Mrs. Sherlock Holmes | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

Ruth doesn't come home. And after a couple hours, her sister looks out the window and she sees the
snow kind of falling on the Hudson and she starts to get worried. Then the hours started to pile one upon
another and she still doesn't come home. At this point they call their father who's away at a a business trip. They
cable him and they say Ruth is missing um and he comes home immediately. On the day before Valentine's Day in
1917, 18-year-old Ruth Cruger disappeared. So, Ruth was very well liked in her high
school and very well liked in the church. She had no boyfriend and back then the term was she had no attachment.
Um and so when she disappeared, it was completely out of the blue. Something completely out of her normal pattern of
behavior. Ruth's father and her two sisters all went out looking for her. Trying to
imagine all of the places she might go in a day. The bank, the stationery store,
and the motorcycle shop, Metropolitan Motorcycles, where the mechanic had a side business sharpening ice skates.
Ruth's sister Helen knocked on the door. And there was a man there, an Italian man named Alfredo Cocchi.
And he said, "Yes, um there was someone who looked like that. Um kind of looked like you." He said, "You know, about
your size and she came in, she dropped off her skates, I sharpened them, she came back, she paid for them and she was
gone." We're hearing about Ruth Cruger from Professor Brad Ricca. On February 16th, a New York Times
headline read, "Pretty girl skater strangely missing." A neighborhood women's group jumped into
action. They distributed missing person flyers with Ruth's picture. They asked movie theaters to project
Ruth's photograph on the screen before movies began. At that time, the big movie was Charlie Chaplin's Easy Street.
The NYPD Commissioner ordered all available detectives to join the search. The police have no clue to go on. And as
the days start to to go on, um then you start getting things in the newspapers that say like, "Well, maybe
she ran off with a boyfriend. Um maybe she had some sort of secret life that no one knew about." And in 1917, this is,
you know, scandalous um news of the highest order. And this really made her father angry.
He doubled down by hiring private detectives to look for his daughter. But they say there are no clues and there's
no there's no way to pursue a case in which she left of her own accord with someone
else, so there's no reason to pursue it. Newspapers reported that there were no leads. The police felt the case was
unsolvable. The family held a press conference. Ruth Kruger's father criticized the
mayor of New York, the police commissioner, and the NYPD. And he says they have not done their
job. Um my Ruth was a good girl and and people start to notice that in the back of their kind of entourage of family,
there's a a woman um a middle-aged woman who's cloaked in black. And this woman steps up and she
announces herself as the lead investigator on the case. The woman's name was Grace Humiston.
And she says, "I will find Ruth." I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Grace was born in 1869 in Greenwich Village.
Her father was an insurance claims expert and was often called to court to testify on different cases.
He'd take Grace along with him. She loved it. Grace grew up and got married to a
doctor named Henry Forest Quackenbush. Uh the marriage didn't last, however, um when they discovered that the uh
esteemed Dr. Quackenbush had drilled um holes into his waiting room walls um to look at his patients when they
were getting undressed. In 1901, she decided she wanted to go to law school. But she had to find one that would allow
women. The only school in New York that accepted women was NYU. And this was, you know, a full
60 years before Harvard started accepting women. And women had to go to the night class, which was this
motley crew of There were ex-baseball players in the night class, and there were kind of older students, and they
would play pranks on the women by dumping snow on them to discourage them from being there.
Um but Grace had none of this. She was such a good student that the dean of NYU's law school made an
exception for her and let her take classes during the day, too. With the men. She finished the three-year program in
two years, graduating 12th in her class. Grace got a job at the Legal Aid Society
of New York. She passed the bar exam and then used her inheritance to open a clinic called The People's Law Firm.
She hung a sign near the door that read, "Justice for those of limited means." Grace thought the legal system often
took advantage of immigrants and she wanted to help. And she says, "Give me, you know, what you can afford." And some
people would would pay her a little bit and some people would cook her meals and
some people would bless her and there's one woman who says, "You know, you have the ugliest hat in the world. Let me
make you a new one." And she makes her a new hat. Soon after she opened her law firm, Grace got a letter about a woman
in prison. This woman had been sentenced to death by hanging. She had less than a
