Forgotten True Crime

Monday night, the fourth of June, 1945. Park Avenue at Forty-Seventh Street, the Hotel Marguery, where the people who live there don't visit; they live there, in suites, with maids. Two men in soft dark hats step into an elevator, and one of them says one word: "Seven." Up on the seventh floor, in apartment 705, a red-haired heiress is lying in bed. Her husband, Albert Langford, sixt...

Two women and a girl, killed in one Chicago neighborhood in the space of seven months. On June 5, 1945, Josephine Ross was murdered in her flat at 4108 North Kenmore Avenue. Within a week, everyone held for questioning had been let go. Six months later, on December 10, Frances Brown, a former WAVE just home from the Navy, was killed at the Pine Crest hotel on Pine Grove Avenue. On her bedroom wall...

On the morning of December 10, 1945, a maid at the Pine Crest hotel on Chicago's North Side saw a door standing open and heard a radio playing. Inside, someone had written a message in lipstick on the wall, begging the police to catch him before he killed again. The woman in that apartment was Frances Brown, 33. She grew up in Richmond, Indiana, played the bass fiddle in her high school orches...

Chicago, June 1945. A woman is murdered in her apartment on the North Side of the city — and when they find her, one of her hands is closed around several short black hairs. She fought him. Somebody taped the wounds on her throat closed afterwards and left the tape to dry, rinsed her clothes in the bathtub, and went out the back way, down the fire escape, between noon and one o'clock. Nothing...

Updated October 1st 2026. On Wednesday morning, about an hour before the State of Tennessee was set to execute Christa Pike, a federal appeals court stopped it. This is the story of how she got there, and of the nineteen-year-old girl thirty years of headlines mostly forgot. It's a Thursday night in January of 1995, and May Martinez's phone is ringing in Orange Park, Florida. It's her...

Half past two on a Monday afternoon, the third of March, 1952, in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Augustus Shoals comes home and finds his wife sitting on the side of the bed with her head down. She tells him what his cousin did that morning — and the cousin, on the other side of the wall, hears every word of it, and calls through the boards: "If you fool with me, I will take my old scatter gun and shoot...

On a Monday evening in November 1936, a young woman carried a basket of clean laundry up the steps of a little clapboard house on South Waco Avenue in Wichita, Kansas, and knocked on her grandfather's door. Nobody answered. She knocked again on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, and by then she had decided the old man was behind his curtains, laughing at her. On Thursday her father snapped the l...

On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, two men walked a shoe company's payroll down a street in South Braintree, Massachusetts, the way they had done it a hundred paydays before. They never reached the other end of the street. Thirty-three years later, a New York newspaper gave that afternoon a full page, a photograph, and a map. It gave one of the murdered men a single sentence. It gave the othe...

Santa Cruz, California. The ninth of September, 1933 — Admission Day, the state's own holiday — and up on Beach Hill, above the bay, the afternoon is coming down soft and warm. In the garden of a big house called "The Cabins," Francis J. M. Grace sits in his chair: fifty-nine years old, a millionaire, a retired shipping man of the Grace family, and a semi-invalid whose heart will not...

At about seven o'clock on a Sunday morning in November of 1921, two men walked out of a farmhouse on Hickory Creek, south of the little town of Woodford, Oklahoma, to gather pecans. One of them was about sixty years old. The whole county called him Uncle Bill. The other had been living in his house for a week or so — eating at his table, picking pecans alongside him to sell in Ardmore. Three d...

Omaha, Nebraska, the winter of 1926. On a Sunday night in February, a dairyman named W. L. McDevitt steps out of his house — "We're waiting supper for him now" — and is shot dead on the sidewalk in front of the First Methodist church. Four days later, a wealthy physician named Dr. Austin Searles is found shot behind the ear in his own locked office, an empty shell on the floor and hi...

Six-thirty on a Friday morning, February 19, 1926, in Troy, Ohio. Jacob Nesbitt gets up, fixes the furnace, sweeps the snow off the front walk, and drives to Dayton to sell kitchen machines at a food show — the machines at which his own wife had just been handed the better territory. His wife is in the bathtub. She has been there since 6:30. Frances Drake Nesbitt was twenty-six — three-time tennis...

