The salacious murder of this New York City prostitute changed the American media landscape
Two centuries after Helen Jewett, we’ve got TMZ
The murder wasn’t especially unique. But since it involved sex, a new recipe for journalism was born.
At 3 a.m. on April 10, 1836, Helen Jewett’s body was discovered in her bed. Her skull had three mortal gashes. Her body had been crisped by the fire still smoldering in her mattress. There were no signs of struggle.
Jewett was a 23-year-old prostitute in what is now New York City’s Tribeca. By the time she was murdered, her profession had earned her a stream of upstanding customers, luxurious brothel accommodations, and the respect of the women around her. But 19-year-old shop clerk Richard Robinson and his hatchet would end all that.
The investigation and subsequent trial exploded into a national sensation. For the first time in American history, tabloids known as “penny papers” plied a seductive narrative of sex, crime, and romance. In the media world, it was chaos, with little regard for journalistic integrity or facts.
Jewett’s brothel keeper, Rosina Townsend, awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of someone trying to get out the front door, which she kept locked from the inside. At first, she thought nothing of it and dozed back to sleep. Then she went upstairs to check on the women. When she tried Jewett’s door, smoke billowed out of the room.
“Fire!” she cried. “Fire! Fire!” Soon the whole house was awake, pouring into the hallways in various stages of undress. Someone alerted the watchman stationed down the street.
With the alarm sounded, Townsend burst into Jewett’s room in a futile rescue attempt.
Jewett’s blood pooled on the floor. Women and watchmen doused the smoking mattress and the body with water from the backyard cistern. The police checked the backyard, which seemed the likely escape route since the front door was locked. Nearby the fence was a hatchet; on the other side lay a long cloak.
Police questioned Rosina Townsend. She recounted the previous evening’s events. Jewett had asked her not to admit one of her Saturday night regulars. Another caller would visit her instead. When the man arrived, he covered his face with a cloak. But Townsend recognized him as one of Jewett’s longtime clients — a man named Richard Robinson.
Early that morning, police found Robinson asleep in his home and ushered him to the crime scene, a common practice of the time. Officers were “amazed to note his composure and impassivity” upon his viewing of the body, according to Patricia Cline Cohen’s detailed history, The Murder of Helen Jewett (1998). “Do you think I would blast my brilliant prospects by so ridiculous an act — I am a young man of only nineteen years of age yesterday, with most brilliant prospects,” Robinson told a neighbor.
At the time, news was powered by several tiers of daily papers. In New York City, the more weighty “six-cent papers” (e.g. The New York Times, Evening Post, et al) reported on international and financial markets and were tailored to the city’s elite businessmen. At first, these publications ignored local crimes of the Jewett murder variety, deeming the content merely salacious. But a dire competition for circulation among the seedier “penny papers” would not only propel the story to national front pages, it would change the nature of crime reporting — as well as the public’s role in it.
At first, with little information, penny papers like the Sun and the Courier and Enquirer struggled to conclude how an “upstanding” and legitimately employed young man like Robinson could possibly be mixed up with murder. And what about Jewett, a prostitute so well-read, her closets full of fine gowns, her reputation so prominent in New York society? How would they square such a narrative?
Soon, they discovered it didn’t matter—as long as sex, a topic rarely open to discussion in polite society, was part of it. Editor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald viewed the crime scene and reported back:
“Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of the corpse, as one would the beauties of a statue of marble…Not a vein was to be seen. The body looked as white — as full — as polished as the pure Parian marble. The perfect figure — the exquisite limbs — the fine face — the full arms — the beautiful bust — all — all surpassing in every respect the Venus de Medicis.”
Papers flew off newsstands.
In addition to playing up sexual details, and lacking other concrete facts, papers turned to blatant editorializing. “It seems impossible a loop can be found whereupon to hang a doubt that the life of Miss Jewett was taken by any other hand than his,” wrote the Sun. Others falsified evidence. Bennett of the Herald was accused of paying someone 50 dollars to forge a letter purported to be from the “real killer.” It was printed, and within a week the paper was selling out daily print runs as big as 15,000 copies (up from pre-murder levels between 1,000 to 2,000).
The Jewett murder had established a new form of journalism that, over the next 200 years, would inspire everything from America’s Most Wanted to TMZ to The People v. O.J. Simpson.
Robinson’s trial commenced on June 2, 1836. Six thousand people crowded the second floor of city hall in hopes of witnessing the trial. On the second day, the mob broke the railings in the courtroom. Fifty marshals were called to clear the building.
