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In 18th century Europe, arsenic was close to a perfect murder weapon: odorless, tasteless, easily dissolved in tea or soup, and a death that looked just like cholera. The French called it inheritance powder. Early chemists could coax a garlic smell or a yellow precipitate from a sample, but nothing that would last long enough to show a jury. This episode tells how that changed, through a frustrate...

In early 18th century London, the victim of a robbery could do little more than shout stop thief and hope a neighbor gave chase. The British feared a state police force as a tool of tyranny, so the government offered cash rewards instead and got a trade in extortion. Thief takers such as Jonathan Wild staged robberies, returned the goods for a fee, and sent their own men to the gallows for the bou...

Movie villains love to brag about being number one on the FBI's most wanted list. No such ranking exists. This episode tells the real story of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, which began in late 1949 as a conversation between J. Edgar Hoover and William Kinsey Hutchinson, a wire service editor looking for a good story about the toughest guys the Bureau was chasing. Readers loved it, and on Mar...

On January 16th, 1935, federal agents surrounded a vacation cottage in Florida and, after an hours long gun battle, found two bodies inside. One was a 61 year old woman. The FBI told the country it had eliminated the most vicious, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade. Alvin Karpis, who actually ran with her, said she could not have planned a morning breakfast. This episode u...

For centuries, a neighbor judged too argumentative could be strapped into a crude wooden chair, paraded through town to jeers, and plunged into a freezing river. This episode traces the ducking stool from its origin as the cucking stool, a name that has nothing to do with cuckolds. It comes from an old verb meaning to defecate, and the Domesday Book of 1086 records the device in Chester under a La...

Before it was the most notorious slum in New York, Five Points was Collect Pond, a spring fed lake 48 acres across and 60 feet deep that supplied Manhattan's drinking water. Breweries, tanneries, and a slaughterhouse poisoned it. Pierre Charles L'Enfant proposed cleaning the pond and building a park around it, but the city chose to fill the basin with loose soil, brush, and street sweepings. The f...

The most famous police headquarters in the world is not a yard and is nowhere near Scotland. When Sir Robert Peel pushed the Metropolitan Police Act through Parliament in 1829, the first commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, set up in a private townhouse at Four Whitehall Place. The public was sent around to the rear entrance on a narrow street called Great Scotland Yard, and Londoners b...

Walk into Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 and the local authorities would order you to hand over your firearms. That detail sets the tone for an episode that takes apart the Hollywood gunslinger piece by piece. Nobody in the 1880s used the word, which was coined for a 1920 Western called Drag Harlan. The men themselves said gunfighter, gunman, or bad man, and Bat Masterson simply called them man killer...

The agents who run the real Con Air and track fugitives from covert surveillance planes belong to an agency that once took the national census and paid the courthouse janitors. This episode follows the United States Marshals Service from the Judiciary Act of 1789, when George Washington appointed the first 13 marshals, through more than a century in which they were paid by the fee, appointed throu...

Popular culture promises that a stumble into a South American river means a boiling frenzy of teeth and a polished skeleton in 30 seconds. The real piranha tells a different story. This episode traces the legend to a 1913 Amazon expedition by Theodore Roosevelt, when local fishermen netted off a stretch of river, trapped and starved thousands of fish, then pushed a cow into the water. Roosevelt de...

Early European explorers in Tasmania heard unearthly screeches in the dark and named the unseen creature Beelzebub's pup. Daylight revealed a chubby, shuffling, dog sized marsupial that stores fat in its tail. This episode looks past the cartoon and the settler myths to the mechanics of a specialized survivor: an animal that once ranged across the Australian mainland until a drying climate, vanish...

In January of 1871, a sleigh crash in snowy New York City fatally injured James Watson, the secret bookkeeper of the Tweed ring. His unguarded ledgers reached the press and revealed tens of millions of dollars embezzled by a shadow government. This episode treats Tammany Hall as the subject of a biography, following its 180 year life from the Society of St. Tammany, founded by William Mooney in 17...

Jefferson Randolph Smith II was born in Georgia in 1860 to a wealthy family that lost everything in the Civil War. In Texas he saw the outlaw Sam Bass die and concluded that a deck of cards was safer than a revolver. His masterpiece was the prize soap racket. He wrapped real bills around a few bars in front of a crowd, mixed them into the pile, and sold every bar for a dollar. A shill would tear o...

