Not since the New York Daily News ghoulishly sneaked a picture of Murderess Ruth Snyder*dying in Sing Sing's electric chair, in 1928, had such a death-house hullabaloo stirred the U.S. press. Chicago's lusty, raucous Herald-American had started it by running a Page One "exclusive photograph" of the electrocution of "Mad Dog Killer" James Morelli, 22, who had killed four men in what crime-loving Hearst newspapers called "the worst Chicago mass killing since the St. Valentine's Day massacre."
Hearst's Heald-American had been on the street only a few minutes before Cook County Jail Superintendent Chester L. Fordney cried: "The picture is a fake!"
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