On the afternoon of 16 November 1906, a middle-aged woman was standing in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo, New York, when suddenly she ‘felt the knuckles of a hand rub against me’. Turning, she saw a ‘foreign-looking man’ loitering behind her. The woman (‘Mrs Hannah Graham’, the newspapers reported) screamed, fearing ‘there was no mistaking the insult intended’ – the foreigner was, in the language of the period, a ‘masher’, a sexual predator who ‘annoyed’ women by making unwanted advances on them in public places.
Events quickly escalated in a startling fashion. A plain-clothes policeman, James Caine, stepped forward to intervene in the encounter. Caine was no ordinary bystander, but in fact had 13 years’ experience on the Park Zoo beat, ‘watching for men who annoy women,’…