Two maneless male lions stand in a glass case at the Field Museum in Chicago. In March 1898 they began dragging railway workers out of their tents along the Tsavo River in Kenya, where several thousand laborers were camped to build a single bridge for the British. Thorn fences and all-night fires did nothing. Hundreds of workers fled, construction stopped, and the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, h...

The saltwater crocodile is the largest living reptile on Earth. Males can reach six meters and weigh over 1,500 kilograms, and they range from India across Southeast Asia to northern Australia. A crocodile about 15 feet long registered a bite of over 16,000 newtons in a laboratory, roughly four times the force of an adult lion. Yet the muscles that open the jaw are so thin and weak that a few wrap...

On the freezing morning of February 14, 1929, George Bugs Moran was running late to a garage on North Clark Street, where a truckload of hijacked Canadian whiskey was waiting. He saw a police car out front, assumed a raid, and ducked into a cafe. Inside the SMC Cartage Company garage, men in police uniforms lined seven people against a wall and opened fire. A lookout had mistaken Albert Weinshank...

Ronald Arthur Biggs had one job in the Great Train Robbery of August 1963: bring a driver who could move the hijacked mail train. The retired railwayman he recruited had only driven shunting engines and could not work the diesel locomotive. The gang beat the real driver, Jack Mills, with an iron bar and forced him to do it, while Biggs waited in a vehicle. He still collected a full share of about...

The legend says Boot Hill cemeteries were filled with gunfighters who died with their boots on. The records tell a sadder story. The first graveyard to carry the name was in Hays, Kansas, a frontier town founded around 1867, five years ahead of the famous one in Dodge City. As the 1800s went on, footwear changed from soft homemade shoes into stiff leather boots fitted by skilled cordwainers to lef...

It is two in the morning in a police precinct, and a shaken witness is asked to describe a stranger's nose. Most people cannot do it, and this episode explains why. For decades the facial composite depended on a skilled sketch artist, a luxury most small departments never had. The fix was the mechanical kit: Identikit arrived in the United States in 1959, and Jacques Penry's Photofit followed in t...

A sign in a crowded station says beware of pickpockets, and nearly everyone who reads it pats the pocket where the wallet sits. That reflex tells every thief in the room exactly where to reach. This episode treats pickpocketing as a study in human attention. In the transit hubs of Rome and Barcelona, teams use lurching trains, dropped maps, blocked walkways, and doorway crushes to overload the sen...

Until 1984, Colombia's Gorgona Island prison needed no walls. The jungle interior was full of venomous snakes, and the 30 kilometers of water to the mainland was a feeding ground for sharks. This episode treats the penal colony as one of history's most durable tools of statecraft: a way to remove unwanted people, put them to work on a hostile frontier, and keep them beyond the reach of ordinary la...

A cocktail, an undefeated Japanese racehorse, and a glacier in New Zealand all carry the name of an 18th century Scottish outlaw. Robert MacGregor was born in 1671 into a clan whose very surname had been banned by the Crown, so he lived under his mother's name, Campbell, and earned the nickname Roy for his red hair. At 18 he joined the 1689 Jacobite Rising with his father, who was then jailed for...

An estimated 436 people were killed by a single female Bengal tiger. Her attacks began in the late 1890s in western Nepal and escalated so quickly that the Nepalese army was called in. The soldiers never killed her. Their massive beat only drove her across the river into the Kumaon district of India, where she changed her habits to stay ahead of hunters, covering up to 32 kilometers in a night and...

Enoch L. Johnson stepped out of a powder blue limousine in a raccoon coat with a fresh red carnation on his lapel, and he ran Atlantic City for 30 years without, as far as the record shows, killing anyone or ordering a hit. Born in 1883 to a county sheriff, he studied English literature before joining the family trade of machine politics. When boss Louis Kuehnle went to prison in 1911, Johnson was...

The deadliest animal on the planet is not a shark or a tiger. It is an insect whose name means little fly, and it kills over a million people every year. This episode takes apart the mosquito's bite piece by piece. What looks like one needle is a bundle of six tools hidden in a flexible sheath: toothed blades that saw through skin with one thousandth of the force of a medical syringe, a probe that...