Blood & Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime

Dedication

For Jessanne, Ada, and Austin

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1. The Crabapple Tree

2. The Heiress

3. The Tabloid Editor

4. The Reverend

5. The Choir Singer

6. Hark! Hark, My Soul!

7. Billy Goat! Billy Goat!

8. The Flapper

9. The Sideshow

10. House of Mystery

11. The Pig Woman

12. Meet the Press

13. The Grand Jury

14. Madame Astra

15. A New, Mongrel Fourth Estate

16. Investigation A

17. A Tissue of Disgusting Lies!

18. The Arrests

19. Trial of the Century

20. I Have Told Them the Truth, So Help Me God!

21. A Sort of Genius

22. The Verdict

23. Old Glory

24. And Then There Were None

25. A Room with a View

Epilogue

Postscript

Acknowledgments

A Note on Research and Sources

Selected Bibliography

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

On the first day of February 2019, I stood in a small room on the third floor of the Somerset County prosecutor’s headquarters in Somerville, New Jersey, a quaint borough nestled in a pocket of the state where the suburbs blend into countryside. The evidence unit supervisor, Ken Pryor, had allowed me to spend the morning in his office as part of my research into this book, which chronicles a bedeviling double homicide from a century ago. The media circus of its day, set in the nearby town of New Brunswick, this hoary old mystery had long since faded from the popular imagination. Pryor was now the steward of its vestiges, the tangible ones at least.

Before I arrived, he’d retrieved a stack of boxes and totes from the evidence vault. The first one I perused included autopsy reports, witness lists, fingerprints, and brooding photographs of a dusty rural road next to an abandoned farm. That’s where the victims were killed late one night, their bodies carefully arrayed beneath a crabapple tree. The dead man was a prominent local minister, married to a proud matron from an illustrious New Jersey family. Beside him lay a working-class housewife from the church choir. Their murders, shrouded in scandal and intrigue, set off a tempest of sensational newspaper coverage, fueling a circulation war between the infant tabloids of Jazz Age New York.

I spoke to Pryor about these age-old publications while riffling through files on a table. He stood up from his desk and left the room, returning minutes later with a clear plastic packet. It contained several rare editions of a bygone tabloid newspaper that led a crusade against the main suspects. The papers had been locked away in the evidence unit all these years, slowly decomposing. Bits of brittle newsprint crumbled off the edges as I carefully laid out the front pages: GRAND JURY HEARS OF CLERGYMAN’S TRYST! GHASTLY STORY TOLD BY FINGERPRINTS! MRS. MILLS’ GHOST!

After an hour or so, one of Pryor’s colleagues, an evidence custodian named Mike Wilder, took me to an adjoining office. Here I found the real bounty, a trove of lonely forensic antiquities neatly packed into a half dozen or so storage bins. I’d become a voracious student of this crime and I suddenly held pieces of it in my hands: Handkerchiefs found at the murder scene. The star witness’s day calendar. Ancient skeleton keys. The reverend’s wire-rim glasses, snapped in two. I picked up a piece of shriveled sheer black fabric—a pair of stockings. Wilder told me the choir singer had been wearing them when someone put three bullets in her head and opened her neck from one ear to the other. Now, here they sat in a generic suburban office building, tucked away inside a blue plastic flip-top tote that looked like it came from Home Depot.

The minister and the choir singer have been dead for a hundred years, but the themes of their sordid tale still resonate. It’s a story about dark secrets upending a community. About the media and the public’s interaction with scandal and crime. About class, privilege, morality, love, betrayal, power, and the collision of these forces. It’s also a story about ambition—triumphant at its best, but sometimes deadly. The beginning of the story is simple: four gunshots and two corpses. The way it ends is anything but.

