IT was Silas Bannerman who finally ran down that scientific wizard and
arch-enemy of mankind, Emil Gluck. Gluck’s confession, before he went to
the electric chair, threw much light upon the series of mysterious
events, many apparently unrelated, that so perturbed the world between
the years 1933 and 1941. It was not until that remarkable document was
made public that the world dreamed of there being any connection between
the assassination of the King and Queen of Portugal and the murders of
the New York City police officers. While the deeds of Emil Gluck were
all that was abominable, we cannot but feel, to a certain extent, pity
for the unfortunate, malformed, and maltreated genius. This side of his
story has never been told before, and from his confession and from the
great mass of evidence and the documents and records of the time we are
able to construct a fairly accurate portrait of him, and to discern the
factors and pressures that moulded him into the human monster he became
and that drove him onward and downward along the fearful path he trod.
Emil Gluck was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1895. His father, Josephus
Gluck, was a special policeman and night watchman, who, in the year 1900,
died suddenly of pneumonia. The mother, a pretty, fragile creature, who,
before her marriage, had been a milliner, grieved herself to death over
the loss of her husband. This sensitiveness of the mother was the
heritage that in the boy became morbid and horrible.
In 1901, the boy, Emil, then six years of age, went to live with his
aunt, Mrs. Ann Bartell. She was his mother’s sister, but in her breast
was no kindly feeling for the sensitive, shrinking boy. Ann Bartell was
a vain, shallow, and heartless woman. Also, she was cursed with poverty
and burdened with a husband who was a lazy, erratic ne’er-do-well. Young
Emil Gluck was not wanted, and Ann Bartell could be trusted to impress
this fact sufficiently upon him. As an illustration of the treatment he
received in that early, formative period, the following instance is
given.
When he had been living in the Bartell home a little more than a year, he
broke his leg. He sustained the injury through playing on the forbidden
roof—as all boys have done and will continue to do to the end of time.
The leg was broken in two places between the knee and thigh. Emil,
helped by his frightened playmates, managed to drag himself to the front
sidewalk, where he fainted. The children of the neighbourhood were
afraid of the hard-featured shrew who presided over the Bartell house;
but, summoning their resolution, they rang the bell and told Ann Bartell
of the accident. She did not even look at the little lad who lay
stricken on the sidewalk, but slammed the door and went back to her
wash-tub. The time passed. A drizzle came on, and Emil Gluck, out of
his faint, lay sobbing in the rain. The leg should have been set
immediately. As it was, the inflammation rose rapidly and made a nasty
case of it. At the end of two hours, the indignant women of the
neighbourhood protested to Ann Bartell. This time she came out and
looked at the lad. Also she kicked him in the side as he lay helpless at
her feet, and she hysterically disowned him. He was not her child, she
said, and recommended that the ambulance be called to take him to the
city receiving hospital. Then she went back into the house.
It was a woman, Elizabeth Shepstone, who came along, learned the
situation, and had the boy placed on a shutter. It was she who called
the doctor, and who, brushing aside Ann Bartell, had the boy carried into
the house. When the doctor arrived, Ann Bartell promptly warned him that
she would not pay him for his services. For two months the little Emil
lay in bed, the first month on his back without once being turned over;
and he lay neglected and alone, save for the occasional visits of the
unremunerated and over-worked physician. He had no toys, nothing with
which to beguile the long and tedious hours. No kind word was spoken to
him, no soothing hand laid upon his brow, no single touch or act of
loving tenderness—naught but the reproaches and harshness of Ann Bartell,
and the continually reiterated information that he was not wanted. And
it can well be understood, in such environment, how there was generated
in the lonely, neglected boy much of the bitterness and hostility for his
kind that later was to express itself in deeds so frightful as to terrify
the world.
It would seem strange that, from the hands of Ann Bartell, Emil Gluck
should have received a college education; but the explanation is simple.
