Annie Bock.

(New York Journal, August 5, 1896)

Annie Bock and her husband Jacob were spending the summer at Rockaway Beach. On Sunday, August 1, 1896, Annie went back to their flat at 207 E. 21st Street in New York City’s Tenderloin district to pay their monthly rent. She had $300 in the Dry Dock Savings Bank and on Monday morning, she withdrew $50 from the bank and paid the rent with $20. The plan was to return to Rockaway that afternoon, instead she went to Coney Island, possibly accompanied by a man. Around 9:00 that night she went to 14th Street, “the pavements of which she knew well.” 

Her movements were observed by others who knew the pavements well. Rosa Schwartz saw Annie stop and converse with a man, 5’ 6”, slender, graying hair, wearing a black frock coat and a straw hat. They walked to 3rd Avenue and took a cable car uptown. Hattie Stein and Lillie Field saw them alight from the car on 21st Street and enter No. 207 together. Mamie Freidman saw them leave the house about 20 minutes later. At about 12:30, Mrs. Feltner, who had a view of the entrance to 207 from her window, saw Annie return to the house with another man, medium build, with a swarthy complexion and a black mustache. This was the last time Annie Bock was seen alive by anyone but her killer.

Rosa Reichman, the Bocks' servant, heard them moving about, but she was nearly deaf and after they closed the bedroom door she heard nothing. The next morning, Rosa opened the door and the first thing she noticed was that the canary usually singing in the bedroom, was lying dead in the cage, its wing torn off. Then she saw her mistress, lying half on the bed, her head in a pool of blood. She ran from the room and through the hallway until she found a janitor, who notified the police.

(New York Journal, August 5, 1896)

The police investigated the room and had the body removed to the morgue, where the coroner’s physician performed an autopsy. He found bruises on her neck, but death was caused by hemorrhaging from four cuts on her neck, the deepest of which severed an artery.

Annie had been wearing diamond earrings, which the killer had pulled from her ears, tearing the flesh, but the police did not believe that robbery was the motive. The murder had been done in a moment of frenzy. There were marks on the sheet where his heels had twisted the fabric in the struggle. A pillow had bloody finger marks, indicating that she was smothered, so her cries could not be heard.

Jacob Bock was notified of his wife’s death by telegraph. He arrived around 5:00, took a look at the bloody sheets, and broke down crying. He later told police that he could not think of anyone who would want to murder his wife. He claimed that he never knew her to be unfaithful and did not know she had an account at the Dry Dock Savings Bank.

Jacob Bock and Annie Brafman were both Polish immigrants who had known each other as children in Warsaw. They were married by a rabbi in New York, four years before the murder. Jacob was a cigar maker who was often unemployed. Annie was the money maker, working as a waitress in cafes on the East Side. She was petite and, at one time, was considered one of the prettiest in that profession. By 1896, she was frail and dissipated, weighing less than 100 pounds.

On Wednesday, the police arrested Mortimer Golden, a pawnbroker who resembled the description of the last man she was with. Rosa Schwartz, a close friend of Annie’s, told the police Golden had once threatened Annie. Golden admitted he knew Annie Bock but said he was in Atlantic City on Monday night. He had two Empire Theatre tickets to prove he had attended an opera there. The alibi was solid, and after spending a night in jail, Mort Golden was released.

(New York World, August 7, 1896)

The next suspect was Jacob Levy, a white man known as “Nigger Jake” because of his dark complexion. Levy boarded a streetcar and stood with Patrolman Patrick J. Dinan on the front platform. Dinan knew him because Levy often ran errands for the police. Levy told Dinan he had met a fine-looking woman on the Coney Island ferry Sunday night and, at her request, accompanied her to her flat at 207 E. 21st Street, where he remained until 8 AM Monday.

When Dinan learned of the murder at the same address, he told the story to his captain, who detailed two detectives to question Levy. They found that Levy had shaved his mustache and could not adequately explain why. In his pocket was a pearl-handled knife with a stained blade. They brought him to the station and scraped his fingernails carefully for traces of blood. Levy told the police that he made up the story. He had not been on E. 21st Street, Sunday night, and he did not know Annie Bock. He had been there four weeks earlier to see a woman named Dora Gilbert.

Levy told Captain O’Brian that on Monday night he was on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street where he met Policeman Corrigan and was with him until Midnight. Corrigan corroborated his story, but Levy’s mother and brother said he was home with them both Sunday and Monday nights.

The stains on Levy’s knife turned out to be tobacco juice, not blood. There was no blood under his fingernails, and the police concluded he had not shaved his mustache to hide his identity. Levy was not a murderer, just a lying braggart.

Concerning the story told by his family, Levy said, “They were trying to help me, but they came very near to sending me to the electric chair.”

(New York World, August 11, 1896)

Alice Cohen, a frequenter of the district, approached Detectives Stephan and Cronin and told them that the man last seen in Annie Bock’s company was probably Victor Roundtree, whom the women who haunt the thoroughfare near 14th Street very much feared. The detectives hunted for Roundtree with no success. Finally, they told Alice that if she saw him again, she should immediately notify a patrolman. 