1

The Crabapple Tree

It was midmorning on Saturday, September 16, 1922, a warm but partly cloudy end-of-summer day, described in local forecasts as unsettled, when Pearl Bahmer and Ray Schneider found the bodies. They’d rendezvoused a little before 9:00 A.M. in the city center of New Brunswick, a then-192-year-old municipality along the railway corridor between Manhattan and Philadelphia. Once a rugged patch of swampland and cedar forest, situated on a winding river that empties into the Atlantic Ocean, New Brunswick had evolved into a bustling hub of industry, home to makers of wallpaper and fruit jars, ironworks and rubber shoes, musical strings and cigars and hosiery. As Pearl and Ray walked west, away from the city’s shops, restaurants, and several nouveau theaters where locals took in the latest musical revues and D. W. Griffith films, they passed the imposing headquarters of Johnson & Johnson, founded in 1886, and the courtly brick buildings of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, chartered by King George III a full decade before the American Revolution. After a mile or so they reached Buccleuch Park, a bucolic seventy-eight acres with a colonial mansion that once hosted George Washington. This was the brink of the countryside, farmland all around. The British had tempted Washington into battle on these plains, but his men resisted the cry of war until their rivals withdrew, destroying several farms along the way. Two centuries later, the landscape was under threat once again, soon to be replaced by paved roads and suburban sprawl. The nearest farm, known as the Phillips farm, with a barn and an unoccupied two-story house, had fallen into disuse. Pearl and Ray crossed a small brook and turned onto the adjacent road, De Russey’s Lane, a barren strip of dirt between two busier arteries leading to the center of New Brunswick. De Russey’s Lane happened to be a popular destination for romantic escapades, which accounted for Pearl and Ray’s excursion.

Pearl was a brown-eyed girl of fifteen, thin and pretty, with a coy smile and a short blond bob. Ray, twenty-three, had a chiseled face and neatly coiffed hair. He looked sharp in the photographs that would end up in the newspapers, handsome and smartly dressed in a white button-up and necktie. Ray and his wife had been separated for months; he and Pearl had been fooling around longer than that. Fooling around was very much on the agenda that morning, never mind the couple’s age difference.

They followed a smaller trail off De Russey’s Lane, lined by strawberry patches and masses of goldenrod. Amid the thickets and tall grass, as they came upon a clearing and a crabapple tree, something caught Pearl’s attention.

There is a man and woman there, she said.

Ray looked over. The two people lay next to one another on their backs, silent and motionless.

Pearl, don’t make any noise, Ray chided.

They snuck past and drifted into a field on the opposite side of the trail where, after they picked a secluded spot away from the snoozing couple, one thing led to another.

A short time later, reemerging on the lovers’ lane, Pearl felt uneasy when they passed the crabapple tree once again.

The people are still lying there, she said, lingering nervously in the brush, her pulse quickening. Goodness, they are lying the same way as when I first seen them. Go over and look at them!

Ray crept closer, with Pearl trailing behind. He circled around the pair until he stood at their feet. Pearl retreated to a nearby cedar tree as Ray studied them. Their chests didn’t rise or fall. He saw blood and markings on the woman’s head, bullet wounds, perhaps, all but confirming Pearl’s suspicion: these were corpses.

RAY KNEW OF A HOUSE on the far edge of Buccleuch Park where they might be able to use the phone, but first they needed to get their stories straight. What were they supposed to tell the cops? Certainly not that they had gone to De Russey’s Lane for the unseemly reason two red-blooded young people would have gone to De Russey’s Lane. Ray came up with what he thought sounded like a better answer. If anyone asked, Pearl was to say, We had gone out for mushrooms. I stopped in one field and he in another.

Pearl and Ray hurried back to the main road and rang the bell of a house where a young woman named Grace Edwards answered the door. Ray caught his breath and explained what they’d seen—a pair of bodies across the way, a man and a woman who looked like they’d been shot. Ray appeared shaken up, like anyone that would come across two dead people, Grace thought. She gave Ray the phone.

New Brunswick twenty-seven, he told the switchboard, specifying the exchange for police headquarters. As the operator patched the call through, Ray’s nerves got the best of him. He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out. Grace took the receiver and did the talking for him.

Half an hour later, shortly before eleven o’clock, officers Edward Garrigan and James Curran arrived. Patrolmen didn’t always have cars in those days, so they’d hitched a ride with a local motorist. They picked up Ray and drove down the lane, parking near the edge of the path that led to the crabapple tree. From there, they continued on foot. Ray stuck to the script when the officers asked what he and Pearl had been doing: Looking for mushrooms.