week to live. Her name was Antoinette Tola. Antoinette and her husband Giovanni had
recently immigrated to New Jersey from Italy. You could come to this country um a little easier if you had a sponsor
here in America. And so some of these smaller neighborhoods would have a big sponsor
who would bring in people and they would support um him because it was always a him. And this was the case in a a small
community um in New Jersey where there was a a patriarch for you know, that's the word for it, named Santa.
And Santa would bring people over from Italy. He would sponsor them and in turn they would owe him.
Santa had helped Antoinette Tola and her husband immigrate to New Jersey. And Santa would always, you know, kind of
give her a wink and make a gesture and say, you know, "What you owe me will happen
eventually." One day Santa found Antoinette alone at home. He walked into her house with a gun in
one hand and a roll of cash in the other. He told her she had a choice. She could
sleep with him and he'd give her the money or he would kill her. And she takes out a gun and shoots him and kills
him. Antoinette was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. She went to trial, but she didn't speak
any English and was entirely dependent on the court's translator. And the translator kind of changes things as to
what happened, and she is sentenced to be hanged. Um no self-defense whatsoever. What
hurts her case especially is that the gun has gone missing. Saulntes' gun. Without it, Antoinette's argument that
she'd acted in self-defense didn't hold up in court. And Grace hears this, and this speaks to something in her.
Grace visited Antoinette in prison, and despite the fact that she hadn't done much criminal law before, she decided
she'd try to intervene. She didn't have much time. Antoinette was scheduled to be hanged
within days. Grace went to the home of the coroner. When she got there, he was playing the
organ. He invited her to stay and listen. When he finished, Grace told him who she
was. And then, she said she was there to see the gun she knew had been taken from Saontes'
dead body. The coroner looked at her. And then he gets up, um and comes back with the gun.
The coroner admitted everything. That he had the gun the whole time. Uh that they
had framed her um because Saontes' power was so great. Um people owed him even in death and were
protecting him. Antoinette's execution was put on hold for 30 days to give Grace a chance to
petition the New Jersey Supreme Court. When she did, she asked for a new trial in light of the discovery of the gun.
Her request for a new trial was denied. But then, the day before Antoinette was scheduled
to be executed, Grace happened to run into the governor on a train. She approached him and found a way to
convince him to stop the execution. Antoinette's sentence was reduced to 7 years in prison.
The New York Evening World reported that Grace had done the impossible and that the quote old grey beards of the New
Jersey bar are shaking their heads in amazement over the woman's feet. She is rather worth thinking about.
Some reporters said that Grace could solve mysteries no one else could because of her women's intuition.
As word spread of what she'd done for Antoinette Tola, her legal clinic took off.
She opened a second location, then a third. Eventually, she had offices all over New
York City. She was willing to do anything to solve a case. To investigate the conditions at a labor
camp, she pretended to be a traveling saleswoman selling scissors. She would often wear disguises. She has to find
different ways of of getting things done. She becomes a detective because she can't always trust
police departments and and so forth that she really believes in doing things herself. So, she becomes
she says this unnecessary detective and she kind of makes this her thing and she's very successful in it and because
of this she gets a lot of press coverage and this leads to bigger and bigger cases and
the Krugers see it. >> When 18-year-old Ruth Krueger disappeared and the police weren't able
to find her, the Krueger family went to Grace Humiston. By this point in her career, Grace was
well known as an investigator who would do anything to solve a case. The first thing she did was get every
single newspaper article about Ruth Krueger and every document the NYPD would give her.
And then, she went to visit Metropolitan Motorcycles, the last place Ruth Krueger
had been seen. When she got to the motorcycle shop, the owner, Alfredo Cocchi, was not there.
He hadn't been seen in a while. Neighbors said he'd been badly shaken by the fact that he was the last person to
see Ruth alive. His wife was trying to keep the business afloat by herself. Grace asked if she could look around the
shop. Mrs. Cocchi said, "No, the police had already searched it repeatedly." And then,
Grace noticed that Mrs. Cocchi had put up a sign in the window that said, "Mechanic wanted."
She got an idea. Grace enlisted the help of a man named Julius J. Crone, a Hungarian detective.
And he's really this definition of the hard-boiled detective. He has a scar on his left eye. He was a
