Part 1Cold Open - Seven
Monday night. The fourth of June, 1945. New York City. Park Avenue, at Forty-Seventh Street. The Hotel Marguery. It isn't really one building. It's six of them, twelve stories high, built around a garden in the middle of the block. The people who live here don't visit. They live here, in suites, with maids. By the elevator man's own account, it's about twenty minutes to eight. The war in Europe has been over for less than a month.
In one of the elevators, the operator is a man in his seventies. His name is James Delamater. He's sliding the door open, the way he always does, letting it roll on its own, he'd say later, when two men step into the car. Fast. He's never seen either one of them before. One of them says one word. "Seven."
Before he can get the door shut, a woman steps in too. Well dressed. About thirty. He lets her off at the third floor. A tenant, he figures. It's that kind of hotel. People come and go. At seven, the two men get out. They walk straight ahead. His bell rings, and as the door slides shut, he sees them make a right turn. Soft dark hats, both of them. One a little taller, maybe five-foot-seven. The other one shorter, and stout. Dark suits. Dark shoes.
Remember those hats. Upstairs, on the seventh floor, in apartment 705, a woman is lying in bed. She's red-haired, and she's rich, and tonight she isn't feeling well. Her husband is sitting at the foot of the bed, reading the paper. He's sixty-three. Tall, and gray-haired. He's been married to her for not quite three years. Their dog, a little black Pekingese, starts to growl. It's growling at a door. Not the front door. The apartment was made out of a run of old hotel rooms, and it has four doors, and they only ever use one of them. The dog is at one of the others. She asks him to go and see what's bothering the dog. He gets up. She hears him open the door, and the low sound of men talking. Then he's back in the bedroom.
There are two men out there, he tells her. Strangers. They want to see her. In her words, as the police gave them to the papers two days later: "They wanted to talk to me 'about Raphael Diaz,' they said." She doesn't know them. She doesn't want to see them. She tells him to send them away. He goes back out to the foyer.
"Then I heard a thud," she said, "and a groan." Rafaelo Diaz was a tenor. He'd sung at the Metropolitan Opera. She'd helped pay for his career. And Rafaelo Diaz had been dead for a year and a half.
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome to Forgotten True Crime, the true crime podcast where we tell the stories of crimes that happened long ago. If you're a true crime fan, make sure you subscribe, so when we have new episodes you'll be the first to know. Check us out on our YouTube and Facebook pages, "Forgotten True Crime," and visit our blog, Section29.com, where we post the cool things we found for each episode. This one, The Murder at the Marguery, has some great stuff for you to look at: the newspaper pages from 1945 all the way to 1950, the photographs, and a floor plan of the apartment that a newspaper artist drew. The links are in the description below. Parts of this story may contain opinions and speculation, and should be taken as such. I'm going to tell it the way I've come to understand it, built from the newspapers of the time and the public records that survive. Where I'm reading between the lines, I'll tell you. These stories depict violent crimes and may be a trigger for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised.
So. That was a Monday night in June of 1945, about a month after the war in Europe ended. A man got up to see why the dog was growling, and he died on the floor of his own foyer. His name was Albert Edward Langford. He was sixty-three. The papers called him a wealthy textile man. And then, almost right away, they lost interest in him. One of the papers admitted it six weeks later, in so many words: "Langford himself was lost sight of in the beginning of the investigation, which centered around his wife and her gallery of friends." Her gallery of friends. Oh, she had a gallery. In the hour or so to come, we're going to meet an opera tenor who'd been dead for a year and a half. A silent movie star the papers said she'd once been engaged to. A woman whose face was the most famous in America back in 1906. A singer who sang under a borrowed name. A man who called himself a Cherokee chief, and a woman who called herself a baroness. A producer who left early with a leg of lamb. A little dog the newspapers couldn't agree how to name. And a little book with more than two hundred names in it, and an amount of money written beside every one. Every one of them is real. Every one of them was questioned. And here's what I'm not going to tell you. Not yet. I'm not going to tell you how old his wife really was, even though she told the papers herself. I'm not going to tell you what time the elevator man said those two men went up, or why that mattered so much. I'm not going to tell you what happened when the police found the woman who rode to the third floor. I'm not going to tell you what was in the little parcel Albert carried home at six o'clock that evening. Nobody knows that one. And I'm not going to tell you the name a district attorney finally said out loud in a courtroom, five years later. Or where that man had been, almost from the start. Because those are the story. Now, I'll tell you this much up front. As of October 2026, as far as the record shows, no one has ever been charged with the murder of Albert Langford. The two men who came to that door were never identified. So this isn't a story with a courtroom at the end of it. It's a story about everything a city looked at instead. And it's a story about Albert. Because if the papers lost sight of him, we're not going to. This is the Murder at the Marguery: The Albert E. Langford Murder. Let's start where he did. In Brooklyn.
Part 3Mr. Millionbucks
Albert Edward Langford was born in Brooklyn on the fourth of November, 1881. We know the date because, sixty years later, he gave it to a draft board, and signed his name under it. Hold on to that card. We'll come back to it. The first time we can really see him is in the summer of 1900. The census taker came to the Langford house in Brooklyn on the first day of June. The head of the house was a woman. Clara Langford, fifty-three, a widow. She'd had seven children. Six were still living, and all six were living under her roof, with a live-in servant.
Frederick, the oldest boy, was a grocer's clerk. Howard, sixteen, was still in school. And Albert, eighteen, had a job the census taker wrote down in two words: "Broker. Sugar." Remember Howard. He'll be there at the very end. Ten years later, in 1910, the family was still together, still in Brooklyn, and Clara was living on her own income. Fred was a manager now. Albert was twenty-seven, still single, and working as a bookkeeper. The census taker wrote down where: a cotton house. Cotton. Textiles. That's the trade Albert Langford would be in, one way or another, for the rest of his life.