On August 9, Alice Cohen pointed out a young man to Patrolman Gleason and said, “I know that man, and I knew Annie Bock. That man was in her company at 11:30 o’clock on the night of the murder.”

Gleason placed the young man under arrest, and the police began a thorough investigation. But there was a mix-up from the start. The man was not Victor Roundtree, but Emil Drangenstein, a hotel waiter. Another witness, Minnie Fisher, also said the man was with Annie the night of the murder, but when she saw him face-to-face in Yorkville Court, she said Drangenstein was not the man. Witnesses at Drangenstein's house said he was home that night. The police accepted his alibi and concluded they had no evidence linking Drangenstein to the murder—another dead end.

After several more false leads, the investigation seemed hopeless. Captain Elbert O. Smith of the Eighteenth Precinct told the New York Journal:

This is a strange case—a remarkable case. I may say that there have been 113 men at work upon it constantly, for each officer of this command had been instructed to keep a sharp lookout for persons resembling the “swarthy man” seen with Annie Bock by Rosa Schwartz. The most astute detectives in the department have been indefatigable. There are certain features in this mystery which make it difficult of solution. She knew many men, and this fact made it a matter of no particular notice when she was seen walking with a man or even taking one to her home.

This is one theory, the maniac theory is only borne out by the savage attack made upon the canary bird, and yet this theory loses force because there was no mutilation of the body, as it seems not unlikely would have been the case were she slain by a victim of homicidal mania. As to the theory of an enemy of long standing, I prefer not to discuss that.

(Pontiac Daily Leader, September 19, 1896)

The captain may have been referring to rumors surrounding Jacob Frankenstein, who reportedly threatened Annie after she jilted him several years earlier. On the steamer that brought her to America, 16-year-old Annie Brafman met 18-year-old Jacob Frankenstein, who had escaped military service in Russia. They fell in love on the voyage, and after they landed, Frankenstein sought her out. 

They became engaged to marry, but before the ceremony, Frankenstein’s business took him out of town.  When he returned, Annie had left. He tracked her down and found she had begun a life of shame. He begged her to fulfill her promise of marriage, but she laughed at him, saying she preferred the life she was leading. 

Frankenstein’s mind became unbalanced. He threatened to kill her and attacked her with a carving knife, leaving a scar on her forehead. He was arrested and sent to the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island. In September 1896, the police learned that Frankenstein had recently been released, but they never arrested him. Though the story was featured in newspapers throughout the country, his connection to the murder was never more than rumor.

On September 2, another violent murder shocked the Tenderloin. Hannah Altman, a friend of Annie Bock was strangled and slashed in her home. Three young women were violently murdered in the Tenderloin district between May and September 1896—Mamie Cunningham, Annie Bock, and Hannah Altman. In spite of Captain Smith’s doubts, the press and the people of New York began to fear that a maniacal killer was loose in the city.  Annie Bock died from a severed artery, but bruises on her throat revealed that the killer had strangled her first. As the death count rose, Annie Bock was listed among the victims of New York’s Jack the Strangler.

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Sources: 

“"Murder Will Out" Their Only Hope,” New York Journal, August 10, 1896.
“"Nigger Jake" Discharged,” Sun., August 8, 1896.
“An Arrest in the Bock Case,” New-York Tribune, August 7, 1896.
“An Outcast Woman Murdered,” The New York Times, August 5, 1896.
“Another Annie Bock Suspect,” The World, August 11, 1896.
“Another Block Murder Suspect,” Evening Post, August 10, 1896.
“Another Bock Suspect arrested,” New-York Tribune, August 9, 1896.
“Arrest in the Bock Case,” New York Herald, August 7, 1896.
“Dangenstein Discharged, Too,” New-York Tribune, August 12, 1896.
“Levy's Wagging tongue,” The World, August 7, 1896.
“Mrs. Bock buried,” New York Herald, August 6, 1896.
“Murder a Mystery Yet,” The World, August 6, 1896.
“The Murdered Woman Buried,” New-York Tribune, August 6, 1896.
“Mysterious Murder,” Evening Journal, August 4, 1896.
“New York City Police Have Solved the Bock Mystery,” Pontiac Daily Leader, September 19, 1896.
“Not an Assassin, but a Lying Braggart,” New York Journal, August 8, 1896.
“Police Views in Recent Crimes,” New-York Tribune, September 5, 1896.
“Slain in Her Bed by an Unknown,” New York Journal, August 5, 1896.
“Strange Trio of Criminal Mysteries,” New York Journal, August 11, 1896.
“The Strangler's Victims - All Women.,” New York Journal and Advertiser, May 14, 1897.
“Telegraphic Brevities,” Alexandria Gazette, August 4, 1896.
“Who Killed Mrs. Bock?,” Sun., August 5, 1896.
“With Her Throat Cut,” Evening Bulletin, August 4, 1896.
“With Her Throat Cut,” The World, August 5, 1896.