On a Wednesday morning in July 1841, three men in a sailing-boat saw a body in the water off Castle Point, Hoboken. It was the dead body of a beautiful brunette, Mary Cecilia Rogers, just 21 years old. According to the New York Tribune ”it was obvious that she had been horribly outraged and murdered”. Her clothes were torn, her petticoat was missing and a piece of lace from the bottom of her dress was embedded so deeply her throat that it had almost disappeared. An autopsy led to the conclusion that she had been “brutally violated”.

Mary Cecilia Rogers worked as a salesgirl for John Anderson, who had a cigar shop on Broadway. In 1840, New York was even more “Victorian” than London, and young unmarried girls were not to be found behind shop counters, particularly not if the shops were frequented exclusively by young men. Mary drew many new customers to the shop, but – as Thomas Duke noticed in his Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (1910) – “she did not hesitate to repl all undue advances”.

One day in January 1841, Mary failed to appear. Her mother had no idea where she was, nor had her employer, Mr. Anderson. The police searched for her, the newspapers reported her disappearance… but six days later, Mary reappeared, looking tired and rather ill.”

I visited some relatives in the country,” she said. Her mother and her employer corroborated the story, but then there began to circulate a rumour that she had been seen with a tall and handsome naval officer, and only a few days after returning, Mary gave up her job abruptly. A month later she announced her engagement to the clerk David Payne, who was one of the boarders of her mothers boarding-house in Nassau Street.  

On Sunday, 25 July, at 10 a.m., Mary knocked on her fiancé’s door and said she was going to see her aunt in Bleecker Street. Payne also wanted to spend the day away from home, but he would call for her that evening. Towards the evening however, a violent thunderstorm came on and he decided not to call for Mary, but to let her stay the night with her aunt. “When Payne returned from work and learned that Mary was still away,” Colin Wilson writes in his book World Famous Unsolved Crimes, “he rushed to see the aunt in Bleecker Street – a Mrs Downing – and was even more alarmed when she told him that she had not seen Mary in the past forty-eight hours.”

E.A. Poe Reading Annabel Lee 

Daniel Payne – who did not go see the corpse, although he had searched for Mary all over New York – was interrogated by the police, and released. A large reward was offered, but a week passed without any clues. Then the coroner received a letter from some anonymous man, who wrote he had not come forward before from “motives of perhaps criminal prudence”. This man claimed to have seen Mary Rogers on the Sunday afternoon of her disappearance. She stepped out of a boat with six rough-looking characters and walked with them into the woods, laughing and apparently under no kind of constraint. Soon afterwards a boat with three well-dressed men came ashore, and these men asked if someone had seen a young woman in the company of six men. When the anonymous writer told them he had seen this girl, the trio turned their boat and headed back for New York.

“The next important piece of information came from a stagecoach driver named Adams,” Colin Wilson reports, “who said he had seen Mary arrive on the Hoboken ferry with a well-dressed man of dark complexion, and that they had gone to a roadhouse called Nick Mullen’s. This tavern was kept by a Mrs Loss, who told the police that the couple had ‘taken refreshment’ there, then gone off into the woods. Some time later she had heard a scream from the woods; but since the place ‘was a resort of questionable characters’ she had thought no more of it.”On 25 September, the missing petticoat of Mary Rogers was found by children playing in the woods. They also found a white silk scarf, a parasol and a handkerchief marked “M.R.” Soon after, Daniel Payne committed suicide in this spot. Now a gambler named Joseph Morse was arrested, because he had been seen with Mary on the evening of her disappearance. But he could prove he had been that afternoon at Staten Island with another young lady, and was released.

In the following year, Poe’s Mystery of Marie Rogêt was published in three parts in Snowden’s Ladies Companion. “There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural,” he started his famous detective story, “by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them. (…) The extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public, will be found to form, as regards sequence of time, the primary branch of a series of scarcely intelligible coincidences, whose secondary or concluding branch will be recognized by all readers in the late murder of MARY CECILIA ROGERS, at New York. (…) When, in an article entitled The Murders in the Rue Morgue, I endeavored, about a year ago, to depict some very remarkable features in the mental character of my friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, it did not occur to me that I should ever resume the subject.”

The Mystery of Marie Roget, Trailer of the Classic Horror Mystery (1942)

Poe situated his story - with a little help from his “friend the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin” – in Paris, the Hudson was changed in the Seine, Mary Rogers in Marie Rogêt, David Payne in St. Eustache and so on. But Poe followed the main facts of the murder of Mary Rogers and argued that the girl was not murdered by a gang, but by a single individual.  The signs of a struggle in the woods and the battered state of her face indicated she was killed by an individual, because there would not have been a struggle between a gang and a weak and helpless girl. A gang would have overpowered Mary easily. And if Mary was attacked by a gang, there would have been at least one guy who would have taken the handkerchief away, that could identify their victim easily as Mary Rogers.