Her ne’er-do-well husband, deserting her, made a strike in the Nevada
goldfields, and returned to her a many-times millionaire. Ann Bartell
hated the boy, and immediately she sent him to the Farristown Academy, a
hundred miles away. Shy and sensitive, a lonely and misunderstood little
soul, he was more lonely than ever at Farristown. He never came home, at
vacation, and holidays, as the other boys did. Instead, he wandered
about the deserted buildings and grounds, befriended and misunderstood by
the servants and gardeners, reading much, it is remembered, spending his
days in the fields or before the fire-place with his nose poked always in
the pages of some book. It was at this time that he over-used his eyes
and was compelled to take up the wearing of glasses, which same were so
prominent in the photographs of him published in the newspapers in 1941.
He was a remarkable student. Application such as his would have taken
him far; but he did not need application. A glance at a text meant
mastery for him. The result was that he did an immense amount of
collateral reading and acquired more in half a year than did the average
student in half-a-dozen years. In 1909, barely fourteen years of age, he
was ready—“more than ready” the headmaster of the academy said—to enter
Yale or Harvard. His juvenility prevented him from entering those
universities, and so, in 1909, we find him a freshman at historic Bowdoin
College. In 1913 he graduated with highest honours, and immediately
afterward followed Professor Bradlough to Berkeley, California. The one
friend that Emil Gluck discovered in all his life was Professor
Bradlough. The latter’s weak lungs had led him to exchange Maine for
California, the removal being facilitated by the offer of a professorship
in the State University. Throughout the year 1914, Emil Gluck resided in
Berkeley and took special scientific courses. Toward the end of that
year two deaths changed his prospects and his relations with life. The
death of Professor Bradlough took from him the one friend he was ever to
know, and the death of Ann Bartell left him penniless. Hating the
unfortunate lad to the last, she cut him off with one hundred dollars.
The following year, at twenty years of age, Emil Gluck was enrolled as an
instructor of chemistry in the University of California. Here the years
passed quietly; he faithfully performed the drudgery that brought him his
salary, and, a student always, he took half-a-dozen degrees. He was,
among other things, a Doctor of Sociology, of Philosophy, and of Science,
though he was known to the world, in later days, only as Professor Gluck.
He was twenty-seven years old when he first sprang into prominence in the
newspapers through the publication of his book, _Sex and Progress_. The
book remains to-day a milestone in the history and philosophy of
marriage. It is a heavy tome of over seven hundred pages, painfully
careful and accurate, and startlingly original. It was a book for
scientists, and not one calculated to make a stir. But Gluck, in the
last chapter, using barely three lines for it, mentioned the hypothetical
desirability of trial marriages. At once the newspapers seized these
three lines, “played them up yellow,” as the slang was in those days, and
set the whole world laughing at Emil Gluck, the bespectacled young
professor of twenty-seven. Photographers snapped him, he was besieged by
reporters, women’s clubs throughout the land passed resolutions
condemning him and his immoral theories; and on the floor of the
California Assembly, while discussing the state appropriation to the
University, a motion demanding the expulsion of Gluck was made under
threat of withholding the appropriation—of course, none of his
persecutors had read the book; the twisted newspaper version of only
three lines of it was enough for them. Here began Emil Gluck’s hatred
for newspaper men. By them his serious and intrinsically valuable work
of six years had been made a laughing-stock and a notoriety. To his
dying day, and to their everlasting regret, he never forgave them.
It was the newspapers that were responsible for the next disaster that
befell him. For the five years following the publication of his book he
had remained silent, and silence for a lonely man is not good. One can
conjecture sympathetically the awful solitude of Emil Gluck in that
populous University; for he was without friends and without sympathy.
His only recourse was books, and he went on reading and studying
enormously. But in 1927 he accepted an invitation to appear before the
Human Interest Society of Emeryville. He did not trust himself to speak,
and as we write we have before us a copy of his learned paper. It is
sober, scholarly, and scientific, and, it must also be added,
conservative. But in one place he dealt with, and I quote his words,
“the industrial and social revolution that is taking place in society.”
A reporter present seized upon the word “revolution,” divorced it from
the text, and wrote a garbled account that made Emil Gluck appear an
anarchist. At once, “Professor Gluck, anarchist,” flamed over the wires
and was appropriately “featured” in all the newspapers in the land.
