CALLOUS EDITOR

Waikato Times, Volume 118, Issue 19759, 14 December 1935, Page 16 (Supplement)

CALLOUS EDITOR

Sacks Reporter for Preventing a Murder . . . Later Falls Victim to His Own Sleuths.

At twenty-five years of age, Charles Chapin was the most famous newspaper editor in America. Punctuality was his ritual, and news was his god. Savage earnestness propelled him to the firing-line of crime—that evergreen garden of news —so that, no matter what the cost in human life, the “story” was all that mattered. When the General Slocum, a pleasure steamer loaded with women and children, caught fire and became a blazing inferno on the East River, Chapin went into paroxysms of joy. All day he sat at the telephone while his reporters covering the holocaust sent him their messages. His Ghoulish Glee. “Fifty more bodies recovered!” he is reported to have cried. “Fine! Great! That's the stuff. Get me more!” And far into the night the ghoul sat at his receiver chuckling at the story he was going to splash on the pages the following day. He had a reporter named Heggarty, whose business it was to cover the police courts. One day, in the magistrate’s court, the reporter was idly jotting down his notes on a rather dull case of a man accused of beating his wife, when his eye caught the slight movement as the prisoner stealthily drew a revolver from his pocket and aimed it at his wife in the witness-stand.

Avarice and greed were part of Chapin’s make-up. The more, he made the more he wanted to make. He began to speculate wildly; at first he had luck, then came the crash, and one day he woke to find himself almost penniless. Diseased Brain Active. Suicide, which had always appeared to him a merciful release, now seemed to him the best solution. But what about his wife? He had told hex* nothing. Could he leave her to struggle on alone? He decided _ to shoot her and then take his own life. On a night in 1912, in one of the expensive suites of New. York’s most fashionable hotel, Chapin . bent over his wife as she lay asleep in bed, and deliberately shot her. No one heai’d the shot, and, though the wound was mortal, she took two hours to die. During those two houi*s the crazed man cradled her in his arms, while he fought for the nerve to kill himself. But his nerve had failed. When his wife was still, he reverently laid her down, covered her face with a sheet, hung a card on the door saying “Do ixot Disturb,” and walked out into the night, a murderer. Nerve Which Failed.

All night long he sat in an underground train, going round and round the city. How often had the murderers whom he had ruthlessly pursued, done the same? At last he knew what it felt like to be hunted, instead of the hunter. The very reporters he had trained would be after him.

Heggarty sprang at him, and, after a struggle, succeeded in deflecting the pistol so that the shot went wide. Then he rushed out and telephoned home to the chief. “Drop everything and come down here at once,” was Chapin’s answer. Heggarty returned and sti-ode into Chapin’s office, bursting with pride. “Heggarty,” said Chapin, looking at him coldly, “you’re fired!”

When morning dawned, he bought a copy of the paper he now worked on, the “New York Woidd.” Blazing at him from the front page were the words, “Chai'les Chapin Wanted for Murder.” Did the ironical thought strike him that he had himself proved the greatest news story of his life? But the newspaper gave him a sudden access of courage. He would be coward no longer. He walked to the nearest police station, and calmly gave himself up. His trial was a nine days’ wonder. He refused to plead anything but guilty, and, as such, was condemned to penal servitude for life. He died in pi’ison a few yeai-s ago, a model prisonei - , a great grower of roses, and the greatest editor the prison newspaper ever had.

Heggarty gaped in astonishment. “But, chief, I prevented a murder. I’ve got a grand stox-y!” ‘Get out!” snaided Chapin. "Here’s the only news story from that court in a year, and you go and spoil it with your damned interference.”

Such was the ruthlessness which earned his love of fame. Little did the great newshand or his most ardent admirers realise that Fate, by a garish trick, was to break him and make him “copy” for other screaming sheets. Yet it was so.