True Crime Historian

Alexandria, Virginia
February 28, 1844 

A pleasure cruise on the Potomac River turned into the deadliest single-day loss of senior government officials in American history when the world's largest naval cannon exploded on the deck of the USS Princeton. Secretary of State Abel Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, and four others were killed instantly in front of four hundred horrified guests. President John Tyler survived only because someone handed him a glass of champagne at the foot of the ladder. Among the dead was David Gardiner, whose twenty-three-year-old daughter Julia fainted a...

The Crocodile Tears of Calvin Dellinger

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Episode 99 begins early one brisk fall morning in 1888, when a group of railroad men spy the drowned body of Mary Catherine Dellinger on the bank of Conestoga Creek in rural Pennsylvania. The evidence is thin and circumstantial, but it all points to her husband, Calvin, who expertly plays the part of the grieving husband, but his history of cruelty to women leads to a different conclusion. There’s a coda to the murder story that takes place thirty years later, when Calvin Dellinger again ge...

Los Angeles, California
February 26, 1931

The Great Depression had America on its knees, and men in power needed someone to blame. On a sunny Thursday afternoon, federal immigration agents and local police sealed off La Placita park in the heart of Mexican Los Angeles, trapping nearly four hundred men, women, and children. They demanded papers. They beat those who tried to run. They arrested a man whose documents proved he'd lived legally in the country for eight years — and stuffed them back in his pocket. The raid was the opening salvo in wh...

The Crescent City Quadrangle Scandal

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Episode 98 involves a rare love quadrangle that comes to light when a woman is charged with accessory to the murder of her banker husband, committed by her physician lover and the state’s attorney turns out to be her former fiance. It’s a tangled, tangled web, and you know it’s not going to end well. 

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Munich, Germany
February 24, 1920

A failed painter and Army intelligence operative named Adolf Hitler stood before a packed house at Munich's Hofbräuhaus to announce a new political program. The event, which nearly erupted in a riot, marked the public christening of what would soon be called the Nazi Party.
The episode reports from the oldest and most famous beer hall in the city on the chaotic night Hitler read the twenty-five points of the party’s platform—a volatile blend of nationalist fury, populist promises, and racial hatred. The program was b...

The Redpath Mansion Myster

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Episode 465, a classic locked-room mystery, takes place in the summer of 1901, when two bodies are discovered inside a mansion in Montreal’s exclusive Golden Square Mile. Ada Maria Mills Redpath and her son, Clifford, are dead. Authorities quickly ruled it a tragic murder-suicide, blaming a seizure. But the evidence was immediately buried—literally—as the family arranged a funeral within 48 hours. 

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Yo...

What Happened In The Guttenberg Woods 

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Episode 97 is another story of a honeymoon trip gone awry, but it was a marriage likely doomed from the start. For one thing, Mina Muller and Martin Kettler -- if that’s his real name -- were both already married. With children. But they still visit the minister and, well, you know it’s not gonna end well.

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Rouen, France
February 21, 1431
At eight o'clock on a frozen Wednesday morning, a nineteen-year-old peasant girl in leg irons shuffled into the Chapel Royal of Rouen Castle to face forty-two robed clerics who had already decided her fate. Two years earlier, Joan of Arc had heard the voice of the Archangel Michael in her father's garden. She went on to break the siege of Orléans, rout the English across the Loire Valley, and crown a king at Reims. Now she was chained to a wooden block in an English military prison, guarded day and n...

There were ghosts at the San Quentin gallows. That's what the hangman saw. San Quentin

Executioner Amos Lunt 

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Episode 95 explores a different point of view of capital punishment, a behind the scenes look at the gallows of San Quentin Prison from the hangman’s point of view. One of the minor characters in Episode 84 “The Belle in the Belfry” was the hangman, Amos Lunt, who seemed quite shaken by the event and was reported as “seeing spooks”. That was enough to get me to look a little deepe...

True Tales From The Old West

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Episode 63 tells the story of the scoundrel Charley Bowles who took the moniker Black Bart from a villain in a dime novel, but I think he used it ironically because it didn’t really fit his gentlemanly style. He only robbed coaches carrying treasure belonging to the Wells Fargo Company, apparently in revenge for a mining dispute in Nevada. When he left his doggerel poetry at the scene of the crime, he would sign it “Black Bart PO8” spelling poet with a numeral, text-m...

