What I've Read | Oct 2012 {Murder of the Century. . .}

Among the many genres of books I love to read, true crime is right up there at the top. I believe the very first true crime novel I ever read was "Helter Skelter". Have you ever read it?

Well, this next true crime, is a culmination of news reports, court transcripts and the like. It isn't exactly a quick read (IMO), BUT, it was a good read.

If you find it fascinating to read how murders, the investigations and newspaper stories were handled not so long ago, then this is the book for you. If you have ever wondered how tabloid journalism got its start, then this book is for you.

I came away from this book realizing that we as a society haven't veered to far from this type of journalism. In fact, we are faced with it everyday, to the point where the truth is untrue and the untrue is the truth!

Maybe you will come away feeling differently?

(book description:amazon.com)

On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are 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 baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments 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--a hard-luck 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 whom the police couldn't identify with certainty, and who 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.