Ray stood back as Garrigan and Curran approached the crime scene. The bodies had been carefully laid out on their backs, side by side, about a foot apart, their feet closest to the tree trunk. The man’s outstretched arm cushioned the woman’s head, and her left hand rested atop his right thigh. Her legs were crossed at the ankles, right over left. The man wore black shoes and a dark gray suit with a white button-up and a long white necktie, secured by a gold clasp that matched the ring on his little finger. The woman’s clothing was of a markedly different quality, with a blue-and-red polka-dot dress revealing coarse black stockings rolled down below the knee, disappearing into weathered brown shoes.

The bodies had been laid out quite perfectly, almost as if it had been the work of a mortician, Garrigan thought. He noticed that the grass near the corpses had been trampled down, whereas the rest of the brush in the vicinity was thick and high, but he didn’t see any signs of a struggle.

Garrigan observed a brown scarf wrapped around the woman’s neck and head, and a panama hat placed over her companion’s face, just above his eyes, as if it had been put there to shield them from the sun. The woman’s blue velvet hat sat on the ground beyond their heads. Pieces of handwritten paper lay scattered around the bodies, as well as two handkerchiefs and a dark leather billfold containing a driver’s license.

It occurred to the officers that they faced a jurisdictional discrepancy. The bodies lay just over the border in the town of Franklin, part of Somerset County, whereas New Brunswick was in Middlesex County. This is no case of ours, Curran said.

He walked back to the residence where Pearl and Ray had summoned the police and phoned one of his superiors, who then placed a call to the Somerset County authorities. Within minutes, a detective was on the way.

In the meantime, a reporter arrived from New Brunswick’s Daily Home News, the local publication of record. Even for a small newspaper in central New Jersey, crime was familiar terrain, as befit the times. The Home News had covered raids on local gambling dens and the seizure of moonshine imported from a gang in Brooklyn. In a neighboring town, a man had confessed to choking his wife to death and beating her with the blunt edge of an ax, blaming the massacre on bootleg hooch. In another nearby town, the Home News reported on the discovery of a dead New Yorker who the police believed was engaged in some hazardous occupation, such as a gambler or a bootlegger, or possibly that he was a victim of the Italian mafia. Still, the Home News had never covered a story like the one now unfolding at the crabapple tree.

The reporter, Albert Cardinal, stood in front of the bodies as flies buzzed all around. Cardinal made a more thorough inspection than the officers had. He peered down at a bullet wound near the woman’s hairline, almost in the middle of her forehead. The small ring of black powder around the hole gave him the impression she had been shot from close range. What really got him was the woman’s ghastly stare, as he would later describe it, as though she died in horrified fright.

Cardinal looked at the woman’s companion, whose eyes were closed, a single gaping bullet wound just above his right ear. He walked around the bodies and made a mental note of every detail that stood out: three or four empty bullet shells that looked like they came from a .32. The woman’s wedding ring. The way her dress tightly hugged her body. The angle of the man’s head, which looked to Cardinal like it had been tilted. He marveled at how perfectly composed their clothing was. It was as though they were peacefully at rest, he thought.

Cardinal knelt to get a closer look at several items placed between the bodies. Near the victims’ knees he saw a handful of papers arranged in a stack, except for a few pieces that the breeze must have carried a couple of feet away. Garrigan warned him not to sift through the papers, so he examined the top two sheets without disturbing the pile. They looked like letters, scrawled in pencil on cheap paper. He transcribed a bit of text: Please do not laugh at this. I know I am a crazy cat, but I cannot be different.

The real bombshell lay near the man’s left foot, where Cardinal set his eyes on a professional card lying in the grass. According to Garrigan, it had initially been propped against the man’s left heel, like a curator’s label in a museum exhibit. Whoever killed the man wanted whoever found him to know exactly who he was. Cardinal turned the card over. He read the name, printed in bold gothic letters, and jotted it down on a slip of paper: Rev. Edward W. Hall.

