The Murder of the Century Read Online Free PDF

suggestion was compelling; a butcher’s handiwork might account for the curious quality of the murderer’s saw cuts—more skilled than an amateur, yet cruder than a med student.
    “A butcher may have done it,” Coroner Tuthill mused aloud. “Or, perhaps, a carpenter.”
    Yet the scalding seemed to favor a butcher, and reporters and morgue employees alike could hardly keep from thinking of the Luetgert case—a recent Chicago murder where a local sausage maker dropped his wife into one of his factory’s vats. Luetgert’s case was a peculiar one, since there was no witness and no victim left to produce. But this Manhattan mystery provided a horrifying and neatly packaged clue—a body with skin, a
Herald
reporter marveled, that was “as white as marble.” That, the coroner explained, was because “the body had been washed, and the blood removed before it was wrapped up.”
    But who would do such a thing? The victim might not have been drinking, a
Press
reporter suggested, but the killer surely had been. Not just to commit the deed, mind you, but to steel himself to venture into the Bronx woods at night. “His nerves must be of iron,” he speculated, “and probably he fortified himself with liquor for the ordeal.” Even just the sawing would have been exhausting, awkward work. On this the coroner spoke from some experience, after all—in cutting through the trunk, he explained, you’d need somebody to hold the arms so that they wouldn’t keep getting in the way. And that meant an accomplice.
    Or, perhaps, an entire gang.
    The
World
knew just the man to ask about the case: Andrew Drummond, the former head of the U.S. Secret Service.
    These days he was running a detective bureau at the foot of Newspaper Row, and he’d been following the case closely. “I believe that this most atrocious murder was committed by a foreigner,” he huffed to a
World
reporter. Its ferocity, he deemed, was the work of men hailing from warm and lusty climes. “The murderer is a Sicilian, or possibly a Spaniard or Cuban. Maybe a Spanish spy has been put out of the way by the Cubans. The most likely one is that it is the result of a family feud among Sicilians. I know the ways of the Mafia.”
    To Drummond, the clincher was the oilcloth. What murderer would call attention to his deed by wrapping it in lurid red cloth? Ah, but attention was the
point
with a Mafia hit. And of course, as Drummond reminded readers—“Sicilians love bright colors.”
    Even asscores of reporters were fanning out across the city, beating the bushes and shadowing the police along the riverbanks and in the Bronx woods, Drummond was sure of one thing: Whether the head was burned, buried, or sunk in the river, they wouldn’t like what they’d find. “When the head is found,” he warned, “it will be seen to be horribly disfigured.”
    But where some saw horror, others sensed opportunity.
    EVERY DAY OR SO for the last couple of years on Newspaper Row, a mob of mustachioed, derby-hatted men would come tumbling out of a low brick building, the first of them saddling up onto their squeaking bicycles even as they ran, and then careening wildly past City Hall; then a second group, more raggedly bohemian with their leather portfolios and wooden camera tripods, would clamber aboard carriages and go clattering madly after the bicycles. Behind them, editor Sam Chamberlain could be heard roaring from his desk.
    “Get excited.God damn it,
get excited
!”
    This was the Wrecking Crew.
    The appearance of the Wrecking Crew meant just one thing: that a splendid story—a lover gunning his society sweetheart down on Broadway, a passenger ferry upending itself, or a rollicking downtown building collapse—was to appear in the next edition of the
New York Journal
.
    You could tell when New York was having a peaceful day, it was said by friends, by how despondent
Journal
publisher William Randolph Hearst looked. But give him a murdered lad or tragic maiden, and Hearst