The Murder of the Century Read Online Free PDF Page B

joyfully revived. And a man dying at the hands of a maniac who scattered parts all around the city? He was ecstatic.
    For their newly created
Evening Journal
edition—meant to be even saucier and more shameless than the morning
Journal
—it was pure homicide gold. What a way to launch! And so the word came down from the top: Do whatever it takes. Hearst editorssent reporters off to tail detectives and swipe evidence from the scene if necessary, the better to run it in the
Evening Journal
first. Photograph the Meyer boys, map the spot where they found it, show the twine and the knots and the pattern of the oilcloth around the torso. Get diagrams of the nude body. Get graphics and put it on page 1. That morning the Wrecking Crew seemed to be rushing in and out of the
Journal
almost nonstop; it was like nothing anybody had seen before.
    “Events seem to indicate that men, like dogs, go mad at certain seasons,” Hearst mused as he surveyed the day’s news. There wererace riots in Key West, idiotsstealing electricity off high-voltage streetcar lines in Ohio, and two millionaires fighting over a$15 dog here in New York. But this story,
this
was something more than ordinary madness. It was already getting picked up by the wires and running across the country. And so the order came from Hearst’s offices:Hire four launches, and set them to dragging the bottom of the East River—immediately.
    Find that head
, the chief wrecker commanded.
    CAPTAIN O’BRIEN COULDN’T ward it off anymore, not with every newspaper headline on his way in to the Mulberry Street headquarters yelling at him. After two days of hopeless stalling by the police, several detectives were sent trudging over to the morgue in the early-morning hours to take down names and addresses.
    They had a long day ahead of them. The steps and wooden porch leading into the death house werecrowded with bereaved families—scores of people, all convinced their lost loved ones were inside—aswell as local curiosity seekers, lounging surgeons from the neighboring hospital, and legions of reporters. The detectives and the coronercould barely make their way inside. The first two visitors to squeeze in gave their names to a detective asJohn Johnson and Adolph Carlson of 333 East Twenty-Eighth Street. They were fellow boarders with Max Weineke. As men living in close quarters, they’d seen Max nude a number of times; there was a mole on his shoulder, they said. There wasn’t one on the body, so that settled that.
    But then, marveled a
Herald
reporter, three “Japanese—or at any rate, Orientals” pressed their way to the front and were led to the slab. They announced that it
was
Weineke. Who were they, and how did the three of them know a Danish scrap-metal dealer? They wouldn’t say. Another mysterious visitor correctly described, sight unseen, a surgical scar on the abdomen; the fact had not been announced to the public, and he was quickly led to the slab. He identified the body as Weineke; but the fellow wouldn’t identify
himself
, and promptly melted back into the crowd. So now they had five positive identifications of Weineke—four by men who refused to name themselves—and three negative identifications of the very same body.
    The morning had only just begun at the morgue.
    Next came thepresumptive widow of Mr. Robert Wood. She was regal in her floral-decked hat and dark mourning dress, waiting with her attending minister amid all the tumult and weeping outside. Wood, it seemed, was a Long Island City butcher who had gone missing after leaving his shop with a $150 bankroll in his pocket, and his empty wagon had been found abandoned in front of a Greenpoint saloon. His description, the location, the motive—they all matched the body pretty well. Mrs. Wood and the minister were led inside, and the headless and legless body—further decomposed and sliced into by two autopsies—was revealed to her. She fell into a dead faint.
    It was too much—too much. She