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A cook scolds a clumsy farmhand who cannot work a roasting jack, and he explains that his family was too poor to eat meat. The farmhand is Charles II, the most wanted man in England. On September 3rd, 1651, Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army destroyed his forces at the Battle of Worcester, and the king fled out the back of his lodgings with about 60 mounted officers. Persuaded that a private army could not hide, he sent them away, put on green breeches, a leather doublet, and a greasy gray hat, and let Richard Penderel hack off his hair with shears.

This episode follows the six weeks that came after, a flight kept alive by Catholic families practiced at hiding people, by a borrowed travel permit, and by luck. Parliament offered 1,000 pounds for the king and promised death to anyone who helped him. He walked on bleeding feet in shoes too small, hid in priest holes, rode as a servant named William Jackson, and was nearly undone by a locked bedroom door and a set of horseshoes. In the early hours of October 15th he sailed from Sussex on a coal boat, two hours ahead of the cavalry.

• Charles spent a day in an oak tree near Boscobel House while soldiers searched below, and Colonel William Careless pinched him to keep him from falling asleep and out of the branches.
• At Moseley Hall the priest John Huddleston bathed the king's feet, and Charles called for him on his deathbed 34 years later to convert to Catholicism.
• Posing as Jane Lane's servant, he told a blacksmith that the rogue Charles Stuart deserved to be hanged more than all the rest.
• A captain hired at Charmouth never showed because his wife, sensing danger, locked him in his bedroom.
• Captain Nicholas Tattersell recognized his passenger in a Brighton pub and demanded an extra 200 pounds before he would sail.

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In February 1861 a woman on a night train to Washington, D.C. fussed loudly over her sick brother, a tall man slumped under a shawl and a soft felt cap. The brother was president-elect Abraham Lincoln, and the woman was Kate Warne of the Pinkerton agency, moving him through Baltimore past a planned assassination. Five years earlier, in 1856, she had walked into Allan Pinkerton's Chicago office as a 23-year-old widow and asked for a detective's job. Told it was not the custom to employ female detectives, she argued that a woman could collect secrets in parlors and on train rides where a man would be suspected at once.

This episode pieces together what survives of her career. She cracked an 1858 embezzlement case by befriending the suspect's wife, ran Pinkerton's female detective bureau by 1860, and posed as a Southern lady at Baltimore's Barnum Hotel to learn how the plotters meant to strike during Lincoln's horse-drawn transfer between stations. She later spied for the Union and worked murder and poisoning cases under invented names. She died in January 1868 at about 35, and most records of her work burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

• In the Adams Express case, Warne's friendship with Mrs. Maroney helped convict her husband and recover nearly $40,000 of a stolen $50,000.
• The Baltimore plotters planned a staged street brawl at the Calvert Street Station to draw off police while Lincoln's car was pulled by horses toward Camden Street.
• Pinkerton had the telegraph lines cut on the night of February 22nd so no one in Harrisburg could warn Baltimore that Lincoln had left.
• Warne's sleepless watch until the 6 a.m. arrival in Washington reportedly inspired the Pinkerton slogan, We Never Sleep.
• After the war she posed as a fortune teller named Lucille to draw confessions in a suspected family poisoning.

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Between roughly 1688 and the 1820s, a worker in England, Wales, or Ireland who stole goods worth 12 pence, about one twentieth of a skilled worker's weekly wage, could be hanged for it. Historians call the system the Bloody Code. In 1689 there were about 50 capital offenses. By around 1820 there were more than 200, and most of the additions protected property. As common land was enclosed, the landowners sitting in Parliament made it a hanging matter to poach deer, cut down estate trees, damage a fish pond, or embezzle from the post office.

This episode examines the logic behind those laws and why they failed. With no organized police, Parliament bet on terror, a view summed up by the Marquess of Halifax: men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen. Juries refused to cooperate. Executions actually declined as the statutes multiplied, and the standoff pushed the government toward transportation, first to the American colonies and then, after 1776 and the misery of the prison hulks, to Australia. The story ends with a repeal so slow that its last traces survived into the age of the internet.

