As Markoe was passing the collection plate, the dingy little Simpkin pulled out a gun and shot him point-blank in the forehead. The collection plate fell to the floor with a noise “like crashing glass.”18 The rector, Karl Reiland, flung his Bible to the pulpit and leapt over the chancel rail. Although the organist stopped playing, the church choir continued to sing angelically as vestrymen in cutaways pursued Simpkin; they caught him in Stuyvesant Square. By coincidence, Dr. Markoe was rushed to the Lying-in Hospital, the hospital he had persuaded Pierpont to endow, and died there a few
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