Forgotten Felonies

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! Just days after Scott Jackson is convicted of murdering Pearl Bryan, chaos erupts at the Newport Jail. Six prisoners make a break for freedom—and Scott and Alonzo are suddenly caught in the middle of an escape that could have changed everything. Then Alonzo Walling finally faces a jury of his own. His attorney, Colonel Washington, mounts what may be the stronge...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! Scott Jackson finally takes the stand in his own defense—and for six and a half hours, he tries to explain everything.  But Scott’s testimony is only the beginning. As the trial barrels toward its conclusion, the courtroom descends into chaos: witnesses are accused of manufacturing evidence, an ex-convict “detective” gets caught coaching testimony, a profession...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! Scott Jackson’s trial finally begins in Newport, Kentucky, and after four episodes of rumors, "confessions," strange witnesses, missing evidence, and absolutely bizarre behavior, the Commonwealth finally has to put all of it together in front of a jury. Pearl’s family takes the stand. Letters are read in court. Testimony swirls about blood coagulation...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! Psychics. Séances. Strange packages. Secret transmitters hidden inside jail cells. As the investigation into Pearl Bryan’s murder moves into March of 1896, Cincinnati seems to have completely lost its mind. While mystics and dreamers offer their own solutions to the mystery, investigators uncover new witnesses, physical evidence, and a big problem with Scott Ja...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! By the end of February 1896, the murder of Pearl Bryan had become more than an investigation. It had become a true spectacle. Detectives were chasing new leads. Reporters were printing every rumor they could find. Songs were being written, crowds were paying to watch reenactments of the crime, and seemingly everyone connected to Pearl Bryan had something to say...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! After Pearl Bryan's identity is finally discovered, investigators begin the difficult task of answering an even larger question: What happened during her final days in Cincinnati? Following newspaper accounts, trial testimony, and contemporary records, we retrace Pearl's last known movements—from train depots and hotels to piano stores, saloons, and a...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! In January 1896, 23-year-old Pearl Bryan boarded a train bound for Indianapolis... and never came home. When her body was discovered in northern Kentucky a few days later, investigators didn't even know who the victim was. But once they uncovered her identity, the trail led them to two young dental students and one of the most sensational murder investigat...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! In June of 1865, fourteen-year-old Isabella Joyce and her twelve-year-old brother John packed a picnic basket, visited their grandmother, and set out for a summer afternoon in the woods outside Boston. They never returned. What followed was years of false arrests, sensational newspaper headlines, an ingenious undercover prison operation, and a suspect with one...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! A serving fork isn't supposed to be a murder weapon. In 1911, a Sunday evening argument in a Pennsylvania boarding house ended with one man dead and his wife under arrest for murder. But conflicting newspaper accounts soon turned my research into a detective story all its own. Featuring:  De Ring Tailed Coon: The Minster Singers (1911)

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! A respected fire captain. A woman dying from horrific burns. A small Connecticut town searching for answers. In this Fun-Sized Felony, Monica pieces together a forgotten case from scattered newspaper accounts dating back to 1842. What she uncovered was far stranger—and far more haunting—than she ever expected.

