10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lost chapter brought to life, July 31, 2006
This review is from: Master Detective: The Life and Crimes of Ellis Parker- America's Real-Life Sherlock Holmes (Hardcover)
Good murder mysteries never die - nor fade away - but live on in our collective imaginations. Some of them now seem so preposterous that only a full understanding of the periods in which they happened can explain the hold they once had on us. The Lindbergh kidnapping and murder continues to fascinate, with its many unanswered questions, and a major part of that famous episode has just been resurrected with 'Master Detective, the Life and Crimes of Ellis Parker,' by John Reisinger.
The execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann was delayed for several days in 1936 as a bizarre scenario played out, with Ellis Parker (Burlington County`s Chief of Detectives) at the center. Himself the hero of an adulatory memoir by Fletcher Pratt ("The Cunning Mulatto"), Parker had become embroiled with the Crime of the Century, after a lifetime of sleuthing just one county over from Hopewell, New Jersey. Ironically, he and his son (Ellis jr), and a strange cast of characters, would soon become targets themselves, as they were successfully prosecuted under the new federal "Lindbergh" kidnapping law. "America's Real-Life Sherlock Holmes" had become the victim of his own grandiose schemes and a misplaced alliance with the corrupt one-time governor of New Jersey, Harold Hoffman. Agencies and egos were in full political mode.
The tangled story of Parker, his origins, and his rise and fall, has never been adequately sorted out before now. But John Reisinger, in a worthy detective hunt of his own, has located many long-lost documents, and engaging reminiscences of family members, and woven it all together in a well-written book, enlivened by his dry wit and appreciation for the vagaries of human nature.
Born in 1871 to a Quaker family, young Ellis had his first brush with crime when his fiddle, and his father's borrowed horse and buggy, were stolen. His quick teenage solution to the deed, accomplished before Arthur Conan Doyle's Study in Scarlet, soon led to full-time employment with county authorities. His energy, ability to interpret physical clues, and a sixth sense in profiling likely culprits, led to an amazing success rate in solving murders - at one point over 98%. What teller of tales, in such a career, could have predicted his comeuppance - his slow but steady involvement with the death of a small child, and his offbeat solution? He died in federal prison, not very long after the man whose guilt he claimed to doubt.
Initially, Parker thought that only "dope fiends" would have even dared to kidnap the aviator's son, since the matter seemed beyond any rational explanation. He would later suggest that the real motivation was concealed in a mid-life crisis of the kidnapper, one he gradually placed on the unlikely shoulders of a disbarred lawyer, friend, and sometime naturopath, "Dr." Paul Wendel. It was that convoluted kidnapping, of the "kidnapper" himself, that would prove to be Parker's undoing. He veered from thinking the dead child was, or was not, the actual corpse of Lindbergh's son, and became obsessed with a typographical error, misstating the baby's height.
Reisinger has spent a long time sorting out the many strands of this whole episode, so much a reflection of the 1920s-30s, and one gets the full flavor of Parker's seat-of-the-pants background, and his rise in law enforcement (before modern forensics). One of his prior successes, involving a pickled corpse and 175 suspects, suggests why Parker had become such a power to be reckoned with, and why confessions often flowed when he was "on the case." But then the "most famous detective" met the "most hated man in America." The results weren't pretty, and both suffered the consequences of an unforgiving public.
The author has done a lot of his own spadework (from primary sources), and navigated the many personalities and complex historical record well. There is some small confusion on p. 170, with details of how Rail 16 was traced to Hauptmann's attic (the original matching floor board was NOT the one traced to Dorn Milling in SC), but the correct analysis of the most recent wood investigation is properly cited. In this modern world, many of these reports, along with the handwriting samples, are now available on the Internet. Every man is now his own detective, and each of us can scrutinize the sources so ably marshaled here. The reader is in Mr. Reisinger's debt (over 300 pages and excellent photos) for bringing more light to such a convoluted chapter in American history. It is a handsome and worthy addition to anyone's library, certainly anyone who has a taste for real-life mysteries and the hard work that was (and is) required to solve them. In a world of revisionism and innuendo, such books are rare and to be treasured.
Allen
Moderator: LindyKidnap
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