A STUDY IN DISMEMBERMENT (1914)
Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes.
The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
Do you know the history of YOUR house?
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When the pieces of a dismembered body started showing up in different locations in Brooklyn around Christmas of 1914, it didn’t take long before Brooklyn Detectives traced those body parts to a block on Macon Street in the Stuyvesant section of town.
“The two pieces of torso which were found on Friday by boy skaters embedded in ice in a pond between Coney Island and Ulmer’s Park were identified yesterday afternoon as parts of the body of Rufus Dunham, 61 years old, of 752 Macon Street, Brooklyn.”
So began the article that was to create a great sensation on Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Macon Street between Ralph and Howard avenues.
DREDGING UP THE PAST
When we uncovered this story a few years back, we had been researching a house on this block of Macon Street (near to Howard Avenue) for our first House History Book. We had thought it would be interesting to see who else had lived on the block over the past 125 years.
During our historical research, up popped this gruesome and sensational story which must have created quite a stir on the block at the time.
SEARCHING FOR THE KILLER
The murder case, described as “one of the most disturbing that police of the city have had to cope with in many years,” caused the police to devote “thirty detectives” to “sifting out clues.”
At the time the article was written, Dunham’s “head and limbs had not yet been found,” although they would be discovered some time later in a section of sewer in “South Brooklyn.”
In an anti-Italian rant, not uncommon for the times, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that “the case is disturbing, for, while there have been scores of instances of murder and dismemberment among the low and brutal of the Italians of the city’s population, this is the first time that an American-born has been killed and cut up by the human butchers.”
WHO WAS RUFUS DUNHAM OF 752 MACON STREET?
An installment collector for the Cowperthwait Furniture Company, Dunham had been collecting installment payments in Park Slope when he went missing for about two weeks.
Known as “a man of quiet habits, 60 years old, steady as a clock in his comings and goings,” Dunham was “thoroughly trusted by his employers and devoted to his wife.” He had spent “most of his spare time with his childless wife.
“The pair lived most happily on the top floor of the two story and basement house at 752 Macon Street,” the story noted.
Copies of an Italian paper and an English paper, from a few days after Dunham went missing, were used to wrap “the body into bundles,” and were “tied with brown cord” and “made fast by a knot which, according to the detectives, is chiefly used by butchers.”
Eventually, the police nabbed the slayers. They were “three Italians,” in an area that was home to the Cincotti Gang. The New York Times made sure that their readers remembered who the Cincotti Gang was – Also members of the Black Hand Gang, they had tried to blackmail Enrico Caruso in 1910 for $15,000.
For more on this story, see HERE.
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Brownstone Detectives is an historic property research agency. Our mission is to document and save the histories of our clients’ homes. From our research, we produce our celebrated House History Books and House History Reports. Contact us today to begin discovering the history of your home.
