As dead as Kelsey’s nuts

From The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins.  Page 110.

“To reassure the gentlemen in charge of the Herald,” a night reporter replied tartly, “The World has not the head of Guldensuppe and would not keep it if it had.”

Yet there was no denying the head’s importance. Old-timers in the newsroom still recalled “the Kelsey Outrage” of more than twenty years back, when Long Island poet Charles G. Kelsey unwisely wooed a very engaged woman named Julia. She’d set a candle in the window as their sign to meet, but he was seized in her yard by locals armed with tar and feathers, most likely led by Julia’s fiancé, Royal Sammis. After turning the lovelorn poet into a scalding mass of tar, they sent him screaming out into the night, never to be seen again. Julia and Royal married three months later, freed of the bothersome suitor, and everyone lived happily ever after—at least until ten months later, when fishermen pulled Kelsey’s tarred body from Huntington Bay. Or rather, they pulled out the bottom half of it; the top was gone, and his genitals had been hacked off.

As with Guldensuppe, the facts of the Kelsey case seemed clear: The identity of the victim, the perpetrators, and the motive all appeared obvious. There was even the same shock of betrayal: The candle that lured Charles Kelsey was lit deliberately by Julia, who then allegedly watched his tarring. But without a complete body, and with stories floated by the defense of live Kelsey “sightings,” no jury had been able to convict a single person involved. The whole grisly affair was crudely preserved for decades in a popular turn of phrase—“as dead as Kelsey’s nuts”—but Royal and Julia Sammis still walked free.”