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A German-born gunman shot J.P. Morgan in Glen Cove in a protest about World War I

His Calling Cards Were Guns

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

NINE MONTHS into The Great War, 128 Americans were among the 1,198 persons who drowned when the British liner Lusitania, on its way from New York to Liverpool, was sunk by a German U-boat. The ship was carrying 173 tons of rifle ammunition and shells for the British and French war effort. The United States, ostensibly neutral, underwent a severe case of the jitters. Two months later, on the morning of Saturday, July 3, 1915, the financier J.P. Morgan and his wife, Jane, were having a leisurely breakfast with the British ambassador and his wife at Morgan's three- story brick mansion on their 60-acre East Island estate, at Glen Cove's Matinecock Point.

The front doorbell rang. Answering was the butler, Henry Physick, impeccably dressed in a dark coat and gray striped trousers. At the door was a slender, gaunt, 40-ish man wearing a loose-fitting dark gray suit with a slight bulge in each jacket pocket.

"I want to see Mr. Morgan," he said, handing Physick a business card that read "Summer Society Directory, Represented by Thomas C. Lester."

"What is your business with him?" asked Physick.

"I can't discuss that with you," replied the visitor. "I am an old friend of Mr. Morgan's. He will see me."

Physick was suspicious. "You must tell me the business you have with him."

Instead of answering, the visitor withdrew a .38-cal. pistol from his left pocket and a .32-cal. from his right, jamming them into Physick's body and pushing him into the front hallway. Physick calmly led the visitor to the library. Then, after backing out of the library, Physick turned and ran in the direction of the breakfast room, shouting repeatedly, "Upstairs, Mr. Morgan!" The butler then ran below to the servants' quarters to get aid.

Led by the 47-year-old Morgan, the entire breakfast party fled upstairs by a rear staircase. They soon heard a shout that someone was heading up the front stairway. Both Morgan and his wife hurried to the head of the stairs to confront the intruder, who later gave his name as Frank Holt.

"Now, Mr. Morgan, I have got you," Holt said as he approached the second floor landing. Quickly, Mrs. Morgan jumped forward and threw herself against the gunman. The 220-pound Morgan immediately pushed his wife aside and jumped at Holt. In the melee, two shots were fired from Holt's right-hand pistol, both hitting Morgan in the groin. Morgan fell on top of Holt, wrestled away one gun and pinned the second arm.

Now came the coup de grce. Returning from the basement with the only weapon he could find, a large chunk of coal, Physick plunked Holt on the right temple and the gunman lay stunned. Only then did the servants notice that Holt carried a stick of dynamite in his pocket, which they promptly thrust into a bucket of water.

At 7 p.m. Morgan's doctors issued a bulletin: "A further examination of Mr. Morgan's wounds shows that the bullets did not involve any vital organs. The condition of the patient continues excellent."

Holt, who used more aliases than a secret agent, was a mystery man. As the story unraveled in the next six days, the attempted assassination, if that's what it was, took on many of the lurid elements of a story usually found in the Police Gazette, rather than in The New York Times, where it was extensively reported: spousal murder by poisoning, phony names, explosives-making, bombing of the U.S. Capitol, and last, a grandly executed aerial suicide.

Arraigned before a Glen Cove justice of the peace, Holt identified himself as 40 years old, born in Dallas, where his wife, Leona, and two children lived. He had just received a PhD from Cornell University in Ithaca, was the son-in-law of the Rev. O.F. Sensabaugh of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Dallas, and was due to take a teaching job in the fall at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

In a written statement, Holt said he was not trying to murder Morgan, but wanted him to use his influence to stop the financing of war loans to the European allies and to have an embargo put on shipments of ammunition to them. He had chosen Morgan because his bank was acting as the U.S. purchasing agent for food and munitions being supplied to the Allied forces, even though the United States was officially neutral in the war. In response to a reporter's question, Holt said, "You seem to think my sympathies are pro- German. That is not the case. I am merely against wholesale slaughter."

Later in the afternoon, Holt was taken to the county jail in Mineola.

That was Saturday, and Holt had been busy. The previous evening, at 11:23 p.m., an exploding bomb wrecked the Senate reception room at the U.S. Capitol, although no one was injured. In his confession, Holt took responsibility for that, too.

Police learned that two weeks earlier, using the name "Mr. Patton," he had rented a two-room bungalow in Central Park (the name of Bethpage until 1936), where he had honed his bomb-making skills. On June 28, using the name "C. Hendricks," he had received two cases containing 120 pounds of dynamite at the Syosset railroad station, shipped from the Long Island City branch of the Aetna Explosives Co.

But Holt could not, or would not, account for his whereabouts before 1909. The reason, it was soon learned, was that he was not American-born Frank Holt at all. He was German-born Erich Muenter, and he was wanted in Cambridge, Mass., for poisoning an earlier, pregnant wife with arsenic in 1906. An unidentified Chicago source told The Times that Muenter took his two children and his dead wife's body to Chicago, where he left the children with his mother- in-law and had the body cremated. He left town and hid out in Mexico, where he worked as an accountant. He later reappeared in Texas as Frank Holt, married again in 1910 and had three more children.

Now he was at the Nassau County Jail, under 24-hour guard because the warden felt he was suicidal. About 10:30 p.m. on July 6, his guard, Jerry Ryan, stepped out of Holt's cell for a moment and left the door open behind him. Holt, who had feigned sleeping, quickly stepped outside the cell, climbed up the bars to the top of the two- tiered cell block - about 15 feet - turned and made a mortal dive head-first into the concrete floor.

A letter to his wife was found in Holt's cell. It ended: "All please pardon me for all the heartaches I have brought you. Pray with me that the slaughter will stop. My heart breaks. Good-bye."