Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

In the spring of 1853 the ill-fated William and Mary, an American sailing ship captained by the incompetent Timothy Stinson, departed from England carrying over 200 Dutch, Scotch, Irish and English emigrants, all bound for New Orleans. The voyage was an absolute disaster, replete with illness, bad weather, starvation, a shipwreck, and ultimately the captain's betrayal - in the form of an attempted...

Do you have a criminal from your family's past that you've always wanted to learn more about, but don't know where to start? On this special episode of Most Notorious, prolific British author Stephen Wade offers helpful tips on how to maneuver through what can be both a daunting and thrilling experience - digging up sordid details of long-lost villainous ancestors. His book is called "Tracing Your...

Of all of the Jack the Ripper suspects, Montague Druitt is the most maligned in modern times, my guests argue, despite the fact that many of his contemporaries believed him to be the murderer of the Canonical Five before drowning himself in the Thames. Jonathan Hainsworth and Christine Ward-Agius are the authors of "The Escape of Jack the Ripper: The Full Truth About the Cover-up and His Flight fr...

The Cherry Mine in Cherry, Illinois was built to be one of the safest in the United States. However on November 13th, 1909, it caught fire, killing 259 boys and men who were trapped inside, hundreds of feet below ground. A few miners eventually escaped - and later told the tale of their experiences battling darkness, thirst, fire and the ominous "Black Damp". My guest, bestselling author Karen Tin...

Roanoke Island is host every year to the famous "Lost Colony" outdoor drama. It was during the 1967 production that a young makeup artist named Brenda Joyce Holland went missing - her body eventually discovered floating in Albemarle Sound. A murder investigation ensued, with important evidence being mishandled and a slew of suspects to sort through, including her boyfriend and an abusive dentist....

On the evening of December 23rd 1881, three teenagers, alone in a farmhouse in Ashland Kentucky, were savagely murdered and the house set afire to cover the crime. What followed would be an investigation, trials, a lynching, and a massacre of Ashland citizens by state militia, in this fascinating and tragic series of events. My guest is Joe Castle, author of "The Ashland Tragedy: Murder, a Mob &am...

At the tail end of World War Two, a serial killer named James Waybern "Red" Hall, stalked the roads of Arkansas, Kansas and other middle American states, remorselessly murdering kind people who made the unfortunate decision to offer him a ride. My guest, Janie Nesbitt Jones, is the author of “The Arkansas Hitchhike Killer: James Waybern ‘Red’ Hall." She talks about Hall's murders, how investigator...

When sheriff's deputies arrived at David and Allene Lamson's Palo Alto home on Memorial Day, 1933, they found David frantic over what he said was a terrible accident in their bathroom. Allene, he explained, had slipped when getting out of the bathtub and bashed her head on the sink, resulting in her death. Investigators, however, believed something far more sinister had taken place. My guest is To...

In November of 1912, a young woman named Ella Barham journeyed home, on her horse, to her family farm in Boone County, Arkansas, but never arrived. After her body was discovered, murdered and dismembered, suspicions quickly centered on a neighbor, Odus Davidson, who was rumored to have been in love with Ella, a love never returned. My guest, Nita Gould, has a very personal connection to Ella, one...

Imprisoned in a Turkish war camp during WW1, two British officers pull off an unbelievable con against their captors involving a Ouija board, an angry ghost and feigned madness - leading to a truly astonishing escape. My guest is bestselling author Margalit Fox, author of "Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History." More information about Margalit Fo...

Albert Johnson is famous in Canadian crime history for leading Mounties on a sensational and deadly chase through the Yukon and Northwest Territories during the winter of 1931-32. How he managed to elude police over hundreds of kilometers in subzero temperatures through a mountainous wilderness is as much a mystery as his real identity. To this day, very little is known about the man nicknamed "Th...

Most of us are familiar with the critically acclaimed film called Catch Me If You Can, based on the autobiography of legendary confidence man Frank Abagnale. It's the story of a brazen teenage imposter who through charm and intellect was able to pass as an attorney, a doctor, a pilot and a university professor in the late 1960s and early 1970s. My guest, Alan C. Logan, has done extensive research...

