The Mysterious Murder (Maybe) of Starr Faithful (episode 223)

Transcript

Jake:
[0:01] Hi listeners. Before we get started. This week, I want to give a brief content warning in this week’s story, I’ll discuss the sexual abuse of a child which contributed to her death as a young adult,
I’ll also discuss topics of self harm and suicide in that context.
While, I won’t get into graphic sexual details. Some elements may be disturbing to sensitive listeners.

Intro-Outro

Jake:
[0:30] Welcome to hub history where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of boston, the hub of the universe.
This is episode 2 23 the mysterious murder maybe of Starr Faithfull Hi, I’m jake.
This week. I’m talking about the disappearance and rediscovery of Starr Faithfull as her stepfather would say to the press at the time, two R’s in Starr two L’s in Faithfull,
When her body washed up on a long island beach 90 years ago, the case became a national obsession.
At the center of the story was a beautiful young flapper with a diary full of covert sexual conquests, assorted history with a prominent politician and a drug and booze fueled nightlife.
In the speakeasies of two major cities was her death a suicide driven by your dark past?
A tragic accident after one too many?
Or was it something even darker? A murder for hire on behalf of a former boston mayor or his underworld adversaries.
But before we talk about the tragic life and untimely death of Starr Faithfull might just like to pause and thank the loyal listeners who make it possible for me to make up history.

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Now it’s time for this week’s main topic.

[2:45] Down in New York. The ocean side of Long Island is protected by a series of outer barrier islands stretching 75 miles from Rockaway Beach in Queens to West Hampton.
Near the southern end of this span is Long Beach Island, and in the middle of Long Beach Island is the town of Long Beach.
It’s known for having a very long beach during the Great Depression. This long beach was popular with beachcombers looking for valuables that they could sell to get by.
One of these. Beachcombers found the body of a young woman partially buried in the sand at about 6 30 in the morning on monday june 8th 1931 near the town line between Long Beach and atlantic beach.

[3:24] She had been wearing a silk dress from Lord and taylor with no undergarments, and her clothes and chestnut brown hair were caked with sand from where the waves and tides it nearly buried her.
Her skin was covered in bruises, abrasions and other marks.
The beachcomber who found the body, hailed some other beachcombers, and together they found a passing policeman.
The cop came along and looked at the body and then sent one member of the growing crowd to find a telephone with which she called police headquarters.
Eventually, a detective in an undertaker arrived and the unidentified body was taken to the Nassau County morgue.
They’re a physician named Algernon Warinner from a nearby town, performed an autopsy in his book, The passing of Starr Faithfull Jonathan Goodman quotes from Warner’s report upon opening the torso.
He found one half pint of cherry red bloody fluid free in the peritoneal cavity and collected in pelvis and flank,
exploration of the abdominal cavity, revealed to small lacerations one inch in length and five small ones one quarter inch in length, on the dome of the liver on the right side, high under the diaphragm ma’am.
The lungs are grayish red in color and containing throughout air on sectioning of lung, it presents a bright red color and red froth exudes from the cut surface.
In the book, Goodman points out a number of typos and errors in the report is a sign of the doctors carelessness, but the analysis of the lungs was consistent with drowning.

[4:54] Drownings were not uncommon along this popular stretch of beach, so there didn’t seem to be much urgency to launch an investigation.
Detective Inspector Harold King made a note to start trying to identify the body after lunch and then went back to his office to wrap up loose ends.
When he got there at about 10 a.m. Stanley, Faithfull was waiting for him,
the next day’s boston Globe reported that Stanley had come because he heard that they had found a missing woman And his stepdaughter had been missing from their apartment at 12 ST Luke’s place in Manhattan. Since Friday.

[5:27] Within hours of arriving in Long Island, he’d identified the body as his stepdaughter.
Starr Faithfull That first notice was buried on page 19 of the globe.
By the next day the story had moved to the lead headline on the front page, the local press had discovered that Starr Faithfull was once Marian Starr Wyman of Brookline and that a.
D. A from Nassau county new york was in boston to question stars, known friends and acquaintances The globe ran a profile of starr in the evening edition on June 10 containing details of her life in the Boston area, many of which would become important in the case.
It describes stars being well remembered by the playmates of her school days in Brookline as a precocious though moody girl who was noted for her remarkably erudite conversation and her habit of reading books far beyond her years.
Even today, folks out in Park Street, Brookline recalled this exceptional girl who religiously kept a diary from the time she was a dozen years of age, claiming she intended some day to write a book, and she would then appreciate this daily record of,
all the reactions, experiences and conclusions on life in general,
the article also noted that she was related by marriage to former Mayor Andrew J.
Peters, her mother being a cousin of mrs Peters.

