When the famous author Edgar Allan Poe soon afterwards published his story "The Murder of Marie Rogêt", it was clear that his detective Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin was solving a true crime mystery...
On a Wednesday morning in July 1841, three men in a sailing-boat saw a body in the water off Castle Point, Hoboken. It was the dead body of a beautiful brunette, Mary Cecilia Rogers, just 21 years old. According to the New York Tribune ”it was obvious that she had been horribly outraged and murdered”. Her clothes were torn, her petticoat was missing and a piece of lace from the bottom of her dress was embedded so deeply her throat that it had almost disappeared. An autopsy led to the conclusion that she had been “brutally violated”.
http://bookstove.com/book-talk/the-mystery-of-marie-roget-murdered-by-edgar-allan-poe/ - via historicalmysterywriter
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Your Favorite Ghostwriter.
I always instantly exit those, so I guess I'll never know. : (
Sounds to me like Poe liked spooky stuff and a story like Mary Rogers's, with all the sex and murder and mystery, probably really grabbed his attention. He realized that other people might be fascinated by the story too, and fictionalized it a bit here and there and made money off of it.
I didn't see anything in the article that was damning evidence against Poe. Knowing a lot about a case and giving a case a lot of thought means he found it interesting enough to follow the case intently in the news and such, not that he was a killer.