Forgotten True Crime

Thanksgiving night, 1949. Bethel Island, out in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta. Two sheriff's deputies pull up in front of a small cottage at twenty-five past seven. A woman is lying on the front lawn, where she's been since about four o'clock. Inside, the potatoes for the day's dinner are still cooking on the stove, and the table has been set and, in the paper's words, "gaily decorated."

Nobody ever sat down to that dinner.

Next door, five of her guests have been hiding for three hours, afraid the man with the gun is still out there in the dark. Neither house has a telephone.

And the man who did it never kept it a secret. The night before, according to the man he shared a room with, he said out loud that he was going to wipe out a Thanksgiving dinner party. The man he told paid no attention.

The papers gave Hildegard Clark a single line: a widow, 58. They even got her age wrong. The records give her a whole life: a girl from Sweden who crossed an ocean by herself at twenty-two, married a soldier home from France, cut hair for a living, buried her husband, saved her money, and ended up with a little house of her own on an island in the Delta.

This is her story, built from the Thanksgiving-weekend front pages of 1949 and the records she left behind, from a Swedish emigration list to a troopship manifest to the census.

Welcome to Carving Season: all November long, Forgotten True Crime is telling the stories of crimes that happened around Thanksgiving. So when you sit down with the family this year, consider this your friendly warning. Be careful what you say at dinner.

Content note: this episode includes a killing with a gun and a suicide attempt. If you or someone you love is struggling, you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time, day or night.

ON THE BLOG: The front pages from Thanksgiving weekend, 1949, and Hildegard's emigration record from Sweden are at Section29.com, under The Murder of Hildegard Clark.

SOURCES: The Richmond Independent, the Oakland Post-Enquirer, the Oakland Tribune, the Martinez News-Gazette and the Selma Enterprise, through Newspapers.com; Swedish emigration records; U.S. Army transport passenger lists, 1919; federal census records, California voter registers, the California Death Index and the Social Security Death Index; court and probate notices of Contra Costa County; and a 1943 photograph of San Quentin by Ann Rosener, at the Library of Congress.

HAVE A CASE? If there's a forgotten case you'd like me to dig into, reach out at Section29.com. I'm always looking for the next forgotten story.

Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast. One man doing the research, the writing, the recording and the editing. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

MUSIC: Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. https://www.tracktribe.com · https://www.instagram.com/tracktribemusic/

FIND THE SHOW

Blog: https://section29.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sect29

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/forgotten-true-crime/id1524457435

All links: https://linktr.ee/forgottentruecrime

Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops. And if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

Thanksgiving night, 1934. Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the back of the Owl Tavern, two doors from the Quaker Drug Store, nineteen-year-old Phil Kennamer, a federal judge's son, opens his coat to show a friend the hunting knife on his belt. He has a date tonight, he says. With Gorrell. At eleven o'clock.

He walks out the front door and yells back that he'll be back in five minutes. He never does come back.

For nine days before that night, Phil had been telling his friends what he was going to do. He showed them a note. He sent one of them a telegram from Kansas City that ended, "Keep your mouth shut." By the county attorney's count, at least ten people had seen that note. As far as the record shows, not one of them went to the police.

John Gorrell was twenty-one: a licensed pilot, a first-year dental student, home for Thanksgiving. This is the story of how he died, and of the young crowd at the Quaker who heard it coming, told through Jack Snedden, the friend Phil called to the Owl that night. It's built from the Tulsa front pages, the wire stories that carried it across the country, and the court's own record of what was said under oath.

Back in August 2020, this case got about ten minutes tucked inside another episode. This time it gets two. Part 1 follows it from the fall of 1934 into the winter of 1935. Part 2, A Roman Holiday, is next.

Content note: this episode involves violence and the deaths of young men, and one of those deaths was ruled a suicide. If you or someone you love is struggling, you don't have to carry it alone. In the U.S., call or text 988, any time.

ON THE BLOG: The Tulsa front pages from that winter, the wire photographs and the court's opinion are all at Section29.com, under The Killing of John Gorrell.

IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING: If your family knew the Sneddens, the Gorrells or the Wilcoxes, if you have a photograph of Jack Snedden or of Dr. J. F. Gorrell, or if you've ever come across newsreel footage shot in Tulsa in December 1934, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at Section29.com. And if you have a forgotten Oklahoma case you'd like me to dig into, send it along.

Listening on the Forgotten True Crime feed? Okie Investigations is now home to every Oklahoma case we do. Find Okie Investigations wherever you're listening and subscribe, so you'll know when the next one drops.

Okie Investigations, by Forgotten True Crime. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

MUSIC: Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

FIND THE SHOW: Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime

Subscribe wherever you're listening, and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

Two people were in that rice field with Joseph Calloway, and each said the other pulled the trigger. Louisiana would try Toni Jo Henry three times. While her case went up to the state Supreme Court and back, the man who was with her that night waited. The state wouldn’t execute one of them while the other’s fate was still undecided. Meanwhile Louisiana gave up the gallows for an electric chair that could be taken to the parish where the prisoner was convicted.

