Jacqueline Smith’s botched abortion made headlines in newspapers across the United States. Wire services relayed select details of the homicide remaining vague about the abortion procedure itself and focusing instead on the subsequent mutilation and disposal of Jacqueline’s body. Jacqueline’s hometown paper offered readers biographies of the major players. Reporters described the frantic and ultimately unsuccessful police search for Jacqueline’s body, detailing how dozens of detectives dragged the Hudson River and searched through garbage dumps for her remains. Jurists explained the legal precedents for prosecuting a crime without a body and a medical expert clarified the correct dosage for sodium pentathol. Articles lingered on details such as the 800 stolen medical tools, some still covered in blood, discovered in Pijuan’s apartment.
As the state of New York tried Thomas and Pijuan for first-degree manslaughter, the media and the public obsessed over the personal lives of all involved in the case. The New York Daily News hired a plane to fly Jacqueline’s bereaved father from Pennsylvania to New York, housing him with one of their reporters. This arrangement allowed the paper to offer the inside scoop on the emotional reactions of a bereaved and traumatized father. Jacqueline’s hometown paper, The Lebanon Daily News, interviewed her high school teachers and friends and featured Jacqueline’s artwork and poetry. The New York Daily News likewise featured clothing that Jacqueline designed, having one of its employees model her scarves. Readers nationwide followed the court case until its conclusion in June of 1956 when a jury found Thomas G. Daniel guilty of manslaughter and a judge sentenced him to 8 – 20 years in prison.
Jacqueline’s death and the literal absence of her body enabled commentators to inscribe their own sexual scripts about women, sexuality and reproduction upon her. Thomas G. Daniel’s defense lawyer used common tropes that denigrated sexually active women to characterize Thomas as “the victim of a girl who pretended to her family and friends that she was a little angel when she was in fact just a girl who like to enjoy so-called free love.” The prosecutor and the media turned Jacqueline into a beautiful daughter in need of protection from predators like Thomas. To do so, they used ethnic signposts to contrast “Jackie, the pretty blonde daughter” with “dark Thomas G. Daniel,” “Son of Greek parents,” the Puerto Rican nurse Pijuan, and the “Mexican Doctor” Mireles. This racial and gendered narrative sought to rehabilitate Jacqueline’s reputation and to convey that she was a good girl who did not deserve her fate.