Mystery Monday: The 1841 Hudson River Homicide
Very few unsolved murders have received media and popular culture treatment quite like that received by the murder of New York’s Mary Rogers, a woman whose slaying was so famous that Edgar Allen Poe later based a short story on it.
The daughter of a widowed house-keeper, Mary was renowned for her extraordinary beauty. Her employment as a clerk for John Anderson's Liberty Street cigar shop, combined with her youthful charm to earn her affectionate acclaim as "The Cigar Girl." Established writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving would visit the cigar shop for the sole purpose of flirting with a young woman whose smile and flirtatiousness served as a muse.
Illustration of the short story "The Mystery of Marie Roget" by American author Edgar Allan Poe. From Tales of Mystery, Imagination, & Humour: And Poems By Edgar Allan Poe.
It was, therefore, of great concern to the local community when in 1838, Mary Rogers left town and failed to return after a few days. Her time missing was exasperated by concerns that Mary was suicidal (her mother had found what appeared to be a suicide note). Panic rang so sharply throughout the community that the New York Sun ran a report on Mary's disappearance, concluding that Mary was indeed a great danger to herself. Yet, a few days after the news report had circulated, Mary returned home, appearing to be in perfect health. It turned out that she had been visiting a friend in Brooklyn.
This 1838 event and its outcome would eventually relieve concerns when Mary went missing again, this time in July of 1841. Now married to Daniel Payne, a cork-cutter and boarder in her mother's house, Mary left town under the pretenses of visiting family in New Jersey. For three days after Mary left town, few worried that anything had come of her disappearance. Then, on July 28th, a group of men out for a stroll near a Hudson riverside spot in Hoboken discovered the body of a young woman after seeing a bobbing figure in the distant waters. Rowing out to retrieve the body, they returned to shore and summoned a crowd, where eventually Mary's fiancee Daniel Payne identified the body as the much-beloved "Cigar Girl".
While foul play was not suspected at first, a coroner quickly confirmed the worst: her dress and hat were torn and she had sustained considerable bruising. What followed was an act of pure speculation as the community raced to determine who would possibly have had a motive to kill Mary. Suspicions rested initially on her fiancee, but later reports place her at the mercy of a gang of vicious criminals: an unfortunate victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
With a solid alibi for her prospective husband, and no evidence to substantiate the gang activity rumors, the case to find Mary's killers eventually went cold. Where the detectives left off, Edgar Allen Poe picked up, using details from news reports to write a short story entitled "The Mystery Of Marie Roget". Many literary historians consider this to be the first murder mystery ever written and confirmed to be inspired by actual events.
Want to learn more about Mary Rogers and the evidence and theories that have surfaced over the past 150+ years? Check out this article from Smithsonian Magazine which covers the case in greater detail.
Interested in learning more about unsolved mysteries from the Victorian era? Check out or our blog and @my_dear_holmes every Monday for a new puzzle to scratch that mysterious itch while you wait for your next Dear Holmes letter!
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