One of the things that strikes me an attention to detail the modern reader would find tedious or irrelevant. The room the priest checked into, the fact that the clerk inserted the term “The Rev” in front of his name. Did reporters think the more detail, the more informative the story is? It reads like a police report.
The priest’s quote near the end of the story is interesting in that it was almost certainly fabricated. I understand that people spoke more formally in days of yore, but I find it unlikely he could form such coherent sentences after shooting himself in the temple.
One final thing: I had never heard of the term ‘alienist’, which was apparently an old term for psychiatrist and a person who testified in sanity trials.
One reason it read like a police report is because it’s quite likely that a lot of the information was taken from a police report. In those days most newspapers had reporters at police headquarters 24/7 and their primary job was to get that sort of detail.
As for the quote, I prefer to believe it was “reconstructed” rather than fabricated. However, if I read the story correctly, the bullet creased his scalp rather than entering his brain. That’s enough to cause a lot of blood while not impairing his cognitive functions.
‘Alienist’ can still be seen in some P.G. Wodehouse stories, written in the Twenties and Thirties, so it seems to have still had some currency by that time.
While it doesn’t go to your OP, there was another strory in the NYTimes that same day, which said that Groghan had not served as a priest since 1900, had been commited(my words) to a mental hospital until 1907. After the incident you describe, he was returned to the “home.”