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

the
Sun
’s publisher before turning on him.
    The irony was not lost on the denizens of Newspaper Row. Pulitzer had made his fortune by attacking his old colleagues at the
Sun
as dinosaurs, and he then went after James Gordon Bennett’s equally celebrated
New York Herald
by undercutting its newsstand price. Now Hearst, trained in his college years at the
World
, was doing the exact same thing.
    “When I came to New York,” one editor heard Pulitzer say with a sigh, “Mr. Bennett reduced the price of his paper and raised his advertising rates—all to my advantage. When Mr. Hearst came to New York I did the same. I wonder why, in view of my experience?”
    The
World
’s unmatched circulation of more than 350,000—an audited figure it proudly advertised atop its front pages by proclaiming CIRCULATION BOOKS OPEN TO ALL —was now in danger of being overtaken by the
Journal
. And as the two pulled perilously close in record-setting circulations, the city’s other papers were getting shoved further aside. A future owned by yellow journalism was not one most reporters wished to contemplate. Some libraries had already barredthe
World
and the
Journal
from their precincts, with one Brooklyn librarian sniffing that they attracted “anundesirable class of readers.” Rival papers were quick to agree, and laid into the salivating coverage of what the
World
had dubbed the Missing Head Mystery.
    “The sensational journals of the city have now become scientific and publish anatomical charts and figures, solely in the interests of science, and to supply a want which the closing of the dime museums in the Bowery creates,” mocked the
New York Commercial Advertiser
. A
Times
reporter bemoaned the sight of the yellow journals co-opting the case from a bumbling police force: “The freak journals, those startling and irrepressible caterers to the gross and savage side of human nature, are having a particularly fine time with their new murder mystery … and putting all the celebrated detectives of fact and fiction to shame.” Worse still, he admitted, they were good at it: “Yet it seems that in an enlightened age criminals might be brought to justice in a manner less demoralizing to the whole community.”
    But it was another observation by the
Times
, one being quietly made all down Newspaper Row that day, that contained the real sting for Pulitzer’s men.
    “The
Journal
, by the way,” they wrote, “is generally doing better nowadays. The pupil is taking the master’s place now.”
    It was all too true. Ned and Gus and the rest of Pulitzer’s newsmen were barred from the very crime scene that
they’d
been the first to uncover. Locked out of Nack’s building while a joyous Hearst scampered about inside, infuriated
World
reporters marched off to the neighborhood pay phones to call the newsroom and complain. But when they picked up the earpieces, nothing happened.
    Hearst’s men had cut the cords.
    WHILE PULITZER’S JOURNALISTS fumed in disbelief outside, the police carefully picked through Augusta Nack’s apartment. DetectivesPrice, Krauch, and O’Donohue, the three who had taken Nack in, spent the next few hours unpacking and rifling through the hastily packed boxes. It wasn’t easy. Nearly everything had been readied for storage, and by Nack’s own account, she’d been busily brushing andsponging the apartment down before moving out. But was it to get her deposit back, or to wash away evidence?
    Amid the crates of crockery and bedclothes there remained intriguing hints of life at 439 Ninth Avenue. Photographic albums immediately went into the evidence pile; so did a large number of letters, including the telegram that had arrived on Sunday, the day after the first bundle was found in the river. It was signed
Guldensuppe
, something that occasioned more than a little skeptical commentary among the detectives.
    More policemen spread out onto the other floors of the building. There was, almost unnoticed in the fuss