[6:47] At this point, the press was still referring to star as an accidental drowning victim.
At first blush, the drowning explanation makes a lot of sense.
Over the five years or so before death, Starr had gone on cruises in the Caribbean and Mediterranean and she made the trip to London at least five times for extended stays.

[7:07] Even when she wasn’t going on a trip, the young Faithfull was a frequent and welcome guest along the Chelsea waterfront in new york, especially a majestic Cunard line steamers like the olympic, the Laconia or the Franconia,
In fact, she had visited the ship’s doctor on Cunard RMS.
Franconia on May 29th, just a few days before her death, she was more than a little bit obsessed with dr George Jamison Car, who she referred to as the love of her life.
Dr Jamison car was just not that into her in a deposition, he described how Starr Faithfull first came into his life In June 1927.
Shortly after the Urania sailed from Montreal, I was called by my nurse to deal with an emergency and one of the third class tourist cabins.
Starr Faithfull whom I had not met before was in the cabin.
There was a young man in the cabin with her also intoxicated.
Both persons were fully clothed. She was comatose. In fact, I thought she was dead, but he was making love to her.
She naturally had no response. At this stage, I arranged for the young man to be placed under surveillance until after I’d used a stomach pump.
Starr Faithfull regained consciousness.

[8:24] She insisted that he was the love of her life. But when reporters later questioned the nature of their relationship, he would say, you don’t become romantic about a girl on whom you used a stomach pump.
The first time you saw her On May 29 1931, she spent some time in his cabin in the crew quarters, but then he made her leave when the ship was preparing to push back from the dock,
instead of de boarding, she just went up on deck while the ship maneuvered through the harbor.
She had to be forcibly removed from the Franconia and returned to shore on a tugboat.

[8:58] Some sources say that she was begging the sailors who dragged her off the ship to thorough overboard and killer.
That was a friday night. One week before her disappearance.
Starting on the next Thursday, June four stars, behaviour became even more erratic than usual.
That afternoon she got extremely drunk and had a cabbie driver around queens looking for a party that she never found that evening.
She claimed to have an invitation to a party with broadway actors, but another physician acquaintance later said that she spent the evening with him drinking at a speakeasy and then driving aimlessly around Manhattan.
The next morning she left the family apartment at 12 ST Luke’s place at 9:30. AM.
She was wearing a silk dress from Lord and Taylor. She had $3 in her pocket and she said she was going to get her hair done according to her family. She would never return.
Incidentally, 12 ST Luke’s place was right next door to the fictional Huxtable residence.
Whenever an outdoor shot of the house was shown on the Cosby show, it was 10 ST Luke’s place.

[10:06] Starr Faithfull seems to have spent the day of her disappearance June 5 1931.
At the Cunard Dwarves, she bought a newspaper in Greenwich village at 11:30 a.m.
And then at about one p.m. She hailed a cab near the Cunard war from Chelsea.
The cabbie was named Murray Edelman and he had seen stars picture in the papers after she was kicked off the Franconia the week before,
he told police that started gotten into the taxi with a man in the Cunard uniform who she called, Brucie the pair road to 12 ST luke’s place.
And along the way, Starr told this Brucie that she’d see him at four p.m.
He told her sternly not to come back.

[10:47] After dropping Starr at her house. Edelman drove Brucie back to the Chelsea piers, where Edelman waited for another fair.
To his astonishment. Starr Faithfull again, climbed into his back seat at about two p.m.
This time she was visibly drunk and arguing with Brucie who told the cabbie to take her home and not let her come back.
Unfortunately, she only had 10 cents in her pocket, so Edelman dropped her off after just a few blocks.
The last time he saw her she was walking toward the Wars again.

