pplpod

Mary Broad was born in Cornwall around 1765, a farmer's daughter. In 1785 she and two other women robbed Agnes Lakeman on a road near Plymouth, taking goods that included a silk bonnet worth 12 pence. The sentence was death, commuted to seven years of transportation. She waited aboard the prison hulk Dunkirk, gave birth to a daughter named Charlotte, and sailed with the First Fleet in May 1787. In...

Frances Glessner Lee was born in Chicago in 1878 into the International Harvester fortune and raised to run a household. Her brother went to Harvard while she was taught at home. A childhood bout of tonsillitis, first mistreated and then cured by surgery, left her fascinated by medicine, and she spent summers in the White Mountains of New Hampshire following country doctors on their house calls. M...

Habeas corpus means produce the body: the state must bring a prisoner into open court and justify the detention to a judge. It is often credited to the Magna Carta of 1215, but that charter offered a principle, not a procedure. The working machinery traces to the Assize of Clarendon in 1166 under Henry II, and similar tools appeared independently across medieval Europe, from Aragon's manifestation...

William Francis Sutton Jr. was born on June 30, 1901, in the Irishtown section of Brooklyn, the son of a blacksmith, and left school after the eighth grade. Over a 40-year career he stole an estimated $2 million and spent more than half his adult life in prison, yet the public came to see him as a folk hero. He robbed banks in costume, arriving just before opening as a postman, police officer, or...

Eugène François Vidocq was born in 1775 in Arras, the son of a prosperous baker, and was in trouble almost at once. At 13 he pawned the family silver, and the two weeks in jail his father arranged as a lesson served mostly as an introduction to the underworld. He robbed the bakery cash box, played a raw meat eating cannibal in a traveling carnival, fought at Valmy, dueled his own officers, deserte...

On June 29, 1892, police in Necochea, in Argentina's Buenos Aires province, found six-year-old Ponciano and four-year-old Felisa dead in their home. Their mother, 27-year-old Francisca Rojas, lay nearby with a wound to her neck and a ready accusation: a neighbor, Pedro Ramon Velasquez, had broken in and attacked the family. In an age when a surviving victim's word was the strongest evidence a cour...

In December 1976, a television crew filming inside the Laugh in the Dark funhouse at the Pike amusement park in Long Beach reached out to move a neon-painted prop hanging from a gallows. The arm snapped off, and inside was human bone. The body belonged to Elmer McCurdy, born in 1880 in Washington, Maine, to an unmarried 17-year-old and raised to believe his aunt and uncle were his parents. Learnin...

The movie anaconda is a boat swallowing, man hunting monster. The real green anaconda, Eunectes murinus, is something stranger: a study in biological efficiency. This episode starts with the name. The Carib people called it the great snake, while Carl Linnaeus in 1758 gave it a Latin label that actually means mouse hunter. It then takes on size. Guinness notes that no living animal has been more e...

The man who dropped the blade on King Louis XVI in 1793 spent his evenings reading philosophy that argued against the death penalty. Charles-Henri Sanson, chief executioner of Paris, was born in 1739 into a hereditary office his great grandfather had founded. He wanted to be a doctor, but his school in Rouen expelled him in 1753 when it learned his father's trade, and a stroke soon left that fathe...

Search for the phrase hole in the wall and the results include a rock arch, a Norwegian country rock band, a Polish game show, and a British cash machine. This episode follows those four words through geography, culture, and everyday speech. The trail starts with literal gaps in rock, from a sea arch on South Africa's Eastern Cape to a cave on Mount Cory in Alberta, and with the pass in Wyoming's...

In the winter of 1895, an aging man with a ruined foot soaked in a bathhouse in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. He was Bill Doolin, founder of the Wild Bunch, and he was about to be arrested without firing a shot. This episode traces how he got there. Born in 1858 to a sharecropping family in Johnson County, Arkansas, Doolin left for Indian Territory in 1881 and found work on Oscar Halsell's ranch along...

In 1871 a man in Abilene, Kansas was shot dead through a hotel wall because he snored too loudly. The shooter climbed out a second story window in his night clothes, hid in a haystack, and fled the state on a stolen horse. He was John Wesley Hardin, born in Texas in 1853 to a traveling preacher and named for the founder of the Methodist Church. This episode follows his path from a schoolyard stabb...