In June of 1913, in Philadelphia, he got married. The register of the Fourth Presbyterian Church has them on one line. Albert E. Langford, New York City. Bernice E. Glanding, Philadelphia. The nineteenth of June. Seven years later, the census found them in Manhattan. Albert was thirty-eight, a sales manager for a manufacturer. Bernice was twenty-seven. She'd been born in Pennsylvania. And that is nearly everything the record will tell us about Bernice. When Albert was murdered, a New York paper wrote that his first wife had died years before, and then it added one more sentence: "Nothing is known of the late Mrs. Langford." Well. Now we know her name. There's one other person who remembered them together. The woman Albert would marry next said she'd first met him in the late 1920s, when both of them were married to other people. "He was happily married," she said, "and I was happily married." She said he and his wife had traveled all over Europe, and to Cuba. She said that twenty-five years before, he'd been the best-dressed man in New York. Take that for what it's worth. She said a lot of things to the papers in June of 1945, and we'll get to most of them.
By 1940, Bernice was gone. That April, the census found Albert in Pelham Manor, in Westchester County, just north of the city. Not in a home of his own. He was living in another man's house, the house of a neckwear company vice-president named Paul Strohmenger. Both men were widowers. Albert was fifty-nine. Under occupation, the census taker wrote "salesman." Under industry, "textiles." His brother Howard lived in Pelham too. One of the papers would later call Howard the wealthy one. He represented one of the big Southern cotton mills.
And then, two years after that, in the spring of 1942, comes the draft card. The United States was at war, and this time every man in the country up to sixty-four had to register, even the ones far too old to be called. So Albert Edward Langford, sixty years old, filled out his card. Born in Brooklyn, November the fourth, 1881. The person who'll always know where he is: his brother, H. M. Langford, in Pelham. His address: the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York City. And on the line that asks for the name of his employer, one word. "Unemployed."
He was sixty years old, he was living in a hotel, and he was out of work. Four months later, he married a utility heiress who lived on Park Avenue. And three years after that, when he walked through the lobby of the Hotel Marguery every evening at six, the staff had a name for him. "There goes Mr. Millionbucks." He looked the part. That's how the paper put it. "He looked the part."
Part 4Lady Bountiful
Now, the woman he married. Eugenie Marion Mayer was born in Buffalo, New York, in the spring of 1875. Keep that year in mind. She didn't. Her father was Joseph Bell Mayer. The wire services called him a retired judge and a utilities magnate. One New York paper said he owned "a small empire in traction companies and oil properties." Streetcars, in other words. And oil. Early in the century, the Mayers left Buffalo for Manhattan. When her mother died, in 1919, the family was living in a hotel, the Buckingham. Her early life is a fog, and some of the fog may be her own. In the summer of 1945, an eighty-year-old philanthropist named Gustave Veit told a reporter he'd had what he called a "romance" with her, fifty years before. "I went around with her when she was about 21," he said. Asked whether they had ever married, he wouldn't say. Then there's the Social Register, the little black book of New York society. The 1918 edition lists her as the wife of Robert H. Grimes. And in parentheses after her name, it gives two earlier ones. One is Mayer. The other is Wirsing. At some point, then, she had been Mrs. Wirsing. Who he was, nobody in 1945 could say. Neither can we. Robert Grimes was a lawyer. According to the paper, he first met her while he was doing legal work for her father's companies. They had money, and they spent it with some style. Part of every year in the South of France. He collected art. The Social Register dropped the Grimeses in 1919. Her father stayed in the book. She never appeared in it again. At some point the two of them moved into the Hotel Marguery, on Park Avenue at Forty-Seventh Street. First on a year's lease. Then on a ten-year lease. Seventh floor. Apartment 705.
By the 1930s, a good deal of her money was going to singers. One singer who told the story was named Reed Lawton, and we'll hear a good deal more from him. In 1934, by his account, he was the singing master of ceremonies at the Club Tokay, on Fifty-Second Street. One evening a singer there named Dolores Cassinelli, a former film actress, brought in a party. Mrs. Grimes. Her father. A tenor named Rafaelo Diaz.
"Mrs. Grimes told me she thought I had an excellent voice and deserved to sing in a better place." Soon after, he said, he was singing in the Rainbow Room. Then the Central Park Casino. The Maison Russe. She told it almost the same way, except that in her version, it was her father who'd wanted to meet him. "Daddy," she said. "My father." Two weeks later, she said, he was in the Rainbow Room.
Rafaelo Diaz had sung at the Metropolitan Opera for eighteen years. The Sunday News called him a Texan of Mexican ancestry. In those years he was putting on a series of concerts at the Waldorf. The three of them went into business together, a concert bureau with offices in Steinway Hall. It was called the EMG Associates. The initials were hers. Eugenie Marion Grimes. And this is the man whose name two strangers would give at her door, a year and a half after he died.
Robert Grimes died in Cannes. She wasn't with him. When he died depends on whom you ask. The Sunday News said 1936. She told the police 1938. She lived on an allowance from her father. How large depends on which paper you read: three thousand dollars a month, or as much as seventy-five thousand a year. Rich, unattached, footloose. That's how the Sunday News described the Widow Grimes, and it went on: she "took up the kind of life that often is led by such women."
Night clubs, usually with younger escorts. Cards. And music, "in the persons of promising singers." That's how New York's papers talked about her, and it's worth hearing it for exactly what it is. To her friends, she was just "Grimes." Lawton said that was what he always called her, and she kept it, even after she married again. A Chicago paper had a kinder name for her, or at least a grander one. To the singers and musicians whose careers she'd helped, it said, she was known as a "Lady Bountiful."
In 1941, a publisher named James McKinley Bryant brought out a cafe society bluebook, a who's who of the night-club set. It caused something of a stir, for who was in it and who wasn't. She wasn't. "She came in one night with several men," Bryant said. "My name should have been in your book," she told him. "You know I am cafe society." He apologized, he said, and promised to put her in the next one.
The next summer, at a party, Albert Langford walked back into her life.
Part 5Now's Your Chance
So. The summer of 1942. On one side of town, a man of sixty, living in a hotel on lower Fifth Avenue, who had told his draft board he had no employer at all. On the other, a widow on Park Avenue, with her father's money and a suite at the Marguery. That summer, somebody brought them together. And that's where the agreement ends. Here's what everyone agrees on. There was a party in an apartment on West Seventy-Third Street. It was the home of Mrs. Gloria Noble, the widow of a painter. Mrs. Grimes was there. Albert Langford was there. And more than one account says she didn't arrive alone. She came with Rafaelo Diaz. What nobody agrees on is why Albert Langford was there.