Then, in November 1942, Claude “Cowboy” Henry broke out of a Texas prison farm under gunfire, telling the papers he wanted to see his wife. This is the end of the story: the courtroom, the death cell, and what became of everyone the case touched, including the family Joseph Calloway left behind.

Content note: violence and an execution.

Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

On Valentine’s night, 1940, Joseph P. Calloway, a Houston tire salesman doing some friends a favor, stopped for two hitch-hikers on the Old Spanish Trail near Orange, Texas. Nobody reported him missing. Three days later, a young woman picked up in Shreveport over a burglary told Louisiana state police there was a dead man in a rice field south of Lake Charles. Then she spent six hours leading them to him.

Most tellings of this case give Calloway a name and nothing more. In this episode we follow his own records, from a farm in the North Carolina mountains to the open road. We also meet the people in the car with him that night: Annie Beatrice “Toni Jo” Henry, her husband Claude “Cowboy” Henry, sitting in a Texas prison, and a young Army deserter called “Arkie.” She said she shot him. Then she said she didn’t. Then he said she did.

Content note: violence, and descriptions of exploitation and drug addiction.

Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

On a Thursday night in May 1977, two Midwest City patrolmen met a few blocks from an apartment complex at Southeast 25th and Douglas so neither one would have to walk in alone. They’d been sent on a welfare check: a man nobody had seen all week. What the older officer found when he opened the refrigerator stayed with him for the rest of his life.

The man was Theodore Canatis, a retired Air Force man who worked maintenance at the OU Health Sciences Center. Six months earlier his son Gregory, nineteen and just out of Hawaii, had come to live with him. By the following morning, police said Gregory had told them he killed his father.

What came after is the stranger story. Gregory was charged with first-degree murder, but he was never tried and never convicted. Doctors called him insane, the court sent him to a state hospital, and the charge was dropped three years later. Then came a lawsuit over the warning nobody gave, a federal ruling that rewrote Oklahoma’s commitment law, and a grocery store in Norman. For thirty-seven years, nobody could quite decide what to do with him.

We first told this story in August 2020. This is the full version, rebuilt from the newspapers of 1977 through 2017, the court filings and the press photographs.

Content warning: violence, dismemberment, cannibalism, serious mental illness and self-harm.

The newspaper coverage and links to the 1977 press photographs (Oklahoma Historical Society) are at Section29.com.

Follow us at https://www.youtube.com/@Sect29

https://open.spotify.com/show/0TzmO5YuMYA2ECbTiCKdEt

If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time in the U.S.

Okie Investigations, by Forgotten True Crime. Hosted by Trevor Shelby.

Monday night, the fourth of August, 1919. Binghamton, New York. A mother and her two grown daughters have just moved into a plain frame house on Robinson Street, and a crowd of young people has come by to welcome them. Out on the little back porch, a young man just home from the war is sitting in the dark with a cigarette. Out front, the last guests are saying goodnight.

Then a big touring car comes up the street with its headlights on. A tall, heavy-set man gets out, walks up the front steps, and goes inside.

Everyone in that house knew the man who came through the front door. Proving it in a courtroom was going to be another thing altogether.

This one has everything: a railroad policeman who'd lost his job a month before, a soldier just back from France, four women in a taxicab and a bar that wouldn't sell a man a drink, a dying woman, a patrolman and a notebook, five hundred men called in for jury duty, and a bundle of letters nobody expected to hear read out loud in a courtroom. And the one man who saw it all happen, who would never take the stand at the trial.

This is the story of Vera Rickard, told the way I've come to understand it, built out of the Binghamton Press of 1919 and the sworn testimony from the trial.

Content note: this episode describes a shooting inside a family home and the deaths that followed, a fatal accident at work, heavy drinking, and threats of violence. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one.

ON THE BLOG: Everything I found for this episode is at Section29.com: the Binghamton Press coverage from 1919, the photographs the paper ran that summer, and the 1918 fire-insurance maps that show the house, the train station and the courthouse as they stood the year before.

SOURCES: The Binghamton Press, 1919, through Newspapers.com; the Elmira Star-Gazette and other papers of 1919, through Newspapers.com and the Library of Congress's Chronicling America; Broome County's Famous Murder Trials (c. 1922); federal and New York State census records, draft registration cards and the New York State death index; and the Sanborn fire-insurance maps of Binghamton, 1918, and Detroit Publishing Company photographs, at the Library of Congress.

HAVE A CASE? If there's a forgotten case you'd like me to dig into, reach out at Section29.com. I'm always looking for the next forgotten story.

Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast. One man doing the research, the writing, the recording and the editing. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

MUSIC: Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. https://www.tracktribe.com · https://www.instagram.com/tracktribemusic/

FIND THE SHOW

Blog: https://section29.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sect29

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/forgotten-true-crime/id1524457435

All links: https://linktr.ee/forgottentruecrime

Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops. And if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

In the fall of 1954, Dr. Sam Sheppard went on trial for the murder of his wife, Marilyn. Reporters sat inside the rail, the jurors’ names and addresses were printed in the paper, and a radio station broadcast from the room next to the jury room.

In Part 2 we follow the case from the county jail to the verdict, and then through the years that followed: a scientist from Berkeley, ten years of appeals, a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, a second trial, and a son who spent his life trying to clear his father’s name.

This episode is built from the word-for-word 1954 and 1966 trial transcripts, the federal court rulings, the Cleveland newspaper coverage and the police files. Where something comes from a secondary source, I say so.

If you haven’t heard Part 1, start there.

Content note: this episode covers violent crime and includes two deaths by suicide. If you’re struggling, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time, day or night.

Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

Just before six on the morning of July 4, 1954, the mayor of Bay Village, Ohio, picks up his phone. It’s his friend and neighbour, Dr. Sam Sheppard, saying: “My God, Spen, get over here quick. I think they’ve killed Marilyn.”

Upstairs, Marilyn Sheppard, 31 and four months pregnant, has been beaten to death in her bed. Her husband says he fought a bushy-haired intruder twice in the dark, once in the bedroom and once on the beach. Then the house starts to tell its own story. Two watches stopped an hour apart. A green bag of jewelry turns up in the weeds, and a T-shirt nobody can find. A burglar seemingly left the cash behind, and the family dog never barked.

In Part One, we follow the first 26 days. A prominent family closes ranks around its son. A coroner holds his inquest in a school gym in front of 200 neighbours. A young woman’s name surfaces, and with it the story of a wristwatch bought as a gift. Through it all, the Cleveland Press tells the police on its front page exactly what it thinks they should do. It all ends with a warrant signed late at night, and a black light that finds something in the house that nobody expected.

Told from the 1954 newspapers and the sworn inquest testimony.

Content note: this episode describes the violent death of a pregnant woman and discusses a marriage and an affair.

Photos, clippings and inquest transcripts are at Section29.com.

Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops — and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

On January 31, 2002, Robert Roberson carried his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, into the emergency room in Palestine, Texas. She was limp and blue, and she had been sick all week. He said she had fallen out of bed in the night. The nurses thought he seemed too calm, and the detective said his story didn’t match the evidence. Nikki died the next day.

Doctors called it shaken baby syndrome. Within a year a jury had convicted Roberson of capital murder, and he was sentenced to death.

Twenty years later the case looks different. New experts point to pneumonia, the medicine she was given, and a fall. The State’s experts still stand by abuse. Roberson was later diagnosed with autism, and the detective who arrested him now says he didn’t see Robert for who he was. In October 2024, days before his execution date, a Texas House committee stepped in. A year later the state’s highest criminal court stopped the execution and sent the case back to East Texas.

This episode walks through what the jury heard, what has changed since, and why some of the people who were most sure in 2002 aren’t anymore. As of October 2026, Robert Roberson is still waiting.

• Blog: https://section29.com
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sect29
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/forgotten-true-crime/id1524457435

Monday night, the fourth of June, 1945. Park Avenue at Forty-Seventh Street, the Hotel Marguery, where the people who live there don't visit; they live there, in suites, with maids. Two men in soft dark hats step into an elevator, and one of them says one word: "Seven."

Up on the seventh floor, in apartment 705, a red-haired heiress is lying in bed. Her husband, Albert Langford, sixty-three, a textile man, is sitting at the foot of it, reading the paper. Then their little black Pekingese starts to growl at a door they never use. Two strangers are out there, and they want to see her about Raphael Diaz, a Metropolitan Opera tenor who has been dead for a year and a half. She tells Albert to send them away. He goes back out to the foyer, and she hears a thud, and a groan.

Within days, New York had everything it wanted except an answer: a widow who said one age and was another, a silent film star, the most famous face of 1906, a singer under a borrowed name, a self-styled chief and a self-styled baroness, and a little gift book with more than two hundred names in it and a sum of money beside every one. The papers chased all of it, and somewhere along the way they lost sight of the man on the foyer floor. This is his story, built from the newspapers of the time and the records that survive, and it's about what a city looked at instead of him, and the name a district attorney finally said out loud, five years later.

Content note: this episode describes a shooting and a death, and the investigation that followed. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one.

ON THE BLOG: Everything I found for this episode is at Section29.com: the newspaper pages from 1945 to 1950, the photographs, and a floor plan of the apartment that a newspaper artist drew in 1950.

Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

MUSIC: Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

FIND THE SHOW: Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime

Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops. And if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.