He had attempted to reply to the previous newspaper attack, but now he
remained silent. Bitterness had already corroded his soul. The
University faculty appealed to him to defend himself, but he sullenly
declined, even refusing to enter in defence a copy of his paper to save
himself from expulsion. He refused to resign, and was discharged from
the University faculty. It must be added that political pressure had
been put upon the University Regents and the President.
Persecuted, maligned, and misunderstood, the forlorn and lonely man made
no attempt at retaliation. All his life he had been sinned against, and
all his life he had sinned against no one. But his cup of bitterness was
not yet full to overflowing. Having lost his position, and being without
any income, he had to find work. His first place was at the Union Iron
Works, in San Francisco, where he proved a most able draughtsman. It was
here that he obtained his firsthand knowledge of battleships and their
construction. But the reporters discovered him and featured him in his
new vocation. He immediately resigned and found another place; but after
the reporters had driven him away from half-a-dozen positions, he steeled
himself to brazen out the newspaper persecution. This occurred when he
started his electroplating establishment—in Oakland, on Telegraph Avenue.
It was a small shop, employing three men and two boys. Gluck himself
worked long hours. Night after night, as Policeman Carew testified on
the stand, he did not leave the shop till one and two in the morning. It
was during this period that he perfected the improved ignition device for
gas-engines, the royalties from which ultimately made him wealthy.
He started his electroplating establishment early in the spring of 1928,
and it was in the same year that he formed the disastrous love attachment
for Irene Tackley. Now it is not to be imagined that an extraordinary
creature such as Emil Gluck could be any other than an extraordinary
lover. In addition to his genius, his loneliness, and his morbidness, it
must be taken into consideration that he knew nothing about women.
Whatever tides of desire flooded his being, he was unschooled in the
conventional expression of them; while his excessive timidity was bound
to make his love-making unusual. Irene Tackley was a rather pretty young
woman, but shallow and light-headed. At the time she worked in a small
candy store across the street from Gluck’s shop. He used to come in and
drink ice-cream sodas and lemon-squashes, and stare at her. It seems the
girl did not care for him, and merely played with him. He was “queer,”
she said; and at another time she called him a crank when describing how
he sat at the counter and peered at her through his spectacles, blushing
and stammering when she took notice of him, and often leaving the shop in
precipitate confusion.
Gluck made her the most amazing presents—a silver tea-service, a diamond
ring, a set of furs, opera-glasses, a ponderous _History of the World_ in
many volumes, and a motor-cycle all silver-plated in his own shop.
Enters now the girl’s lover, putting his foot down, showing great anger,
compelling her to return Gluck’s strange assortment of presents. This
man, William Sherbourne, was a gross and stolid creature, a heavy-jawed
man of the working class who had become a successful building-contractor
in a small way. Gluck did not understand. He tried to get an
explanation, attempting to speak with the girl when she went home from
work in the evening. She complained to Sherbourne, and one night he gave
Gluck a beating. It was a very severe beating, for it is on the records
of the Red Cross Emergency Hospital that Gluck was treated there that
night and was unable to leave the hospital for a week.
Still Gluck did not understand. He continued to seek an explanation from
the girl. In fear of Sherbourne, he applied to the Chief of Police for
permission to carry a revolver, which permission was refused, the
newspapers as usual playing it up sensationally. Then came the murder of
Irene Tackley, six days before her contemplated marriage with Sherbourne.
It was on a Saturday night. She had worked late in the candy store,
departing after eleven o’clock with her week’s wages in her purse. She
rode on a San Pablo Avenue surface car to Thirty-fourth Street, where she
alighted and started to walk the three blocks to her home. That was the
last seen of her alive. Next morning she was found, strangled, in a
vacant lot.
Emil Gluck was immediately arrested. Nothing that he could do could save
him. He was convicted, not merely on circumstantial evidence, but on
evidence “cooked up” by the Oakland police. There is no discussion but
that a large portion of the evidence was manufactured. The testimony of
Captain Shehan was the sheerest perjury, it being proved long afterward
that on the night in question he had not only not been in the vicinity of
the murder, but that he had been out of the city in a resort on the San
Leandro Road. The unfortunate Gluck received life imprisonment in San
Quentin, while the newspapers and the public held that it was a
miscarriage of justice—that the death penalty should have been visited
upon him.
