True Crime Historian

Clyde Tolson ran personnel and discipline at the FBI for 44 years — the man who hired, promoted, and silenced the agents who carried out J. Edgar Hoover's illegal surveillance campaigns. He built the compliant machine. He signed the memos. He inherited the house. History gave him the quiet burial he counted on. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www....

The Case Of Bathsheba Spooner Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 474 takes place in 1788 when the secrets of a prosperous Massachusetts family are revealed, beginning with a dead body in the bottom of a well. By spring, four people would hang because of what came to light. One of them was a woman. One of them was pregnant. Hear More Stories About FEMMES FATALE!!!! Become a supporter of...

Wu Zetian entered the Tang court as a teenage concubine in 638. By 690, she'd murdered her way to the Dragon Throne — the only woman in Chinese history to rule as Emperor. She stuffed rivals into wine jars, built a secret police, and spent her final years afraid of house cats. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-his...

Episode 130 Murder By Fire, by Brandon White The Abominable Mr. Yelverton, by Edmund Pearson The American Exchange Bank Robbery, By Cleveland Moffat Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support . You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is still just a buck a week, and you can ge...

William N. Roach embezzled sixty thousand dollars from a Washington bank, fled to Dakota Territory, and returned the money just fast enough to dodge prison. Fourteen years later, a Republican civil war handed him a U.S. Senate seat nobody voted for. The Senate tried to expel him. Time said no. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podca...

The Mysterious Death of Louise Monteabaro In Jump To The AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 20, Police Chief Henry Blake’s story stays consistent throughout, from the time he reported the incident to the judge/acting coroner to the time that the dead girl’s aunt stabbed him in the neck: Miss Louise Monteabaro used her own gun to commit suicide in the passenger seat of her car. But according to tho...

Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 22 is an exciting story that has many of the elements of classic noir: A deadly robbery, an exhaustive manhunt, a daring escape from the county jail and a tense showdown ending with a clever police ploy. In the spring of 1918, three men burst into a business meeting and steal a mere pocketful of cash, but leave three men, including one of their own, d...

Gilded Age New York. William Magear Tweed rode Tammany Hall to the top and looted the city treasury through padded bills, phantom invoices, and kickbacks buried in plaster. His crowning theft was a courthouse whose $250,000 budget swelled past $12 million. In November 1873, a jury convicted him inside it. AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podca...

The Assassination of Huey P. Long Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 473 takes us to Baton Rouge on the night of September 8, 1935, when a quiet young doctor walked into the Louisiana State Capitol and never walked out. He left no note. No confession. No explanation. Six people who stood beside him — or over him — tell the story he never told. Hear more episodes about ASSASSINATIONS!!!...

The Complicated Romance of Fannie Brice and Notorious Nicky Arnstein  Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition In Episode 60, we take a little break from murderous mayhem for a love story with a different kind of mayhem. The world of Broadway was quite aghast when Fannie Brice, a star of the Ziegfield Follies, took up with New York gambler Julius Wilford Arnstein, better known as Nicky, whose story...

In 1869, Medal of Honor recipient Daniel Butterfield took a ten-thousand-dollar bribe from Jay Gould to leak Treasury gold sales, helping trigger the Black Friday panic that bankrupted brokers and ruined farmers across the Midwest. The man who composed Taps sold out his country and never spent a day in prison. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historia...

Turned Into A Tigress By Her Borgia Blood. How A Criminal Acrobat Makes A Living Out Of His Genuine Broken Neck. How A Little Dog Avenged The Murder Of His Master. AD-FREE SAFE HOUSE EDITION Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support . You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is still just a buck a week, and you can...

In 1902, Kansas Senator Joseph R. Burton walked a mail fraud operator into the Post Office inspector's office and made a federal investigation disappear. The price: twenty-five hundred dollars, paid in monthly installments. The first sitting senator convicted of a felony sold his office for the price of a used carriage. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crim...

The Murder Of Captain Joseph White Jump to AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 472 takes us back to Salem, Massachusetts in 1830 when an old man dead in his bed from thirteen stab wounds. The clues: an unlocked window and a fortune that was never what anyone thought it was. The plot implicates four young men from two of Salem's best families and involves one famous and very expensive lawyer. This i...

What’s In The Package Mr. Wainwright? Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 49 is adapted from our favorite true crime pioneer, Edmund Pearson, who worked in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. He was a librarian by training and profession, but first made his mark on the true crime canon with his unique take on the Lizzie Borden crime. He wrote several books and many magazine articles, a...

The Cincinnati Tanyard Murder Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 17 is a report from Lafcadio Hearn, on of my favorite Pioneers of True Crime. Although he became better known late in his career for his books on travel and on Japanese legends and ghost stories, Lafcadio Hearn began his professional writing career as a staff correspondent for the Cincinnati Enquirer. He was such a devote...

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...