Doris Lane

The man went out shopping along Third Avenue in New York. He bought a good quantity of sleeping powders, a lot of heavy brown wrapping paper, two hundred razor blades, and an extremely large supply of vanishing cream. Then he went to a luggage store and bought a large steamer trunk, the kind with compartments for a wardrobe. The trunk could be explained; the man was about to go on a European honeymoon. But two hundred razor blades and several pounds of vanishing cream? And then there was all that heavy brown wrapping paper.

Not to mention that when the man reserved passage for his honeymoon voyage on the S.S. Olympic, he bought only a single ticket.

In the spring of 1933 Agnes Tufverson bought herself a round trip ticket for her first visit to Europe. Agnes was a well off lawyer who worked for the
Electric Bond and Share Company of New York. She was 45, unmarried, and had raised and educated four younger sisters. As far as anyone who knew Agnes was aware, the had so far lived a life of no romantic experience whatever.

But when Agnes returned from her trip it was with a future husband, Ivan Ivanovitch Poderjay, who claimed to be an ex-cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. He was a handsome fellow ten years younger than she, who was seeing financing for an invention of his. Agnes was not interested in investing her life savings, about $55,000, so Poderjay left to go back to Europe. He soon returned, however, pledging his love for Agnes. He married her on December 4 at the Little Church Around the Corner. Not even Agnes’s sisters were invited to attend. Agnes explained that her new husband was jealous of anyone close to her.

Three days before the wedding, Agnes resigned from her job, saying she was leaving for a European honeymoon, after which she and her husband planned to live in England on one of his estates. Shortly after her marriage, Agnes withdrew $7,000 from the bank and gave it to Poderjay. Two weeks later, she sold all of her stocks and bonds and gave that money to Poderjay. They spent the two weeks in between in her apartment on East 22nd Street, going out only on shopping sprees.

Agnes’s friends who ran into her on the street thought she seemed radiant and happy. Her part-time maid, Flora Miller, thought otherwise. She said that Poderjay insisted on preparing strong black coffee for Agnes, who soon after would suffer violent stomach pains. Flora was worried, too, about all the shopping, which was totally out of character for her frugal employer.

An odd thing happened on December 20, the night the couple was supposed to sail on the S.S. Hamburg. Their trunks and baggage at the pier, bon voyage gifts and messages awaiting them, Agnes learned that Poderjay had not booked them passage on the ship. They quarreled violently in the cab back to her Gramercy Park apartment.

It was the day after this Poderjay went out shopping along Third Avenue. When he returned, he dismissed Flora for the night, countermanding Agnes’s instructions for the maid to return the next day. Flora said that, although Agnes was extremely upset over it, Poderjay ordered the maid not to come in the next day, but the day after.

When Flora Miller reported back to work after her unwanted day off, she found Poderjay alone in the apartment going through his wife’s papers. He ordered the maid in a menacing way to burn them. When she asked where Agnes was, he shouted at her, saying his wife had gone to Philadelphia. The maid fled the apartment in terror, stumbling against the three trunks she had packed for Agnes’s honeymoon trip, and a fourth trunk she had not seen before.

At ten o’clock that night Poderjay took the four trunks down in the freight elevator. He sent three trunks ahead to the pier, but took the fourth, a
wardrobe trunk, into the cab with him. Onboard ship, where he had booked a single passage, he had the wardrobe trunk put inside his cabin. Ship stewards reported that Poderjay was a jovial traveler, frequently inviting them for drinks in his stateroom.

In London, he rejoined another wife, Marguerite Suzanne Ferrand. Poderjay sent a cable in Agnes’s name to her sisters, telling them she was leaving
England and on her way to India. When Agnes was never heard of again, her family reported her disappearance to the Missing Persons Bureau in New York. Detectives sailed for Europe and discovered that Ferrand went about London dressed in Agnes’s clothes, but they saw no sign of Agnes.

Poderjay and Ferrand left London for Vienna, trailed by the detectives, to an apartment with a concealed sado-masochist torture chamber where Ferrand
would chain Poderjay to the floor and abuse him. The detectives found letters between the two that ridiculed Agnes and other women like her who were bilked of their fortunes by the twisted pair.

The New York police had Poderjay extradited from Vienna to stand trial. Unfortunately, there was no body and Poderjay could only be charged with bigamy. After serving five years in prison, at Sing Sing and Auburn, Poderjay was deported back to Europe.

Police speculated that Poderjay drugged Agnes with the sleeping powders, killed her, and stuffed her body into the fourth trunk. But there were no bloodstains found in the apartment. It would have been possible to throw the body overboard, they supposed, but how to fit it into the compartmentalized wardrobe trunk without dismembering it? If her body were dismembered, wrapped in the brown paper and tossed through the large portholes in his ship’s cabin, then where was the blood?

New York Daily News columnist Danton Walker came up with a possible scenario.

Butchers, he wrote, used vanishing cream on their hands and arms to come between their skin and the blood of animals. Walker proposed that Poderjay, naked, coated his entire body with vanishing cream, as well as the bathtub and pipes in Agnes’s bathroom. He butchered her in the tub, scraped her bones with the two hundred razor blades, and sent her flesh down the apartment house incinerator. Then he used the heavy brown paper to wrap her bones, tied them up, and stored them in the trunk. Then he tossed them one by one out the porthole of the S.S. Olympic.

Maybe so, but, officially, the disappearance of Agnes Tufverson remains unsolved since 1933.