True Crime Historian

The Borden Murders Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 499 revisits the most famous event in American crime history, a sweltering August day in 1892, when Andrew and Abby Borden were hacked to death with a hatchet in their locked Fall River home. Thirty brutal blows, yet not a drop of blood was found on Andrew's respectable daughter, Lizzie. She was acquitted, but the famous double murd...

H.H. Holmes and the Murder Castle Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 498. Chicago, 1893. Twenty-seven million people come for the World's Fair. A pleasant, well-dressed doctor named Holmes places an ad for his hotel and waits. The women who answer are not foolish — they're careful. That's the whole trick. He built something that looked exactly like an opportunity. And by the time you k...

A Spirit and a Demon from the Hottest Hell Jump to AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 497 takes place in New Orleans, 1918. A killer is working the back streets of the Italian immigrant neighborhoods — chiseling through back doors in the dead of night, using his victims' own axes, leaving the money on the table and the bodies on the floor. He will strike a dozen times. He will taunt the city from...

A Diary Of Retribution Jump to the Ad-Free Safe House Edition Episode 496. September 6, 1949. A World War II veteran put on his best suit, loaded a German Luger, and walked out of his Camden apartment. Thirteen people dead in twelve minutes. He never stood trial. He kept a grievance diary with nearly two hundred names in it. His neighbors were just slow to find out they were in it. Become a suppor...

The HinterKaifeck Murders Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 495 takes place in the weeks before Easter 1922, when footprints appear in the snow outside a remote Bavarian farm. They lead in from the forest. None lead back out. The family notices. The neighbors are told. No one calls the police. What happens next has never been solved. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spr...

The Eighty Days Of President Garfield Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 494. July 1881. Charles Guiteau waits in a Washington railroad station with a revolver picked for its ivory grip — he wants it to look good in a museum someday. He fires twice at the President. James Garfield will take eleven weeks to die. Guiteau will spend those weeks insisting he is not the killer. He will turn...

Episode 246.  Pulp Nonfiction: Remembering the Pioneers of True Crime Jump to AD-FREE Safe House Edition "The Lake Como Honeymoon Trunk Murder" by R.O. Scallan. When an American newlywed bride's body turns up in a trunk in an Italian lake, police expect to find the groom's body to be floating nearby. Alas, not a double murder, but a honeymoon squabble gone too far. "The Brighton Trunk Murders" (35...

The Killing of Wild Bill Hickok and the Two Trials of Jack McCall Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 493 begins in Deadwood, August 1876, six weeks after Custer dies at Little Bighorn. A small Kentuckian named Jack McCall walks into Saloon No. 10 with a Colt revolver and a brother who never existed. Wild Bill Hickok sits with his back to the door because his friend will not switch chai...

The Slashing Of Old Shakespeare Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 492 concerns the morning of April twenty-fourth, eighteen ninety-one, when a sixty-year-old Englishwoman named Carrie Brown is found butchered in a fifteen-cent hotel room on Water Street. The scene resembled the work of a certain infamous English slasher. A police department that promised it could catch Jack the Ripper...

The Poisoning of George Wythe Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 490 takes place in Richmond, Virginia, 1806. George Wythe signs the Declaration of Independence, teaches Jefferson how to think, and frees his slaves. His grandnephew thanks him with arsenic in the coffeepot. The cook sees everything. The law says her eyes don't count. A Founding Father's murder, and the legal code he bui...

The Killing Of Senator Arthur Brown Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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. Become a supporter of this...

The Murder of Anna Marie Keenan Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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 ca...

The Execution Of Joe Hill Jump To The AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-h...

The Snyder-Gray Affair Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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. Become a supporter of this podcast: htt...

The Girl Who Named Him Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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 li...

Assassin Unknown Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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.  Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-cri...

No Mercy At Mountain Meadows Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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. Become a supporter of this podc...

The Klan Claims A Scallywag Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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. Mo...

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. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this po...

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. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this...

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. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://ww...

The Smuttynose Island Murders of 1873 Jump To The AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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,...

"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. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support . You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is still just a buck a week, and you can get access to over 400 ad-...

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. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com...

Crimes of the Scoundrel Clarence V.T. Richeson Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition 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...