I’ve written an unpublished novel called GRACE HUMISTON AND THE VANISHING about a remarkable American detective whose name has been lost to history. I turned up the story some time ago while working with a friend of mine, a Hollywood screenwriter, to try to come up with scripts for made-for-TV crime movies. We pitched the movie, but it didn’t sell. Grace Humiston, a lawyer who solved some of New York’s most puzzling mysteries in the period leading up to and including World War I, is largely forgotten today as a sleuth.  In her day, though, Literary Digest magazine called her “A Feminine Sherlock Holmes.”  A black-haired, dark-eyed woman with a hypnotic gaze and an indomitable will, she traveled throughout the South exposing conditions in peonage camps.  Back home in New York, she offered her services to the poor and stepped in to help with difficult murder cases.  Twice she achieved commutations of death sentences for inmates. In a third case, she and her friends rescued Charles Stielow, an illiterate tenant farmer sentenced to death for a double murder, by coming up with new evidence 40 minutes before Stielow was scheduled to be executed.  In the Stielow investigation, Humiston obtained a confession from one of the true killers simply through the force of her personality. And, in her most celebrated case, known as the “White Slave Case,” Humiston penetrated a police cover-up to prove that an 18-year-old high school girl named Ruth Cruger had been killed by Alfredo Cocchi, an Italian immigrant who ran a motorcycle repair shop and who was involved in a graft scheme with motorcyle officers. The New York Times profiled her as: “Mrs. Humiston, The Woman Who Shamed Police in The Ruth Cruger Murder Case.”  Ultimately, Humiston’s star fell as she was seen as going to far in crusading to save young women from prostitution.  But time can’t obscure her legendary detective feats.

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