Edward Hall was a prominent Episcopal minister whose congregation at New Brunswick’s St. John the Evangelist included some of the city’s most affluent residents. His wife, Frances Noel Stevens Hall, was a daughter of old money with illustrious ancestors and ties to the Johnson & Johnson dynasty. Cardinal could tell this was an even bigger scoop than he thought, with all the makings of a major scandal. He rushed out of De Russey’s Lane and made it back to the newsroom before the first edition went to press.

THE CALLING CARD WAS AN unambiguous clue as to the dead man’s identity, but the officers needed confirmation. They got it when another bystander showed up, Elton Loblein, who had pulled over to talk to Curran while the officer stood guard on the nearby main road, Easton Avenue. Loblein, as it happened, knew Edward Hall personally. Garrigan instructed him, Just lift the hat off the man’s head and see if you know him. The recognition was immediate and unequivocal: Edward Hall.

Loblein, a veterinary surgeon, noticed what the others hadn’t. Blood speckled Hall’s gold-wire-rimmed glasses. Powder marks tinged the hole in his head. The hair around the edge of the wound had been burned off. The letters and the woman’s scarf were stained with blood. Loblein lifted the scarf to see her face, though he hadn’t the slightest idea who she was. Then again, as Loblein would later recall, Her face was in such a condition it would be very hard to recognize her even if you had known her. Loblein did, however, spot three bullet holes in the woman’s face. When Loblein inspected the woman’s neck, he discovered the source of the vermin that were marching into her mouth, up her nose, all over her cheeks and jaw. There was a deep gash from ear to ear, filled with maggots, which decorated Hall’s face as well.

Daniel Wray, city editor of the Daily Home News, came upon the group. He had known Reverend Hall for years, and he was stunned when he saw the body. Hall had married into a wealthy and prominent family. Now he lay dead in a lovers’ lane next to a woman who was clearly not his wife. Wray picked up the letters, about ten of them in all. Garrigan looked on without protest.

The unsigned missives were scrawled in a feminine, almost juvenile hand. Wray scribbled down a few excerpts. You are a true priest, one of the notes read. You see in me merely your physical inspiration.

Who was the mystery woman, and what was her connection to Hall? The questions raced through Wray’s mind as he sped back to the Daily Home News to rush the first edition to press.

2

The Heiress

Around seven thirty on the evening of Thursday, September 14, two nights before Edward Hall’s body was found, the phone rang at 23 Nichol Avenue, a Victorian mansion where Hall had lived with his wife, Frances, for a little more than a decade. One of the couple’s maids, twenty-year-old Louise Geist, paused her work in a bedroom on the second floor and scurried across the hallway to answer the call. A woman on the other end of the line asked for the reverend.

Is that for me? Edward called out from the bathroom.

Yes, Louise replied.

I’ll be out in a minute.

Louise went back to work, though she couldn’t help but overhear Reverend Hall’s side of the conversation.

Yes . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . That’s too bad . . . Yes . . . Couldn’t we make arrangements for about eight fifteen? . . . Goodbye. Click.

Before long, Edward came down and put on his coat. Frances entered from the porch. I am going to make a call, dear, and will be home soon, Louise heard the reverend say. She passed through the kitchen and went out onto the back stoop, where Reverend Hall appeared moments later.

Isn’t this a lovely evening? he said.

Hall bade Louise good night. She watched as he walked down the street, disappearing into the dusk. She would not see him alive again.

The next morning, Friday, Louise awoke to the sound of shutters being drawn on the first floor, a telltale sign that Reverend Hall had gotten up early to catch a train to New York. Louise hopped out of bed and hurried downstairs to prepare breakfast. When she walked into the dining room a little after seven, however, she was greeted not by the reverend, but by his brother-in-law Willie Stevens, usually the last one to the table for breakfast. Seeing him at that hour was rather odd, but then again, Willie was nothing if not a little odd.

A lumbering five foot ten, Willie had a singular appearance, with an ice cream scoop of bushy black hair, thick eyebrows, a doughy face framed by petite spectacles, and a mustache befitting a walrus. In Willie’s fifty years, he’d barely worked, save for a few years when he was employed by a local contractor. He’d spent most of his adult life at 23 Nichol Avenue, where his second-floor bedroom overflowed with scholarly reading material. He devoured the newspapers and smoked a pipe, but he could also come across as something of a dimwit. He was, one might say, an eccentric.

