Forgotten True Crime

On Valentine’s night, 1940, Joseph P. Calloway, a Houston tire salesman doing some friends a favor, stopped for two hitch-hikers on the Old Spanish Trail near Orange, Texas. Nobody reported him missing. Three days later, a young woman picked up in Shreveport over a burglary told Louisiana state police there was a dead man in a rice field south of Lake Charles. Then she spent six hours leading them...

On a Thursday night in May 1977, two Midwest City patrolmen met a few blocks from an apartment complex at Southeast 25th and Douglas so neither one would have to walk in alone. They’d been sent on a welfare check: a man nobody had seen all week. What the older officer found when he opened the refrigerator stayed with him for the rest of his life. The man was Theodore Canatis, a retired Air Force m...

Monday night, the fourth of August, 1919. Binghamton, New York. A mother and her two grown daughters have just moved into a plain frame house on Robinson Street, and a crowd of young people has come by to welcome them. Out on the little back porch, a young man just home from the war is sitting in the dark with a cigarette. Out front, the last guests are saying goodnight. Then a big touring car com...

In the fall of 1954, Dr. Sam Sheppard went on trial for the murder of his wife, Marilyn. Reporters sat inside the rail, the jurors’ names and addresses were printed in the paper, and a radio station broadcast from the room next to the jury room. In Part 2 we follow the case from the county jail to the verdict, and then through the years that followed: a scientist from Berkeley, ten years of appeal...

Just before six on the morning of July 4, 1954, the mayor of Bay Village, Ohio, picks up his phone. It’s his friend and neighbour, Dr. Sam Sheppard, saying: “My God, Spen, get over here quick. I think they’ve killed Marilyn.” Upstairs, Marilyn Sheppard, 31 and four months pregnant, has been beaten to death in her bed. Her husband says he fought a bushy-haired intruder twice in the dark, once in th...

On January 31, 2002, Robert Roberson carried his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, into the emergency room in Palestine, Texas. She was limp and blue, and she had been sick all week. He said she had fallen out of bed in the night. The nurses thought he seemed too calm, and the detective said his story didn’t match the evidence. Nikki died the next day. Doctors called it shaken baby syndrome. Wi...

Monday night, the fourth of June, 1945. Park Avenue at Forty-Seventh Street, the Hotel Marguery, where the people who live there don't visit; they live there, in suites, with maids. Two men in soft dark hats step into an elevator, and one of them says one word: "Seven." Up on the seventh floor, in apartment 705, a red-haired heiress is lying in bed. Her husband, Albert Langford, sixt...

Two women and a girl, killed in one Chicago neighborhood in the space of seven months. On June 5, 1945, Josephine Ross was murdered in her flat at 4108 North Kenmore Avenue. Within a week, everyone held for questioning had been let go. Six months later, on December 10, Frances Brown, a former WAVE just home from the Navy, was killed at the Pine Crest hotel on Pine Grove Avenue. On her bedroom wall...

On the morning of December 10, 1945, a maid at the Pine Crest hotel on Chicago's North Side saw a door standing open and heard a radio playing. Inside, someone had written a message in lipstick on the wall, begging the police to catch him before he killed again. The woman in that apartment was Frances Brown, 33. She grew up in Richmond, Indiana, played the bass fiddle in her high school orches...

Chicago, June 1945. A woman is murdered in her apartment on the North Side of the city — and when they find her, one of her hands is closed around several short black hairs. She fought him. Somebody taped the wounds on her throat closed afterwards and left the tape to dry, rinsed her clothes in the bathtub, and went out the back way, down the fire escape, between noon and one o'clock. Nothing...

Updated October 1st 2026. On Wednesday morning, about an hour before the State of Tennessee was set to execute Christa Pike, a federal appeals court stopped it. This is the story of how she got there, and of the nineteen-year-old girl thirty years of headlines mostly forgot. It's a Thursday night in January of 1995, and May Martinez's phone is ringing in Orange Park, Florida. It's her...

Half past two on a Monday afternoon, the third of March, 1952, in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Augustus Shoals comes home and finds his wife sitting on the side of the bed with her head down. She tells him what his cousin did that morning — and the cousin, on the other side of the wall, hears every word of it, and calls through the boards: "If you fool with me, I will take my old scatter gun and shoot...

