On the afternoon of February 8, 1902, a rent collector climbed the stairs of an empty house on Sutter Street, a cold key in his hand. Every door in the building stood open except one. Behind it, with the curtains drawn, a pale figure lay on a bed that should not have been there, as though sleeping. He did not yet know her name.
But all of San Francisco would soon know it. To understand the girl on that bed, it is necessary to go back a month, to the gray January of that same year. San Francisco in the winter of 1902 was a city of gaslight, fog, and streetcars rattling over steep hills, with salt damp creeping in from the bay. At a modest house at 1747 Fulton Street lived a divorced woman and her children, all of them pressed by hard circumstances.
There, a fifteen-year-old girl went quietly about her small daily duties. Her name was Elena Fuller, though everyone who loved her called her Nora. She had been born far away in China, the daughter of English parents, and had come to this American city as a young child. By all accounts she was sensible and kind, fond of children, and possessed of a sweet singing voice that she hoped might one day carry her to the stage.
That winter the family had little money, and Nora had recently left school to look for work that might ease her mother’s burden. She woke each morning in a crowded house, cared for her younger brother and sister, and read the help-wanted columns with hopeful eyes. She stood at the threshold of her life, unaware that a patient stranger had already begun preparing a room for her. A room she would never leave.
Little was recorded of Elena Fuller’s early years beyond the fact that they began at sea and in deep sorrow. She was born in China in 1886. Her father, a man named Barlaine, was an engineer aboard the steamer Tai Woo. One night in 1890, while the ship lay at anchor, he was seen resting on a wooden bench on deck.
When his services were needed in the engine room and an assistant was sent to fetch him, the bench was empty. He was never seen again. The sea kept its silence. The widowed mother, Alice, brought her children to San Francisco.
In 1891 she married a man named W. W. Fuller, who gave the children his name. There was a period of stability, but the marriage did not last, and after roughly seven years it ended in divorce.
Alice Fuller was left with four small children and little else. By the winter of 1902 the family was living at 1747 Fulton Street, where every penny was counted twice. Nora felt that weight. Although she was only fifteen, she carried a grown sense of duty and a child’s bright hope, both living side by side inside her.
On January 6 she wrote to a theatrical agency, saying she had a reasonably good singing voice and asking whether there might be a place for her. It was also said that she was skillful with children, having long experience caring for her younger siblings. Then, on January 8, another door seemed to open. An advertisement appeared in the columns of the Chronicle and the Examiner.
It read: “Wanted: A small white girl to take care of a child. Good home and good wages. ” For a girl who wanted nothing more than to help her mother, it must have seemed a small, honest blessing. She answered it.
She did not know that those words had been written by a careful hand, or that one word among them, placed there without need, would later trouble the very men trying to save her. She saw only good wages, a good home, and a way to be useful. She saw a new beginning. In truth, it was the quiet closing of a lock.
On Saturday, January 11, a reply came for Nora. It was a postcard signed by a man calling himself John Bennett. It read: “Miss Fuller, in reply to your letter, please come to the Popular Restaurant, 55 Geary Street, and ask for Mr. John Bennett at one o’clock.
If you cannot come at one o’clock, come at six. ” That second hour was a gesture of kindness. It was also a trap with two entrances. Shortly after five that evening, Nora put on her jacket and tied the ribbon at her neck that her brother loved to adjust, then set out.
She carried the postcard with her. Her mother allowed her to go. What mother in a season of need would refuse a willing daughter an honest job? About an hour later, the telephone rang at the house on Fulton Street.
Nora’s brother, a twelve-year-old boy, answered. A strained, hurried voice, sounding much like his sister’s, told him that she was at Mr. Bennett’s house at 1500 Geary Street and that her new employer wanted her to start right away. The mother replied through the boy: “Tell Nora to come home, and start her work Monday.
” The voice only answered: “All right. ” Then the line went dead. It was learned much later that 1500 Geary Street was not a house at all. It was an empty lot.
Nora did not come home that night, nor the next. While her frightened mother waited at a silent door, the truth was already written across the city in furniture receipts and lease agreements, if anyone had known how to read them. The man who called himself Bennett had other names. Three days earlier, on January 8, a well-dressed stranger had walked into the real estate office of Olmstead and Company and given the name C.
B. Hawkins. He wished to rent a two-story house at 2211 Sutter Street. He could offer no references, being new to the city, but his manner was easy and refined, and he paid a month’s rent in advance.
The lease was signed in the name of Hawkins. To the men at the restaurant he was Bennett; to the landlord he was Hawkins, always the same man, always under a different name. For nearly a month the newspapers followed the mystery of the missing girl and found no trace. Then came the afternoon of February 8.
The rent at 2211 Sutter Street was overdue, and word had reached the office that the house still stood empty, although it had been let a month earlier. A rent collector and inspector named H. E. Dane was sent out with a passkey.
He entered the building. The lower floor was entirely bare. He climbed the stairs. Every door was open except one at the back, and he opened it.
The curtain was drawn and the room lay in darkness, but he could make out a brightly colored dress on the floor. Something in that stillness chilled him, and he went out into the street. At the corner he found a policeman, Officer Gill, and asked him to come along. The two men returned, climbed the stairs, and entered the back room.
The officer raised the curtain. There, on a cheap bed furnished with new sheets that had never been washed, covered to the chin with a blanket and quilt, lay the body of a young girl. She looked like a sleeping child. The house revealed its few shocking truths.
Beside the bed there was only one old chair. There was no food, no utensils, no means of heating or lighting, for the gas line had never been connected. On the floor lay the stub of a cigar. On a shelf in the front room stood a nearly empty whiskey bottle and a single towel, and nothing else in the way of toiletries.
There were letters addressed to Mrs. C. B. Hawkins, sent from furniture stores.
One circular, dated January 21, ten days after Nora’s disappearance, had been opened by someone and tucked into the girl’s own dress. Her handbag was there. It contained no money, only a card bearing the name of a Mr. Severbrinck of Port Arthur, a man who was quickly traced and cleared, as he had sailed for China aboard the Peking three hours before Nora left her home.
Of Bennett’s postcard there was no trace. The mother came and identified her daughter’s clothing. The brother came and recognized the little ribbon around her neck, for he had tied it himself. Chief of Detectives John Seymour took the case.
The most famous missing girl in San Francisco had been found. The dead do not speak, so the living examined her in hope that she might tell them something. The city’s toxicologist, Dr. Charles Morgan, examined the contents of the stomach.
He found no trace of drug or poison. The last thing she had eaten was an apple, consumed an hour or two before death, and he found slight congestion, perhaps from a small amount of alcohol she was not used to. Her mother confirmed that Nora had eaten an apple before leaving the house on January 11. From that small fact a terrible conclusion could be drawn.
She had died very shortly after arriving. The autopsy surgeon, Dr. Basegoluppi, examined the throat. He found two dark marks, one on each side of the larynx, and congestion of the lungs.
He recorded his conclusion plainly: the cause of death was strangulation. The examination also revealed that the girl had been assaulted before her death. On that point the record says only what decency requires, and no more will be said here. Now the pieces lay on the table, each completing the other.
The handwriting expert Theodore Kitka compared the scraps filled out by Bennett for his advertisement with the signature of Hawkins on the lease, and found that a single hand had written both. The furniture was traced through stores on Mission Street. One salesman remembered a polite man in a tall silk hat who had bought bedding on January 9 and asked for night delivery, and to ensure no mattress would be exchanged, he had written three heavy pencil letters on it: C. B.
H. A delivery boy had carried those goods to a dark house whose owner would not allow the light to be turned on. Another man sold the bed and the old chair, and a shipping clerk moved them into that same back room, piece by piece, with care. A stranger had furnished a single room for a single purpose.
There would be no arrest. That is the bitter truth of this case. Yet even as the investigation began, one name was rising into the light. On January 16, a clerk employed at the San Francisco Examiner named Charles B.
Hadley had disappeared, and it was said his accounts were short. The investigator Charles Cody was assigned to find him. Living in Hadley’s rooms on Ellis Street was a young woman known as Ollie Bracegirdle, and what she would tell the police, once Nora was found, would make the missing bookkeeper the most wanted man in the state. No man was ever tried for the murder of Nora Fuller.
