The Press: Murder at Retail

The war has gone on for more than four years now, with its incessant news of legalized wholesale slaughter. These repeated shocks of horror eventually numb the mind. . . . Murder at retail, however . . . is something else again. Anybody can comprehend a crime of passion or cupidity or both, and most people are fascinated. . . . We don’t see what anybody can do about it. Or should.

This was the explanation offered editorially by New York’s Daily News for a nationwide phenomenon that mushroomed in the U.S. press last week: a hothouseful of murder stories musky with sex.

Mystery, Maltese Cats. In the Bahamas, the trial of Alfred de Marigny, charged with murdering his father-in-law, Sir Harry Oakes (TIME, Nov. 1), was in its second week. The case involved wealth, mystery, youth, beauty, titles, tropical lightning, Maltese cats. Newsroom trained seals and plain reporters gave it the works. With characteristic enterprise, Hearst papers hired Mystery Novelist Erie Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason), sent him down, printed daily thrillers under his name.

On top of this journalistic natural—a good story any old day—came a crop of murders that were just the thing for an escape from war news. In Washington, a 30-year-old blonde was found in the street, shot to death. A woman who saw a man at the scene said he scurried away after yelling, “What the hell are you looking at?” A 14-year-old girl was slain in Massachusetts, a student Army nurse, 19, at Poughkeepsie, N.Y. In Lubbock, Tex. a doctor and his wife were bludgeoned to death in what an enthusiastic reporter called “one of the greatest murder mysteries in Texas annals.”

And topping all these by a typographical mile was the Manhattan murder of Brewery Heiress Patricia Burton Lonergan.

Nudity Is Not Enough. There was only a skeleton staff hanging around in the tabloid Daily News’s city room when the Associated Press teletype clattered briefly, spewed forth a two-paragraph bulletin about the discovery of Patricia Lonergan’s body. Customary Sunday evening doldrums vanished. Mention of a “nude body” and the murder weapons (candlesticks) was promising. But only when they saw “triplex apartment” and”Beekman Hill” did News staffers know they had something. The fastest-breaking crime staff in the U.S. swung into action.

Not since the Easter Sunday (1937) murder of Model Veronica Gedeon had Manhattan newsmen had a really good chance to indulge in boob-catching antics like diagrams with X’s marking spots. This one looked as if it would back the Gedeon killing on to the trash pile.

Police Reporter Tony Marino was rushed with a cameraman to the Lonergan apartment, on traditionally (but not actually) prim Beekman Hill. Earthy, fire-hydrant-shaped Al Binder, who “knows everybody” and who had come in from vacation for his mail, was told to get Patricia’s picture. He scored a screaming beat, an exclusive photo which the News splashed over Page One. Before it was over, 20 News cameramen, 20 reporters were on the story.

Because rewritemen could not find in the News’s files anything about the Lonergans, nightclub pressagents were called, reporters were hustled to addresses where the Lonergans had formerly lived. The files were finecombed again, this time yielded one society item filed under “Lanergan.”* From it the Newsmen got the name of Patricia’s mother, went to work on her.

Crime 251, War 145. The story took shape at a crawl, at first looked more Ellery Queenish than it was. But when the last replate went to bed at 3 a.m., the News had its picture and coverage with only one gap in it: there was nothing much about Patricia’s husband, R.C.A.F. Cadet Wayne Lonergan.

Except for the beating they took on the picture, other Manhattan papers and the press associations were close behind the News. Even the usually sedate, aloof New York Times took down its hair, assigned crack Reporter Meyer Berger to the yarn, gave it top-of-Page-One display. And for the first time in its haughty history, the Times let words like homosexuality creep into its columns. All over the U.S. newspapers made room for the kind of news most people like to read. One day’s News had 251 column-inches devoted to sex & crime, 145 devoted to the war.

But the field day was soon over. The small-fry cases proved to be two-day stories at best. The Lonergan case, born in a palace, died in an alley. Its climax: estranged Husband Lonergan, who had fled to Toronto and been brought back by plane, had pulled the job. It took no Sherlock Holmes to untangle a crime whose tawdry details petered out into unprintable and nearly unprintable gossip.

Editors, paid to give their public what it wants to read, still played the story for all it was worth. But by week’s end the De Marigny trial alone marched on, side by side on Page One with the Russian Army in the Dnieper bend.

* Misfiling is not rare in newspaper morgues. In the Pittsburgh Press morgue Sir Samuel Hoare’s pictures were once found under “Seal, Lord Privy.”