Speaker 1

This story contains adult content and language, along with references to sexual assault.

Speaker 2

Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 3

At that moment, they had no idea what was going to come out of that seller. They were hoping it would be Ruth, who was five, who was in captivity, and there were stories of that that she was being held against her will.

Speaker 1

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical true crime podcast tenfold war Wicked on Exactly Right. I've traveled around the world interviewing people for the show. I've interviewed some people in person and some from my home studio over zoom, and they are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true crime stories, and now we want to tell you those stories with details that have never been published more Wicked Presents. Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make, good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories behind the stories. Author Brad RICKA and I both love good mysteries and smart investigators. He wrote a book called Missus Sherlock Holmes. It's about an attorney slash detective who advocated for victims and then solved their cases using some really clever techniques.

Speaker 3

It's the big city. It's New York City in nineteen seventeen, and it's where the boroughs have finally been consolidated into this one big project that will be the city. And it looks great on paper, but not everyone agrees because you have all these little neighborhoods being told you're now part of a bigger mission. It's the time of the tenements. It's the time of the immigrant everywhere, and there's Little Italy and there's all these places that look like they were just plucked out of Europe and dropped under the street. But then there's automobiles and there's a lot of crime, and there's the presence of the police through all this. World War One is on the horizon and the Germans are kind of making these machiavellian moves with Mexico and President Woodrow Wilson has had enough. It's an exciting time, but it's also an uncertain time, a lawless time, a dirty time.

Speaker 1

Where does Ruth and her family, because we're talking about the victim now, Ruth Kruger and her family fit, Is this an immigrant family in New York.

Speaker 3

Yes, but they're well to do. Her father is an accountant, Henry Krueger, and he's done very well for himself, and they live in this nice apartment building in Harlem, and he travels a bit, and his daughters do very well in school. Ruth is a star pupil in high school and teaches at the Sunday School. Kind of doing all right for themselves in this larger New York.

Speaker 1

And Ruth is eighteen. So is she the eldest or the youngest or does she seem like someone who has a lot of responsibility at this age.

Speaker 3

She does. She has an older sister. Her main responsibility has been taking care of her sister, who's been sick for about a year with rheumatic fever and some other things. So this was after she graduated high school. But that's as anyone who's ever cared for a sick person, especially as sick family member, that's a lot of responsibility. So she would often be the one going out doing chores, running errands, while her sister would would stay at home.

Speaker 1

So Ruth is in a very large city, but she comes from a really good family and she's got this responsibility do you have an indication of any kind of dreams that she had. I mean, where was she heading in life?

Speaker 3

That is a great question, because we don't know when she disappears. She's eighteen, and at eighteen, you have every dream in the universe almost and at the same time, you, in a weird way, kind of don't have any because you're not sure what the future is going to bring. She probably wasn't going to college. She seemed to like being a teacher at Sunday schools. But that's just me speculating. And that's part of the common tragedy that runs through so many of these stories, is not just the plans for the future, but the fact that those plans have been taken away.

Speaker 1

When you have somebody as young as Ruth at age eighteen and you have limited information, how do you, as a writer create this person that people can relate to, because you want to put the victim at the forefront, not the killer necessarily right.

Speaker 3

One thing I had to realize because there's lots of gaps in that kind of knowledge in this book of people who we know existed and did all this stuff, but there's no personal records of and Ruth certainly is one of them. So what I decided to do is focus on her as she became understood through the media. This story is kind of one of so many. What happens to Ruth I found out by the end, you know, just happens again and again and again. And a big part of that is how the media tells her story.

Speaker 1

Okay, so let's talk about the next step for Ruth. She's eighteen, she teaches Sunday school, She's taking care of her sister, she seems responsible. What is the next pivotal thing that happens to her that moves your story forward?