What are you doing up so early? Louise asked.

I would rather have Mrs. Hall tell you, Willie cryptically replied, suggesting something amiss.

As Louise passed the coatrack in the hallway, she put two and two together: the reverend’s hat was not hanging in its usual spot. He hadn’t come home.

Louise didn’t think much of it. The reverend always seemed to have a good excuse on those nights when he returned home late. His car had broken down. He’d missed the train back from New York. Someone needed a ride somewhere. On the other hand, Louise had never known him to stay out all night. She figured that after his appointment the previous evening, he must have been summoned back out on a sick call. Edward Hall would have stayed at the bedside of an ill friend or parishioner no matter the hour, or so Louise told herself. She set the table for three and acted none the wiser when Frances came down for breakfast about twenty minutes later.

Frances was neither beautiful nor glamorous, despite her considerable wealth and aristocratic blood. She had a stocky build, which went well with her old-fashioned wardrobe. A reporter uncharitably described her as having a face to look twice at—a long, narrow face with a firm, tight-lipped mouth, a suggestion of hair on the upper lip, a broad chin. A crescent-shaped scar accentuated her right temple, and she had unusually prominent black eyebrows. Another journalist dispensed with the euphemisms altogether, stating that Frances had the head and features of a man. Her pince-nez glasses suggested, quite accurately, a woman of a different era. A new century ripe with opportunity had dawned and women’s roles in society were changing, but Frances wanted nothing to do with any of that. She wore her conservatism with pride.

While Frances never had children of her own, she was devoted to her family and its legacy, as well as to charity and her church, St. John the Evangelist, where she had taught Sunday school before meeting Edward, seven years her junior, when he ascended the pulpit there in 1909. She was everything you’d expect of a well-bred woman from the late-Victorian age: proper, imperious, and, of course, private. To a servant like Louise, Frances had a haughty air about her, but something seemed different when Louise greeted her employer that Friday morning in the dining room.

Frances sat down and picked at her food, hardly eating. Louise hadn’t set out the small silver water pitcher used by Reverend Hall to mix up his instant coffee substitute. Normally, Frances would have reminded Louise to retrieve it, but not today. There was an unspoken tension, and Louise finally piped up to break the awkward silence.

Is Mr. Hall going to have breakfast in bed? she asked, playing dumb.

Louise, Frances replied, Mr. Hall has not been home all night. I do not know where he is.

Maybe he had an accident. Have you called the police?

I did. There hasn’t been any accident. Frances had phoned the station around 7:00 A.M., but to avoid any unpleasant notoriety, she didn’t specify that Edward was missing.

Louise couldn’t help but notice an incessant jingling as she cleared the table. Frances held a set of car keys and rustled them nervously. That went on for most of the day as she paced the floor, rushing over to the window whenever she heard a car slow down outside the house. This antsy behavior did not suit Frances Hall, ordinarily a picture of calm and composure. As Louise would later say, She had never acted this way before.

That afternoon, Frances summoned her two sisters-in-law. She also consulted with the family attorney, Edwin Florance, a former mayor of New Brunswick and New Jersey state senator. Beyond that, Frances had no other visitors, no telegrams, and certainly no hints as to Edward’s whereabouts. However, Louise eavesdropped on an intriguing phone call around 11:00 P.M. Her ears perked up when she heard Frances say, No, there was nobody else. He was friendly with her. She’s in the choir.

Before Frances went to bed that night, the other maid, thirty-eight-year-old Barbara Tough (pronounced too), brought her a glass of water. Barbara saw no tears on Mrs. Hall’s cheeks, but she thought her face looked puffy, as if she’d been crying. Oh, Barbara, where is Mr. Hall? Frances moaned. Oh, I hope I will get strength to bear it.

