Who Killed Mary Rogers? 7 Facts About the Real Murder Behind Poe's "Marie Rogêt"
Mary Cecilia Rogers left her mother's New York boarding house on Sunday, July 25, 1841. Three days later her body was pulled from the Hudson River at Hoboken, New Jersey. No one was ever tried for her death.
Edgar Allan Poe turned the case into "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," his second tale of the detective C. Auguste Dupin, and told an editor he had "indicated the assassin."
1. Mary Rogers Was Famous in New York Before She Died
Rogers was born in Connecticut around 1820. Her mother, Phoebe, kept a boarding house in Manhattan. Mary worked behind the counter at John Anderson's tobacco shop, where she became known as the "Beautiful Cigar Girl."
A shop clerk with a nickname the city knew made good copy. When she died, the penny papers covered the case for weeks.
2. She Had Disappeared Once Before, in 1838
On October 4, 1838, Rogers went missing. Several newspapers reported it the next morning, along with word of a suicide note. She came home within days. The explanation given was a visit to a friend in Brooklyn. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, who edited Poe's tales for Harvard University Press, notes that the episode drew suspicion of a hoax.
A different account appeared three years later. On August 3, 1841, James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald asserted that in 1838 she had been "seduced by an officer of the United States Navy and kept at Hoboken for two weeks." Poe built his theory on that officer.
3. Her Body Surfaced at Hoboken Three Days After She Left Home
On July 25, 1841, Rogers told her fiancé, Daniel Payne, that she was going to visit an aunt. She never arrived. On July 28 her body was found floating in the Hudson near Sybil's Cave and brought ashore by the Elysian Fields, a Hoboken pleasure ground.
Dr. Richard F. Cook examined the body for the acting coroner, Justice Gilbert Merritt. Cook later testified to a strip of muslin tied with a hard knot and to abrasions on the back. The press was slow to react. Mabbott notes that a New York paper mentioned the inquest briefly on July 29 and that the Sunday Mercury of August 1 was the first to take the death seriously.
4. The Evidence Kept Changing After the Inquest
Frederica Loss kept a tavern at Weehawken. By her account, two of her sons found women's clothing in a nearby thicket on August 25. On September 17 the Herald reported that the items had "evidently been there at least three or four weeks." Loss said a young woman had come to the tavern on July 25 with a young man of dark complexion, and that she heard screams after dark. No one outside the family saw the clothes in place. The find seemed to confirm the gang theory the papers had pushed since early August.
Then Payne died. On October 8, 1841, he was found unconscious on a bench near the spot where the body had been discovered, and he died soon after. An empty laudanum bottle lay nearby. His note, as the New-York Tribune printed it, read: "To the World. Here I am on the spot. God forgive me for my misfortune, or for my misspent time." The coroner's jury blamed "congestion of the brain." He had an alibi for July 25.
5. Poe Worked From Newspapers in Philadelphia
Poe was living in Philadelphia. Mabbott identifies his main sources as the New York weekly Brother Jonathan and the New York Evening Post. Poe moved the case to Paris, renamed the victim Marie Rogêt, turned the cigar shop into a perfumery and the Hudson into the Seine, and gave the file to Dupin, the detective of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
On June 4, 1842, he offered the tale to George Roberts of the Boston Notion for $50. The same day he offered it to Joseph Evans Snodgrass of the Baltimore Saturday Visiter for $40. "I have imagined a series of nearly exact coincidences occurring in Paris," he told Roberts. He added that he had "indicated the assassin in a manner which will give renewed impetus to investigation."
Snowden's Ladies' Companion of New York published the tale. In it, Dupin dismisses the gang theory and argues for a single killer, a secret lover. He ties that man to the naval officer of the first disappearance and reasons that the body was dropped from a boat.
6. A Deathbed Statement Broke While the Story Was Running
The first two installments ran in November and December 1842. On November 18, the New-York Tribune printed "The Mary Rogers Mystery Explained." Frederica Loss had been shot by accident when a gun went off in her son's hands. Before she died she sent for a New Jersey magistrate, Justice Merritt. The Tribune reported that she told him Rogers had come to the tavern with a young physician for an abortion and died during the procedure.
Merritt denied it. In a letter printed in the New York press on November 19, he called the Tribune's statement "entirely incorrect" and said no such examination took place. A hearing in Jersey City that day examined Loss's sons under oath and produced nothing. Mabbott calls the report "the deathbed words of a delirious woman."
The report still cut against a tale that pointed to a murderer. Poe's third installment skipped January and appeared in February 1843. John Walsh argued in Poe the Detective (1968) that Poe used the delay to revise.
7. Poe Revised the Tale in 1845, Then Claimed a Confession
Poe reprinted the story in his 1845 Tales. Walsh counted 15 small changes. Mabbott found that every reference to a possible abortion was added for that printing. Poe also added footnotes that tied the main characters, the places, and the Paris newspapers to their New York originals. The first footnote said that two later confessions had confirmed his conclusions. Mabbott judges that note "by no means unequivocal or candid" and writes that Poe "did not solve the mystery."
Poe went further in a letter to George W. Eveleth on January 4, 1848. "Nothing was omitted in 'Marie Roget' but what I omitted myself," he wrote. He said the naval officer had "confessed it" and described the death as "the accidental death arising from an attempt at abortion." He declined to say more "for the sake of relatives." No record of that confession has surfaced.
Was the Mary Rogers Case Ever Solved?
No. No one was ever tried. Several men were arrested and released, John Anderson among them, and the cause of death is still disputed. The historian Amy Gilman Srebnick ties two 1845 measures to the case: the reorganization of New York City's police and a tougher state abortion law. Mabbott writes that Anderson, in his last years, "communed with the ghost of the murdered girl."
Poe's tale is free to read at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, with Mabbott's notes on the newspapers Poe used. Read the 1845 footnotes against the dates above.
Prophet, Bird or Devil, a novel by Nathaniel Free, reopens the questions Poe left in "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt."
Sources
Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log (1987), entries for November 1842.
Brown University Library, exhibit note on Mary Rogers, with a passage credited to Srebnick.
Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (Oxford University Press, 1995).
John Walsh, Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind The Mystery of Marie Roget (Rutgers University Press, 1968).
William K. Wimsatt Jr., "Poe and the Mystery of Mary Rogers," PMLA, March 1941.
Daniel Stashower, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder (Dutton, 2006).
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