Haverstraw

Haverstraw enters the investigation through a newspaper report of animals killed and opened for their hearts. Though the account does not identify the culprit, its resemblance to the crime at West Point turns a nearby community into a crucial point of comparison: what first appears to be a threat confined to the Academy may belong to a wider pattern.

The Report from Haverstraw

In an October 31 newspaper item, Mr. Elias Humphreys reported that a cow and a sheep belonging to him had been found in a terrible condition the previous Friday. Both animals had been killed by slashes across their throats, and both had been carved open; their hearts had been removed, with no trace of either organ left behind. The report offered no suspect and no explanation. Its starkly practical details established a disturbing parallel with the missing heart in the West Point case without proving that the same person was responsible.

The article also mentioned reports of a similar assault on a cow belonging to Humphreys’s neighbor, Mr. Joseph L. Roy, but explicitly said those reports could not be corroborated. That qualification matters: Haverstraw supplies a confirmed pair of mutilated animals and an additional rumor, not a confirmed series of identical crimes. The distinction leaves the investigation with evidence suggestive enough to widen its scope, but too uncertain to settle the connection.

Proximity and Suspicion

The report changes the scale of the inquiry. Reading it on October 31, Captain Hitchcock brandished the newspaper and treated the animal killings as possible sacrifices, asking whether any creature could be safe from the unknown assailant. Augustus Landor answered that cows were preferable victims to cadets, a dry reply that did not resolve whether the violence had moved away from West Point. Haverstraw was not remote: Hitchcock observed that a cadet could reach it in a little over an hour, or sooner by obtaining a horse. Landor agreed that a cadet could cover the distance, then added that an officer could as well. The suggestion widened suspicion beyond the Academy’s students, though Hitchcock answered it only with a steely look and a shake of his head.

Hitchcock followed the exchange with questions about Landor’s inquiry at West Point. Landor had searched the icehouse and found ice, but no heart or other clue; his conversations with instructors had produced speculation rather than a useful lead. The contrast sharpened Haverstraw’s importance: the newspaper supplied a concrete parallel to the missing heart, while the Academy offered theories without comparable evidence. Yet neither the distance between the places nor the likeness of the crimes established who had traveled, or whether the same perpetrator was responsible.

The Later Identification of the Heart

When a doctor examined a heart in the investigation, he judged it too large to have come from a sheep and almost certainly a cow’s. Captain Hitchcock immediately connected that assessment to the newspaper account from Haverstraw, recalling that one of the two dismembered animals reported there had been a cow. His conclusion that the specimen must have come from Haverstraw gave the earlier report a new role: it was no longer merely a parallel to the missing heart at West Point, but a possible source for the heart now under discussion.

The exchange nonetheless preserves the difference between a compelling lead and a demonstrated fact. Augustus Landor remembered the report and accepted Hitchcock’s explanation as plausible, but did not claim that the heart had been traced to a particular animal or that the same assailant had committed both crimes. Hitchcock’s frustration with Landor’s reluctance to make a definitive judgment exposes the investigation’s central evidentiary limit: the physical resemblance and the reported location fit, but the connection remains an inference. Haverstraw therefore narrows the field of explanation without resolving the mystery.

Animal Victims and the Academy’s Fears

The Haverstraw report also unsettles the boundary between the investigation’s human and animal victims. Captain Hitchcock’s question about whether any of God’s creatures could be safe casts the violence as a threat extending beyond the Academy, while Augustus Landor’s reply ranks the danger differently: cattle are preferable to cadets. The exchange is grimly comic, but its humor depends on the fact that the animals have already been killed and mutilated. Their suffering is acknowledged, then measured against the danger to the young men whose safety is the Academy’s immediate concern.

Hitchcock’s flaring nostrils, which Landor likens to a bull’s, make that concern bodily rather than abstract. The sight returns Landor to his own experience as a cadet, linking the officer’s anger to the institution’s vulnerable past and present. Haverstraw thus enlarges the fear surrounding the West Point case while exposing its human-centered limits: the animals’ deaths matter as suffering, but also as signs that may help explain a danger to cadets.