Five past eight on a Saturday morning, the eighteenth of March, 1944, in Weleetka, Oklahoma. The man delivering the milk sets his bottles down inside a corner grocery and looks over at the chair by the front door — the chair where the owner sits every morning of his life, with the radio going. The chair is empty. Arley Keck was sixty years old, though his own town would have told you sixty-five. H...

This August I asked the Beverly Hills Police Department for the file on crime case number 46176. It is a homicide from 1947. They wrote back twenty-four days later. The records exist. They are in the department's possession. And they are exempt from disclosure, and will not be released. Then they told me the rest of it. The case is presently assigned to the Crimes Against Persons unit of the D...

On the night of Friday, the seventh of April, 1944, a posse of farmers and twenty-five sailors from the naval firing station at Shawnee, Oklahoma, put about a hundred and fifty shots into a patch of brush. Twelve days after they pulled a man out of it, he had pleaded guilty to three murders and been sentenced to die. Twelve days. From three bodies to a death sentence. There was no trial. The defen...

On June 23, 2021, a 24-year-old field geologist named Daniel Robinson drove away from a water well site outside Buckeye, Arizona, in the rain. Twenty-six days later a rancher found his Jeep in a ravine three and a half miles out — rolled, every airbag fired, still in drive, his phone and keys and wallet inside it. His clothes were scattered up the hillside above it. Jeans inside out. Socks inside...

Oklahoma, the summer of 1978. A family pulls over on Interstate 35 to help a woman with a broken-down car. Twenty-four days later, six people are shot to death in a walk-in freezer at a steakhouse in south Oklahoma City. For eight months, nobody knew the two crimes were connected — until a ten-year-old boy came around the side of his house holding a paper sack. Nine people died: Melvin, Linda and...

On a hundred-degree night in August of 1938, in Durant, Oklahoma, a fifty-year-old woman named Ethel Story burned to death in a storeroom behind her own house. The building was eight feet by five. It had no windows. And the latch was on the outside. Her fourteen-year-old son heard her screaming from forty feet away. He got that door open once — and watched it swing shut again. The next afternoon a...

La Crescenta, California — August 1935. A barber comes home after dark with two friends invited for a barbecue supper, and finds his wife face down in the backyard fish pond. There's a snakebite on her foot, a note pinned to the door that's been hanging there a day too long — and for a long time, longer than you'd believe, this wasn't a murder case at all. From the newspapers, the...

A justice of the peace comes half out of his chair and threatens to throw a defense attorney in jail — in open court, in a case where a police officer is dead. Five weeks later, the prosecution decides the lawyer was right, and asks to throw out its own hearing and start the whole thing over. That's how Part Two begins. This is Part 2 of 2. Start with Part 1 — this one will make a great deal m...

On a Sunday night in July of 1952, an Oklahoma City police officer was shot once in the stomach with his own .38 service revolver, in a garage apartment on Northwest Eleventh Street, during an argument with his wife about a five-dollar bill. He got himself down the stairs to a neighbor's door. He named the person who shot him. And then, in an emergency room at Mercy Hospital, in the last two h...

Phoenix, January 1932. Winnie Ruth Judd goes on trial for her life — and on the first morning, before a single juror is seated, her lawyers tell the room she will not be taking the stand. She never does. Twelve men sentence her to death without once hearing her voice. Part Three is the trial, the verdict, and the sixty-seven years that came after. Spectators fighting hand to hand at the courtroom...

Phoenix, Arizona. October, 1931. Saturday night, half past ten. A truckman named Richard Swartz pulls up to a little white stucco duplex on an unpaved street and finds the house completely dark. He rings the bell. Keeps ringing it. Finally a young woman opens the door with every light in the place out behind her, and tells him she's giving up the flat — the electricity's been disconnected....

Los Angeles. October, 1931. Somewhere in the desert night, on the overnight train from Phoenix, a sleepy baggageman notices something seeping from the corner of a trunk. He's seen this before — hunters are always trying to sneak deer meat past the railroad. So he writes out two red warning cards, tags the trunks, and goes about his work. By Monday noon, a calm, well-dressed young woman is stan...

On a dark Wisconsin highway in November of 1939, two lawmen were driving two teenage boys home to answer for a stolen car. It should have been the most routine night of the week. And then a gun went off inside the car. Minutes later, the two officers were lying handcuffed together in a roadside ditch, the boys were gone in a stolen sheriff's car — and one of the most beloved small-town police...