The first version comes from Reed Lawton, the singer Mrs. Grimes had launched. Lawton said the whole thing was arranged. By an Austrian baroness, as he put it, with the help of a self-styled Indian chief. Two adventurers, he said, living on the fringes of society, who set out to marry Albert Langford to a rich woman. For a fee. Twenty-five thousand dollars, payable after the wedding. About a month after the wedding, Lawton said, the baroness turned up at his office, furious. Langford hadn't paid. "I paid all of Langford's bills during that period!" she told him. "I even bought the sport suit and shoes he wore the night he met her." Lawton said he took the story to Mrs. Langford. She laughed, he said, and called it an attempt to shake her down.
The second version comes from the chief himself. Robert Redwing, who called himself a Cherokee chief, told his story to the Daily News a week after the murder. The baroness, he said, was a woman named Beatrice Coleman, who went by Baroness, or sometimes Countess. In Redwing's telling, Coleman had been keeping Albert Langford for years. His clothes, his spending money. But her own income was falling off. So she wanted Bert, as they called him, to find a rich wife. Redwing said he knew the Wolcotts, and Mrs. Wolcott, the former Mrs. Noble, was a dear friend of Mrs. Grimes. He asked if he could bring two guests to her party. She said yes. She didn't know why. And then, Redwing said, something surprised them. When Mrs. Grimes walked in, Bert hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. He'd known her for years. Afterward, back at her own apartment, Coleman turned to him and said, "Now's your chance to get in with some real money." Redwing said he had his own interest. Mrs. Grimes owned some oil leases in Texas, and Bert promised that if he married her, Redwing would get one. But a fee? Twenty-five thousand dollars? Redwing said no. Nobody ever mentioned a sum. Coleman only expected Bert to help her out. And later, when he told her how the courtship was going, Coleman said something that puzzled him. "He's a fool if he marries her."
And the third version is hers. There was no baroness and no chief in it. She said she'd known Albert Langford for eighteen years, since they were both married to other people. After both of them were widowed, they ran into each other again, and, in her words, "decided we were meant for each other." Her lawyer, Carl Rood, said the same thing. No adventurers.
Asked by the district attorney why she married him, she said: "He was a friend of my late husband, a very nice man and easy to get along with. I wanted companionship." And the hostess? Mrs. Noble told the paper she'd had the impression the two of them were renewing an old acquaintance. "I had no idea that any plot had been hatched to bring the two together," she said. "Not then. Long afterward, I did hear considerable gossip."
So there are three versions. A paid match. An unpaid one. And two old friends. We're not going to pick one for you. But notice that even the chief's version has him kissing her cheek like someone he already knew. There was one person who didn't want the marriage at all. Her father. She told the police what he'd said to her: "Don't be silly! If anybody wanted to marry you at your age, it would be only for your money not for love." She married Albert Langford anyway. The city of New York recorded it on the twenty-sixth of August, 1942. Certificate number one-seven-three-one-eight. One of the papers later said September, in Scarsdale. The record says August. She never told her father. He lived in the same hotel, five floors above her. By her own account to the police, he never knew he had a son-in-law. She had a room added to her suite, for his bed.
About a year before he died, he found work again, with a firm of factory representatives called Conlin and Smith, in a small, discreet-looking building on East Thirty-Fourth Street. The police later said he was comfortable, earning ten to twenty thousand a year as a sales manager. The Sunday News said nobody believed he'd made any great sums. They lived, the paper said, very quietly, but well. And for not quite three years, the man from the Fifth Avenue Hotel lived on Park Avenue.
Part 6Monday Night
Let's go back to that Monday. Slowly, this time. The Langfords' suite was on the seventh floor. Six rooms, by most accounts. The rent, one paper said, was three hundred and seventy-seven dollars and fifty cents a month. It had been made out of a run of old hotel rooms, so it had four doors onto the hotel corridor. The Langfords only ever used one of them, the door into the living room. That afternoon, she had company. Her closest friend, Mrs. Vilma Kempton, known around the night clubs as Lady Kempton, until the murder made her drop the title. They played gin rummy. Mrs. Kempton lost sixteen dollars, and paid up. Her fiancé, a theatrical producer named Frank Teller, came by too. At about six o'clock, Albert came home. And he was carrying something. The Sunday News described it in one line, and never explained it: "a small, loosely-wrapped parcel, which contained none knows what." Nobody ever said what was in it. Hold on to that parcel. There was some talk of the four of them having dinner together. But Mrs. Kempton had a leg of lamb, enough for two, and she wanted to cook it. So she and Teller left, for her apartment. A wire reporter wrote it up that week as a leg of lamb and a hungry show producer that "may have cleared the stage" for a murder. It was about two and a half hours before the shooting. After that, it was just the two of them. And the dog.
They talked about going downstairs to eat. But she wasn't feeling well. She had asthma, and arthritis. She went to bed. He sat on the foot of the bed with the evening paper. That's how the Sunday News told it, from what the police had been told. Downstairs, at some point that evening, two men had come up in the elevator. We'll come back to when.
At about twenty minutes to nine, the dog went to one of the doors nobody used, the one that opened off the corridor into a short passage. The papers mostly called the dog Winnie. Winnie was sniffing at that door. She asked him to go and see what was bothering the dog. He put down the paper and went. She heard the door open, and the rumble of men talking. He came back. Two men, he said. They wanted to see her about Rafaelo Diaz. She wasn't well enough to talk to strangers, she said, and she couldn't imagine what they'd want. Send them away. He went back out.
And here, the accounts come apart. On the night of the murder, she told the police she heard the loud voices of three men, in what sounded like a heated argument. Then a scuffle. Then a shot, and a body falling. Then silence. Two days later, the version the police gave the wire services had no argument in it, and no shot. "Then I heard a thud, and a groan." From then on, she insisted she had never heard a shot. She was lying on a bed, the police said, about thirty feet away. In the version the Sunday News pieced together, she heard more talk, louder, and then a thud. The dog barked. She got up, put on a dressing gown, and went to see. And in a statement she gave out four days after the murder, he wasn't at the foot of the bed with the paper at all. "He was sitting on the chair talking to me," she said, "and I was lying on the bed reading." None of these is a lie we can prove. Any of them could be fear, or shock, or a reporter's shorthand. But they don't match.
