TopPodcast.com
Menu
  • Home
  • Top Charts
  • Top Networks
  • Top Apps
  • Top Independents
  • Top Podfluencers
  • Top Picks
    • Top Business Podcasts
    • Top True Crime Podcasts
    • Top Finance Podcasts
    • Top Comedy Podcasts
    • Top Music Podcasts
    • Top Womens Podcasts
    • Top Kids Podcasts
    • Top Sports Podcasts
    • Top News Podcasts
    • Top Tech Podcasts
    • Top Crypto Podcasts
    • Top Entrepreneurial Podcasts
    • Top Fantasy Sports Podcasts
    • Top Political Podcasts
    • Top Science Podcasts
    • Top Self Help Podcasts
    • Top Sports Betting Podcasts
    • Top Stocks Podcasts
  • Podcast News
  • About Us
  • Podcast Advertising
  • Contact
Not in our directory?
Add Show Here
Podcast Equipment
Center

toppodcastlogoOur TOPPODCAST Picks

  • Comedy
  • Crypto
  • Sports
  • News
  • Politics
  • True Crime
  • Business
  • Finance

Follow Us

toppodcastlogoStay Connected

    View Top 200 Chart
    Back to Rankings Page
    Personal Journals

    Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast

    Foggy gaslit streets. A quiet courtroom. And crimes that history tried to bury.

    Foul Play is a historical true crime podcast that investigates the most chilling murder cases from the 1800s and early 1900s across the United States and the United Kingdom. Hosted by investigative crime journalists Shane Waters — who pioneered crime podcasting in 2008 — and Wendy Cee, each season unravels one complete criminal case through original research, court records, and primary source material.

    This isn't sensationalized true crime. Every season of Foul Play puts victims first — their names, their stories, their humanity — before examining how murder investigations unfolded in an era before modern forensics, when justice was far from guaranteed.

    From Victorian poisoners in London to Gilded Age killers in America, Foul Play brings historical true crime to life with cinematic storytelling and relentless accuracy. Every fact is verified. Every claim is sourced. Every story is told with the gravity it deserves.

    New seasons of this historical true crime podcast release throughout the year, with episodes dropping weekly on Tuesdays.

    Hello, friend. Welcome to Foul Play.

    Advertise

    Copyright: © Copyright Black Label Podcasting

    • Apple Podcasts
    • Google Play
    • Spotify

    Latest Episodes:
    Kansas and Virginia: Badges, Betrayal, and Frontier Justice Oct 06, 2026
    Show notes

    Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary — fifty states, fifty crimes, two hundred and fifty years. This double--

    feature episode covers Kansas and Virginia.

    A city marshal with a gold-engraved Winchester and a secret past as a wanted killer. A mountain doctor who

    preached Sunday sermons and planned a massacre on a mountain road. Two men who wore badges. Two

    communities that trusted them. Two moments when the authority collapsed and the man underneath it was

    exposed. This is the story of Henry Newton Brown and Marshall Benton "Doc" Taylor — and the people they

    killed.

    The Victims

    **E.W. Wylie Payne** was the president of the Medicine Valley Bank in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. He was a

    Missouri-born businessman, married to Susan, and the father of nine children. He was shot during a robbery on

    April 30, 1884, and died the following day — May 1, 1884. **George Geppert**, the bank's chief cashier, was

    shot twice during the same robbery. Dying, he sealed the bank vault with his own hands. The robbers escaped

    with nothing because of what Geppert did in his final moments.

    **Louranza Mullins** was thirty-five years old on May 14, 1892, traveling through Pound Gap on the Virginia-Ken-

    tucky border with her husband **Ira Mullins**, **Wilson Mullins**, **John Chappel**, and **Greenberry Harris**.

    All five were killed in a planned ambush at a place now called Killing Rock. Two survived: fourteen-year-old **John

    Harrison Mullins**, whose left arm was shattered, and **Amoda Jane Mullins**, Ira's sister, who was carrying an

    infant and identified the killers by their voices.

    The Crimes

    **Case A — The Medicine Lodge Bank Robbery (Kansas, 1884):** Henry Newton Brown was city marshal of

    Caldwell, Kansas — a man so trusted that citizens presented him a gold-engraved Winchester rifle in January

    1883. What no one in Caldwell knew was that Brown was wanted for murder in New Mexico Territory. He had

    ridden with Billy the Kid's Regulators and participated in the ambush that killed Lincoln County Sheriff William

    Brady in April 1878. On April 30, 1884, five weeks after marrying Alice Maude Levagood, Brown led his deputy Ben

    Wheeler (real name: William Sherod Robinson, also a fugitive) and two accomplices to rob the Medicine Valley

    Bank. The robbery failed. Cowboys sheltering from a thunderstorm in a nearby livery stable gave chase. The gang

    was trapped in a flooded box canyon within three miles. Brown was shot and killed by a mob that night. Wheeler,

    Smith, and Wesley were hanged from an elm tree.

    **Case B — The Killing Rock Massacre at Pound Gap (Virginia, 1892):** Marshall Benton "Doc" Taylor was a

    physician, Baptist preacher, and former federal revenue officer in the Appalachian coalfields of Wise County,

    Virginia. In 1889, Taylor led a posse that intercepted a Mullins whiskey wagon on the main street of Wise

    Courthouse — approximately 250 shots were exchanged. The wagon driver was killed, Ira Mullins was shot

    through both hips and crippled for life, and several others were wounded. Taylor lost his federal appointment.

    Three years later, on May 14, 1892, Taylor and brothers Henan and Calvin Fleming ambushed the Mullins party at

    Pound Gap, killing five people from behind a breastwork of sandstone and rhododendron.

    The Investigation

    Taylor fled and was dubbed the Red Fox of the Mountains by the press. Railroad detectives captured him on

    August 18, 1892, in an empty freight car at Bluefield, West Virginia. His trial was moved 275 miles to Lynchburg for

    security. A ballistics question emerged — rim-fire shells at the scene did not match Taylor's modified center-fire

    Winchester — but the jury deliberated two hours and convicted him on five counts of first-degree murder, largely

    on the eyewitness identification of Jane Mullins.

