February 8, 2007
O. J. Simpson and Helen Jewett Posted by Ellen Feldman at 02:15 PM EST The Judith Regan–O. J. Simpson brouhaha has died down—for the moment—but reading The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, by Daniel Stashower reminded me of another acquitted alleged murderer who managed to have it both ways, and the publisher who made a bundle in the bargain.
Stashower’s excellent book is about the murder of Mary Rogers in 1841, an unsolved crime that inspired Poe to set his brooding detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who would serve as a model for the modern gumshoe, to a fictional solution of the case in “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” It also put in motion reform leading to a centralized municipal police force. But another crime recounted in the book bears a closer analogy to current events.
Five years earlier, Helen Jewett, a 23-year-old prostitute, who worked at the Palace of Passions on Thomas Street in New York City, a mere stone’s throw from the local police station, was bludgeoned to death with a hatchet, her body subsequently set on fire. Jewett was, according to James Gordon Bennett, “beautiful but erring.” For the press, murdered young women of easy virtue are always beauties. Plain Janes never meet violent ends. In the New York Herald, which Bennett had started only a year earlier, he described his visit to the scene of the crime for voyeuristic (and aren’t we all) readers of the day. “Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of the corpse as one would the beauties of a statue of marble. . . . The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici.”
Bennett’s account of the dead girl was not much more lurid than others in the penny press. His true originality and flair emerged when he turned the paper’s attention to Richard Robinson, the 19-year-old clerk and would-be roué arrested for the murder. The police, the newspapers, and the public found it an open-and-shut case. Several witnesses placed Robinson with Jewett in her room the night of the crime. The weapon matched a hatchet that was missing from the shop where Robinson worked. The blue cloak found at the crime scene looked like one Robinson was seen wearing that night, though he denied it. But if Bennett, whom Walt Whitman described as a “reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes and breathing mildew at everything fresh and fragrant,” was going to outsell his competitors, he had to have a gimmick. The Herald pinned the blame on another culprit. “Is it not more likely the crime of a woman? Are not the whole chain of circumstances within the ingenuity of a female, abandoned and desperate?” All evidence pointed, Bennett insisted, to a jealous Rosina Townsend, an “old miserable hag who has spent her whole life seducing and inveigling the young and old to their destruction.” When an army of young clerks took up the cry and crowded the courtroom, sporting special rakish hats, cheering Robinson, and heckling the prosecution, acquittal was inevitable. According to Stashower’s book, “Robinson, whom a later writer branded ‘the Great Unhung,’ would spend the rest of his days coyly hinting that he had gotten away with murder.”
The scenario sounds uncannily like a certain television interview that few have seen and fewer still have been able to avoid hearing and reading about. The similarity belongs to the the-more-things-change-the-more-they-remain-the-same school of history. Our fascination with murder, especially if it is committed in passion, remains eternal. Our need to project current concerns onto the details and take away relevant lessons from them is equally constant. Bennett blamed womanhood, weak and immoral, for the murder of Helen Jewett. A large part of America found revenge, or at least redemption, for a greater centuries-old crime in the acquittal of Simpson. The fact that the first was a put-up job and the second a valid grievance does not make the injustice any less perplexing.
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