In researching my wife’s extensive Lawrence clan, I came across a 1902 murder case.
The facts briefly were:
The 17-year-old Sarah Ray Lawrence, aka Dimples, was the daughter of a moderately prosperous insurance executive. While summering in Good Ground, Long Island, she had a habit of disappearing, supposedly visiting relatives, but in fact going off with boyfriends.
The boyfriends happened to be 20-something married men. One, Clarence Foster, was a local who worked for the hotels ferrying people around on the water. He had been married only a few months, but his wife was sick, so he amused himself with Dimples. The other, Louis Disbrow, was the son of a meat merchant. He had married a 16-year-old about 5 years previously and quit his job to move in with his in-laws. When his father-in-law insisted Louis get a job, Louis moved and left the wife behind.
The three, Louis, Clarence, and Dimp went out on the water together and had a rollicking good time. On June 9 they went out dining and drinking. Afterwards there was a quarrel and a fight between the two rivals, and Clarence and Dimp went off in a leaky skiff. Their bodies turned up in the water a few days later. Louis, who had been passing bad checks all over town, absented himself and was suspected of and indicted for murder.
There were thousands of articles all over the country about this sordid affair. These were the Gilded Youth of Society, maybe in a ménage à trois, misbehaving and even murdering.
The Brooklyn Eagle was a reputable paper, and on June 19, 1902 it decided it was necessary to preach a little.
“The first province of a newspaper is to print the news. This is a truism which, in these days of sensation-mongering, may be repeated definitely to the benefit of all and to the detriment of none. Nothing is gained by the distortion of fact or by the magnification of the unimportant.
“Certain newspapers … are more than anxious that the lamentable tragedy at Good Ground should turn out to have been a double murder.
“But supposing that Clarence Foster and Sarah Lawrence were murdered, what is the use of lending a fictitious interest to the case by misstatement. Foster has been described as an “amateur yachtsman” of such extraordinary skill that he was invariably barred out of all club contests on Shinnecock Bay. Miss Lawrence was described as a “great beauty” and an “heiress.” Both were “fearless” and “skillful” swimmers , therefore they could not have been accidentally drowned , and so on until the unintelligent reader lost sight of the most obvious explanation of the miserable affair, that a drunken baymen afloat in a leaky boat was unable to save either himself or his companion from the effects of an unexpected capsize. Foster was not an “amateur yachtsman,’ with all the social status that the name implies. He made his living largely by sailing as the servant of others, and for this reason, and not because he was so expert at handling tiller or sheets, was he debarred from competitions limited to those who were amateurs within the accepted meaning of the term. He was just an ordinary swimmer, too, and Sarah Lawrence could not swim a stroke, so that death by drowning was quite possible, and, in fact, quite likely, under the known circumstances of the case. Miss Lawrence was not a beauty and she was not an heiress, and the attempt to make her either or both belongs to the category of misdirected effort mainly responsible for the delusion of that part of the public which daily invests faith and money in the purchase of yellow journals.”
The most egregious example was the story that got circulated about a supposed eyewitness:
A bayman named Otto Schwanecke later said that he was sleeping in a boat when he was awaked by the cries of men. From the cockpit of his catboat he saw two rowboats on the water. Each contained a man; they were fighting. One contained a woman; she was screaming for her companion to sit down before he capsized the boat, Schwanecke then saw an oar flash across the woman’s head and hit her companion on the forehead. He fell into the water. Schwanecke cowered from fear in the cockpit. When it was quiet he looked up and saw an empty boat floating. Shortly he saw a man rowing toward shore; he beached his boat and ran into the trees.
There was no such person and no such catboat. The story is a total fabrication.
Disbrow was tried and acquitted after a 40-minute deliberation by the jury. His doctor testified that he had a serious arm injury and had difficulty moving that arm.
But he had been tried and convicted in the press, and the millions who had read it never got the truth, and probably assumed that Society had protected its own.