What work had he been doing?
Who owed him money?
Who had he planned to visit?
The name John Colt surfaced.
Then the investigation acquired a witness.
Asa Wheeler.
The man in the next office.
The Sounds Through the Wall
Wheeler remembered September 17.
The strange disturbance.
The sounds coming from Colt's office.
The violent noise.
The heavy fall.
At some point he had looked through a keyhole.
He saw someone bent over something on the floor.
He could not necessarily know at that moment exactly what he was seeing.
But after Adams disappeared, the memory looked different.
Wheeler also noticed the office itself.
A crate that had been there was gone.
The floor appeared to have been cleaned or scrubbed.
Each detail alone could be innocent.
A box disappears from a business office because it has been shipped.
Floors get cleaned.
People argue.
Something heavy falls.
But investigators rarely solve cases through one magical clue.
They solve them when innocent explanations begin collapsing under accumulation.
Samuel Adams goes to see John Colt.
Samuel Adams disappears.
A neighbor hears a fight.
A heavy crash follows.
Colt's floor is scrubbed.
A large crate disappears the next morning.
Someone transports that crate to the harbor.
At some point, coincidence stops looking like coincidence.
Colt Walks Into Adams's Shop
Then John Colt did something strange.
On September 22, several days after Adams vanished, Colt visited Adams's printing shop.
He asked about his books.
And he asked where Adams was.
The timing was extraordinary.
Colt knew exactly where Adams was.
Or at least he knew where he had tried to send him.
One of Adams's associates reportedly made clear that Samuel had last been seen heading to meet Colt.
Colt did not provide a useful explanation.
He left.
If the visit was meant to make him appear innocent, it had the opposite potential effect.
He had placed himself directly inside the conversation about the missing man.
People around Adams now had even more reason to examine the business relationship between them.
Follow the Business Records
Adams's ledgers became evidence.
This is one of the details that gives the Colt-Adams case its distinctly nineteenth-century detective quality.
There were no fingerprints in the modern forensic sense.
No DNA.
No computerized financial records.
Investigators followed paper.
Who owed whom?
What job had been printed?
What balance remained?
What appointment did Adams have?
The account books pointed back toward Colt.
Lane, Wheeler and people connected with Adams took the information to city authorities.
New York's mayor, Robert Hunter Morris, became personally involved.
This itself shows how sensational the disappearance had become.
Officials needed to find the cartman who had taken the missing crate away from Colt's building.
The city's superintendent connected with carts, William Godfrey, helped locate the driver.
Richard Barstow was found.
And Barstow remembered the job.
The box had gone to the Kalamazoo.
For investigators, this was the breakthrough.
Until that moment, the crate was an object that had vanished.
Now it had a destination.
A ship.
The question was whether they were already too late.
The Kalamazoo
Imagine the realization.
A suspicious box left Colt's building the morning after Adams vanished.
It was loaded onto a ship bound south.
If that vessel had sailed, authorities might need to send word to another port.
Days could pass.
Cargo could be unloaded.
Moved again.
Opened by strangers.
Lost.
But the Kalamazoo was still there.
The storm had held her in New York for nearly a week.
The crate had never escaped the city.
Accounts differ somewhat in the exact sequence by which crew and authorities converged on the box, but the central facts are consistent.
A powerful odor was coming from the hold.
It was traced to Colt's crate.
The box was brought up.
The lid was opened.
And Samuel Adams was found inside.
The murder had literally begun to reveal itself.
Colt had tried to use salt, wrapping and distance.
But decomposition continued.
The smell reached beyond the wooden walls.
The secret had become physically impossible to contain.
Identification
The condition of the body made identification difficult.
The head injuries were severe.
Clothing had largely been removed.
But Colt had not eliminated everything.
A gold ring remained on the little finger.
There was also a distinctive scar on the left leg.
Those features helped establish that the man in the box was Samuel Adams.
This is one of the most striking ironies in the case.
Colt's plan was large.
Kill.
Clean.
Strip.
Bind.
Pack.
Salt.
Address.
Hire a wagon.
Choose a ship.
Send it to another city.
Yet identification came down to details small enough to overlook.
A ring.
A scar.
Crime plans often fail that way.
Not because the offender forgets the central plan.
Because reality contains more details than one person can control.
Back to Broadway and Chambers
Now investigators had a body.
A victim.
A box.
A cartman.
A pickup location.
They went back to the building at Broadway and Chambers.
The murder investigation was closing geographically.
Samuel Adams had walked into that building alive.
His body had left it inside cargo.
The room between those two moments belonged to John Colt.
Wheeler described what he heard.
The sounds of confrontation.
The fall.
The activity.
The missing box.
The cleaned floor.
John Colt could no longer explain the case as a simple missing-person mystery.
Authorities arrested him.
Among the issues investigators examined were Adams's possessions and Colt's handling of property after the killing.
The prosecution would later argue that his conduct after Adams died revealed calculation rather than the panic of an innocent man who had accidentally killed someone in self-defense.
And eventually Colt admitted the central fact.
He had killed Samuel Adams.
The battle moved from:
Who killed him?
to:
What kind of killing was it?
Self-Defense
John Colt did not tell the jury:
I never touched him.
He could not.
The evidence had gone too far.
Instead, the defense argued that Adams had attacked first.
According to Colt's account, the argument escalated over money.
Adams assaulted him.
Choked him with his neckwear.
Colt desperately reached for a nearby object.
He struck until Adams released him.