Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives by Marilee Strong

the
    strongly evangelistic Salvation Army and, later, members of another
    devoutly religious sect) and who seemed to have a promising life
    ahead of him could murder a defenseless pregnant woman in cold
    blood and abandon her body so casually.
    Other aspects of the crime quickly became subjects of more
    salacious public interest, such as Grace Brown’s affair with the

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E R A S E D
    attractive but incorrigible womanizer, her secret pregnancy, and the
    scores of painfully intimate letters the two had exchanged.
    Grace’s letters to Chester—large portions of which were published
    by newspapers that were competing with each other in search of every
    scandalous tidbit on the case—detailed her every emotion on an
    almost daily basis, revealing a sensitive and vulnerable soul. Chester’s
    letters to Grace, sent with significantly less regularity, were far more
    perfunctory, exposing very little of the man behind the mask.
    If nature abhors a vacuum, the media abhors a crime without a
    motive it can understand. The search for motive is natural enough:
    after learning who, what, when, and where, people want to know
    why . The crime occurred just when one of the greatest newspaper
    circulation wars in U.S. history was in full sway. William Randolph
    Hearst’s New York Journal was competing ruthlessly with Joseph
    Pulitzer’s New York World in an epic battle that involved, quite
    literally, war and peace and, of course, money. Just a year before the
    trial, Hearst had egged on his editors to crank out ever more sensa-tionalistic stories so that the newspaper’s headlines would ‘‘bite the
    public like a bulldog’’— giving rise to the term ‘‘bulldog’’ journalism.
    Veracity was not merely low on the list of journalistic priorities but
    seen as an impediment to telling a good story.
    What the mass circulation newspapers wanted was not simply a
    good murder mystery, but ideally one that contained other elements.
    Eventually, the idea that the real motivating factor behind the murder
    was a love triangle—and not just a love triangle but one that had a
    young man choosing between a ‘‘Miss Rich’’ and a ‘‘Miss Poor,’’ as
    the tabloids put it at the time—was the kind of formula that editors
    of the day knew they could milk endlessly.
    So a myth was born, a myth that rapidly took on a life of its own.
    At least part of the myth had a factual basis: Chester Gillette had
    been born to a poor family, though the poverty was to some extent
    self-imposed in a religious climate of strict self-denial. As evidence
    of his yearnings for upward mobility, he began to date a number of
    young women in Cortland from high-society circles, including one,
    Harriet Benedict, whose name became inextricably linked with his
    when some reporters picked up on the fact that Chester had taken
    Harriet herself out for a boat ride just one week before his deadly trip
    with the ‘‘factory girl.’’
    In reality, there was no love triangle. Chester and Harriet were
    only acquaintances, and she did not even count him among her

    The Real American Tragedy
    5 9
    friends. But when the newspapers discovered that Chester’s prized
    camera still had film in it containing pictures of Harriet Benedict, she
    quickly became known as ‘‘the other woman.’’
    The insistence that Chester killed Grace Brown so that he could
    pursue ‘‘rich girl’’ Harriet Benedict was proclaimed as fact elaborately
    and with great imagination by many newspapers—especially the
    large-circulation New York papers that were each trying to outdo the
    other in sensational coverage.
    One newspaper even invented out of thin air a second set of letters,
    which ‘‘Miss Rich’’ was supposed to have secretly sent to Chester
    while he was being held in jail.
    Q
    Dreiser wanted his novel to center on a crime story, but also to
    evoke the social complexities he saw in the world around him and that
    he had experienced in his own life. When he