    Brown's case never reached trial. The mob killed him and his accomplices the night of the failed robbery, after

    bank president Wylie Payne died of his wounds. A coroner's jury reported the deaths were at the hands of "a

    mob, composed of persons unknown."

    Historical Context

    Both cases reveal the thin line between law and lawlessness on the American frontier. Brown carried active murder

    warrants while serving as one of the most effective marshals in Kansas. Taylor combined medicine, ministry,

    and federal authority in a single person — and used all three to position himself for premeditated murder. The

    gold-engraved Winchester that Caldwell gave to Brown now sits in the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka

    (collection item 209981). The Red Fox Trail runs 1.5 miles through the George Washington and Jefferson National

    Forests past the sandstone outcropping called Killing Rock. Every May, descendants of both the Taylor and

    Mullins families return there together.


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    1898 America: The Burning of Baker, McGeisey & Sampson Sep 29, 2026
    Show notes

    Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes. Two fires burned in 1898

    America. One in South Carolina, where a mob murdered a Black postmaster and his two-year-old daughter. One

    in Indian Territory, where a mob burned two Seminole teenagers alive. Both cases reached federal court. Neither

    delivered justice.

    Frazier Baker held a federal appointment. Lincoln McGeisey and Palmer Sampson were teenagers with no

    connection to the crime they died for. The federal government proved it could indict in both cases. What it could

    not do -- or chose not to do -- was convict. This is the story of 1898, when America showed exactly what it was

    willing to tolerate.

    The Victims

    Frazier Baker was born around 1857 in Effingham, Florence County, South Carolina. He became a schoolteacher,

    then a postmaster. On July 30, 1897, the McKinley administration appointed him the first Black postmaster of

    Lake City, Williamsburg County. He and his wife Lavinia had six children: Rosa, Cora, Lincoln, Sarah, Millie, and the

    youngest, Julia, who was two years old in the winter of 1898. Baker refused to abandon his federal post despite

    threats, a shooting, an arson, and a boycott. He stayed.

    Lincoln McGeisey was fifteen or sixteen years old. His father, Thomas McGeisey, was the superintendent of the

    Seminole Nation's public schools and was in Washington, D.C., negotiating on behalf of his people when the mob

    took his son. Lincoln had four siblings -- Martha, Nora, William, and James -- and had never been in trouble. Palmer

    Sampson was also a teenager, the son of Sukey Natuksie and Sampson Walker. Congress formally exonerated

    both young men within six months of their deaths, declaring them innocent before a single defendant stood trial.

    The Crimes

    On February 22, 1898, at approximately 1:00 in the morning, a mob surrounded Frazier Baker's home in Lake City,

    South Carolina -- which also served as the post office. They set fire to the building and fired approximately one

    hundred bullets into the structure while the Baker family was inside. Frazier Baker was killed. Two-year-old Julia

    Baker died from a bullet that passed through her mother Lavinia's forearm. Three more Baker children survived

    with gunshot wounds.

    On January 8, 1898, shortly after 2:00 in the morning, Lincoln McGeisey and Palmer Sampson were chained to

    trees at the Maud tabernacle in Indian Territory. A minister named Andrew J. Mathis prayed over them, then set

    fire to the dry brush heaped around them. A crowd numbering in the hundreds watched. Three white Protestant

    ministers were documented as present. Neither teenager had been formally charged, brought before any legal

    authority, or connected by evidence to the murder of Mary Leard, the crime the mob claimed to be avenging.

    The Investigation

    In March 1898, journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett organized a delegation to the White

    House, meeting President McKinley. She was the sole woman in a group that included eight Illinois congressmen.

    She demanded federal action and a federal anti-lynching law.

    In the Baker case, thirteen men were indicted on twenty-four criminal counts in April 1899. Joseph P. Newham

    testified under immunity, admitting in open court that he personally started the fire. An all-white jury in

    Charleston, South Carolina, acquitted three defendants outright and deadlocked on the remaining eight. The

    judge declared a mistrial. No one was ever convicted for the murder of Frazier Baker or Julia Baker.

    In the Seminole burning case, more than fifty people were indicted. Fifty-four were tried. The prosecution

    succeeded in convicting six individuals, including Nelson M. Jones, a former Deputy U.S. Marshal whose federal

    status made the prosecution legally viable, and Andrew J. Mathis, the minister who set the fire. It was the first

    successful prosecution of lynchers in the American Southwest. When convicted mob member Mont Ballard

    returned to Maud after serving seven years, the town threw him a celebration.

    Historical Context

    1898 was a year of organized racial terror across America. The Wilmington Massacre rewrote the political map

    of North Carolina. The Curtis Act dissolved Seminole tribal government. Federal prosecutors proved the system

    could work -- and then the system refused to deliver results. The United States did not pass a federal anti-lynching

    law until March 29, 2022, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into law -- one hundred and

    twenty-four years after Frazier Baker and Julia Baker were killed. Ida B. Wells-Barnett demanded that law in 1898.

    She died in 1931 without seeing it. Lavinia Baker moved her family to Boston, later returned to South Carolina,

    and died in 1947. The Lake City post office was renamed in honor of Frazier B. Baker on February 22, 2019. There

    is no major public memorial to Lincoln McGeisey or Palmer Sampson.


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    Rhode Island & North Dakota: Who Killed the King? Sep 22, 2026
    Show notes

    Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes. This is Episode 13, covering

    Rhode Island and North Dakota with two true crime cases from the 1880s and 1890s that circle the same

    question: who do you believe when the dead cannot speak?

    October 1885. A wealthy Black businessman in Newport, Rhode Island, is found dead at his kitchen table -- two

    gunshot wounds, unchewed bread still in his mouth. The city calls it suicide before the day is over. Eight years

    later, a hired hand in North Dakota murders six members of the family that trusted him, and a fifteen-year-old

    girl walks barefoot to town to report it.

    Both killers were inside the circle. Both were trusted. Both destroyed the people who let them in. This episode

    examines what trust costs in a country still deciding which lives deserve investigation and which can be dismissed

    with a shrug from the mayor's office.

    The Victims

    Benjamin J. Burton was the wealthiest Black businessman in Rhode Island when he was killed in October 1885.

