ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the early coverage of two New York City murders that illustrate the sensational aspects of two different news outlets during the antebellum era. The first, of course, is the murder of Helen Jewett in April 1836—a story that made James Gordon Bennett and his New York Herald a financial success. The other is the murder of a dentist, Harvey Burdell, in 1857 that helped Frank Leslie define news in his illustrated newspaper that visually took readers to crime scenes and reenactments of crimes. These two publications and their crime coverage reflected the moral debates on the streets of antebellum New York as the print media and law-enforcement officials began to challenge and define ethical and moral limits of journalism and popular culture. Popular crime stories often become more significant than those who read them realized or than scholars would like to admit.
