Sex, Money and Séances: This 1922 Murder Had It All

SHADOW MEN: The Tangled Story of Murder, Media, and Privilege That Scandalized Jazz Age America, by James Polchin

“Shadow Men” opens on a note of uncertainty: “We don’t know why Duncan Rose was late to work that May morning in 1922.” As it turns out, it doesn’t really matter what detained him; like a cold-opener on “Law & Order,” he’s just a device to get us to the main event — a dead body on the side of the road in Westchester County.

The victim was Clarence Peters, a 19-year-old apprentice sailor who had been dishonorably discharged for stealing. But something seemed off: The bullet that killed Peters had only pierced his shirt, not his outer garments. The body, the police concluded, must have been moved from the scene of the crime — and possibly dressed.

Just a few days later, a man named Walter Ward confessed, crying self-defense. Ward, a handsome guy who was also wealthy — his family owned the Ward Baking Company, one of the largest chain of bread factories in America — claimed that he was the victim of blackmail by a group of “shadow men” to whom he had already paid $30,000.

The question that preoccupies James Polchin, a clinical professor at New York University who previously wrote “Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall,” is: What secret could Ward possibly have been guarding at such a high cost?

The police took inventory of what they found on Clarence Peters’s body, including a pair of dice, a pack of playing cards, four cuff buttons, a new pack of Chesterfield cigarettes and a “ladies’ handkerchief” embroidered with two small lavender pansies in the corner. Mostly normal possessions for a teenager who liked to smoke and gamble — but what if the handkerchief had a deeper meaning? It could have been a gift from a female friend. But could it also have been a nod to his hidden sexuality? Ward, who was married to a socialite named Beryl and had two children, had been rumored to frequent men-only parties at several hotels.