Crimes of the Centuries

On September 10, 1897, roughly 300 to 400 unarmed strikers marched peacefully to a coal mine to support a newly formed United Mine Workers union. The miners, mostly consisting of Slovak and German ethnicity, were on strike fighting for safe working conditions and livable wages. On their march they were met by law enforcement officials multiple times and were asked to disperse, but kept on marching...

Born December 27, 1957 in Epazoyucan, Hidalgo, Juana Dayanara Barraza Samperioa was a 48-year-old single mother with a troubled past. After years of traumatic experiences in her early life, including being sold by her mother to a man in exchange for three beers, Juana moved to Mexico City and began killing in 1998. Residents were on edge as they noticed the mysterious killings seemed to be targeti...

On July 6, 1944, in Hartford, Connecticut, thousands of patrons were excited to escape the heat and attend the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus performance. While the Flying Wallendas began their performance inside the tent, chaos ensued shortly after. The fire that began as a small flame about 20 feet from the main exit spread rapidly when it came in contact with the tent canvas. Pa...

When five college students in Florida were brutally slain in a four-day span in 1990, it sent shockwaves across the nation as newscasters made comparisons to serial killer Ted Bundy. Police frantically worked to stop this new madman before his body count got any higher. " Crimes of the Centuries " is a podcast from the Obsessed Network exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark an...

Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory is known as the most prolific female serial killer of all time, accused of slaughtering over 600 young women in her luxurious castles. Legend says Báthory believed she'd be given eternal youth for bathing in their virginal blood. On the contrary, she would go on to live long in infamy. However, this tale has been questioned by many researchers who believe as pa...

At a brothel in New York in 1885, the great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton, Robert Ray Hamilton, met con artist Evangeline Steele. Steele was looking to make their part-time relationship permanent and soon told Hamilton that she was pregnant with his child. They married in January 1889 and shortly after, the marriage began to fall apart. On the morning of August 26, 1889 while on vacation in Atlan...

In 1918 in Milford, Kansas, John R. Brinkley, a fake doctor with no properly accredited medical education, opened a 16-room clinic where he promoted goat glands as a cure for over 20 ailments. The scam continued to go unnoticed due to patients being too embarrassed to talk about what happened in the operating room, until a few brave individuals stepped forward to tell their stories. In today's epi...

On April 27th, 1865, the Sultana , a 260 foot-long wooden steamboat, exploded into flames and sank on the Mississippi River. While the ship was only designed to hold 376 people, more than 2,000 passengers, predominantly made up of Union soldiers returning home from Confederate prisons, were crowded on board under the command of Captain James Cass Mason. In addition to the ship being overloaded, th...

Matthew Shepard, born December 1, 1976, was a gay 21-year-old student attending the University of Wyoming. On October 6,  1998 near Laramie, Wyoming, Matthew was found horribly beaten, tortured and tied to a fence in a field left to die. Matthew was taken to a hospital in Fort Collins where he died six days later after succumbing to his severe injuries. In today's episode, we examine the case that...

On November 22, 1905 at 5:30 p.m, Marshall Field, Jr. was discovered at his residence with a gunshot wound through his left side. While some thought this was an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound, others believed the high-class brothel owners known as the Everleigh sisters, Minna and Ada, were responsible. This was the first of two deaths the sisters were attempted to be framed for. In today...

On September 13, 1868 in Cold Springs, Indiana, the bodies of business-minded Jacob Young and Nancy Jane Young were found along White River. Both Jacob and Nancy were shot in the head and Nancy's body was badly burned burned, smoke from her body still wisping in the air until the next day. While the murder took place in a busy public area, no one seemed to have heard the gunshots, or at least knew...

In 18th- and 19th-century England, doctors employed grave robbers - or "resurrectionists" - to unearth bodies for anatomical research. Unwilling to wait for bodies to present themselves via natural causes, William Burke and William Hare took their own dark and illegal twist on the job. In today's episode, we explore how the grave robbers' role shifted from exhuming bodies after death to obtaining...

