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The Murder of the Century
Paul Collins
The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars
Crown
June 2011
On Sale: June 14, 2011
336 pages ISBN: 0307592200 EAN: 9780307592200 Hardcover
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Mystery
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.
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