15 Minutes of Infamy

Christmas Day of 1889 had a special meaning for one Boston family. Isaac Sawtelle, Jr., would be reunited with the family he hadn't seen in sixteen years. But Isaac's long absence from home was neither the result of his seeking fortune out West or traveling abroad, nor was it because of a family rift. No, the reason for Isaac's long-awaited homecoming was because he had been pardoned by the governor after serving a long sentence for a serious crime.Isaac's freedom would be short-lived, however; not long after his pardon, he would be convicted of first-degree murder. But, unlike so many murderers who have been forgotten by history, Isaac Sawtelle earned his fifteen minutes of infamy-- not just for the brutal nature of his crime, but for having the distinction of being sentenced to death in a state where the crime hadn't been committed.

In a small farmhouse in Oregon, there once lived a family named Covell. The head of the household was Dr. Fred Covell, a chiropractor with an office in the town of Bandon. When Ebba Covell was found dead in her bed with her neck bent at an unnatural angle, as if twisted by powerful hands, her chiropractor husband was the logical suspect. But murder often defies logic, as Ebba's real killer turned out to be the last one anyone would have suspected.

On April 8, 1922, Abraham Becker walked into a Bronx police station and reported that his wife, Jennie, was missing. The discovery of her body, and the post-mortem analysis of her partially-digested last meal, ultimately led two men to Sing Sing Prison's electric chair.

After Nancy Boyer, a middle-aged hairdresser, was found murdered in her apartment by her landlady, Washington D.C.'s top detectives leaped into action-- but little did they know that the man they were after had left a trail of red-haired victims from New Orleans to Chicago. So, what was the reason for the killer's distaste for redheads?

The Archer Home for Elderly People was a highly-specialized business. That is, it specialized in the quick and speedy extermination of its residents.This is the true story of Amy Archer Gilligan, a nursing homeowner from Windsor, Connecticut, who came under scrutiny after a newspaper report noticed an unusually high number of resident deaths-- and a mysterious black hearse that visited the Archer Home every midnight to collect and spirit away the bodies.