Gluck entered San Quentin prison on April 17, 1929. He was then
thirty-four years of age. And for three years and a half, much of the
time in solitary confinement, he was left to meditate upon the injustice
of man. It was during that period that his bitterness corroded home and
he became a hater of all his kind. Three other things he did during the
same period: he wrote his famous treatise, _Human Morals_, his remarkable
brochure, _The Criminal Sane_, and he worked out his awful and monstrous
scheme of revenge. It was an episode that had occurred in his
electroplating establishment that suggested to him his unique weapon of
revenge. As stated in his confession, he worked every detail out
theoretically during his imprisonment, and was able, on his release,
immediately to embark on his career of vengeance.
His release was sensational. Also it was miserably and criminally
delayed by the soulless legal red tape then in vogue. On the night of
February 1, 1932, Tim Haswell, a hold-up man, was shot during an
attempted robbery by a citizen of Piedmont Heights. Tim Haswell lingered
three days, during which time he not only confessed to the murder of
Irene Tackley, but furnished conclusive proofs of the same. Bert
Danniker, a convict dying of consumption in Folsom Prison, was implicated
as accessory, and his confession followed. It is inconceivable to us of
to-day—the bungling, dilatory processes of justice a generation ago.
Emil Gluck was proved in February to be an innocent man, yet he was not
released until the following October. For eight months, a greatly
wronged man, he was compelled to undergo his unmerited punishment. This
was not conducive to sweetness and light, and we can well imagine how he
ate his soul with bitterness during those dreary eight months.
He came back to the world in the fall of 1932, as usual a “feature” topic
in all the newspapers. The papers, instead of expressing heartfelt
regret, continued their old sensational persecution. One paper did
more—the _San Francisco Intelligencer_. John Hartwell, its editor,
elaborated an ingenious theory that got around the confessions of the two
criminals and went to show that Gluck was responsible, after all, for the
murder of Irene Tackley. Hartwell died. And Sherbourne died too, while
Policeman Phillipps was shot in the leg and discharged from the Oakland
police force.
The murder of Hartwell was long a mystery. He was alone in his editorial
office at the time. The reports of the revolver were heard by the office
boy, who rushed in to find Hartwell expiring in his chair. What puzzled
the police was the fact, not merely that he had been shot with his own
revolver, but that the revolver had been exploded in the drawer of his
desk. The bullets had torn through the front of the drawer and entered
his body. The police scouted the theory of suicide, murder was dismissed
as absurd, and the blame was thrown upon the Eureka Smokeless Cartridge
Company. Spontaneous explosion was the police explanation, and the
chemists of the cartridge company were well bullied at the inquest. But
what the police did not know was that across the street, in the Mercer
Building, Room 633, rented by Emil Gluck, had been occupied by Emil Gluck
at the very moment Hartwell’s revolver so mysteriously exploded.
At the time, no connection was made between Hartwell’s death and the
death of William Sherbourne. Sherbourne had continued to live in the
home he had built for Irene Tackley, and one morning in January, 1933, he
was found dead. Suicide was the verdict of the coroner’s inquest, for he
had been shot by his own revolver. The curious thing that happened that
night was the shooting of Policeman Phillipps on the sidewalk in front of
Sherbourne’s house. The policeman crawled to a police telephone on the
corner and rang up for an ambulance. He claimed that some one had shot
him from behind in the leg. The leg in question was so badly shattered
by three ’38 calibre bullets that amputation was necessary. But when the
police discovered that the damage had been done by his own revolver, a
great laugh went up, and he was charged with having been drunk. In spite
of his denial of having touched a drop, and of his persistent assertion
that the revolver had been in his hip pocket and that he had not laid a
finger to it, he was discharged from the force. Emil Gluck’s confession,
six years later, cleared the unfortunate policeman of disgrace, and he is
alive to-day and in good health, the recipient of a handsome pension from
the city.
Emil Gluck, having disposed of his immediate enemies, now sought a wider
field, though his enmity for newspaper men and for the police remained
always active. The royalties on his ignition device for gasolene-engines
had mounted up while he lay in prison, and year by year the earning power
of his invention increased. He was independent, able to travel wherever
he willed over the earth and to glut his monstrous appetite for revenge.