A thousand pound predator swims up to a National Geographic photographer in Antarctic water, opens its jaws, and gently offers him a dead penguin. It keeps doing so for four days. This episode takes that encounter as the starting point for a portrait of the leopard seal, an animal first described in 1820 from a faded, stretched taxidermy skin. The living seal is a countershaded giant up to 11 and...

In the late 18th century, rotting warships with their masts stripped away sat low in the River Thames, packed with hundreds of men. This episode traces how the prison hulk began as a stopgap. Britain had long shipped its convicts to the American colonies, and when the rebellion closed that route, courts kept handing down transportation sentences with nowhere to send anyone. In 1775 a private ship...

A patterned cone shell on a tropical beach looks like a souvenir. Inside is one of the fastest and most venomous predators on the planet. This episode explains how the cone snail, a family with roughly 33 million years of evolutionary history, solves the problem of a slow animal hunting fast fish. It tracks sleeping prey by scent using an organ called the osphradium, loads a hollow barbed tooth ma...

The cassowary is billed as the world's most dangerous bird, a flightless giant from the rainforests of New Guinea, the Moluccas, and northeastern Australia with a five inch dagger claw on each foot. This episode tests that reputation against the evidence. The southern cassowary stands up to six and a half feet tall, weighs upwards of 160 pounds, sprints at 30 miles per hour through thick vegetatio...

The movie version of the last meal is a blank check: steak, truffles, a rare vintage, then the long walk. The real version comes with an auditor. This episode separates the legend from the procedure inside modern American prisons, where most states do not even use the phrase and call it a special meal instead. It is usually served a day or two before the execution so that a heavy dinner cannot dis...

The legend says a single Texas Ranger can stop a riot. The record says something more complicated. This episode follows the Texas Ranger Division across 200 years, starting in 1823 when Stephen F. Austin hired just 10 men to range across Mexican Texas and protect isolated settlements. Within decades they had become a paramilitary force fighting the Comanche and Cherokee, then scouts and shock troo...

Baloo from The Jungle Book was almost certainly modeled on the sloth bear, and the real animal could hardly be less cuddly. This episode examines a bear that evolved from ancestral brown bears into a specialist eater of ants and termites. It has no upper front teeth, a lower lip that stretches over its nose, nostrils it can close at will, and 10 centimeter claws for ripping open mounds. It blows t...

The most famous photograph of Bonnie Parker shows her leaning on a car with a revolver and a cigar. She smoked Camel cigarettes; the cigar was a joke for the camera, found on undeveloped film police recovered from an abandoned hideout in Joplin, Missouri. This episode sets that image against the facts. Bonnie grew up in Cement City, married an abusive man at 15, and waited tables in Dallas. Clyde...

Arthur Flegenheimer was born in the Bronx in 1901 to German Jewish immigrants, abandoned by his father as a child, and out of school by the eighth grade. A job with a trucking company put him in the right place when the Volstead Act took effect, and under the name Dutch Schultz he built a beer empire with speakeasy owner Joey Noe. This episode follows how he held it: through terror rather than loy...

In 1752 a windmill spun on the roof of Newgate Prison, built by Stephen Hales to push fresh air into a building so thick with gaol fever that physicians refused to enter. The fever was epidemic typhus, carried by body lice, so the breeze did nothing. This episode covers the full life of Newgate from 1188 to 1902, beginning with Henry II and the Assize of Clarendon in 1166, which created traveling...

A traffic island near Marble Arch, marked by three young oak trees, was once the deadliest piece of ground in London. This episode traces Tyburn from its entry in the Domesday Book of 1086 as a rural estate of eight households, through the 1236 contract that piped its spring water free to the city at Cheapside, to its long career as England's main stage for public execution. The site sat where two...

In the 1920s an American could order a Thompson submachine gun by mail for $200 and have it shipped to the front door. That was never the plan. Brigadier General John T. Thompson designed the weapon in 1918 to break the stalemate of trench warfare, giving a single soldier the firepower of a machine gun. A friction-based mechanism called the Blish lock forced him to settle for the .45 ACP pistol ca...

In the summer of 1916, leading scientists assured Americans that sharks in temperate waters were timid scavengers with jaws too weak to break human bone. Then, over 12 days in July, five people were attacked along the New Jersey coast and four of them died. This episode follows the attacks from the crowded resort beaches to a muddy inland creek, and shows how a heat wave and a polio epidemic had d...