In Long Island, a farmer found a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys discovered a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumbled upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. The police were baffled- There were no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus, and an unlikely trio--an anxious cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor--all raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial- an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim that the police couldn't identify with certainty, and that the defense claimed wasn't even dead. The "enormously entertaining" (The Wall Street Journal) account of a shocking 1897 murder mystery that "artfully re-create s the era, the crime, and the newspaper wars it touched off" (The New York Times) AN EDGAR NOMINEE FOR BEST FACT CRIME . "Fascinating . . . won't disappoint readers in search of a book like Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City."-The Washington Post On Long Island, a farmer finds a duck pond turned red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two boys discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. The police are baffled- There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects. The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most perplexing murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus, as their rival newspapers the World and the Journal raced to solve the crime. What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale-a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that forever changed newspaper journalism.