True Crime Historian

The Oklahoma Phantom Terror Jump to the Ad-Free Safe House Edition Episode 471 finds us in 1932, a hill country reporter named Vivian Brown did what no one else ever managed — she sat down with Pretty Boy Floyd and got him talking. Two years later, a teletype changed everything. The only interview the phantom bandit ever gave. Tonight, we hear the story from her point of view. Hear more stories ab...

The Execution of J.G. Rawlings and His Accomplice  Jump to AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 45 takes us back to the turn of the last century, rural Georgia circa 1905, when an argument over a field border incites a family feud that results in four deaths, including the murder of two innocents and a double hanging. Hear more stories about CAPITAL CRIMES !!!! Become a supporter of this podcast: ht...

San Francisco, California March 28, 1944 A pyromaniac works the skid row district south of Market Street, lighting fires in flophouses all evening long. The sixth one catches. Twenty-two people die inside the New Amsterdam Hotel. The man they convict says God knows he's innocent. The dead say nothing. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--290931...

The Trial & Travails Of Norma Brighton Millen Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 43 is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a prominent minister and graduate of a fine finishing school, who fell into the wrong crowd and married a man who would be executed for the crime of the gang he was trying to build. The papers never said, but I can’t help but think the Millen-Faber Gang...

Poprad, Slovakia March 25, 1942 Nine hundred and ninety-nine young Jewish women boarded a train believing they were headed to factory work. They sang folk songs as the Tatra Mountains slid past the windows. The train crossed the Polish border before dawn. What waited on the other side would change the world. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian-...

From True Crime Pioneer Edmund Pearson Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 25 takes place in 1849, a week before Thanksgiving, in a laboratory at the Harvard Medical College while the famed physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes was lecturing in the room directly above. The victim was one of Boston's wealthy elite on a mission to collect a bet from a geology professor. The Parker-We...

Cincinnati, Ohio March 24, 1862 Abolition's golden trumpet, Wendell Phillips, takes the stage at Pike's Opera House to tell a river city what it doesn't want to hear. The eggs come first. Then the rocks. Then the mob outside, waiting with a rope. The mayor watches and does nothing. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support . You can...

The Wrongful Execution of William Jackson Marion Jump To The Ad-Free Safe House Edition Episode 470 begins in 1887, when Nebraska hanged Jack Marion for murdering his friend John Cameron. Four years later, Cameron turned up alive on a Kansas farm. He'd never heard of the trial. He still had the receipt for the horses Marion supposedly killed him for. Nobody ever figured out whose body was in the c...

The 1896 Klaettke Family Massacre  Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 42 is the sad tale of a family of seven shot and killed by the crazed father, who then turned the gun on himself. It’s rare that we do an episode about a murder/suicide, because you rarely get to hear about the drama that led up to the tragedy, because there’s no one left to tell the story. There are still a lot of u...

Oxford, England March 21, 1556 The Archbishop of Canterbury signed five recantations to save his life. Queen Mary scheduled his burning anyway. On the morning of his execution, Cranmer was ordered to renounce his faith one final time before the crowd. He had other plans — and a right hand he intended to punish first. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-h...

Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 14. One summer day in 1896, three young boys discover a mysterious package floating near the docks of the East River. Hoping for some kind of treasure, what they found was the freshly dismembered body of a man. Police eventually discovered the identity of the man and found that he was involved in a deadly love triangle. His lover and her other man wer...

East Texas March 19, 1687 The man who claimed half a continent for France walked into a stand of river cane looking for his missing nephew. Waiting in the grass were the men he'd led into the wilderness — men who had no intention of following him back out. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support . You can pay more if you want to, b...

Murder in the Marberry Resort Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition In Episode 57, we get an unusual glimpse into the world inside a bordello at the turn of the previous century, when a young prostitute reneges on a suicide pact with another, and allegedly kills a third girl to keep her secret safe. One of the things I like about this story is the outrage and indignation expressed by the newspape...