In 1897 a Belgian named Adrien de Gerlache, in command of a ship called the Belgica, sailed to Antarctica with the intent to be the first to reach the south magnetic pole. On the expedition was Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who would later become one of the world's most famous explorers, and Doctor Frederick Cook, who would become one of America's greatest charlatans. My guest, Julian Sancton, shares...

J. Frank Norris rose to fame as the controversial fundamentalist pastor of America's first megachurch, the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. He used his pulpit, his newspaper and his radio station to battle his enemies in unscrupulous ways, and when one angry local businessman named Dexter Chipps marched into his office in July of 1926 to confront him about his tactics, Norris pulled out...

One of the more enduring mysteries in true crime history involves Vincenzo Capone, Al Capone's eldest brother, who abruptly left his struggling family in New York City one day, eventually resurfacing as a lawman with a new identity: Richard Hart. His rise to fame - becoming one of the most famous Prohibition agents of the 1920s - coincided with his brothers' rise to power in the violent streets of...

Almost a decade before Bonnie and Clyde blasted their way into our collective public consciousness, Richard and Margaret Whittemore, aka "The Candy Kid" and "Tiger Girl" made national news, not only for their participation in deadly robberies in 1920s New York, but also for their romantic love story, played out through newspaper articles and photographs across America. My guest is prolific author...

The late 1960s and early 1970s were witness to some of the worst serial killers in American history. Ranking at the top was Gerard John Schaefer, a cop who used his charisma to lure unsuspecting females into his car before torturing and murdering them in brutal fashion. My guest is Patrick Kendrick, who has spent the past 35 years gathering information on Schaefer, and for a time was even the focu...

Holmes County, Ohio is one of the largest Amish communities in America. It was here, in the summer of 1957, that an Amish man named Paul Coblentz was murdered by two ex-cons in his family's rural farmhouse. My guests are David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker, authors of the book "A Murder in Amish Ohio: The Martyrdom of Paul Coblentz". They not only share details of the case, but also offer insight...

Sophie Lyons was arguably the most successful (and colorful) female criminal of 19th-century America. She was a trained by her abusive parents at an early age in the art of thievery and scam artistry, and by the end of her life had accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars through her ill-gotten means. And in her wake, she had left a trail of four husbands, estranged children, and spent untold...

One of the great historical Hollywood mysteries, still unsolved, revolves around the death of silver screen comedienne Thelma Todd. She was found dead in her car on December 16th, 1935, killed by carbon monoxide poisoning according to the Los Angeles coroner. But rumors have circulated for decades that she was murdered, with suspects that have included her live-in boyfriend Roland West, ex-husband...

My guest, Russell Shorto, has a unique connection to the subject of his latest book, "Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob". He is the namesake of his grandfather, a gangster who ran an Italian-American outfit in the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania in the 1940s and 50s. The organization would eventually crumble after the murder of a local bookie in 1960 exposed its underbelly to unwanted at...

Murder, Inc. was arguably the most ruthless and successful hit squad in American history, killing hundreds of people throughout the 1930s. It was led by a brutal Brooklyn gangster named Abe "Kid Twist" Reles, who under orders from mob bosses like Lucky Luciano, Lepke Buchalter and Albert Anastasia, dispatched his hitmen across the country to kill anyone who threatened the interests of "The Commiss...

My guest, Ben Montgomery, tells the story of George Dinning, a former slave who was visited one night in 1897 by a mob, hellbent on driving him and his family off of their Kentucky farm. In an exchange of gunfire, Dinning killed a wealthy white man. Dinning then had to elude lynchers while fighting for his life in court. Unlikely allies would come forward, including a former Confederate officer wh...

In the autumn of 1920, two couples pulled into a campsite in Central Park, Montana, but only one left alive. Seth and Iva Danner would eventually turn on each other with their own versions of how John and Florence Sprouse were murdered, but only Seth would be tried, convicted, and put to death. And questions still linger - about whether justice was truly served. My guest, Kelly Suzanne Hartman, au...

Somehow Jane Toppan managed to skirt through the first half of her life murdering people at will, before finally being caught and committed to an insane asylum in 1901. Her nursing background made her an expert with drugs, and she used that expertise to kill over thirty people, often torturing them by purposely prolonging their suffering. My guest is Mary Kay McBrayer, and she shares some stories...