The Disappearance of Juliet Poyntz in 1937

 

Today we return to the streets of New York in search of answers to another long unsolved political assassination, that of Juliet Poyntz, a leading member of the US Communist Party who turned against Stalin after witnessing first hand the terror accompanying the Show Trials of 1936-37 in Russia. After her disappearance, it was Carlo Tresca more than any other radical who pointed directly to Stalin's killers as responsible for her death. 

Shortly before her disappearance on June 5, 1937, she met with Tresca and explained to him exactly why she could no longer associate herself with the Party. She had not yet gone public with what she had seen in Russia nor with what she knew of Soviet crimes in the US, but she may well have revealed far more to Tresca than the Party could tolerate. Or at least, Party leaders may have thought so. This possibly explains why he was assassinated  in January 1943, a time when Stalin was desperate for US aid to continue the war against Hitler. If members of the Soviet consulate in New York were complicit in Poyntz' abduction, that would have proven most embarrassing to the dictator.

Poyntz' New York story begins at Barnard College, where she was a leading student not only in academics but also in drama and debate. Following a brief early marriage, she took up a life of activism,  eventually becoming education director for the ILGWU. When the Socialist Party split after the Bolshevik Revolution, she sided with the newly formed Communist Party and became head of its Women's Department in 1928. Later, she dropped out of public view, traveled to Europe and Asia, and was widely assumed to have become an agent for the Comintern, Stalin's international intelligence/terrorism branch. In 1937 she was back in New York trying to raise money from her deceased ex-husband's estate, telling her attorney Elias Lieberman that she needed to "get away fast." Both Lieberman and Tresca later said that she seemed very frightened at this point in her life.

In the spring of 1938, Juliet Poyntz was staying at the American Women's Association at 353 West 57th Street in Manhattan, a low cost hotel for women. The building is still there, quite shabby and  undergoing renovations, but 84 years ago it was a very respectable place for single women. 

According to Denise Lynn (Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz, UMass Press 2021) the only thing hotel employees saw  as unusual about Miss Poyntz was the frequency of phone calls she received from one unidentified man:

"Sometime in the spring of 1937, telephone operators at the American Woman’s Association Clubhouse at 353 West 57th Street in Manhattan began noticing that a man with a deep, German-sounding voice was calling daily for a resident named Juliet Stuart Poyntz. Poyntz was by all accounts a good resident. She was well educated, articulate, and had a background in teaching at Columbia University, where she was also working on a historical research project. She paid her rent on time and kept her room tidy. It was not particularly unusual for residents to get phone calls, but the man with the deep voice called so frequently that the clubhouse employees remembered him. Poyntz took the calls every time, so she must have known him. These daily calls did not raise any alarms, until Poyntz disappeared."

 She must have led a very isolated life by this point because no friend or acquaintance noticed that she had gone missing on June 5. According to the same source, it was the hotel manager Mr. Thackerberry who checked on her room when the rent went unpaid for several weeks:

Still, there was nothing to alert him to her unusual life—except for those daily phone calls. The telephone operators noticed that Poyntz took the calls throughout the spring and into the early summer. Then, on a hot June evening, after speaking briefly to the man, she left the clubhouse and reportedly walked in the direction of Central Park, three short blocks away. She did not return that day, or the next. After the rent went unpaid for several weeks, Thackerberry realized that something was wrong. He went to her deserted room and found an open jar of Jell-O on the desk, stale breadcrumbs on the table, and her belongings still in their places. The operators told him about the calls from the deep-voiced man and said that he had never called the clubhouse again after the June evening she had disappeared.

Thackerberry called Poyntz’s emergency contact, Marie B. MacDonald, a former co-worker and a long-time friend. MacDonald contacted Poyntz’s attorney, Elias Lieberman, also a former co-worker, and the two went to her room to look around. There was no indication that Poyntz had planned to be away from her room for long: she had left behind her passport and her citizenship papers and had not withdrawn any money from her skimpy bank account. The two contacted another friend of Poyntz’s, and together they packed up her belongings and put them into storage. They decided not to alert authorities because they knew that Poyntz was working for the underground and they did not want the police or FBI tracking her.

Seven months passed, and still no formal missing person’s report was made. MacDonald, concerned that Poyntz had failed to contact her, claimed that she had pressed Lieberman to contact the police, but he never did. Eventually, it was Thackerberry who unintentionally alerted them. After he mentioned to a police officer friend that one of his tenants had gone missing, that officer or another employee of the New York City police leaked the news to the press.

The mystery is why neither the friend whom she listed as her emergency contact nor her lawyer ever reported her missing. Were they active party members complicit in her disappearance or simply afraid for their own lives? Carlo Tresca, the longtime editor of the weekly il Martello, had no such hesitation once he learned of Poyntz' disappearance. Largely thanks to his unrelenting drumbeat of accusations, a grand jury investigated her disappearance and called the veteran anarchist as a witness. Tresca asserted, perhaps based on what she had told him, that Poyntz had been lured to Central Park by a former lover and current Comintern agent, Shachno Epstein, but no indictment was ever returned. A somewhat unreliable ex-communist named Paul Crouch accused the Stalinist executioner George Mink of being the one who lured her to her death, but there is no evidence she ever knew Mink. 

In the late 1940s many leading American communists became what could be called professional anti-communists, offering exposes of the Party's crimes to the Dies Committee (later HUAC) and to Joseph McCarthy. Among this group was Whittaker Chambers, Sidney Hook, Elizabeth Bentley and a long-ago founder of the Party, Benjamin Gitlow. He offered a very detailed take on Juliet Poyntz' disappearance. Whether it was based on insider knowledge or speculation is impossible to say. However, Peoples World, which bills itself as the successor to the Daily Worker, dismisses it as fiction:

 Poyntz was disillusioned by Stalin's purges and was unwilling to continue as an espionage agent for the USSR. Gitlow relates that the OGPU/NKVD used Poyntz's former lover, a man named Shakne Epshtein (Shachno Epstein (1881-1945)), the associate editor of the Communist Yiddish daily Morgen Freiheit (and an OGPU/NKVD agent himself), to lure Poyntz out for a walk in Central Park. "They met at Columbus Circle and proceeded to walk through Central Park...Shachno took her by the arm and led her up a side path, where a large black limousine hugged the edge of the walk ... Two men jumped out, grabbed Miss Poyntz, shoved her into the car and sped away." Gitlow relates that the assassins took Poyntz to the woods near the Roosevelt estate in Dutchess County, and killed and buried her there. "The body was covered with lime and dirt. On top were placed dead leaves and branches which the three killers trampled down with their feet."

Did the Comintern agent Epstein really meet Juliet Poyntz at this busy spot on the evening of June 5, 1937? 

Did Epstein really lead her to Central Park Drive, in 1937 a busy thoroughfare for automobiles, where she was seized and thrown into a waiting limousine?  

This scenario is certainly possible, maybe even likely, but if Gitlow had evidence of a brazen abduction and murder, why was he never called before a grand jury? In fact, why was he never indicted for concealing evidence of a crime? There are no answers at this late date, but it does seem likely that Poyntz was silenced so that she could not reveal what she had seen in Russia. And my own growing conviction is that Tresca's murder  five years later was linked to this never-solved disappearance.

"353 West 57,"  a short story based on the Juliet Poyntz mystery, was published in the journal, Drunk Monkeys, in May, 2023.