On the morning of July 3, 1915, an armed man rang the bell at J.P. Morgan Jr.'s estate in Glen Cove, forced his way inside and shot the financier twice. The man had already set off a bomb in the U.S. Capitol, and investigators soon learned he was living under a name that was not his own. On Monday, November 9, the author of a recent book about him comes to the Great Neck Library to tell the story, a few miles down the North Shore from where it happened.

Mary Noé, a lawyer, professor and author, will discuss The Man Who Shot J.P. Morgan: A Life of Arsenic, Anarchy and Intrigue, published by Kent State University Press. The talk runs from 2 to 3 p.m. in the Community Room of the library's Main Building at 159 Bayview Avenue. No registration is required, and seating is first come, first seated. Copies will be available to buy and have signed.

The house on East Island

Morgan's estate, Matinecock Point, sat on East Island in Glen Cove. He bought the property in 1909 and built a 57-room Neo-Georgian mansion there, finished in 1913. He was entertaining guests, among them the British ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice, when the gunman pushed past the butler. Morgan was hit in the hip and abdomen and survived. The house itself is gone: after the Morgan family sold it in the 1940s it passed through several owners, was leased to the Soviet Union as a retreat for its United Nations diplomats, was later donated to an order of nuns, and was demolished around 1980. Three homes now stand on the land.

One man, two names

The book follows Erich Muenter, a Harvard German professor whose wife, Leone Krembs Muenter, fell ill and died shortly after giving birth in 1906. Muenter blamed her Christian Science beliefs, which ruled out medical care, but an investigation pointed toward arsenic poisoning. As suspicion grew, Muenter disappeared.

Years later, a man calling himself Frank Holt married Leona Sensabaugh in Texas, and the couple moved to Ithaca, New York, where he pursued an academic career at Cornell. Some of Holt's colleagues thought he looked like a man they had known before, one suspected of killing his wife. When the attacker's photograph appeared in newspapers after the shooting at Morgan's home, the question of whether Holt and Muenter were the same man had a new urgency.

In the same days as the attack on Morgan, a timed explosive had wrecked the Senate Reception Room at the Capitol in Washington. No one was killed, but the city was on edge. Noé's book traces how the bombing, the shooting and the 1906 death connect, against the backdrop of the period just before the United States entered World War I, with its false identities, radical politics and criminal schemes.

The author

Noé is a professor at St. John's University. She has worked as an administrative law judge for the New York State Office of Professional Medical Conduct and as an impartial hearing officer under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and early in her working life she was in the typing pool at the FBI's New York office, later becoming the only woman among roughly 700 school bus drivers at a Brooklyn depot. She is a graduate of Brooklyn College and St. John's University School of Law. She has discussed the book on podcasts including the Fox True Crime Podcast, Untapped New York and Most Notorious.

Going

The author event is Monday, November 9, from 2 to 3 p.m. at the Great Neck Library's Main Building, 159 Bayview Avenue, Great Neck. No registration is needed. The library's main number is 516-466-8055.

Sources