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Francisco’s four daily newspapers for July 25th and 26th carried identical if slightly ungrammatical headlines: “ ‘THAT’S HIM!’ ”
    “Girl Victim Identifies ‘Fang’ Suspect”, continued the News (7/25/57). Directly under the headline, a picture of the person thus identified bore the caption:
“Baring his teeth in response to a reporter’s half-whimsical suggestion, Allan Messinger * shows his buck teeth that made him a suspect in the ‘Fang’ case”.
    Thus the news was broken that, after five days of intensive police search, one Allan Messinger had turned up as a likely suspect in the latest sensational sex crime, and had been identified by the victim.
    From first commission of the crime on July 20, the papers had evidently decided here was an event of unusual public interest. Even in the absence of any new developments it was seldom off the front pages.
    The heat was on the police department to produce the culprit.
    Briefly, the facts as related by the victims were these: At about 10.30 p.m. of a Saturday night, a pretty young nurse and her escort, a Mr. James Lonergan, were approached by a stranger as they stopped their car in Golden Gate Park. At knife’s point, the stranger bound Lonergan with cord and gagged him with adhesive tape, manacled the girl with leg irons, cut off her hair with a pair of scissors, burned her with a cigarette, raped her twice, and before leaving pricked her and Mr. Lonergan with his knife. To top all, he had stolen Mr. Lonergan’s wristwatch.
    The San Francisco News (7/23/57) had reported that, according to the victim, the most outstanding feature of the assailant was his “canine teeth, which protruded fanglike over his lower lip. They were more than twice normal size ...”
    The News thereupon had become the first newspaper to use the descriptive and alliterative nickname, “FANG FIEND”.
    The rest of the published description was unexceptional, although it was to have some bearing on later developments: a white man, 20 to 25, 5' 9" tall, 150 to 160 lbs., dark complexion, big nose, light horn rimmed glasses.
    The young girl’s identification of Messinger as the culprit drove most other news off the front pages. First reports variously described him as “insular, suspicious and withdrawn”, ( Chronicle , 7/26/57) “evasive”, ( News , 7/25/57) a “schizoid personality with an incipient hysterical psychosis” ( Examiner , 7/26/57) “querulous” ( Call-Bulletin , 7/25/57)
    To San Francisco newspaper readers, this treatment of a suspect in a notorious crime revived uneasy memories of another recent big sensation—the arrest, trial and subsequent execution of Burton W. Abbott, for the kidnap-murder of a Berkeley school-girl.
    Newspaper handling of the Abbott case had resulted in a flood of protest in the letters columns. While many readers had complained that the newspapers had shown “bad taste” in the undue publicizing of gruesome details of the case, others had raised a more fundamental question: Was it possible for Abbott to have received a fair trial, in view of the unending flood of adverse publicity he had received, both during the trial and for months beforehand?
    Could the jury have been truly unbiased, coming as it did from a community saturated by so thorough a press bombardment—all pointing to Abbott’s guilt?
    Does the traditional American concept of freedom of the press extend to the trial of such a case in the newspapers before the defendant has been brought into court?
    An English judge, holding a newspaper in contempt for commenting on a case before the trial, once said: “It is possible very effectually to poison the fountain of justice before it begins to flow.” (Wills J., Rex. v. Parke)
    Had the fountain of justice been poisoned for Abbott? And was it now being poisoned for Messinger?
    The newspapers themselves were quick to notice the parallel between the two cases.
    Under the headline, “MESSINGER TALE RECALLS THAT OF ABBOTT”, the