Sing Sing Prison
February 18, 1916
On September 5th, 1913, two boys fishing off a dock in Weehawken, New Jersey, hauled up a bundle wrapped in oilcloth and weighted with stone. Inside was the upper torso of a young woman. No head. No identification. What followed was one of the most sensational murder investigations in New York City history — a trail of pillowcase tags, bloodstained walls, and forged documents that led detectives from a bare apartment on Bradhurst Avenue to the rectory door of a Catholic church in Harlem. The man they arrested at half past eleven th...

Rome, Italy
February 17, 1600

Rome, the day after Ash Wednesday. A naked man rides a mule through the streets toward the Campo de' Fiori, a leather bridle strapped across his mouth to keep him from shouting heresies to the crowd. Giordano Bruno — philosopher, former Dominican friar, and the man who told the Roman Inquisition that the universe was infinite — is about to be burned alive at the stake for refusing to take it back.Bruno spent sixteen years as a wandering scholar across Europe, dined with kings, debated at Oxford, and proposed idea...

Nazis Invade America

Episode 464

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In the summer of 1942, the war was supposed to be a distant conflict. But that illusion shattered when German U-boats, the predators of Operation Drumbeat, brought the fight to the American home front, sinking ships within sight of Long Island. This episode dives into the extraordinary story of Operation Pastorius, Hitler’s audacious plan to cripple the “Arsenal of Democracy.”Eight German agents—all fluent in English and trained in sabotage—landed on American beaches carrying a staggering $175,000 in cash and their most terrifying weapon: th...

Miami,
FloridaFebruary 15, 1933

A warm Wednesday evening in Bayfront Park. President-elect Franklin Roosevelt has just finished a short speech from the back of an open touring car when a five-foot-one Italian bricklayer named Giuseppe Zangara climbs onto a wobbly folding chair, pulls a thirty-two caliber revolver, and fires five shots into the crowd. Roosevelt is untouched. But Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who had just stepped away from the president-elect's car, takes a bullet to the lung. He will be dead in nineteen days. Zangara will follow him to the grave thirteen days...

Strasbourg, Alsace
February 14, 1349
Six hundred years before Al Capone made Valentine's Day synonymous with bloodshed in Chicago, the citizens of Strasbourg, in the German Empire, committed a massacre that dwarfed it in scale and savagery. On February 14, 1349, as many as two thousand Jewish men, women, and children were marched to the Jewish cemetery and burned alive on a wooden platform — accused of poisoning the wells and conjuring the Black Death. The plague hadn't even reached the city yet. Five days earlier, a guild revolt had overthrown the city government that had been protecting the Je...

The Crimes of Winona Green Freeman

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Episode 52 is a feature report from the St. Louis Post Dispatch reporter Frederick H. Brennan on a visit to the Little Rock, Arkansas, jail to visit with accused double murderess Winona Green. I am particularly taken by Brennan’s description of Mrs. Green’s hold on the local law enforcement and press. In 1928, Brennan would be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in another murder case. In the prologue, you hear about her final murder conviction as Winnie Ola Freeman, and afte...

Dark History Today

The Murder of Clayton Dale Elkins

Lawton, Oklahoma
February 12, 1950

Two old friends from Seminole — Clayton Dale Elkins and James Albert Collier Jr. — reconnect over bootleg whiskey at the Big 6 bar on a Saturday afternoon. That night, with their wives in tow, the drinking continues through two half-pints of illegal liquor, a stop at Ruth's Drive-In, and a long evening that splits the couples into separate rooms. When Elkins tells Collier's wife something that suggests her husband has been unfaithful, the night unravels fast. Tears, accusations, and a de...

King Ben and the Curse of the House of David

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In Episode 53 we explore portions of a five-part investigative expose the Detroit Free Press published on the cult House of David, which operated a commune near Benton Harbor Michigan in the 1920s. The leader of the cult was Benjamin Franklin Purnell, in these articles confronted with allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct among young members of his flock. Much of the expose, the parts that we’ll be examining, are based on a sworn deposition by one of these yo...

Prescott, Arizona Territory
February 10, 1886

In 1881, the Arizona Territory was rocked by the chilling crimes of Dennis Dilda, a man whose outward appearance as a hardworking settler masked a predatory nature. Settling near Prescott with his wife and children, Dilda’s descent into infamy began with the disappearance of several travelers. Suspicion peaked when Deputy Sheriff James Bozarth went missing after visiting Dilda’s ranch to investigate a theft.A subsequent search of the property revealed a gruesome scene: Bozarth's body was discovered buried beneath the floor of Dilda's cabin. Furt...

