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She was a lovely corpse.
Her nails were painted a bright red, her silk dress an expensive design she might have worn to a society party in New York City. And although her hair had been tossed around in the surf, you could still see the outlines of a fashionable cut.
The body was lying in a pile of seaweed on a deserted stretch of sand in Long Beach when five Nassau County detectives arrived. It was the morning of June 8, 1931. That day's edition of the Nassau Daily Review said:
Police today were seeking to identify the body of a young woman, about 24 years old, expensively dressed and apparently of a wealthy family, who was washed ashore at the foot of Minnesota Avenue, West Long Beach, early this morning . . . She had dark brown hair, apparently hennaed, well manicured nails, finished in a bright red polish, and perfect teeth.
By noon, Nassau County Police Insp. Harold King believed the dead woman was Elizabeth Wardwell, the daughter of an upstate bank president, who had been reported missing. But by the following morning, King also was trying to determine if the dead woman was Catherine Hill, 26, of Provincetown, Mass.
It would be another two days before a name was finally attached to the corpse: Starr Faithfull, the well-to-do daughter of a Manhattan society couple. STARR FAITHFULL fit perfectly into a splashy headline, over stories filled with talk of murder and cover-up, political intrigue, wild partying on cruise ships, Manhattan society affairs and mysterious diary entries.
"This was one of those cases that grabbed people's attention," retired Nassau County chief of detectives Ed Curran said recently. "When I came on in 1946, the old-timers were still talking about it."
Today, the only way to reconstruct the events that followed the discovery of Faithfull's body is to...