Speaker 3

It's always kind of nothing, really that propels her into this story that she does not want to be a part of. It's so often just a regular day. It's the day before Valentine's Day, of all days, just over one hundred years ago, and she goes out to do some errands and there's some light snow, and she goes to the bank, into the stationery store, and all these wonderfully mundane things we do all the time, and that are even better in New York City, right, And at some point she decides to do something for herself. Caring for her sister and being in the apartment all day. She decides to go ice skating because she loves to ice skate. And back then, you know, there were all these ponds and lakes you could go skating on, and so part of her itinerary for that day was to get her skates sharpened.

Speaker 1

Okay, so she goes to get her skates sharpened, and where does that even happen? Is there a shop that does that in nineteen seventeen in New York City.

Speaker 3

One of the best things of researching nineteen seventeen New York is you learn all these things that people would do to make a living, all these kind of side hustles. And so I found out that you would get your skates sharpened at mechanics or an auto mechanic would sharpen your skates. And she went to, of all places, a motorcycle store. It was called Metropolitan Motorcycles NATA sign you know, will sharp your skates, and she went in to drop your skates off to be sharpened, and she picked them up.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 1

So the last thing that we know of is that Ruth drops off these skates at the Metropolitan Motorcycles and then picks them up and then disappears.

Speaker 2

What is the next thing.

Speaker 1

Who knows that she disappears At this point, she doesn't come home, and her mom gets upset.

Speaker 3

Her parents are away, they're up in Boston, and her sister starts to become worried that she should have been home by dark. And she goes out and goes to all the places she was going to go, and goes by the motorcycle store because she knows her sister knows she would want to go ice skating. She loves to ice skate, and it's closed, which she found a bit strange. But she knew something was wrong. She could just feel it. And she telegrammed her father and said Ruth is missing. Come home immediately. And the next day in the Times it said pretty girl skater goes missing and the police were brought in.

Speaker 1

So the parents were turning home, I'm assuming at.

Speaker 3

Some point overnight.

Speaker 1

Yeah, So they return home and what's the next step for the police. Is this just what any police officers now would do, which is canvass area go to the shop?

Speaker 4

Question people, yes and no.

Speaker 3

One. Thing I had to do a lot of research was how police worked back then, and what I found was there are a lot of things that are the same they canvassed the shops and it was the owner of the store was an Italian. His name was Alfredo Kochi. When she disappeared after this day, he was questioned by police and said, yoh, yeah, I remember her. She was very pretty. His English was very broken, but he said she picked up skates and leave. They talked to all these other people, and you can read the records, but then there's stuff that the police did that doesn't show up in records that would show up later on. The police were a huge presence in New York City even then, and they had their kind of influence in almost every walk of life. And they were in this huge new headquarters downtown that they referred to as the White House because that's how much power they had. And so they did question Alfredo Kochie and they did search his shop too, and they searched his first floor, and he had a basement and they searched the basement and they said, everything's fine, But it kind of fizzles out once they run out of people to talk to and run out of evidence. And here's where her father, Henry Krueger, who's this short accountant, really gets furious and shows up at police headquarters. Why aren't you searching for my daughter?

Speaker 1

I assume they looked for boyfriends, right? Did they find any boyfriends?

Speaker 2

Was she dating?

Speaker 3

Yeah? So that's always the next step. So you get the picture, and then you get the rumors and the gossip. And that's what kind of turned the tide, because all of a sudden in the papers and the other thing is New York back then had twenty newspapers.

Speaker 4

Oh yeah, at all times of the day.

Speaker 3

It's the the best. It's pulp internet, and you can imagine the stuff that they would print and just make up. So after a couple of days, when they don't find any clues and don't find her, they start with the gossip and the rumors, and it starts with boyfriends that, oh, she must have run off with a man. And all of a sudden, calls were coming in from Brooklyn. I saw Ruth Krueger. She was with someone with white hair. And it turns out she did have a few nice Columbia boys. They were called and the police brought them in and we have their questioning and.

Speaker 1

Uh, well wait a second, Columbia the country or Columbia the university.