The Chicago Wynekoop Scandal

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In November 1933, Chicago undertaker Thomas Ahern was summoned to the basement surgery of Dr. Alice Lindsay Wynekoop, a respected 62-year-old physician. There he discovered her daughter-in-law Rheta, 22, face-down on the operating table with a bullet in her back—and immediately called police instead.

Dr. Wynekoop initially blamed an intruder, but investigators uncovered a damning picture: a family fortune reduced to twenty-six dollars, insurance policies taken out on Rheta just ten days before her death, and a ne...

Fotheringhay Castle. Northamptonshire, England.
February 8, 1587.

The Great Hall has been transformed into a theater of death. A scaffold, two feet high and covered in black cloth, stands in the center. A fire crackles in the hearth, fighting the winter chill, but it does little to warm the blood of the three hundred spectators crowded into the room.

They are waiting for a woman who has been a prisoner for nineteen years. A woman who was Queen of France at sixteen, Queen of Scotland at birth, and who—according to the government of Elizabeth I—is now...

The Murder Of Joseph Smith

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Episode 466 is the story of John C. Elliott, the Ohio woodcutter turned political assassin who rode 500 miles to execute a prophet. Hiding as a schoolmaster, Elliott was arrested and set free by Joseph Smith himself. Discover the man history forgot.

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Madge Oberholtzer Kills The Klan

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Episode 461 takes us to 1925, when Indiana Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon D.C. Stevenson kidnapped and assaulted Madge Oberholtzer, who died from poison she took to escape him. Her "dying declaration" was the key evidence. His murder conviction, based on "proximate cause," shattered the Klan’s immense political power in Indiana and ended the careers of prominent politicians, including a governor.

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The Condemnation Of Mary Ann Cotton

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Episode 462 is the tale of the wicked Mary Ann Cotton, one of Victorian Britain's most prolific serial killers, exploiting the era's poverty and the new industrial life insurance market for financial gain. Using arsenic, her crimes were camouflaged by high mortality rates, as symptoms mimicked "gastric fever."

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The Barrow Gang’s Bloody Rampage

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Episode 460 tells the brutal story of two young lovers and their gang as they escalate from small-time robbery to a bloody, two-year crime spree across the Southwest. With an arsenal of machine guns and other deadly weapons, they left a trail of dead lawmen and merchants in a desperate flight that ended in a deadly ambush.

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Kahahawai Shot In The Heart 

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Episode 93 takes you to the island paradise of Hawaii, not yet a state in 1932 when the wife of a naval officer stationed there is allegedly raped and beaten by four natives. A few months later, her mother, her husband and two of his enlisted men face a jury under the counsel of the famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow in a case that both sides claim puts the territory of Hawaii itself on trial. 

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The Escapes and Escapades of Winnie Ruth Judd

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Episode 90 begins in the fall of 1931 when a Phoenix resident shows up in a Los Angeles train depot trying to claim three trunks that she had shipped there. The clerks wouldn’t let her take the trunks because of the foul odor emanating from them.  Winnie Ruth Judd said she’d go get the key so they could see there was nothing nefarious in her luggage and made her first escape.

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Or, Death of a Composer

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Episode 86 involves the body of a songwriter and real estate speculator found tied to a chair with an expression of surprise frozen on his dead face and suspicions of suicide. - Wait. What? - Suicide tied to a chair? - The evidence is so jumbled, police are at a loss to explain, but the backstory to the incident and a foray into the worlds of traveling musicians and actors, hints at motives deeply hidden, and possibly scandalous. - This is one that...

From Thrill Slayer To War Hero

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Episode 459 unlocks the bizarre, true tale of George Harsh, the Oglethorpe "Thrill Slayer," and his partner Richard Gallogly. Bored rich kids trade philosophy for a Colt .45 and a rash of robberies that turn fatal. Harsh's journey spirals from university to death row, then from chain-gang surgeon to hero of the Great Escape. Yeah, Paul Newman’s Great Escape was based on that one...

