Chapter Thirty
THIRTY
I haven’t spoken to Izzy since last night, when she took the spare bedding and decamped to the living room without a word.
I think she would have gone home if it wasn’t even more stressful there.
I managed to sneak out to the kitchen this morning and carried back as many snacks and drinks as possible, because unless I want to talk it out, which I do not, then I’m stuck in here for the foreseeable future.
I force myself out of bed and tidy up the cereal bar wrappers on my bedside table. I try really hard to avoid looking at the wall as I put them in the trash, but it’s almost impossible.
What was I thinking?
I smooth out the photos of The Four. They’re crumpled and torn now, the edges ripped, and guilt gnaws at my stomach over my behavior last night. Maybe Izzy was right. Maybe I am looking for things that aren’t there. I should leave the police to their thing and concentrate on mine.
I leave the pages stacked on my dressing table and get back into bed with my notebook and iPad. I have another few days to finish the project, but it’s not like I’m doing anything else today, is it? Plus there’s one glaring hole in my research.
I need to identify BBK’s victims.
I plug in the iPad and open the web browser.
Where do you start when you don’t know someone’s name?
I glance at my notes to see what I already have—an area, which helps, and some dates.
Obviously I’ve seen the BBK sketches too, but none of those named a victim.
I type “BBK victims” into Google and see the same thing over and over.
Unidentified transient women, sex workers…
there’s nothing tangible. Another article mentions the fire that destroyed the evidence, and I get annoyed.
This is why no one ever managed to link BBK to a real person, whether he was the artist or not.
He left nothing behind. I suppose that’s why it’s become such a mystery—people can have their own wild theories and no one can prove them wrong.
I lean back against the headboard and ponder for a second.
Would there be a list of people who went missing in New York at that time?
There must have been so many of them, and I bet most were never reported, but it would be a place to start.
Maybe I can narrow them down by area somehow.
I type “missing persons, New York 1911” into the search bar, but the page just fills with stats and reports that I can’t make heads or tails of.
I scroll a few pages in, hoping I might find something buried, when a recent article from a website called The News Messenger catches my eye, thanks to the phrase “Last known whereabouts New York City, July 1911.”
I open the article, a little rush of excitement flooding through me as I read it.
The Strange Case of Lorenna Randolph
By Laila Niko
A donation to a museum in Blacksburg, Virginia, that included several diaries from the early 1900s has caused quite the stir in the community.
The diaries belonged to a member of the once-prominent Randolph family, prompting archivist Jean Gilroy to trace their descendants.
Little did Jean know, she was about to uncover a long-buried family secret.
“It started innocently enough,” Jean tells me as we sit on the porch outside the museum.
“I was archiving the contents of a crate that had been donated from a local estate—objects that had been squirreled away in the attic for years, old war muskets and such. But it was a stack of beautiful leather diaries that really caught my eye, because we so rarely receive objects this personal. Once I opened the first one, I recognized the name inscribed on the title page as belonging to a family from the area.” The diaries spanned seven years, between 1903 and 1910, and belonged to early twentieth-century socialite Lorenna Randolph.
Born in 1891, she was the only daughter of Virginia politician John Lee Randolph and his second wife, Eliza.
“The final diary ends with Lorenna confessing that her father wanted her to marry George Ambler, the son of a local plantation owner. She seemed to have very different ideals from his and was unhappy with the arrangement, but that entry is dated New Year’s Eve 1910 and we can only assume she started a new volume in January.
I started to do some digging and came across their engagement announcement, but I couldn’t seem to find anything regarding a Lorenna Ambler after that, which is unusual among the more prominent families because you often find wedding and birth announcements in the newspapers. ”
Jean did find more about Lorenna Randolph, though, because she called off her engagement in July 1911, only a month before the wedding.
“By all accounts Lorenna left a note for George and her family and fled to New York City. It would have caused quite the scandal at the time, but records show that within the year George had married a woman called Bethany Culpepper and Lorenna was dead. I found one well-buried obituary, dated August 1911, but there was no detail about how she passed. We can only assume that the family downplayed the incident. She was buried in the family plot.”
