The Alchemy of Murder (4 page)

Weaker, indeed.
I worked as hard as the men around me, yet there were no opportunities for me—or any of the women I worked with, except a lifetime of the same menial labor.

One could argue that I held a lowly position because my education had been cut short by a heart condition that forced me to leave high school just prior to getting my three-year diploma.
*
But there were men at the factory that had less education and received better pay and promotions.

It all boiled down to one thing:
I was a woman in a man’s world.

Emboldened by my anger—for I knew this Mr. Wilson would just think of me as a hysterical woman if I barged into his office and gave him a piece of my mind—I sat down with pen in hand, determined to educate this newspaper about the plight of factory girls. However, I was not entirely ignorant of how my employer might react if he found out one of his worker bees held the radical belief that she should be treated as fairly—or at least not more unfairly—than men.

For fear of losing the job that put food on the table, I signed the letter to the editor, “Lonely Orphan Girl.”

To say the least, I was more than surprised when a few days later I read a cryptic message in the “Our Mail Pouch” column in the
Dispatch
:

LONELY ORPHAN GIRL

If the writer of the communication signed “Lonely Orphan Girl” will send her name and address to this office, merely as a guarantee of good faith, she will confer a favor and receive the information she desires.

Concerned over what action to take, I finally decided that the best course was to take the matter in hand and present myself at the newspaper office.

I arrived in a black ankle-length dress and black coat, an imitation Russian silk with a circular hem and false fur turban. The coat and turban I borrowed from a woman at our boarding house who had received it as a “present” from her shopkeeper employer after she worked “overtime” for him. While the outfit might have appeared flamboyant for a girl of eighteen, I hoped it added a degree of sophistication and feminine poise.
*

As the doorman took me into the news room and pointed out Mr. Maddox, the editor, I couldn’t help but smile for I’d expected a big man with a bushy beard who would look over the top of his specs and snap, “What do you want!?”

Instead, I found a pleasant-faced, boyish individual, wearing suspenders and an open collar, who was mild-mannered and good-natured. He wouldn’t even kill the nasty roaches that crawled over his desk.

He told me I wasn’t much for formal writing style, but what I had to say I said it right out regardless of paragraphs or punctuation.

“I could tell you wrote that Lonely Orphan Girl stuff with your heart, not your head, and it’s just right, too.” He also added that with guidance, I could learn the newspaper craft quickly.

“Miss Cochran, I am looking to bring something fresh to the new Sunday edition. Would you compose an article on ‘the woman’s spheres in life’?”

I was rendered speechless. I’d never dreamed I could be a reporter, it being the consensus that newspaper reporting in general was not a fit job for a woman. However, I’ve always had the belief that nothing is impossible if one applies a certain amount of energy in the right direction. I believe this state of mind emboldened me to obtain a job reserved for men.

*   *   *

“T
HE
G
IRL
P
UZZLE
,” my very first newspaper piece, was prominently placed at the top of page 11, on January 25, 1885.

To make life better, I received five dollars—
five dollars
mind you, more than a week’s wages earned at the factory. I could only conclude my article was well received because Mr. Maddox not only asked me to write another piece, he suggested I choose my own subject.

“Young lady, your grammar is still rocky, but you do manage to get your facts straight, so why don’t you select a subject that interests you.”

I’m impassioned to write exposés of the terrible wrongs people suffer—especially women. That being said, I chose the subject of divorce.

Not only are divorces rare and difficult to obtain, most people have no idea how awful it is for a woman to be trapped in an unhappy or even brutal marriage. After witnessing what my mother had endured with my stepfather, I became in favor of divorce, especially when there is abuse—physical or mental—in the household.

At fourteen years of age I offered this testimony for my mother concerning her divorce:

My stepfather has been generally drunk since he married my mother. When drunk, he is very cross and cross when sober. He often uses profane language towards her and calls her a whore and bitch. My mother is afraid of him. He attempted to choke her. This was sometime after they were married. The next time was in the Oddfellows Hall New Year’s Night 1878.

I decided to take my own experiences, along with my father’s old law books and case notes, and report on why I felt divorce was proper when the circumstances demanded it. The following week when the article appeared I became infuriated, to say the least, when no one believed a woman had written the article. Everyone thought it was a man using a woman’s name! Imbeciles.

Mr. Maddox, however, decided I should have my own byline, but because reporting was considered unladylike, I had to write under a pseudonym. When he threw out to the men in the news room the question of what my byline should be, someone started humming and the whole gang sang a popular Stephen Foster song:

Nelly Bly, Nelly Bly, bring de broom along.

We’ll sweep de kitchen clean, my dear, and hab a little song …

“Nelly Bly!” was shouted in the news room and Elizabeth Cochran from Cochran Falls, Pennsylvania, was laid to rest, R.I.P. But I spelled it Nellie, not Nelly. As Mr. Maddox was so fond of saying, my spelling and grammar were “rocky.”

I bid farewell to my factory friends, but I would never forget them. I was determined to help them gain better working conditions and wages. To that end, I did a hard-hitting story on sweatshop conditions in the city.

The day my story appeared, I was indoctrinated into how the system really works, and I didn’t like the taste of it.