[11:19] Starr was spotted by an acquaintance at Grand Central Terminal at about 2:30 At five p.m. She was kicked off of Cunard’s Mauretania just before it sailed for the Bahamas.
Later that evening. Starr Faithfull visited dr Charles young roberts.
The same doctor should go into the speakeasy with the night before on his ship.
RMS Caramania She had dinner and drinks with him on the ship from 5:30 until sometime after 10. p.m., when he put her in a cab bound for the Il de France, another Cunard liner, which was docked nearby.
She didn’t make it home that night, At about dinnertime. The next day, June six her stepfather filed a missing persons report with the NYPD On Monday morning, June eight.
Her body was found perhaps Starr Faithfull had been successful and stowing away on one of the many Cunard steamers. She had visited friday afternoon and perhaps she was despondent and jumped, or maybe she was just drunk and she fell overboard.

[12:21] That accidental drowning theory is less convincing when you find out that Starr Faithfull had once been. Marian Starr Wyman A competitive swimmer at her private boarding school in Lowell massachusetts.
Known to her family is Bamby spelled with a Y.
Marian Wyman had been born in evanston Illinois in 19 oh six, but she grew up in Brookline Her father frank, Wyman was an investment banker in boston who made a series of bad bets and lost his fortune.
While her mother Helen came from an impoverished branch of the otherwise fairly wealthy Pierce family of Andover Helen’s family background didn’t come with a lot of money, but it did come with connections.
She was related to many of the old boston brahmin lineages, including the peabodys from whom she inherited to some large enough to keep the family’s heads above water For a while.
She was also connected with the Peters family at least from the time, her first cousin Martha Phillips, married Andrew James Peters in 1910,
At the time he was a Congressman representing the Massachusetts 11th district, mostly Brighton in West Roxbury.
Eventually he would pay to send Bamby in her younger sister to boarding school at Rogers hall and Lowell.

[13:37] The evening edition of the Boston Globe on June 10 noted Starr Wyman attended the Brookline High School and later the Rogers Hall School in Lowell,
While she did not graduate at the latter school, Miss Olive s Parsons principal said Starr excelled in athletics and was especially expert in swimming.
In fact, she’d been the captain of the swim team, a fact that prompted the Nassau County D. A. Elvin Edwards to seek a second opinion on the findings of Starr faithfuls autopsy.
The second autopsy will be performed by Dr Otto Schultz and experienced forensic pathologist who worked for the D. A. S. Office and the Nassau County Police in the past.
In the evening edition of the globe on June 10, District Attorney Edwards was quoted discussing the second autopsy and it sounds much more professional.
Dr Schultz professor of Cornell University has just performed the autopsy on the body of Starr Faithfull He told me that his autopsy indicated that the girl had not been drinking prior to her death or prior to the time she met her death.
There was no indication of any liquor in her organs.

[14:46] Schultz interpreted the discoloration of the girl’s skin differently than the local doctor had, and he found new evidence as well,
and Goodman’s book, He accepts a passage from the autopsy report that caused investigators to re evaluate the circumstances of the case.
The bronchi of the lung contained fine gritty particles not visible but palpable,
on scraping with the knife, the lung delivers very light colored froth that easily runs off the surface of the knife and a froth of large bubbles from the froth.
Very fine gritty sand particles can be separated on the palm of the hand.
Similarly, if one probing the branches of the bronchi of the left lung, he felt numerous fine grains of sand when sectioned.
The lung delivers an almost colorless froth, with large bubbles, which, when rubbed between the hands, discloses fine particles of sand.

[15:42] The sand in her lung tissue, as well as a heavy residue of sand in the trachea Lead Schultz to conclude that Starr had been drowned in the shallow water of the sandy surf zone near the beach.
He also re evaluated the discoloration of the skin on the arms and torso that Warinner had chalked up to post mortem hemorrhages, instead, believing that they could have been bruises.
The june 10th Evening Globe interpreted the results released by D. A. Edwards Office as forced into the waters of Long beach new york by the hands that had brutally beaten and bruised or partially clothed body.
MS Starr Faithfull formerly of Brookline was held under the surface until she drowned, bruises on her body.
Sand and water in her lungs disclosed that this was the manner in which the girl was slain.

[16:31] While wildly speculative, it still seemed like a more likely explanation than assuming that the champion swimmer had accidentally drowned by this time. Starr swimming days were long behind her.
It’s not exactly clear whether the Wyman marriage fell apart because Helen met a brash entrepreneur named Stanley.
Faithfull or whether she met Stanley after her marriage fell apart.