Later, she said this: "Had I been dressed I would have gone to that door, and I believe they would have killed us both." She found him lying in the hallway of the apartment. She picked up the phone and called the hotel switchboard. And the operator would later report what she said. "Two men are beating my husband!" Beating. As if she'd seen them. The woman who never heard a shot. The operator turned to the desk clerk, George Castine, and then called the manager, Theodore Radcliffe, in his apartment. Just then the night manager, Gregory St. John, walked into the lobby, and the operator told him there was trouble on the seventh floor. St. John took the elevator up. He found Albert Langford bleeding, still alive, unconscious. He told the operator to get a doctor. Then he gathered up some small scatter rugs, and made a pillow for him. The family doctor, Shirley Sprague, came from West Fifty-Sixth Street. When he got there, ten minutes later, Albert Langford was dead. She'd telephoned Mrs. Kempton, too. Mrs. Kempton and Teller came rushing back from their leg of lamb, and to get to her friend, she had to get past the body in the foyer.
He'd been shot once, in the face. A thirty-eight. A second gun, a thirty-two, had been fired too, and missed. The bullets and the empty shells were all the two men left behind. The guns were never found. He was sixty-three years old. The hotel staff's Mr. Millionbucks. In an apartment full of her money, he was the one who went to the door. As for the two men in the soft dark hats, nobody remembered taking them back down in the elevator. Nobody saw them leave.
Part 7Murder on Park Avenue
By Tuesday morning, New York had the story. The Daily News put it on the front page under three words. "Murder on Park Avenue." And look at the photograph they chose. Not the man who'd been killed. His wife, at a restaurant table, beside a silent-film star named Carlyle Blackwell. The caption said she'd once been engaged to him. That's the story in one picture. From the first morning, the case was about her.
Thirty-five plainclothesmen were put on it. They searched the hotel and questioned the staff. By Wednesday they'd talked to more than seventy people, and the captain in charge said he had no suspects, and "no theory as to the motive." The gun wasn't found. Even the most basic question came out three ways in a single day. The Daily News said the elevator operator remembered carrying nobody to the seventh floor at that hour. The Associated Press said two men had been taken up in the elevator. And the United Press had the operator's name, James De La Mater, and said he'd taken two strange men up about twenty minutes before the shooting, couldn't describe them, and couldn't say who'd taken them down. Nobody could. The police decided they'd left by the back stairs. Same morning, one of the wire services had Mrs. Langford in her bedroom changing her clothes when the men came. Not in bed at all.
Then detectives remembered something. Four or five years earlier, Mrs. Langford, then Mrs. Grimes, had complained to the police that people she'd helped with money were pestering her for more. At least twice, she'd actually called the police on men who were demanding money. Among the friends they rounded up that first day was a woman they found in a tavern near Carnegie Hall. Detectives said she'd been with Mrs. Langford on one of those two occasions. She came down to headquarters in a brown fur jacket over a blue dress, and a maroon turban, leading a cocker spaniel on a leash. She was fifty-nine, by the wire's count. Her name was Evelyn Nesbit.
Thirty-nine years earlier, she'd been the most talked-about woman in America, the girl at the center of the 1906 murder of the architect Stanford White by her husband, Harry Thaw. Now she was a witness, and nothing more. She was never a suspect. But for a day, she was the headline. The Chicago Tribune ran it on page one: "Evelyn Nesbit, Actor Quizzed in N.Y. Slaying." Farther down, it named the dead man. It called him Alfred.
The actor in that headline was Blackwell. The first screen Bulldog Drummond, a matinee idol of the silent days. The AP called Mrs. Langford his "one-time fiancee," and a photo caption dated the engagement to 1937. Blackwell said he hadn't seen her in years. The police looked at everyone in her orbit. One Sunday paper even reported that detectives were dissatisfied with some elements of her own story. One reason was a woman across the hall. Mrs. W. Brinkerhoff, a guest in apartment 716, right opposite the Langfords' 705, about fifteen feet from their door. She'd heard the shots. Two little sounds, she said, like "pop." No louder, she said, than "a knocker striking a door." The police took that to mean silencers. And it left them more puzzled than ever. The woman fifteen feet away heard two shots. The wife in the bedroom heard none.
And then there was the name. Rafaelo Diaz had sung at the Metropolitan Opera for eighteen years, until 1936. He was best known for one role, in The Golden Cockerel. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in December 1943. When two strangers said his name at her door, he'd been dead for eighteen months. So why his name? The detectives had two guesses. One was that the men had come expecting to find her alone, with a story ready for her, and when her husband opened the door instead, they used the story anyway. The other was that the men were Diaz's own hangers-on, young men who'd run his errands and sold his tickets, broke since he died, and going around to his old patronesses for money.
Nobody was ever named. That was the first week. A front-page photograph of his wife with a movie star. A famous witness from 1906. A dead tenor. A neighbour who heard what the widow didn't. And somewhere under all of it, a man from Brooklyn whose name one of the biggest papers in the country couldn't get right.
Part 8The Gift Book
The detectives went through the apartment. And what they found wasn't a clue to who killed Albert Langford. It was a record of everyone his wife had ever given money to. First there was a telephone book, with thirty or forty names in it. Then an address book. And then the one the papers fell in love with. The gift book. About eight inches long, the Daily News said, full of names and dollar amounts, and almost never a word about what the money was for. The gift book alone had more than two hundred names. One of them, a handsome young singer, had received eighteen thousand dollars. The district attorney's office guessed the total might come to nearly two hundred thousand. The next day, they found a fourth book, and the count of people who'd taken money from her went to five hundred. The Associated Press, a few days after that, counted a hundred and fifty.
Nobody ever settled it. Organizations were mostly down for small sums. The big numbers sat next to the names of people. One of them, the wire services said, was a well-known cafe society playboy who'd drawn about as much as Reed Lawton did. His name was never printed.
Which brings us to Lawton, the singer she'd launched back in 1934. How much did he get? Here's every answer the papers printed, in the order they printed them. Fifteen thousand, and fifteen hundred, written next to his name in the address book. Thirty thousand, over four years. Fifty thousand, on the books. More than a hundred thousand, over ten years, by her own account. And then, a day later, from her again: a hundred and twenty thousand. Lawton said they were loans, and that he'd "repaid practically all of this." She said he'd never paid back a cent except two checks, a thousand dollars each. Police also went looking for her former chauffeur. He'd worked for her for years, and they'd heard he used to run errands for her, delivering money to her protégés.
