If the bruised body of a pretty girl with veronal in the liver were washed ashore on the sands of Long Beach, N. Y.; if she were found to be of respectable but somewhat eccentric family; if her diary revealed her as a neurotic and alluded to childhood misadventures with an unnamed, elderly and prominent man; if the girl's name were Sadie Schmitz and she lived, say, on West 17th Street, New York; if such a case occurred in cool weather with an abundance of other news breaking concurrently—how would the newspapers treat it? Probable answer: as a good local five-day sex mystery, to be slipped off the front pages of conservative papers if no solution was forthcoming.
But if the dead girl's name were Starr Faithfull; if she had had an eventful sex life on two continents; if her address were No. 12 St. Luke's Place, three doors from Mayor James J. Walker; if her sister, Tucker Faithfull, were a secretive girl whose full lips and slim legs photographed well; and if the story broke during a heat wave and a scarcity of big news—then, as happened last fortnight, the august New York Times might consider it fit to print front-page for nearly two weeks. Cyrus H. K. Curtis' polite New York Evening Post might feature on its front page a three-column drawing of the girl's family and dog in their home. The Chicago Tribune might feel called upon to print an 8-column banner: SCAN SLAIN GIRL'S LOVE DIARY. The Atlanta Constitution, San Francisco Examiner, Milwaukee Sentinel, Cincinnati Enquirer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Indianapolis News might go for the story, as go for it they did. So did the newspapers of Boston, so energetically that Andrew J. Peters, onetime Boston Mayor, whose wife was a distant cousin of Starr Faithfull's mother, found occasion to issue a formal denial that he had ever been improperly involved with the girl.
The potentialities of the strange story as hot-weather reading were in nowise chilled by Nassau County's publicity-wise District Attorney Elvin Newton Edwards, who had just finished the noisy business of sending hare-brained Francis ("Two-Gun") Crowley to the electric chair (TIME, June 15). Soon after Starr Faithfull's body was found, the district attorney announced she had been killed by two men. one prominent in politics, her body taken out in a boat and thrown overboard. Next day he declared that the girl was knocked unconscious aboard a boat, then thrown into the water. By then the prominent politician had been "practically eliminated." Ultimately Prosecutor Edwards was weighing suicide against the murder theory.
But the paucity of essential facts was more than made up for to the Press by Starr Faithfull's background and home life. The family, occupying one floor of a brownstone house, consisted of Starr, her sister, her mother and stepfather, Stanley Faithfull, a not prosperous chemist and salesman for a pneumatic mattress concern. Lean, gimlet-eyed, red-whiskered, bewildered, he talked & talked to the thronging newshawks who came away with many conflicting stories and white lies. For some reason his daughter was made an "heiress" by the first sensational stories, a description soon dropped by all but the tabloids. But other newspapers kept the family endowed with an air of gentility, apparently as an excuse to give the story special attention.
Officials of the