A delegation of businessmen paid a visit to Mr. Maddox and advised him that working conditions were too rude a subject for a woman. Just like that I was assigned to the society page to report: “On June 1st
the
Mr. and Mrs. Snot-Grass gave their daughter, Amanda, to Brian, the son of
the
Mr. and Mrs. Blue-Nose. The bride wore…”

Poppycock!

Anarchists were planting bombs, factory workers were battling for rights, courageous women were demanding the right to vote, empires were clashing around the world, but all the newspaper women in America—and there were only a few in such a lofty position—were pigeonholed into reporting news about weddings and gossip.

Unbelievable, yet depressingly true.

To become a detective reporter, and investigate crime and corruption, or a foreign correspondent sending dispatches from wars and revolutions at the far ends of the world, one must be a man.

Rubbish.
I was not going to spend my life writing about liver pâté, especially after my article was so well received. I had to do something to change management’s rules.

The question was “what?”

I considered traveling to the West and wiring stories of desperadoes and boom towns. Stagecoaches rumbled where the tracks didn’t reach and encountered fearsome Apaches where the cavalry didn’t dare go. But the Wild West had been covered by male reporters. To be noticed, I had to do something different. Mexico fit the bill—it was wild and dangerous and virgin territory.

With my mother in tow and my meager savings in hand, I bought train tickets for the land of the Aztecs.

What a marvelous country it turned out to be—ancient and beautiful and exotic, but also a place of political unrest and tyranny. Not long after I started sending dispatches focusing not only on the color and charm of the sunny land but on the poverty and injustices I saw, I was informed that the Mexican government no longer desired my presence in the country.
*

When I returned home I discovered that my feat didn’t convince the paper’s management that being a foreign correspondent was a fit job for a woman. To the contrary, they considered it pure luck I had not been raped and murdered by bandits and ordered me back to covering card parties attended by horse-faced society women.

Unacceptable! Pittsburgh was too confining for a woman overflowing with ideas. On March 23, 1887, I left a note on the desk of Erasmus Wilson, the Quiet Observations columnist and my dear friend:

Dear Q.O.—I am off to New York. Look out for me.

                                                    
Bly

I left for New York with my poor mother once more in tow, but a bit wide-eyed at my exciting dream of being a real news reporter so I could change the world for the better.

Accuracy is

to a newspaper

what virtue is

to a woman.

—JOSEPH PULITZER

4

Upon arriving in Manhattan I went straight to the
New York World
, my newspaper of choice for a job. Its domed citadel was on Park Row where the city’s papers gathered to make it easier to spy on one another.

The guard protecting the
World
’s newsroom off the main lobby refused to let me in after I told him I’d come to see Mr. Pulitzer about a reporting job. “You should be home cooking and cleaning for your husband,” he told me.

I left fuming. Pushing my way in would have been futile because the guard also told me Mr. Pulitzer was out of the country.

I soon found out it made not a bit of difference to the newspaper gods of Gotham that I had worked for the
Dispatch
, had quite a few good stories to my credit, and had been a foreign correspondent in Mexico. All the determination of a mule did me no good.

After nearly four months of no job, I was almost penniless and losing weight.

I’m ashamed to admit, but this city really put to test my stamina. I was on the verge of giving up after my purse was stolen in Central Park and I found myself stranded and about to face eviction and starvation when a picture of Mr. Pulitzer entering the
World
appeared on the front page of the paper. He was back. It’s a day I will never forget— September 22, 1885.

This time nothing was going to stop me from seeing him. He was going to hire me and that was that. Besides, my parents constantly told me, “It’s not how many times you get knocked down, its how many times you get back up.”

I borrowed streetcar fare from the landlady who was running the brownstone boarding house on Lexington Avenue where we were staying and mustered up the last of my courage for another assault on the
World
.

*   *   *

B
EFORE
I
APPROACHED
Mr. Pulitzer for a job I decided to take my mother’s advice—society would not be ready for a woman warrior like me; I would have to work twice as hard as a man and knowledge would be my strongest power. So, I stopped at a library to learn all I could about Mr. Pulitzer.

Other newspapers claimed that the
World
was lurid and offensive in its reporting, but they just didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to expose political corruption and do hard-hitting stories the way Mr. Pulitzer did. He was a reformer and had a flair for news that no other newspapermen had.

He believed the paper was a watchdog against privilege, a friend of the people. As long as society was kept ignorant of what was really happening, change would never happen. And he had a strong belief in crusades against wrongs. When he began to receive threats on his life, it didn’t stop him; he just started carrying a pistol. To him, the threats only proved he was hitting home.

When I discovered how he had obtained his first job as a newspaperman, I knew I was destined to work for this man.

Mr. Pulitzer, at the age of seventeen, was rejected from the Austrian, French, and British armies because of his poor eyesight and fragile physique. At six feet two and one and a half inches tall he looked like an emaciated scarecrow. But these obstacles didn’t stop him. He went to Hamburg and signed up with bounties looking for people to enlist in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.

Once the war was over he headed to St. Louis to obtain a job, only to run into another obstacle. In order to get to St. Louis he had to cross the broad Mississippi River. Even though he was penniless and hungry, he approached the operator of the Wiggins Ferry, who also spoke German, and worked out a deal where he paid his fare by firing the boiler.