Then there was the rumor about the machine. Some of the hotel staff believed she kept a recording device in the apartment, and used it to take down the money requests from her protégés, in case anyone ever tried to extort her. If the records existed, they'd be priceless evidence. But when the police searched the apartment that Monday night, they found no machine. There were cards, too. It was reported that she'd gambled heavily at a number of clubs, sometimes losing as much as fifteen hundred dollars a week. And when police raids closed most of the clubs, she started holding small games in her own apartment. Mrs. Kempton, her rummy partner that last afternoon, put it kindly. "Marion was an average player. She'd win one night; I'd win the next."
And then the jewelry. In a drawer of her bedroom dresser, on the night her husband was shot, were diamond bracelets, rings, and pearl necklaces worth more than a hundred thousand dollars. They were still there the next day. Nobody had taken them. Her lawyer, Carl Rood, said he'd warned her again and again to put them in a vault. She wouldn't. Mrs. Kempton said she never wore the real pieces in public; she wore costume jewelry instead. But another wire story said she frequently wore a twenty-three-thousand-dollar bracelet of diamonds and emeralds.
Rood had his own theory, and he said it out loud that first week. "My theory is that Bert was killed by amateur crooks who in some way got knowledge of the jewelry and of the layout of the apartment." Somebody who knew. Hold on to that.
So the police went down the list. The protégés, the card players, the night-club owners, the people in the books. One night that week they picked up a Broadway promoter named Joseph Rosenzweig, who went by Mickey Owens. The paper called him an acquaintance of Mrs. Langford's, and the police said he had a record, a bad check. He'd been trying to raise money to buy a night club. They questioned him, and that was that, for now. When detectives pressed her on why she'd handed out so much money to so many singers and musicians, she had an answer. "Why not? It was my own money, to do with as I desired. Are you going to question how I should spend my money and who I am to give it to?"
Five hundred names, or two hundred, or a hundred and fifty. Thousands of dollars beside them. Every dollar of it hers. The man who'd opened the door left an estate that his own lawyer described as very little.
Part 9Oh, Good God, No
On Thursday afternoon, three days after the murder, Marion Langford left the apartment for the first time. It was five minutes to three. She was wrapped in long silver fox furs, a black dress and a black hat, with two detectives beside her. She went out through the hotel restaurant, onto Forty-Seventh Street, where the reporters were waiting. One asked if she was going to see her father. "No," she said, "I'm going to visit a doctor." Another asked if she'd be going to her husband's funeral. "Oh, good God, no." She went to see her father, in another part of the hotel, for about ten minutes. When she came out, by the elevator, with her furs pulled up around her face, she said, "I'm getting faint." A waiter and one of the reporters got her to the hallway until she came round. Her father was ninety-six. Nobody had told him his son-in-law had been murdered. By her own account to the police, he'd never known he had a son-in-law at all.
That evening, Reed Lawton flew in from Chicago, where he'd been managing a touring operetta, and walked into the district attorney's office on his own. An hour and a half later, she was called in too. Whether the two of them saw each other there, the paper said, "couldn't be learned." They were both still being questioned in the early hours of the morning.
Lawton came with an alibi. On Monday night, he said, he'd been on the road, driving from Springfield, Massachusetts, to Chicago. He had the telegram he'd sent at 4:59 that afternoon from Kendallville, Indiana, and he'd spent the night at his brother's place in Milford, Indiana. The Daily News called it "seemingly iron-clad." He gave the papers the story you've already heard, the baroness, the chief, the twenty-five thousand dollars. And he told the district attorney something more. The chief, he said, had been furious when Langford wouldn't pay, and had sworn he'd get him, "if it's the last thing I do!" When the paper printed the threat, it left a blank where one of the words should have been. That's the only threat against Albert Langford anywhere in the record. And it's Lawton's word for what someone else said. He also said that when he'd once asked her what became of the baroness, she'd answered, "I got her deported." That's his word, too. Nothing anywhere confirms it. About her, he was warm. "I loved Grimes," he said, "as anyone would love a friend who extended many kindnesses. There was never anything improper in our relationship. My wife knew of it all along and approved." His wife. That was the problem. For years, he admitted, he'd never told his patroness he was married. Once she asked him straight out. "Maybe I am," he said he told her, "but it's my own affair." Then someone sent her an anonymous letter about his family, and he had to tell her the truth.
On Friday afternoon, there was a funeral at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Church, on Madison Avenue at Eighty-First Street. Close friends and family only. The casket was wooden, with a silver finish, and closed. A few flowers. She'd been described as too ill and too nervous to go. She went. She came with Albert's brother, Howard. His two sisters were there, and Carl Rood and his wife, and a few friends. A minister from Brooklyn read the service. One paper said it lasted five minutes. Then the casket was carried out, and the party drove to Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx.
That evening, back at the Marguery, she gave the Daily News an interview. Howard was there. She announced a reward, ten thousand dollars, for whoever solved the murder. Howard told her to talk to her lawyer first. "No," she said. "I want to do it my way. It's my money." When a friend phoned the papers about it, she grabbed the receiver herself. "I am offering ten thousand dollars reward to find the murderer of my darling husband. I buried my husband today. Please advertise that." She was furious about the papers printing her age as past seventy. "I was born May 27, 1890," she said. "I had a birthday two weeks ago. I am 55. Do I look any older?" She was seventy. Born in the spring of 1875. And she had things to say about Reed Lawton. "He represented his wife, Louise Netto, as his sister. He represented his daughter, Celia, as his niece. His real name is Antonio Netto. He's 44, not 30 or so, as some of the papers have said." She called him a snake in the grass, and said she'd given orders that if he ever called, she was not at home. She'd typed up a statement, too. "I never saw a recording machine or a dictaphone," it said. "I never went to bed later than twelve o'clock and never had a poker game in my home. I am not wealthy, live simply on a simple income." And then she broke down. "All my life I've done this, been kind to other people, and now look what it's brought me to. A police record." A policeman on guard in the apartment told her she didn't have a police record. Being questioned in a murder case doesn't give you one.
