True Crime Historian

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...

Boca del Infierno, Puerto Rico March 5, 1825 Three nations set a trap at the Mouth of Hell, and the Caribbean's most wanted pirate sailed right into it. Roberto Cofresí was the son of an Austrian nobleman who'd fled a murder charge and a Puerto Rican mother from one of the island's founding families. Noble blood, empty pockets. When colonial Puerto Rico collapsed around him, Cofresí took to the se...

The Lindbergh Tragedy Jump to the Ad-Free Safe House Edition Episode 113 came about because of a listener request. Indeed, several people have asked for this, one of the rare cases that really earned the title “Crime of the Century.” The baby Lindbergh, son of an American aviation hero, “the little eaglet,” was one of America’s most-loved babies of his day, and that helped make his short life one...

Washington, D.C. March 3, 1913.  The day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer named Inez Milholland climbed onto a white horse and led more than five thousand women down Pennsylvania Avenue in the largest suffrage demonstration the nation had ever seen. They never made it four blocks before a mob of a quarter million men surged into the street. Women were grabbed, sho...

Emmett Till Jump to Ad-Free Safe House Edition Episode 467 takes us back to the Mississippi Delta in August 1955, where a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy named Emmett Till whistled at a white woman in a country store. What followed—the abduction, the murder, the sham trial, and one mother's radical decision to open the casket—changed America forever. Hear More Stories About MOB JUSTICE Become a supp...

Wellington, Washington March 1, 1910 Two Great Northern Railway trains sit snowbound at a tiny depot in the Cascade Mountains, trapped by a nine-day blizzard that has buried the tracks under seventeen feet of snow. The rotary plows are broken. The shovelers have walked off the job. The telegraph lines are down. Some passengers escape on foot down a near-vertical slope. The rest stay, because the r...

Alexandria, Virginia February 28, 1844  A pleasure cruise on the Potomac River turned into the deadliest single-day loss of senior government officials in American history when the world's largest naval cannon exploded on the deck of the USS Princeton. Secretary of State Abel Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, and four others were killed instantly in front of four hundred horrified guest...

The Crocodile Tears of Calvin Dellinger Ad-Free Safe House Edition Episode 99 begins early one brisk fall morning in 1888, when a group of railroad men spy the drowned body of Mary Catherine Dellinger on the bank of Conestoga Creek in rural Pennsylvania. The evidence is thin and circumstantial, but it all points to her husband, Calvin, who expertly plays the part of the grieving husband, but his h...

Los Angeles, California February 26, 1931 The Great Depression had America on its knees, and men in power needed someone to blame. On a sunny Thursday afternoon, federal immigration agents and local police sealed off La Placita park in the heart of Mexican Los Angeles, trapping nearly four hundred men, women, and children. They demanded papers. They beat those who tried to run. They arrested a man...

The Crescent City Quadrangle Scandal Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 98 involves a rare love quadrangle that comes to light when a woman is charged with accessory to the murder of her banker husband, committed by her physician lover and the state’s attorney turns out to be her former fiance. It’s a tangled, tangled web, and you know it’s not going to end well.  Read more stories abo...