• The Black Act of 1723, aimed at poachers like the Waltham Blacks who darkened their faces with soot, created over 50 new capital offenses on its own.
• In a practice called pious perjury, juries valued an obviously costly stolen item at 11 pence, one penny under the threshold for death.
• The First Fleet sailed in 1787, and between 1788 and 1867 over a third of all convicted criminals in Britain were transported to Australia.
• The Judgment of Death Act of 1823 let judges pass lesser sentences for almost all capital crimes, and by 1861 the list had shrunk to five.
• Treason and piracy with violence stayed capital crimes on paper until September 1998, decades after the last execution in 1964.

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A skeleton on display in a London medical museum belongs to the man who ran the city's underworld while the public thanked him for fighting crime. Jonathan Wild was born poor in Wolverhampton in the early 1680s and came to a London of around 600,000 people with no police force, only unpaid parish constables. Thrown into the Wood Street Compter for debt in 1710, he learned how corruption worked by running errands for the jailers and lending to inmates, and a prostitute named Mary Milliner taught him the stolen goods trade. He then studied extortion as assistant to the crooked under-marshal Charles Hitchen and took the racket from him.

This episode explains the closed loop Wild built from an office in the Old Bailey. His gang stole the goods, victims paid him a finder's fee to recover them, and any thief who held out was handed to the hangman for the government's 40 pound bounty. The scheme lasted until Wild met Jack Sheppard, a burglar who refused to work for him and kept escaping from prison. The feud turned London against the self-appointed Thief-Taker General, his own men testified, and he was hanged at Tyburn before a jeering crowd.

• When Hitchen tried to expose him in print, Wild answered with a pamphlet revealing Hitchen's visits to molly houses, which ended him as a threat.
• In 1720 the Privy Council asked Wild for advice on crime, and he persuaded them to raise the bounty for thieves from 40 pounds to 140.
• He advertised a lost notebook found near a tavern known as a brothel, a public hint to its owner to pay up or be exposed.
• Blueskin Blake, denied Wild's help at his trial, slashed Wild's throat with a pocket knife in open court.
• Convicted in 1725 over 50 yards of stolen lace, Wild tried laudanum on the morning of his execution, and Arthur Conan Doyle later cited him as the model for Professor Moriarty.

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In July 1882 a man hauling wood in West Turkey Creek Canyon, Arizona found a body seated on a flat rock among five oak trees growing from a single root. The corpse was blackened by the sun, a bullet had entered the right temple, a revolver was still in the right hand, and the feet were wrapped in strips torn from an undershirt. This was John Peters Ringo, the outlaw the movies present as a Latin-quoting rival of Doc Holliday. The record shows someone else: a boy who at 14 watched his father die in a shotgun accident on a Wyoming wagon trail, and who grew into a drifter and a violent drunk.

This episode works from coroner's findings, newspaper clippings, and court records to separate the man from the legend. It covers his killings in the Texas feud known as the Hoodoo War, his loose ties to the Cochise County Cowboys, and a Tombstone more worried about mining investors than gunfights. Then it tests each theory of his death. Wyatt Earp's claim does not fit the calendar, Doc Holliday was in a Colorado courtroom, and the coroner's jury ruling of suicide is the one the evidence supports.

• In September 1875 Ringo and a partner shot an unarmed James Chaney on his own porch while he washed his face in a basin.
• In Safford, Arizona a drunk Ringo shot Lewis Hancock for declining a whiskey and saying he preferred beer. Hancock survived.
• His January 1882 street confrontation with Doc Holliday ended with both men arrested and fined for carrying weapons inside city limits.
• Ringo's horse was found 11 days after the body, two miles away, with his boots still tied to the saddle.
• Court records put Doc Holliday in Pueblo County, Colorado on July 11th, 14th, and 18th, roughly 700 miles from the canyon.

