The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins Read Free Book Online

working up a special color illustration. Not for the Sunday comics supplement, mind you—but for that day, Tuesday.
    And if that didn’t knock the competition sideways, his next idea would: an elite band ofWreckers dedicated to homicide coverage. Backed by veteran crime reporter George Waugh Arnold, they’d be even
better
than the NYPD’s rudderless Detective Bureau, which had been adrift ever since Inspector Byrnes was forced out. Not so George and his men. They’d carry their own badges, pack licensed pistols. They’d make arrests, they’d
get things done
. Hearst even had a dandy name for them, one that might have sent that suspicious letter writer into a tizzy: the Murder Squad.
    ——
    CROWDS POURED into the morgue that morning, ready to identify the city’s most famous body, but they were made to wait; the coroner had scheduled yet another autopsy. Three days had now passed since the body’s first discovery, and reporters were growing jaded about the odds for any more would-be identifiers. “One might as well have tried to identify a particular Texas steer by the sirloin hanging in a butcher’s shop,” a Hearst man dryly observed.
    Some guesses had certainly been less helpful than others. Occultists plied their way into the city morgue, including at least one phrenologist apparently undeterred by the absence of a head; that morning’s
World
ran a palmist’s not particularly edifying judgment: “Did love or jealousy have aught to do with the tragedy? Perhaps.” Not to be outdone, the
Journal
hired the country’s most famous palm reader, Niblo, who swanned into the morgue and performed a reading on the dead man’s hands. Among his pronouncements: the victim had been murdered for love rather than money, and the killer might be a “female Jack the Ripper.”
    Oddly enough, it looked like Niblo might be on to something. Inside the Bellevue morgue,five men gathered around the dissecting table: Deputy Coroner O’Hanlon, three consulting physicians, and pathologist Frank Ferguson of New York Hospital. Dr. Ferguson had seen this kind of case before; three years earlier he’d been in this very same room, at this same table, examining the headless and limbless body of Susie Martin, an eleven-year-old girl who vanished from her Hell’s Kitchen tenement. Twelve days later her remains were found in a cellar just blocks away, identifiable only by the clothes the killer had used to bundle her body into. The crime had gone unsolved; and now, reading the details of this new case in the papers,Ferguson sensed a chilling familiarity.
    Look
, he pointed to two stab wounds: one to the left lung, the other from a downward thrust to the collarbone. Both made with a long, narrow blade.
    The same had been done to Martin
.
    The sawing along the neck and atop the legs?
    The same
.
    Dr. Ferguson directed their gaze to a previously ignored wound—a faint cut into a rib, where the saw had glanced off the body. It was a crucial clue, for unlike the stumps, it was here that you could determine the width of the saw.
    “The same kind of saw was used,” he surmised after measuring the cut. “The blade of the saw is only a millimeter in thickness. A butcher’s meat saw is about that thickness. A carpenter’s saw is thicker.” In fact, the angling of the cuts told a story of their own. “By examining the marks made by the saw and the knife,” he said, “I can tell about how the murderer went at it to carve up the body.” The body, disassembled under the terrible light of the dissecting room, bore mute witness as Ferguson envisioned its fate.
    “I can almost see him in the room with his dead victim,” he told his transfixed audience. “I can see him tearing off the clothing, if he had any on when he was slain. I can see him turn the body belly-down, so that the wild eyes should not stare at him. I can see him sever the flesh of the neck and then use the saw on the vertebrae. The murderer stood on the right-hand side. The