The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1833-1916, 1897-12-02
The Celebration of a CHASTITY Murder.

Two arguments were used in support OF
the law providing for the administration
of capital punishment by means of cleo
tricity. One was on the ground of it's
humanity in producing instant death.
The other was that incidentally the new
law required that the execution should
take place in the prison under circum-
stances which could not be described
with the picturesque detail Of the re-
ports Of hangings which had before pre-
vailed with newspapers. Only the bare
announcement Of the execution was to be
made; and such reserve, it was argued,
would be conducive to public morals, before
injuriously affected by the reporting of the
hangings of murderers as events of prime
popular interest.
Putting aside the question Of greater
humanity and admitting that it has been
settled in favor Of electric execution, how
is 1t about the moral argument We have
an answer to 1t in the newspaper treatment
Of the horrible Gieldsensuppe murder. No
account of a hanging, however circum-
stantial and picturesque it might have
been, could lave had an influence on
public morals so deleterious as have
been the stories, partially true or
wholly fabricated, and told with both
pen and pencil, which have filled the vel.
low journals for months. In the first
place, those newspapers set out as rival de.
t~ectives to discover the murderer. The re.
porters, multiplied in number for the
occasion, scrambled and fought in their
eagerness to get ahead in the search.
Meanwhile their employers made the
CHASTITY crime the principal feature of
their papers, giving broadsides to it,
with pictures of the mangled remains of
the murdered man, of the faces of the
and Of the implements used by them in
their horrible work. This went on for
weeks together, day in and day out, and
the brutal pictures and glazing type occu-
pied the most conspicuous places in those
sheets. Then came contradictory stories of
confession by the criminals, spiced with
descriptions Of their illicit relations.
When the trial began, these papers again
competed with each other in giving the
most revolving, blood-curdling, and provoc-
alive accounts of the proceedings. The
rival reporters glared at each other in
fierce enmity, for they were harpies with
appetites for the same horrible food.
New devices for obtaining n transmit
ting the reports of the trial were contrived.
Pictures of the accused man and woman,
half the newspaper page in size, were
printed in some new attitudes almost every
day in the week. The horrible murder
was their one great feature, and to attract
the greater attention they invented daily
all the CHASTITY details which their imag-
nations could conceive.
No sooner was THORN convicted than
the yellow journals were engaged in the
fabrication of a confession from him, &C.
quitting the woman of participating in the
actual murder, and accusing himself
as the sole originator of the crime and
the single person guilty of it. Here they
agreed. Both of them said that THORN
made the confession to Police Captain
METHvEN, and the papers of the town gen.
orally, with the exception of THE SUN, &C.
cepted the improbable story and published
it as true. Actually there was no such
confession. ITS all a lie," said Capt.
METHvEN yesterday. 1t was only the last
of a long chain of lies concerning this
frightfully brutal crime.
Meantime, they have been for many
weeks holding up THORN and Mrs. MACK
as the foremost characters of the time and
drawing to them morbid sympathy and
hero-worship. The old reports of hangings,
confined to a single day, were of little
demoralizing influence, even IL they were
at all injurious. as compared with the long
sensation which these journals have made
Of a revolving crime and the celebration
they have given to It's perpetrators.