A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [28]
Because Maria worked in the men’s department at Flint & Kent, Grover Cleveland may have first encountered her when she waited on him from behind the counter. Perhaps Emma Folsom, trying to make a match, spoke to him of this eye-catching young widow who spoke fluent French. Grover Cleveland was attracted to the tall and slender saleswoman, and Maria said of him, “He sought my acquaintance and obtained an introduction to me from a person in whom I had every confidence, and he paid me very marked attention.”
Maria never divulged the identity of the person who made that formal introduction, but she said that Cleveland was “persistent” in his desire to meet her, which was not in his nature. As a widow and congregant of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Maria made the necessary inquiries and determined that her suitor’s character “so far as I then knew, was good, and his intensions I believed were as pure and honorable.”
Grover Cleveland had one more onerous duty to perform before his term of office as sheriff was over, and that was the public execution of yet another prisoner.
Jack Gaffney was a hard case. He had coal-black hair and a mustache, very pale skin, and blue eyes. He stood five foot eight and had a well-built and slender physique. Gaffney grew up in the slums of Buffalo and ran with the Break-o’-day Johnnies, a notorious Irish street gang. His criminal record was shocking for its depth of wickedness. For no apparent reason, he had shot a woman in the hip as she sat at her window. He shot a minstrel singer on the street without the slightest provocation. He bashed in the skull of a saloonkeeper with a stone. He grabbed a silk hat off a stranger’s head on Canal Street, for which crime at least the law came down on Gaffney; he was fined $10. As his first wife lay on her deathbed, she told him she was glad to be dying just to be rid of him.
Justice finally caught up with Gaffney when he turned twenty-seven. It was four in the morning, and he was playing draw cards at Sweeney’s saloon, a dive on Canal Street near the waterfront, in the heart of the “vilest of the vile sections of the city.” He was in a foul mood, down $8, all the money he had, when he pulled out a pistol and shot a sailor named Patrick Fahey in the head. No one mourned for Fahey, who, it was said, was a “loafer, vagrant, thief” and apparently preferred to earn a living in any manner other than honest labor. In any event, Gaffney, while sticking to his story that he had had nothing to do with the murder, said of Fahey: “Dead or alive, he’s a son of a bitch.” The appeals judge really let Gaffney have it when the sentencing was affirmed.
“John Gaffney, stand up. There is blood on your hands, and there is blood upon your soul, and we do pray you go to the only source by which you can be purged.” His hanging was set for September 27, 1872.
Gaffney pulled every trick in the swindler’s handbook to delay his day of reckoning. Then, during a jailhouse visit, his brother-in-law said, “Why, Gaffney, you look as if you was crazy, and I believe you are crazy.” It gave Gaffney an idea. He went to sleep, and when he woke up, he complained about hearing “bees in my head.” That morning and for days thereafter, his ravings and profanities startled even the hardened deputies working at the Erie County Jail. No one believed for a minute that Gaffney was really insane, but Sheriff Cleveland, in concurrence with the county judge, appointed a twelve-man jury of inquiry to determine whether he should be certified a lunatic—grounds for a reprieve in New York State. Under Cleveland’s name, a telegram was sent to the governor, John Dix, requesting a stay of execution until the issue of Gaffney’s sanity could be determined. Clearly, Cleveland was doing what he could to sabotage the execution. The sour experience of springing