PRESS PHOTOGRAPH OF PETER KUDZINOWSKI: BROWNSVILLE HERALD, DECEMBER 21, 1928

The face in the box on page 2 of the Brownsville Herald belonged to a man who had staggered up to a police traffic booth in Detroit and told the officer he was wanted. Peter Kudzinowski was drunk that day, and the caption under his portrait, the only words the Texas paper printed about him on December 21, 1928, puts it plainly: arrested as a drunk, he had confessed, according to police, to the murder of Joseph Storelli, a seven-year-old New York boy, in a swamp near Jersey City.

Joseph had been on First Avenue in the East Village late on the afternoon of November 17, 1928, when a half-drunk stranger promised him a box of candy and a picture show. Kudzinowski did take him to the show. Then he took the boy on the Hudson tube to Journal Square and walked him about a mile and a half along Hudson Boulevard to the meadows near Secaucus. When Joseph tried to get away he was knocked down and beaten, and his throat was cut so that his crying would not carry to the passing cars. His own overcoat was laid over him.

The caption's last sentence looks ahead: police believed he could clear up other killings in New York and Pennsylvania. To the Detroit detectives he had already described killing a friend, Harry Quinn, twenty, with a rock near Scranton in 1924, after a fight over a stolen bottle of whiskey; Quinn's remains were never found. He confessed as well to the death of five-year-old Julia Mlodzianowski, lured away from her parents at a school picnic at Lake Hopatcong that August, though he later told reporters he doubted he had really killed her. The picture ran a year to the day before New Jersey put him to death.

There is no story here, only a captioned press photograph, printed a little over two weeks after his confession of December 5, 1928, and it is loose with the facts. It says he had been returned to New York to face charges; he was brought to Jersey City, New Jersey, where the murder was charged and tried. It calls him formerly of Greenwood, Pa.; he was born in Dickson City and grew up around Scranton. The boy's family name also appears as Storella. Kudzinowski was convicted of first-degree murder for Joseph Storelli alone, in January 1929, and electrocuted at Trenton State Prison on December 21, 1929. The other killings he described were never tried, and the New York disappearances he was suspected in were never tied to him.

Brownsville, Texas, printed this page on December 21, 1928, more than ninety-five years ago, so photograph and caption alike are in the public domain. The scan comes from the Library of Congress and its Chronicling America collection, and the full citation and the Library's rights statement are printed beneath it.

The caption is short and cleanly printed, and every word was read straight from the scan. After "slaying" in the last sentence sits a speck that may be a broken final s or a stray bit of type; nothing has been supplied for it, so the word stands as "slaying," exactly as it prints. The comma the sense wants after "according to police" is missing on the page and is missing here. The portrait sits just above the edge of the cropped column and was confirmed on the full page, and the item does not continue anywhere else.

Transcription

Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.

[photograph, captioned: the text below, which is the whole of the item — a portrait head of Kudzinowski, set in a box with a heavy rule under it, immediately above the caption]

Peter Kudzinowski, formerly of Greenwood, Pa., arrested by Detroit, Mich., police, has confessed, according to police to the murder of Joseph Storelli, 7-year-old New York boy, in a swamp near Jersey City, N. J. Kudzinowski was arrested in Detroit as a drunk and has been returned to New York to face charges. Police believe he can clear up other slaying in New York and Pennsylvania.

Transcriber's notes

- Readability: Very good. The caption type is clean and every word is legible. One mark is not readable — see the next note — but no whole word needed an [illegible] marker.

- The word "slaying" in the last sentence is followed by a small raised mark where a final letter would fall ("other slaying· in New York"). The mark is not legible as a letter — it is either a broken final "s" that printed only as a speck or a stray piece of type — so nothing has been supplied for it and the word is given as "slaying", exactly as it reads on the page.

- Printers' errors and period usage kept as printed: "has confessed, according to police to the murder of…" — the second comma that the sense requires, after "police", is not printed. Abbreviations are as printed: "Greenwood, Pa.", "Detroit, Mich.", "Jersey City, N. J."

- This item has no headline. Above it there is only a wavy rule and then the boxed portrait; the text is the photograph's caption, set as a single paragraph and closed off by a rule. The photograph itself lies above the top edge of the supplied crop — the first tile opens on the heavy rule that forms the bottom of the picture box — so its presence and position were confirmed from the full-page scan held in the same folder as the tiles (kudzinowski.fullpage.jpg).

- The item is complete; it does not continue on another page.

- Unrelated matter inside the crop, below the rule and not transcribed: a long verbatim court decree concerning a $2,000,000 navigation-district bond issue, the purchase of land on Padre Island and Brazos Island, and a channel through the Laguna Madre bay from Brazos Santiago pass toward Brownsville. It begins mid-sentence at "bill on Padre Island and on Brazos Island…" in the first tile and fills the whole of the remaining three tiles, which contain none of the Kudzinowski item. (That decree carries its own printers' error, "any purpose whtasoever", which is noted here only to identify the matter, not transcribed as part of this article.)

- Tile note: the files supplied for this article are named c1_000000.png, c1_000818.png, c1_001636.png and c1_002454.png (an 818-pixel stride), not the 740-pixel stride given in the task list. The four tiles are consecutive and overlap correctly.