brilliant um um man of facts, but he was also unafraid to, you know, throw a right hook. And
she met with him in um at the Manhattan Hotel, and they had lunch, and she, you know,
gave him the uh the details of the case, and she said she needed his help. She said, "Do you
know how to fix motorcycles?" The next day, Julius Crone went to Metropolitan Motorcycles and asked Mrs. Kochi to give
him a mechanic job. She looked him up and down and and she seemed very wary, but she hired him on the spot.
The only problem was that Julius Krone didn't really know how to fix motorcycles. So, what he does is during
the day, he kind of acts busy and memorizes what's wrong with the bikes, goes home, looks through all the manuals
and and figures out how to fix it and the next day goes in and fixes it. I mean,
motorcycles back then weren't what they are now. They were basically kind of bicycles with sewing machine engines on
them. So, they weren't the worst things to to fix, but he still is able to pull off
this really great gambit to get in the store. The only problem is he wants to get into the basement of the store, but
Mrs. Kochi will not let Krone in the basement for anything. So, that becomes his goal to get in that basement.
How does he do it? So, after a few weeks of gaining her trust and actually fixing
these motorcycles to good success, he's working on a bike and he says, "Well, I have to go solder these these
spokes." And this meant that he would have to go down the street to another machine shop and
do it there and she says, "Oh, no, don't worry about it. We have you know, go do
it in the basement." And he freezes for just a second because here's his opportunity.
Um but he's a professional, so he just, you know, says, "Okay." And he goes down
into the basement and he knows he only has a few minutes at most. And he looks around and one
thing he looks for, um he's looking for shiny nails, um which means they're new nails that they might be covering
something up. Um he's, you know, conscious of the clock, conscious that she's up there.
And then he hears her. She screams, "You come up here right now." And he knows he waited just that split
second too long where he was revealed. And he comes up and she says, "You get out right now."
With Julius Krohn's cover now blown, he and Grace needed to come up with a new plan. So, they find an old coal chute
from the street that goes up to the basement. And they find through the permits that they had that's public
property. And through a variety of of ways, Grace gets a permit for this. And Krohn and
someone else start digging in it. It's a hole they find. And they start digging every day. And policemen walk by and
laugh at them and and kind of throw things at them. Mrs. Koches stands there with a hammer and says, "If
you come closer to my property, here's what I'm going to do." But they're fine. They keep digging and
digging. And then they find a door. They open the door and they find some weird things. They find
street signs. And they find a newspaper from 2 days after Ruth Kruger disappeared.
And then they find the small flower. And they wonder what this is. Why is there a
flower? And then they find it was a piece of a corset. And then they find bones.
And Krohn finds them and he pulls them up and he brings them to Grace. And he says, "Well, this is it." And she takes
them to um an expert. And he says they're pigs bones. Grace realized right away that the bones
had been planted. Someone was playing a trick on her. Almost everybody it seems like in reading the story and
researching the story is against them. Um the public wants to find Ruth. Um they want to find her alive.
Um but it seems like the people in power, the police, the mayor, everything else is working against her.
Grace had had enough. She took matters into her own hands and announced to Julius Crone that they
would resume digging at Metropolitan Motorcycles. He says, "Well, what do you mean? We can't dig anymore. We can't get
in the building." She goes, "No, just walk in. You can dig in the basement now."
And what Crone finds out is that Grace bought the store. Grace just buys the store?
Yeah. And so what what does she march right in? She marches right in. A huge crowd gathers on the street um
because they know this is the moment and in the the photographs it's uh men with
their their sons and people, you know, hanging over the balconies. And Crone goes in with his men and
they start looking around. They start digging. And true to her word, uh Grace Humiston
finds Ruth Krueger. Ruth's body was found buried 6 ft under the wooden flooring of the basement.
Her body was badly decomposed by this point, but she was identifiable by a ring she always wore. It was engraved
with the name of her high school. They bring her out in a um a cardboard coffin with a um
a flower on top. And she, you know, is is is carried out of the front the front door of the motorcycle shop,
and all the men take their hats off. What was discovered about how she was killed?
She had a a bruise on her uh forehead. They do an autopsy. She has um what they call a ripper's mark, um which is she