Speaker 3

Oh no, I'm sorry Columbia, the university. Yeah, it's funny because they're always referred to in the police reports as those nice Columbia boys, and they're kind of clueless, right, They're like, Oh, I smiled at her once and she was mad at me because I didn't say hi to her on the street. So there's no there's no path there. They quickly find out there's.

Speaker 1

No potential for an acrimonious relationship, at least with the men that they were able to locate, is what it sounds like.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, but this is what drives her father, just Barker's because all this suggestion is that not only first she has one boyfriend, but then she has multiple boyfriends and they're fighting over her, and he he holds a press conference, which is like unheard of in nineteen seventeen, and is adamant. He says, my daughter was a good girl. He said, you stop this right now. He's like, she was a good girl and something happened to her, And this is really kind of unheard of for the time.

Speaker 1

Are they suggesting multiple boyfriends because A she ran away with one of them. B she just was no matter what happened to her, she sort of deserved it because she was a woman about town or is it suggesting that one of them hurt her and she's truly a victim.

Speaker 3

It's the first one they start to paint it that this was her fault. And this is one thing you see that you can see it today. Unfortunately, like clockwork, when somebody, especially a woman, goes missing, this is the kind.

Speaker 4

Of cycle of news victim shaming.

Speaker 3

Yes, yes, she was on drugs, she was promiscuous. Just this nonsense, and that's what they do to her. The first picture of her is just her face, and then all of a sudden, the next picture of her goes further down to show more of her body, and it just keeps going that way and it gets even worse. So the next step after the boyfriends is that she's part of this white slavery ring. Some of the stories are that she's been sold into white slavery, but some are that she has gone in willingly sex trafficking, right right. It was a huge fear, and there were all these stories that people had seen Ruth on a ship going to Brazil. And a woman comes forth later and says, we were in this harem like room and I saw Ruth Krueger.

Speaker 1

But the irony of this is something we talk about with the Gabby Patito case and other cases, is of the missing white woman's which I talk about in some of my other shows. That is the idea that Ruth, even though it was bad publicity, was sure getting publicity that other people, particularly other immigrants or women of color, were not getting, and I'm sure they were going missing all the time.

Speaker 3

What I found with the official numbers is there were about one to two thousand a year that were just never found. Wow, which is ridiculous.

Speaker 2

What is the next thing?

Speaker 1

How many days are the police searching and the media reporting until this finally starts to recess back a little If.

Speaker 3

You kind of chart all the places that people put her after she disappears, she had traveled the globe six times, but it's a few weeks and after that peak, it kind of disappears a little bit and the police basically stop their investigation. They publicly say that it's over, and they say that they have concluded that she probably ran off with some romantic interests. There's a couple stories that someone saw her get into a cab, so of course that's just the same as fact. So that's what really sets her father off. And he again has this press conference. He says, my daughter was a good girl. I know something bad happened to her. And this is when he unveils that he has hired a new attorney. And this is where we meet Missus Sherlock Holmes.

Speaker 1

This is our protagonist. So this is Grace Hummiston.

Speaker 3

He has this press conference and there's this woman in her late fifties mid fifties in the back and she's dressed all in black with this huge, weird black hat, and they think she's the grandmother and they think, oh, maybe they've found Ruth. And she's died and she's already in mourning. And she steps up and she says, I am Missus Hummiston. I'm the attorney. All clues will now go through me. She's had this incredible career that has kind of gone forgotten, and people didn't really know her then either until this case.

Speaker 1

So now let's back up and talk about Grace and what kind of person she was and where she comes from.

Speaker 3

She was someone that i'd heard of or I saw an article when I was digging for this in the early stages and just found nothing on her. Absolutely nothing. I figured someone of the length of her career and she becomes really famous and yet she leaves nothing behind. So that was like a real wall to meet in the first few days of this book, where I said, I can't write this book. But then I realized that I love Sherlock Holmes stories. I always have. What I love about Sherlock Holmes is he never talks about himself. You just get these little tidbits and then they're so just delicious that you're like, wait, Holmes does opium and then you just eat it up.