[16:56] By the time Helen filed for divorce and did um district court in 1924 she and the Children were living in an apartment on Grove Street in West Roxbury near the denim line while frank was still in the family home on Park Street in Brookline.

[17:11] Stanley, Faithfull was recently widowed, living in an apartment on Sutherland Road in Brookline and recently out of work after the food additive company that he’d been president of went bankrupt.
The two recent singles wed in february 1925 and all three Wyman women changed their surnames to Faithfull,
By this time started, already dropped out of school over a year before when she was 18 and just two months away from graduating.
Her teenage years hadn’t been happy ones as she matured. She displayed what her family considered an excess of modesty.
She even frequently wore boys clothing to hide her shape, although that was very unusual at the time, 1924 star was committed to a mental hospital in Wellesley for nine days.
And in the wake of that hospitalization, she confessed the dark secret that she’d been keeping to her mother.
Starting in 1917, when she was 11 years old and he was 45. Andrew. Peters had begun abusing her.
He was a trusted family member with Children about Starr Zone age and her parents often centered to the Peters household for Playdates and slumber parties at one of these sleepovers.
Mr Peters dosed the young girl with ether and when she came to he was physically abusing her.

[18:36] Over the course of the next seven years or more, the pair would take many long automobile trips together to Quebec City, where they shared a room in the Frontenac hotel to Manhattan, where they shared a room at the Astor and many more.
The night at the Astor ended up leading to another stay in a mental hospital which the United Press eventually discovered and reported on on June 11.
The most startling perhaps, of the many developments within the last 24 hours which have made the mysterious death a case of the first magnitude,
was a telltale hospital record card which portrayed Miss Faithfull is scarcely the quietly demiroren reserved homegirl that her stepfather described to the police.
The record revealed that a little more than a year ago she was taken to Bellevue Hospital as an alcoholic patient after being found in a room at an uptown hotel with a man who described himself to the ambulance surgeon as her husband.

[19:33] When admitted she was suffering from bruises and lacerations, but neither her parents who took her home the next day nor the police have been able to learn the name of her companion.
That night stars parents and later stepfather were grateful for the older man’s attention, believing that the trusted family member was helping to reveal the horizon of a wider world.
They couldn’t afford to show their daughter to the ether Peter Suna added the barbiturate verin, all a hypnotic agent in sleep aid and Starr Faithfull began abusing alcohol when she wasn’t around him.

[20:09] Within a year of this predatory relationships beginning Andrew Peters was elected mayor of boston.
The abuse would continue and escalate throughout his term and for years afterward when he was weighing a run for governor.
His term as mayor is mostly remembered for the Boston Police Strike of 1990.
In the weeks leading up to the strike as his administration desperately trying to negotiate a compromise position between the newly formed police union and the commissioner Peters was AWOL spending a week off the grid in May,
Probably within 13 year old starr faithfull in tow.

[20:49] After seven years of dozing the young girl with anesthetic and hypnotic agents, forcing her to read passages from sexual self help books by Havelock Ellis and physically abusing her in an escalating pattern.
Peter’s abuse was finally revealed to the faithful’s.

[21:06] Another family might have pressed charges or going to the papers or demanded a private apology.
The chronically broke faithfuls chose a different approach.
Stanley Faithfull met with one of Peter’s lieutenants and proposed a cash settlement in exchange for the family’s silence.
After some haggling, they settled on about $25,000 in payments toward the family’s way over mortgage Cape House along with cash payments to the family to cover the cost of stars, medical and psychiatric care,
Adding up to about $38,000.
It was a small fortune at the time.
Still Stanley, Faithfull was not satisfied. Over the years, he received several more payments from Mayor Peters for a total of perhaps $80,000.
This blackmail scheme may have been the family’s primary source of income for years.

[22:01] Even on the day, Starr Faithfull went missing. All her parents could seemingly think of was how to capitalize on our misfortune.

[22:09] That day, Stanley typed a letter to Andrew, Peter’s sister in law, Helen’s cousin’s husband, and Helen signed it in it.
They reveal what they learned after stars, hospitalization.
After questioning her for hours, we drew from her the story of the past years,
beginning when she was only a young child, Andrew had forced his attentions on her and at many hotels where had stopped with her on his trips to North Haven in new york, he had falsely registered her.