That afternoon, Albert Langford had been taken to Woodlawn, to a family plot owned by his wife's father. A man who, by her account, never knew Albert existed.
Part 10The Chief and the Baroness
On the eleventh of June, the Daily News found the chief in Washington and brought him back to New York. The paper photographed him standing in a doorway in a long, light topcoat and a light hat. His name was Robert Redwing. And he had a story about himself. He was forty-two, he said, a Cherokee, born in Tulsa. He'd gone to the Carlisle school, and taken a law degree at the University of Southern California, and spent three years as an investigator in the Los Angeles district attorney's office. These days he was in oil. Six producing wells in Kentucky. Leases on thirty-two hundred acres in Maryland. The title "Chief," he said, was purely honorary. The record was less impressive. In 1939, a cafe society figure named Mabel Boll, known in the columns as the Queen of Diamonds, had given him a thousand dollars for an Indian Village at the World's Fair. It never opened. She sued to get her money back, and her suit said he was no chief, and no Cherokee either. He countersued her for a hundred thousand dollars. She won. Under oath in that case, he'd said he'd earned absolutely nothing from 1935 through 1939. Her lawyer asked him how much money he had in his pocket. "A dollar and a quarter."
He had an alibi for the night of the murder. He'd been in a movie theater in Washington. And he told the paper he had two pistol permits, one in Oklahoma and one in Virginia. He said he owned a thirty-two caliber revolver, "but no .38." Remember, the second gun in that foyer was a thirty-two. But owning one isn't evidence of anything. Nothing in the record says his was ever tested. He and Lawton were questioned for sixteen hours, and the district attorney's office said it had "disclosed nothing."
Redwing also told the paper about Bert. By his account, the baroness had kept Albert Langford for years. Bought his clothes, gave him spending money, and, he said, "even provided his rent at a Fifth Ave. hotel, because Langford in those times had almost nothing." A Fifth Avenue hotel. Remember the draft card? Spring of 1942. Address: the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Employer: "Unemployed." On those two points, a government record backs Redwing up. The address, and the job. Not the rest of it. Redwing said he'd visited Bert at that hotel three or four times. They always talked about Mrs. Grimes. Bert told him he used to be in the textile business but had lost all he had. And, Redwing said, Bert was really in love with the baroness.
The baroness, it turned out, had been born Berta Faber, in East Prussia. She liked to hint at a family tie to Field Marshal von Hindenburg. She'd been a model before she came to America, and in 1940 she'd married a man named John Coleman, and then separated from him. She went by Countess, or Baroness, Coleman. She'd had a Park Avenue apartment. The silent-film star Pola Negri said she knew her "slightly."
By June 1945, she was living in a modest apartment in Hollywood, studying metaphysics. She denied she'd ever been a baroness, and denied anyone had ever promised her money. The twenty-five thousand dollars? "A little joke between Mr. Langford and me." But she did admit something. Before his marriage, she said, Albert Langford had given her "a lovely diamond bracelet" and a forty-karat star sapphire ring. She said she'd given them back. A diamond bracelet and a sapphire, from a man who that spring had told his draft board he had no employer. And she had a theory of her own. Langford, she said, was killed because "he was in some one's way." "You know there was much money involved," she told reporters, "and money is a powerful force." That same day, at Mrs. Langford's request, her lawyer, Carl Rood, put out a statement. Langford had told him, Rood said, that before the marriage he'd been aiding Mrs. Coleman financially, not the other way around. And that it wasn't very much. So who was keeping whom? Even the Sunday News gave up. There seemed to be some dispute, it wrote, and it "probably never will be cleared up."
There were other stories. Police were checking reports that, two or three years earlier, the baroness and Mrs. Langford had had a hair-pulling fight in the Marguery apartment. Dolores Cassinelli, the singer, was named as a guest who might have seen it. And they went hunting for Redwing's former business partner, a man named Aubrey Jarboe, who'd been arrested in 1942 for impersonating a naval officer to land war contracts, and never tried. "It could be that he knows who might have wanted to get Langford," the detective captain said, "and I'm overlooking no bets." Two New York detectives who were headed to Los Angeles on another case were told to stop by and see the baroness. She told them she and Langford had joked about the twenty-five thousand, and that after the wedding he'd told her he couldn't give her the money. And then, the paper said, the questioning "petered out," when she insisted on telling them about a dream she'd had, about some horses. And by July, the chief had changed his story, too. Now he said there had been an arrangement after all, only the money had all been meant for the baroness.
The chief and the baroness. Two people who'd lived on other people's money, telling stories about a man who, depending on whom you believe, had lived on theirs, or kept them going on his. Neither was ever charged with anything in the case.
Part 11Rich in Theories
Eleven days after the murder, James Delamater, the elevator man, told the Daily News the police had his story wrong. The police had said he took the two men up at around eight thirty-five. Ten minutes before the shooting. He said no. It was between seven-forty and seven-forty-five. Which is what he'd told us at the very beginning of this episode. Twenty minutes to eight. And if he was right, the paper said, then a gap of fifty-five to sixty minutes, between the time he took them up and the time two strangers came to Mrs. Langford's door, "must be somehow explained." If those two men were the killers.
Where do two men spend an hour on the seventh floor of a hotel? Nobody ever said. He also remembered the woman who'd ridden up with them and got off at three. The police went looking for her. Theories filled the gap. The district attorney's man, Jacob Grumet, called in reporters and offered one. The gunmen, he said, had been shadowing Mrs. Langford, had overheard Diaz's name, and used it to get in. When Langford sent them away, one of them "lost his head" and fired into the ceiling, and the other shot Langford while his partner grappled with him. The detectives on the case didn't comment. The paper said they "lodged their tongues securely in their cheeks." The New York Times printed the official reconstruction. Extortion. Men who hadn't meant to kill, and fired when their victim resisted. It fit, the headline said, though it had "not yet been proved." Two detectives went out to Milford, Indiana, to check Reed Lawton's alibi with his brother. What they found isn't in the record. And a police artist made sketches of the two men from the elevator man's description. About thirty years old. One slender. One stockily built. If those sketches were ever printed, we haven't found them. By July, the papers were losing interest. On the first of July, the Sunday News looked back on how editors had "seized upon the case with great howls of delight," because it had all the makings of "a lovely murder." But, it said, "except for a rather odd cast of characters, the story failed to live up to editorial hopes." Two weeks later, the same paper gave it a two-page summing-up, under a headline that said it all. "Rich in theories, characters, but very short on clues." "That Langford is dead," it wrote, "is about the only established fact in the whole case." And it had news about the woman on the elevator. She'd been found. And she "firmly states that she saw no men on the elevator." In late July, a detective took a night plane to Toronto on a lead nobody would explain. The Toronto police wouldn't talk about it either. A few days after that, Walter Winchell reported in his column that Reed Lawton was suing Mrs. Langford for half a million dollars, for slander. How that came out, we haven't been able to find.
