SCOTT SIMON, Host:
Who cracked the case and who scrambled facts, myths and suspicion about it all through a boiling summer? The World, The Herald and the Evening Journal.
SIMON: Paul Collins joins us from Portland. Thanks for being with us.
PAUL COLLINS: Oh, it's good to be here.
SIMON: So what are all the elements that - in addition to a ghastly crime, what fueled this great newspaper war?
COLLINS: And so in a way when this case came along Hearst decided if the other newspapers weren't going to solve it and if the police weren't going to solve it, he would.
SIMON: Now, in fact, it was a reporter at the World, Ned Brown, who saw something on the headless torso that got him thinking. He noticed an anomaly.
COLLINS: He eventually realized that where he had seen that was actually in the bathhouses in New York, with the masseurs who really, you know, had to put a lot of physical effort in but they kept their skin quite soft. And he started asking around at some of the bathhouses if any of their employees were missing.
SIMON: What was driving the investigation - the police or the newspaper war?
COLLINS: And, in fact, the first arrest in the case was basically attempted by two Hearst reporters who jumped onto a moving carriage on Ninth Avenue.
SIMON: Tell us about Hearst's wrecking crew, as they were called.
COLLINS: And that's what the wrecking crew was. It was this mob of reporters that would pour out anytime they got word that something big was happening.
SIMON: It's now what respectable news organizations call team reporting.
COLLINS: That's right.
SIMON: You know, William Randolph Hearst, who owned the Journal, and Joseph Pulitzer, who ran the World, are often considered to be just about as different as Bill O'Reilly and Arianna Huffington. But were they really?
COLLINS: I think the reason we view them a bit differently today is that Pulitzer came to regret somewhat what he had helped create.
SIMON: Was there a lot the newspapers got wrong?
COLLINS: And it emerged that somebody had paying employees of the local water company $1 a clue to plant clues around. Most people had just two guesses as to who that was. It was probably either the World or the Journal.
SIMON: Was this really some kind of golden age of journalism or something else?
COLLINS: Those were all things that were really kind of pioneered in this era in a lot of ways. They took the news and they made it compelling. They actually made it entertaining. By the same token, I think the tragedy of yellow journalism is they took news and they made it an entertainment and we've had to live with that too.
SIMON: Paul Collins, our literary detective on WEEKEND EDITION, and his new book, "The Murder of a Century: The Gilded Age Crime that Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars." Paul, thanks so much.
COLLINS: Oh, thank you.
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