was stabbed uh in the the side. And all signs, all clues, point to Alfredo Cochi, who
is gone. Gone? Home to Bologna, Italy. An AP reporter finds him, and he says, "Are you Alfredo
Cochi?" And he says, "Well, I suppose I am." And he's he's kind of free in Italy,
just uh living with family and and so on. Um but then when they find Ruth, they send uh a cable to the Italian
authorities. It says, "Hold Cochi." He was held in an old monastery. When he was questioned by police, he
said Ruth's death was an accident, that she'd fallen through the basement, and he'd tried to cover it up.
But he also said he had tried to kiss her, and she had rejected him. What came out afterwards is that there
were others, that mothers started coming forth to the papers and saying, "You know, my We used to live across from
Cochi, and my daughter would go over, and he said, 'Oh, I'll make you I'll make your bicycle motorized,' and they
disappeared, and she ran out and said he tried to kiss her." And this story began to repeat, and it started to
create a portrait of Cochi as someone who was was headed towards this direction.
Ruth Kruger's family wanted Alfredo Cozzi brought back to America to stand trial.
But Italy refused to extradite him. They said they would handle it. Even though there wouldn't be a trial in
the United States, Grace wanted to make sure that Alfredo Cozzi was punished properly in Italy.
She gathered every piece of evidence she had and got written statements from people who'd known him. And she just
sent it over. And what it did was it portrayed um a pattern of behavior, not of murder,
um but of something leading up to that. Um and he stands trial in in Italy and in the middle of it he proclaims his
innocence and said his wife did it. She was jealous of her and she did it. Um but then that changes again and he said
I did it. And he said um he doesn't even say it wasn't an accident and he's sentenced to life in prison.
After Ruth Kruger's case was closed, the press began referring to Grace Humiston
as Mrs. Sherlock Holmes. Brad Ricca says Julius Krone was her Watson. And then the NYPD had to answer for why Grace
found so many clues they couldn't. The NYPD undergoes its most extensive internal audit in its history to this
point. And this is largely due to Grace pointing out that they had missed key things in the investigation. But what
comes out in the audit is not only did they miss things, but they deliberately may have covered them up.
What they find is that Cozzi um ran a gambling ring. Um that many of the policemen were part
of and he also fixed their motorcycles. They even found a note in all caps that said protect Kochi. So, you know, when
they did these searches of his place, did they miss what was in the basement or did they turn the other way? And this
huge investigation goes forward and it floods the papers for a year and all these detectives get fired.
The New York Sun ran a profile on Grace that began with the line The New York police let a woman put them
to shame. It went on to say that trying to stop Grace is like flashing a red flag in a
bull's face. The NYPD made Grace the first official female detective in New York. They gave
Grace a um a badge and they said she could carry a gun and she was going to head the bureau
um for missing people. And it was a big deal. And of course, you know, behind this all
because of this this massive investigation is there's also a great deal of animosity towards her from the
police because she showed them up. Parents all over the country began mailing letters to Grace begging her to
help them find their lost daughters. And she focuses her life on just missing girls.
Grace told a reporter it's the unfortunate truth that too often the attitude of the official
police is the girl was bad to begin with. >> Criminal is created by Lauren Spor and
me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our assistant producer. Audio mix by Rob Byers.
Special thanks to Argo Studios. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of
Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com where you can also learn more about Brad
Ricca's book, Mrs. Sherlock Holmes, the true story of New York City's greatest female detective and the 1917 missing
girl case that captivated a nation. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. We're
proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Shows like Passenger List, the newest
Radiotopia show. Passenger List is a beautifully produced new fiction series that tells the story
of a missing plane, a cabin full of suspects, and a search for the truth about what happened.
Starring Kelly Marie Tran, Colin Morgan, Rob Benedict, and Patti LuPone. Who are you?
Someone who wants to find out what really happened. You can trust me, okay? I'm trying to put all the pieces
together. Every time there's been a theory that just might make sense, something just proves it. There are
still plenty of questions we haven't asked. This all just got really gnarly. That's how you know you're onto
something. Passenger List is out now. Head to passengerlist.org to find out more and subscribe.
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX.

