Upcoming event hosted by @newburghhistoricalsociety. Author @alexhortis5 will be discussing his new book, The Witch of New York. Below, you will find more information on this upcoming Sundays event. I will also share a post on my blog. You can find the link in my bio. #bookevent #booksigning #thewitchofnewyork #alexhortis #booklover
#booknerd #nybookevents

Come to this FREE presentation on the 1846 Newburgh trial of Polly Bodine–the “Witch of New York”–for the murders of her sister-in-law and niece.  America’s attention was focused on Newburgh for this sensational trial, including Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman.  This event is being held inside the historic old courthouse where the original trial took place in April 1846.  See you there at 3:00 pm, Sunday, April 21, 2024!

Goodreads Blurb

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, December 25, 1843, in a serene village on Staten Island, shocked neighbors discovered the burnt remains of twenty-four-year-old mother Emeline Houseman and her infant daughter, Ann Eliza. In a perverse nativity, someone bludgeoned to death a mother and child in their home—and then covered up the crime with hellfire.

When an ambitious district attorney charges Polly Bodine (Emelin’s sister-in-law) with a double homicide, the new “penny press” explodes. Polly is a perfect media villain: she’s a separated wife who drinks gin, commits adultery, and has had multiple abortions. Between June 1844 and April 1846, the nation was enthralled by her three trials—in Staten Island, Manhattan, and Newburgh—for the “Christmas murders.”

After Polly’s legal dream team entered the fray, the press and the public debated not only her guilt, but her character and fate as a fallen woman in society. Public opinion split into different camps over her case. Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman covered her case as young newsmen. P. T. Barnum made a circus out of it. James Fenimore Cooper’s last novel was inspired by her trials.

The Witch of New York is the first narrative history about the dueling trial lawyers, ruthless newsmen, and shameless hucksters who turned the Polly Bodine case into America’s formative tabloid trial. An origin story of how America became addicted to sensationalized reporting of criminal trials, The Witch of New York vividly reconstructs an epic mystery from Old New York—and uses the Bodine case to challenge our system of tabloid justice of today.

Author Biography from his website

Alex Hortis is a constitutional lawyer and historian of crime. He has appeared on

national television as an on-screen personality for AMC’s The Making of the Mob

(2015), Hortis has been interviewed on NPR stations across the country and for true

crime podcasts. He has also been a featured speaker at the New York Public Library, the

Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the Mob Museum in Las Vegas.

Hortis’s first book, The Mob and the City: The Hidden History of How the

Mafia Captured New York (Prometheus, 2014), was praised by Jerry Capeci, the dean

of mob reporters, who wrote: “If there’s a better book on the early history of

Cosa Nostra in America, I haven’t seen it.”

Malcolm Gladwell quoted Hortis’s book in “The Crooked Ladder:

The criminal’s guide to upward mobility” New Yorker, Aug. 3, 2014. The New York

Post also featured Hortis’s groundbreaking work on the Mafia’s control of gay bars, in

“How NYC’s gay bars thrived because of the mob,” New York Post, May 3, 2014.

Hortis is a former federal law clerk for the United States Court of Appeals for the

Eighth Circuit. He is a graduate of New York University School of Law, where he was a

member of the Law Review. His writings have appeared in New York University Law

Review, New York Law School Review, and in book anthologies on crime.

Alex lives with his family in Maryland.