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

ALSO BY PAUL COLLINS

The Book of William:
How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World

The Trouble with Tom:
The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine

Not Even Wrong:
A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism

Sixpence House:
Lost in a Town of Books

Banvard’s Folly:
Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World

The tremendous press coverage of this affair, with sometimes more than a dozen newspapers fielding reporters at once—not to mention the later memoirs of its participants—allowed me to draw on many eyewitness sources. All of the dialogue in quotation marks comes directly from conversations recorded in their accounts, and while I have freely edited out verbiage, not a word has been added.

—P. C.

THE VICTIM

(photo credit p1.1)

IT WAS A SLOW AFTERNOON
for news. The newsboys along the East River piers still readied themselves on a scorching summer Saturday for the incoming ferry passengers from Brooklyn, armed with innumerable battling editions of Manhattan’s dailies for June 26, 1897. There were sensational “yellow papers” like Pulitzer’s
World
and Hearst’s
Journal
, the stately flagships of the
Herald
and the
Sun
, and stray runts like the
Post
and the
Times
. By two thirty, the afternoon editions were coming while the morning papers were getting left in stacks to bake in the sun. But there were no orders by President McKinley, no pitched battles in the Sudan, and no new Sousa marches to report. The only real story that day was the weather:
OH! YES, IT IS HOT ENOUGH!
gasped one headline. The disembarking ferry passengers who couldn’t afford lemonade seltzer from
riverside refreshment stalls instead downed the usual fare—unsterilized buttermilk for two cents, or sterilized for three—and then headed for East Third Street, where Mayor Strong was giving the dedication speech for the new 700-foot-long promenade pier. It was the city’s first,
a confection of whitewashed wrought iron, and under its cupola a brass band was readying the rousing oompah “Elsie from Chelsea.”

Weaving between the newsboys and the ladies opening up parasols, though, were four boys walking the other way. They were escaping their hot and grimy brick
tenements on Avenue C, and joining a
perspiring crowd of thousands didn’t sound much better than what they’d just left. To them, the East Eleventh Street pier had all the others beat; it was a disused tie-up just a few feet above the water, and surrounded by cast-off ballast rocks that made for an easy place to dry clothes. The boys took it over like a pirate’s landing party, claiming it as their own and then lounging with their
flat caps and straw boaters pulled rakishly low. It was a good place to gawk at the nearly completed boat a couple of piers over—
a mysterious ironclad in the shape of a giant sturgeon, which its inventor promised would skim across the Atlantic at a forty-three-knot clip. When the boys tired of that, they turned their gaze back out to the water.

Jack McGuire spotted it first: a red bundle, rolling in with the tide and toward the ferry slip, then bobbing away again.

“Say, I’ll get that!” yelled McGuire’s friend Jimmy McKenna.

“Aw, will you?” Jack taunted him. But Jimmy was already stripped down and diving off the pier. A wiry thirteen-year-old with a powerful stroke in the water, he grabbed the bundle just before the wake from the Greenpoint ferry could send it floating away. They’d split the loot; it might be a wad of clothes, or some cargo toppled off a freighter. There was no telling what you’d find in the East River.

Jimmy dragged the parcel up onto the rocks with effort; the boys found it was the size of a sofa cushion, and heavy—at least thirty pounds, tightly wrapped in a gaudy red-and-gold oilcloth.

“It’s closed,” Jimmy said as he dripped on the rocks. The package had been expertly tied with coils of white rope; it wouldn’t be easy for his cold and wet fingers to loosen it. But Jack had a knife handy, and he set to cutting in. As kids gathered around to see what treasure had been found, Jack sawed faster until a slip of the knife sank the blade into the bundle. Blood welled out from inside. He figured that meant they’d found something good; all kinds of farm goods were transported from the Brooklyn side of the river. It might be a side of fresh pork.

“I’m going to see what’s in there,” he proclaimed, and dug harder into the ropes. As they fell aside, Jack peeled back the clean new oilcloth to reveal another layer: dirty and blackened burlap, tied with twine. Jack cut that away too, and found yet another layer, this one of
dry, coarse brown paper. Annoyed, he yanked it off. And then, for an interminable moment, the gathered boys stopped dead still.