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On a July night in 1934, bystanders in a Chicago alley dipped handkerchiefs and scraps of newspaper in the blood of a man federal agents had just shot. The man was John Dillinger, born in 1903 in Indianapolis and raised by a strict grocer father. His path to that alley began with a clumsy 1924 grocery store robbery that netted about $50. On his father's advice he pleaded guilty without a lawyer, expected leniency, and got 10 to 20 years. He came out in May 1933 after nine and a half years, trained by veteran bank robbers in the stopwatch methods of Herman Lamm.

This episode follows the short, violent career that came next. Dillinger robbed his first bank within weeks, was broken out of an Ohio jail by the mentors he had armed, and walked out of the supposedly escape proof jail at Crown Point. To a public that blamed banks for the Depression, he looked like an avenger. To J. Edgar Hoover, his state-hopping was the argument for a federal police force. The pursuit ran through shootouts in St. Paul and at Little Bohemia, back room plastic surgery, and a betrayal outside the Biograph Theater.

• Lamm's system gave each robber a role, including a driver who timed the job with a stopwatch, and Dillinger avoided Anderson, Indiana because trains might block his getaway.
• The March 1934 Crown Point escape is credited to a wooden pistol blackened with shoe polish, though a deputy and a later investigator claimed the gun was real.
• A doctor paid $5,000 nearly killed him with an ether overdose during facial surgery, then burned his fingertips with nitric and hydrochloric acid.
• A brothel owner facing deportation to Romania tipped off the FBI and wore an orange dress to the movies on July 22nd, which the papers turned into the Woman in Red.
• An estimated 15,000 people lined up to view his body, and his gravestone at Crown Hill Cemetery has been replaced several times because visitors chip off pieces.

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Jim Corbett killed big cats that had taken hundreds of human lives, and he is also remembered as a founding figure of wildlife conservation with a tiger subspecies named for him. Born in 1875 in Nainital, India, the eighth of nine children of a postmaster who died young, he grew up roaming the jungles near the family's winter home at Kaladhungi. He moved from a catapult to a pellet bow to a muzzle loading shotgun by age eight, and learned to read alarm calls and pug marks from villagers. As an Anglo-Indian he lived among local people, spoke their languages, and respected their beliefs.

This episode follows that boy through 22 years running river transport at Mokameh Ghat, a labor corps on the Western Front, and the hunts that made him famous, beginning in 1907 with the Champawat tigress. It also traces his turn from rifle to camera. Years of tracking taught him that man-eaters were usually injured animals and that the real danger to India's wildlife was vanishing habitat. He filmed tigers with a noisy hand-cranked camera, pressed the government to create India's first national park, and wrote Man-Eaters of Kumaon from a sickbed in 1943.

• The Champawat tigress killed 200 people in Nepal and another 200 in India before Corbett used a beat of nearly 300 men to drive her toward his rifle.
• Of the 500 Kumaon men he personally led to France in World War I, only one died, in part because he built them a brick building with heated bathhouses and drying rooms.
• He hunted the leopard of Rudraprayag for ten weeks in 1925 and killed it on his last night in the region.
• In 1952 at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya he guarded Princess Elizabeth on the night her father died, and wrote in the log book that she went up a princess and came down a queen.
• His first national park was later renamed Jim Corbett National Park, and in 1968 the Indochinese tiger was given the scientific name Panthera tigris corbetti.

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On a January night in 1875, armed men surrounded a Missouri farmhouse and threw an incendiary device through the window. It rolled into the fireplace and exploded, nearly severing a mother's arm and killing her nine-year-old son. The attackers were Pinkerton detectives. The victims were the family of Frank and Jesse James, who were not even home. This episode starts there to ask how a gang of bank and train robbers came to look like the wronged party, and the answer begins in Civil War Missouri, where teenagers like the James brothers and Cole Younger learned ambush and terror as Confederate bushwhackers.

When the war ended, those skills moved to a new target. The February 1866 raid on the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty used cavalry tactics on a bank and took around $60,000. A newspaper editor named John Newman Edwards then recast the robbers as noble knights in an editorial called The Chivalry of Crime, and Jesse James wrote his own letters to the press. The story follows that publicity machine through the Pinkerton war, the catastrophic 1876 raid on Northfield, Minnesota, and the reward money that finally turned the gang against itself.

