The Murder of the Century
The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars
(Crown, 2011)

"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."

From the Reviews
"[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." --Wall Street Journal

“Riveting….Collins has mined enough newspaper clippings and other archives to artfully recreate the era, the crime and the newspaper wars it touched off.” --New York Times

“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 siecle yellow journalism.” --Kirkus Reviews

"A dismembered corpse and rival newspapers squabbling for headlines fuel Collins’s intriguing look at the birth of “yellow journalism” in late–19th-century New York.  an in-depth account of the exponential growth of lurid news and the public’s (continuing) insatiable appetite for it." --Publishers Weekly

From the Author
This is my most popular book, but I had to wait years to write it. I stumbled across this murder case in 2005, and was astounded to find that aside from some references in histories of Hearst and Pulitzer, it'd basically been forgotten. But ​I'd just landed my contract for The Book of William a week earlier, and as that book stretched into a bigger and bigger project, this one long remained tantalizingly out of reach.

Writing about crime is an immersive experience for a historian -- not only do you have courtroom testimony of people recalling what they were wearing, doing, and saying at any given moment, you also have the case itself being covered by packs of reporters. For some of the scenes in this book, there were basically a dozen people in the room taking note of the expression on someone's face, the quality of the light, even how they're fidgeting. It allows a novelistic level of detail that's very difficult to achieve in any other area of history.