True Crime Historian

The Poisoning of George Wythe Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 490 takes place in Richmond, Virginia, 1806. George Wythe signs the Declaration of Independence, teaches Jefferson how to think, and frees his slaves. His grandnephew thanks him with arsenic in the coffeepot. The cook sees everything. The law says her eyes don't count. A Founding Father's murder, and the legal code he bui...

The Killing Of Senator Arthur Brown Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 489 takes us to the Hotel Raleigh, Washington, December 8, 1906, when a Salt Lake mother of four walks into the senator's sitting room with the nickel-plated revolver he bought her himself. Seven years of promises, one folded pair of hands, two shots fired. The gun was for her protection. Become a supporter of this...

The Murder of Anna Marie Keenan Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 488 takes us to a top-floor flat on West Fifty-Seventh Street, the Ides of March, nineteen twenty-three. A chorus girl named Dot King lies dead across a blue silk bed. A scraped chloroform bottle. A Philadelphia millionaire under a fake name. A mother in Harlem naming the killer nobody arrests. The Broadway Butterfly ca...

The Execution Of Joe Hill Jump To The AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 487 takes us to Salt Lake City, 1914, where a grocer and his seventeen-year-old son die on a pine floor, and a Swedish songwriter named Joe Hill rings a doctor's bell with a bullet in his lung and a name he will not say. He dies for the silence. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-h...

The Snyder-Gray Affair Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 486 takes us to a Dutch Colonial on 222nd Street in Queens Village, where a housewife, a Methodist corset salesman, and a crooked Prudential agent put together the most famous botched murder of the Jazz Age. Damon Runyon called it the Dumbbell Murder. The electric chair called it Thursday. Become a supporter of this podcast: htt...

The Girl Who Named Him Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 485 takes us to Kidbrooke Lane, Eltham, before dawn on the twenty-sixth of April, eighteen seventy-one, where a beat constable named Donald Gunn stumbles across a sixteen-year-old maidservant crawling in the mud with a plasterer's hammer in the ditch beside her. Jane Clouson names her killer. The English courtroom declines to li...

Assassin Unknown Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 484 takes us to a frost-covered parlor outside Yankton, South Dakota, on the last Sunday of 1934. A retired featherweight sits under a lamp reading a magazine. His wife is nearby. The radio is playing. Outside, in the frozen dark, a German Luger is waiting.  Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-cri...

No Mercy At Mountain Meadows Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 482 takes us to Mountain Meadows, Utah Territory, 1857, where Arkansas emigrants accept safe passage under a white flag. The flag is a lie. A hundred and twenty dead, seventeen toddlers spared, and one man sitting on his coffin twenty years later, waiting for bullets his prophet won't share. Become a supporter of this podc...

The Klan Claims A Scallywag Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 477 tells the story of Judge George W. Ashburn — Union colonel, scalawag, author of the state's civil rights provisions — who is gunned down by the Ku Klux Klan in their Georgia debut. The killers are caught, tried, and freed through a devil's bargain: their liberty exchanged for ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Mo...

New York, 1888. Ann O'Delia Diss Debar — self-styled Spirit Princess, alleged daughter of Lola Montez — convinced a grieving Madison Avenue lawyer that Raphael and Rembrandt were painting for him in his own parlor. The paintings were chemical tricks. The deed to his townhouse was hers. And the worst of her career was still ahead. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this po...

B. Gratz Brown — ex-senator, sitting governor, Vice-Presidential nominee of two parties at once — was handed the stage built to topple Grant's corruption and showed up drunk. He fainted at a New York rally, forgot his own policies, and buttered a watermelon at a campaign picnic. The reform ticket died. The Whiskey Ring kept pumping. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this...

Gilded Age Washington, 1876. Senator Stephen W. Dorsey and the Second Assistant Postmaster General ran a bid-rigging racket that bled the Post Office of millions — fake mail routes, real money. Two trials, two acquittals, one stolen castle on the New Mexico prairie. The jury said not guilty. The record disagrees. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://ww...