Speaker 2

That is not a little tidbit. But yes, I understand what you mean.

Speaker 3

But we never hear, like anything of his personal life. It's always the mystery. So I said, that's how I'm going to tell this story. The cases right, and she's fascinating. She is born to wealth and she marries this doctor, doctor Quackenbush, and he's busted early on for having peep poles in his medical practice, so she divorces him immediately and says that she's going to go to law school. And the only law school for women is NYU, and she enrolls and she has to go at night. Women can only attend at night and it's really a motley crew and she's kind of hazed. There's like snow coming in the windows and they're throwing it at her. This doesn't face her. She goes to the front row and she really takes to the laws so much so that they move her to the day class and she graduates in two years instead of three, twelfth in her class, which is amazing. And she founds something called the People's Law Firm, which eventually grows into a series of legal clinics all over the city for the immigrant poor. And she does it for free. She doesn't take any money. She has a sign outside that says, with a kipling quote, you do the work for the good of the people. And she's like Robin Hood, only ten times better. There's all these stories that come out of this that these immigrant New Yorkers are going through these horrible situations with bad bosses and bad husbands, and she just solves all of these things on the fly without even getting the law involved. And they'd pay her in bread and they make her clothes and stuff, and it's just really amazing to me.

Speaker 2

What was the.

Speaker 1

Strength from her. I can imagine if you're in law school and you're coming out and you're young attorney. Is it attention to detail? Is it just a deep knowledge after reading so much of the law, or is it just a cute attention to forensics that were available at the time.

Speaker 2

What made her brilliant?

Speaker 3

There were teachers that she said she liked, and they focused on the practical aspects of law, not the euretical kind of academic Ivory tower that she was really interested in getting her hands dirdy. And one thing we do know is her father, who she really looked up to, was an insurance claims adjuster, but he would often be in court because he would testify and court was a lot especially that kind of cos a lot different than is now, and he would really help people. And so I think this really affected her because her father died right kind of before she went to law school, and that's around the time she started to wear black, and she wore all black her entire life, and nobody really knew why. It's because of her father, but I think she really liked that being able to help people.

Speaker 1

Did you get a sense for her personality? We obviously can tell she's probably pretty headstrong and she's very smart.

Speaker 2

Was she clever was she stern? Was she warm?

Speaker 3

One of the main mysteries of the book, there's the mystery of Ruth Krueger. But to me, the other mystery that I really tried to solve was who was Grace Hoiston, because she's just as much a mystery to me. But she was those things. She was very smart, very sharp, witty, and warm. She loved to go shopping. She would often show up in court late with like all these bags from the department stores and she would say, well, there was a sale on this, and so very endearing. I think too. Once she was on a case, there was really and this is a cliche, but there was nothing that could deter her from finding what happened. And I think that's kind of just a very kind of lateral thinking mind open to any possibility.

Speaker 1

So early spring nineteen seventeen, mister Krueger, who is Ruth's father, has hired this hot shot attorney who has a heart of gold, who wants to help immigrants, and it's just really keen on solving crimes. What is her first step, aside from explaining to both the police and the media that she needs to receive all of the clues before everyone else does.

Speaker 3

Every Sherlock Holmes says Watson, she has this terrific character named Julius J. Cron, who's this Hungarian federal agent. He was known as the man who couldn't be bribed, and he has a scar down his left sheek, and he's just a dream to write about. But she hires him immediately, and she says, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to read everything. And she locks herself up in her office and takes every piece of evidence that the police have handed over because the police are done with it, so they hand everything to Ruth's father and she just reads it all. And she emerges a few days later and says, we need to look at Alfredo Coach, who ran the skating store. What I didn't say, I forgot to say is that in those first few weeks Coachi disappears. When I say this, people are like, oh, he's guilty, he did it, But it was more everyone thought that he was just feared for his life.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Yeah, this is a time period and people have says to me too, like New York kind of vacillates with who's to blame for something, And at this period it was very heavily anti Italian.

