Bucholz and the Detectives

Henry Schulte came to America carrying a fortune and a conviction that someone was going to kill him. He bought a farm outside South Norwalk, Connecticut, kept to himself, and made the villagers curious in the way that only a wealthy eccentric can. He was right about the danger, if wrong about where it would come from. He was found murdered on his own land, and more than fifty thousand dollars of his money was gone.

Suspicion landed fast on William Bucholz, the young German servant who had been living alongside him, and who suddenly had expensive habits and no good explanation for them. Suspicion, though, is not evidence. What follows is one of the strangest operations in Pinkerton's catalog: a detective placed inside the Bridgeport jail as a fellow prisoner, befriending Bucholz over months, waiting for the one conversation that would give him away.

Pinkerton tells it in three movements, The Crime, The History, and The Detection, reaching back to a village in Germany decades earlier to explain how a genial farmer became a frightened miser. Our annotated edition works from the 1880 text, with the historical context Pinkerton assumes you already have, and a clear-eyed look at the methods he was so proud of: the informant in the next cell, the manufactured trust, and what it meant that this was becoming normal police work in America.