Good Morning POU! Hope you’re enjoying the intriguing story of Hannah Elias. Today is Part 4.
Hannah Elias passed most of her time reading about murders in dime novels and the newspapers. In September 1901, the murder of President William McKinley by an anarchist in Buffalo filled the pages of the local dailies. Two months later, a different scandal arose after his vice president Theodore Roosevelt, was sworn into office and invited Booker T. Washington to the White House.
In the headlines of the New York papers, the presence of a black man at the White House was called outrageous; articles about the meeting quoted South Carolina senator Benjamin Tillman who thundered, “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”
The same year Hannah became pregnant, and John Platt was presumed to be the father. The following spring, she delivered a baby girl at her home and named her Gwendolyn Elias. On the baby’s birth certificate, she listed the child’s race as white.
By recording Gwendolyn as white, Elias had manifest her hope that her daughter could achieve what Elias was unable to do herself: pass for white. Elias’s life, even as a woman of means, was bounded by race. In her view, the only way to escape the limitations that came from being rich and black, was to escape being black altogether.
Several weeks after her birth, the baby became sick and died. Elias consumed herself with making funeral plans, arranging for an elaborate marble mausoleum to be constructed at her daugter’s grave site. The work cost $15,000 ($422, 560) and Platt paid the bill. He however, did not attend the funeral. Having no friends, Elias paid her staff to attend her daughter’s burial. On the death certificate, Elias listed the child’s race as black. As she was dead, there was no point continuing to pretend she was white.
On Friday November 13, 1903, Cornelius Williams stood looking into the mirror of a public restroom in Manhattan. He adjusted his three piece suit and placed a matching bowler hat atop his head. He then paced a razor, gold plated watch and a revolver into his pockets. His mind was made up. This was the day he was going to find Hannah Elias and take revenge upon her.
Elias had evicted him from her boardinghouse eight years before and since then, according to those who knew him, Williams had gone mad. He still carried a grudge against her and had resolved to track her down and “cut her tongue out.”
He was unable to track Elias as no one at the former black social establishments she had frequented before moving, had seen her in years. Williams decided to extract her whereabouts from Platt whom he had knew by the pseudonym “Mr. Green” and with whom he had once had a run in at Elias’s boardinghouse.
Several days later, Williams found a man named Andrew Green in the city directory and had gone to the address listed for him. Leering through a window, he saw an elderly white man with a beard and white hair and was sure this was his man. However, this was the New York city planner, Andrew H. Green.
On the morning of November 13, Williams went to the address listed as Green’s resident and waited for Green to show up. When Green arrived home around noon, he found Williams waiting for him on the stairs.
As soon as he walked up, Williams began demanding to know Elias’s whereabouts. “Who are you anyway, I don’t know you! Get away from me” Green shouted at Williams. Williams took his revolver from his hip pocket and shot Green three times, once in the head, once in the abdomen, and once more in the groin.
Williams took off after the shooting but ran back to the stoop in a panic when neighbors shouted for him to stop. Standing over Green’s lifeless body he yelled “You forced me to do it!”
After a few minutes, a police carriage arrived and Williams immediately confessed as he was arrested . During the interrogation, Williams said he killed Green because he was the lover of a woman who had slandered him. The next day, the police formed a committee to determine his sanity and assigned detectives to find and question Hannah Elias.
On Saturday, November 14, 1903, the front page of the newspapers across the country carried banner headlines with the news of the murder of New York’s city planner by a “crazed Negro” seeking revenge against Green’s black mistress.
Throughout New York, flags were lowered to half-mast for the man who had unified the five boroughs and overseen construction of some of New York’s greatest monuments and parks. Even as they mourned though, New Yorkers were shocked that Green had been shot over a black woman. On the steps of Green’s house, still stained with blood, his nephew addressed a group of reporters, attempting to quell the rumors of an interracial liasion. “This story that this negro tells is a perfect humbug and a fiction from A to Z,” he told the scrum of reporters.
Inspector George McClusky was tasked with finding the woman Williams spoke of. He discovered Hannah Elias residing in a mansion at 236 Central Park West. He went to her house that morning and was let in by her staff, who led him to Elias sprawled on a sofa in her best Cleopatra post. She told McClusky that William’s statement was a “tissue of lies.” She then admitted that Williams had lived in her lodging house in 1895, but swore she had never heard from him since he had left. She denied knowing or meeting Green but told McClusky that Green resembled a man she was having an affair with, John R. Platt.
That same evening, McClusky visited Platt at his house to confirm Elias’s story. Platt’s son-in-law, W.J. Cassard, was with Platt and insisted on being present for his questioning. Platt told McClusky that Elias’s story was true but asked that his affair with her be kept confidential. McClusky agreed. However, Platt’s secret affair had now been revealed to his family.
Williams was deemed insane and committed to an asylum. McClusky, true to his word, kept Platt’s affair from reaching the papers. Platt’s relatives were another matter, Cassard shared the secret with the rest of Platt’s family, who became outraged when they found out how much of his fortune, which they stood to inherit, had been lavished on his black mistress.