Speaker 2

The police were Irish, right.

Speaker 3

Yes, and he was terrified that they were going to plant evidence and he would go to sing sing and die on the chair. So he disappeared, and his wife had no idea where he went, and she had two kids, and so she was running the motorcycle shop. But Grace came out of her research hole and said, we need to look at Alfredo Kochi. And there were all these other stories of the cab drivers and all these other sightings of Ruth all over the city, but she narrowed down that that was the path to go down.

Speaker 1

Did the press harass Alfredo Kochie at all? When the police first revealed that this was literally the last person aside from her killer or her kidnapper, who had seen her alive, they must have just gone on attack at him, I would assume.

Speaker 3

I think he left early enough to avoid the big brunt of that. But they did it in little insidious ways, like you know, the dark eyed Italian whose level of English is very the burly or so, they really painted him like the villain. Yeah, so they definitely started that. One of the major enemies at this time in New York was the Black hand. And this was this mafia group that would kidnap people and send you these terrible handwritten letters with like black hearts and daggers and say, you know, you have to pay me this money if you want to see her whoever back And many people now I'll say, oh, the black can was all made up. But there I found all these cases of just horrific. There is one where they took a kid, an infant, and by the time the family could afford to pay the ransom, he didn't recognize his parents. And this is a police report. So at the core of all this just hysteria, there was bad stuff happening.

Speaker 1

Now we have talked about the Irish police targeting Italian immigrants, which is very well documented, especially in Gilded Age and early nineteen hundreds of New York City. I'm assuming that Grace Hummiston actually has evidence this is her targeting Alfredo Kochie because she actually has dug up something.

Speaker 2

What does she think she's found?

Speaker 3

So that is such a terrific question because my answer is not what you think it's going to be. This goes back to your last question a while ago, is why is she a great lawyer? She becomes this lawyer, but then she finds out that because she can't trust the police half the time, she has to become a detective, so she has to go looking for clues and weigh one against the other and what's good and what's bad evidence, And she still throughout her whole career she says she relies on female intuition, and the newspapers always put this with her Missus Sherlock Holmes, her intuition is impeccable, but clearly it's not just that. For her, it was that he was the last person to see her, and he did disappear, and everyone agreed that he was fearing for his own life, but he was still the last one to see her, and when the sister went back that night, he was gone, and the shop was supposed to be open. So I think it's that just the kind of the bare facts if he was the last one, combined with that feeling that something was going on. They didn't know, so she wanted to focus on him. And what she desperately wanted to do was get in that motorcycle shop been searched at this time three times by the police, and she didn't trust that, and she said, I want to get in there, and I want to search it. But missus Kochi, she was writing the store now, she was pretty helpful and amenable. She had had enough. She said, no one is coming in this store again, no more searches, leave me alone, leave my children alone. You're just out to get poor al, she would say. But Grace wanted in. She wanted in bad.

Speaker 2

Okay.

Speaker 1

So I don't know whether warrants were required back then. But she's an attorney, so what are her avenues to get into that shop?

Speaker 3

So yeah, so that's the first thing she does, goes to the police, Can you help me out? Blah blah blah. The police are no help. They look at her and she has by this time a tremendous resume, but they don't help. They say the case is closed, and they say there's no reason to go back in, and they keep going back to the fact that it's been searched three times by detectives and they say there's nothing there. So she has left with kind of the impossible mystery of having this place under the ground, the basement that she really wants to search, but she has no way into it.

Speaker 1

Okay, So what's her next step is Julius J. Cron show up and kick in some doors or what can be done.

