Before the sensational cases of Amanda Knox and Casey Anthony — before even Lizzie Borden — there was Polly Bodine, the first American woman put on trial for capital murder in our nation’s debut media circus.

On Christmas night in 1843, neighbors in a serene village on Staten Island discovered the remains of twenty-four-year-old mother Emeline Houseman and her infant daughter Ann Eliza, bludgeoned to death and burned in a fire. When an ambitious district attorney charged Emeline’s sister-in-law with the murders, the new “penny press” exploded. Polly Bodine was a perfect villain for the media. When Bodine assembled a legal dream-team, the debate expanded from the question of her guilt to her character as a “fallen woman,” a separated wife who committed adultery, had several abortions, and drank gin. Between 1844 and 1846, reporting on three separate trials over the “Christmas murders” enthralled the city and nation. Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman covered the story as young newsmen. P. T. Barnum made a circus out of it. James Fenimore Cooper’s last novel was inspired by it.

The Witch of New York is the first narrative history of the dueling trial lawyers, ruthless newsmen, and shameless hucksters who turned the case into America’s formative “tabloid trial.” In this origin story about how the US became addicted to sensationalized criminal trials, Alex Hortis (author of The Mob and the City) vividly reconstructs an epic mystery from old New York and uses it to challenge our system of tabloid justice of today.