Stranger Than Fiction

October 2024

Penny (Press) Dreadfuls
by Dean Jobb

At Christmastime in 1843, Polly Bodine murdered her sister-in-law and her infant child, and stole jewelry, silverware, and other valuables before setting fire to their Staten Island home to destroy the evidence of her crime. That, at least, was the verdict of New York City’s feisty and trashy penny press. Bodine was convicted in print and in the court of public opinion long before she stood trial in court of a law, where a starkly different outcome awaited her.

Author and lawyer Alex Hortis vividly recreates Bodine’s dramatic, years-long legal ordeal in The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice (Pegasus Crime). He delivers an indictment of trial-by-media—then and now—as he recounts how scoop-obsessed newspapers published gossip, half-truths, and outright lies with little regard for accuracy or how their reports might influence jurors with the power to send accused murderers to the gallows.

It’s one of three recent true crime books that revisit sensational American murders of the nineteenth century and explore the roots of tabloid-style journalism.

James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald led the charge to convict Bodine, declaring her guilty within days of the murders and before she was even in custody. “Horrible, most horrible,” the Herald reported, “when it is considered that this act was committed by the sister of the husband of the murdered wife and mother.” Bennett caught a ferry from his Manhattan office to tour the charred remains of the house where the bodies were found and to indulge in more prejudicial reporting. This, he told his readers, was “where a woman and child had been sacrificed to Mammon, by the hands of a woman—a sister.”

Moses Yale Beach, proprietor of the New York Sun and Bennett’s rival in the race to convict Bodine and sell newspapers, paid two Staten Island men $100 for a few comments supposedly overheard once she was lodged in a jail cell. The paper ran them under the bold headline “Confession of Polly Bodine,” even though they seemed to exonerate her. The National Police Gazette, a pioneering crime-laden tabloid founded in the 1840s, published a front-page sketch that depicted Bodine leaving the murder scene as flames consumed the bodies of her victims. Even master showman P.T. Barnum hopped on the Bodine-is-guilty bandwagon, exhibiting a wax figure depicting her as a witch-like hag at his American Museum only steps from a Manhattan courtroom where she was on trial for murder.

Bennett, who does not appear to have known how to spell the word “alleged,” defended his sensational reporting and the dubious ethics of his reporters. “The Press is the living Jury of the Nation,” he insisted. “It is as much the sacred duty of writers of the public press to detect and expose guilt and ignorance, as to defend innocence.”

The Bodine prosecution demonstrated the dangers of unfettered and unscrupulous pre-trial reporting. She stood trial three times and it was so hard to find jurors who did not read the papers or assume she was guilty that each trial had to be held in a different jurisdiction. It was the first time a change of venue was granted in a major US homicide case based on newspaper reports, Hortis asserts. The Bodine case also clarified procedures for questioning prospective jurors about how publicity had influenced their opinions on whether an accused person was guilty.

It’s no stretch to see the origins of today’s obsession with blogs and podcasts that claim to have cracked cold cases and the no-suspect-unconvicted new coverage of major American crimes. The legacy of the penny press’ handling of the Bodine case, Hortis concludes, is a “lightning rush to judgment” and “tainting of jury pools” that’s all too common in our own time. “The curse of tabloid justice has been reappearing in new forms of media ever since.”

Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman wrote about the case and have cameos in this excellent and hard-to-put-down book. Did a jury ultimately convict Bodine of the crimes the press was so certain she had committed? The real tragedy of the Staten Island murders, as Hortis makes clear, is how many editors and reporters refused to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Murder on the Mountain: Crime, Passion, and Punishment in Gilded Age New Jersey (Rutgers University Press) is not a murder mystery—not, at least, when it comes to identifying who was convicted of killing John Meierhofer, a farmer in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1879. The book opens with the back-to-back hangings in 1881of Meierhofer’s wife, Margaret Klem, and their hired hand, Frank Lammens. But there’s a mystery for authors Peter Wosh and Patricia Schall to investigate: which of the two put a bullet into the back of the victim’s head?

“I am as innocent as Jesus,” Klem proclaimed on the way to the gallows (she is the last woman hanged for murder in New Jersey). Lammens, too, denied being the killer. “Oh God!” he asked. “How can they hang an innocent man?” Both were under intense pressure to confess. If one of them had admitted firing the fatal shot, the authorities were ready to pardon and spare the life of the other. This final act of selflessness, however, was unlikely—they accused each other of the crime.

Wosh and Schall, a husband-and-wife team who lived close to the murder scene, became obsessed with the crime and spent years researching it (Schall died in 2020, before the book was published). They delve into every aspect of the case, from the demons that haunted Civil War veterans like the volatile, abusive Meierhofer to the area’s stagnating post-war economy. “The Meierhofer story,” the book asserts, is “embedded in the historical, social, and political context” of West Orange and America in the late nineteenth century.

