Shortly after 2 o’clock on a March morning in 1894, frantic reports reached police in Jersey City that a woman was being attacked in a vacant lot. When officers rushed to the scene, they found a horrifying struggle unfolding in the darkness beside an abandoned house.
Several men fled as the police arrived. Others were captured on the spot.
The victim was Adeline Waters, a traveling stage actress who had been performing in the area only days before.
Found terrified, injured, and barely able to speak, she was taken to the police station and later to the hospital, where doctors feared the shock might prove fatal.
Her ordeal quickly became front-page news, fueling fears about public safety in a city already unsettled by another unsolved attack on a woman discovered gravely injured in a vacant lot just weeks earlier.
In Grasp of Fiends
JERSEY CITY, New Jersey. — The police of Jersey City early this morning caught a number of ruffians red-handed in an attempt to criminally assault a young woman in a lonely lot on the corner of York and Hudson Streets.
About 2 o’clock, word was sent to the First Precinct Police Station that a woman was being murdered in the lot. Officers Cody and Gannon were despatched to the place. When they arrived at the scene, Cody went in at the rear of the lot and Gannon in by the front.
In the lot is an unoccupied house. Standing on the stoop of the house the policeman saw a woman struggling to free herself from a number of men. When the officers appeared three men left the crowd and succeeded in making their escape over a side fence. The rest of the men were rounded up and put under arrest.
The woman was Adeline Waters, an actress, playing with the McKee Rankin Company, which appeared in this city a week ago. Her clothing was torn almost from her back, her hair disheveled and she was almost dead from fright.
The officer took her and the prisoners to the police station, where the woman was too overcome to make a statement. She was almost in a state of collapse. This morning the men were arraigned before Justice O’Donnell, who held them in $300 bail each for trial.
The prisoners are Henry Fagan, a fireman on the steamship Alaska; John Connelly, a switchman; Michael Klugenstiel; and William Gurr.
Miss Waters was in such a condition that the police sent her to the City Hospital, where she is in a critical condition from shock. As she has recently been ill, the physicians at the hospital fear she cannot recover.
Miss Waters is a handsome brunette, 33 years old. When the McKee Rankin combination was playing here a week ago, she became ill in the railroad station and had to be taken to Taylor’s Hotel, where she has been since, under the care of Dr. J.J. Nivin. [Read: The Collapse of America’s Stage Queens]
She had been taking morphine to allay her pains and it is supposed that she became delirious last night and left the hotel unknown to the doctor, and wandering away, fell into the hands of the men who assaulted her.
The police are looking for the three men who escaped.
It is not many weeks ago that the public was horrified by the report of the finding of Miss May Barrowcliffe, a music teacher, with a fractured skull in a vacant lot in Jersey City.
It is possible that there is some connection between that assault and the one upon Miss Walters, as far as the perpetrators are concerned.
Miss Barrowcliffe has since recovered, and is living with her mother in Brooklyn. The police have stopped working on her case.
Source: The Evening World. New York, N.Y. March 20, 1894.