Speaker 3

Well, it's even better than that. And this is why I really like her, because she's so smart. So she realizes that since Coachie's gone, there's nobody to fix motorcycles. So she meets with Kron and she says, we got to get in that basement. And he says, how we can't, We can't, we can't, And she asks him, do you know how to fix motorcycles? Smart? And it takes them a minute, but he gets it, and so he has never met missus Coachy. So he shows up the next day and applies for the job, and she looks them up and down and she says, okay, okay, and he has no idea how to fix the motorcycle. What he does is he goes in during the day and just kind of moves things around and tries to memorize. I always thought this his great feat, but then I saw motorcycles in nineteen seventeen are really just kind of bicycles with like a sewing machine engine on them, not that I could fix it. And he would memorize it and then go home and stay up all night going through all these manuals and go in the next day and fix them.

Speaker 2

Wow.

Speaker 3

It worked. And he stayed there for a week, but came two and the only thing is she would never let him down the basement. He was very suspicious of this, and he would tell Grace and the whole team. She has a team. By now, they're all like hidden down the street in the back of a candy store, which is great. I got to learn all about nineteen seventeen candy and it's just tremendous. So finally one day comes and he has to file something down and he knows it's in the basement. She won't let him use it, and he goes, I'll go down the street. And he's earned her trust by now, and she says, just go down the basement. It'll take two minutes. So he goes down and he looks around and everything's clean, floors clean, there's a toolbox, there's a table, but there's very little in the basement, and he's looking for bloodstains. He's looking for signs of a struggle. He's also looking for this was new to me. He was looking for shiny new nails because apparently that would mean that something was behind them. Oh, interesting that he had created some kind of a space.

Speaker 2

Right, okay, put somebody behind a wall or something.

Speaker 3

Yeah. So he finds nothing, and so he's like, okay, I got to go back up. And he's just like devastated by this nothing. And he's a train detective, and so he starts to go up, and he just stops for one second because he wants to look in the back corner and he hits that moment that everyone's had when you've just gone too far, when you've stayed too long. And he knows that she knows, and he hears her scream from upstairs. You get up here right now. And he gets up. She throws him against the wall. She has a hammer and she says, I see you, I know you now. She goes, you are here to get poor Al get out, and she throws him out and he walks down the street to the candy store. And he says later that this was the lowest part of his career, not that he didn't find anything in the basement, but that he disappointed Missus Hamiston, who he adored. So he goes back and he goes, I blew it, but he said, he goes, I didn't see anything. There was nothing wrong, but I know there's something in that basement.

Speaker 2

Does she figure out another way to get down there?

Speaker 3

She gets a permit from another court to dig into the sewers, to kind of maybe come right up close to the basement. This is weird. I just realized this. This is what archaeologists do in Jerusalem. They're not allowed to like dig like right by any temple, but they get a permit to do like one inch away from it. She did that, which is really ingenius, found a lot of weird stuff, but she still couldn't get in, and they basically gave up. They had dug this huge pit in the middle of the street. The police were furious, the street was furious. The newspapers thought she was insane, and Cron didn't know anything she could do, and he had kind of resigned himself that they would never solve this case. And then she comes walking down the street that she had finally found a way into the basement. She'd bought the motorcycle shop.

Speaker 1

Oh my gosh, it's nice to be an attorney detective with lots of money. Yeah.

Speaker 3

Yeah. It apparently it had been up for sale and no one had known because she wanted out because she couldn't afford to run it.

Speaker 2

Yeah, missus Coachee.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, missus coachy and Grace found out and went and did some secretive private sale and came back with the deed to the place and she said, go in start digging.

Speaker 1

Well, boy, that must have just sent missus Coachee through the roof when she realized who she had sold her motorcycle shop to.

Speaker 2

That's incredible.

Speaker 3

Yeah, it sounds like she didn't know, because Grace was very adamant that she went through a third party, and there's no way she would know it was her, but she had to know in selling it that finally, if there were any secrets, they would be laid bare.

Speaker 1

But if you don't have money, what choice do you have in nineteen seventeen New York. I mean, you're not going to get a loan. Probably at that point her husband was a suspect and he can't do anything. She doesn't have anybody who can reliably fix motorcycles, so she had no choice. So that was really smart. Okay, she owns the motorcycle shop and she sends Julius and I'm assuming her other team from the candy store down into the basement and they start wrecking everything.