• At Gallatin in December 1869, Jesse James shot cashier John W. Sheets because he mistook him for Samuel P. Cox, the Union officer who had killed Bloody Bill Anderson.
• During the 1874 Gads Hill train robbery the gang reportedly checked passengers' hands for calluses, then telegraphed their own press release to a St. Louis newspaper.
• In Northfield, citizens grabbed rifles from hardware stores and fought back, and medical student Henry Wheeler shot gang member Clell Miller from a hotel window.
• The Youngers were cornered at Hanska Slough about two weeks later, pleaded guilty to murder to avoid the death penalty, and never informed on Frank or Jesse.
• On April 3rd, 1882, Bob Ford shot Jesse James behind the ear as he stood on a chair to dust a picture, in a deal made with Governor Thomas T. Crittenden.

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In the fall of 1724, the most secure prison in England was beaten by a five foot four carpenter with a slight stutter. Jack Sheppard was born in Spitalfields in 1702, sent to a workhouse at six, and bound to a seven year carpentry apprenticeship in which his labor belonged to his master. For five years he was a model apprentice. Then he fell in with the crowd at the Black Lion, including the thief known as Blueskin and Elizabeth Lyon, called Edgworth Bess, pocketed two silver spoons, and walked away from his contract into full-time burglary.

This episode follows the 20 months that made him a legend. Sheppard refused to fence his goods through Jonathan Wild, the self-styled Thief-Taker General who secretly ran London's organized crime and sent his own men to the gallows for a 40 pound bounty. Wild hunted him, and Sheppard answered with four escapes, each more humiliating to the authorities than the last. His final arrest came two weeks after the greatest of them, when he was found drunk in a stolen black silk suit. An estimated 200,000 people, about a third of London, lined the route to his hanging at Tyburn.

• His first escape took less than three hours: he went through the timber ceiling of St. Giles's Roundhouse, then pointed at the roof so the crowd would look away while he left.
• Chained to the floor of a Newgate strong room called the Castle, he dug an iron bar out of the chimney, smashed through six iron-reinforced oak doors in the dark, and reached a roof 60 feet up.
• Jailers loaded him with 300 pounds of iron and charged visitors four shillings to see him, while he refused an offer to reduce his sentence by informing.
• Friends planned to rush his body to a doctor for resuscitation, but the crowd that rioted to save him from the surgeons kept them from reaching it.
• An 1839 novel by William Harrison Ainsworth set off such a craze that London banned licensing any play with Sheppard's name in the title for 40 years.

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J. Edgar Hoover grew up in Washington, D.C. with a severe stutter and beat it by teaching himself to talk at ferocious speed. At 18 he took a messenger job at the Library of Congress, where he absorbed a cross-referenced cataloging system and a lesson he never forgot: power belongs to whoever can retrieve and connect information fastest. He carried that method into the Department of Justice in 1917, built paper files on political radicals, and helped orchestrate the Palmer raids. In 1924, at 29, he was handed a scandal-ridden Bureau of Investigation to clean up.

This episode traces 48 years in power across eight presidencies. Hoover turned the bungled Dillinger hunt into a public relations triumph, built a national fingerprint database and forensics lab, and pushed aside the agent who actually got Dillinger. He also denied the Mafia existed until a 1957 mob summit in upstate New York made denial impossible, hid decoded Soviet cables from President Truman, and created COINTELPRO to disrupt groups the courts would not let him prosecute. Presidents complained about him in private and kept him anyway, out of fear and because his surveillance was useful.

• The 1934 ambush at Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin left a civilian shot by mistake and an agent dead while Dillinger slipped out the back windows.
• Hoover locked the Venona decryptions of Soviet spy traffic in his office safe and kept them from his attorney general and from President Truman.
• In 1964 the Bureau sent Martin Luther King Jr. an anonymous package with a tape and a letter that King read as a push toward suicide.
• Richard Nixon admitted on tape in 1971 that he could not fire Hoover because he feared the reprisals.
• Hoover died of a heart attack in 1972 at 77 and became the first civil servant to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, while his secretary reportedly destroyed his private records.