[22:39] The letter continued, Bamby had disappeared, and we can find no trace of her friday morning. She left to take a walk and has not returned.
We have inquired of every place where she might be found, and nobody has seen her yesterday afternoon. Mr Faithfull went to the police headquarters and listed her among the missing.

[23:01] We are in a terrible predicament. If we give the information needed for a public search, it would probably result in a lot of undesirable notoriety involving perfectly innocent people.
This is the one thing I have tried to avoid. We must find Bamby and yet I do not see how I can do it privately. Can you help?

[23:24] He then listed a number of debts and expenses related to the family’s house on Cape Cod and the apartment in new york, strongly implying that if the Peters covered those expenses, they would be able to avoid that undesirable notoriety.
As far as I can tell, the Peters family never made that requested payoff,
On Wednesday, June 10, 2 days after the body was discovered, police search starr faithfuls bedroom in the apartment on ST Luke’s place to see if there were any clues about what led up to her death.
As an aside, this was during the era when newspaper spelled clue as C L E W, which I find delightful.
After looking through her dressing table and bureau, a detective sat down on stars bed and started sorting through the top shelf of the bookcase that was just an arm’s length away.
It held books by kipling Milton and Alfred Lord Tennyson, as well as knickknacks, like a collectible plate from Lindbergh’s solo flight across the atlantic and a bunch of dried flowers.
He set aside a stack of theater programs there on top of the books on the first shelf and noticed that the tops of the spines of two volumes were more worn than their neighbors, as if these two are regularly pulled out following his gut.
He pulled out these two books, and behind them was Star’s Secret Diary.

[24:47] The volume began in September 1926, noting the day that she got home from her first cruise to the Mediterranean.
It ran through January 1929 with the final entry simply saying, God damn our house.
Most of the entries were typical stuff trips. She went on family squabbles and drives in the country with her parents.

[25:11] Between those prosaic entries were a handful of more salacious ones.
The diary detailed her long series of encounters with someone named Edwin from December 1926 through June of the next year.
This would turn out to be Edwin McGarr G, an artist who the Faithfull had hired to take Starr to bed and hopefully exposure to a more so called normal sexual encounter after years of trauma with Mayor Peters,
Stars, Diary recorded her sexual liaisons with at least 19 different men who she identified by initials or first name.
Among those initials AJ P appeared several times.
Most of them were in reference to her attempts to deal with the fallout from the abuse rather than about the abuse itself.
Maybe that had been recorded in the 12 pages that have been carefully torn out.

[26:05] One of the remaining entries confirmed Stanley’s blackmail attempts.
God someday mother and Stanley at the doctor meet me off to California, Stanley looks so well, I didn’t know him.
Everything is unbelievably wonderful.
Stanley’s tactics have come through and we got $20,000 out of old age. Ap, we’ll have another car and a motorboat in everything.
I was so excited and thrilled since initially speaking to Stanley in the days after Star’s body was discovered, District Attorney Edwards and made veiled references to a powerful politician and a statements to the press.
For example, on June 11, the United Press syndicated a story that quoted him saying there are several persons who would have been happier if Starr Faithfull were dead and some of these are prominent, both socially and politically.
The big politician mentioned in the case since the investigation started is not out of the picture yet we have evidence to show that he had a motive for putting Starr out of the way.

[27:12] Through leaks in the police Department and through careless comments by Stanley Faithfull many reporters came to believe that Andrew Peters was the politician.
Edwards kept hinting at, they all tried to get a comment on the record from Peter’s, but he just gave a bland quote about having known the family back in boston.

[27:30] Then on the monday after the body was discovered, a United Press reporter named Carl grow ran the first in a series of articles that obviously drew on inside information.
Under the headline, Starr faithfuls family bears shocking story of girls ruined by benefactor.
Grote painted a picture of the anonymous politician that clearly drew on inside knowledge from both the family and Starr faithfuls diary.
The man in question is prominent and well to do a respected member of the community in which he lives, he has Children of his own.
He was according to the parents kinda Starr and later to her pretty sister tucker.