    He had arrived in Newport around 1845 from Connecticut and spent four decades building a baggage transfer

    empire -- the Original Express and the Bellevue Avenue Express Line -- moving trunks between the wharves

    and the Gilded Age mansions. Burton was a civil rights organizer who helped desegregate Rhode Island's public

    schools in 1866, working alongside Isaac Rice and George T. Downing. He was fifty-nine years old. He had been

    eating breakfast when he was shot.

    Daniel and Barbara Kreider were a Mennonite farming family who had relocated from Lancaster County, Penn-

    sylvania, to a homestead southeast of Cando, North Dakota. Daniel was born in 1856; Barbara came from one

    of Lancaster County's most established Mennonite families -- the Rissers, whose meeting house had been in

    continuous operation since the 1700s. By summer 1893, they had eight children. Four of those children -- Bernice,

    thirteen; Murbey, eleven; Mary, nine; and David, seven -- were killed alongside their parents on the morning of

    July 7, 1893.

    The Crimes

    In Newport, Burton's son-in-law Allen Dorsey -- a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, one year from

    finishing his degree -- shot Burton at 63 Levin Street on October 6, 1885. The wound sequence was medically

    damning: a shot to the head first, a shot to the heart second. No powder burns. Unchewed bread in the victim's

    mouth. The city ruled it suicide anyway. The coroner signed off. The mayor ridiculed the idea of murder.

    In North Dakota, Albert Bomberger -- a twenty-two-year-old hired hand who had lived with the Kreider family for

    five years -- killed six family members with a shotgun in thirty minutes after the eldest daughter, Annie, rejected

    his advances and her father told him to leave. After the killings, Bomberger forced fifteen-year-old Annie to cook

    his breakfast while the bodies lay in the rooms around her. He ate, ransacked the house, beat Annie with a rope,

    and fled toward Canada on a stolen pony.

    The Investigation

    In the Burton case, Newport's official investigation went nowhere. The community Burton had spent forty years

    building ran a parallel investigation through church and civic networks. Seven weeks later, Burton's younger

    daughter Emmie came forward and named Allen Dorsey as the killer and Maria Dorsey as complicit. Her testimony

    made prosecution possible. The trial began in late June 1886. Allen and Maria Dorsey were convicted and

    sentenced to life. Emmie was also convicted -- she had served as lookout -- and died of consumption in the prison

    infirmary within six months. In June 1887, the Burton case was presented to the American Medical Association

    at their 38th Annual Meeting as an example of physical evidence clearly indicating murder that official authority

    chose to read otherwise.

    Annie Kreider walked to Cando barefoot. No shoes, no horse, no telephone. Her testimony was the entire

    foundation of the prosecution. Bomberger was captured at Deloraine, Manitoba, three days later. The threat of

    lynching was immediate -- the Grand Forks County sheriff moved Bomberger to a more secure jail. On November

    21, 1893, Bomberger was arraigned. Two days later, he was sentenced to death. The entire court proceeding

    lasted fifteen minutes. He was hanged on January 19, 1894 -- the first legal execution in North Dakota history.

    Historical Context

    These two historical murder cases sit at the edges of American justice in the Gilded Age. In Rhode Island, the

    system initially failed a Black man whose physical evidence was dismissed by the same city he had served for

    decades. In North Dakota, a state just four years old produced a fifteen-minute guilty plea and a death sentence

    in two days -- justice delivered under the shadow of a lynch mob. Allen Dorsey was pardoned in 1912, moved to

    New York City, worked as a waiter, and died in 1918. Annie Kreider lived until 1960, carrying that July morning for

    sixty-seven years.


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    Hawaii and Louisiana: The Plantation's Shadow, 1887-1889 Sep 15, 2026
    Show notes

    This episode is part of Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes

    exploring the cases that shaped American history from every corner of the country.

    Hawaii, 1889. A Japanese shopkeeper is lynched from a telephone pole on the main street of Honoka'a for

    speaking English on behalf of plantation workers. Louisiana, 1887. Ten thousand sugar cane workers strike for cash

    wages instead of scrip -- and armed paramilitaries sweep through residential streets at dawn, killing between 35

    and 300 people. Two plantation economies. Two communities who challenged the system. The same answer.

    The Victims

    Katsu Goto was twenty-seven years old when he was killed on October 29, 1889. Born in Japan in 1862, he

    changed his family name from Kobayakawa to Goto to qualify for the Hawaii immigration program. He arrived in

    Honolulu Harbor on February 8, 1885, aboard the SS City of Tokio -- one of 944 immigrants in the first wave of

    government-contract Japanese workers under the kanyaku imin program. After three years cutting cane at nine

    dollars a month on the Hamakua Coast, Goto opened a general store in Honoka'a, the second-largest town on

    the Big Island. He spoke English. He used that skill to help Japanese workers file complaints against plantation

    abuses. That made him a target.

    In Thibodaux, Louisiana, the victims of the November 23, 1887 massacre were overwhelmingly Black -- formerly

    enslaved people and their children who had struck for fair wages during the sugar harvest. Eight names survived

    the historical record: Willis Wilson, Felix Pierre, Archy Jones, Frank Patterson, Grant Conrad, Marcellin Weldon,

    Riley Anderson, and Mahala Washington. They represent a fraction of those killed. The full death toll has never

    been established.

    The Crimes

    On the night of October 28, 1889, Katsu Goto rode on horseback to Robert Overend's plantation to meet with

    Japanese workers who had been fined for a cane field fire they may not have set. He left the meeting around ten

    o'clock. Six men were waiting on the road: Joseph R. Mills, Thomas Steele, William C. Blabon, William D. Watson,

    John Richmond, and a man identified only as Lala. Goto was found the next morning hanging from a telephone

    pole on Honoka'a's main street. The coroner determined he died of asphyxiation -- he was alive when the rope

    went around his neck.

    In Louisiana, the 1887 sugar strike began on October 29 when approximately 10,000 workers laid down their cane

    knives at the start of harvest season. The Knights of Labor had demanded $1.25 per day in cash wages, elimination

    of the scrip system, and biweekly payment. Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery -- himself a planter -- deployed

    eleven companies of state militia to evict striking families from plantation housing. Parish District Judge Taylor

    Beattie, a former Confederate and sugar planter, declared martial law over the Black population of Thibodaux,

    assembled a committee of three hundred armed white men, and required Black residents to carry passes. On

    the morning of November 23, 1887, armed paramilitaries moved through Black neighborhoods for more than two

    hours, killing men, women, and children in their homes, yards, and streets.

