Ichabod Crane of headline writers dies
The Headless Headline Hero has reached the bottom of his life.
Vincent Musetto, 74, who
wrote the legendary New York Post headline you see above, passed away Tuesday
in the Bronx. He was 74.
This headline appeared April 15, 1983.
On April 13, 1983, Charles Dingle, drinking in a tavern in the Jamaica
section of Queens, argued with the owner, Herbert Cummings, and shot him to
death. He then took several women hostage, raping one and forcing another, in
an apparent bid to confound the police, to cut off Cummings’s head.
Dingle was sentenced to 25 years to life and died in the Wende Correctional
Facility near Buffalo in 2012.
Mr. Musetto’s headline appeared on T-shirts, was the title of a 1995 movie
starring Raymond J. Barry and loosely based on the crime and was the title of a
2007 book, “Headless Body in Topless Bar: The Best Headlines From America’s
Favorite Newspaper.”
As former colleagues have recalled over the years, Musetto’s
headline almost did not come to be. That April day, as deadline loomed in the
newsroom, it occurred to someone that the bar in question might not actually be
topless.
“It’s gotta be a topless bar!” Musetto cried, as his former colleague
Charlie Carillo wrote for The Huffington Post in 2012. “This is the
greatest ^%^&^%%$ headline of my career!” The Post dispatched a reporter,
who phoned from Queens to say, to the relief of all and to the everlasting glory
of American tabloid journalism, that topless it was.
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