The Unsolved Murder of Mary Rogers That Inspired Edgar Allan Poe

In the aftermath of the bank panic of 1837, a young woman named Mary Rogers and her mother moved from Connecticut to New York City, where she took a job at John Anderson's Tobacco Emporium and quickly became known as the "Beautiful Cigar Girl." The clientele she attracted included poets, politicians and journalists.

Twenty- or 21-year-old Rogers (her exact age is unknown) was last seen on July 25, 1841. Three days later, her body was fished from the Hudson River near Hoboken, N.J. Her battered face and a bruised neck made it clear she'd been murdered.

Though she'd left the tobacco shop to help her mother run a boarding house, Rogers remained famous. Newspapers clamored to share updates about suspects, among them Rogers' fiancé and an unknown tall, dark man. They shared theories about how Rogers died, ranging from a gang attack to a botched abortion. Edgar Allan Poe even tried to provide answers in a new detective story. But no solution was found—and the case remains a mystery to this day.

On July 25, 1841, Rogers told her fiancé, Daniel Payne, a boarder at her home, that she was going to visit her aunt. When Rogers didn't come back, Payne learned she had never arrived there and tried to retrace her possible movements. Alfred Crommelin, a former boarder and rejected love interest of Rogers, also joined the search.

Crommelin was in New Jersey on July 28 and saw Rogers' body shortly after boaters brought it to shore. He opened a sleeve and then proclaimed it was Rogers, apparently making the identification based on her clothes and the hair on her arm.

The coroner in New Jersey and investigators suspected that Rogers had been assaulted by multiple men, beaten and strangled. Street gangs were a problem at the time, so this seemed to many like a plausible explanation. The investigation also looked into Payne, who didn't go to New Jersey after his fiancée’s body was discovered there. However, police were satisfied by his alibi. Crommerlin, John Anderson (Rogers’ former employer) and a sailor who'd once lived in the family boarding house were also eliminated as suspects.

A month after the murder, a stagecoach driver in New Jersey said he'd seen Rogers arrive on a ferry with a tall, dark man. Frederica Loss, who ran a tavern called Nick Moore's, also said she'd seen Rogers on July 25 with an unknown man, though she'd earlier told police that she'd spotted Rogers with several men. Loss added in her revised testimony that after Rogers and her companion had left the tavern, she'd heard a scream.

In August, Joseph Morse was arrested for Rogers' murder. Morse said he'd stayed in a hotel with a different young woman on the day Rogers disappeared, but he couldn't provide her name. Authorities believed they'd found their killer, but then a group of men identified the young woman, who confirmed that after being tricked into missing the last ferry, she'd spent the night of July 25 fighting off Morse's advances. Hotel staff also backed up his alibi.

In September 1841, Loss's sons found some items—a parasol, gloves and a handkerchief with the initials “MR”—in a thicket near the tavern. Payne went to the spot where Rogers was presumably killed. On October 7, 1841, his body was discovered in Hoboken. His suicide note read: "To the World—Here I am on the very spot. May God forgive me for my misspent life." The note raised new suspicions, but Payne's alibi seemed to hold.

Poe decided to follow his short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," called the world’s first detective story by many sources, by writing about Rogers' murder. He set the events in Paris and renamed the characters but otherwise replicated the basic facts of the case in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," which came out in three installments in 1842 and 1843. His detective debunked the gang theory in the story, pointing out that if multiple men had attacked Rogers, there would not have been much of a struggle.

Before the final installment was published, there seemed to be an answer in the case: One of Loss's sons accidentally shot his mother in October 1842. After she died the following month, a paper reported she'd made a deathbed confession that revealed Rogers had died after a botched abortion.

According to Amy Gilman Srebnick's book The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers, an abortion gone wrong became many historians’ answer for Rogers' death; they believed that the coroner, who'd seen signs of sexual assault, had misunderstood the evidence. Poe implied a naval officer could have been the killer, but he tinkered with a later version of his story to make room for the possibility of a failed abortion.

Today there's still no certainty about how Rogers died, though additional solutions have been proposed. An Era magazine article from 1904 suggested that Loss's sons had robbed and killed Rogers and possibly the unknown man seen with her.

In his book, Who Murdered Mary Rogers?, Raymond Paul posited that Payne was the real killer. He accounted for Payne's unbroken alibi by saying Rogers had been killed on Tuesday, not Sunday, and explained that in the meantime, Rogers had been recovering from an abortion.

Rogers' death was used to encourage the passage of two different pieces of legislation in 1845: a police reform act for New York City that replaced volunteer patrols with a real police force and a state law criminalizing abortion.