On a Monday evening in November 1936, a young woman carried a basket of clean laundry up the steps of a little clapboard house on South Waco Avenue in Wichita, Kansas, and knocked on her grandfather's door. Nobody answered. She knocked again on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, and by then she had decided the old man was behind his curtains, laughing at her. On Thursday her father snapped the l...

On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, two men walked a shoe company's payroll down a street in South Braintree, Massachusetts, the way they had done it a hundred paydays before. They never reached the other end of the street. Thirty-three years later, a New York newspaper gave that afternoon a full page, a photograph, and a map. It gave one of the murdered men a single sentence. It gave the othe...

Santa Cruz, California. The ninth of September, 1933 — Admission Day, the state's own holiday — and up on Beach Hill, above the bay, the afternoon is coming down soft and warm. In the garden of a big house called "The Cabins," Francis J. M. Grace sits in his chair: fifty-nine years old, a millionaire, a retired shipping man of the Grace family, and a semi-invalid whose heart will not...

At about seven o'clock on a Sunday morning in November of 1921, two men walked out of a farmhouse on Hickory Creek, south of the little town of Woodford, Oklahoma, to gather pecans. One of them was about sixty years old. The whole county called him Uncle Bill. The other had been living in his house for a week or so — eating at his table, picking pecans alongside him to sell in Ardmore. Three d...

Omaha, Nebraska, the winter of 1926. On a Sunday night in February, a dairyman named W. L. McDevitt steps out of his house — "We're waiting supper for him now" — and is shot dead on the sidewalk in front of the First Methodist church. Four days later, a wealthy physician named Dr. Austin Searles is found shot behind the ear in his own locked office, an empty shell on the floor and hi...

Six-thirty on a Friday morning, February 19, 1926, in Troy, Ohio. Jacob Nesbitt gets up, fixes the furnace, sweeps the snow off the front walk, and drives to Dayton to sell kitchen machines at a food show — the machines at which his own wife had just been handed the better territory. His wife is in the bathtub. She has been there since 6:30. Frances Drake Nesbitt was twenty-six — three-time tennis...

Five past eight on a Saturday morning, the eighteenth of March, 1944, in Weleetka, Oklahoma. The man delivering the milk sets his bottles down inside a corner grocery and looks over at the chair by the front door — the chair where the owner sits every morning of his life, with the radio going. The chair is empty. Arley Keck was sixty years old, though his own town would have told you sixty-five. H...

This August I asked the Beverly Hills Police Department for the file on crime case number 46176. It is a homicide from 1947. They wrote back twenty-four days later. The records exist. They are in the department's possession. And they are exempt from disclosure, and will not be released. Then they told me the rest of it. The case is presently assigned to the Crimes Against Persons unit of the D...

On the night of Friday, the seventh of April, 1944, a posse of farmers and twenty-five sailors from the naval firing station at Shawnee, Oklahoma, put about a hundred and fifty shots into a patch of brush. Twelve days after they pulled a man out of it, he had pleaded guilty to three murders and been sentenced to die. Twelve days. From three bodies to a death sentence. There was no trial. The defen...

On June 23, 2021, a 24-year-old field geologist named Daniel Robinson drove away from a water well site outside Buckeye, Arizona, in the rain. Twenty-six days later a rancher found his Jeep in a ravine three and a half miles out — rolled, every airbag fired, still in drive, his phone and keys and wallet inside it. His clothes were scattered up the hillside above it. Jeans inside out. Socks inside...

Oklahoma, the summer of 1978. A family pulls over on Interstate 35 to help a woman with a broken-down car. Twenty-four days later, six people are shot to death in a walk-in freezer at a steakhouse in south Oklahoma City. For eight months, nobody knew the two crimes were connected — until a ten-year-old boy came around the side of his house holding a paper sack. Nine people died: Melvin, Linda and...

On a hundred-degree night in August of 1938, in Durant, Oklahoma, a fifty-year-old woman named Ethel Story burned to death in a storeroom behind her own house. The building was eight feet by five. It had no windows. And the latch was on the outside. Her fourteen-year-old son heard her screaming from forty feet away. He got that door open once — and watched it swing shut again. The next afternoon a...

La Crescenta, California — August 1935. A barber comes home after dark with two friends invited for a barbecue supper, and finds his wife face down in the backyard fish pond. There's a snakebite on her foot, a note pinned to the door that's been hanging there a day too long — and for a long time, longer than you'd believe, this wasn't a murder case at all. From the newspapers, the...