Dr. Walter Wilkins had led a blameless life up to the time the three men in gray walked into his house and lay in wait to attack him.
He looked forward to a comfortable old age; for if his wife died before him, it seemed certain, so devoted was she, that he would benefit by her will. And if she outlived him there was an equal certainty that her loving devotion would continue.
The two were looked upon as an exemplary pair, a marriage which, in its twilight, was as full of romance and love as at its dawn. Dr. Wilkins was not well at sixty-seven, he suffered a chronic ailment of the digestive system, to which his wife administered with care and concern.
He needed his wife, that was plain from many an angle — and had William J. Burns not got into the case the crime of her death would have been set down probably as the work of the three mysterious men in gray.
Dr. Wilkins had been married twice earlier in life; it was Mrs. Wilkins’s second marriage. They lived in New York in a large house in Sixty-Fifth Street, but they preferred the smaller summer home in Long Beach, and frequently spent the winter months there as well, leaving the town house, which was partly let to roomers, in the care of their housekeeper.
After awhile, however, Dr. Wilkins began asking these roomers to find other accommodations, giving the excuse that he did not care to have cooking done in his rooms.
But in February, 1919, the Wilkinses were living at Long Beach and journeying back and forth into town for dinner, or for the theater sometimes twice or thrice a week.
They spent this particular week-end in the deserted Sixty-Fifth Street house, and on the 27th of February, Sunday, started back to the beach by the train which would allow them to reach Long Beach at 9.06.
It was not far to their home in Olive Street, the air was mild for February, and they walked, thinking the stroll might do them good.
“I Want What You Have”
At about ten o’clock a frantic ringing on the bell of one of their neighbors, Max Mayer, a glove manufacturer, showed Dr. Wilkins in great dishevelment and much agitation, standing on the porch. His derby hat had been dented and broken, his overcoat slit from its pocket. Mr. Mayer rather wondered why, if he had been beaten, as all signs indicated, there were no marks on his face or head.
And it appeared that Dr. Wilkins had been beaten.
By the mysterious three men in gray!
“Just as we reached the house one of these men attacked me and knocked me down,” he gasped as he confronted Mr. Mayer in the doorway. “I called to my wife to get help; then the other two rushed after her and felled her. She is lying in a pool of blood. For God’s sake get help!”
But it happened that Mr. Mayer had no phone, as Dr. Wilkins, in any other calmer moment would have recalled. So he hurried back with the doctor to Mrs. Wilkins, while the stricken man went to another house, that of Cassius Coleman, justice of peace, to summon police aid and to notify the hospital.
The unconscious woman, with her skull fractured and her face pitifully bruised, was taken to the Nassau Hotel, which had recently been made over into a hospital for soldiers. Then the doctor told his story.
“As I walked in the gate I observed that the vestibule door was open, and I told my wife to stay behind while I investigated.
“The inner door, however, was closed; I opened this with my key. I stepped in and at once a tall man in gray rushed at me and beat me over the head with a blunt instrument. The only thing which saved me from a cracked skull was my derby, which remained on.
“ ‘I’ve a gun here,’ the man told me, ‘but I am not going to shoot. I want what you have on you.’ ”
Then, as Dr. Wilkins handed him his wallet, stickpin, watch and chain, the robber sent his companions outside to attend to Mrs. Wilkins, “to stop her infernal noise,” Dr. Wilkins quoted them.
She had been hit over the head with a small hammer, which lay beside the dying woman when she was found.
The house looked as if the three men in gray, who had of course disappeared, had been in it for hours. There were cigarette ashes, soiled dishes on the table, places set for three, food lying about. On the buffet was a half empty brandy bottle with three glasses standing near. And, funniest of all, a remarkably well filled purse close beside it!
“Odd they dealt with you so much more gently than with your wife,” one of the police detectives remarked after a little.
Mrs. Wilkins Dies
“It is odd,” agreed the doctor, but, after all, it was an oddity in his favor, and he could not take offense at the slight.
“Odd that the robbers overlooked this purse,” the detective continued, holding it up.
“It is very odd.”
Now the Wilkinses had two dogs, and the police asked what had become of them. They searched and found that one had been rather brutally stabbed, but the other, closed up in the cellar, set up a fine how-do-do when he saw his master.
Dr. Wilkins, happy that the second pet had escaped the fate of the first, who, though not dead, was dying, took the dog out for a walk before following his wife to the hospital. And when he arrived, he found that she was dead.
“She kept putting her hands over her face and moaning, ‘Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!’ ” the hotel keeper told Dr. Wilkins as he returned to the house after his sad vigil.
A detective spent the night at the house, and the doctor insisted that he share the same room. Neither slept for the moaning of the wounded dog, and the doctor’s own restlessness and nervousness further prevented any tranquillity in the chamber.
When morning came Dr. Wilkins stopped suddenly in his dressing, buried his head in his arms and cried for nearly twenty minutes.
“I have lost my best friend,” he sobbed, controlling himself with difficulty.
The Unwitnessed Will
There were no clews save his own description — the three men had been young and had worn gray caps. Just how they had escaped so completely remained a mystery.
Two women living near-by insisted that they had heard the sounds of a departing automobile, yet the police proved to their entire satisfaction that no such auto had crossed the bridge leading from the island to the long road through the marshes.
Nor had the robbers departed by boat — none had heard the sound of a motor, and the channel gave up no evidence in the way of a drifting craft which the three might have used to reach the mainland and then abandoned.
The police decided that the men had a safe rendezvous in the heart of town from which they operated. The empty house near the Wilkins home was suspected, and Max Mayer’s young niece aided this theory when she recalled the evening of the tragedy.
“When Uncle Max was talking to the doctor at the door,” she told them, “I was in my room undressing for bed. I saw lights wafting up and down stairs in that empty house across the way, lights which disappeared when Dr. Wilkins and Uncle Max rushed back to the scene of the murder.”
On the fence in the rear of the house was the mark of a bloody hand as if the perpetrator of the deed leaned back to view his work with satisfaction, grasping the fence to give himself support after the ardor of his labors.
There were finger-prints on the brandy bottles and on the glasses on the buffet. There were finger-prints on the hammer with which Mrs. Wilkins had been struck.
The police scattered copies of the fingerprints throughout the country for comparison with those of known criminals, but to no purpose. They did not resemble any in the files of the police elsewhere or here.