October 25

October 25 is the night Leroy Fry was killed, and a turning point in the case because two separate designs converged on Fry’s body. Edgar Allan Poe’s reconstruction distinguishes those who needed a heart-bearing corpse from Augustus Landor, who intended to kill Fry himself; Landor’s later admissions connect the night to the false appearance of Satanism and to the investigation that followed.

The Two Plans

Poe provisionally identifies the first party as Artemus Marquis and Lea Marquis. They were watching for a dead body and, in his account, would have taken any suitable corpse; Fry’s identity mattered less than the presence of a heart. Poe distinguishes this need from a willingness to kill: the pair would not kill to obtain a body.

The other party, provisionally named Augustus by Poe, had a specific target. Landor’s inward recollection confirms the force of the reconstruction: he recognizes that the returning suspect would have feared being apprehended, while Poe describes him as having completed his deadly purpose before escaping notice. The difference between the two plans is central to the date’s significance: a search for a corpse intersected with a murder committed for another reason.

The Night and Its Aftermath

After the killing, Landor returned to his cottage at Buttermilk Falls. The following day he was summoned back to West Point, where he could reasonably believe that the authorities had discovered his crime. Instead, the discovery that Fry’s body had been mutilated gave Landor cover: the additional offense redirected attention toward the people who had taken the corpse and led the authorities to seek his assistance in finding them.

Landor later admitted that he had been careless in leaving a note with Fry. He said Fry had believed it came from Patsy, for whom Fry had been sweet on. Landor also acknowledged arranging the deaths of sheep and cows; he explained that he removed the hearts of the other two men he killed to make their deaths appear to be the work of Satanism. These admissions place the night’s murder within a wider effort to misdirect suspicion, while distinguishing Landor’s violence from the body-seeking plan Poe attributes to Artemus Marquis and Lea Marquis.

What the Date Reveals

In a later exchange, Landor recalls that Fry and Randolph Ballinger, under duress, both named Mattie as the hostess on the night in question and remembered what she had been wearing. They disclosed those details but refused to betray their comrades. Their silence helps explain why the circumstances surrounding October 25 could remain obscured even as the investigation accumulated clues: the men would speak about the gathering, but not identify those involved.

The date therefore functions as more than a point on a chronology. Poe uses the night to separate motive from opportunity and to show how one crime’s aftermath concealed another: Fry’s murder gave Landor an opening to pose as an investigator of the mutilation that followed. The reconstruction also shows the limits of what was initially known. The identity of the body-seekers, Landor’s responsibility, and the purpose of the heart-taking become legible through later questioning and confession, rather than through the apparent sequence of discoveries alone.