Overnight, it seemed, show business and its feedline subsidiaries began to enjoy boomtime prosperity. Times Square from sundown to 3 A.M. was roaring and impassable. Taxi drivers were saying, “It’s just like the war all over again.”
The phenomenon was not restricted to midtown Manhattan. It was simultaneously experienced by the entertainment districts of downtown Brooklyn, Fordham Road in the Bronx, and other localities throughout the five boroughs.
That week, too, advertising agency executives were bewildered by advance reports from their radio-polling services. At a time when most major radio shows had returned to the air to begin the fall and winter broadcasting cycles and an appreciable rise in listener-response should have become apparent, the advance ratings unaccountably dropped in the metropolitan area. All networks were affected. The independent stations with local coverage had Pulse and BMB make hasty special surveys and discovered that the bottom had fallen out of their program-response and listener-circulation tables. The most significant of all — in all surveys — were those showing the percentage of sets-in-use. They were unprecedentedly small.
A parallel drop was noted in television surveys.
New Yorkers were not listening to. the radio and watching the telecasts.
Account executives and broadcasting company vice-presidents were busy preparing explanations to their clients, chiefly masochistic. The truth seemed to have occurred to none of them, which was that radio and television sets could not be turned on in the home by people who were not there or why, if they were, were absent spiritually.
Police were puzzled by the abrupt rise in drunkenness and disorderly conduct cases. Routine raids on gambling houses bagged huge takes and a type of burgher clientele not ordinarily found throwing its money away. Marijuana and narcotics cases took a disturbing jump. The Vice Squad was compelled to put on a co-ordinated drive in an attempt to curb the sudden spread and acceleration of prostitution activities. Muggings, car thefts, holdups, common assaults, sex offenses increased sharply. The rise in juvenile delinquency was especially alarming.
And of peculiar interest was the reappearance all over the City of strangled alley cats.
It was evident to the thoughtful few that what had seemed a healthy loss of interest in the Cat case on the part of New Yorkers was not that at all. Fear had not died; the City was still in the mob mood and mob psychology was still at the panic stage; it had merely taken a new form and direction. People were now in flight from reality on a psychic rather than a physical level. But they were still fleeing.
On Sunday, October 2, an unsurprisingly large number of clergymen took as their texts Genesis XIX, 24–25. It was natural to cite Sodom and Gomorrah that day, and brimstone and fire were generously predicted. The ingredients of moral disintegration were all present in the melting pot, bubbling to the boil. The only trouble was that those whom the lesson would have profited were atoning for their wickedness in a less godly fashion, elsewhere.
By a sly irony the ninth life of the Cat proved the crucial one.
For the break in the case came with the ninth murder.
The body was found a few minutes after 1 A.M. on the night of September 29–30, exactly one week after the Cat Riots and less than two miles from the site of Stella Petrucchi’s murder. It lay sprawled in deep shadows on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History, at 77th Street and Central Park West. A sharpeyed patrolman spotted it on his rounds.
Death was by strangulation. A cord had been employed, of tussah silk, dyed blue as in the cases of Archibald Dudley Abernethy and Rian O’Reilly.
According to a driver’s license found in his untouched wallet, his name was Donald Katz, he was 21 years old, and he lived on West 81st Street. The address proved to be an apartment house between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. His father was a dentist, with offices at Amsterdam Avenue and West 71st Street near Sherman Square. The family was of the Jewish faith. The victim had an elder sister, Mrs. Jeanne Immerson, who lived in the Bronx. Donald was enrolled in extension courses in radio and television engineering. He had been, it seemed, a bright quixotic boy given to quick enthusiasms and dislikes; he had had many acquaintances and few friends.
The father, Dr. Morvin Katz, officially identified the body.
It was from Dr. Katz that police learned about the girl his son had been out with that evening. She was Nadine Cuttler, 19, of Borough Park, Brooklyn, a student at the New York Art Students’ League. Brooklyn detectives picked her up during the night and she was brought to Manhattan for questioning.
She fainted on viewing the body and it was some time before she could give a coherent story.
Nadine Cuttler said that she had known Donald Katz for almost two years. “We met at a Palestine rally.” They had had “an understanding” for the past year, during which period they had seen each other three or four times a week. “We had practically nothing in common. Donald was interested in science and technology, and I in art. He was politically undeveloped; not even the war taught him anything. We didn’t even agree about Palestine. I don’t know why we fell in love.”
The previous evening, Miss Cuttler stated, Donald Katz had met her at the Art Students’ League after her classes and they had walked down Seventh Avenue from 57th Street, stopping in at Lum Fong’s for a chow mein dinner. “We fought over the check. Donald had juvenile ideas about this being a man’s world, and that women ought to stay home and have babies and smooth their husbands’ brows when the men came home after an important day, and all that sort of thing. He got very angry with me because I pointed out to him it was my turn to pay. Finally, I let him pay the check just to avoid a scene in public.”
Afterward, they had gone dancing in a little Russian night club on 52nd Street, The Yar, across from 21 and Leon and Eddie’s.
“It was a place we liked very much and often went to. They knew us there and we called Maria and Lonya and Tina and the others by their first names. But last night it was crowded and after a while we left. Donald had had four vodkas and didn’t touch any of the zakuska, so when we hit the air he got lightheaded. He wanted to go clubbing, but I said I wasn’t in the mood and instead we strolled back uptown on Fifth Avenue. When we got to Fifth and 59th, Donald wanted to go into the Park. He was feeling very... gay; the drinks hadn’t worn off. But it was so dark in there, and the Cat...”
At this point Nadine Cuttler broke down.
When she was able to continue, the girl said: “I found myself awfully nervous. I don’t know why. We’d often talked about the Cat murders and neither of us ever felt a personal threat, I’m sure of it. We just couldn’t seem to take it seriously, I mean really seriously. Donald used to say the Cat was anti-Semitic because in a City with the biggest Jewish population in the world he hadn’t strangled a single Jew. Then he’d laugh and contradict himself and say the odds were the Cat was Jewish because of that very fact. It was a sort of joke between us which I never thought very funny, but you couldn’t take offense at anything Donald said, not really, he...” She had to be recalled to her story.