Icy Cold Case: The 126-Year Mystery of the Death of ‘Typewriter’ Martha Fuller

Who pulled the trigger of the 0.38 calibre pistol that killed “typewriter” Martha Fuller at 5.45 on the afternoon of St Patrick’s Day, Saturday, March 17, 1894? The answer to that question proved beyond New York’s finest detectives – from Dubliner Thomas F. Byrnes down – as well as its leading lawyers, its medical and psychology experts and its most frenetic shoe-leather sleuthing reporters. Coroner Edward T. Fitzpatrick told a jury the curious case was “one of those that occur not oftener than once in half a century”. District Attorney John R. Fellows said at an early inquest the “facts were inchoate [and] intangible”. Ultimately, so utterly perplexed were all these great minds and criminal investigators, professional or otherwise, that less than three months after her death, the mystery of Martha Fuller was pushed from the news pages it had dominated and quietly forgotten. It had beaten the very best in the game.

Martha Fuller, born in 1865 at Scott’s Corner, a hamlet in Montgomery, Orange County, New York, and a product of the famed Packard’s Business College, was the ‘typewriter” and stenographer for lawyer William M. Mullen in the Chambers Building at 114 Nassau Street, Lower Manhattan. She shared an office, working back-to-back, with Mullen’s managing clerk, Irish-born Joseph T. Magee. With Mullen out of town on Staten Island, Fuller and Magee were working alone when other occupants of the building were alerted by the sound of a single gunshot and Magee’s cries for help.

One of the first to join Magee at the scene of the tragedy was a hard-boiled journalist, Frank Kernan, who was working on the third floor, one floor up from where Ms Fuller died. Magee told Kernan he was out of the office when the revolver was discharged. Kernan gave police and fellow reporters a graphic description of what he found. He remained adamant in subsequent court hearings that he saw no weapon, in spite of moving Ms Fuller and his efforts to locate the gun, and that Ms Fuller, in the last throes of life, lay beside a wicker chair (which Mullen later insisted was a revolving bookcase). After Kernan left the office to seek help, a clerk from another second floor firm, Frank S. Denninger, entered the room and, ignoring the firm insistence of Magee, picked up the gun from the floor and put it on a desk, saying he feared the still-alive Ms Fuller might use it. Richard H. Burton, an office boy from Mullens’s firm, later testified that he checked the office desks and their drawers on the morning of Ms Fuller’s death, and the pistol in question was in Magee’s top drawer, though unloaded from a box of cartridges beside it. There was no doubt the revolver was Magee’s, but how did Kernan not see it, when Denninger later found it in plain view on the floor? And why was Magee so determined that Denninger not touch it? There were also conflicting stories about the entry and exit points of the 0.38 bullet on Ms Fuller’s temples. Based on size and whether there were any powder marks, the original theory was that she had shot herself at close range through the left temple, but it later emerged she was right-handed. Regardless, it was very apparent to Kernan, Denninger and others that she hadn’t died instantly from a bullet passing through her brain. An ambulance surgeon called Dr Cutter had obtained a glass of whisky from Flynn’s billiard room to inject Ms Fuller twice. As The New York Times reported, “Hope that she might rally was inspired by her extraordinary vitality.” The Times added that the surgeon had wanted to ask, “Who shot you?” All of New York City, it seemed, wanted to know that, but would ultimately be denied the truth.

On the night of her death, members of Ms Fuller’s extended family made it known they were convinced Magee had murdered her, on the grounds that she had spurned Magee’s persistent and unwelcome advances toward her. “Their relations were not as close as Magee desired,” said one report. Ms Fuller’s brother, Walter Elliott Fuller (1868-1959), a bookkeeper at Latham Alexander & Co on Wall Street, said Magee had paid Ms Fuller “distasteful attention”. Of course, New York’s red-blooded Press had an absolute field day with all this, and for weeks after Ms Fuller’s death newspaper columns were filled with interviews with people who claimed to be “in the know”, with salacious stories about Magee’s chequered past with other women, with police statements mainly aimed at trying to calm everyone down, and outright speculation (often about police work) from the reporters themselves.

Eight days after the shooting, The New York Times felt itself compelled to sort out “Much wild or silly theorizing [with] no new salient facts”, amid rumours, clues and discoveries the Times listed in inverted commas. “All these stories,” the Times said, “were idle, or well-meaning fabrications”. At the end of it all, however, the Times, along with many less fact-driven newspapers, was forced to admit Ms Fuller’s death “remains a mystery”. It was a mystery with only two possibilities: either Ms Fuller killed herself, or Magee killed her. For a time Magee was imprisoned in the Tombs, while police worked on a murder charge they failed to make stick, and immediately after his release in May, NYC police and newspapermen quickly forgot the whole thing. To this day, the sorry saga of Martha Fuller is still unsolved.

Martha Fuller was the daughter of caterer Nelson Fuller and his wife Mary (née Tears, or Teares). She was survived by her mother and brother, Walter E. Fuller. Ms Fuller was variously described by those who knew her as “of even temperament, reserved and of hitherto excellent reputation”, “an admirable young woman” and as “steady, sensible, refined and intelligent”. It was known she was unhappy with her pay and conditions in Mullen’s employ, and had set herself a target of establishing her own typewriting and stenography establishment. Mullens said Ms Fuller was “ambitious, quite a lady”, but admitted she had been sacked by Magee, who she found “exacting and fault-finding”, then reinstated. It also emerged, however, that before her death she had been losing sleep and using Antipyrine, an analgesic that helps to decrease  pain and inflammation. She had also, allegedly, self-administered chloroform, and it was claimed she was being treated for hysteria, insomnia and “nervous prostration”. Burton testified she had been seen “crying hysterically over her typewriter”.

For Thomas F. Byrnes, the famed Dublin-born head of the New York City Police’s detective department, to admit defeat in a case such as this shows just how puzzling it was. After all, Byrnes had “invented America's modern detective bureau” and no doubt gave Magee his notorious “third degree” interrogation, but with no success in proving whether Magee was guilty. Called “the American Vidocq” (after French criminalist Eugène François Vidocq) in mid-June 1894 Byrnes conceded to William Standish Hayes in the Daily True American, “No, murder will not always out. It is seldom, however, that the man who is not a professional criminal - and a high grade one at that – who commits murder is not found out.” Eleven months later, Byrnes was compelled by Theodore Roosevelt to resign. The last passing mention of Ms Fuller’s death came in mid-February 1898, when the building in which she worked burned down. It had belonged to Levi Parsons Morton, who was US vice president under Benjamin Harrison to 1893 and a governor of New York from 1895-1896.