In 1917, 18-year-old Ruth Cruger disappeared. She’d last been seen getting her ice skates sharpened in the motorcycle shop of a man named Alfredo Cocchi. Newspapers reported that she probably ran off with a boyfriend, and New York police said that there were no clues to go on. But an investigator named Grace Quackenbos Humiston decided that she would do whatever it took to find her. She became known as “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.”

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Join Criminal Plus on Patreon for ad-free listening, bonus episodes, listener chat rooms, behind-the-scenes content, and more membership perks. https://www.patreon.com/Criminal

Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. https://pod.link/809264944

Say hello on Twitter (https://twitter.com/criminalshow) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/criminal_podcast) Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/thisiscriminal) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@criminal_podcast)

Sign up for our occasional newsletter, which includes a note from Phoebe, behind-the-scenes photos, and things our team has been enjoying lately. https://thisiscriminal.com/newsletter

We also make the podcasts This is Love (https://pod.link/1337100398) and Phoebe Reads a Mystery (https://pod.link/1503921457).

Artwork by Julienne Alexander: http://www.yssrs.com/. Check out our online shop: https://shop.thisiscriminal.com/

Episode 123 originally published September 27, 2019. https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-123-mrs-sherlock-holmes-9-27-2019/

Music in this episode: “Bedroll” by Blue Dot Sessions “Cat's Eye” by Blue Dot Sessions “The Blotter (Original Music for Criminal)” by Blue Dot Sessions “Rate Sheet” by Blue Dot Sessions “Laser Focus” by Blue Dot Sessions “Awaiting an Arrival” by Blue Dot Sessions “Fermin Canyon” by Blue Dot Sessions “Paper Trail (Original Music for Criminal)” by Blue Dot Sessions

Brief Summary

Ruth Cruger went missing in 1917; detective Grace Humiston led the investigation that uncovered her tragic fate.

Key points

Ruth Cruger Disappears. On February 16, 1917, 18-year-old Ruth Cruger mysteriously vanished, sparking widespread concern.
Grace Humiston Takes Charge. Grace Humiston, a determined investigator, vows to find Ruth Cruger after the police fail.
Ruth's Body Discovered. Grace Humiston's relentless search leads to the discovery of Ruth's body buried in a motorcycle shop.
Alfredo Cocchi's Arrest. After Ruth's body is found, authorities track down Alfredo Cocchi in Italy.
Grace Becomes NYPD's First Female Detective. Following her success, Grace Humiston is appointed as the first official female detective in New York.
Grace Becomes First Female Detective. Grace is appointed as New York's first female detective, heading the missing persons bureau.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

My Ruth was a good girl.

Ruth's father criticizing the police's handling of the case.

3:19WatchJul 29, 2026

Tension

85/ 100High tension

More from Criminal | A Podcast About Crime

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.