DR. MARKOE RITES HELD UNDER GUARD
Surgeon’s Funeral Takes Place in Chapel Near Where he Was Slain.
J.P. MORGAN A MOURNER
No Reference to Last Sunday’s Tragedy is Made at the Service.
From the chapel of St. George’s Protestant Episcopal Church
in Stuyvesant Square, where a crazed assassin’s bullet brought his distinguished
life to a close last Sunday morning, Dr. James Wright Markoe was buried
yesterday after a ceremony from which every one concerned strove to obliterate
every hint of the tragedy which so shocked the whole community.
But though the Rev. Dr. Karl Reiland, pastor of the church, made not the
faintest reference to the manner in which Dr. Markoe’s life was ended nor the
remotest mention of Thomas W. Simpkin, the escaped lunatic who shot him to death,
there was not a second of the half-hour service during which the minds of the
mourners did not dwell upon that gruesome business.
There were among them not only the widow, who had been in the balcony of the
church when the sudden attack upon her husband startled the worshippers, and Dr.
George E. Brewer, who got a flesh wound when he tried to prevent the murderer’s
escape, but others who had heard the shots and seen the powder flashes and lived
through all the tense moments of the drama. And even though the service was held
in the chapel, a separate structure from the church which it adjoins, Sunday’s
misfortune seemed almost palpably present.
The chapel was crowded to its seating capacity, with a few standees. Those who
attended were friends of Dr. Markoe, professional associates, a guard of honor
of traffic patrolmen, sent out of gratitude for the surgeon’s services to the
Police Department, and representatives of the Lying-In Hospital, across the
street, which Dr. Markoe founded with money contributed by the late J. Pierpont
Morgan.
From the moment they entered, there were manifest on all sides evidences of deep
and genuine grief. But just as the congregation on Sunday, with disciplined
self-control, went through the service to its end after the insane man’s deed
had profaned the edifice and the stricken physician had been carried out,
yesterday those who gathered for the last tribute kept their emotions so well
under control that not a sound disturbed the quiet, simple service except the
dismal beating of the rain on the tin roof which at times almost muffled the
droning of the prayers for the dead.
While inside were as many as could comfortably be cared for, each with a special
ticket of admission, no morbid crowd stood without. This was due to
extraordinarily painstaking police arrangements. Fearing that some irresponsible
crank might be moved to emulate the assassin’s deed, the police, under
command of Deputy Commissioner Wallis, took such precautions as cannot be
recalled in connection with any other funeral in this city. Details of uniformed
men were posted at every possible approach to the edifice, and not a single
person was allowed to approach the chapel after 9 o’clock in the morning - an
hour before the funeral - unless he or she bore a ticket to the chapel or could
give excellent evidence of legitimate business in the neighborhood.
There were no pall bearers. The casket, smothered in a blanket of fragrant red
roses, was borne into the chapel precisely at 10 o’clock while the organ played
gently and the little honor guard of traffic policemen in command of a sergeant
lined the aisles at salute. There followed it the physician’s widow, Mr. and
Mrs. C.S. Sargent, Arthur L. Devens, a son-in-law, Markoe Roberts, and Mr. and
Mrs. Henry Markoe.
The services were concluded with a prayer, the pronouncing of the benediction
and the recessional hymn, “ Lead, Kindly Light,” played softly as the casket was
borne from the chapel. The pastor delivered no eulogy. The body was taken to
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, to await the return from the West of Dr. Markoe’s daughter, Mrs. William Jay Schieffelin, Jr.
The ushers in the chapel were Morton S. Paton, Herbert L. Satterlee, Arthur
Devens and Markoe Robertson. One of the first of the city’s noted figures to
arrive was J.P. Morgan, who, it will be recalled, was himself the victim of the
lunatic’s bullet when Eric Munter shot him in his Long Island home early in the
war. Others who attended were R. Fulton Cutting, William Fellowes Morgan,
William Jay Schieffelin, Henry W. Monroe, Charles H. Brown, William Gibbs
McAdoo, Chief Magistrate William McAdoo, Olcott G. Lane and George E. Warren.
TO ASK INDICTMENT TODAY.
Seek to Send Dr. Markoe’s Slayer to Asylum Quickly.
Assistant District Attorney Benedict Dineen will ask the Grand
Jury this morning to indict Thomas W. Simpkin, the slayer of Dr. James W. Markoe,
for murder in the first degree. The witnesses will include Herbert W. Satterlee,
Dr. George E. Brewer, Medical Examiner Charles Norris and two policemen. After
the Grand Jury meets application will be made to Judge Mulqueen in General
Sessions to appoint a lunacy commission, so that Simpkin may be committed to the
Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminal Insane.
Mr. Benedict received a letter yesterday from G.W. Brown, Superintendent of the
Eastern State Hospital at Williamsburg, Va., the institution to which Simpkin
voluntarily went on March 15. Mr. Brown said that when Simpkin arrived at the
institution he said he was “Jonah, who had been swallowed by the whale.”
In a letter to Mr. Brown after his escape from the Institution Simpkin said:
“I am Jonah, in the belly of the whale. It takes an ancient mariner to find the
old whale. This one was born in 1773 and has only one attendant. This is hell, a
sane man in an insane asylum.”