    The Investigation

    In Hawaii, all six perpetrators in the Katsu Goto lynching were identified within weeks. Lala and Richmond

    cooperated with authorities in exchange for dropped charges. The 1890 trial convicted four men of manslaughter

    -- not murder. Mills and Steele received nine years; Blabon and Watson received four years each. But justice

    eroded: Steele escaped to Australia, Blabon escaped to California, and Mills was pardoned in 1894 by the same

    planter-aligned provisional government that had overthrown Queen Lili'uokalani the year before. Only Watson,

    who played the smallest role, served his full sentence.

    In Thibodaux, no one was arrested for the killings. No one was tried. No one was convicted. The bodies were

    collected and dumped in unmarked graves at a site that later became the city dump. Andrew Price, a sugar planter

    who participated in the attacks, was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1889 -- two years

    after the massacre.

    Historical Context

    Both cases occurred within plantation economies that ran on the same equation: keep labor costs low, keep

    workers dependent, and make it dangerous to organize. In Hawaii, the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 had already

    stripped voting rights from Asian residents. In Louisiana, the scrip system effectively trapped formerly enslaved

    workers on the same land they had worked before emancipation. Black farm labor organizing in the American

    South did not resume in earnest until the 1930s -- more than forty years after the Thibodaux massacre.

    Today, a memorial to Katsu Goto stands near the Honoka'a Library on Mamane Street, erected in 1994 -- 105 years

    after his death. A documentary, Honoka'a Hero: The Story of Katsu Goto, remains in production. In Thibodaux,

    the City Council officially condemned the violence in 2017, and a state historical marker was approved for 1123

    Bourbon Street. Ground-penetrating radar surveys of the former dump site have found anomalies consistent

    with burials. As of 2025, excavation and formal identification have not been completed. The bodies are still in the

    ground.


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    Wyoming and New York: Children in the Dock, 1892 Sep 08, 2026
    Show notes

    Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary — fifty true crime stories from fifty states. Wyoming, 1892. A fiftee-

    n-year-old orphan train rider murders two young men in a boxcar and becomes the first person executed by

    the state. New York, 1906. A seventeen-year-old immigrant kills the uncle who abused her and walks free from

    a packed Manhattan courtroom. Two teenagers. Two states. Two verdicts that split the question of whether a

    child's history belongs to them or to the law.

    In this historical true crime double feature, Foul Play examines the execution of Charles "Kansas Charley" Miller

    and the acquittal of Josephine Terranova — two cases that reveal how gender, geography, and political timing

    determined which children America chose to protect and which it chose to destroy.

    The Victims

    Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh** were eighteen and twenty years old, from St. Joseph, Missouri. They

    were not vagrants. They had outfitted themselves for a tramping adventure on the Union Pacific line with new

    clothes, spending money, and arms. On the night of September 27, 1890, they were shot in the head while they

    slept in a boxcar somewhere between Pine Bluff and Hillsdale, Wyoming, by a fifteen-year-old boy they had been

    traveling with. Fishbaugh was found alive but died without recovering.

    **Gaetano and Concetta Riggio** were killed in their home at 110 East 220th Street in the Bronx by their niece

    and goddaughter, Josephine Terranova, in 1906. Gaetano had been Josephine's legal guardian and godfather

    since her arrival from Sicily. Trial testimony established that he had subjected her to years of forced labor and

    sustained sexual abuse behind closed doors.

    The Crimes

    Charles Miller — known as Kansas Charley — was born in a Manhattan tenement in 1874. Orphaned by age six, he

    was placed into the Children's Aid Society orphan train system founded by Charles Loring Brace in 1853. Roughly

    two hundred thousand children rode those trains between 1854 and 1929. Charley was beaten by his foster family

    for bedwetting and abandoned at a train depot at thirteen. He was gang-raped in a boxcar in Omaha. He bought

    a pistol. On September 27, 1890, he killed Emerson and Fishbaugh in their sleep and took their belongings.

    Josephine Pullare arrived at Ellis Island from San Stefano, Sicily, around 1903. Within a year, her aunt and uncle

    had turned her into a domestic servant working from four in the morning until midday, seven days a week.

    The sexual abuse began sometime after. Following her husband's departure, Josephine experienced a ten-day

    psychological collapse involving auditory hallucinations she believed were the voice of God commanding her to

    kill her uncle. She traveled to Park Row in lower Manhattan, purchased a revolver and a long potato knife, and

    returned to the Bronx to kill both Gaetano and Concetta Riggio.

    The Investigation and Trials

    Miller turned himself in through his brother Fred's foster family in Manhattan, Kansas. His court-appointed

    defender, Frank Taggart, had never handled a capital case and was not yet admitted to the Wyoming bar.

    Taggart's defense included the humiliating strategy of having Charley testify to chronic masturbation — a

    nineteenth-century theory linking the practice to moral derangement. The jury convicted. First-degree murder.

    Death by hanging. An eighteen-month petition campaign involving senators, congressmen, and the son of Esther

    Hobart Morris — the first woman to hold judicial office in the United States — failed to persuade Acting Governor

    Amos Barber to commute the sentence. On April 22, 1892, Charles Miller became the first person executed by

    the state of Wyoming, killed by a hydraulic gallows mechanism designed by James Julien that had never been

    used on a person before.

    Josephine Terranova's trial opened May 14, 1906, in Justice Francis M. Scott's courtroom on Franklin Street in

    Manhattan. Several hundred people packed inside, including more than forty women from the Italian-American

    community. Defense attorney ex-Judge Palmieri argued temporary madness. Prosecutor James R. Ely argued

    deliberate calculation. Competing alienists — the 1906 term for forensic psychiatrists — reached irreconcilable

    conclusions. The jury delivered a swift verdict: not guilty. Scholars have called it jury nullification. Josephine was

    seventeen years old.