Speaker 2

I guess to figure out what's down there.

Speaker 3

Yeah. So one of the things that really helped me in this book was photographs, and there were a lot of photographs of the street. And I found this great photograph of the store of Metropolitan Motorcycles. And one of the things I never noticed about it even after it was printed in the book is I was giving a talk at some point and someone said, look in the front door, and if you look in the front door, there's Coachy in shadow, just staring out. And I say this because one of the photos I found next was in front of the motorcycle store on the day they went in and dug up the basement, and the crowd stretches down the whole street filled with people. They're hanging out of windows, they're up on rooftops and it looks like a party. There's men with their sons, they're holding them up on their shoulders, they're wearing hats. It's in the summer. And I realized when I saw that picture, at that moment, they had no idea what was going to come out of that cellar. They were hoping it would be Ruth, who was fine who was in captivity, and there were stories of that that she was being held against her will. They hoped that she would be hale and hardy and fine. And Kron goes in and they start digging and they find a hole under this huge workbench and he goes in and he finds Ruth and he goes out, and they call missus Hummiston in and she goes in and she comes out and someone takes her picture and she has her head in her hands. And the next picture they're taking a makeshift almost cardboard coffin out of the motorcycle store with a single flower on it, and this is Ruth who's dead. So they know it was Coachy who's in the wind. But she solved the case. And I think that's really important because she didn't find her alive, but it's really important she saw the case because it was completely given up on. And I think maybe more important is that she proved Ruth's father right, that this wasn't Ruth's fault, This was someone else's fault, This wasn't anything she did, and she was so adamant on that with the rest of her career. I mean, this just drives her life. Is that She thinks that we should approach missing girl cases from the point of they did nothing wrong, something wrong was done to them, and this seems like such an easy change in logic, but it's still not done. So they bring Ruth out and it's the end of the case. But there's lots more she thinks to be done.

Speaker 1

What do we know happened once Ruth went into that motorcycle shop and met Alfredo Kochi, He hands over these skates.

Speaker 2

Do we have any idea what happened between them?

Speaker 3

There's an autopsy, and there's a couple clues. No one outright says that she was assaulted or raped. There's a couple clues that she may have been. There's language that says she had a slasher's mark, which is sometimes used for that. And part of the autopsy is strange because things disappear after it. But who we have is after she has found All of a sudden, there's an ap The reporter who's in Italy, who follows a lead and runs into Alfredo Cocchi who is sitting outside Bologna, you know, in a bicycle store, and he says, what do you know of Ruth Krueger? And he says, oh, she was nice, she came in, she did her He's like, I had to leave. He says, my wife was crazy, this sort of typical explanation that somehow will solve everything. And he says, you know they're going to try and extradite you now that I've found you. And he says for what, And he says for Ruth's death, and he said, oh, she was a pretty girl, that's all.

Speaker 2

Could they even figure out the cause of death.

Speaker 3

They said she was stabbed through the back. We do have an account of what happened from Coachi himself after they find him in Italy. He's taken into custody by the Italian authorities and he's questioned. He's in a prison tower in these really medieval conditions and the judge himself and questions him, and we have a record of that, and it's very surreal because Coachi it changes his story many times, and sometimes he just keeps laughing and won't stop. And eventually he goes to trials. There's a couple attempts at this, and there's a big push to bring him back to New York to stand trial, but he does not, so it's held in Italy. And he finally admits to doing it, and he says that she just came in and like so many of these stories, she rebuffed his advances and she tried to fight him, and he threw her down into the basement and killed her. He's sentenced to a lifetime in this tower. And one of the strangest parts of the story there's no death penalty in Italy, is that I found that he was released after decades. I think it was nineteen forty seven. The only record that I found said that he was parole and indeed rehabilitated. So in nineteen forty seven, the doors open and he walked out.

