The Press: Five Star Final

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In New York last fortnight someone knotted a clothesline around the shapely neck of Benita Franklin Bischoff, alias Vivian Gordon, strangled her and threw her dead body into the bushes of Van Cortlandt Park. She had been about to testify in the city's vice investigation. Vivian Gordon became the story of the week.

In Audubon, N. J., Vivian's daughter, Benita Bischoff, a dark, homely, boyish girl of 16, read the newspapers. In her diary she wrote:

"What an awful mess mother got herself into. . . . They are saying such terrible things. . . . I just can't live any longer. This has got to be too much for me. I am going to end it all. . . . I am in my right mind, and I'm going to turn on the jets."

Then Benita lay on the kitchen floor and inhaled gas from the stove until she was dead.

The tabloid press had, indeed, turned up Vivian Gordon's past much as a bear snouting for ants turns over a stone. Even the conservative papers devoted column upon column to the murder mystery and its ramifications. But the sensational papers tackled Vivian's story with a mad gusto, especially Joseph Medill Patterson's big little Daily News.

On one day when the News printed more than four pages of story and pictures concerning the dead woman, her daughter might have read: "A gigantic love racket which netted the slain Vivian Gordon half a million dollars in three years. . . . She had her own private call list . . . of 40 to 50 lovely girls. In her 'catalogue' were photographs taken in the nude of the various girl-wares Vivian had to offer. . . ."

Publisher Albert J. Kobler's Mirror gave less space but equal "juice" to the story. One of its big headlines read: SLAIN GIRL VICE WITNESS IS LINKED WITH SHOOTING OF "JACK" DIAMOND.

Bernarr Macfadden's Evening Graphic shrieked its loudest in great front-page streamers: ROTHSTEIN MURDER CLUE BARED BY VIVIAN'S PAL, and 20 MEN OWED VI $100,000; DIARY REVEALS LOVE RING.

Publisher William Randolph Hearst's Journal nearly outdid the tabloids in baring the VICE GIRL'S SECRETS. Two days later it was its lot to headline: JURY GETS VICE MURDER DIARY; VIVIAN'S CHILD KILLED BY SHAME.

Nearly every newspaper in Manhattan printed an editorial of pity for little Benita Bischoff. But Mr. & Mrs. Ogden Reid's Herald Tribune ventured a trifle farther. Said their editorial:

"One has only to quote some of the things which this girl—or her friends— might have bought to read at any newsstand:

" 'Hitherto undisclosed chapters in the mad love life of the ravishing redhead, Vivian Gordon, were revealed exclusively to the——today.' . . .

" 'In the tangled web of clews uncovered in the investigation of the strangle murder of beautiful Vivian Gordon, three things stood out in sharp relief against the murky background of the dead girl's past: Dope. Stock racketeering. Vice. "If these lines, taken from New York daily newspapers,* no doubt make sensational and, for its purpose, effective reading matter, one's admiration for the effectiveness vanishes when one thinks of a child reading them. . . ."