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Sign up todayThe Murder of the Century
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Learn moreIn 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.
Paul Collins is an author specializing in science writing, magazine writing, history, and memoir; his books have appeared in a dozen languages. He is the recipient of an Oregon Book Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and teaches in the Creative Writing program at Portland State University.
William Dufris began his audio career in London, England. He co-found the audio production company The Story Circle, Ltd in the UK. In the US, he founded Mind’s Eye Productions and co-founded Rocky Coast Radio Theatre in addition to The AudioComics Company, for which he is producer, director, actor and engineer. Durfis was nominated six times as a finalist for the APA's prestigious Audie Awards. He garnered eighteen Golden Earphones Awards through AudioFile magazine, which honored him as one of The Best Voices at the End of the Century. Of his work, AudioFile said, "William Dufris commands a dazzling array of voices that bring to life the dozens of audiobooks he’s narrated." His audiobook credits include many of Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, Ph.D.'s works, such as Days of Infamy and Pearl Harbor, in addition to George McGovern’s Abraham Lincoln, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and John Scalzi’s The Ghost Bridges.
Dufris acted on stage and in television and is best known as the original North American voice of the cartoon character Bob in Nickelodeon's popular children's show, Bob the Builder. Additionally, he worked with legendary director Dirk Maggs on his audio drama productions of Spider-Man.
Reviews
“Riveting…Collins has mined enough newspaper clippings and other archives to artfully recreate the era, the crime, and the newspaper wars it touched off.”
“[Collins’] exploration of the newspaper world, at the very moment when tabloid values were being born, is revealing but also enormously entertaining…Collins has a clear eye, a good sense of telling detail, and a fine narrative ability.”
“[A] richly detailed book that reads like a novel and yet maintains a strict fidelity to facts. The Murder of the Century isn’t a case of history with a moral. It’s simply a fantastic factual yarn, and a reminder that abhorrent violence is nothing new under the sun.”
“An in-depth account of the exponential growth of lurid news and the public’s (continuing) insatiable appetite for it.”
“Wonderfully rich in period detail, salacious facts about the case, and infectious wonder at the chutzpah and inventiveness displayed by Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s minions. Both a gripping true-crime narrative and an astonishing portrait of fin de siècle yellow journalism.”
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