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! In September 1902, the body of Annie Pulitzer was discovered in New Jersey's Morris Canal, weighted down and hidden from view. The investigation quickly led police to William Hooper Young, grandson of famed Mormon leader Brigham Young and a man whose increasingly erratic behavior had alarmed those around him. In this episode, Monica and Olivia follow the c...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! Dr. Charles M. Clayton was having a great day... until he came home for lunch. Over the next few months he would shoot a man, face a murder charge, suffer a nervous collapse, accidentally hit a teenager with his car, paint the inside of a jail, and listen as a very nosy neighbor revealed what she'd been watching through their kitchen window... day, after d...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! Jack Vincent was a stagecoach driver, prospector, practical joker, hotel deadbeat, prison escapee, alleged murderer, and—according to one newspaper—a professional bummer. In 1882, Vincent shot his brother-in-law, steamboat mate John Westfall, twice in the face during a saloon argument in Toledo, Washington Territory. Westfall survived for nine months before dyi...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! By 1925, the Jones Brothers Gang had changed. Dewey Jones was no longer part of the outlaw life, Milam Jones had vanished, and Oregon Jones was back in the Oregon State Penitentiary ready to cause more trouble. After the deadly prison break that would make headlines across the Pacific Northwest, newspapers began calling the group the Jones-Murray Gang—a nod to...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! Ellsworth Kelley became tangled up with the notorious Jones Brothers Gang — a crew of young outlaws, including the elusive Oregon Jones and 20-year-old escape artist Tom Murray, whose lives became a cycle of burglaries, highway robberies, prison escapes, freight-train rides, manhunts, and violence across the Pacific Northwest during the 1910s and 1920s. This st...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! In the fall of 1910, husband and father Frank E. Clark vanished from Oakland, California without a trace. His wife was left stranded in a city where she knew no one. Newspapers across California carried the story of the missing husband, while neighbors and the Catholic Ladies’ Aid society stepped in to help feed Mrs. Clark and their 5-year-old son. Had Frank ab...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! A woman’s body floats more than 150 miles downriver before finally being recovered near New Albany, Indiana. By the time she is identified as Hannah Goddard Knapp, her husband—Alfred Knapp—has already confessed to murdering her. But Hannah wasn't the first—Not by a long shot. In 1903, Alfred Knapp shocked the country with confessions involving multiple wom...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! Bertha “Bessie” Boronda attacked her husband, Narciso "Frank" Boronda, in the middle of the night in their San Jose home in 1907. The newspapers called it a violent, deliberate mutilation. The court charged her with mayhem—a crime defined by the destruction of part of the human body. But no one ever said exactly what she did. Over time, the story beca...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! In February of 1927, a Brooklyn father watched his six-year-old son struggle to breathe as diphtheria tightened its grip. Desperate for help, Frank Caruso called for doctors, begged for treatment, and clung to the hope that his boy might survive. But when that hope slipped away, something else took its place. Within hours of his son’s death, Frank turned his gr...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! Years before this double homicide, there were already signs—clear, documented, and deeply concerning. Sarah saw them. Sarah lived with them. Sarah warned the authorities that he was going to kill her. But Jesse didn’t kill her. Even Sarah didn’t see this coming. When he couldn’t reach the person he wanted, Jesse McClure made a different choice—one that ended in...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! In 1925, 29-year-old Florence Kane stepped off a subway in Brooklyn after a night out with friends. She called her mother to say she would be home in 30 minutes. In the final stretch of just 6 blocks, the unthinkable happened; Florence never made it home. As fear spread through the neighborhood, reports surfaced of other women being attacked in the same way—gra...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! This is the third and final episode in our Edmund Creffield series. By the time Edmund Creffield lay dead on a Seattle sidewalk, it should have been over. The prophet was gone; the spell should have been broken. The story should have ended, but another chapter had just begun. Because what followed was not closure… it was unraveling. As George Mitchell stands tr...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! This is the second episode following Edmund Creffield and the cult he began in Corvallis, OR, after her arrived in late 1902. In this episode, he was finally caught. After months in hiding, Edmund Creffield is pulled from beneath a house—filthy, frail, and barely able to stand—and brought into custody at last. For the people of Corvallis, it feels like the end...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! On a quiet Sunday in October of 1903, ten-year-old Hoga Iverson noticed something wasn’t right. His sister had gone inside… and never came back out. What followed was a chain of events that no child should ever have to carry: a train ride alone to find his father, a doctor turned away at the door, and a journey in the dark that would end in a discovery too deva...

Send a message to Monica and Olivia! In the early 1900s, a young German preacher arrived in Corvallis, Oregon with a message he believed came directly from God. Within weeks, he had gathered a devoted circle of followers who called themselves God’s Anointed. Others had a different name for them: The Holy Rollers. Their intense prayer meetings, strange teachings, and bizarre behavior quickly made t...