- This investigation is considered one of the finest pieces
of detective work in the history of law enforcement.
I'm Alex Tresniowski,
I'm the author of The Rope,
A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP.
- [Host] The history Alex Tresniowski shares in The Rope
begins in the Jersey Shore town of Asbury Park in 1910.
Asbury Park seemed like an idyllic place
until a little girl went missing.
- Ten-year-old, Marie Smith.
She was a school girl who left for school at 8:00 AM
one morning in the winter and never made it back home.
And there was a five-day manhunt for, for her with no clues,
no sign of her until her body turned up in the woods,
battered, abused.
It was a grizzly crime and almost immediately
a black handyman in town named Tom Williams was rounded up
and arrested for the crime.
The white mob stormed the jail and tried to pull him out
and lynch him.
There was no proof.
There was nothing else.
There was just a suspicion that he was the murderer.
- [Host] In 1910, there were more
than 60 lynchings reported in the United States.
So long as he was a suspect,
Tom William's life was in danger.
- The prosecutor in Asbury park, John Applegate,
was convinced that Williams was the killer.
But, there were a couple of town officials who weren't.
So they privately and secretly hired a New York
detective named Raymond Schindler to come to Asbury Park
and conduct a clandestine investigation
and try to find another suspect and try to get to the truth.
- [Host] Schindler identified another suspect,
a white man who had reportedly approached Marie Smith
a few days prior to her disappearance.
- Used an investigator to go undercover and rope his suspect
in, befriend him, gain his trust.
And it was a day-to-day process and it took weeks
and months.
And I've asked the law enforcement officers today
if this kind of operation would ever fly, the answer is no.
- [Host] Schindler had several elaborate
plans to smoke out a confession.
- So Ray Schindler is a fan of all of Shakespeare's works.
He believes that in Shakespeare's plays characters
reveal themselves through their actions,
through their thoughts, by which we hear
through the language
and that's what he wants to do with criminals.
So he actually uses a scene from Hamlet involving a ghost to
sort of scare his suspect into a confession.
- That guilty creatures, sitting at a play
have, by the very cunning of the scene,
been struck so to the soul that presently
they have proclaimed their malefactions.
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak.
- And he rents out a movie theater
and he shows a particular movie that is intended to
scare his suspect and haunt him and get him to confess.
And he tries a lot of things
like that along the way, which are very unconventional.
And ultimately he begins to wear his suspect down.
- [Host] Schindler also borrowed a plan from popular
detective fiction.
- Later on Raymond Schindler would be called
America's Sherlock Holmes,
but he was aware of a Conan Doyle story,
'The Hound of the Baskervilles' where townspeople
were terrified of a mysterious dog.
- What's that?
- Oh that.
Well the people around here say it's the hound.
- He tried to use that to smoke out his suspect too.
He, he put an officer in the bushes
outside of his suspect's house
and told them to throw a rock at a doghouse every hour
on the hour after midnight to stir the junkyard dog
out of his home and bark and unnerve
the suspect who lived in the house.
And he did this for seven days and sure enough
he would see the bedroom light come on.
He would see the suspect pacing.
- [Host] Meanwhile, Tom Williams sat in jail
at risk of being lynched.
- It was the fact that if a black man committed a crime
against a white woman or a white girl,
they were almost automatically found guilty
of the crime simply because of a prevailing view
that black men could be savages
and had to be controlled in order to be tolerated.
And this was one of those cases where the guilt
just fell on Tom Williams like a hammer
before anybody investigated anything.
- [Host] Fortunately for Williams, he got some help
from a newly formed organization.
It was called the NAACP.
- The Tom Williams murder investigation ended up being only
the third legal case ever handled by the NAACP.
And this was an organization that had just been
founded a year early.
It was in its infancy, didn't have much money.
And it was one of the cases
where they first sort of found their footing.
- [Host] Ultimately, Schindler's investigation
turned up the actual predator.
We'll let you read the book to find out who it was
but it wasn't Tom Williams.
- The legacy of the Tom Williams case, uh,
he basically disappeared afterwards.
He became a nobody again, but the
the case mattered because it was one less black man lynched.
- [Host] Raymond Schindler would go on to become one
of the most famous detectives of the 20th century.
- Policing and investigating can be a means
of providing a community with justice, with safety,
with, with peace
in the way that the investigative officers react
with the town.
It's about getting the police force to work
with the community and
and actually be a dispenser of justice.
And that's a very modern idea that we're
we're still grappling with the 110 years later.
How do we make that work in America today?
- [Host] Tresniowski also wanted to honor
the little girl whose death was at the center of this case.
- When I finished the book,
I went to the cemetery where Marie Smith is buried.
It's the Holy Cross cemetery in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
And I looked for her grave site again.
And this time I left the little stone on her site.
It was a little marble plaque that said
Marie is the flower, which is something
one of her relatives said about her at one point.
And it just, it was a good feeling
to sort of leave something there, to mark her existence.
And it's important, I think that we look that way
at history that these are lives that were lived
and mattered and have something to say to us today.
- This is Inside Edition digital.