    Historical Context

    These two cases, separated by fourteen years, mark a fault line in American juvenile justice during the historical

    true crime era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wyoming in 1892 was less than three months

    past statehood, assembling its legal institutions while the Johnson County War between cattle barons and

    homesteaders demanded hard enforcement. New York in 1906 had a legal tradition that sometimes extended

    a margin of leniency to female defendants — the so-called "unwritten law" — though it was not applied equally

    across race, class, or ethnicity.

    Cornell historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg brought Charley's story back to public attention in a 2003 book,

    discovered while researching juvenile male violence after the 1998 Jonesboro school shooting. In 2005, the

    Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that executing people for crimes committed before age eighteen was

    unconstitutional. Josephine relocated to California — reportedly with financial assistance from William Randolph

    Hearst — and settled in Marin County. She died on July 16, 1981, at ninety-two years old, outliving her uncle by

    seventy-five years.


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    New Mexico & Illinois: Two Political Murders, No Justice Sep 01, 2026
    Show notes

    Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states. Fifty crimes. Two hundred and fifty years of American

    history, told through the true crime cases that other shows leave behind.

    New Mexico, 1892. A former sheriff walks into the dark with a man he trusts and never comes home. Illinois, 1871.

    A former Secretary of State steps off his porch for a midnight train and is shot dead in the street. Both men

    served their communities. Both were killed for it. Both were largely forgotten — until now. This is historical true

    crime, and tonight both cases are about what happens when political power turns lethal.

    Case A: Francisco Chavez and the Santa Fe Ring

    Francisco Chavez was born around 1851 in New Mexico Territory, the son of a family that had shaped this region

    for generations before the American flag flew over Santa Fe's plaza. He was Hispanic, a nuevomexicano, and he

    became sheriff of Santa Fe County at a time when the territory's government had been captured by the Santa Fe

    Ring — an informal network of Anglo-American lawyers, politicians, and land speculators who exploited Spanish

    and Mexican land grants to strip Hispanic families of land they had occupied for generations.

    At the center of the Ring stood Thomas Catron, a Confederate veteran and Missouri lawyer who arrived in New

    Mexico in 1866. By the 1890s, Catron had acquired interests in thirty-four land grants totaling approximately

    three million acres — making him, by most accounts, the largest private landowner in the United States. He had

    served as district attorney, territorial attorney general, and U.S. attorney. He owned the territory as surely as

    anyone could.

    Chavez stood against him. Historian Tobias Duran, writing in the New Mexico Historical Review, called Chavez a

    formidable foe of the Santa Fe Ring. He was the rare Hispanic Democrat using the blunt authority of the sheriff's

    office to push back against the most powerful men in the territory.

    On the night of May 29, 1892, Chavez was lured from a Santa Fe bar by a man named Atilano Gold — someone

    he trusted. Gold walked him toward the Guadalupe bridge, near the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe,

    the oldest shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the United States. Armed men waited behind a telegraph pole.

    Chavez was shot multiple times. His last words, spoken in Spanish, were that brutes had assassinated him.

    Four men were indicted: Francisco Gonzales y Borrego, his brother Antonio, Laureano Alarid, and Patricio

    Valencia. Their defense attorney was Thomas Catron — the man widely suspected of ordering the murder,

    now defending the accused killers. The prosecution's key witness, Juan Gallegos, testified that a $700 payment

    had been offered through intermediaries for Chavez's death. Judge Seeds ruled that he did not believe Catron

    personally made the offer, but accepted the conspiracy existed. That distinction shielded Catron from criminal

    liability.

    All four defendants were convicted and sentenced to death. Appeals dragged on for nearly five years. On April

    2, 1897, they were hanged simultaneously at the Santa Fe jail grounds. Forty-five National Guard soldiers were

    present. At 9:09 AM, the trap bolt was drawn. Three necks broke on impact. Patricio Valencia strangled for three

    to four minutes before he died.

    Thomas Catron was never charged. When New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912, the territory he had helped

    plunder elected him as one of its first two United States Senators. He died in 1921. A former senator. Never

    charged. Never tried.

    Case B: Sharon Tyndale and the Seal That Outlasted Him

    Sharon Tyndale was born in Philadelphia on January 19, 1816. He arrived in Belleville, Illinois in 1833 — the same

    year Chicago was incorporated as a town — and spent the next three decades building railroads and building a

    career. Abraham Lincoln personally appointed him Postmaster of Belleville in 1861. When Lincoln was assassinated

    in 1865, Tyndale was among the committee members who received the president's coffin in Springfield. He was

    one of the original fifteen members of the National Lincoln Monument Association, the group that built Lincoln's

    tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery.

    In 1865, Tyndale was elected Illinois Secretary of State. His younger brother Hector had bled for the Union at

    Antietam, was promoted to brigadier general, and was later breveted major general for gallantry. The family's

    loyalty to the Union was bone-deep.

    In 1867, the Illinois legislature authorized a new state seal. Tyndale proposed reversing the state motto from "State

    Sovereignty, National Union" to "National Union, State Sovereignty." The Civil War had settled that question with

    blood. The Senate rejected his proposal. So the legislature gave him the wording and handed him the design.

    Tyndale kept the words in their mandated order. But he designed the banner in the eagle's beak to twist, placing

    the word "Sovereignty" upside down. The seal entered use in 1868. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the

    word "Sovereignty" still hangs inverted on the Great Seal of the State of Illinois.

    On April 29, 1871, two years after leaving office, Tyndale walked out of his home on Adams Street in Springfield

    just after one in the morning, heading to the Chicago & Alton railroad station for a 1:50 AM train. On the dark

    street, steps from his own front door, someone clubbed him to the ground and shot him behind the right ear with

    a single-shot Derringer — the same type of weapon used to kill Abraham Lincoln six years earlier. His $50 wallet

    was taken. His gold watch was not. His killer was never identified.

    A five-thousand-dollar reward went unclaimed. Four theories competed — robbery, romantic entanglement,

    political enemies, railroad business dispute — and the competition destroyed the investigation. The 1929 Illinois

    State Journal concluded the welter of possible motives had hindered the case. No arrest was ever made.

    The seal lives on. Every official document issued by the State of Illinois, every state flag that flies over Springfield,

    still carries the handiwork of a man who was murdered two years after completing it.


