True Crime Historian

Gilded Age New York crowned her the Queen of Crime. Sophie Lyons — pickpocket, shoplifter, blackmailer — spent fifty years selling men's shame back to them at Parker House prices. She retired to Detroit a millionaire philanthropist. Three of the men she tried to reform killed her for the rest of it.

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Crimes of the Scoundrel Clarence V.T. Richeson

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Episode 74 explores the tawdry case of Clarence Virgil Thompson Richeson, who was apparently an eloquent preacher and a rising star in the Baptist community, as well as a notorious scoundrel. The tangled web of deceit he wove between three women finally ended in the mysterious death of the unmarried mother of his expected child. Richeson would later confess that he gave her poison, telling her that it was medicine to induce an abortion. This case is historically significant in that it...

Father George Rapp ran the Harmony Society at Economy, Pennsylvania, by two commandments: celibacy for men whose wives he had evicted, and poverty for workers whose gold he hoarded. By 1846 the prophet was burning ledgers and stashing half a million in coin beneath his floor. He had it coming.

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The Trial and Execution of Amelia Dyer 

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Episode 43 comes at the request of a listener across the great pond in the United Kingdom. We will be exploring the testimony from the trial of Amelia Dyer, who would take in infants and toddlers for adoption for a fee, and then murder the poor children for the profit. She is said to have once referred to herself as an angel maker. I’ve seen estimates of her carnage at as many as 400 young souls, but she was convicted on only one cou...

For ten years, George Cassiday, known on Capitol Hill as the Man in the Green Hat, ran liquor to the United States Congress while four out of five of his customers voted dry. When Prohibition agents finally caught him in February of 1930, he took the hypocrites down with him.

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The Nebraska Spree Killer

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Episode 475 takes us on a wild ride across Nebraska with Charles Starkweather, a 19-year-old with a stolen shotgun, a 14-year-old companion who may or may not be kidnapped, and a string of dead bodies across the American plains that shocked a nation.

Hear more stories about SERIAL & SPREE KILLERS.

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"The Merry Widow of Bicester" takes us to battle-torn England during World War II, when as if there wasn't already enough death and suffering, a jealous mistress plots to take out her man's wife.

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Born Elizabeth Bigley in a Ontario railway camp, she died Cassie Chadwick in an Ohio prison cell — and in between, she convinced the banks of northern Ohio that Andrew Carnegie was her shamefaced father and they were sitting on a gold mine. They were sitting on forged paper. The Queen of Ohio. Circa 1897–1904.

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The Reckless Reno Gang

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Episode 92 takes place after the Civil War, when the Reno Brothers explored a new way to rob trains that inspired the James and Younger gangs. But even the wild and wily Reno brothers were no match for Allen Pinkerton and his detectives. Although it takes place in Indiana, this story has the trappings of a tale of the Old West: Daring robberies, fugitives from justice, clever arrests, and a final showdown in the New Albany jail. Adapted from "The Pinkertons: A Detective Dynasty" by Richard...

Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War spent a decade courting a married woman, arranged her husband's convenient posting to the Mediterranean, and married her six weeks before the 1829 inauguration. The Cabinet collapsed. Calhoun was destroyed. Jackson never recovered. John Henry Eaton walked away clean. Washington City's most elegant arsonist.

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Family Tragedy in Rising Sun

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Episode 89. In a lot of these stories from the old newspapers, the press coverage and the locale itself often take on the attributes of characters in the drama. In this case, the town of Rising Sun, Indiana, seems to evolve as the story progresses. When one of the town matrons, the spinster Lizzie Gillespie is found assassinated in her parlor, townfolk tell reporters she had no enemy in the world and there could be no logical reason for the murder. Then they start thinking...

Clyde Tolson ran personnel and discipline at the FBI for 44 years — the man who hired, promoted, and silenced the agents who carried out J. Edgar Hoover's illegal surveillance campaigns. He built the compliant machine. He signed the memos. He inherited the house. History gave him the quiet burial he counted on.

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The Case Of Bathsheba Spooner

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Episode 474 takes place in 1788 when the secrets of a prosperous Massachusetts family are revealed, beginning with a dead body in the bottom of a well. By spring, four people would hang because of what came to light. One of them was a woman. One of them was pregnant.

Hear More Stories About FEMMES FATALE!!!!

