The Murder of the Century

<b>No writer better articulates ourinterest in the confluence of hope eccentricity and the timelessness of the bold and strange than Paul Collins.--DAVE EGGERS<br></b> <br>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. <p/>The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26 1897 plunged detectives<br>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. <p/>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. <i>The Murder of the Century </i>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.<br>