The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, Murdered By Edgar Allan Poe

In July 1841, in Castle Point, Hoboken, the dead body of a beautiful brunette was found. The name of the 21 year old girl was Mary Cecilia Rogers. She had been horribly outraged and brutally violated.  In the following year, Edgar Allan Poe's “Mystery of Marie Rogêt” was published in Snowden's Ladies Companion. “The extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public,” he wrote, “will be recognized by all readers in the late murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, at New York.” After his “article” about “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, Poe wrote again a true crime story, with his “friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin” solving the mystery.

Poe situated his story in Paris and changed the Hudson in the Seine and Mary Rogers in Marie Rogêt, but he indeed followed the facts of the murder of Mary Rogers and argued that the girl was murdered by an individual, not by a gang, and that this person was well-dressed, had a “dark complexion” and was “a young naval officer, notorious for its excesses”.  At this point, the author who was known for his brilliant pointes, ended his “article” with a cheap trick: the publisher found it inappropriate to reveal the identity of the man with the dark complexion, who was once admitted to the military academy of West Point and got fired because of his excesses, and who could only be Edgar Allan Poe himself. Poe had probably met Mary Cecilia Rogers in a bookseller shop on Broadway, near the tobacco-store where she worked.  In 1837, Edgar Poe rented a few rooms in Manhattan, in a house that belonged to the famous bookseller William Gowans. His shop on Broadway, near the tobacco-store of Anderson, became Poe's office and meeting place.

In his famous poem The Raven , Poe dealt with his obsession with death and destruction. In his “spirit of the perverse”, the death of a beautiful and beloved woman gave him “poetic chills”. And some years after the murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, he was looking for a “Mary” on the scene of the crime…

The whole story is here .