[28:13] The kindness and philanthropy, they told the United Press were a cloak for their relationship that lasted for years and came to light only five years ago through an incident in a new york hotel.
The man’s kindness cloaked his deeds according to the faithfuls, but one day she came home distraught and troubled and told of a night in a new york hotel, at the recollection of which she shuddered.

[28:38] And the subsequent week long series of articles that many papers carried on the front page.
Grote excerpted the most salacious passages in the diary, speculated that Starr had been suicidal and dished rumors and gossip about the case.
It turns out that the wire service had agreed to pay the family for background details and access to the diary by putting stars little sister on the payroll.
She made 100 bucks a week for a job that had no duties and didn’t require her to go into the office.
Soon the new york, Daily News broke the story of Stanley faithfuls attempt to extort more money from Peter’s in the days after Stars disappearance.

[29:19] Now, all the leading theories of the case that were being investigated by the police were also being pondered by the public first and most obviously, Starr Faithfull might have drowned accidentally.
She had a documented history of alcohol abuse, even being hospitalized for it at Bellevue and she loved to talk her way onto Cunard liners, getting very publicly dragged off the Franconia after it put to see just a week before her disappearance.
An early theory of the case was that she had snuck onto another Cunard steamer by getting close to a crew member, gotten drunk and fallen off the ship as it left new york harbor.
However, as more facts came out, this version of events started to look less likely.
First of all, the autopsies revealed that she hadn’t consumed any alcohol for 36-48 hours before her death.
Then there was the inconvenient fact that she was an excellent swimmer.
If she had fallen off a boat sober, it seemed unlikely that she would have succumbed to the waves easily.
What if instead of falling off a Cunard she had been thrown off.
That was also a popular theory, as many people had witnessed her volatile temper as she fought with dr George Jamison car on the Franconia and the other maritime friends and lovers.

[30:38] Add to that, the barbiturates that were in her liver when she was found on June eight, and it seems likely that foul play might have been involved.
Certainly, that’s what Stanley Faithfull in Elven Edwards believed, when the United Press published this lead paragraph on June 16.

[30:55] Both the family of dead Starr Faithfull and District Attorney Elvin in Edwards of Nassau County clung today to the theory of murder and her strange death,
moreover, their idea that the girl of many moods met a violent death before her body was cast up by the sea at Long Beach was strengthened as traces of varon all were found in postmortem examination.
The very anal may have been merely a sedative, but from the sinister chain of circumstances so far produced in their life. History authorities were more than ever convinced that her death was traceable to someone who wanted her silenced.

[31:30] Later analysis would reveal that instead of the Marinol, Starr instead had a stronger barbiturate known as allen all in her system when she died.
Lending additional credence to the idea that she had been drugged by someone else.

[31:43] Against. That however, stands the fact that Starr was well known around the Cunard Dwarves and Chelsea and her comings and goings at the warf seemed to have been well observed and recorded in the days before her disappearance.
It’s not impossible that she slipped through the cracks and got on board, but it doesn’t seem likely either the sand in her lungs and trachea also provided strong evidence against the idea that she was thrown off a ship in deep water.

[32:09] Then there was the possibility of suicide. Her diary was full of references to killing herself if this or that lover refused to see her, but they seem like the overdramatic pros of an emotional teenager, which is what she was at the time.

[32:25] However, in the days immediately before her disappearance, she wrote three letters to Dr Jamison Car, who had already departed for London on the Franconia In two of the letters, she’s frighteningly specific about harming herself.
The doctor would receive both letters in London after Starr was long dead and he brought them back to new york for examination by the police and the district attorney.

[32:49] In a letter dated May 30 the day after she was kicked off the Franconia Starr wrote, I am going definitely now.
I’ve been thinking of it for a long time to end my worthless, disorderly bore of an existence before I ruin anyone else’s life as well.
I certainly have made assorted future this mess out of it all.
I am dead, dead sick of it. It’s no one’s fault on my own. I hate everything. So life is horrible being a sane person. You may not understand.
I take dope, to forget and drink to try to like people, but it’s no use.
I am mad and insane over you. I hold my breath to try and stand it.
Take Alan all in the hope of waking happier. But that homesick feeling never leaves me.
I have, strangely enough, more of a feeling of peace or whatever you call it, now that I know it will all be soon over the half hour before I die. Will I imagine be quite blissful?

