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The torso was found first: the headless upper part of the body of a well-built man bobbing in the East River on a hot summer day in New York City in 1897. Wrapped in floral-patterned red oilcloth, the type used to cover kitchen tables and line cupboards, the tightly tied package was pulled from the water by a group of boys playing near the pier at the foot of East Eleventh Street. The mans chest was sawed off just below the rib cage and was missing a sliced-out hunk of flesh.

The following day, ten miles away, a man and his two sons were out picking berries in the woods in a sparsely settled part of the Bronx, near the High Bridge Aqueduct, when they stumbled upon the lower part of the body, minus the legs. This bundle, too, was wrapped in red oilcloth.

Three days later, the severed legs showed up in another package near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where sailors from the USS Vermont fished it from the river.

All that was missing now was the head.

Among the first New York police detectives assigned to the case was thirty-one-year-old Arthur Carey, a boyish-faced, Staten Islandborn son of an Irish cop. A veteran of the central detective bureau in Lower Manhattan, Carey specialized in homicide cases. But lately he had been patrolling the beat in Goatville, the Bronx precinct where the lower torso had been discovered in the woods. Like Russians banished to Siberia, police officers who fell out of favor during one of the departments periodic political shake-ups were reassigned to Goatville, where nothing much ever happened.

Detective Arthur Carey, the Murder Man who led the investigations of many sensational homicide cases and headed the New York Police Departments first homicide squad.

That had been Careys fate, in 1895, after his mentor, police chief Thomas F. Byrnesthe most famous cop in Americawas forced into retirement by Theodore Roosevelt, the new head of the Board of Police Commissioners. The reformer Roosevelt had taken office in the wake of a highly publicized legislative investigation that unearthed rampant police corruption in New York City. Although Carey was not personally implicated in the scandal, the fallout was enough to get him sent to Goatville, where hed been languishing for almost two years.

Careys career would change dramatically beginning on June 27, 1897, when the package containing the limbless midsection was brought into the Bronx precinct station. Carey and his partner unwrapped the bundle to find, in addition to layers of brown paper and burlap, red-and-gold-patterned oilcloth that matched the type enclosing the partial corpse found in the East River the day before. The two pieces of wrapping even fit together. Carey now dismissed the initial police theory that mischievous medical students had cut up a cadaver and dumped it in the river to create a mystery. Instead, the matching oilcloth suggested a carefully coordinated crime by the same hand. He also noted, as confirmed later by city morgue doctors who fit the body parts together like a jigsaw puzzle, that the body appeared to have been crudely hacked with a saw, not a precision medical knife. Carey was sure this was no joke. Despite his exile to Goatville, Murder followed me here, Carey would later recall.

As he continued examining the body, Carey spotted something else: a small ink stamp on a piece of wet brown wrapping paper stuck to the mans back, which read, Kugler & Wollens Hardware, 277 Bowery. Carey guessed that the saw had been purchased there. So, he took the Third Avenue elevated train down to the corner of Bowery and Houston, near the central headquarters station at 300 Mulberry Street, where he had begun his detective career under Byrnes.