It was up to a jury—and a legion of newspaper reporters and editors—to sort through conflicting evidence to identify Meierhofer’s killer. And it’s here the prejudices, stereotypes, anti-immigrant hysteria, and misogyny of the Gilded Age are on full, ugly display. Klem and Meierhofer were German-born and Lammens was Dutch. Lammens was one of the vagrants who wandered rural America in search of food and work and haunted the popular imagination as potential thieves and killers. Klem was portrayed as a Jezebel who had seduced Lammens—and many other men—and plotted to kill her much-older husband. The press reported as many of the salacious details as possible. Klem’s claim that Meierhofer had beaten her, and that local constables had refused to intervene, were buried under the evil-woman narrative.

Context is vital for any foray into historical true crime and the authors’ exhaustive research firmly fixes this murder in its time and place. The storyline, however, is sometimes hijacked by tangents or unnecessary detail that could have been left on the cutting-room floor.

The decision to begin the book with the hangings of Klem and Lammens may give away the story’s ending, but it also highlights the brutality of the law and the ghoulishness of the press and public. Both hangings were botched—the drop failed to break their necks and each of them slowly strangled to death. “DEAD, DEAD, DEAD,” blared one enthusiastic headline, capturing the public mood. Another paper quoted a Newark greengrocer’s quip on the eve of the executions: “Lemons are reasonable today,” he told a customer, “but tomorrow Lammens will be high.” The book offers many other sobering insights into capital punishment and attitudes toward crime and justice in the nineteenth-century.

Six decades before Lizzie Borden stood trial for the axe murders of her father and stepmother, residents of the Massachusetts city of Fall River were shocked by an equally lurid and infamous crime. In December 1832 the body of Sarah Maria Cornell, who worked in one of the city’s many cotton mills, was discovered on a nearby farm just over the border with Rhode Island. The authorities assumed she had hanged herself until a note was discovered among her belongings. “If I am missing inquire of Rev. Mr. Avery,” it said, “he will know where I am gone.”

The man referred to in the note was Ephraim Avery, a married father of four and a fiery Methodist preacher with a penchant for attacking and slandering those he considered less pious than himself, which was just about everyone he encountered. Before her death Cornell accused Avery of raping her at a religious retreat—one of the days-long “camp meetings” Methodists organized to build congregations and celebrate their faith—and she was pregnant with his child when she died.

Bruce Dorsey, a professor of history at Pennsylvania’s Swarthmore College, meticulously recreates the lurid crime and its aftermath in Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime That Captivated a Nation (Oxford University Press). It’s a tragic and scandalous tale of religious zealotry, abuse of power, misogyny, and press sensationalism at the beginning of America’s long and jarring transformation from a nation of farmers and into an urban and industrial economy.

Dorsey shows how the murder unleashed two forces that collided like tectonic plates. Cornell, thirty and unmarried, was one of the new women of the time – a rootless “factory girl” who supported herself and changed jobs as she pleased, making her morals and behavior suspect in tradition-bound New England (Polly Bodine, too, was attacked for her unconventional lifestyle). Avery was at the vanguard of a religious revival and backlash against the social upheaval the factories were creating and the modernizing, materialistic world of Cornell and her co-workers. It made his downfall all the more shocking.

The press ate up the tawdry details of a clergyman accused of a “most foul and abominable deed.” Dorsey touts it as America’s first celebrity trial and a precursor of a phenomenon “that would one day be a defining feature of popular culture in the United States: sensational criminal cases that garnered the label ‘crime of the century’ – no matter how frequently such crimes occurred.” It was certainly one of the country’s first trials to become a celebrity circus. The case made headlines far beyond New England, was debated in books and pamphlets, and inspired songs and at least two plays. And the conspiracy theories and fake news the case generated, he argues, show that misinformation is a problem with deep roots.

The book is heavy on analysis but the author makes sure the drama commands center stage. He weaves together the events as they unfolded with the background and detail needed to make sense of the bigger picture and the agendas at play. He shows how small-town rivalries, overlapping jurisdictions, and the rudimentary policing and judicial systems of the day almost allowed Avery to escape a reckoning in a courtroom. A determined constable finally tracked him down in New Hampshire and returned him to Newport, Rhode Island to stand trial.

Dorsey dissects the case against Avery and the courtroom drama of his prosecution with precision. Was the preacher convicted of murdering Cornell and his unborn child to cover up the rape and protect his reputation? Or were Cornell’s lifestyle and reputation the real focus of the trial? Read this insightful account to find out.

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Dean Jobb’s latest book, A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue (Algonquin Books) is the incredible true story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York while planning some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. For more on this and his other true crime books, find him at deanjobb.com.