FRANCES NOEL STEVENS HALL CAME from New Jersey royalty on both sides: the Stevenses and the Carpenders. She took immense pride in her noble ancestry, which stretched back to the founding of the republic. Frances’s great-grandfather Ebenezer Stevens was the stuff of grade-school history books. He hurled tea into Boston Harbor and joined the Continental Army after the Battle of Lexington, later corresponding with founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Another of Ebenezer’s many great-grandchildren, descended from his first and second wives, was a prominent New York woman who became a famous author. Her name was Edith Wharton.

Frances’s grandfather on her maternal side, Jacob Stout Carpender, was an early member of the New York Stock Exchange, whose wife descended from a man who gave the third public reading of the Declaration of Independence. Frances’s uncle Charles J. Carpender accumulated his wealth from a wallpaper company that later leased its headquarters to the founders of Johnson & Johnson. One of her cousins married Louise Johnson, the daughter of James Wood Johnson.

In New Brunswick, Frances’s family was akin to the Boston Brahmins. Their tony neighborhood, also home to the newly established women’s college of Rutgers University, was a menagerie of Carpender domiciles, including a twenty-one-acre retreat with a Tudor-style manor surrounded by immaculate landscaping and walking trails, a slice of English countryside in the middle of New Jersey. Frances’s residence, a three-story Victorian filled with dark wood paneling and heavy mahogany furniture, occupied a leafy plot that took up a full city block. She practically couldn’t throw a stone without hitting an aunt, uncle, or cousin. One cousin, a stockbroker named Henry de la Bruyere Carpender, resided with his wife, Mary, in an adjacent lot on Nichol Avenue. Another cousin, Edwin Carpender, lived around the block with his wife, Elovine.

Frances had lived in New Brunswick since she was an infant, but she was born in Aiken, South Carolina. The region was said to be favorable for treating tuberculosis, and her father, a Civil War veteran named Francis Kerby Stevens, had moved the family there in hopes of recovering his health. He succumbed to the disease in February 1874, six weeks after Frances’s birth, leaving behind his thirty-four-year-old bride, Mary Noel Carpender Stevens, and three fatherless children: Frances, William, and the oldest of the bunch, four-year-old Henry. After her husband died, Mary took the children north and settled in New Brunswick with the rest of the Carpender clan.

Frances presumably had the same rearing as any member of America’s Gilded Age gentry. She attended Miss Anable’s School, a private academy where New Brunswick’s finer young ladies practiced their reading, writing, arithmetic, and etiquette. Then came the cadence of society life: dinner receptions, weddings, afternoon teas, and, of course, Sunday church.

As a young woman, Frances took up charitable work. During the Spanish-American War, she formed a Red Cross auxiliary, which collected aid items and sundries for wounded soldiers. She was active in her local YMCA, where she helped organize recitals, stage performances, and benefits. She was a devoted fundraiser for New Brunswick’s city hospital, which would later become Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and she organized card games to raise money for ailing infants.

In addition to her philanthropic pursuits, Frances was a lady of leisure. There were sojourns in Europe, jaunts to Atlantic City, summer vacations in Maine, and afternoons at the New Brunswick Country Club. The one thing that seemed to have eluded her was a suitable match. Frances was an outlier in an era when marriage had immense bearing on an upper-class woman’s identity, and a bride’s average age was twenty-one. She’d been a bridesmaid numerous times, as well as a maid of honor. But by the time she turned thirty-five, in 1909, she’d heard no wedding bells of her own. She remained closest to her mother, and they spent their days reading, dining, and playing cards. For a while, it seemed all but certain that Frances would end up a spinster. Fate had other plans.

ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, September 16, some thirty-six hours after Edward had gone missing, Frances awoke from another restless night and, after breakfast, phoned her cousin Edwin Carpender. I knew something terrible had happened, she later told a prosecutor, and he seemed the only one I could get hold of. When Edwin arrived, Frances explained everything that had transpired: Edward leaving the house Thursday night, his absence through the following day, her sinking fear that he must be dead, or else why wouldn’t he have come home or called by now? I am almost crazy, Frances said.

