The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York - Essay Example

The story is about a twenty one year old, beautiful woman called Mary Cecilia Rogers who used to live with her mother at the New York boarding house. Her father had been in a steamboat explosion which he had not survived when she was only seventeen years old. So she started working behind the counter as a clerk at a small cigar store called Anderson’s Liberty Street in Manhattan whose owner was John Anderson. He paid her an above than normal wages because her beauty brought in more customers than usual so sales were high.

This was proven when fewer customers turned up on the day that she did not come for work. Mary had used her savings to buy her mother an Inn and it was there where the two resided. One of the customers living here was a young man called Alfred Crommelin who was a lawyer. He soon fell in love with Mary who rejected her, but he was gentleman enough to retreat without complaints. He moved out but the two remained friends despite his continuous love for the girl. The person who Mary did fall in love with despite his weakness of alcoholism was Daniel Payne who worked as a cork cutter.

The two got engaged though the relationship was disapproved of by her mother Phoebe but life carried on. The first time Mary’s disappearance was reported was in the month of October in 1838 in the Sun. Phoebe had come across what seemed like a suicide note where Mary stated her wish to finish herself off. However, the young girl returned the next day saying that she had been only visiting a friend who lived in Brooklyn. It was said that the Sun had published a hoax to get some attention. Later, there were rumors that Anderson had created the story to gain more customers.

She lived a normal life until the incident that took place during the summer of 1841 in New York City when she was announced missing from her mother’s home for the second time. After three days of search, her mutilated corpse was found. Her badly bruised body had been discovered floating on the Hudson River near the Jersey shore, Crommelin having identified her. The hand prints around her neck proved that she had been murdered and not committed suicide. Investigations were carried out, several theories were provided by the police force as well as the journalists, and yet no one managed to discover for sure who exactly was responsible for such an act.

Her fiance Payne was implicated but had an alibi to prove his innocence. Nonetheless, some weeks after Mary’s death, he took his life by drinking poison out of his love for his fiancee. The police thought that some members of a gang had tortured her, killed her and then dumped the woman in the River to rot. Later on, a woman called Mrs. Loss who was notorious in that area for her job of helping single pregnant women getting abortions made some revelations. She stated that Mary had conceived a child and had come to her with a dark, handsome man to get rid of the baby.

This led to rumors that the abortion had led to complications leading to her death. However, questions were raised regarding the very obvious bruises on her bodies which showed that she had been killed in a very brutal and violent manner. During this time, New York was considered as the urban city where everyone was moving up to raise their social and living standards. The Rogers family had done the same. However, the security of the regions was not good, the police force just present for name, not doing any work.

There were sets of officers whose duty was to patrol the city during the