In February 1946, investigators in Brooklyn and Manhattan floated a theory that the Langford killing and the murder of the anarchist editor Carlo Tresca might be the work of the same holdup gang. The FBI's file on Tresca called them "two of New York's most celebrated unsolved murders." Two informers were questioned. The Times reported the police found them "off key." Nothing came of it. And in September 1947, the Marguery was back in the papers, for a police raid on a crooked gambling suite. Marked cards. Crooked dice. Suite 609. The Daily News noted that it was almost directly below the apartment where Albert Langford had been shot. It got the date of the murder wrong, and his age.
Then, in November 1947, twenty-nine months after the murder, the case moved. Detectives brought in a fifty-four-year-old theatrical booking agent, questioned him all day, and had him held as a material witness, on five thousand dollars bail. His name was Joseph Rosenzweig. On Broadway he was known as Mickey Owens. Remember him? The promoter with the bad check, picked up in the first week, questioned and released. Now he was back. The district attorney, Frank Hogan, refused to say how he was connected to the case. He was held as a witness. He was never charged with anything. And the same story had something else in it. The police, it said, were checking on three suspects. One had been questioned a number of times. One was still being sought. And one was a convict, about to finish a prison term imposed since the slaying. He had refused to talk. The next day, the Times reported that Hogan was furious with the police for leaking it. A convict who wouldn't talk. The paper didn't print his name. Hold on to him.
Part 12The Rebel
Here's something nobody outside the district attorney's office knew in 1947. Back on the eleventh of May, 1946, eleven months after the murder, a couple of men from the Daily News had gone to the district attorney, Frank Hogan, with information from what they called underworld sources. It named three men. One of them, the paper said, was a notorious cop-fighter. The paper sat on the story for almost four years.
On the night of the twenty-first of March, 1950, five detectives grabbed a man as he was getting into a car at Ninety-Fourth Street and Columbus Avenue. In his pockets they found seven picklocks, four celluloid strips for slipping locks, and seven master keys. At his place on West Ninety-Third Street, they found more. He was forty-four years old. His record went back twenty-six years. His name was Edison Cable.
When he was arraigned the next day, on a charge of possessing burglar's tools, the chief of the district attorney's homicide bureau, George Monaghan, was in the courtroom. He wouldn't say why. The police said Cable was just one of many men they wanted to question about the Langford murder. He was "not considered a suspect." A month later, Cable's lawyer went to court to get him out on bail. And to keep him in, Monaghan had to say out loud what his office had been working on for four years. "We have information from reliable sources," he told the judge, "that he is the fingerman in the Hotel Marguery murder case."
Named, in open court, as the fingerman. Not charged with the murder. Then or ever. The Daily News, which had been waiting four years for this, described him as "a stubby, unreconstructed hoodlum from the South, known to Manhattan's underworld as The Rebel." Monaghan added one more thing. "Since Cable was a boy, he has never done a single day's legitimate work." The records say otherwise. In October 1940, when Edison Cable filled out his own draft card, he gave an employer: a man named Al Price, at 1465 Broadway. Remember that address. It comes back.
So what, according to the district attorney and the Daily News, had happened on the fourth of June, 1945? A robbery. The target was Mrs. Langford's jewelry, a hundred thousand dollars of it. Cable was the fingerman, the planner. The paper's word was "centerfielder." He didn't go up himself. Two of his associates did, armed, at about half past eight. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. But Albert Langford answered the door himself, out of his wife's sight. And, in the paper's words, "He put up a fight in the foyer." A fight. Remember what the switchboard operator said Mrs. Langford cried into the phone that night? "Two men are beating my husband!"
The Daily News printed something else that day. A floor plan of the apartment, drawn by its staff artist. There are the two bedrooms. There's the foyer, marked with a letter A, where he was shot. There's the corridor out to the elevator. And there are two fire exits. One to Vanderbilt Avenue. One to the Park Avenue gardens. Remember: nobody ever saw those two men come back down in the elevator.
Cable's lawyer, Bernard Alderman, was furious. His client had been out of prison since 1948, he said, and "they have trailed him every step of the way." If they had a murder case, why hadn't they arrested him for it? And he said the DA's office was threatening to throw the book at Cable on the burglary charge unless he told what he knew. The judge sided with Monaghan. Cable stayed in, without bail. He was a three-time loser, the paper said. On burglar's tools alone he could get fourteen years. Unless, it said, "he appeases justice by spilling what he is believed to know." At his first arraignment, the police said, he seemed close to cracking. "I'll be glad to see Mr. Monaghan," he told them. But by the time they got him to Monaghan's office, the swagger was back. "Well, you haven't convicted me yet." The district attorney announced he'd be questioning the old circle all over again. Reed Lawton. Mrs. Kempton. Frank Teller. And the widow? The same day the Daily News named Cable, it ran her picture, with her new husband, a Dr. Walter Von Elvers. They had announced their marriage, the caption said, at a party. In the murder apartment.
The Daily News laid out the whole theory, and then it asked the question it couldn't answer. If Cable was the fingerman, who fingered the jewels for him? Back in 1945, her own lawyer had guessed at amateurs who "got knowledge of the jewelry and of the layout of the apartment." In 1950, the paper put it in one line. "Who tipped off the fingerman about the heiress' jewels?"
Part 13Inmate 104156
In all the 1950 stories we've found about Edison Cable, there's one thing none of them mentions. Maybe they didn't know. Maybe nobody told them. But the State of New York wrote it down. It's the receiving blotter from Sing Sing prison. The intake form. One page, filled in by hand, for every man who came through the gate. Here's what it says about him. On the twenty-first of January, 1945, in the Bronx, Edison Cable and two other men tried to break into a store. The form says the value involved was "none." He was sentenced for it in Bronx County Court, two to three years. The date of the sentence was the twenty-ninth of June, 1945. Twenty-five days after Albert Langford was shot. On the ninth of July, he was received at Sing Sing. Inmate number one-oh-four-one-five-six.
