And then it died.

From The Murder of the Century by Paul Collins.  Page 269.

It seemed as if that final word on the Guldensuppe case might remain with Hearst himself. But when the media baron died in 1951, there was still another man who hadn’t forgotten about the case—one man still standing. That man was Ned Brown.

The cub reporter who first found Mrs. Nack’s apartment rose in time to write the World’s “Pardon My Glove” boxing column. He outlasted the newspaper itself; Ned worked in its newsroom until its final hours in 1931, then graduated to a long career handling publicity for Jack Dempsey and editing Boxing magazine. But he never stopped filing ringside newspaper reports, and when his fellow boxing writer A. J. Liebling profiled him in 1955, it was as much in admiration of an era as of a man: Ned was the last Victorian holdout in the New York sports pens.

“Being a newspaperman gave you stature then,” the old man fondly recalled. “Everywhere except in society. It didn’t cut any ice there.”

Ned then went on to outlive Liebling, too. In fact, he also outlived nearly every New York newspaper. After the World went under, it combined with the Evening Telegram to become the New York World-Telegram. Then it swallowed the Sun to become the New York World-Telegram and Sun. Then it was mashed together with the remnants of the Journal, the Herald, and the Tribune to become the New York World Journal Tribune. And then it died.

But Ned Brown lived on.

Nothing could knock Ned to the mat; the same inquisitive blue eyes that searched Mrs. Nack’s mantelpiece for a picture of Guldensuppe would go on to witness the Manson trial and Watergate. In an age of Kojak and Dirty Harry, he still recalled the days when journalists carried badges. Yet although news evolved from carrier-pigeon dispatches to satellite broadcasts, the business remained curiously familiar; when Rupert Murdoch started his chains, and Ted Turner bought his first TV stations, it was already old news to Ned Brown. He’d seen it all before. Hearst’s saturation coverage of sensational local crime—creating a suspenseful narrative out of endless news updates from every angle, whether there was anything substantive to cover or not—had already anticipated the round-the-clock cycle of broadcast news.

When Ned Brown died in 1976, he was well into his nineties—nobody was quite sure how old he was anymore. It wasn’t long since he’d made a final bow to the public; evicted from his apartment by the Hudson River, the one possession the old man had bothered to retrieve was his tuxedo.

“I need that suit for my social life,” he explained to a reporter.

With him ended the living memory of Augusta Nack and Martin Thorn. Even the case files had been destroyed years earlier by the Queens County Courthouse in a fit of housekeeping. As they were on their way to the incinerator, though, one curious reporter picked out a yellowed evidence envelope and opened it up.

It held little inside—just six duck feathers and a mystery.