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The Trial Of Louise Vermilya

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Episode 80. Although Louise Vermilya of Chicago was never convicted of a crime, history lays around 10 deaths at her door, mostly family members and suitors. She did go to trial once, and we’ll take a pretty close look at the drama, including a suicide attempt, that led up to her acquittal as we look at the wake of mysterious deaths throughout her life. This story features our dear friend the late Emily Simer Braun to read the quotes attributed to Louise Vermilya in...

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For this remastered edition, I’ve dug deep into the vault and combined Episodes 7 and 77, both regarding post-Civil War vigilante action in the Ozark Mountains.The Giant Vigilante Captain Nat KinneyEpisode 7. Captain Nat Kinney was a large man, both in stature and reputation, and both seemed to grow to mythic proportions among the citizens of Taney County, Missouri, deep in the Ozark Mountains. Kinney was the king of the Bald Knobbers, a group of Christian citizens who organized to police themselves against the ruffians and hooligans who would interrupt their church se...

The Villisca Ax Murders Mystery 

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Episode 69 starts with a brutal ax murder that scandalized the quiet town of Villisca, Iowa, about 2,000 souls in the summer of 1912, when a family of six and two young visitors were killed in their beds by an assailant wielding a long-handled ax, the family’s own tool, which was left at the scene. Clues were scant, and it took years for the twists and subplots to emerge, including a string of similar murders, implications that it was a job for hire by a business riv...

The End Begins At Coffeyville

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Episode 458 concludes our three part exploration of the infamous Dalton Gang. With the law breathing down their necks and increasing the guards on trains, the gang needs to find a new way to raise money to finance an exile to South America. In desperation they attempt a double bank robbery in a town where they are well known. Well, the title says it all.

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The Awful Crimes of the Northcott Family

A missing boy returns from a cross country walkabout, but the mother says it's not him.

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You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is just a buck a week, and you can get access to over 400 episodes from the dusty vault, plus content not available anywhere else on the Internet, direct access to the Boss, and whatever personal services you require.

In episode 47, we follow the unusual narrative of...

Seven Dead at Taliesin

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In Episode 46, we relive a somewhat famous crime involving the noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the night that his apparently crazed butler -- yes, the butler did it! -- slaughtered seven people at Wright’s Wisconsin rural home he named Taliesen after the ancient Welsh poet, and built as a hide-away for himself and the love of his life, Mamah Borthwick, who was among the dead.

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Roadhouse Of No Return

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Episode 40 takes a look at the legend of a Kansas family that killed at least 11 visitors to their roadhouse in the early 1870s. They aroused suspicion by choosing as a victim a well-known physician, whose family soon pulled out all stops in a search until they uncovered his body, along with 10 missing travelers, on the Bender property. The Bender Family was nowhere to be found, and never were. Sightings and even arrests were regular for many years, even into the next century, but the second...

Train Robberies Bring Troubles

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Episode 457 continues a three-episode exploration of the infamous Dalton Gang, who terrorize the Plains states near the end of the nineteenth century. In this episode, the gang strikes it rich with a big haul, and some want to retire, but getting out of the country isn't the piece of cake they thought it would be.

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The Early Days Of The Electric Chair

This is a combination of two early episodes with a common theme.

The Shocking Death Of William Kemmler: The First Electric Execution

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Episode 19. Following the brutal murder of his common law wife Tillie Ziegler in Buffalo, New York, March, 1889, the rough character William Kemmler said he was glad he did it was was happy to hang for the crime. He did not quite get his wish, as a newly passed law in the state of New York allowed Kemmler...

The Fall from Grace and Tragic Murder of the Rev. Gaylord V. Saunders

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Episode 38 tells the sordid tale of a Methodist minister suffering from a midlife crisis and in losing his faith falls into the path of sin and degradation. It gets so bad, that his beleaguered wife offers a young man a $10 bill to find someone to kill her husband before he kills her. This was in 1934, so adujsted for inflation, that comes to $177.71 in 2016 dollars.

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The Bothamley Murder Mystery

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Episode 37 is the story of an 1883 murder that appeared in newspapers across the country in 1905 as "The Bothamley Murder Mystery" under the byline of Captain Patrick D. Tyrrell, who at that time had retired from a career as a detective in the United States Secret Service. His job was mainly to hunt down counterfeiters, but he achieved some fame when he foiled a plot to steal the body of Abraham Lincoln, a case I hope to take up in a future episode. He wrote this...