The Mystery of Marie Roget, Murdered by Edgar Allan Poe

In the following year, Poe's Mystery of Marie Rogêt was published in three parts in Snowden's Ladies Companion. "There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural," he started his famous detective story, "by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them. (...) The extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public, will be found to form, as regards sequence of time, the primary branch of a series of scarcely intelligible coincidences, whose secondary or concluding branch will be recognized by all readers in the late murder of MARY CECILIA ROGERS, at New York. (...) When, in an article entitled The Murders in the Rue Morgue, I endeavored, about a year ago, to depict some very remarkable features in the mental character of my friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, it did not occur to me that I should ever resume the subject."

The Mystery of Marie Roget, Trailer of the Classic Horror Mystery (1942)

Poe situated his story - with a little help from his "friend the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin" - in Paris, the Hudson was changed in the Seine, Mary Rogers in Marie Rogêt, David Payne in St. Eustache and so on. But Poe followed the main facts of the murder of Mary Rogers and argued that the girl was not murdered by a gang, but by a single individual.  The signs of a struggle in the woods and the battered state of her face indicated she was killed by an individual, because there would not have been a struggle between a gang and a weak and helpless girl. A gang would have overpowered Mary easily. And if Mary was attacked by a gang, there would have been at least one guy who would have taken the handkerchief away, that could identify their victim easily as Mary Rogers.

Poe spoke of a strip from the girl's skirt that had been wound around the waist and that, with a "sailor's knot", could afford a kind of handle for carrying the body. Chevalier Dupin aka Edgar Allan Poe thought of either a fatal accident - perhaps the result of an abortion - that was made up to look like a brutal murder perpetrated in the thicket were the petticoat was found, or a brutal murder "by a lover, or at least by an intimate and secret associate of the deceased. This associate is of swarthy complexion."  The sailor's knot and the "dark complexion" of the well-dressed man who was seen with Mary, pointed to a seaman "above the grade of the common sailor". During her first disappearance, Mary was seen in the company of "a young naval officer, notorious for its excesses."

"Let us know the full history of "the officer", with his present circumstances, and his whereabouts at the precise period of the murder. Let us carefully compare with each other the various communications sent to the evening paper, in which the object was to inculpate a gang. (...) And, all of this done, let us again compare these various communications with the known MSS. of the officer. Let us endeavor to ascertain (...) something more of the personal appearance and bearing of the 'man of dark complexion'.

Je Suis Animal / Marie Roget

At this point, Edgar Allan Poe, an author who was known for his brilliant pointes, ended his "article" with a cheap trick. The "publisher" declared in a footnote that it was inappropriate to reveal the truth and the identity of the perpetrator. Why the author suddenly could not or would not do anymore what he had promised just a few pages before: to track down the "naval officer with the dark complexion"?

Perhaps because Edgar Allan Poe knew all about the "seaman's knot"? He had spent a lot of time in harbours. In March 1830 he was admitted to the military academy of West Point. He was fired because of insubordination, but he always kept his military overcoat. In 1837, Edgar Poe rented a few rooms in Manhattan, in a house that belonged to the famous bookseller William Gowans. His shop on Broadway, near the tobacco-store of Anderson, became Poe's office and meeting place. It was here that he probably met Mary Cecilia Rogers.

In 1841, his tubercular child female Virginia was very sick. Poe visited the most vicious neighborhoods of Philadelphia, where he did his intense readings of The Raven, the poem that so eloquently dealt with his obsession with death and destruction. As a sado-necrofiliac, Poe had good reasons to flee a dying, blood-spitting woman, because in his "spirit of the perverse", the death of a beloved woman gave him "poetic chills". A few years after the murder of Miss Rogers, he wandered around on the scene of the crime, looking for a "Mary". He finally landed in the arms of a youth girlfriend who lived there, Mary Devereaux.