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Mystery’, and must be exclusively for the
World
. Appearance of the solution in any other paper will cancel this offer of reward.
    It was a jaw-dropping amount—a year’s pay for the clerk who could recall selling the oilcloth; several thousand bottles of cheap claret for the proprietor in whose establishment the deed was hatched; a personal horse and carriage for the commuter who might have overheard it. It was $500, for that matter, to
any
reader who could deduce a solution, just like readers had been doing with the Arthur Conan Doyle stories that the
World
ran. Now they could do more than just read Sherlock Holmes; they could
be
him.
    This was going to be a sensation.
    Hearst ordered his pressmen into action:Run an Extra Final Edition, timed to appear just minutes after the
World
’s $500 reward. He had an utterly devastating headline to run atop his
Evening Journal
, and the words rolled deliciously off the tongue.
    $1,000 REWARD …

5.

JILL THE RIPPER
    ONE READER ALREADY KNEW who the culprit was:
Hearst
.
    The body was the work, a
Journal
reader wrote in, of “some enterprising newspaper or group of men who wish to test the efficiency of the local detective force, which has been called in question quite often under its present management.”
    As letters piled into the
Journal
offices on Tuesday morning, otherreader guesses included tramps killing a peddler (conveniently “using rope and oilcloth from the peddler’s pack”); bickering butchers (“probably employed in one of the slaughter houses on the East Side or in Harlem”); a nefarious cabal (“I think the man was tattooed or branded with the marks of some secret society”); and, of course, “fiendish” Spaniards who “hacked him to pieces with their machetes.” Some suspected a woman of the deed, since only “jealousy could have terminated with such terrible results.” Still others invoked Sherlock Holmes, who seemed the best guide to such a baffling case. Alas, Arthur Conan Doyle had recently killed off his great detective. “If he were still alive,” one reader mourned, “Sherlock Holmes would surely earn your thousand-dollar reward through deduction.”
    Still, the suggestion of Hearst himself topped them all. “It would be a comparatively simple matter,” the reader insisted, “for a newspaper to secure through a physician a suitable cadaver and to dispose of the portions effectively, yet theatrically, so as to secure the widest possible publicity.”
    The
Journal
had a good laugh and ran the letter; if only they’d thought of it themselves!Hearst loved promotion; he’d already run bandwagon signs and sandwich-board men around the city and advertised his paper’s one-cent price by mailing out sackfuls of pennies to New Yorkers. He’d invaded the city, as one editor put it, as quietly “asa wooden-legged burglar having a fit on a tin roof.”
    And the roof he most loved to dance on was the
World
’s. When he’d rolled into New York, Hearst stole his old paper’s crown jewel by grabbing
Sunday World
editor Morrill Goddard, a daredevil journalist who’d made his name as a London correspondent covering Jack the Ripper. “Take all or any part of that,” he’d told Goddard, tossing him a crumpled Wells Fargo bank draft for $35,000. Then, for good measure, Hearst immediately bought the rest of the
Sunday World
staff as well. An outraged Pulitzer purchased them back, only to find his repatriated
World
men emptying their desks yet again and walking back to the
Journal
. Hearst had stolen them
twice
. ThePark Row sidewalk between the two papers, newsmen joked, was wearing thin.
    Now, rallying his pirated staff from his barber’s chair as he took his morning shave, the young millionaire was ebullient. “We must beat every paper in town,” he declared.
    His first blow for the
Journal
would beat them all—maybe even top the sensation created by the reward. It would be something nobody had ever seen before. He had his pressroom chief