know” who committed the crime in question, but we can
never truly know. Also like the Borden murders, the complete
absence of discernible motive leaves one deeply disquieted. If the captain of the “Glendower” could be
slaughtered in such an apparently pointless fashion, who among us is safe?
Our
tale-without-a-moral began on June 9, 1911.
The “Glendower,” a coal barge that had seen seventeen years of service,
was part of a three-ship flotilla. The
captain was fifty-five year old Charles Wyman, a man with a long, and so far as
is known, perfectly commendable history at sea.
His three crew members, William DeGraff, William Nilsen, and Antonio
Priskich, seemed both hard-working and respectable. The vessel appeared to be approaching its
scheduled destination of Newburyport, Massachusetts without incident. The first sign of trouble came at about eight
in the evening, when the barge began whistling.
It sent out signals indicating it wanted the “Monocacy,” the tug that
was leading it, to change course and come alongside.
The
“Monocacy’s” pilot, a Captain Camp, realized this was a sign of trouble, but
what happened next must still have been a great shock. When his tug approached the barge, the ship’s
cook, William DeGraff, shouted to him, “The captain is dead!” When Camp sputtered out words of disbelief, DeGraff
reiterated phlegmatically, “He took a rest this noon at twelve, and when we
went to call him around five o’clock—well, he was dead, that’s all. We found him dead.”
Camp was
understandably stunned by the news, but he assumed Wyman had died of some unexpected,
but perfectly natural causes. Before
heading to shore and notifying the police, the flotilla dropped anchor and he
attempted to question DeGraff further.
In response to these inquiries, the cook said that Wyman had evidently
died around noon, casually adding the information that “there was blood in the
bunk, too.” He invited Camp to come
aboard and inspect the corpse himself.
Camp
declined—he probably already suspected by this point that events were becoming far too weird for him to handle
alone—and the ships made their way to Boston, where he went ashore to file a
report with the police and the local coroner.
It was not
until dawn of the following day that the Suffolk County medical examiner, Dr.
George Magrath, accompanied by several policemen, went aboard the ill-fated
barge. DeGraff greeted them
quietly. DeGraff, a sailor for nearly
forty years, had joined the crew of the “Glendower” only a month before. DeGraff ‘s background was and is a
puzzle—virtually all we know of him is contained in the previous sentence—and
although he was a strongly-built man with powerful arms and shoulders, he was
also extremely hunchbacked. His strange,
oddly composed figure only compounded the grim atmosphere of the scene.
The
visitors found Wyman’s body lying face-down in his bunk. He was wrapped in a blanket, which was
heavily bloodstained. Drops of blood
also covered the area around him. His
head had been repeatedly battered with what was believed to be a hatchet or
large club. Dr. Magrath found a hammer
loosely held in the dead man’s hand. It
was, however, bloodless, proving that it had been placed in Wyman’s hands after
the blood on them had already dried. It
did not take a forensic genius to realize this was not, as Camp had assumed, a
stroke or heart attack, or even a suicide.
When
Magrath and the patrolmen questioned the crew, they obtained little helpful
information. The trio insisted that
there could not have been anyone but themselves aboard ship, and they all
professed complete ignorance of how their captain met his violent end. The policemen made a minute search of the
little barge, without discovering a single clue to help them solve the
mystery. The crewmembers were all placed
under arrest and brought ashore. It was
noted that DeGraff, unlike his obviously confused shipmates, was quietly wary,
taking careful notice of all that went on around him.
When the
trio faced a Boston Grand Jury, it was brought into evidence that while Nilsen
and Priskich bunked some distance away from the captain, DeGraff’s cabin
communicated with Wyman’s, enabling him to clandestinely enter Wyman’s
quarters. It was also revealed that the
other two survivors of the “Glendower” were continuously alone together during
that fatal afternoon, in a different part of the ship. It was judged to be a ridiculously easy case
to solve. There appeared to be literally
no one in the world who could have killed Captain Wyman but his crippled cook.
DeGraff
went on trial on February 19, 1912.
Testimony showed that DeGraff called the men to meals by ringing a
bell. Three of them ate at a time, while
the fourth manned the wheel. On the day
of the murder, Nilsen was at the wheel for the midday meal, which was served at
eleven. Priskich was with him until the
dinner bell rang, and DeGraff arrived for his turn at the wheel. Wyman ate a full meal and retired to the
chartroom, which adjoined his cabin, shortly before twelve. It was the last time anyone admitted seeing
him alive.
Nilsen took
the wheel at noon, and Priskich went to the engine room, where it was
impossible for him to reach Wyman’s cabin unobserved. DeGraff went somewhere below deck, where he
was unseen by Nilsen or Priskich until close to five PM. Around one-thirty Nilsen thought he heard a
groan or cry, without being able to place its source. (Some vaguer accounts state he heard an angry
cry of “Get out of here!”) Doctors who
examined the murder victim believed that what he heard were the last sounds
made by Captain Wyman.
