Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast

Season 40: America's 250th — 50 states, 50 forgotten crimes. Two communities. Two murders decades apart. In the Arkansas Ozarks, a town rushed to convict a man on circumstantial evidence and may have hanged the wrong person. In northern Michigan, an entire town conspired to kill its tyrannical founder — then said nothing for sixteen years. In 1912, eighteen-year-old Ella Barham walked to a pos...

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary — fifty states, fifty crimes, two hundred and fifty years. This double-- feature episode covers Kansas and Virginia. A city marshal with a gold-engraved Winchester and a secret past as a wanted killer. A mountain doctor who preached Sunday sermons and planned a massacre on a mountain road. Two men who wore badges. Two communities that trusted them. Two mo...

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes. Two fires burned in 1898 America. One in South Carolina, where a mob murdered a Black postmaster and his two-year-old daughter. One in Indian Territory, where a mob burned two Seminole teenagers alive. Both cases reached federal court. Neither delivered justice. Frazier Baker held a federal appointment. Lincoln Mc...

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes. This is Episode 13, covering Rhode Island and North Dakota with two true crime cases from the 1880s and 1890s that circle the same question: who do you believe when the dead cannot speak? October 1885. A wealthy Black businessman in Newport, Rhode Island, is found dead at his kitchen table -- two gunshot wounds, u...

This episode is part of Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes exploring the cases that shaped American history from every corner of the country. Hawaii, 1889. A Japanese shopkeeper is lynched from a telephone pole on the main street of Honoka'a for speaking English on behalf of plantation workers. Louisiana, 1887. Ten thousand sugar cane workers st...

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary — fifty true crime stories from fifty states. Wyoming, 1892. A fiftee- n-year-old orphan train rider murders two young men in a boxcar and becomes the first person executed by the state. New York, 1906. A seventeen-year-old immigrant kills the uncle who abused her and walks free from a packed Manhattan courtroom. Two teenagers. Two states. Two verdicts th...

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states. Fifty crimes. Two hundred and fifty years of American history, told through the true crime cases that other shows leave behind. New Mexico, 1892. A former sheriff walks into the dark with a man he trusts and never comes home. Illinois, 1871. A former Secretary of State steps off his porch for a midnight train and is shot dead in the street....

Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins close out their reunion by going down the list of the people who appeared in the Netflix documentary The Keepers, where they are today, who is still fighting, who has found peace, and who the world has lost. It is a warm, reflective conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and...

Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins continue their first sit-down in over a year, working through the second half of the questions listeners submitted through the show's Facebook community. This is the follow-up to "The Mary Statue and Unanswered Questions, " a wide-ranging conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik in Baltimore, Maryland. Known to millions t...

This episode contains descriptions of murder, mob violence, historical racial violence, and the execution of a convicted killer. If you need to skip this content, advance past the 18:00 mark. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes. This Episode Season 40: Fifty states, fifty forgotten crimes, America's 250th year. Episode 9 covers California and Alabama — two cases, two communi...

This episode contains discussions of murder, execution, racial violence, and a botched public hanging. If you need to skip any section, the chapter markers below will help you find your way around. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes. This Episode Season 40 of Foul Play covers America's forgotten crimes — fifty states, 250 years, and the stories that slipped out of the histo...

Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins sit down together for the first time in over a year for a wide-ranging conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik in Baltimore, Maryland. Known to millions through the Netflix documentary The Keepers, Gemma has spent more than a decade investigating what happened to Sister Cathy, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English...

This episode contains detailed descriptions of violent death, including axe murders and decapitation. If you need to skip this content, advance to the chapter markers below. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes. This Episode Season 40 of Foul Play marks America's 250th anniversary with a series of Twin Portraits, two true crimes from two different states, set in the same deca...

This episode contains discussions of murder, arsenic poisoning, the deaths of children, and historical criminal trials. Ifyou need to skip any portion, advance past that segment using your chapter markers. This Episode Season 40 of Foul Play marks America's 250th anniversary by examining two cases that expose how the justice system treated killers differently based on wealth, gender, and class...

Historical Significance In Georgia, a Webster County posse pursued Susan and Enoch one hundred twenty-five miles to Coffee County, Alabama. The grand jury indicted both on May 27, 1872, twenty-three days after the murder. Enoch's trial lasted a single day; the jury deliberated for three minutes. Both were sentenced to death on May 30. Twenty-six days from murder to death sentence. The Georgia...

July 1877. A dirt road in rural Missouri. A fifty-eight-year-old woman named Martha Parrish is shot dead by her own son-in-law while trying to rescue her daughter from an abusive marriage. Fifteen years later and five hundred miles east, an eighteen-year-old maid named Ellen Smith is shot behind a luxury hotel in Winston, North Carolina — and someone writes a song about it. Two historical murders....

Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions of gun violence, intimate partner violence, poisoning, and discussions of coercive control in same-sex and heterosexual relationships. Crisis resources are listed at the end of these notes. of Foul Play, Shane and Wendy examine two cases from the American Gilded Age connected by the same institutional failure: not a lack of evidence, but a refusa...

Billy Wimbish - was born around 1859. A Black man who made his life in the Alaska Interior, Wimbish earned respect among the miners of the Fairbanks district. In 1906, he served as lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against mine owner D.H. Cascaden on Cleary Creek. Judge James Wickersham ruled in the miners' favor, finding Cascaden liable for all wages owed. That legal victory, won in Alaska Territor...

Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions of gun violence, intimate partner violence, poisoning, and discussions of coercive control in same-sex and heterosexual relationships. Crisis resources are listed at the end of these notes. Historical Context In Indiana, public pressure forced an exhumation four months after Hattie's death. Organs shipped to Chicago forchemical analysis revea...

Content Warning This episode contains discussions of murder, suicide, and Victorian scandal. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes. This Episode Season 39 Finale: The Balham Mystery. The jury deliberated for three hours. Their verdict would haunt this case for one hundred and fifty years: "Willful murder by person or persons unknown." Murder--but no murderer. Four suspects...

Content Warning This episode contains discussions of adultery, abortion, and Victorian scandal. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes. This Episode Season 39: The Balham Mystery. For twenty-three days, the secrets of The Priory were stripped bare in the longest inquest in English legal history. Forty witnesses. Thousands of pages of testimony. Florence Bravo finally forced to admi...

Content Warning This episode contains detailed descriptions of poisoning and prolonged death. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes. This Episode Season 39: The Balham Mystery. For seventy-two hours, Charles Bravo lay dying at The Priory while doctors—including Queen Victoria's own physician—watched helplessly. He suffered. He convulsed. He said almost nothing about who poison...

Content Warning This episode contains discussions of poisoning and death. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes. This Episode Season 39: The Balham Mystery. April 1876—a young barrister collapses in agony minutes after retiring to bed. For three days, Charles Bravo suffers while doctors, family, and suspects gather. He names no one. The poison is antimony—enough to kill ten men. B...

Content Warning This episode contains discussions of domestic abuse, poisoning, and death. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes. This Episode Season 39: The Balham Mystery. April 1876, a successful barrister collapses in his bedroom after drinking from a bedside water jug. For three agonizing days, doctors begged him to name his poisoner. He never would. This is the story of Char...

A Victorian courtroom drama unfolds as a chilling murder verdict is delivered in 19th-century London, a place of evolving laws and societal norms. This episode, nestled in the heart of Season 38's exploration of 'The Rugeley Poisoner,' uncovers the judicial outcomes and societal impact of murder trials during this transformative era. Episode 3 follows the toxic trail left by the infamo...