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The Murder of the Century

The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime were turning up all over New York, but the police were baffled: there were 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 perplexing murder. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Re-creations 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—an anxious 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 that the police couldn't identify with certainty, and that 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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    • AudioFile Magazine
      William Dufris does wonders narrating this long, convoluted tale of the shocking murder and mutilation of William Guldensuppe in New York City in the summer of 1897. If this were fiction, critics would call it overplotted, melodramatic, and far-fetched, but every detail of this sensational crime story, incredibly, is true. Dufris keeps interest high with his energetic, intelligent reading. From the discovery of a headless, legless torso in the East River, to the battle between newspaper giants Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst and the onset of yellow journalism, to the trial of the accused and its lurid details--Dufris offers a colorful narration of the bizarre incidents that kept turn-of-the-century New Yorkers glued to their tabloids. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 18, 2011
      A dismembered corpse and rival newspapers squabbling for headlines fuel Collins's intriguing look at the birth of "yellow journalism" in lateâ19th-century New York. On June 26, 1897, the first of several gory bundles was discovered: a man's chest and arms floating in the East River. The legs and midsection were found separately and "assembled" at the morgue for identification. The two most popular newspapersâWilliam Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York Worldâdevoted entire issues to the corpse, sending reporters out to shadow police and offering dueling rewards for identifying the man. Hearst even formed the "Murder Squad," reporters who were often one step ahead of the cops. Eventually identified as William Guldensuppe, the Danish immigrant had been caught between his landlady (and lover) Augusta Nack and her new suitor, Martin Thorn. Though both were suspects, only Thorn was tried and executed, after Nack cut a deal. Collins (The Book of William), founder of McSweeney's Collins Library imprint, gives an in-depth account of the exponential growth of lurid news and the public's (continuing) insatiable appetite for it. B&w illus.

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  • English

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