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    The Keepers, Where Are They Now Jun 17, 2026
    Show notes

    Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins close out their reunion by going down the list of the people who appeared in the Netflix documentary The Keepers, where they are today, who is still fighting, who has found peace, and who the world has lost. It is a warm, reflective conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, and about the community of survivors, investigators, journalists, and filmmakers her case brought together.

    The Investigators and Advocates

    Gemma gives an honest update on her own life, recovering from a broken hip, stepping back from the day-to-day advocacy, and finding peace in a quiet home in the woods. She talks about her fellow amateur investigator Abbie Schaub, who remains active in the legislative fight and helps run the official Keepers community online.

    The Survivors

    Shane and Gemma share where the survivors are now. Jean Hargadon Wehner, known as "Jane Doe" in the case, is doing meaningful work and published her memoir, Walking with Aletheia. Teresa Lancaster, "Jane Roe, " became an attorney and a leading public voice for survivors, helped pass Maryland's 2023 Child Victims Act, and wrote her memoir, Safe in Socks. Donna testified in Annapolis for the Child Victims Act and helped get Father Neil Magnus added to a public list of credibly accused clergy. They also remember Charles Franz and several of Sister Cathy's former students, including Kathy Hoback, the student Sister Cathy once shielded from Father Maskell, who passed away thispast year.

    The Journalists and Experts

    They remember journalist Bob Erlandson of the Baltimore Sun, who covered the case as it happened and died this past year at 94, and renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Werner Spitz, who died in 2024 at 97. Shane and Gemma also revisit Delegate C.T. Wilson, the abuse survivor who championed the Child Victims Act, and journalist Tom Nugent, whose reporting first brought the case back into the light.

    The Filmmakers

    Gemma catches listeners up on the team behind The Keepers, director Ryan White, producer Jessica Hargrave, and cinematographer John Benham, whose work since the series includes the Oscar-nominated, Peabody-winning documentary Come See Me in the Good Light. And, of course, they give a nod to Kim, who edits this very podcast.

    What Comes Next

    Shane and Gemma agree to keep going as the story unfolds, and invite listeners to suggest the people they would still like to hear from.

    Content Warning

    This episode discusses clergy abuse and violence.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is The Keepers about?

    The Keepers is a 2017 Netflix documentary series about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a Baltimore nun and teacher, and the allegations of abuse at Archbishop Keough High School that may be connected to her death.

    Who were Jane Doe and Jane Roe?

    Jean Hargadon Wehner was known as "Jane Doe" and Teresa Lancaster as "Jane Roe, " two survivors whose accounts were central to The Keepers. Both have since written memoirs and become advocates for other survivors.

    What is the Maryland Child Victims Act?

    Passed in 2023, the Maryland Child Victims Act removed the time limits on lawsuits for survivors of child sexual abuse. Survivors featured in The Keepers, along with Delegate C.T. Wilson, were instrumental in its passage.

    Is Sister Cathy's murder solved?

    No. The murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik remains unsolved more than fifty years later. Crisis Resources

    If you or someone you know has been affected by abuse:

    US: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673

    US: Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-422-4453

    UK: NSPCC Helpline, 0808 800 5000

    UK: Rape Crisis England & Wales, 0808 500 2222


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    The Suspects and the Silence Jun 11, 2026
    Show notes

    Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins continue their first sit-down in over a year, working through the second half of the questions listeners submitted through the show's Facebook community. This is the follow-up to "The Mary Statue and Unanswered Questions, " a wide-ranging conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik in Baltimore, Maryland. Known to millions through the Netflix documentary The Keepers, Gemma has spent more than a decade investigating what happened to Sister Cathy, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School.

    The Persons of Interest

    Listeners asked about the figures who have circled this case for years. Gemma explains why "Brother Bob" has never been publicly identified, how the nickname came to stand for more than one man, and why she has stepped back from the theory she put forward in her own 2019 book. She and Shane talk through how a single murder sits at the center of a web of other abuse and other suspected crimes, and why that makes Sister Cathy's case so difficult to untangle.

    New Questions Around Father Koob

    Gemma describes the women who have come forward in recent years with accusations against Father Gerard Koob, and walks through why, in her understanding, charges have been so hard to bring, including questions of jurisdiction and corroboration, since only some of the accusers were abused in Maryland. She recounts asking Detective Josh Battaglia to put her questions to Koob directly. Koob, who was the subject of a 2023 Baltimore Banner investigation by reporter Justin Fenton, continues to deny wrongdoing and says listeners are thinking of a different man. He has not been charged.

    Who Knew, and the Attorney General's Report

    Shane and Gemma discuss how much the staff at Archbishop Keough may have known, and why so many people went quiet after Sister Cathy was killed. They place it in the context of the Maryland Attorney General's 2023 report on clergy abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, a 456-page document detailing the abuse of more than 600 children across decades and the conclusion that "no parish went untouched. " That history is part of what is driving the Archdiocese's current bankruptcy.

    Joyce Malecki and the Sealed Files

    The conversation turns to Joyce Malecki, the 20-year-old whose 1969 murder near Fort Meade has long been discussed alongside Sister Cathy's. Gemma updates listeners on the 2023 exhumation of Joyce's body, the family's still-unanswered request for thousands of pages of FBI files first sought in 2014, and the letter Senator Chris Van Hollen carried to the White House on their behalf. Shane makes the case for why physical evidence in an unsolved murder should never be destroyed.

    Cathy's Family

    Gemma reflects on why Sister Cathy's family chose to step out of the spotlight after The Keepers, the heartbreak of learning their loved one's death may not have been random, and the dignity of their decision to protect their own peace.

    Content Warning

    This episode discusses clergy abuse and violence.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Who is Gemma Hoskins?

    Gemma Hoskins is a retired Baltimore teacher and former student at Archbishop Keough High School. She has spent more than a decade investigating the murder of her former teacher, Sister Cathy Cesnik, and was one of the central figures in the Netflix documentary The Keepers. She was named Maryland Teacher of the Year in 1992.

    Has anyone been charged in Sister Cathy's murder?

    No. The 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik remains unsolved, and no one has ever been charged.

    What is the Maryland Attorney General's report?

    Released in 2023, the report documented decades of child sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore, naming Father Joseph Maskell among its most prolific abusers and identifying more than 600 victims across the Archdiocese.