Dorcester, England March 17, 1794 A fifteen-year-old girl who claimed she had never learned the difference between good and evil killed her grandfather in his sleep. The Murder Act demanded swift justice. Elizabeth Marsh became the first person hanged at a gaol that wasn't even finished yet. Her body went to the surgeons. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-cr...

The Bawdy House Murder Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 469 unearths the 1919 murder of Lucina Broadwell — a carpenter's wife found strangled in a vacant lot in Barre, Vermont, the granite capital of the world. A private eye, a madam's little red book, and a trail of tire tracks expose the double lives of a town built on dust and secrets. Hear more stories about LOVE TRIANGLES GONE A...

The True Crimes of Edward F. Keller Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 110 follows the criminal career of one Edward F. Keller, who makes national headlines when h e is arrested for murdering his business partner and burying the body in a trunk in the basement of their leather shop. But his trouble doesn’t stop there. You’ll want to stick around to the end to find out how karma accompl...

New Orleans, Louisiana March 14, 1891 A jury acquits nine Italians of murdering the police chief. By noon the next day, a mob of thousands, led by the city's finest citizens, storms the parish prison and slaughters eleven men. Nobody is punished. Nobody ever learns who actually killed the chief. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/supp...

Madame Bessarabo's Explanation Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 111 When the body of a missing international businessman is found in an unclaimed trunk in the train station at Nancy, France, his wife (the French dramatist and poet known as Hera Mirtel) and his stepdaughter were immediately suspected, but it took two years  to end their legal ordeal. Mysteries still remain (such as ho...

New York City March 12, 1888 New Yorkers woke to the worst blizzard in American history. Fifteen thousand passengers stranded on elevated trains. The East River frozen solid. Four hundred dead. And one stubborn former senator who refused to pay for a cab — and walked two and a half miles into legend. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311...

The 1885 Preller-Maxwell Murder Of St. Louis Ad-Free Safe House Edition Episode 101 spans three years and three continents as a pair of British dandies meet on the steamer ship coming out of Liverpool and make a pact to travel together across the United States and on to Auckland, New Zealand. One of them only makes it as far a St. Louis before his body is found packed in a trunk in a hotel room an...

March 10, 1865 Darlington, South Carolina Thirty days before the end of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers hanged seventeen-year-old Amy Spain from a sycamore tree on the courthouse lawn. Her crime: shouting "Bless the Lord, the Yankees have come!" and taking linens from the house where she'd been enslaved since birth. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crim...

Dolly Oesterreich’s Hidden Lover Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 468 is what Agatha Christie would call a "locked room" murder. In 1922 Los Angeles, Fred Oesterreich seems to have been murdered by a ransacking intruder. The problem: The house was locked up tight when the police arrived with the dead man on the floor and his wife locked in a closet. No signs of forced entry. Eight ye...

Gnadenhutten, Ohio Country March 8, 1782 The name meant "Huts of Grace." It was a Moravian missionary village where Lenape and Mohican converts had embraced Christianity, European dress, and pacifism. They refused to take sides in the American Revolution. Both sides hated them for it. When 160 Pennsylvania militiamen rode into the Tuscarawas Valley that March, they found unarmed families harvestin...

Washington, District of Columbia March 7, 1850 Daniel Webster — the most celebrated orator in American history — rose in a packed Senate chamber to deliver the speech that would save the Union and destroy his reputation. With the nation tearing itself apart over slavery, and a dying John C. Calhoun having just issued an ultimatum for Southern secession three days earlier, Webster endorsed Henry Cl...

Bloody Murder Among the Pews Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 112 begins inside the Rattle Run Michigan Methodist Church, smeared with blood as if it had been the scene of a battle to the death. Charred bones discovered in the stove were presumed to belong to the missing pastor, Rev. John H. Carmichael. But then, the town roustabout also turned up missing, and the game is on to figur...