After seeing a movie together on February 22nd in 1946, Jimmy Hollis and his girlfriend Mary Jeanne Larey parked on a secluded road known as a lovers' lane. Just minutes later, a man in a white mask forced them out of their car, struck them both with blunt force objects, and sexually assaulted Larey. Luckily both Hollis and Larey made it out alive, but future victims would not be so lucky. In toda...

When Ruth Snyder began having an affair with a married corset salesman, Henry Judd Gray, in Queens, New York, in 1925, things soon turned deadly. Ruth convinced Henry to assist her in killing her husband, clumsily staging the murder as an attempted robbery. In today's episode we explore how Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray became known as the Double Indemnity killers, and how  the murder of Albert...

At 9:30 am on July 2, 1881 in Washington, D.C., the 20th American president James Garfield was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station. Garfield's assassin: Charles J. Guiteau, a man described as awkward, insecure, and mentally disturbed. Guiteau was motivated by revenge after falsely believing he played a major role in Garfield's election victory, and never being rewarded for it. In to...

As we explored in our first episode covering this case, Sir Harry Oakes was a member of the "elite" class of men who migrated to the Bahamas to avoid taxes and take part in business activities that weren't on the up-and-up.  This group also included two men who detested each other - the exiled aristocrat Alfred de Marigny and the Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated the British throne. In the conclu...

Harry Oakes was an entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, and gold miner. Sometime after midnight on July 8, 1943, Oakes was found dead inside his Bahamas house, struck four times behind the left ear and burned all over his body using insecticide. The accused murderer: his son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny. In today's episode, we discuss one of the highest profile cases of the century, the complicate...

In 1931 in Honolulu, Hawaii, Thalia Massie claimed she was raped by a group of men, including Joseph Kahahawai, a well-known local prizefighter. Cracks in Thalia's story throughout the case led to deadlocked jury and a mistrial, leading Thalia's mother, Grace Fortescue, and several accomplices, to murder Joseph Kahahawai. The group soon thereafter were charged with his murder. In today's episode w...

In 1959 in Louisville, Kentucky, Alberta Jones was named the first woman prosecutor. Only a few years later in 1965, she was found dead in the Ohio River. In today's episode we discuss Alberta's trailblazing life and career leading up to her mysterious death, and what is suspected to have happened that night, as the case today still remains unsolved. What happened to Alberta Jones? " Crimes of the...

Hey, Crimes of the Centuries listeners! We’re off for the Memorial Day holiday, but didn’t want to leave you with an empty feed, so we’re featuring an episode from another Obsessed Network show, “Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan” Daisy is a Tony Award-winning actor, writer, and true crime fanatic. But she’s also a skeptic. Each week she looks  at real stories of hauntings, disappearances,...

Multiple murders, violent assaults, and a new forensic fingerprint technique. In today's episode we visit the killings, the acquittals, and eventually the conviction of Richard Rogers, a cold-blooded serial killer whose suspected crimes span from 1973 to 1993, and whose final victim count may never be known. " Crimes of the Centuries " is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes f...

In the musical Chicago , the foreign woman held prisoner on Murderess Row has only one line in English: "Uh-uh, not guilty."   In today's episode, we explore the real-life case that inspired that character, Sabella Nitti, who was accused of murdering her husband, and her fight to speak for herself and prove her innocence. " Crimes of the Centuries " is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forg...

Though he had been known by many names throughout his life, it was under the name Edward Earl that he was prosecuted and hanged in 1881 New York.  What would the writings he composed in prison reveal about why he murdered his estranged wife? " Crimes of the Centuries " is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. Follow us...

You're probably familiar with the concept of Stockholm Syndrome - the phenomenon where people taken hostage come to empathize with or even join up with their captors.  But did you realize that the term comes from a specific incident, a strange bank robbery at the Sveriges Kreditbank that turned into a multiday siege pitting the criminals against the police, with innocent workers trapped in the mid...

Chicago's state-of-the-art Iroquois Theatre was supposed to be a jewel in the rapidly expanding American arts scene of the early twentieth century.  But in an emergency, a combination of disaster management, design flaws, and construction shortcuts proved to be a deadly combination. Special thanks to Charlie McCarron for producing and performing the out-of-print song "Let Us Swear It By the Pale M...