He had become a monomaniac and an anarchist—not a philosophic anarchist,
merely, but a violent anarchist. Perhaps the word is misused, and he is
better described as a nihilist, or an annihilist. It is known that he
affiliated with none of the groups of terrorists. He operated wholly
alone, but he created a thousandfold more terror and achieved a
thousandfold more destruction than all the terrorist groups added
together.
He signalized his departure from California by blowing up Fort Mason. In
his confession he spoke of it as a little experiment—he was merely trying
his hand. For eight years he wandered over the earth, a mysterious
terror, destroying property to the tune of hundreds of millions of
dollars, and destroying countless lives. One good result of his awful
deeds was the destruction he wrought among the terrorists themselves.
Every time he did anything the terrorists in the vicinity were gathered
in by the police dragnet, and many of them were executed. Seventeen were
executed at Rome alone, following the assassination of the Italian King.
Perhaps the most world-amazing achievement of his was the assassination
of the King and Queen of Portugal. It was their wedding day. All
possible precautions had been taken against the terrorists, and the way
from the cathedral, through Lisbon’s streets, was double-banked with
troops, while a squad of two hundred mounted troopers surrounded the
carriage. Suddenly the amazing thing happened. The automatic rifles of
the troopers began to go off, as well as the rifles, in the immediate
vicinity, of the double-banked infantry. In the excitement the muzzles
of the exploding rifles were turned in all directions. The slaughter was
terrible—horses, troops, spectators, and the King and Queen, were riddled
with bullets. To complicate the affair, in different parts of the crowd
behind the foot-soldiers, two terrorists had bombs explode on their
persons. These bombs they had intended to throw if they got the
opportunity. But who was to know this? The frightful havoc wrought by
the bursting bombs but added to the confusion; it was considered part of
the general attack.
One puzzling thing that could not be explained away was the conduct of
the troopers with their exploding rifles. It seemed impossible that they
should be in the plot, yet there were the hundreds their flying bullets
had slain, including the King and Queen. On the other hand, more
baffling than ever was the fact that seventy per cent. of the troopers
themselves had been killed or wounded. Some explained this on the ground
that the loyal foot-soldiers, witnessing the attack on the royal
carriage, had opened fire on the traitors. Yet not one bit of evidence
to verify this could be drawn from the survivors, though many were put to
the torture. They contended stubbornly that they had not discharged
their rifles at all, but that their rifles had discharged themselves.
They were laughed at by the chemists, who held that, while it was just
barely probable that a single cartridge, charged with the new smokeless
powder, might spontaneously explode, it was beyond all probability and
possibility for all the cartridges in a given area, so charged,
spontaneously to explode. And so, in the end, no explanation of the
amazing occurrence was reached. The general opinion of the rest of the
world was that the whole affair was a blind panic of the feverish Latins,
precipitated, it was true, by the bursting of two terrorist bombs; and in
this connection was recalled the laughable encounter of long years before
between the Russian fleet and the English fishing boats.
And Emil Gluck chuckled and went his way. He knew. But how was the
world to know? He had stumbled upon the secret in his old electroplating
shop on Telegraph Avenue in the city of Oakland. It happened, at that
time, that a wireless telegraph station was established by the Thurston
Power Company close to his shop. In a short time his electroplating vat
was put out of order. The vat-wiring had many bad joints, and, on
investigation, Gluck discovered minute welds at the joints in the wiring.
These, by lowering the resistance, had caused an excessive current to
pass through the solution, “boiling” it and spoiling the work. But what
had caused the welds? was the question in Gluck’s mind. His reasoning
was simple. Before the establishment of the wireless station, the vat
had worked well. Not until after the establishment of the wireless
station had the vat been ruined. Therefore the wireless station had been
the cause. But how? He quickly answered the question. If an electric
discharge was capable of operating a coherer across three thousand miles
of ocean, then, certainly, the electric discharges from the wireless
station four hundred feet away could produce coherer effects on the bad
joints in the vat-wiring.