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Wu Zetian entered the Tang court as a teenage concubine in 638. By 690, she'd murdered her way to the Dragon Throne — the only woman in Chinese history to rule as Emperor. She stuffed rivals into wine jars, built a secret police, and spent her final years afraid of house cats.

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Episode 130

Murder By Fire, by Brandon White

The Abominable Mr. Yelverton, by Edmund Pearson

The American Exchange Bank Robbery, By Cleveland Moffat

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William N. Roach embezzled sixty thousand dollars from a Washington bank, fled to Dakota Territory, and returned the money just fast enough to dodge prison. Fourteen years later, a Republican civil war handed him a U.S. Senate seat nobody voted for. The Senate tried to expel him. Time said no.

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The Mysterious Death of Louise Monteabaro In

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Episode 20, Police Chief Henry Blake’s story stays consistent throughout, from the time he reported the incident to the judge/acting coroner to the time that the dead girl’s aunt stabbed him in the neck: Miss Louise Monteabaro used her own gun to commit suicide in the passenger seat of her car. But according to those who knew the young sewing machine saleswoman, that seemed unlikely. 




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Episode 22 is an exciting story that has many of the elements of classic noir: A deadly robbery, an exhaustive manhunt, a daring escape from the county jail and a tense showdown ending with a clever police ploy. In the spring of 1918, three men burst into a business meeting and steal a mere pocketful of cash, but leave three men, including one of their own, dead in a fusillade of bullets.

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Gilded Age New York. William Magear Tweed rode Tammany Hall to the top and looted the city treasury through padded bills, phantom invoices, and kickbacks buried in plaster. His crowning theft was a courthouse whose $250,000 budget swelled past $12 million. In November 1873, a jury convicted him inside it.

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The Assassination of Huey P. Long

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Episode 473 takes us to Baton Rouge on the night of September 8, 1935, when a quiet young doctor walked into the Louisiana State Capitol and never walked out. He left no note. No confession. No explanation. Six people who stood beside him — or over him — tell the story he never told.

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The Complicated Romance of Fannie Brice and Notorious Nicky Arnstein 

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In Episode 60, we take a little break from murderous mayhem for a love story with a different kind of mayhem. The world of Broadway was quite aghast when Fannie Brice, a star of the Ziegfield Follies, took up with New York gambler Julius Wilford Arnstein, better known as Nicky, whose story was adapted into the musical “Funny Girl.” The first act is a Sunday magazine article that was published while Nicky was serving time in the Leavenworth prison, and a...

In 1869, Medal of Honor recipient Daniel Butterfield took a ten-thousand-dollar bribe from Jay Gould to leak Treasury gold sales, helping trigger the Black Friday panic that bankrupted brokers and ruined farmers across the Midwest. The man who composed Taps sold out his country and never spent a day in prison.

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Turned Into A Tigress By Her Borgia Blood.How A Criminal Acrobat Makes A Living Out Of His Genuine Broken Neck.How A Little Dog Avenged The Murder Of His Master.AD-FREE SAFE HOUSE EDITION


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In 1902, Kansas Senator Joseph R. Burton walked a mail fraud operator into the Post Office inspector's office and made a federal investigation disappear. The price: twenty-five hundred dollars, paid in monthly installments. The first sitting senator convicted of a felony sold his office for the price of a used carriage.



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The Murder Of Captain Joseph White

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Episode 472 takes us back to Salem, Massachusetts in 1830 when an old man dead in his bed from thirteen stab wounds. The clues: an unlocked window and a fortune that was never what anyone thought it was. The plot implicates four young men from two of Salem's best families and involves one famous and very expensive lawyer. This is the murder that taught Edgar Allan Poe everything he needed to know about guilt.

More CAPERS & CONSPIRACIES

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What’s In The Package Mr. Wainwright?

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Episode 49 is adapted from our favorite true crime pioneer, Edmund Pearson, who worked in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. He was a librarian by training and profession, but first made his mark on the true crime canon with his unique take on the Lizzie Borden crime. He wrote several books and many magazine articles, a regular contributor to the New Yorker for a time as well as a syndicated newspaper columnist. In this episode, he tells the story of an 1875 murder in...

The Cincinnati Tanyard Murder

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Episode 17 is a report from Lafcadio Hearn, on of my favorite Pioneers of True Crime. Although he became better known late in his career for his books on travel and on Japanese legends and ghost stories, Lafcadio Hearn began his professional writing career as a staff correspondent for the Cincinnati Enquirer. He was such a devotee of Edgar Allen Poe that he carried the nickname The Raven, given to him by an early mentor, throughout his life. The devotion shows in much of his writing...

