BLOOD & INK: The Scandalous Jazz-era Double Murder That Turned America Into True Crime Joe Pompeo
Newspaper publisher Joseph Medill Patterson is said to have ranked the themes most popular with readers in the 1920s. “(1) love or sex, (2) money, (3) murder.”Best story — his emerging New York tabloid The Daily The kind of story that powered his news All three were included, from local rags to America’s most circulated newspapers.
Joe Pompeo, Senior Media Correspondent at Vanity Fair, cites Patterson’s formula in his comprehensive new book. he follows it too. “Blood & Ink” depicts two of his stories that are explosive and intertwined. Two gruesome murders and the rise of American tabloid journalism.
He died in September 1922 when the bodies of the charismatic Reverend Edward Hall and his congregation, local housewife Eleanor Mills, were found dead under a crabapple tree in a field in New Jersey. starts with. Their precise placement proved crucial.The bodies fell across the line separating the two counties.The wealthy Middlesex, where the two victims lived, and the policeman, who was in charge of the incident. Somerset caused the
All signs pointed to murder. The weapon was gone, the corpse was staged, and someone had taken the time to prop Edward Hall’s own calling card to his leg. The investigator was groping from the beginning, but he waved at the walker to see if he knew the deceased. That observer first noticed that Mills had a 16-inch maggot-filled cut from ear to ear.
Survivors included the spouses of each of the victims. Hall’s arrogant heiress wife, Frances, and the ill-fated Jim Mills, whom Eleanor treated with open contempt. Both appeared devastated and, when questioned, refused to admit the obvious that the victim was in the middle of a whispered incident.
The Hall Mills murder fascinated not only gossip-hungry neighbors, but also a nation that began to fall under the spell of its own tabloids. ‘Blood & Ink’ Will Delight Journalism Geeks: Pompeo Tracks Daily How His News Boosted Its Circulation Behind Investigations In His Mirror (hopeful “90 percent entertainment, 10 percent information”) and The Evening Graphic right behind. And he makes a compelling case that hard-boiled editors — including the glamorous and doomed Phil Payne — and their relentless reporters caused the most serious twist of the case. is proceeding. (The female journalist who dominated the new true crime beat deserves her own book.)
newspaper’ The quest to find the killer may have been truly tireless, but they were shock journalism, what one contemporary critic called “the new mongrel fourth estate,” There was lax adherence to reporting standards at best. In one memorable attempt to uncover the killer, Payne submitted a staged seance bill casting a reporter as an invented oracle named Mrs. Astra. In another article, a revocation petition somehow went missing, reappearing shortly after the morning papers, until a tantalizing scoop hit the press.
“Blood and Ink” chart An ever-changing roster of potential culprits. A local pig farmer named Jane Gibson became so famous for her ridiculous and false accusations that F. Scott Fitzgerald dropped her name in an interview. The actual arrest and trial of the murder suspect only took place after a series of botched autopsies, one false confession, questionable detentions, a string of incredible eyewitness testimony, and a rumored delivery of a substantial amount of cash. I was. The prosecutor left the case. Fearless editor fired.
True crime obsessives who like bow-tied murders will be disappointed by the lack of case closure. He’s done an astounding amount of research — he details a suspect’s jail cell inventory — and forensic evidence can’t be fleshed out in the absence of it. A sigh comes out as the final 50 pages of . Pompeo himself refrains from offering his own best guess as to the identity of the real culprit until the last minute, and his restraint allows readers to form their own theories as to what happened under the crabapple tree. And while those cogs are turning, the press-focused section shines. It’s a testament to Pompeo’s skill that the tabloid interpretation of Pompeo is as compelling as the double murder in the open field. I could read a few thousand more words of Bernal McFadden’s quaint and vulgar newspaper.
Pompeo writes that the reporter sent a telegram of about 11 million words from the courthouse basement. His own books are more economical, but still conscientiously thorough. Dead ends and false starts can linger. In an afterword, Pompeo explains how he got to the treasure trove of files related to the case, which helped extend his previous account. In his apparent excitement, he sometimes indulges in these details. The slow parts of “Blood & Ink” read like a courtroom stenographer’s notes.
To keep up the momentum, Pompeo has the unfortunate habit of borrowing formats from tabloid material. Some chapters end with exaggerated cliffhangers. As Frances prepares to meet a visitor after her husband’s funeral, “her ordeal was just beginning.”When Jim claims he had been happily married, “his obfuscation Nevertheless, the truth was about to come out.”
Prosperity aside “Blood & Ink” An addictive hooda unit, a vivid depiction of crime that has captivated generations of newspaper readers. Or the internet age. Since at least his Roaring Twenties, we’ve been craving smut and scandal and opening our wallets. And Pompeo does the heavy lifting of delivering goods without losing sight of the crime itself.
In the subtitle, Pompeo claims that the Hall Mills Murders immersed readers in true crime. But this book leaves room for reasonable doubt. What made this particular crime and these characters, at this historic moment, the incident that launched the genre?
There doesn’t seem to be one clear reason. However, publisher William Randolph Hearst provided a clue in a telegram sent to the editor in 1926. 500,000 copies for the first time. “Congratulations on your distribution. Great,” he wrote. “What’s important about a newspaper’s circulation is that when the public is pumping, it’s pumping.” He added that he would reach out.
Indignation! Betrayed sense of justice! Witness went viral — or as viral as Witness can go in the Flapper and Hooch era. As business boomed, the tabloids fanned the ire.
It didn’t solve the Hall Mills murders, nor did it solve Pompeo. True crime continues to inspire the kind of bloodthirst that podcast creators, Reddit thread writers, and TikTok theorists never quench. It makes me want more.
Mattie Kahn is the author of the upcoming book Young and Restless.
BLOOD & INK: The Scandalous Jazz-era Double Murder That Turned America Into True Crime | Joe Pompeo | 352 pages | Illustrations | William Morrow | $32.50
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