Vows: The Myersons flanked by Allen's parents, from left, and sisters Merle and Jean, at their October 1987 wedding.   (Photo: Courtesy of Jean Myerson)

Pinzler e-mailed back to say, “No big deal, we’ll find you another one,” but it’s unclear whether Allen ever read the reply. Between 8:52 and 9:04, he called Chase Manhattan four times. During one of those calls, he managed to transfer the final $1,071 from the joint checking account to his own. Then, at 9:06, he left a message on the answering machine of his divorce attorney, saying he needed to speak to her immediately, that it was an “emergency.” But he didn’t elaborate. By the time she called him back, minutes later, he had already left his desk.

Also that morning, he mailed his sister Jean a draft of a brutal divorce document, outlining a vicious litany of complaints about his wife. He was supposed to file it with the court that afternoon. Jean would later use it as the blueprint for her case against Carol.

At about 9:10, he received another phone call, his last. This one seemed to upset him even more than the 8:30 call (which Pinzler believes had been news about the apartment). Witnesses in the newsroom say he angrily slammed down the phone, with such force that papers went flying off his desk.

Then he scribbled a note, the validity of which is now a thorny legal issue: “Last Will—I leave all my money and possessions to my sisters, Merle Myerson and Jean Myerson.” Signed, “Allen R. Myerson.” He left his wallet and wedding band beside it.

Then he stood up and headed for the fifteenth floor.

That morning, Jean Myerson had taken her three children—a 5-year-old and 2-year-old twins—to the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. They were on the tram ride when her cell phone rang: It was Merle, a cardiologist in Cooperstown, New York, at the time. “Allen’s been hurt,” she said. While still on the ride, Jean called one of his editors. “Jean, your brother’s dead,” he told her.

Natalie Myerson, who last saw her son the previous Saturday at her 79th-birthday party, at Jean’s house, was at the synagogue volunteering. Carol was at her desk at Business Week when her editor summoned her into his office. With him were two top editors from the Times. “I was saying hello to them and shaking their hands,” Carol recalls, “and they told me to sit down . . . ”

In one of the more curious subplots of this saga, it's apparent from numerous documents that while Allen knew his wife was pregnant, he did not know that Carol had conceived twins.

‘You murderer!” Jean Myerson yelled into the phone at her sister-in-law, Carol, in their first conversation hours after Allen’s death. “You did this to him! You killed him.” Ten months later, this conversation is the only thing Carol and Jean agree upon.

“I don’t have to listen to this,” said Carol, hanging up the phone.

In another conversation that day, Natalie told Carol, “You’re not going to keep me from my grandchild.” Carol seemed surprised that she knew about the pregnancy. In one of the more curious subplots of this saga, it’s apparent from numerous documents left by Allen, as well as from conversations he had in the days before his death, that while he knew his wife was pregnant, he did not know, as Carol knew, that she had conceived twins. (Carol, despite numerous requests, declined to comment on this particular mystery.) Jean believes “she was holding that out for some kind of slam-dunk leverage.” And she wonders: Was that what he learned in that last phone call?

Allen’s corpse remained in the city morgue as the fight between his wife and his family quickly escalated. For nearly five days, they battled over his body, preventing him from being buried within 24 hours, as Jewish law requires. Carol, believing that as his widow, she had the right to bury him, chose a plot for her husband in a bucolic cemetery on a hill in New Jersey. Gravediggers dug the hole. But back in New Rochelle, the Myersons had already ordered another grave dug. Furious that Carol—whom they saw not as “the bereaved widow” but rather as the estranged, soon-to-be ex-wife—planned to bury him in a nondenominational cemetery, they threatened to file emergency motions to keep the body from Carol’s possession. They wanted Allen buried near his father, at a Jewish cemetery in Queens, even though that meant Carol, as a non-Jew, couldn’t ever be buried beside him.

Separate memorial services—“the dueling funerals,” as Allen’s pals at the Times put it—were planned, one by the Myersons, one by Carol. Plus, of course, a third, held at the Times auditorium. The bad blood put Times executives in an awkward position—and resulted in Raines and his colleagues delivering their eulogies three times.

On Sunday, August 25, three days after Allen’s death, Jean went with a friend to the spot where Allen had landed—on the roof of a parking garage—then to the morgue. She asked the attendant to leave her alone with her brother. She swore over the cold body that she would avenge Allen’s death. Then she took out a scissors and clipped a lock of his hair—"I was desperate for DNA evidence,” she said later—as she already planned to contest the paternity of the twins.

The next day, Carol presided over a service for Allen: prayers and eulogies at a Jewish funeral home, sprinkled with happy photographs of the two of them together frolicking in France and Germany. Her request to have Allen’s body present in a closed coffin was successfully fought by the sisters, who were convinced she would "pull a fast one” and bury him in the grave she’d had dug.

After the service, friends of Allen and Carol’s gathered for a catered luncheon at the precious Glen Ridge home that Allen never did move into and that Carol would soon put back on the market. Later, the $3,000 bill from Carol’s caterer (and the bill from her gravedigger) would be hotly contested by Jean, as his estate—now handled by a court-appointed administrator—began to try to pay all the funeral bills. Numerous Times people recall their discomfort at the luncheon: Why wasn’t Allen’s family here? Were the rumors all true? Could it be that the babies weren’t his? That Carol was having an affair? That she told him he’d never see the children? That she stole all his money?

That Monday, in another Jewish funeral home, in New Rochelle, Carol and her lawyers were in one room while Jean and hers were in another. The Myersons had just held their memorial service, which was dutifully attended by the crew from the Times. Later, as the rest of the family sat shivah with Raines, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and the rest of Allen’s colleagues over soda and cold cuts at Natalie’s home (the Myersons’ submission to the estate was a grocery bill for $380), Carol and Jean were still duking it out over the body. Jean refused to budge on burying Allen in the family plot.

“My mother said, ‘Give her the body, just give her the body.’ And I said, ‘No, Ma. She took everything from him. She took his belongings, she took his money, she took his life. I will be damned if I’m gonna let her have his body!’ ” And there were other matters that had to be sorted out. Carol wanted her husband buried in a suit; the Myersons wanted Allen wrapped in a simple shroud, in accordance with Jewish tradition. Carol wanted a pricey coffin; the Myersons wanted a plain pine box, also in accordance with tradition. Carol, Jean says, wanted to ride in the family limousine to the graveside. (“I had to tell her,” Jean adds, “we don’t do limos. We drive ourselves.”) In the end, “Carol gave up,” say her friends, though she did get the casket she requested.

On August 28, Allen Reuben Myerson was laid to rest at Mount Judah cemetery in Queens, a bleak expanse of gravestones off the highway with broken beer bottles and trash strewn about. The Myersons (family, friends, cousins) stood on one side of the grave while Carol stood on the other, alone but for her brother, a Protestant minister who had married them fifteen years before. At one point, the rabbi himself took pity on her, handing her the shovel, as is the custom, so she, too, could throw dirt on her husband.