Authors: Harold Schechter
Killer Colt (14 page)
Day’s innovation was to create an inexpensive paper sold on the streets, free of political partisanship, and featuring the kinds of stories that have always appealed to ordinary people. Whereas the contents of traditional dailies consisted largely of commodity prices, ship sailings, legal notices, ads for wholesalers, political editorials, and a smattering of small items about subjects like tariffs, congressional doings, and the federal banking system, Day’s penny paper devoted significant space to such titillating topics as steamboat disasters, suicides, and local crimes. The paper was a runaway success.
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It was James Gordon Bennett, however, who turned the penny press into a vehicle of unabashed sensationalism—a precursor of the “yellow” papers that would flourish in the Gilded Age and the tabloid journalism that
helped define the following century. An emigrant from Scotland, Bennett subsisted briefly as a teacher in Halifax before making his way down to Boston, where he scratched out a living as a proofreader in a printing house. Three years later, he moved to New York City, where a chance encounter led to a job with the
Charleston
(S.C.)
Courier
. During the next ten years, he wrote for various newspapers, honing a brash and entertaining style that—in a pattern that would characterize his entire career—tickled the public while incensing his high-minded peers.
In 1835, after several failed ventures as a publisher, he used his last five hundred dollars to launch
The New York Herald
, a four-page penny paper aimed at “the great masses of the community” (as Bennett proclaimed in the inaugural issue). Expanding on Day’s crowd-pleasing formula, Bennett “fed his readers a steady diet of violence, crime, murder, suicide, seduction, and rape in both news reporting and gossip.” In its first two weeks of existence, the
Herald
published accounts of “three suicides, three murders, a fire that killed five persons, an accident in which a man blew off his head, descriptions of a guillotine execution in France, a riot in Philadelphia, a kangaroo hunt in Australia, and the execution of Major John André half a century earlier.”
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What turned the
Herald
into a phenomenon, however, was Bennett’s lip-smacking coverage of the Helen Jewett murder case. A former servant girl, born Dorcas Doyen, from Augusta, Maine, Jewett was axed to death in a stylish Manhattan brothel in the spring of 1836. Though the slaying of prostitutes was nothing new in the city—according to one historian, “twenty girls had perished in the twenty-two brothels in a single block during the preceeding three months”
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—Bennett immediately recognized that the Jewett case contained elements that lifted it above the merely sordid: not only illicit sex and brutal murder but also a beautiful victim with a mysterious past and a handsome young suspect named Richard Robinson from a highly respectable old-line Connecticut family.
On the day after the discovery of Jewett’s savaged body, Bennett—under the blaring headline “Most Atrocious Murder”—devoted nearly an entire page to an account of the crime. He followed this up with a pioneering piece of investigative journalism, personally visiting the crime scene and describing the “ghastly corpse” in rapturous detail:
I could scarcely look at it for a second or two. Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of the corpse as one would the beauties of a statue of marble. It was the most remarkable sight I ever beheld—I never have, and never expect, to see such another. “My God,” exclaimed I, “how like a statue. I can scarcely conceive that form to be a corpse.” No vein was to be seen. The body looked as white—as full—as polished as the purest Parisian marble. The perfect figure—the exquisite limbs—the fine face—the full arms—the beautiful bust—all—all—surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medicis according to the casts generally given of her.
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Thanks to Bennett’s relentlessly exploitive reporting, the story became a nationwide sensation, America’s prototypical media circus. While his many critics deplored his tawdry techniques—one competitor declared that Bennett had “no more decency than a rutting pig,” while Walt Whitman described him as both a “reptile marking his path with slime” and “a midnight ghoul, preying on rottenness and repulsive filth”—the public couldn’t get enough of his product.
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By the time Robinson’s trial ended,
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the
Herald
had become the city’s leading newspaper, confirming its publisher’s view that nothing was better for business than murders of a particularly lurid stripe. “Men who have killed their wives, and committed other such everyday matters, have been condemned, executed, and are forgotten,” wrote Bennett, “but it takes a deed that has some of the sublime of horror about it to attract attention, rally eloquence, and set people crazy.”
