The Brutal Murder Of Mayme Sherman

A True Crime Short Story by Richard O Jones

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One of the factors behind my interest in historical true crime is that my hometown of Hamilton, Ohio, seems to have a particularly rich history of crime--murder in particular, but not just murder. I’ve done several local programs about the safecrackers, bandits, and other notorious characters. This short story, “Bacon On The Table,” concerns the third of three “bluebeard” killers in the first decade of the 20th century. The first was the murder of Hannah Knapp by Alfred Knapp in December, 1902. This is the subject of my book, “The First Celebrity Serial Killer.” But even before this crime came to light, Samuel J. Keelor tried to decapitate his wife on Valentine’s Day, 1903. You can read more about that story in my ebook, “The Sleepwalking Slasher.”

The following year, just a week after Knapp paid the ultimate penalty for his crime, Charles Victor Sherman commits the horrible crime detailed in this episode.

In more recent days, Hamilton is the hometown of “the Cross Country Killer” Glen Rogers, who murdered at least five people in 1994 and 1995, and probably more than that. He is currently on death row.And perhaps the most sensational of all Hamilton stories is the Easter Massacre of 1975, in which James Urban Ruppert gunned down his mother, his brother, and his brother’s wife and eight children. But friends, this was not Hamilton’s first mass family murder, but our third. In 1925, Francis Lloyd Russell shot eight members of his family one hot summer night (see the Two-Dollar Terror “Massacre On Prospect Hill”). And in October, 1929, the barber Charlie King opened the gas pipes in his house while his wife and five sons slept, then hopped on a northbound freight train (see the Two-Dollar Terror “The Gas Fume Fugitive”).I am also descended from murderers, although their crimes weren’t in Hamilton but in various Kentucky locations. Maybe I’ll tell you about those someday.

More Hometown Horrors

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