[33:52] And then just a few days later, she wrote another letter on June four, the day before she disappeared and the day before she tried so hard to get aboard another Cunard liner.
This one is just as graphic.
It’s all up with me now. This is something I am going to put through.
The only thing that bothers me about it. The only thing I dread is being outwitted and prevented from doing this, which is the only possible thing for me to do.
If one wants to get away with murder, one has to jolly well keep one’s wits about one. It’s the same way with suicide.
If I don’t watch out, I’ll wake up in a psychopathic word, but I intend to watch out and accomplish my end this time.
No ether alan all or window jumping. I don’t want to be named. I want oblivion.

[34:45] Nothing makes any difference Now. I love to eat and can have one delicious meal with no worry over gaining weight.
I adore music and I’m going to hear some good music. I believe I love music more than anything.
I’m going to drink slowly. Keeping aware every second these thoughts represent a young woman who has moved from suicidal ideation to a plan for action.
A 2009 article in the psychiatric times ways how detailed planning can reflect the seriousness of a potential suicide victims intent.
The extent thoroughness and time spent by the patient on suicidal planning may be a better reflection of the seriousness of his intent and the proximity of his desire to act on that intent than is his actual stated intent.

[35:35] To me, suicide is the most convincing explanation of what happened in Starr faithfuls life.
She had written about it quite explicitly and the days before her death included what seemed to be a spiral of increasingly irrational behavior.
Doubts remain. However, because of the method, it seems implausible, if not downright impossible, that someone who had ingested as much alcohol as was found in her system could get into the water on her own,
add to that, the doubt that someone who is fantasizing about having a good meal, listening to good music and slowly enjoying a good cocktail would suddenly pivot to drowning a violent and panic inducing way to go.
And suicide also starts to seem far fetched.
In the end, investigators didn’t reach a conclusive explanation for Starr Faithfull staff.
While there was lots of speculation about accidents, suicide or murder in the press, there just wasn’t enough evidence for Detective Inspector King or Donna Edwards to consider the case solved.
On December 7 1931, the case was officially closed six months and one day after Starr Faithfull was originally reported missing.

[36:47] There is one more theory of stars death, Jonathan Goodman’s book The Passing of Starr Faithfull was published in 1990, almost 60 years after Star’s death.
It has the distinction of being the only account of her death, written by someone who had been given access to the complete police files on the investigation.
And he came to a conclusion that seems both a bit far fetched and very tempting, at least because of its solid ties back to boston.
Goodman leaned heavily on the lack of alcohol and starr system for at least 36 hours, as well as the lack of damage to her silk dress that would have been caused by days in the water.
To conclude that Starr was killed no earlier than the evening of June seven or the early morning of June eight, the day your body was discovered.

[37:34] Goodman also leans on a note in the case file from detective john Fogerty, who said that a mafia informant claimed that Andrew Peters had stayed in the Astor hotel in new york during the first or second weekend in May,
And while they’re mobsters from Boston extorted $30,000 from Peter’s by threatening to expose this sordid past with MS Faithfull The boss who had ordered the shakedown was rumored to be Charles king Solomon.
Long time listeners will remember Solomon as boston, charlie, the immigrant head of the jewish mob in boston who had worked his way up from petty thief to pimp to owner of several nightclubs, including the infamous coconut grove,
during prohibition, Solomon’s business was booming and it became a local celebrity after regularly attending his nightclubs, dressed impeccably and flanked by the most beautiful and well known vaudeville starlets in town,
he even represented boston at the famous 1929 atlantic city conference where mafiosos from around the country like Meyer Lansky, lucky luciano, Nucky, johnson and Al Capone divided up the country’s territory,
and established a sort of non compete clause.

[38:48] If you’re curious, you can learn more about Solomon’s reign over Boston’s underworld and episodes 38 and 39.

[38:56] Goodman theorize, is that boston charlie got information about Peter’s abusive. Starr Faithfull from jOHn Lyons Lyons was a Solomon associate. It would help to deliver the 1917 mayoral election for Peters.
In exchange, he was given Tacit permission to skim 10 off the city contracts, 10%, Joe had his own desk at Boston City Hall with reporter Joe.
Deneen noting in a retrospective about Peters in an anteroom adjoining Peter’s office, there was a bag man who would deal dicker and negotiate for almost anything jobs and promotions had price tags on them.
Political affiliation meant nothing anybody could buy almost anything at the bargain counter.
All that was needed was the price through lions. Solomon learned about Starr and ordered the extortion at the Astor hotel.
There was only one problem before the bagman even got done splitting up the proceeds from shaking down Peters, they were ambushed and robbed.

