This story is based on the actual murder of Mary Cecilia Rogers, a crime that paralyzed New York because of the unprecedented violence that the murderer turned on her. Mary Cecilia Rogers was born in Connecticut in 1820 and disappeared on October 4, 1838, in unclear circumstances. Some days later the newspapers announced that she had been found and had fled to marry a naval officer. The case was closed, but three years later, on July 25, 1841, Mary Cecilia Rogers disappeared again. Her lifeless body was found floating in the Hudson River. A cursory autopsy revealed that she had been murdered.

The death of Mary Cecilia Rogers occupied the front pages of all American newspapers. Some months later, the investigation in full swing, the boyfriend of the girl was found dead in his room with a bottle of poison at his side and a note of repentance, where he confessed as a coward for leaving Mary when she needed him. The police accepted the suicide, and both justice and public opinion stated that the coward had received the punishment he deserved. Edgar Allan Poe followed the case with the same interest of his countrymen. One hundred years later, police criminalists in New York agreed fully with the hypothesis of the poet Edgar Allan Poe, a remarkable writer who sometimes played a detective.