Gluck thought no more about it at the time. He merely re-wired his vat
and went on electroplating. But afterwards, in prison, he remembered the
incident, and like a flash there came into his mind the full significance
of it. He saw in it the silent, secret weapon with which to revenge
himself on the world. His great discovery, which died with him, was
control over the direction and scope of the electric discharge. At the
time, this was the unsolved problem of wireless telegraphy—as it still is
to-day—but Emil Gluck, in his prison cell, mastered it. And, when he was
released, he applied it. It was fairly simple, given the directing power
that was his, to introduce a spark into the powder-magazines of a fort, a
battleship, or a revolver. And not alone could he thus explode powder at
a distance, but he could ignite conflagrations. The great Boston fire
was started by him—quite by accident, however, as he stated in his
confession, adding that it was a pleasing accident and that he had never
had any reason to regret it.
It was Emil Gluck that caused the terrible German-American War, with the
loss of 800,000 lives and the consumption of almost incalculable
treasure. It will be remembered that in 1939, because of the Pickard
incident, strained relations existed between the two countries. Germany,
though aggrieved, was not anxious for war, and, as a peace token, sent
the Crown Prince and seven battleships on a friendly visit to the United
States. On the night of February 15, the seven warships lay at anchor in
the Hudson opposite New York City. And on that night Emil Gluck, alone,
with all his apparatus on board, was out in a launch. This launch, it
was afterwards proved, was bought by him from the Ross Turner Company,
while much of the apparatus he used that night had been purchased from
the Columbia Electric Works. But this was not known at the time. All
that was known was that the seven battleships blew up, one after another,
at regular four-minute intervals. Ninety per cent. of the crews and
officers, along with the Crown Prince, perished. Many years before, the
American battleship _Maine_ had been blown up in the harbour of Havana,
and war with Spain had immediately followed—though there has always
existed a reasonable doubt as to whether the explosion was due to
conspiracy or accident. But accident could not explain the blowing up of
the seven battleships on the Hudson at four-minute intervals. Germany
believed that it had been done by a submarine, and immediately declared
war. It was six months after Gluck’s confession that she returned the
Philippines and Hawaii to the United States.
In the meanwhile Emil Gluck, the malevolent wizard and arch-hater,
travelled his whirlwind path of destruction. He left no traces.
Scientifically thorough, he always cleaned up after himself. His method
was to rent a room or a house, and secretly to install his
apparatus—which apparatus, by the way, he so perfected and simplified
that it occupied little space. After he had accomplished his purpose he
carefully removed the apparatus. He bade fair to live out a long life of
horrible crime.
The epidemic of shooting of New York City policemen was a remarkable
affair. It became one of the horror mysteries of the time. In two short
weeks over a hundred policemen were shot in the legs by their own
revolvers. Inspector Jones did not solve the mystery, but it was his
idea that finally outwitted Gluck. On his recommendation the policemen
ceased carrying revolvers, and no more accidental shootings occurred.
It was in the early spring of 1940 that Gluck destroyed the Mare Island
navy-yard. From a room in Vallejo he sent his electric discharges across
the Vallejo Straits to Mare Island. He first played his flashes on the
battleship _Maryland_. She lay at the dock of one of the mine-magazines.
On her forward deck, on a huge temporary platform of timbers, were
disposed over a hundred mines. These mines were for the defence of the
Golden Gate. Any one of these mines was capable of destroying a dozen
battleships, and there were over a hundred mines. The destruction was
terrific, but it was only Gluck’s overture. He played his flashes down
the Mare Island shore, blowing up five torpedo boats, the torpedo
station, and the great magazine at the eastern end of the island.
Returning westward again, and scooping in occasional isolated magazines
on the high ground back from the shore, he blew up three cruisers and the
battleships _Oregon_, _Delaware_, _New Hampshire_, and _Florida_—the
latter had just gone into dry-dock, and the magnificent dry-dock was
destroyed along with her.