[39:57] Another one of Detective Fogerty’s mob informants told him that the new york gangster Vani Higgins was responsible for the second shakedown.
Whereas men made off with both $30,000 in cash and the priceless knowledge that Andrew James Peters, former congressman in boston mayor, gubernatorial candidate and close political ally of up and comer franklin.
Delano Roosevelt was vulnerable from here.
The story is purely a product of Jonathan Goodman speculation.

[40:27] He believed that Higgins wanted to get an edge on Solomon by going directly to the horse’s mouth for dirt about Faithfull and Peter’s.
So he arranged for the young woman to be kidnapped.
His men tailed her around Chelsea as she tried to talk her way onto various ocean liners.
Then eventually one of them posed as a cab, IgE and picked her up at Pier 56.
The last place where whereabouts could be confirmed.

[40:51] Another mob informant told Detective Ben Grieve that Starr Faithfull had been at taps hotel on the night of her disappearance.
A Nassau County Speakeasy on the waterfront just across a narrow channel from Long Beach in a back room at taps hotel.
Goodman speculates Starr was treated quite well. At first She was given a meal perhaps more than one.
The meal or the last of the meals was of among other ingredients meat and mushrooms and potatoes raw, or perhaps stewed fruit for dessert.
If she was offered a drink, she said no.
Supposing that as dr roberts’s testimony suggests she possessed no calming drugs.
She asked for some and was provided with alan all stronger than Marinol which she was used to taking.
She was told that she had no need to be frightened. Once she dished the dirt.
Every speck on Andrew peters should be driven back to Manhattan.
She might even be given a present. A little something as a gesture of gratitude for a cooperation of regret for the inconvenience she had been caused of appreciation for her promise that she would invent a reason for her absence from home.
She talked, said everything she remembered about her relationship with Andrew Peters.

[42:10] However, no matter what she said, no matter what horrifying details, she forced herself to relive.
It wasn’t enough for Higgins, governments hypothesis continues.
And so Vani Higgins, perhaps aided by a couple of his goons working turn and turn about Enjoyably, tried to beat the truth out of Starr She had no more truth to tell.
She may in desperation, have puffed up her story with lies, but she was not a good liar.
Never had been the lies made Vani furious.
She was left alone for a while. Told that she had only herself to blame for the bruises on her body, that she would suffer further injury, worse injury if she remained obstinate.
She took another dose of Alan, all, all that was left.

[43:00] Fannie Higgins returning, found her unconscious. He may already have decided that she couldn’t be allowed to live now. Perhaps he concluded that the beating had been too brutal, that if she was not yet dead, she was dying.
He made arrangements to dispose of her to give her death the look of an accident.
Goodman believed that the body was dragged out the back door to the hotel’s doc, where rum runners landed their wares at night and merrymakers from the city rented speedboats.
In the daytime, one of Higgins goons borrowed one of these speedboats cut out through the channel about four miles to the ocean side of Long Beach, where the body was unlikely to float back to the hotel and there he dumped it.

[43:46] Goodman concludes a speculative account. That is what I think happened.
I may be wrong. Of course. I rather hope that I am have become, in a sort of way fond of Starr Faithfull I would prefer to think that for once in your life, in the last few hours of it, she was content.

[44:06] To learn more about the tragic life, an unexplained death of Marian Wyman Ak Starr Faithfull check out this week’s show notes at hub history dot com slash 2 to 3.
I’ll have links to coverage of the investigation in the boston globe and the salacious pieces published by Charles growth of the United Press wire service after he got access to Starr Faithfull family and diary,
al include childhood pictures of Faithfull from before introduction to Andrew peters as well as a picture ever taken shortly before she died.
I’ll also include an affiliate link where you can support the show by purchasing your own copy of Jonathan Goodman’s, the passing of Starr Faithfull,
and I’ll link to our related past podcast episodes about the boston police strike, mobster, Charles Solomon and the coconut grove tragedy.

[44:56] If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email us at podcast at hub history dot com.
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Intro-Outro

Jake:
[45:26] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners.