PODCAST · society
True Crime Historian
by Richard O Jones
Tales of classic scandals, scoundrels and scourges told through vintage newspaper accounts from the golden age of yellow journalism Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.
Episodes
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The Walk Of Death
A Diary Of Retribution Jump to the Ad-Free Safe House Edition Episode 496. September 6, 1949. A World War II veteran put on his best suit, loaded a German Luger, and walked out of his Camden apartment. Thirteen people dead in twelve minutes. He never stood trial. He kept a grievance diary with...
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The Footprints That Led In
The HinterKaifeck Murders Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 495 takes place in the weeks before Easter 1922, when footprints appear in the snow outside a remote Bavarian farm. They lead in from the forest. None lead back out. The family notices. The neighbors are told. No one calls…
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I Merely Shot Him
The Eighty Days Of President Garfield Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 494. July 1881. Charles Guiteau waits in a Washington railroad station with a revolver picked for its ivory grip — he wants it to look good in a museum someday. He fires twice at the President. James Garfield…
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Transatlantic Trunk Murders
Episode 246. Pulp Nonfiction: Remembering the Pioneers of True Crime Jump to AD-FREE Safe House Edition "The Lake Como Honeymoon Trunk Murder" by R.O. Scallan. When an American newlywed bride's body turns up in a trunk in an Italian lake, police expect to find the groom's body to be floating...
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The Chair He Took
The Killing of Wild Bill Hickok and the Two Trials of Jack McCall Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 493 begins in Deadwood, August 1876, six weeks after Custer dies at Little Bighorn. A small Kentuckian named Jack McCall walks into Saloon No. 10 with a Colt revolver and a brother who...
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She Died Singing It
The Slashing Of Old Shakespeare Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 492 concerns the morning of April twenty-fourth, eighteen ninety-one, when a sixty-year-old Englishwoman named Carrie Brown is found butchered in a fifteen-cent hotel room on Water Street. The scene resembled the work…
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A Witness Denied
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…
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The Woman By The Window
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,...
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The Broken Butterfly
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...
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The Dumbbell Murder
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...
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The Eltham Murder
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...
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The Luger In The Dark
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...
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The White Flag Massacre
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...
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The Fourteenth Fiasco
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...
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Femme Fatale Ann O'Delia Diss Debar
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...
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American Scoudrel B. Gratz Brown
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...
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American Scoundrel Stephen Wallace Dorsey
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...
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The Moonlight Row
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...
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The Tiny Error of the Wily Widow
"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...
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Femme Fatale Sophie Lyons
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...
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The Poison Pastor
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...
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American Scoundrel Johann Georg Rapp
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.…
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American Scoundrel: George Cassiday
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...
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STARKWEATHER
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...
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The Merry Widow Of Bicester
"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:...
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Cassie Chadwick
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....
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A Family Of Outlaws
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…
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American Scoundrel John Eaton
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...
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Lizzie Gillespie Killed By Twin Brother
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…
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American Scoundrel Clyde Tolson
Clyde Tolson ran personnel and discipline at the FBI for 44 years — the man who hired, promoted, and silenced the agents who carried out J. Edgar Hoover's illegal surveillance campaigns. He built the compliant machine. He signed the memos. He inherited the house. History gave him the quiet burial...
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At The Bottom Of A Brookfield Well
The Case Of Bathsheba Spooner Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 474 takes place in 1788 when the secrets of a prosperous Massachusetts family are revealed, beginning with a dead body in the bottom of a well. By spring, four people would hang because of what came to light. One of them...
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Femme Fatale Wu Zetian
Wu Zetian entered the Tang court as a teenage concubine in 638. By 690, she'd murdered her way to the Dragon Throne — the only woman in Chinese history to rule as Emperor. She stuffed rivals into wine jars, built a secret police, and spent her final years afraid of house cats. Jump to the AD-FREE...
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Magazine #4
Episode 130 Murder By Fire, by Brandon White The Abominable Mr. Yelverton, by Edmund Pearson The American Exchange Bank Robbery, By Cleveland Moffat Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.…
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American Scoundrel Wiliam N. Roach
William N. Roach embezzled sixty thousand dollars from a Washington bank, fled to Dakota Territory, and returned the money just fast enough to dodge prison. Fourteen years later, a Republican civil war handed him a U.S. Senate seat nobody voted for. The Senate tried to expel him. Time said no.…
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Girl Did Not Kill Herself
The Mysterious Death of Louise Monteabaro In Jump To The AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 20, Police Chief Henry Blake’s story stays consistent throughout, from the time he reported the incident to the judge/acting coroner to the time that the dead girl’s aunt stabbed him in the neck: Miss…
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Their Secret Died In The Chair
Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 22 is an exciting story that has many of the elements of classic noir: A deadly robbery, an exhaustive manhunt, a daring escape from the county jail and a tense showdown ending with a clever police ploy. In the spring of 1918, three men burst into a...