The Smuttynose Island Murders of 1873 Jump To The AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 476 explores a case would become one of the most sensational crimes of the American Gilded Age. It would produce a manhunt, a near-lynching, a jail break, and a hanging, among other tropes. It would haunt the New England coast for a century and a half, and it haunts it still. But before it was any of those things,...

"The Tiny Error of the Wily Widow" (57:52) transports us to the plains of the Dakotas and another plot, this one to get rid of a wealthy husband for a younger man. 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 get access to over 400 ad-...

Gilded Age New York crowned her the Queen of Crime. Sophie Lyons — pickpocket, shoplifter, blackmailer — spent fifty years selling men's shame back to them at Parker House prices. She retired to Detroit a millionaire philanthropist. Three of the men she tried to reform killed her for the rest of it. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com...

Crimes of the Scoundrel Clarence V.T. Richeson Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 74 explores the tawdry case of Clarence Virgil Thompson Richeson, who was apparently an eloquent preacher and a rising star in the Baptist community, as well as a notorious scoundrel. The tangled web of deceit he wove between three women finally ended in the mysterious death of the unmarried mother of his...

Father George Rapp ran the Harmony Society at Economy, Pennsylvania, by two commandments: celibacy for men whose wives he had evicted, and poverty for workers whose gold he hoarded. By 1846 the prophet was burning ledgers and stashing half a million in coin beneath his floor. He had it coming. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podca...

The Trial and Execution of Amelia Dyer  Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 43 comes at the request of a listener across the great pond in the United Kingdom. We will be exploring the testimony from the trial of Amelia Dyer, who would take in infants and toddlers for adoption for a fee, and then murder the poor children for the profit. She is said to have once referred to herself as an...

For ten years, George Cassiday, known on Capitol Hill as the Man in the Green Hat, ran liquor to the United States Congress while four out of five of his customers voted dry. When Prohibition agents finally caught him in February of 1930, he took the hypocrites down with him. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-hist...

The Nebraska Spree Killer Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 475 takes us on a wild ride across Nebraska with Charles Starkweather, a 19-year-old with a stolen shotgun, a 14-year-old companion who may or may not be kidnapped, and a string of dead bodies across the American plains that shocked a nation. Hear more stories about SERIAL & SPREE KILLERS. Become a supporter of this podca...

"The Merry Widow of Bicester" takes us to battle-torn England during World War II, when as if there wasn't already enough death and suffering, a jealous mistress plots to take out her man's wife. 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 yo...

Born Elizabeth Bigley in a Ontario railway camp, she died Cassie Chadwick in an Ohio prison cell — and in between, she convinced the banks of northern Ohio that Andrew Carnegie was her shamefaced father and they were sitting on a gold mine. They were sitting on forged paper. The Queen of Ohio. Circa 1897–1904. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.s...

The Reckless Reno Gang Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 92 takes place after the Civil War, when the Reno Brothers explored a new way to rob trains that inspired the James and Younger gangs. But even the wild and wily Reno brothers were no match for Allen Pinkerton and his detectives. Although it takes place in Indiana, this story has the trappings of a tale of the Old West: Daring r...

Andrew Jackson's Secretary of War spent a decade courting a married woman, arranged her husband's convenient posting to the Mediterranean, and married her six weeks before the 1829 inauguration. The Cabinet collapsed. Calhoun was destroyed. Jackson never recovered. John Henry Eaton walked away clean. Washington City's most elegant arsonist. Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter...

Family Tragedy in Rising Sun Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 89. In a lot of these stories from the old newspapers, the press coverage and the locale itself often take on the attributes of characters in the drama. In this case, the town of Rising Sun, Indiana, seems to evolve as the story progresses. When one of the town matrons, the spinster Lizzie Gillespie is found assassinated i...