This image shows the body of New York City gangster David Beadle, aka the Beetle, outside the Spot tavern in Manhattan, where he was gunned down by men who emerged from a passing taxi. Beadle took at least a few bullets in the head and died instantly. As gangsters go he wasn’t very high in the rackets, but his fame surpassed his stature posthumously because Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, photographed his corpse. Another shot appears below, and you can see how back then the integrity of crime scenes was a malleable concept. Changes between the shots include the sheet, the position of Beadle’s hands, and the arrangement of debris in the gutter.
And in fact, the top shot shows Weegee himself, seeming to make an adjustment to the corpse, possibly to make for a more pleasingly composed shot. The first photo, therefore, was made by an unknown, though it’s often credited to Weegee. He made the second shot himself. Most of his archive, including these, reside at NYC’s International Center of Photography, to which Weegee’s longtime companion and caretaker Wilma Wilcox donated 16,000 photos and 7,000 negatives, as well as transferring all copyrights, in 1993. You can see many of them at the Center’s website here.