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• • •
As Bennett recognized, it took the right mix of ingredients to render a crime irresistible to the public. New Yorkers had to wait another five years for a case as juicy as the murder of Helen Jewett.
On the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, on the Hoboken shore, lay a pastoral spot known as Elysian Fields, “a cleared place of about three or four acres, surrounded on three sides by trees and open on the other to the river.” Easily accessible by steamboat from the Barclay Street launch in
lower Manhattan, this idyllic glade—as lovely, according to one contemporary observer, “as a nook of Paradise before Satan entered its gardens”—offered city dwellers a delightful refuge from the heat, stink, and congestion of the metropolis on stifling summer days.
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On the scorching afternoon of Wednesday, July 28, 1841, a young music instructor named Henry Mallin, along with his friend James Boulard, was strolling north along the grassy riverbank, having debarked at the Hoboken ferry landing shortly after 3:00 p.m. As they gazed into the rippling waters, they received what Mallin later described as an “evil shock.” There, bobbing in the river about three hundred yards from shore, was a human body. Dashing to a nearby dock, they leapt into a scull, rowed out to the body, and—after securing it with a length of rope—towed it back to land.
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The corpse was that of a drowned female who, to judge by her ghastly condition, had been decomposing in the water for several days. She was wearing a torn white cotton frock, a bright blue scarf, “light colored” shoes and gloves, and a leghorn straw bonnet. Despite her grotesque appearance—the purplish-black skin, the bloated face, the “frothy blood” leaking from her mouth—she was quickly identified as Mary Cecilia Rogers, a young woman familiar to readers of the popular press. Indeed, she was already something of a local celebrity—though her fame while alive was as nothing compared to the grim immortality that death would bestow.
• • •
Invariably described in the contemporary accounts as a young woman of enchanting appearance—a “raven-tressed” beauty possessed of a “dark smile” and a “hypnotically pleasing” figure—Mary Rogers had first come to the public’s attention several years earlier while working at a popular Broadway “tobacco emporium” owned by an enterprising young merchant named John Anderson. Though his customers represented a broad range of social types—from young clerks and “sporting gents” to luminaries like Horace Greeley, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper—they had one thing in common: They were all men. Calculating (correctly) that a pretty face behind the counter would be a boon to his business, the canny proprietor had hired the eighteen-year-old Mary in 1838 to serve less as a salesgirl than as a sexual magnet.
The strategy worked. Anderson’s profits soared as throngs of male admirers flocked to his shop to “preen and squawk before the young lady.” Dubbed the “Beautiful Cigar Girl” in the city papers (many of whose reporters were also patrons of the store), Mary became a prototype of the modern celebrity, known for being known. Her charms were extolled in newspaper articles—one of which likened her to a luminous candle set out to catch the moths “that flutter around so attractive a center”—and celebrated in doggerel verse:
She’s picked for her beauty from many a belle,
And placed near the window, Havanas to sell,
For well her employer’s aware that her face is
An advertisement certain to empty his cases.
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In 1840, two years after entering Anderson’s employ, Mary quit the shop to manage a boardinghouse leased by her sixty-year-old mother, Phebe. Located at 126 Nassau Street, in the heart of the city’s booming printing and publishing trade, the three-story redbrick building catered to a clientele of young, single workingmen. A number of them, including a cork cutter named Daniel Payne who had become romantically involved with Mary, were residing there on Sunday, July 25, 1841, when the “comely young woman”—after announcing that she was on her way to make a Sabbath visit to an aunt—left the house at around 10:00 in the morning and was never seen alive again.
