Guest Post by Lona Manning
(A Clews note: Freelance writer Lona Manning is a frequent contributor to, among other publications, the online Crime Magazine. Lona came across an autobiography of one of the pioneering "police women" in the New York Police Department in the 1920s. Here, Lona tells us the story of Mary Sullivan's most remarkable murder case. Thanks, Lona.)
New York police woman Mary Sullivan was banished from the undercover assignments she loved, to a succession of dreary station-houses, doing the usual woman’s work – looking after lost children and guarding female suspects. It was the height of the Roaring Twenties, there were plenty of bootleggers, drug traffickers and fake fortune-tellers to apprehend, and Sullivan, a young widow with a friendly Irish manner, impressed her superiors with her ability to transform herself into a dance hall girl or a society dame looking for a good speakeasy. But Sullivan had agitated a bit too forcefully for equal pay and opportunities for female officers. Her exile to regular “matron work,” she later recounted, left her “humiliated by the setback and in a very discouraged frame of mind.”
One windy March night in 1924, Sullivan was surprised to get a teary phone call from a baby-faced young flapper she had once befriended, also named Mary. (In fact every person in this story is named Mary. Or else rhymes with Mary. No wonder Sullivan used pseudonyms in her autobiography.) Mary was a runaway and a sometime gangster’s moll, though still in her teens.
Sullivan found Mary shivering and hungry in a unheated rooming house, took her home and fed her a hot breakfast. In between wolfing down flapjacks, Mary explained that since the last time she saw Sullivan, she had gotten married. She and her husband, Harry Fenton, lived in a boarding house run by an elderly widow named Mary Coleman. Harry, young Mary confessed, had killed the widow – but everybody thought the widow died in a house fire.
Her husband had clubbed the old woman unconscious, then strangled her with one of Mary’s stockings. Mary dropped the bloody stocking into the toilet tank and the corpse took up residence under the newlywed’s bed for three days while Harry and Mary debated what to do with the late Mrs. Coleman. Harry eventually hit on the scheme of staging an arson in the widow’s apartment. The ruse worked – the fire department found the half-burnt body of the widow lying in her fireplace, next to an empty whiskey bottle.
Harry was annoyed that the old lady had only $15.00 in her purse, instead of the rent boodle he’d hoped for. Soon after, the newlyweds quarreled and he threw Mary out. Mary begged Sullivan “never to tell anyone the story, a pledge which only a very naïve person would exact of a police officer.” Sullivan tricked her into going to the station on the pretext of needing information about her old gangster associates.
Once there, Sullivan recalled:
“For a few minutes I talked rapidly about how her husband had thrown her out on the street, and how she had wandered about without any money for food or lodging.”
Then I turned to her suddenly. “You say that this stocking is in the tank of the hall bathroom?” I demanded.
“Yes,” said [Mary], startled out of caution.
Harry Fenton was arrested and convicted, Mary was let off.
Because of her work on the case of the charred widow, Mary Sullivan became the first New York police woman inducted into the Honor Legion. In 1926, she was appointed head of the Policewoman’s Bureau.
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Sullivan’s biography, My Double Life, was originally published in 1938 and was re-issued in 1983 by Chelsea House Publishers. For more interesting reading along these lines see the online exhibit Women in Policing by the New York City Police Museum.
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