On the night of July 25, 1841, Mary Rogers, who lived in New York City, told her mother and fiance she was spending the evening visiting relatives in New Jersey. The 21 year old left and never returned home.
Three days later, her badly beaten body turned up floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken, New Jersey. No one could imagine who might have had a motive to harm Mary – other than her fiance. However, he had an airtight alibi. Mary attracted a slew of admirers, who knew her as the “Beautiful Cigar Girl,” from her job working in a downtown cigar emporium.
No one seemed to suspect a stalker might be involved in her disappearance. The only witness claiming to have seen Mary that night told a story involving an illegal abortion ring that didn’t seem to fit and couldn’t be corroborated. Within a year, the case had gone cold and Mary’s fiance committed suicide by overdosing on a type of opium on the very shores her body had washed up.
The mysterious murder of Mary Rogers, known in the penny press as the “Beautiful Cigar Girl,” in the summer of 1841 remains one of New York City’s most infamous unsolved cases. Even Edgar Allan Poe took a crack at solving it, yet while her ghost is said to have visited the numerous suspects that the press circled after the beautiful young lady’s death, the truth of the grisly crime is still as murky as the Hudson River waters where her corpse was found.
In 1838, John Anderson, who owned a tobacco shop on Broadway in Lower Manhattan, hired Mary Rogers to stand at his counter purely to allure gentleman customers. It worked, and the dark haired beauty who was described as ”ethereal and hypnotically pleasing” made Anderson’s Tobacco Emporium one of the most popular in town. It had a regular clientele of notable figures like Washington Irving and, it’s stated, Poe himself, as well as a cavalcade of journalists, which would help to get her gruesome end its high profile in the press.
One day in October of 1838, Rogers went missing. Two weeks later, she suddenly reappeared, and many thought that Anderson had staged the disappearance for publicity. Rogers’ adoring fans swarmed the shop, and she soon felt overwhelmed and left to work in her mother’s boarding shop. Yet in July of 1841, she went missing again, and this time two men on the shore of New Jersey spotted her floating near Sybil’s Cave.
The whole tragic tale might have faded from history, except that author Edgar Allen Poe, who had become obsessed with the case, memorialised it in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt. Similar to its real-life counterpart, the tale ends with the trail going hopelessly cold.