Poe spoke of a strip from the girl’s skirt that had been wound around the waist and that, with a “sailor’s knot”, could afford a kind of handle for carrying the body. Chevalier Dupin aka Edgar Allan Poe thought of either a fatal accident - perhaps the result of an abortion - that was made up to look like a brutal murder perpetrated in the thicket were the petticoat was found, or a brutal murder “by a lover, or at least by an intimate and secret associate of the deceased. This associate is of swarthy complexion.”  The sailor’s knot and the “dark complexion” of the well-dressed man who was seen with Mary, pointed to a seaman “above the grade of the common sailor”. During her first disappearance, Mary was seen in the company of “a young naval officer, notorious for its excesses.”

“Let us know the full history of “the officer”, with his present circumstances, and his whereabouts at the precise period of the murder. Let us carefully compare with each other the various communications sent to the evening paper, in which the object was to inculpate a gang. (…) And, all of this done, let us again compare these various communications with the known MSS. of the officer. Let us endeavor to ascertain (…) something more of the personal appearance and bearing of the ‘man of dark complexion’.

Je Suis Animal / Marie Roget

At this point, Edgar Allan Poe, an author who was known for his brilliant pointes, ended his “article” with a cheap trick. The “publisher” declared in a footnote that it was inappropriate to reveal the truth and the identity of the perpetrator. Why the author suddenly could not or would not do anymore what he had promised just a few pages before: to track down the “naval officer with the dark complexion”?

Perhaps because Edgar Allan Poe knew all about the “seaman’s knot”? He had spent a lot of time in harbours. In March 1830 he was admitted to the military academy of West Point. He was fired because of insubordination, but he always kept his military overcoat. In 1837, Edgar Poe rented a few rooms in Manhattan, in a house that belonged to the famous bookseller William Gowans. His shop on Broadway, near the tobacco-store of Anderson, became Poe’s office and meeting place. It was here that he probably met Mary Cecilia Rogers.

In 1841, his tubercular child female Virginia was very sick. Poe visited the most vicious neighborhoods of Philadelphia, where he did his intense readings of The Raven, the poem that so eloquently dealt with his obsession with death and destruction. As a sado-necrofiliac, Poe had good reasons to flee a dying, blood-spitting woman, because in his “spirit of the perverse”, the death of a beloved woman gave him “poetic chills”. A few years after the murder of Miss Rogers, he wandered around on the scene of the crime, looking for a “Mary”. He finally landed in the arms of a youth girlfriend who lived there, Mary Devereaux. 

Poe died a few days after he disappeared without a trace, in October 1849, because of a combined abuse of alcohol, opium and laudanum. He was barely 40. In the face of death he called repeatedly for a certain Reynolds, the explorer whose expedition to the Antarctic Ocean encouraged Poe to write the story of Arthur Gordon Pym. But another – G.W.M. – Reynolds played an important role in The Mystery of Mary Cecilia Rogers, as the literary editor of Snowden’s Ladies Companion…

Christopher Walken Reading The Raven by E.A. Poe 

In the papers of the late G.W.M. Reynolds a letter has been found, barely readable and written by a person who… Here are some quotes from it:

“Normally and naturally, there is a strong analogy between the handwriting and the character of every human being. The manuscripts of the various writers, although they show a certain degree of diversity in the design and size of the letters, have undoubtedly a number of characteristics in common… Without exception they exhibit the same tenacity and single-mindedness, and also they all fail to deal with a certain, I would say constitutional, shake of the writer’s hand… What can we deduce from these observations? Apparently, the writer has done the effort to draw each letter in a different handwriting, thus creating the impression that there were different writers at work. 

The style of the letters, in which the soul of the writer is revealed, confirms this conclusion. Symptomatic is the frequent use of inversion. He writes, for example, not a ’superhuman strength’, but ‘a strength, superhuman’. These letters are the result of a literary tour de force. I would say here is a man at work with an exceptional talent in the field of imitation!

It is precisely this consideration that brings us one step further on the road to the unmasking of the culprit. At the time of the first disappearance of Marie, among the faithful visitors of the perfume shop of Monsieur Le Blanc, was the infamous poet Edouard T. Foubert. If I had to describe this man, I would say he is about thirty years old, good looking, always well dressed… His complexion is pale, but his skin has a bright, olive-colored tint. This pale face shows a sharp contrast with his dark eyes and almost black hair, fine as silk. I think his dark eyes and black hair are accentuated by his pale complexion, and not vice versa.

Now, we have already pointed out that the killer of Marie Rogêt has to be a naval officer, and not a poet.  But our description of monsieur Edouard T. Foubert is not yet complete. He like to wear a black coat… with the collar of a cadet or a soldier, the only remnant of his training as an officer. Mister Foubert however had to leave the Navy, on charges of alcohol abuse.

I have already informed the prefect of my findings and if I am not mistaken, one of these days our newspaper will report that the police has finally solved the mystery of Marie Rogêt!

Edgar Allan Poe Articles, Music & Video:

Top 3 of “The Raven Interpretations”

Nightmares from the Mind of Poe

An Urban Explorer Meets Edgar Allan Poe

More Historical Mysteries here!