Research Maniac

I discovered this 1917 murder case from Emily Leider's biography of silent film star Rudolph Valentino. Leider's book spends a few juicy pages on a scandalous episode from his past. Before he was famous, when he was just a two-bit tango dancer entertaining New York high-society ladies at tea parties and gala banquets, Valentino danced with Blanca de Saulles. He testified at Jack and Blanca's divorce hearing and left New York for Hollywood soon afterwards.

Blanca gunned down her ex-husband in cold blood, in front of witnesses. A jury declared her "not guilty." It all seemed so bizarre. Unlike Lizzie Borden or even O.J. Simpson, there was no doubt that she shot Jack. Yet she strolled away free and regained full custody of her young son.

Their tragic, deadly love story had all the glamour of The Great Gatsby and the Titanic.  Yet their names have been mostly forgotten. I felt there had to be more to the story.

• What is the truth? What really happened?
• Who were these people? What sort of man was Jack de Saulles? Was he really a womanizing scoundrel who deserved what he got?
• How did the victim's public image turn upside-down so quickly? How did a popular ex-college football star transform into the villain of his own murder?
• What sort of woman was Blanca Errazuriz? How did a dainty, high society lady turn into a cold-blooded killer?  

I started with historical newspapers. I pieced together a timeline, and then I dove deeper. And deeper. And deeper.

Research is like archaeology--there is always more underneath the surface. Even though I am not blood-related to anyone involved, I used my genealogy skills to go far beyond the newspapers' narrative. I got excited to scrape up rare photographs or forgotten documents that no other researcher has bothered to find. I've spend hundreds of hours excavating snippets on Google Books, on ProQuest, on WorldCat, and on Link+ to acquire rare and out-of-print books. I corresponded with the Library of Congress, Yale University, and the clerk at the courthouse where the trial took place. Thanks to translation software, I could correspond with the tourist information bureau in Blanca's hometown. Anything that had their name on it, I had to have it! By now, I have filled a crate with books, 3-ring binders, and photographs.

What is my favorite piece? It's a tie.

One is a used out-of-print book published in 1916 (the year before the shooting) where Jack wrote some first-person anecdotes about his golden days as a college football star. Along with another football instruction manual published 10 years earlier, these are Jack's own words unfiltered.

The other is when I emailed a reference librarian at the Library of Congress about Blanca de Saulles, he retrieved a box of un-catalogued photographs from off-site storage. A newspaper had gone out of business, he wrote, and just dumped their collection of clippings and marked-up photographs on the LoC. These are images that no one has seen in 100 years.

In the end, I never could decide if I was on Team Jack or Team Blanca. While writing up the narrative, my loyalties shifted either way from day to day. In the end, I had pity for both of them. It's such a heartbreaking tale all around.