Lorenna’s last known whereabouts were New York City, July 1911, but what happened to her that summer remains a mystery.
I rub my eyes and study the photograph of Lorenna included in the article.
Her hair is pulled away from her fine-boned face in a loose updo, and she has a defiant sparkle in her eye that I can’t help but be drawn to.
Excitement courses through me as I spot a silver line on one of her lips.
I’ve seen this scar before. I jump out of bed to grab the pictures of The Four and hold up the first one next to it.
There are differences, of course, but the delicate features and way her hair is tied are almost identical. It’s her.
The model in portrait one is Lorenna Randolph.
I lean back and laugh out loud. I have a lead, but now what? Lorenna’s family must have been notified of her death somehow, because they buried her quietly after she ran away, meaning that something to cause even more scandal must have happened.
Being BBK’s first victim would sure be scandalous, wouldn’t it?
I go back to my iPad and try a few different search phrases until I land on a website where I can search death certificates in New York. Bingo. I type in her name and the year and squeeze my eyes shut as I press the search button.
I open them slowly and almost sob as I see the tiny thumbnail picture of a document with the name Randolph, Lorenna next to it.
I open the document and read it, my blood running cold.
It’s all here, from her birthplace of Virginia to her parents’ names and the place of death—the Lower East Side.
I read further and it all clicks into place: The date she was found matches BBKs first victim, and there’s even a cause of death listed.
Homicide by exsanguination.
But that’s not all.
At the bottom of the certificate there’s a little box labeled “special information,” which asks for address details of people who weren’t from New York. There, in looping script, someone has written an address.
105 Orchard Street
I type the address into Google and click on the first search result, which happens to be a grainy video of an old woman talking directly to camera.
I hesitate, ready to click off, when a banner flashes up on the bottom of the screen.
Anne Steinberg. Lived in the 105 Orchard Street tenements from 1905 to 1913. Filmed in 1994.
“Growing up here was fun,” she says in her thick New York accent.
“I mean, yes, it was tough, but as a child you don’t know that, or at least, I didn’t.
I loved it because there were always so many people around.
They came and went, you know, the people, there were so many drifting through, but I made some good friends too.
” Someone off camera hands her a book and she laughs.
“You have the ledger? I haven’t seen this since we were at Orchard Street.
The tenement kids used to get in trouble for writing naughty fake names in here.
It gave us such a laugh.” She pauses and flips through the book.
“So many of the real hard-up folk came and went with no word. This was the only way to keep track of those ones.”
I pause the video. Would Lorenna be in that ledger?
I consult the menu and go to the digital archive.
There’s more than one ledger there, and it takes me a minute to find the one for 1911.
I flick through the scanned pages until I get to July 1, and that’s where I see Lorenna’s curling script for the first time, signing her into a room for one night.
I reach out and tears well in my eyes as I press my fingertips against the screen.
There’s something so special, so moving about seeing her signature here. It makes her real.
I’m not surprised when Lorenna’s last entry is on July 3.
I wonder what happened to her belongings after that night, whether they were dumped or redistributed.
I wonder if she took her diary with her.
Another name jumps out at me, the large, flamboyant “F” at the start of the name “Frances Hartley” reminiscent of the way a celebrity would sign an autograph.
It’s present on every page until I reach July 11.
Wait a second.
I open my notebook to the table of dates I made in the library earlier this week.
BBK’s victims were all discovered the morning after they had been killed, so it made sense that Lorenna’s last sign-in was on the third.
If Frances last signed in on the tenth, could this be the reason?
Serial killers were known to hunt within a comfort zone—what if he had chosen women who all lived in the same building?
I scour the pages, looking for sign-ins that seem to abruptly stop that month and I find two: Nicole French, who was only there for two nights, and Grace Kaufman, who was there for a few days.
The best part? Nicole’s last sign-in was July 13, followed by Grace on July 17.
The dates match.
I’m bouncing on my bed when a text message from Mom flashes up on the iPad screen and completely bursts my bubble.
Mom: Fliss, I’m on my way to the airport. Dad told me there’s been another murder.