True Crime Historian

The Killing Of Senator Arthur Brown

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Episode 489 takes us to the Hotel Raleigh, Washington, December 8, 1906, when a Salt Lake mother of four walks into the senator's sitting room with the nickel-plated revolver he bought her himself. Seven years of promises, one folded pair of hands, two shots fired. The gun was for her protection.

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The Murder of Anna Marie Keenan

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Episode 488 takes us to a top-floor flat on West Fifty-Seventh Street, the Ides of March, nineteen twenty-three. A chorus girl named Dot King lies dead across a blue silk bed. A scraped chloroform bottle. A Philadelphia millionaire under a fake name. A mother in Harlem naming the killer nobody arrests. The Broadway Butterfly case breaks open, and nobody closes it.

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The Execution Of Joe Hill

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Episode 487 takes us to Salt Lake City, 1914, where a grocer and his seventeen-year-old son die on a pine floor, and a Swedish songwriter named Joe Hill rings a doctor's bell with a bullet in his lung and a name he will not say. He dies for the silence.

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The Snyder-Gray Affair

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Episode 486 takes us to a Dutch Colonial on 222nd Street in Queens Village, where a housewife, a Methodist corset salesman, and a crooked Prudential agent put together the most famous botched murder of the Jazz Age. Damon Runyon called it the Dumbbell Murder. The electric chair called it Thursday.

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The Girl Who Named Him

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Episode 485 takes us to Kidbrooke Lane, Eltham, before dawn on the twenty-sixth of April, eighteen seventy-one, where a beat constable named Donald Gunn stumbles across a sixteen-year-old maidservant crawling in the mud with a plasterer's hammer in the ditch beside her. Jane Clouson names her killer. The English courtroom declines to listen.

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Assassin Unknown

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Episode 484 takes us to a frost-covered parlor outside Yankton, South Dakota, on the last Sunday of 1934. A retired featherweight sits under a lamp reading a magazine. His wife is nearby. The radio is playing. Outside, in the frozen dark, a German Luger is waiting. 

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No Mercy At Mountain Meadows

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Episode 482 takes us to Mountain Meadows, Utah Territory, 1857, where Arkansas emigrants accept safe passage under a white flag. The flag is a lie. A hundred and twenty dead, seventeen toddlers spared, and one man sitting on his coffin twenty years later, waiting for bullets his prophet won't share.

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The Klan Claims A Scallywag

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Episode 477 tells the story of Judge George W. Ashburn — Union colonel, scalawag, author of the state's civil rights provisions — who is gunned down by the Ku Klux Klan in their Georgia debut. The killers are caught, tried, and freed through a devil's bargain: their liberty exchanged for ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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New York, 1888. Ann O'Delia Diss Debar — self-styled Spirit Princess, alleged daughter of Lola Montez — convinced a grieving Madison Avenue lawyer that Raphael and Rembrandt were painting for him in his own parlor. The paintings were chemical tricks. The deed to his townhouse was hers. And the worst of her career was still ahead.

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B. Gratz Brown — ex-senator, sitting governor, Vice-Presidential nominee of two parties at once — was handed the stage built to topple Grant's corruption and showed up drunk. He fainted at a New York rally, forgot his own policies, and buttered a watermelon at a campaign picnic. The reform ticket died. The Whiskey Ring kept pumping.

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Gilded Age Washington, 1876. Senator Stephen W. Dorsey and the Second Assistant Postmaster General ran a bid-rigging racket that bled the Post Office of millions — fake mail routes, real money. Two trials, two acquittals, one stolen castle on the New Mexico prairie. The jury said not guilty. The record disagrees.

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The Smuttynose Island Murders of 1873

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Episode 476 explores a case would become one of the most sensational crimes of the American Gilded Age. It would produce a manhunt, a near-lynching, a jail break, and a hanging, among other tropes. It would haunt the New England coast for a century and a half, and it haunts it still. But before it was any of those things, it was a story about people who crossed an ocean looking for a better life, and for a few short years, found one.

...

"The Tiny Error of the Wily Widow" (57:52) transports us to the plains of the Dakotas and another plot, this one to get rid of a wealthy husband for a younger man.

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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.

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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...