Murder of the Century : The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars

by Collins, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780307592200
• ISBN10: 0307592200
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-06-14
• Publisher: Crown

Summary

;No writer better articulates ourinterest in the confluence of hope, eccentricity, and the timelessness of the bold and strange than Paul Collins. ;-DAVE EGGERS On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell's Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio-a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor-all raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn't identify with certainty, and who the defense claimed wasn't even dead. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale-a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.

Table of Contents

A Note on the Text	p. ix
The Victim	p. 1
The Mystery of the River	p. 3
A Detective Reads the Paper	p. 9
The Jigsaw Man	p. 16
The Wrecking Crew	p. 24
Jill the Ripper	p. 34
The Suspects	p. 43
The Baker in Hell's Kitchen	p. 45
The Undertaker's Neighbor	p. 55
The Widow's Friend	p. 64
The Disappearing Shoemaker	p. 71
The Silent Customer	p. 81
The Intdictment	p. 91
A Case of Life and Death	p. 93
Heads or Tails	p. 103
Queen of the Tombs	p. 112
The High Roller	p. 123
Klondike Willie	p. 134
The Trial	p. 147
Corpus Delicti	p. 149
Covered in Blood	p. 160
Caught in the Headlight	p. 171
Scythe and Saw	p. 184
A Wonderful Murder	p. 195
The Verdict	p. 209
Mrs. Nack's Office	p. 211
The Smoker to Sing Sing	p. 222
A Job for Smith and Jones	p. 233
A Story of Life in New York	p. 244
Garry Out Your Own Dead	p. 254
Epilogue: The Last Man Standing	p. 267
Sources	p. 271
Primary Sources	p. 273
Notes	p. 279
Acknowledgments	p. 315
Illustration Credits	p. 316
Index	p. 317
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