    Who is investigating Sister Cathy's case today?

    Detective Josh Battaglia of the Baltimore County Police Department currently handles the investigation. He took overfrom Corporal Robin Teal after her retirement.

    Crisis Resources

    If you or someone you know has been affected by abuse:

    US: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673

    US: Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-422-4453

    UK: NSPCC Helpline, 0808 800 5000

    UK: Rape Crisis England & Wales, 0808 500 2222


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    California & Alabama: When the Mob Decided to Be the Law Jun 02, 2026
    Show notes

    This episode contains descriptions of murder, mob violence, historical racial violence, and the execution of a convicted killer. If you need to skip this content, advance past the 18:00 mark. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

    This Episode

    Season 40: Fifty states, fifty forgotten crimes, America's 250th year. Episode 9 covers California and Alabama — two cases, two communities that looked at the legal system and reached for something uglier. October 10, 1890. A woman named Helen Riche is playing cards in her tavern near a California quicksilver mine when ten men in flour-sack hoods crash through the door. She does not run. She reaches up and rips the mask off the nearest man's face, and in that single act she solves the crime that is about to kill her. This is true crime history from the American frontier, and the legal system that followed would leave you cold.

    December 1888, Birmingham, Alabama. A railroad engineer named Richard Hawes boards a streetcar with his eight- year-old daughter May. He gets off with her at East Lake. He gets back on alone. The body of a young girl is found floating in the lake the next morning. On the same day, Hawes is across the state line getting married. When Birmingham finds out, two thousand people march on the jail.

    The Victims

    Helen Matilda Riche ran the Campers' Retreat tavern on sixty-two acres near the Bradford quicksilver mine, three miles south of Middletown, California. We do not know where she was born or how she came to run a mining-camp saloon in hard hill country — the historical record is thin on her life before October 10, 1890. What it preserves is a woman who managed a clientele of mercury miners in one of the most physically dangerous industries of the era. She was shot five times during the raid. She fought back, reaching for her husband's .44 Winchester with five bullets already in her body. She died four days later. Her husband J.W. Riche died less than three months after her, his own bullet wound never having healed.

    May Hawes was eight years old when her father took her on a one-way train ride to East Lake on the evening of December 3, 1888. She had been doing the work of a parent since she could walk, looking after younger siblings in a household already coming apart. She was laid out for public identification at Lockwood & Miller's Funeral Parlor in Birmingham, unidentified for a full day. A local butcher recognized her. May, her mother Emma, and her six-year-old sister Irene — all three murdered by Richard Hawes — lay in an unmarked grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in Birmingham for more than 135 years. In April 2024, they finally received a headstone.

    The Crimes

    The Lake County White Cap raid followed personal grudges that had been tightening for months. Blackburn, a mine foreman, had been thrown out of the Campers' Retreat after a brawl with the bartender Fred Bennett. Others in the group had boundary disputes, cattle quarrels, neighborhood debts to settle. They put flour sacks over their heads and called it a community morality action — the Whitecapping movement had spread from Indiana through the Southern states and into California by 1890. The plan was to flog Bennett and run him to the county line. Helen Riche unmasked Henry Arkarro the moment the men crashed through the door, and the plan collapsed into gunfire.

    Richard Hawes murdered three members of his own family to clear the way for a new marriage. Emma and Irene Hawes were found bound with curtain cord and weighted with railroad iron curve-braces in a Birmingham lake on December 8, 1888 — the same day a mob of approximately 2,000 people converged on the Jefferson County Jail demanding to hang him on the spot. Sheriff Joseph S. Smith fired into the crowd. Ten men were killed. Approximately thirty were wounded. The historical murder case that followed Hawes would take fourteen more months and a formal trial to reach the same conclusion the mob wanted.

    The Investigations and Legal Outcomes

    In California, ten men were arrested within days. The mining community was small; Helen Riche had identified one attacker herself. The trial opened February 6, 1891, in Lakeport — *People of the State of California v. B.F. Staley et al.* Four men were convicted of second-degree murder: Blackburn sentenced to twenty-five years, Staley and Cradwick to twenty years each, Osgood to twelve years. All four were released from San Quentin within approximately three years. The Governor had commuted Blackburn's sentence to ten years following an extensive lobbying campaign. Three years, for a home invasion that killed two people.

    In Alabama, Richard Hawes was tried beginning April 22, 1889, before Judge Samuel Greene. The prosecution built the case around May's murder — the strongest evidence available, though entirely circumstantial: eyewitness testimony placing father and daughter on the streetcar together, and only the father returning. The jury deliberated fifty-five minutes. Death. After multiple appeals to the Alabama Supreme Court, all denied, Richard Hawes was hanged by Sheriff Smith on February 28, 1890 — the same man who had fired into a crowd to keep him alive for this moment. Hawes wore a geranium in his lapel. The gallows were built by a man who had served on his jury.

    Historical Context

    Both cases sit at a specific American intersection: communities losing faith in institutional justice and reaching for extralegal violence, with consequences that fell hardest on people who had nothing to do with the original grievance. The Whitecapping movement was already documented across Indiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi before it reached California. In Alabama, the Birmingham riot of 1888 killed ten bystanders, including Maurice Throckmorton, thirty-three, the city's postmaster, who was reportedly trying to calm the crowd when he was shot. The legal system delivered the outcome the mob demanded — it just took fourteen months and cost ten additional lives to get there.

    California's legislature responded to the broader wave of hooded vigilantism during this period with enhanced anti- vigilante and anti-mask statutes. For the Hawes case, Fannie Bryant — the family's cook and a key witness for the prosecution — was herself sentenced to death for allegedly aiding Hawes. She died in a prison riot before the sentence could be carried out. Her actual level of involvement remains contested. She was a Black woman in 1880s Alabama, easily targeted by a system that offered her no protection.


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    New Hampshire & Colorado: Two Forgotten Murders, 1886-1897 May 26, 2026
    Show notes

    This episode contains discussions of murder, execution, racial violence, and a botched public hanging. If you need to skip any section, the chapter markers below will help you find your way around. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

    This Episode

    Season 40 of Foul Play covers America's forgotten crimes — fifty states, 250 years, and the stories that slipped out of the history books. Episode 8 closes out the season with a double portrait. One case from New Hampshire. One from Colorado. Eleven years apart. Two thousand miles between them. The same question at the center of both: when the law finally catches up with a killer, does it actually deliver justice?