• • •
Less than an hour after the drowned and disfigured body was dragged onto the shore, Hoboken coroner Dr. Richard H. Cook arrived on the scene. The results of his autopsy were of so shocking a nature that newspapers could only hint at the more lurid details. Before being dumped in the river, Mary (so Cook concluded) had been beaten, gagged, tied, and ultimately strangled to death with a strip of fabric torn from her underskirt. Even more appallingly, bruises on her “feminine region” left no doubt in the coroner’s mind that the “unfortunate girl” had been gang-raped: “brutally violated by no fewer than three assailants.”
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Because of the heat and the body’s already advanced state of decay, a
temporary burial was quickly arranged. Encased in a rough pine box, Mary’s corpse was placed in a shallow grave not far from where it had been brought ashore. Two weeks later, it was disinterred and taken back to New York City for a second examination. By then her remains presented what James Gordon Bennett described as a spectacle “more horrible and humiliating to humanity” than the “most imaginative mind could conceive”:
There lay, what was but a few days back, the image of its Creator, the loveliest of his works, and the tenement of an immortal soul, now a blackened and decomposed mass of putrefaction, painfully disgusting to sight and smell. Her skin, which had been so unusually fair, was now black as that of a negro. Her eyes so sunk in her swollen face as to have the appearance of being violently forced beyond the sockets, and her mouth, which “no friendly hand had closed in death,” was distended as wide as the ligaments of the jaw would admit, and wore the appearance of a person who had died from suffocation or strangulation. The remainder of her person was alike one mass of putrefaction and corruption on which the worms were reveling at their will.
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The sheer ghoulish verve of this description is typical of Bennett’s shameless style. Trumpeting Mary’s death as “one of the most heartless and atrocious murders that was ever perpetrated in New York,” he filled his paper with graphic descriptions of the injuries inflicted on the “poor girl,” feverish speculations about the identity of her “brutal ravishers and murderers,” and outraged attacks on the local police force for its failure to make an arrest.
As Bennett intended, the case became the talk of the town, generating an unprecedented wave of public excitement. “I can call to mind no similar occurrence producing so general and so intense an effect,” one contemporary wrote. “For several weeks, in the discussion of this one absorbing theme, even the momentous political topics of the day were forgotten.”
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Besides Bennett, other enterprising spirits found ways to profit from the tragedy. Daguerreotypists peddled souvenir “likenesses” of the victim, while hack journalists turned out instant true-crime pamphlets containing full
“particulars of the murder” accompanied by prurient accounts of Mary’s love life—the various “attempts at courtship and seduction brought about by her manifold charms.”
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Typical of the sites of sensational murders, Elysian Fields quickly became a ghoulish tourist attraction. Crowds of the morbidly curious flocked to the crime scene and picnicked on the very spot where Mary’s corpse had been dragged ashore. One headmistress of a Manhattan girls’ school even brought her little charges there on a field trip, under the pretext of delivering a lesson on the “wages of sin.”
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All this frenzied interest could not fail to attract the attention of the writer who regarded the death of a beautiful young woman as “the most poetical topic in the world”: Edgar Allan Poe. Living in Philadelphia at the time of the murder, Poe followed the story closely in the local press, particularly in the
Saturday Evening Post
, which “reprinted nearly all of James Gordon Bennett’s coverage from the
Herald.”
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Besides his general fascination with the macabre, Poe reputedly had a more personal reason for taking a keen interest in the case. Four years earlier, while residing in Manhattan, he himself had supposedly been a frequent visitor to John Anderson’s tobacco emporium and was acquainted with the Beautiful Cigar Girl.
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Whatever the truth of this story, it is undeniable that Poe, who kept a close eye on the news for potential source material, quickly came to see the literary and commercial possibilities of the Mary Rogers case. Before long, he would turn it into a classic work of fiction, a sequel to his trail-blazing detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” starring C. Auguste Dupin, the progenitor of Sherlock Holmes and every amateur sleuth to follow. Called “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” the story is such a thinly disguised version of the actual events that it amounts to little more than a transposition of the facts to a Parisian setting. To ensure that readers don’t miss the connection, Poe helpfully points out at the start of the tale that its details will be known to anyone familiar with “the late murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers at New York.”
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