Edwin, who had been out of town the previous day, was taken aback. This was the first he’d heard of Edward’s disappearance, and he could see the situation had rattled his ordinarily steely cousin. It did all sound strange and foreboding, but the best thing to do was to remain calm. No use jumping to conclusions. Surely there had to be a logical explanation. In the meantime, Edwin and his wife, Elovine, one of Frances’s closest friends, tried to distract her. After they drove Frances downtown to run errands, including a ten-dollar check deposit, Elovine kept Frances company into the early afternoon, when the phone rang. Albert Cardinal, the Daily Home News reporter, had returned from the crime scene and was trying to establish, discreetly, whether Frances was yet aware of Edward’s death.

Is this Mrs. Hall speaking?

Yes.

Is Mr. Hall home?

No.

When will he be home?

Why do you ask me these questions? Has anything happened to him?

I would rather let somebody else tell you.

Frances hung up and immediately dialed the family attorney, Edwin Florance. She told him to get down to the newspaper offices right away and figure out what on earth was going on.

3

The Tabloid Editor

Phil Payne’s eyes lit up when he heard about what was going on down in New Brunswick. It had only been a matter of hours since Ray Schneider and Pearl Bahmer first stumbled upon the bodies. But word about the dead minister was already ricocheting through the whiskey-drenched, smoke-filled newsrooms of New York City’s major newspapers, from Adolph Ochs’s New York Times, to William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, to the late Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Payne worked for a much younger newspaper, one particularly well suited to lurid melodrama: the New York Daily News, America’s first true tabloid.

Founded in 1919 by Joseph Medill Patterson, scion of the illustrious Medill dynasty that controlled the Chicago Tribune, the News was a runaway success, and Payne had recently been promoted from city editor to acting managing editor. It was the biggest job in the newsroom, a sardine-can-like bullpen of dark wooden desks strewn with candlestick telephones and teetering stacks of paper. If and when Payne dropped the acting part from his title, he would become, at twenty-nine, the youngest managing editor of a metropolitan daily in the United States. Exactly one week after his promotion, the story of the New Brunswick murders broke.

Handsome and youthful, Payne had a warm smile and unruly brown hair that he sometimes tamed into a pompadour. His friendly round face was framed by spherical tortoiseshell glasses, which magnified his gray eyes. Payne was an astute disciple of the budding tabloid genre. The idea was to deliver news to the masses in a manner that was not only informative but utterly thrilling. With gigantic photos, screaming headlines, and a compact layout that wouldn’t have looked out of place next to a pulp magazine, a tabloid newspaper thrived on prurient subject matter and larger-than-life characters. When Payne learned about the murders on lovers’ lane, he knew this one had it all: blood, scandal, money, people with money behaving badly. He also knew exactly which reporter to unleash on the wilds of New Jersey.

At the Daily News, a group of fearless young newswomen were making names for themselves thanks to the heavy play that Payne gave their work. The leader of the pack was Julia Harpman. Newly wed and recently recovered from a near-fatal car crash, the beautiful twenty-seven-year-old had begun her career straight out of high school in her hometown of Memphis, where she helped her mother edit the local women’s page for ten dollars a week. Before long, she was covering general assignment stories, gaining enough experience to land a job at Knoxville’s Journal and Tribune for forty dollars a week. By early 1920, Harpman had bigger plans. She arrived in New York with little more than a borrowed squirrel-fur coat, sixty-three dollars in cash, and a stack of clips. The first few city editors she approached didn’t have any work. But they saw the determination in Harpman’s deep brown eyes. One of them suggested she try the Daily News.

When Harpman showed up in Phil Payne’s office, he agreed to give her a trial, assigning her to cover a controversial vestry conclave at Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue. While there, Harpman stumbled upon a political forum that happened to be taking place on a different floor of the parish house. She slid into the meeting room and observed the former New York governor William Sulzer in the middle of a rant about curbing the Supreme Court and abolishing the Senate.

Did you get the story? Payne asked, referring to the vestry conclave, when Harpman returned to the newsroom.

I did, Harpman told him, and also another.

Payne hired her on the spot.

Like many reporters at the News, Harpman immediately took a liking to Payne. He was kind and jovial with a good sense of humor, as well as the requisite