John D. Rockefeller Sr. The Man Who Bought the Story

In February of 1908, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World walked into a drugstore in Freeport, Illinois, put a photograph on the counter, and finally closed a manhunt that had run for seven years. The man in the picture had died there two years earlier under the name Doctor William Levingston. He had a wife in Illinois and a wife he had never divorced back in New York, and the son he walked away from was John Davison Rockefeller, the richest man in the world.

This is part one of a two-part series, and it covers the...