    This is historical true crime at its most uncomfortable.

    Case A: The Great Falls National Bank Murder — New Hampshire , 1897

    Joseph A. Stickney was sixty-eight years old when a man walked into his bank on Good Friday morning, April 16, 1897, and cut his throat.

    Stickney was the cashier of the Great Falls National Bank in Somersworth, New Hampshire — a mill city of seven thousand people where the Salmon Falls River dropped one hundred feet over a mile and powered seven textile mills. The bank had operated since 1865. On a holiday morning, with the mills closed and families walking to Mass, Stickney was alone at his desk with $150,000 in money and securities behind him.

    The man who killed him was Joseph E. Kelley, twenty-four years old, born in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Kelley had been convicted in Somersworth five years earlier for breaking and entering. He had studied the bank's routine. He walked in with a blackjack, knocked Stickney to the floor, cut his throat, and left with approximately $6,000 in cash — leaving $144,000 behind.

    The historical murder investigation moved fast. Kelley hired a horse team from Whitten's Stable. The team was found the next day at Phoenix Stables. On April 29, investigators searched a boarding house in Berwick, Maine, where they found a box containing a false mustache and goatee. Kelley had already crossed into Quebec on a Boston & Maine train. He was caught in a Montreal brothel, seated between two prostitutes, still wearing a woman's dress he had purchased for $10 in gold from a hotelkeeper in Quebec.

    At trial in Dover, New Hampshire, in November 1897, Kelley changed his plea to guilty — but only if the hanging could be scheduled for January 16, 1898. He had a contract with the Devil, he explained, that expired January 15.

    Dr. Charles Bancroft of the New Hampshire State Asylum for the Insane examined Kelley multiple times and concluded he had the instincts of a man but the judgment and capacity of a child of nine. Expert after expert called him a "high-grade imbecile. " Chief Justice Alonzo P. Carpenter, who had served as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court since 1896, presided over a bench that ultimately found Kelley guilty of second-degree murder — thirty years in state prison. Kelley was reportedly disappointed. He had wanted to hang.

    Case B: The Trolley Murder of Joseph C. Whitnah — Colorado , 1886

    On the night of May 19, 1886, Joseph C. Whitnah was driving a horse-drawn streetcar along the Broadway line of the Denver City Railway when two men approached his car at the southern terminus at Broadway and Alameda.

    Whitnah was a streetcar operator in a city mid-boom. Denver's population tripled between 1880 and 1890, from roughly 35,000 to more than 106,000. The Denver City Railway operated forty-five coaches across sixteen miles of track.

    Andrew Green, twenty-five years old, and his associate John "Kansas" Withers had been waiting for Whitnah's car. Green fired two shots from a .38 caliber revolver. The first shot was accidental — triggered when Whitnah screamed. The second was deliberate, close-range, through the heart. Whitnah died on the spot. The $14 in fares in his cashbox went untouched.

    The true crime investigation broke in six days. On May 21, a private detective received a tip at the G.A.R. Saloon on Larimer Street — the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization for Union veterans. Withers confessed almost immediately and identified Green as the shooter. Green was arrested and confessed on May 25. He told investigators he had been promised the death penalty would be taken off the table if he cooperated.

    That promise was never confirmed or denied.

    Green stood trial before an all-white jury. This was Denver six years after a mob of 3,000 attacked the city's Chinese quarter and lynched a man named Look Young. Defense attorney Edgar Caypless worked pro bono. He argued that no robbery had actually been completed, that Green's confession was coerced by a false promise, and that the first shot was accidental. The jury deliberated a little over an hour — was polled four times, one juror holding out for second- degree — and returned a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. Death.

    On July 27, 1886, Sheriff Frederick Cramer of Arapahoe County cut the main rope at 2:24 PM before fifteen to twenty thousand spectators gathered between the Broadway and Colfax bridges. Vendors sold lemonade. Families had brought picnic lunches. Children were in the crowd.

    Green's neck did not snap. Twelve minutes after the jerk-up, doctors could still feel a pulse at his wrist. At 3:45 PM — eighty-one minutes after Cramer cut the rope — undertakers removed Andrew Green from the gallows and placed him in a casket bound for the "colored" section of Riverside Cemetery.

    The execution was condemned by nearly every Denver newspaper. In 1889, Colorado moved all executions to the state prison in Canon City, limited witnesses, and commissioned a new gallows design. In 1897 — the same year Joseph Stickney was murdered in New Hampshire — Colorado abolished the death penalty. It was reinstated in 1901.

    Historical Context

    Both cases arrived during the same decade, when American law was negotiating what justice was supposed to look like. In New Hampshire, a court grappled with whether a man who could plan a murder could simultaneously lack the mental capacity to stand fully accountable for it. In Colorado, a court asked whether a Black man could get a fair trial six years after his city had watched a lynch mob go unpunished.

    Neither question has a clean answer. Both still echo.

    This is Season 40 of Foul Play: America's 250th Anniversary — the crimes that didn't make the monuments.


    Our Sponsors:
    * Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com
    Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
    Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    1 2 3 33 Next

    Related Podcasts

    Up and Vanished

    1

    Up and Vanished News & Politics
    Invisibilia

    2

    Invisibilia Personal Journals
    Team Never Quit

    3

    Team Never Quit Comedy
    STORIES by Lea Thau

    4

    STORIES by Lea Thau Personal Journals
    A Thousand Natural Shocks With Gabe S. Dunn

    5

    A Thousand Natural Shocks With Gabe S. Dunn Business
    Next Question with Katie Couric

    6

    Next Question with Katie Couric Documentary
    footer-logo

    Contact Us

    Toll Free: 844-670-7747

    Links

    • Home
    • Top Charts
    • Networks
    • Apps
    • Independents Podcasts
    • Podcast Advertising
    • Podcast News
    • Contact Us
    • About Us
    • Analytics & Insights

    Stay Connected

      Privacy, Terms of Use & Our Code of Ethics Protecting Content Creators Copyrights