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Nineteen •————————————• The Measure of Their Lifetimes Of the three literary club members from Cornell College who played a major role in the trial, E. L. Boies, who so ably assisted M. J. Tobin, was the first to die, passing away in 1903 at the age of forty-­ two after a bout of typhoid fever. His death was greatly mourned throughout Iowa but especially in his home town, where the Waterloo Daily Courier devoted most of its front page to his passing , calling him a giant in the legal profession, a brilliant man who “thought in syllogisms” and a great orator.1 Years later, in 1912, Tom Milner, the hardheaded lawyer who never gave up his defense of Novak, died of anemia. He lived long enough to see Novak released from Fort Madison. With his perpetual stubbornness , for fourteen years, from 1897 to 1911, Milner was a constant advocate for Novak.2 Called “eccentric,” “flamboyant,” “witty,” and just plain “peculiar,” Milner once summed up his life in a brief, colorful note in the Waterloo Daily Courier: I [first] saw the light in Highland Town, O[hio] on December 1, 1856. . . . I commenced practicing law in Iowa Falls in 1880. . . . I studied law in Dubuque, Iowa. I like it and would rather be poor at that business than a millionaire at anything else. . . . I am freckled, ambitious, red-­ headed and happy. I am a Russell Sage on vacations, never having taken one in my life, and haven’t time if I did want to take one. . . . I never lay down, get licked oftener than I ought to, but universally die in the ditch when The Measure of Their Lifetimes 221 there is no hope beyond and no beyond to go to. My teeth are still good.3 Despite the scores of cases in which Milner served as defense attorney , many of the lawyer’s obituaries led with the Novak case, pointing out that he was “famous as Novak’s counsel.”4 Milner probably would have been less than pleased to have been most remembered for a case that he had lost. The ace tracker, Red Perrin, rode his success in the Novak case to the top of the detective profession. Several papers in the United States and abroad had carried the story of his trip to the Klondike and the pursuit and capture of his prey. The Travelers portrayed him as a hero, and featured his diary in its newsletter for many months. Gus Thiel, head of the detective agency, was especially pleased that Perrin had “got his man.”5 The quiet, auburn-­ haired detective had developed a fondness for Iowa, but it was not due solely to the Novak case. He had fallen in love with one of Ed Murray’s cousins, Mary Agnes Murray. She was twenty years old at the time of the Novak trial, a smart young woman who had attended private school in Dubuque and was a student at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana. Perrin courted her for many years, until he was named general agent of Thiel’s office in Montreal. After that, his visits to Iowa became fewer and fewer until he finally decided that the current situation with Mary was intolerable. And so, after about a six-­ year courtship, on November 15, 1904, Red Perrin and Mary Agnes Murray were married.6 The ceremony was short and low-­ key, as her mother had died recently, and was held in the home of her father at 757 Fifth Avenue in Cedar Rapids. After the wedding, the couple boarded the evening train to Denver for their honeymoon, and planned to be back in Cedar Rapids for Thanksgiving, before Perrin had to return to Montreal.7 But the ace detective was not destined to stay in Canada for much longer. Gus Thiel moved him to New York, where he became managing director of the agency’s New York branch, located at 170 Broad- 222 t h e w h i t e pa l a c e a n d t h e f o r t way in lower Manhattan.8 By then, he and Mary had moved into an apartment in Brooklyn, as even then the cost of living in Manhattan was prohibitive. In 1909, the couple had a child, a daughter whom they named Helen, and shortly thereafter, the family left Brooklyn and moved into a larger apartment at 611 West 111th Street in Manhattan. During that time, Mary Agnes Perrin...

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