The Ryan Murders

"Buffalo Courier," December 31, 1873, via Newspapers.com

On November 28, 1873, 28-year-old Nicholas Ryan and his 24-year-old sister Mary rented furnished lodgings on the fourth floor of a New York City boarding house run by Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Burke. Nicholas was a shoemaker, and his sister had a similar occupation as a "gaiter-fitter." It was a typical tenement room of the day, about sixteen feet square, simply but comfortably furnished. It cost them nine dollars a month rent. Nicholas slept in the walnut bedstead that sat in one corner of the room, while Mary took her rest on a mattress she nightly placed on the horse-hair sofa. The brother and sister were regarded as quiet, hard-working, and deeply religious. They seemed to get along excellently with each other. The pair dressed well, saved their money, and appeared a distinct cut above their seedy, crime-ridden neighborhood. They mostly kept to themselves, having few visitors other than their relatives.  Neither had any known romantic involvements.

So far as anyone could tell, the lives of the Ryans were completely uneventful until the morning of December 22. A policeman who was passing their tenement around three a.m. heard a window raised with a loud crash. Looking up at the source of the sudden noise, he saw a man leaning out from a window on the fourth floor, shouting "Murder! Police!"

The policeman immediately yelled for backup and ran into the house, followed swiftly by several other officers. They were confronted by blood pouring down the stairs. When they reached the landing of the second story, they discovered the body of Nicholas Ryan, wearing nothing but his nightshirt. His throat had been savagely cut. A deeply agitated Patrick Burke met the officers on the stairway with the news that another body could be found in one of the rooms. He led them to the lodgings of the Ryans, where Mary lay on her makeshift bed, her neck slashed as deeply and fatally as her brother's. It appeared that she had been strangled into insensibility before her throat was cut.

Blood permeated the tenement--all over the stairs and walls of all the floors, out on the landing of their room, and, of course, their room itself. It was assumed that the killer had entered the Ryan room using a false key. He then murdered Mary in her bed. Nicholas leaped out of bed to confront the intruder, and they had a savage fight in the landing outside the room, which ended in young Ryan's death. Someone had somehow managed to commit a particularly violent and gruesome double murder in this building of nearly a hundred residents and depart like a malevolent ghost.

Patrick Burke told police that at about 2:30 a.m., he was awakened by strange sounds. He went into the hall, but he saw nothing in the darkness. A moment later, he heard another noise that he likened to "the wheezing of a cat." As he was getting dressed, his eleven-year-old daughter Jennie called to him, "Come here, father; there is something the matter on the landing." He got a lamp and reemerged into the hallway, where he was now able to see streams of blood on the floor and walls. He saw that the door of the Ryan's room, which adjoined the Burke family's lodgings, was open. When he went to investigate, he discovered Mary Ryan's blood-soaked corpse, after which he went to the window and gave the alarm which had summoned police.

A few hours after the bodies were discovered, Jennie Burke found Nicholas' vest on the roof of the building, with the pockets rifled of their contents. (Oddly, the police had previously searched the roof without seeing this vest.) Bloody footprints, which were also noticeable on the roof, indicated the route the murderer had taken after committing the crime. However there was no trace of the murder weapon, or any clue where the killer had gone.

Investigators were baffled by the crime. The motive was never determined. The initial theory was that the pair were victims of a burglar, but that remained nothing more than conjecture. Nicholas' silver watch was believed to be missing from the room, but that seemed hardly worth burglary, let alone murder. It was generally believed that the killer had taken it in order to simulate a robbery. (Mary's gold watch and pencil and a small amount of cash remained in the room.) Patrick Ryan, an older brother of the victims, described his siblings as clean-living, peaceable sorts without any enemies, and no evidence could be found to disprove this statement. A theory was entertained by some police investigators that in a fit of sudden madness, Nicholas had murdered his sister, after which he fled out to the landing to cut his own throat.  However, no solid evidence could be found to support this comfortably tidy explanation. Everyone who knew the siblings described their relationship as affectionate and devoted. It seemed unlikely for the right-handed Nicholas to inflict his own wound, which was largely on the right side of his throat. Besides, if this was a murder-suicide, how to explain the absence of the weapon and the vest on the roof?

Mrs. Burke did tell police one curious little story about her deceased tenants. Several days before the murders, the Ryans, uncharacteristically, had a heated quarrel. Nicholas afterward told Mrs. Burke "that he and his sister could not live together, and that he would have to break up housekeeping, as he had been obliged to do once before." He declared that "he would not be governed by a woman, and that his sister wanted to rule him." Mrs. Burke described his demeanor as "very nervous," and that he "was trembling from head to foot when he was talking to her." The following day, Mary told her that Nicholas had been upset with her for "buying a new teapot, which proved to be too small." A tempest over a teapot, one might say. Mary's explanation smacks of a ludicrous cover story, but the true cause of the fight between the siblings--and whether or not it was somehow connected to their deaths--remained a mystery. (As an aside, there were numerous hints in the contemporary newspapers that while the Burkes probably had nothing to do with the murders, they knew more than they were willing to say.)

As far as the police could tell, the last day the Ryans spent alive was utterly ordinary. Earlier in the evening, Patrick Ryan and another sister, Johanna, had tea with Nicholas and Mary in their room. All were in excellent spirits, laughing and joking. Afterward, the little party all left the house. Nicholas then parted from the company. No one knows where he went or what he did before returning to his lodgings. Mary accompanied her sister to Johanna's house. At about nine p.m. Mary left to return home.

When the bodies of the Ryans were autopsied, everyone, including their relatives, received a severe shock: Mary had been pregnant when she died. It is generally assumed that her child's father was also her killer--perhaps out of desperation to keep his guilty secret safe--but no one had any idea who this man might have been.  Or--on an even more lurid note--did Mary's pregnancy have anything to do with what some investigators believed was an "unnatural" relationship between the siblings?

We simply do not know.