The Blackmailing Butterfly Of Broadway

True Crime Historian

Richard O Jones

True Crime, Documentary, Arts, Society & Culture, Performing Arts

4.4 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2024

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Vivian Gordon’s Final Caper

Though the body was found in the Bronx, Episode 228 is a dark, twisting ride to the seedy side of Broadway near the end of Prohibition, with a heavy dose of family drama swirling around a tale teeming with underworld villainy and police corruption. There were plenty of people with a motive to murder Vivian Gordon. Was it the cops? The crooks? Or some combination thereof? It’s a stumper.

Told from the historic pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and other newspapers of the era.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Blackmailing Butterfly of Broadway, Vivian Gordon's final caper.
0:12.9	New York City, February 26, 1931.
0:19.1	Vivian Gordon, 32, of 156 East 37th Street, Manhattan, who was to have been questioned
0:26.8	last Friday by investigators of referee Samuel C. Berry's investigation of the magistrate's
0:33.2	court but failed to appear, was found strangled to death today on an embankment in Mosulhu Parkway,
0:40.8	the Bronx, in Van Cortland Park. She was identified through police fingerprints. February 7th, she had
0:49.0	written Isidore J. Cressel, then Chief Counsel of the Investigation, quote, I have some information concerning a frame-up by a police officer which I believe would be of interest to your committee, unquote.
1:01.0	She was notified to appear February 20th, but failed to do so.
1:07.0	The inquiry in which the woman was to testify has unearthed evidence that police have framed
1:13.0	vice cases against women by means of paid stool pigeons. Police records show she was arrested
1:20.7	March 1923 by patrolman Andrew McLaughlin on a vice charge and again last August 7th on a charge of extortion.
1:30.4	On October 3rd, the grand jury refused to indict her. She gave her occupation then as an artist.
1:39.1	The woman had been strangled, police believe apparently elsewhere, and her body hurled from an automobile.
1:46.7	A length of clothesline had been drawn tightly three times around her neck and held in place by a
1:52.8	slip knot. One of the woman's hands was clasped tightly about the rope. The body was dressed in a
1:59.7	black velvet evening gown of good quality,
2:02.6	trimmed with cream-colored lace and gun-middle hosiery and silk underwear. A black straw hat was
2:10.1	found on the Macadam Roadway some distance from the body. No shoes were on the feet, but a velvet pump with a buckle studded with brilliance was
2:20.6	found nearby. The left shoe was missing. The discovery of the body brought a score of police
2:28.8	officials to the scene. The police announced that there were no signs of a struggle in the
2:34.0	vicinity of the body.
2:36.2	The assistant medical examiner expressed the opinion that she had been dead about five or six hours.
	...

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