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American Scoundrel Boss Tweed
Gilded Age New York. William Magear Tweed rode Tammany Hall to the top and looted the city treasury through padded bills, phantom invoices, and kickbacks buried in plaster. His crowning theft was a courthouse whose $250,000 budget swelled past $12 million. In November 1873, a jury convicted him...
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Murder In The Marble Halls
The Assassination of Huey P. Long Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 473 takes us to Baton Rouge on the night of September 8, 1935, when a quiet young doctor walked into the Louisiana State Capitol and never walked out. He left no note. No confession. No explanation. Six people who...
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The Showgirl & The Conman
The Complicated Romance of Fannie Brice and Notorious Nicky Arnstein Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition In Episode 60, we take a little break from murderous mayhem for a love story with a different kind of mayhem. The world of Broadway was quite aghast when Fannie Brice, a star of the…
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American Scoundrel Daniel Butterfield
In 1869, Medal of Honor recipient Daniel Butterfield took a ten-thousand-dollar bribe from Jay Gould to leak Treasury gold sales, helping trigger the Black Friday panic that bankrupted brokers and ruined farmers across the Midwest. The man who composed Taps sold out his country and never spent a...
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Magazine #1
Turned Into A Tigress By Her Borgia Blood. How A Criminal Acrobat Makes A Living Out Of His Genuine Broken Neck. How A Little Dog Avenged The Murder Of His Master. AD-FREE SAFE HOUSE EDITION Become a supporter of this podcast…
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American Scoundrel Joseph R Burton
In 1902, Kansas Senator Joseph R. Burton walked a mail fraud operator into the Post Office inspector's office and made a federal investigation disappear. The price: twenty-five hundred dollars, paid in monthly installments. The first sitting senator convicted of a felony sold his office for the...
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The Handyman's Morning
The Murder Of Captain Joseph White Jump to AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 472 takes us back to Salem, Massachusetts in 1830 when an old man dead in his bed from thirteen stab wounds. The clues: an unlocked window and a fortune that was never what anyone thought it was. The plot implicates…
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The Third Passenger
What’s In The Package Mr. Wainwright? Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 49 is adapted from our favorite true crime pioneer, Edmund Pearson, who worked in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. He was a librarian by training and profession, but first made his mark on the true crime canon...
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Violent Cremation
The Cincinnati Tanyard Murder Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 17 is a report from Lafcadio Hearn, on of my favorite Pioneers of True Crime. Although he became better known late in his career for his books on travel and on Japanese legends and ghost stories, Lafcadio Hearn began his...
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Face-To-Face With Pretty Boy Floyd
The Oklahoma Phantom Terror Jump to the Ad-Free Safe House Edition Episode 471 finds us in 1932, a hill country reporter named Vivian Brown did what no one else ever managed — she sat down with Pretty Boy Floyd and got him talking. Two years later, a teletype changed everything. The only…
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A Deadly Family Feud
The Execution of J.G. Rawlings and His Accomplice Jump to AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 45 takes us back to the turn of the last century, rural Georgia circa 1905, when an argument over a field border incites a family feud that results in four deaths, including the murder of two innocents…
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March 28, 1944
San Francisco, California March 28, 1944 A pyromaniac works the skid row district south of Market Street, lighting fires in flophouses all evening long. The sixth one catches. Twenty-two people die inside the New Amsterdam Hotel. The man they convict says God knows he's innocent. The dead say...
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Preacher’s Baby Girl/Gangster’s Wife
The Trial & Travails Of Norma Brighton Millen Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House Edition Episode 43 is the story of a young girl, the daughter of a prominent minister and graduate of a fine finishing school, who fell into the wrong crowd and married a man who would be executed for the crime of the…
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March 26, 1942
Poprad, Slovakia March 25, 1942 Nine hundred and ninety-nine young Jewish women boarded a train believing they were headed to factory work. They sang folk songs as the Tatra Mountains slid past the windows. The train crossed the Polish border before dawn. What waited on the other side would…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Tales of classic scandals, scoundrels and scourges told through vintage newspaper accounts from the golden age of yellow journalism
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.
HOSTED BY
Richard O Jones
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does True Crime Historian have?
True Crime Historian currently has 446 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is True Crime Historian about?
Tales of classic scandals, scoundrels and scourges told through vintage newspaper accounts from the golden age of yellow journalism Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.
How often does True Crime Historian release new episodes?
True Crime Historian publishes regularly with 446 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to True Crime Historian?
You can listen to True Crime Historian on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts True Crime Historian?
True Crime Historian is created and hosted by Richard O Jones.
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