The blotter lists his other names. Edward Williams. Edward Hayden. Edward Carlton. James Butler. It says he was born in High Point, North Carolina, on the twentieth of November, 1905. He was thirty-nine. And it asks for his last job. Since March of 1945, he'd been a ticket seller for the Victory Sight Seeing Company, at thirty-five dollars a week. Its address was 1465 Broadway. The same building as the employer on his 1940 draft card. "Never done a single day's legitimate work." And it lists what he had on him when he came in. Nine cents. A Waltham pocket watch and chain. A ring with a white stone. A union dues book, and his ID cards. Two to three years, starting in the summer of 1945. Which means in November 1947, he'd have been just about finishing his term. Remember the story from November 1947? The police checking on three suspects, one of them "a convict who is about to finish a prison term imposed since the slaying." Who "has refused to talk." And in 1950, Cable's own lawyer said he'd been out since 1948. The paper never printed the convict's name. But it is very likely the same man. In 2020, the Daily News looked back at its own old scoop, and told the story this way. Cable planned the robbery and waited downstairs in a getaway car. When the shooting started, he drove off and left his two men behind. And afterward, afraid of them, he pleaded guilty to that little January burglary on purpose, so the state would put him somewhere safe. Sing Sing, as a hiding place. The blotter backs part of that. He did go to Sing Sing, on a burglary-type charge, within weeks of the murder, for a crime committed months before it. What the blotter can't tell us is why. Or where he was on the night of the fourth of June.
And there's one line on it that bothers us. "Jail time: thirty-one days." Now, this is our speculation, and we want to be clear that it's speculation. On a form like this, jail time usually means the time a man has already spent locked up before he gets to prison. If those thirty-one days are counted back from the day he was sentenced, the twenty-ninth of June, then Edison Cable was already in custody from about the twenty-ninth of May, 1945. A week before the murder. And a man in a Bronx jail cell couldn't have been sitting in a getaway car on Park Avenue. But if they're counted back from the day he arrived at Sing Sing, the ninth of July, his thirty-one days start around the eighth of June. Four days after the murder. And then everything fits. The form doesn't say which way it counts. The Bronx County court file would settle it, and we haven't been able to see it yet.
Either way, by April 1950 he was back inside, in the Manhattan jail they called the Tombs. The census taker that spring counted him there, an inmate, forty-four. In May, his lawyer tried to get the burglar's-tools trial moved out of Manhattan, saying the publicity had poisoned any jury. And he said it was no secret that the prosecutor would see Cable got the limit, unless he "cooperates" on the murder. The judge reserved his decision. On the thirty-first of October, 1950, Edison Cable was convicted of possessing burglar's tools. On the sixth of December, he was sentenced. Five to ten years. Not one entry on that card is a murder charge. Five to ten years, when a few words might have bought him a clean bill of health. As far as any record shows, he never said them. He was never charged with killing Albert Langford, and the two men who rode up in Delamater's elevator that night were never named.
Part 14Buddy
So what became of them? Marion's father, Joseph Bell Mayer, the old utility man who, by her account, never knew he'd had a son-in-law, died in April 1951. He was a hundred and two, by Find a Grave's count. The Hotel Marguery closed in 1948. By 1951 its Italian garden was a parking lot. In 1957 the whole block came down, all six buildings, and an office tower went up in its place. That tower is gone now too. Today the site holds the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase, the third building to stand there. Nothing of the Marguery is left. Not the lobby, not the elevator, not the foyer, not the door nobody used. Marion, the woman who'd told the papers she was fifty-five, died in Freeport, on Long Island, on the tenth of July, 1956. The state recorded her as Eugenie M. Von Elvers. Age, eighty-one. She was never charged with anything, and nothing in the record connects her to her husband's death. Neither were Lawton, or the chief, or the baroness, or the booking agent. Every one of them was questioned. None of them was ever charged.
And Edison Cable, at some point after that, went home to Virginia. He died on the third of January, 1969, at a hospital in Richmond. He was sixty-three. His death certificate says he never married. And under occupation it says retired service-station attendant. Two days later, the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran his death notice. Here it is, nearly whole. "Edison (Buddy) Cable died January 3, 1969."
A sister. Two brothers. Two nephews. Services Monday at noon. Burial in Oakwood. That's all. Not a word about New York. Not the Marguery, not the district attorney, not Albert Langford. To the people who wrote that notice, he was Buddy. So here's where it stands. As of October 2026, as far as the record shows, no one has ever been charged with the murder of Albert Langford. In 1950 the Manhattan district attorney's office named Edison Cable as the finger man. He was never charged with the murder. He was convicted of carrying burglar's tools. And the two men who rode up in that elevator in their soft dark hats were never identified. So let me leave you with what I keep coming back to. Who were those two men? Where did they spend that hour on the seventh floor? Who told anyone what was sitting in that bedroom drawer? The Daily News asked it in 1950, and nobody ever answered. Who tipped off the fingerman? Was Edison Cable even a free man on the fourth of June? Thirty-one days says maybe not, and the form won't tell us which way it counts. And what was in the little parcel Albert carried home at six o'clock that evening? Nobody ever said.
I said at the start that the papers lost sight of Albert, and they did. One of them admitted it. "Langford himself was lost sight of in the beginning of the investigation, which centered around his wife and her gallery of friends." The hotel staff used to watch him cross the lobby every evening at six and say, "There goes Mr. Millionbucks." He looked the part. He wasn't. He was a sixty-three-year-old textile man from Brooklyn who, three years earlier, had told his draft board he was unemployed. And he was the one who got up to see why the dog was growling. The man the papers called a millionaire died with an estate his lawyer called very little. The man the district attorney called the fingerman died with a notice five lines long. Both of them ended up in small print.
Thank you all for listening to this episode of Forgotten True Crime. If it meant something to you, share it with somebody. That's how cases like this one stay alive. Until next time, I'm Trevor with Forgotten True Crime. Stay safe out there. Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.