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Winter Speaker Event - “The Infamous Long Branch Murder of 1860, Solved.”
Stanley Blair, Ph.D., associate professor of English at Monmouth University, will present on “The Infamous Long Branch Murder of 1860, Solved.”
According to newspaper reports, the crime was committed on the Long Branch beach, behind the Monmouth House hotel, early on August 7, 1860. Hundreds gathered around the crime scene and watched investigators, while hotels and boarding houses were searched for anyone missing. In the eastern half of the U.S., dozens of newspapers reported the murder and speculated about the victim’s identity and the perpetrator’s motives. Within days, the papers reported that a second crime, related to the first, had occurred.
Newspapers covered the developing story in stages, Blair said, as telegraphed updates as well as New York correspondents’ on-site reports rippled across the country for almost three weeks. One local paper in Freehold suggested that something like a nationwide trauma had occurred.
Despite the public’s outrage and calls to punish the perpetrator, the murder victim was never found, and the perpetrators of both crimes were never identified. Blair’s presentation examined both crimes, and offered a solution.
The local literary connection is a sketch in an 1863 book, “Sprees and Splashes,” by Henry Morford of Middletown, NJ. Morford’s sketch accounts for the 1860 events in Long Branch, but lightly disguises the names of those involved. Based on clues that Morford provides, Blair asserts that the disguised names of two key personages in Morford’s his sketch can be decoded to reveal their real identities.
February 28, 2024, at 7:00 at the Recreation Center on W. Park Avenue.
