Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast

Season 40: America's 250th — 50 states, 50 forgotten crimes. Two communities. Two murders decades apart.

In the Arkansas Ozarks, a town rushed to convict a man on circumstantial evidence and may have hanged the

wrong person. In northern Michigan, an entire town conspired to kill its tyrannical founder — then said nothing

for sixteen years.

In 1912, eighteen-year-old Ella Barham walked to a post office in the Arkansas hills to buy cloth for a hat. She

never came home. Her dismembered remains were found scattered across a hillside that night. The community

blamed a neighbor named Odus Davidson. He was hanged within nine months. His gravestone still declares he

was innocent.

The Victims

Ella Lillian Ethel Barham was born February 16, 1894, in the Pleasant Ridge community of Boone County, Arkansas

— a scattering of homesteads along Crooked Creek in the Ozark hills. Her father, George Solomon Barham, was

one of the largest landowners in the county. Ella was eighteen, described by neighbors as popular and well-liked.

On the morning of November 21, 1912, her world measured in creek crossings and ridge trails. Her biggest concern

was a hat.

In Michigan, the victim was Albert Molitor — born 1842 in Ludwigsburg, Germany, founder of Rogers City and

the political architect of Presque Isle County. He built the sawmill, the store, the boarding house, the post office.

He paid workers in scrip redeemable only at his store. He declared himself "the King of Presque Isle County." He

was thirty-three when fifteen men decided he had to die. But the shooting that killed Molitor on August 23, 1875,

also killed Edward Sullivan — a clerk working late, a bystander, a man whose death nobody conspired to avenge.

The Crimes

In Arkansas, Ella Barham's remains were found around 9:00 p.m. by two boys and a hunter on a hillside south of

Crooked Creek. She had been decapitated, severed at the torso, both legs removed, and nearly every bone in her

skull crushed. Doctors Taylor and Lair determined she had been sexually assaulted, possibly by more than one

person. Neighbor Odus Davidson — twenty-nine, known to have expressed romantic interest Ella rejected —

was arrested within days. His seventeen-year-old brother Lair was taken in as an accomplice.

In Michigan, buckshot from at least two guns tore through the mill office where Albert Molitor and clerk Edward

Sullivan worked. Fifteen to twenty pieces of shot struck Molitor in the back and side. Sullivan took a blast through

the jaw that severed his tongue. Sullivan died the next day on a boat to Alpena. Molitor lingered approximately

three weeks before dying in Detroit.

The Investigations

The Davidson case was built entirely on circumstantial evidence: threatening statements Odus made after Ella's

rejection, red pepper-filled socks dropped from a Davidson window to confuse bloodhounds, a bloody axe at the

family woodpile, and Davidson's reluctance to join the search party. No confession. No eyewitness. No forensic

evidence that would meet modern standards. The trial before Judge George Reed lasted five days. Davidson was

not present when the jury returned its verdict of murder in the first degree after four hours of deliberation. He

was sentenced to hang.

Attorney E.G. Mitchell — a former circuit court judge — fought the conviction through the Arkansas Supreme

Court and lobbied the governor for clemency. Every effort failed. On August 11, 1913, Odus Davidson was hanged

in Harrison before a crowd numbering in the thousands. His final words were a declaration of innocence. The

rope was cut into pieces and thrown to the crowd as souvenirs.

In Rogers City, there was no investigation — not a real one. Nobody particularly wanted to find the killers. For

sixteen years the community kept its silence. In 1891, farmer William Repke turned himself in and named fourteen

other conspirators. He identified Hermann Hoeft, a rival store owner, as the mastermind and Andrew Banks as

the orchestrator. When authorities tried to seat a jury in Presque Isle County, they summoned, examined, and

dismissed 252 prospective jurors. The entire eligible pool. The trial moved to Alpena County. Five men were

convicted and sentenced to life with hard labor at Jackson State Prison. Approximately five years later, the

governor pardoned four; the fifth was pardoned roughly two and a half years after that.

Historical Context

Both cases reveal how justice operated in isolated American communities before professional law enforcement

and modern forensics. In Boone County, Arkansas, grief and certainty replaced due process. In Presque Isle

County, Michigan, a community decided collectively that a killing was deserved — and the state eventually

agreed by pardoning the convicted men. Davidson's appeal has been cited as legal precedent in numerous cases,

including the 1915 Leo Frank appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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.

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