The Oklahoma Phantom Terror

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Episode 471 finds us in 1932, a hill country reporter named Vivian Brown did what no one else ever managed — she sat down with Pretty Boy Floyd and got him talking. Two years later, a teletype changed everything. The only interview the phantom bandit ever gave. Tonight, we hear the story from her point of view.

Hear more stories about MANHUNTS!!!

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The Execution of J.G. Rawlings and His Accomplice 

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Episode 45 takes us back to the turn of the last century, rural Georgia circa 1905, when an argument over a field border incites a family feud that results in four deaths, including the murder of two innocents and a double hanging.

Hear more stories about CAPITAL CRIMES!!!!

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San Francisco, California
March 28, 1944

A pyromaniac works the skid row district south of Market Street, lighting fires in flophouses all evening long. The sixth one catches. Twenty-two people die inside the New Amsterdam Hotel. The man they convict says God knows he's innocent. The dead say nothing.

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The Trial & Travails Of Norma Brighton Millen

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Episode 43 is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a prominent minister and graduate of a fine finishing school, who fell into the wrong crowd and married a man who would be executed for the crime of the gang he was trying to build. The papers never said, but I can’t help but think the Millen-Faber Gang fancied themselves to be the Dillingers of the East Coast. The story grabbed my attention because of the way Norma Brighton Millen pr...

Poprad, Slovakia
March 25, 1942

Nine hundred and ninety-nine young Jewish women boarded a train believing they were headed to factory work. They sang folk songs as the Tatra Mountains slid past the windows. The train crossed the Polish border before dawn. What waited on the other side would change the world.

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From True Crime Pioneer Edmund Pearson

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Episode 25 takes place in 1849, a week before Thanksgiving, in a laboratory at the Harvard Medical College while the famed physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes was lecturing in the room directly above. The victim was one of Boston's wealthy elite on a mission to collect a bet from a geology professor. The Parker-Webster case, as it came to be known, was notable because it was one of the first murder cases where circumstantial forensic evidence was used in a trial. In this case...

Cincinnati, Ohio
March 24, 1862

Abolition's golden trumpet, Wendell Phillips, takes the stage at Pike's Opera House to tell a river city what it doesn't want to hear. The eggs come first. Then the rocks. Then the mob outside, waiting with a rope. The mayor watches and does nothing.

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The Wrongful Execution of William Jackson Marion

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Episode 470 begins in 1887, when Nebraska hanged Jack Marion for murdering his friend John Cameron. Four years later, Cameron turned up alive on a Kansas farm. He'd never heard of the trial. He still had the receipt for the horses Marion supposedly killed him for. Nobody ever figured out whose body was in the creek.

Hear more stories about BOTCHED EXECUTIONS.

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The 1896 Klaettke Family Massacre 

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Episode 42 is the sad tale of a family of seven shot and killed by the crazed father, who then turned the gun on himself. It’s rare that we do an episode about a murder/suicide, because you rarely get to hear about the drama that led up to the tragedy, because there’s no one left to tell the story. There are still a lot of unanswered--and over-answered--questions in this one, but I like how the reporter included the details of the family history and t...

Oxford, England
March 21, 1556

The Archbishop of Canterbury signed five recantations to save his life. Queen Mary scheduled his burning anyway. On the morning of his execution, Cranmer was ordered to renounce his faith one final time before the crowd. He had other plans — and a right hand he intended to punish first.

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Episode 14. One summer day in 1896, three young boys discover a mysterious package floating near the docks of the East River. Hoping for some kind of treasure, what they found was the freshly dismembered body of a man. Police eventually discovered the identity of the man and found that he was involved in a deadly love triangle. His lover and her other man were charged with the grisly crime.

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East Texas
March 19, 1687

The man who claimed half a continent for France walked into a stand of river cane looking for his missing nephew. Waiting in the grass were the men he'd led into the wilderness — men who had no intention of following him back out.

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Murder in the Marberry Resort

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In Episode 57, we get an unusual glimpse into the world inside a bordello at the turn of the previous century, when a young prostitute reneges on a suicide pact with another, and allegedly kills a third girl to keep her secret safe. One of the things I like about this story is the outrage and indignation expressed by the newspaper editors that seems both quaint and relative to many of today’s social issues. 

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