There was no courtroom, no prisoner in the dock, no jury to weigh a guilty life. The closest thing to an accounting came in a small and crowded room at the coroner’s inquest on February 19. The coroner’s office could not hold the crowds that pushed in to hear the evidence. Old men and young girls alike pressed at the entrance to hear the terrible details until the air grew stifling.
A young stenographer recording the testimony fainted at her task. The coroner, Dr. Leland, conducted the inquiry. District Attorney Lewis F.
Bendington attended on behalf of the people, with detectives Dillon and Hammel at his side to watch the case. Mrs. Alice Fuller was the first witness called. The mother of the murdered girl testified coolly, showing no emotion as she answered the coroner’s questions, telling the story of the telephone that rang and the voice that almost sounded like her daughter’s, followed by silence.
Nora’s young friend Madge Graham was called in turn. She had a strange story to tell: that Nora had known a man named Bennett for some time, an older man, and that she herself had once covered for Nora, telling Mrs. Fuller the girls had been at the theater when Nora had not been there, and that she believed the entire advertisement affair had been a trick. A grocer named Meenkee added weight to the case, remembering that Nora had come to use his telephone to call a certain hotel, even though a telephone stood in her own house only a few streets away.
The jury heard all of this, then withdrew and returned. The verdict was entered in the records. Nora Fuller, aged fifteen, had died by strangulation between January 11 and February 4 at the hands of persons unknown. The jurors, describing the crime as atrocious, recommended that the governor offer a reward of five thousand dollars for the discovery of the guilty man.
The foreman, Aquila Ross, signed the verdict: by persons unknown. Four words, with an entire girl’s death folded inside them. The reward was announced, and with it began a nationwide manhunt. Theodore Kitka took Hadley’s photograph, drew a mustache and a tall hat upon it, and carried it to the men who had dealt with Hawkins.
The furniture dealer said it was a perfect likeness. The shipping clerk said it resembled him greatly. The real estate clerk noticed a clear resemblance. Only the restaurant owner who had spoken with Bennett on that final night was unsure, thinking the killer might have filed a change-of-address notice.
Kitka examined about thirty-two thousand such notices. One, from a man in Kansas City, resembled the handwriting so closely that Captain Seymour traveled east to find him. He was not the man, but the case against the missing clerk only grew more complex at every turn. Ollie Bracegirdle told the detectives that Hadley, though clean-shaven, had kept a false brown mustache, purchased from a Japanese shop on Larkin Street.
She said he grew agitated when reading newspaper reports of the missing girl and took the paper with him every morning to read in private. She said that around that time she had found clothing of his stained with blood at the bottom of the laundry and had burned it, along with his tall hat. She also said, as the restaurant men had said, that he was unusually fond of porterhouse steaks, of which he ate only the tender portion. His name was not Hadley at all.
He was Charles Start, and his respectable mother lived in Chicago. Years earlier, in 1889, the Minneapolis police had offered a hundred dollars for his arrest on charges of embezzlement. It was said that about two years before Nora’s death, he had lured another fifteen-year-old girl to a room and assaulted her. Wanted posters bearing his face and his crime were distributed across the country.
No answer ever came. He had left money in a San Francisco bank, and it remained there. Many came to believe he had taken his own life. No one ever proved it.
The city, in its fear, saw the killer everywhere. When a young woman missed her ferry date across the bay, a panicked man called the police. It was only that she had lost her nerve and objected to being photographed as a second Nora Fuller. Then, in April 1906, the earth shook and the fires broke out.
Among the countless things the city lost in that week were the police and autopsy records in the Fuller case. What the killer had not thought to destroy, the burning city destroyed on his behalf. Nora was buried somewhere in San Francisco. With time, the place was forgotten, and the headstone lost, if it had ever existed at all.
Her killer left no grave that anyone could find, and now she herself has none. Somewhere beneath the streets she once walked, a fifteen-year-old girl still keeps her silence in a city that has forgotten where it laid her to rest. There had once been a patient stranger who prepared a room for her.
It is the only room where history can still find her.