Blood & Ink by Joe Pompeo

Author:Joe Pompeo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

19

Trial of the Century

By early November, as Frances Hall and her brothers prepared to face a jury of their peers, Somerville transformed from a provincial backwater into the most heavily scrutinized town in the United States. Nowhere else, it was said, could you expect to find so many journalists in one place, except perhaps for the national political conventions, or the signing of the peace treaty at Versailles. More than two hundred reporters, editors, and photographers—from New York and New Jersey; from Washington and Massachusetts; from Pennsylvania and Kansas and Tennessee—had arrived to chronicle the proceedings, which even the most seasoned among them called “the great story of a generation.” Somerville would be their home for the next several weeks, which meant lodging was now the borough’s most precious commodity. The Daily News reserved a whole floor of the Somerset Hotel, the lobby of which doubled as a social club for visiting scribes. Other New York papers took out leases on entire homes, whose rents soared to five hundred dollars a month. An enterprising property owner welcomed thirteen employees of the Daily Mirror, who shared the house with a single black cat.

Landlords weren’t the only ones profiting from the influx. It was a boon to those who trafficked in bootleg liquor and games of chance, as well as to Somerville’s legitimate entrepreneurs. One haberdashery owner reported that overcoats, shirts, neckties, and socks were flying off his shelves. “Business is good,” he said. But there was also resentment that powerful Hudson County politicians, at the urging of a troublemaking tabloid, had inserted themselves into local affairs. “To believe that one sensational New York newspaper could cause all the recent proceedings and expense,” an editorial in the Somerset Democrat bemoaned, “does not sit well with Somerset County taxpayers.”

Among the hordes of journalists tramping around Somerville were the beat reporters who had been following the story for months, including Herbert Mayer of the Mirror and Grace Robinson of the News. The Evening Graphic sent Leo Casey and Jack Miley, “both wonderful reporters,” a colleague recalled, “our purpose having been not only to report the aroused sensation, but to make it plain, should a conviction not seem likely, that we, we, we, the Graphic, were quite innocent of having brought this trouble to Mrs. Hall, her brother Willie, brother Henry, and cousin Henry de la Bruyere Carpender.”

In addition to their own staff, news outlets commissioned guest correspondents, employing ghostwriters as needed. The Post Syndicate secured the byline of Ethel Stevens—wife of Henry—and the Mirror boasted that its lineup would include Charlotte Mills, who had already produced a series of autobiographical articles for the Famous Feature Syndicate. Also on the Hearst tab was Richard Enright, a mystery author and former commissioner of the New York City police. The Graphic gave a column to the Reverend Dr. John Roach Straton, who proclaimed in his God-fearing prose, “Anyone that strikes a blow at the sanctity of the marriage vow undermines the foundations of the nation.” Editors additionally

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