It was a frightful catastrophe, and a shiver of horror passed through the
land. But it was nothing to what was to follow. In the late fall of
that year Emil Gluck made a clean sweep of the Atlantic seaboard from
Maine to Florida. Nothing escaped. Forts, mines, coast defences of all
sorts, torpedo stations, magazines—everything went up. Three months
afterward, in midwinter, he smote the north shore of the Mediterranean
from Gibraltar to Greece in the same stupefying manner. A wail went up
from the nations. It was clear that human agency was behind all this
destruction, and it was equally clear, through Emil Gluck’s impartiality,
that the destruction was not the work of any particular nation. One
thing was patent, namely, that whoever was the human behind it all, that
human was a menace to the world. No nation was safe. There was no
defence against this unknown and all-powerful foe. Warfare was
futile—nay, not merely futile but itself the very essence of the peril.
For a twelve-month the manufacture of powder ceased, and all soldiers and
sailors were withdrawn from all fortifications and war vessels. And even
a world-disarmament was seriously considered at the Convention of the
Powers, held at The Hague at that time.
And then Silas Bannerman, a secret service agent of the United States,
leaped into world-fame by arresting Emil Gluck. At first Bannerman was
laughed at, but he had prepared his case well, and in a few weeks the
most sceptical were convinced of Emil Gluck’s guilt. The one thing,
however, that Silas Bannerman never succeeded in explaining, even to his
own satisfaction, was how first he came to connect Gluck with the
atrocious crimes. It is true, Bannerman was in Vallejo, on secret
government business, at the time of the destruction of Mare Island; and
it is true that on the streets of Vallejo Emil Gluck was pointed out to
him as a queer crank; but no impression was made at the time. It was not
until afterward, when on a vacation in the Rocky Mountains and when
reading the first published reports of the destruction along the Atlantic
Coast, that suddenly Bannerman thought of Emil Gluck. And on the instant
there flashed into his mind the connection between Gluck and the
destruction. It was only an hypothesis, but it was sufficient. The
great thing was the conception of the hypothesis, in itself an act of
unconscious cerebration—a thing as unaccountable as the flashing, for
instance, into Newton’s mind of the principle of gravitation.
The rest was easy. Where was Gluck at the time of the destruction along
the Atlantic sea-board? was the question that formed in Bannerman’s mind.
By his own request he was put upon the case. In no time he ascertained
that Gluck had himself been up and down the Atlantic Coast in the late
fall of 1940. Also he ascertained that Gluck had been in New York City
during the epidemic of the shooting of police officers. Where was Gluck
now? was Bannerman’s next query. And, as if in answer, came the
wholesale destruction along the Mediterranean. Gluck had sailed for
Europe a month before—Bannerman knew that. It was not necessary for
Bannerman to go to Europe. By means of cable messages and the
co-operation of the European secret services, he traced Gluck’s course
along the Mediterranean and found that in every instance it coincided
with the blowing up of coast defences and ships. Also, he learned that
Gluck had just sailed on the Green Star liner _Plutonic_ for the United
States.
The case was complete in Bannerman’s mind, though in the interval of
waiting he worked up the details. In this he was ably assisted by George
Brown, an operator employed by the Wood’s System of Wireless Telegraphy.
When the _Plutonic_ arrived off Sandy Hook she was boarded by Bannerman
from a Government tug, and Emil Gluck was made a prisoner. The trial and
the confession followed. In the confession Gluck professed regret only
for one thing, namely, that he had taken his time. As he said, had he
dreamed that he was ever to be discovered he would have worked more
rapidly and accomplished a thousand times the destruction he did. His
secret died with him, though it is now known that the French Government
managed to get access to him and offered him a billion francs for his
invention wherewith he was able to direct and closely to confine electric
discharges. “What!” was Gluck’s reply—“to sell to you that which would
enable you to enslave and maltreat suffering Humanity?” And though the
war departments of the nations have continued to experiment in their
secret laboratories, they have so far failed to light upon the slightest
trace of the secret. Emil Gluck was executed on December 4, 1941, and so
died, at the age of forty-six, one of the world’s most unfortunate
geniuses, a man of tremendous intellect, but whose mighty powers, instead
of making toward good, were so twisted and warped that he became the most
amazing of criminals.
—Culled from Mr. A. G. Burnside’s “Eccentricitics of Crime,” by kind
permission of the publishers, Messrs. Holiday and Whitsund.