Speaker 1

Were there any sort of charges that they could file against missus Kochie?

Speaker 2

Do we think she knew if she knew something, she knew he did something in that basement.

Speaker 3

Yeah, she actually testifies against him. There's a whole line of the people in New York. Finally, the police are kind of motivated to do something, and she testifies against him, and I think that goes a long way in keeping her free from any sort of litigation. I think the times were very different in going after a wife with two kids on this, but I do think she makes her situation better by testifying against her husband, and she ends up. She stays in New York. The last record I founded her she became a naturalized American citizen. There was plenty of stories that he had been cheating on her with other women, and one particularly awful story that kind of really sent them towards the store was Crone uncovered that there was a little girl who lived across the street who he would fix her bike, and at one point he said, well, come down in the basement and I'll make it go faster. And she went down and her mother heard a scream and she ran out and she said that he had tried to put his hands on her.

Speaker 1

Oh wow, yeah, he sounds terrible, and then he was walking free in Italy. Does Ruth's family, the Kruegers, feel any sort of redemption being able to reclaim her reputation or how did they end up?

Speaker 3

They did, okay, they stayed out of the limelight, and they don't seem to have had it affect them on a professional or in part of the news and the media and everything like it did. But of course, you know, we don't know the horrific personal cost it must have had.

Speaker 1

And how does this affect the way people perceive Grace Hummiston. At this point, we already know that she would as a respected attorney and then she turned detective. But now she did something that the police in New York City in nineteen seventeen couldn't do.

Speaker 3

She becomes the hero. Now's the point where she becomes super famous. In the newspapers call her Missus Sherlock Holmes, which she really hates. It's a cool nickname, but it's not any kind of nickname because it's not her name. It's just Missus, fictional character. But she was mad at it because she said she doesn't use deduction the way Holmes does. She says she kind of scoffs and says that's for amateurs. So yeah, she becomes the toast of the town and she's in the newspapers, she gets interviews, she speaks at ladies' lunches and the whole nine yards.

Speaker 2

So let's end on a note of what are the big takeaways from this story? Is it tenacity?

Speaker 1

Is it police not giving up on a case or the media falling for victimizing the victim?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think the positive things at least I got from the story that even when all those things are aligned against the truth, which is what happened to Ruth, media, cops, corrupt police, and it turns out that the police knew about Coachy and many of them were friends with him. And she becomes the first person to bring charges after this against the NYPD, and tons of people get fired over it. But it's that idea that if you look hard enough, you can find the truth. But it's also just I like your word, the tenacity and the mission of it all. She knows there's an answer out there, and she doesn't know what it is, but she's willing to take those steps to try and define it a little more like I don't know exactly what happened to Ruth Krueger, right, I don't know exactly who Grace was, but I know enough to tell a story about it. And I think that that's kind of what she was doing, is cutting through all the other things to take away from that to get at the truth.

Speaker 1

On the next episode of Wicked Words, Candas Millard on Death on the Nile.

Speaker 5

So they're attacked early on one night. Another member of the expedition is killed, speak is stabbed eleven times. It's really miraculous that he survives, and Burton has a javelin thrust through his jaw from cheek to cheek, leaving this great scar.

Speaker 4

Down his face.

Speaker 5

And so it ends right then, and they've lost sort of everything that they've put into it.

Speaker 1

My new book, All That Is Wicked is available for pre order now, including the audiobook. All That Is Wicked is based on our first season of tenfold War Wicked. You might think you know the whole story of Killer Edward Ruloff's crimes, but there's so much more. My book American Sherlock is also available. This has been an exactly right tenfold more Media production. The producer is Alexismirosi. Our mixer is Ryo Baum. Our sound designer is Andrew Epen. Curtis heath Is. Our composer Nick Toga did the artwork. Ilsabrink designed the website. The executive producers are Georgia Hartstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold More. And if you know of a historical crime that could use some attention, especially if it happened in your family. Email us at info at tenfoldwoar wicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words