The eyewitness and circumstantial evidence left little doubt of Robinson’s guilt. Over five days, the all-white male jury heard testimony from Rosina Townsend, and from Emma French, a prostitute witness who recalled Robinson arriving at the house at 9:30 p.m. the evening of the crime. Another man identified the hatchet as one missing from his shop. Detectives found a string around the hatchet that matched a loop inside the cloak, presumably to conceal the weapon.
Then the defense presented its case. Most newspapers considered it weak — until a last-minute witness was added. A 33-year-old grocer by the name of Robert Furlong testified that Robinson had visited his store at 9:30 p.m. on April 9, bought a bundle of cigars, and proceeded to smoke and chat with the owner. For a time, he even sat back to read the Evening Post. Furlong said the young man got up around 10:15. As he left, he said, “I believe I’ll go home, I am tired.”
The evidence directly contradicted Emma French’s testimony, which claimed Robinson was in the brothel by 9:30 p.m. All of a sudden, the suspect had an alibi. Furlong was rumored to have been paid off. Later, in 1937, his business would fail; in August 1838, he jumped off a ship to his death.
After five days and 56 hours in court, it was time for the jury to hear closing arguments, which, at the time, were considered the most entertaining part of a trial. Over more than 10 hours, the prosecution and defense concluded their cases with amazing theatricality. The press ate it up. The Newburyport Daily Herald described:
“[T]he incomparably noble and lofty strain of eloquence with which [the prosecution’s argument] was delivered, or of that extremely pathetic and emphatically energetic manner in which he at times worked on the feeling of his auditors till nearly all eyes were moist…In fine, we hesitate not to say it was as great a masterpiece of eloquence as was ever delivered at the Bar.”
After the defense presented its own compelling arguments, however, the judge offered overtly biased jury instructions. He advised weighing the characters of the witnesses, even stating the prostitutes “are not to be entitled to credit unless their testimony is corroborated by others, drawn from better sources…Testimony derived wholly from persons of this description…is not to be received.”
After 15 minutes, the jury returned with an acquittal.
The papers exploded with shock. Few had expected the verdict, much less defended it. Nonetheless, writes Cohen, it exposed the hypocrisy of class and sex privilege in American society.
One Albany, New York, paper called the Microscope printed: “If Robinson is in town, and has a spare hatchet, we would direct him to a sink of pollution in our neighborhood where he might do the public some service in this line.” Elsewhere in New York City, a crop of young men who called themselves the “Robinsonian Juntos” stalked Thomas Street, where Jewett lived and was killed, harassing female passersby. Some purchased and wore dark cloaks.
In one interview after the trial, a reporter asked Robinson whether his conscience troubled him. Robinson replied, “Not a bit…Did it appear in Court that Helen was murdered by me?” On the question of the murder weapon, he said only a “bungler” would have used a dull hatchet “to cut up the girl…I would sooner use a jack knife.”
Likely to escape the press, Robinson moved to Texas in August 1836. Once there, he changed his name to Richard Parmalee.
Over the next two decades, until his death from brain and stomach inflammation in 1855, the media tried to track down the acquitted and make sense of his actions.
Twelve years after the trial, the editor of the National Police Gazette got his hands on a package of 90 mostly undated letters that passed between the victim and accused. He learned that the prosecution had attempted to introduce the evidence, but handwriting experts hesitated to verify them, and the judge prohibited them from public proceedings. At the time, the district attorney appeared to push the matter no further. Now, however, with the public’s demand for justice still so great, the Gazette was compelled to produce the lot.
The letters betrayed more than nine months of damning correspondence between Jewett and Robinson. The first several featured typical professions of love and flirtation between prostitute and client, but between August and the following April, the lovers expressed increasing jealousy and frustration. The missives implied Jewett was aware of, perhaps even engaged in, Robinson’s nefarious business dealings. In one plea for attention, Jewett threatens to expose her client. His reply: “You are never so foolish as when you threaten me. Keep quiet until I come on Saturday night, and then we will see if we cannot be better friends hereafter. Do not tell any person I shall come.”
The Gazette reprinted the letters in five issues, and even posted copies in their office windows, along with the murder weapon, which was also obtained from the district attorney. Crowds of people gathered to witness the disqualified evidence. But it was too late.
The world would not learn what became of Richard Robinson until a series of biographies published in the early 20th century. Within weeks of his move to Nacogdoches, Texas, he had charmed townspeople enough to act as witness in deeds of sale and other official documents. By 1837, he worked as a saloon proprietor and later as a clerk of the court. He married and owned a series of homes — in addition to 20 slaves. He had become one of the wealthiest men in town.
Helen Jewett was buried in St. John’s cemetery in what is now Hudson Commons. Four days later, medical students dug up her corpse for dissection at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The Herald reported her “elegant and classic skeleton” hung in a cabinet.