At two,
Priskich took his place at the wheel.
Nilsen testified that he briefly rested in his bunk, and then rejoined
Priskich. From then until the
four-thirty supper time, the pair were constantly within sight of the other.
Supper
was—for the first time—late, by about fifteen minutes. DeGraff came to take the wheel, and Nilsen
and Priskich went to eat. They were
surprised to find the captain was not there.
After waiting fruitlessly for a while, they went to question the cook
about what they should do. DeGraff told
them indifferently to go ahead and eat—the captain would turn up
eventually. Priskich knocked on Wyman’s
door, but got no reply.
After the
two men ate, they again consulted DeGraff about their increasing unease with
the situation. The cook, with the same
air of nonchalance he displayed throughout the entire story, dismissed their
worries. When Priskich pointed out that
Wyman was due to take the wheel at five, DeGraff replied that he himself would
take the captain’s place. However, after
Priskich left to look after the engines, the cook told Nilsen to take over the
wheel, as he had to clean up after the meal.
Priskich
returned to the wheelhouse an hour and a half later. Upon seeing that the captain had yet to make
an appearance, he insisted on breaking into Wyman’s cabin—a plan DeGraff
strongly discouraged--but his crewmates finally overruled him. Priskich and DeGraff entered Wyman’s cabin,
where their captain’s body was finally discovered. Priskich—again over DeGraff’s
demurrals—insisted on immediately alerting their tug. Before doing so, he suddenly stopped and said
“I don’t really know Captain Wyman is dead.”
“Sure, he
died,” DeGraff replied. “He died long
ago, for I took his hand like this,” holding his left wrist with his right
hand.
The weapon
that killed Wyman was never found, and no blood was on the clothing of the
three survivors. However, only one of
DeGraff’s aprons—freshly washed and unused—could be located.
At
DeGraff’s trial, the prosecution’s main difficulty was establishing
motive. They found two witnesses who
testified that DeGraff had said Wyman was “no good,” and that he had sworn to
kill him. These men were unable to give
any reason for the cook’s reputed hostility, however.
When
DeGraff himself took the stand, his testimony was terse and unenlightening. The best his attorney could do for a defense
was to suggest that a stowaway had secretly hidden aboard ship, slaughtered the
captain for reasons unknown, and then managed to jump overboard and swim to shore
unseen. The prosecutor, on the other
hand, was able to establish that DeGraff was the only one on the ship who had
the time and opportunity to commit the crime.
He also pointed out that the murder must have been done by someone
familiar with Wyman’s habits, and surely some secret lurker would be unable to
know when the captain would be invisible to the rest of the ship.
By the
morning after both sides had rested their case, the jury reached a
verdict: “Not guilty.” Evidently, the prosecution’s inability to
prove why DeGraff would wish to kill his captain so deliberately and violently
outweighed everything else, as far as these jurymen were concerned. They also likely found it difficult to
picture such a calm, nondescript figure in the role of wild butcher. DeGraff left the courthouse, and disappeared
into history. Some believed he changed
his name and went on with his life at sea, but his subsequent history remains
as shadowy as everything else in this case.
There is a
legend that, immediately after DeGraff was freed, he confided to someone who
had struck up an acquaintance with him during his imprisonment the story of his
murder of Charles Wyman. The tale said
that many years before, when DeGraff was a strong, healthy young man, the
brutal Wyman had attacked him, causing him to suffer a fall that left him
permanently crippled. DeGraff waited
decades to take his revenge, biding his time until Wyman had forgotten him and
the tragic incident. Aboard the “Glendower,”
he finally found the opportunity to settle scores.
This slice
of Gothic melodrama is almost certainly the product of an enterprising
journalist or overly imaginative local blowhard, but in the absence of any
other explanation for what happened that gruesome day on the “Glendower,” it
has lingered ever since.
The fate of
the “Glendower” itself may be clearer.
Robert Ellis Cahill, the founder of Salem Massachusetts’ New England
Pirate Museum, has told of visiting an abandoned building in his city where the
second story is composed of an old barge.
Upon entering this upper half of the site, he was greeted by a ghostly
voice yelling “Get out of here!”
Cahill was
convinced that the barge used to construct the building was none other than the
remains of the “Glendower,” complete with the restless, un-avenged spirit of
its murdered Captain. “It sounds,” he
wrote, “like the ‘Glendower’ was kind of a hoodoo vessel.” This is certainly as good an answer to the
mystery as any.
In any
case, let us pay tribute to the otherwise unmemorable William DeGraff. This quiet, unassuming little cook may well
have been as mad, bad, and dangerous to know as the most bloodthirsty pirate.
Once more, my appreciation to Undine for making Triple P's third anniversary all the more special!
Header: Collier Jupiter c 1921 via Wikipedia
