In her time, Polly Bodine was notorious. When her sister-in-law and niece were murdered in their home on Staten Island on or around Christmas of 1842, Mary Bodine—sometimes nicknamed Polly—was arrested for the crime. Widely-read newspapers cast Bodine as a kin-slaying monster. Soon it was difficult to find impartial jurors to try her. In the 1840s, everybody had an opinion about Polly Bodine. In 2024, she doesn’t even have her own Wikipedia entry.
Constitutional lawyer and crime historian Alex Hortis thinks Bodine’s worth remembering. He’s written a book about the Bodine case, The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice. It doesn’t entirely live up to its evocative title, but it’s still a gripping read.
Most of the book is a precise description of recorded fact. Since newspapers covered the case extensively, Hortis has multiple sources to work with. Briefly: on Christmas Night of 1842 a house in Staten Island caught fire; locals gathered to put the fire out; a mother and child were found murdered in the burning house; Polly Bodine, the well-off sister-in-law of the murdered woman, was found to have apparently pawned some of the dead woman’s property earlier in the day; she was arrested; three separate trials followed.
The press followed the case at every step. Bodine was technically married; she’d taken her children and left her alcoholic and abusive husband, who was now in jail for bigamy. Further, Bodine was eight months pregnant by her current lover, apothecary George Waite, and allegedly had multiple abortions during the several years they’d had a relationship. This was startling to the public of the time, and they were fascinated.
It was an era when Staten Island was a rural area of 10,000 people, mostly farmers and oyster farmers, compared to the 312,000 inhabitants of Manhattan. The economy was booming, creating a leisure class fascinated with lurid true-crime stories, which they read about in new tabloid newspapers. Writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman covered the Bodine case. And showmen like P.T. Barnum cashed in on the scandal; Barnum had a waxwork of Bodine made, which looked nothing like her but was so terrifying New Yorkers who saw it as children remembered the sight decades later.
Hortis has chapters about Poe, Whitman, and Barnum, but the greater part of The Witch of New York is a recapitulation of the three trials Bodine went through in the New York area. The book’s dense, and precise in its presentation of facts, so that while Hortis’ style isn’t the most elegant, it holds the interest on a sentence-by-sentence level.
The story’s always moving forward. Dialogue’s often recounted verbatim, and the courtroom scenes have real drama. It’s very fair to Bodine, and in this case that’s a virtue. At this distance in time it’s impossible to be sure what actually happened; all we have are the court records and tabloid reporting. Hortis weaves these sources into a coherent tale. As I read I developed a theory of the case that turned out to be the opposite of Hortis;. Which is to say he does an honest job of laying out information that lets you form your own opinion.
Lingering questions remain about the strategies of both the defense and prosecution, and about facts apparently not raised at the trial or afterward. Hortis focuses on what was recorded and what can be recovered. But he could’ve spent more time bringing out the wider meaning of events. Notably, despite the book’s subtitle, Hortis doesn’t describe how these trials shaped tabloid coverage of future trials. He does describe how rivalries among pressmen shaped the coverage of the Bodine case, but is more interested in legal precedents regarding impartiality of jurors than in what precedents the case set for journalism and the commercial history of newspapers.
Hortis makes an argument that there’s significance here. But although he tries to bring out nuances and hint at resonances, his style remains too neutral. The structure’s too precise, too rigorous. Much is implied, without being explored. For example, one theme of the book is the role of women at the time, and the 19th-century society view. Hortis argues convincingly that the Bodine case was prominent in the media because of contemporary attitudes to nonconformist and sexually active women. He could’ve usefully explored this idea in more depth.
What does it mean, for example, that some women were particularly vocal in their disapproval of Bodine? Was that really the case, or were men who covered the case particularly prone to noting disapproving women? Hortis uses the chapter on Walt Whitman to talk about the rising sentiment against the death penalty, but questions about attitudes toward women have no equivalent narrative focus.
Good journalism, like good history writing, lives in a precision that undermines easy narratives. Hortis is aware of that, and his book works because it confines itself to saying only what’s already been said; it states what was on the record in court, and doesn’t present as fact what could now only be guesswork. He might profitably have drilled deeper into the broader meaning of what was said. But what he’s done here is worth reading, if only as a record of what gets remembered and what can in the long run be known.