pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 2007 the FBI began flashing fugitives' faces on digital billboards across American cities, yet it did not print color photographs on its paper wanted posters until 2009. That odd timeline opens this history of the wanted poster, an object tied in the imagination to dusty frontier towns but still in use today. At its core the poster has three parts: an image, a description of the alleged crime, and a cash reward. In the 1800s it went up in post offices and public squares, where the whole town gathered and gossip did the rest.

The episode separates the working tool from the Hollywood version. The famous blocky lettering was a matter of cost, since large letters were carved from wood instead of cast in heavy metal. The phrase dead or alive rarely came from sheriffs or marshals, who needed suspects alive for trial. It was more often the work of railroads, banks, and cattle barons protecting their money. From there the story follows the poster into wartime propaganda, modern politics, fingerprint identification, and the electronic networks that made paper a relic.

• The posters issued for John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices after Lincoln's assassination show the wood type style at full force.
• Before photography, a bounty hunter often had to bring back the body to prove he had the right man, which made the corpse the receipt.
• On September 4, 1939, the Daily Mirror branded Adolf Hitler a reckless criminal under the words wanted, dead or alive.
• In 2001 President George W. Bush recalled an old poster out west that said wanted, dead or alive when speaking of Osama bin Laden, and the New York Post ran with it.
• The FBI's billboard program started in 23 cities. By 2014 it reached more than 5,200 billboards and was credited with solving at least 53 cases.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Hoa Lo means fiery furnace, or simply stove, a name inherited from a Hanoi street where vendors once sold wood and coal stoves. Between 1896 and 1901 the French colonial government built a high security prison there, the Maison Centrale, to hold Vietnamese dissidents. Designed for about 460 inmates, it held more than 1,400 by the 1930s and over 2,000 by 1954. Set in the middle of a crowded city, it leaked letters and contraband over its walls and gathered future Viet Minh leaders in the same rooms, turning a tool of control into a school for revolution.

This episode follows the same ground through its second life as the Hanoi Hilton. The first American aviator, Everett Alvarez Jr., arrived in August 1964, and prisoners later named a new section Little Vegas after casinos near Nellis Air Force Base. American memoirs and Senate reports describe solitary confinement, beatings, ropes, and irons, while North Vietnam insisted it followed the Geneva Convention and filmed a documentary called Pilots in Pajamas. The account ends with the demolition of most of the prison in the 1990s and the museum that remains.

• Bob Shumaker put the nickname on record by carving Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton on the handle of a wooden bucket to greet a newly captured pilot.
• Isolated prisoners talked through a tap code built on a five by five alphabet grid, introduced by Air Force pilot Carlyle Harris.
• Navy seaman Doug Hegdahl played the fool for his captors and memorized the names and details of 256 fellow prisoners to the tune of Old MacDonald Had a Farm.
• The failed Son Tay rescue raid of late 1970 panicked Hanoi into moving hundreds of prisoners into Hoa Lo, creating Camp Unity and ending their isolation.
• Most of the complex was demolished between 1993 and 1994 for Hanoi Towers, a 14 story office block and 27 story apartment building, and several original cells were later rebuilt in a Massachusetts museum.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In a Chinese farming village in 1248, the investigator Song Ci solved a sickle murder without a single interrogation. He had every villager lay a sickle in the sun and waited until flies gathered on the one blade that still carried traces of blood. That scene opens this history of forensic science, the long effort to replace forced confessions and faulty memory with a witness that cannot lie. The story moves through rice powder ordeals that exploited a dry mouth, a torn newspaper wad that convicted John Toms in 1784, and the arsenic test James Marsh published in 1836.

From there the episode tracks the race to identify people: Alphonse Bertillon's body measurements, the rise of fingerprinting through William Herschel, Henry Faulds, and Francis Galton, Edmond Locard's rule that every contact leaves a trace, and Alec Jeffreys's discovery of DNA profiling in 1984. It also faces the failures. Bullet lead analysis and bite mark comparison fell apart under scrutiny, crime labs have fabricated evidence, and genealogy databases now raise hard questions about privacy.

• Marsh built his test after a jury acquitted an accused poisoner in 1832 because the yellow precipitate proving arsenic had faded before it reached the courtroom.
• In Argentina in 1892, a bloody thumbprint on a door frame identified Francisca Rojas as the killer of her two sons after she had blamed a neighbor.
• Police surgeon Thomas Bond produced the first recorded offender profile while reviewing the Jack the Ripper autopsies.
• The first criminal use of DNA cleared Richard Buckland, who had confessed. A sweep of more than 4,000 local men then led to Colin Pitchfork.
• The FBI dropped comparative bullet lead analysis in 2005, and in 2009 the Supreme Court ruled in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts that lab analysts must testify and face cross-examination.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Flora MacDonald is remembered in statues and song as the romantic Jacobite heroine who saved Bonnie Prince Charlie. The record tells a different story. Born in 1722 on South Uist to a Protestant family of minor gentry, she was raised in a household loyal to the government in London. Her stepfather, Hugh MacDonald, commanded a pro-government militia. When a relative asked her in 1746 to smuggle the fugitive prince off Benbecula after Culloden, she hesitated, then agreed for a practical reason: if he were caught on her clan's land, her family would pay for it.

This episode follows the whole of her life, not just the boat to Skye. Arrested for treason and taken to London, she charmed high society, collected more than 1,500 pounds, and went free under the Act of Indemnity in 1747. Rising rents and failed harvests later drove her and her husband Allan to North Carolina in 1774, where they sided with the Crown in the American Revolution and lost everything. She returned to Scotland in 1780, lived out her days on a tenant farm, and died in 1790 at 68, before Victorian writers remade her as a legend.

• The travel permits used for the escape came from her own stepfather, the militia commander hunting the prince, who appears to have known exactly what was happening.
• The prince was disguised as an Irish spinning maid named Betty Burke and managed his skirts so badly that a steward on Skye told him to take the dress off.
• Asked by Frederick, Prince of Wales, why she had helped a rebel, Flora said it was Christian charity and that she would have done the same for him.
• Allan raised a Loyalist force of about a thousand men that was crushed at Moores Creek Bridge in 1776. He was taken prisoner, and Flora was evicted from their plantation.
• Sailing home on a privateer in 1779, she broke her arm during an attack by a French ship. In 1878 her granddaughter published a fabricated autobiography that fed the myth.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On an Indo-Pacific beach at low tide, a pitted gray rock near the water's edge can turn out to be a stonefish, the most venomous fish in the world. Members of the genus Synanceia are relatives of scorpionfish and lionfish that have traded flash for invisibility. Their cratered heads and mottled skin copy dead coral, a sticky secretion traps algae and sediment on their bodies, and they can survive out of water for up to 24 hours as long as they stay damp. That puts them on exposed sand where bare feet land.

This episode explains the machinery behind the sting and the science behind surviving it. The fish hunts by ambush and uses venom only for defense, delivered through 13 rigid dorsal spines whose glands are squeezed by the weight of whatever presses down. The toxin, verrucotoxin, jams calcium channels open, flooding nerves with pain signals and throwing the heart out of rhythm. Yet because it is a protein, heat unfolds it, which is why hot water is first aid and why the same animal is served as a prized dish in southern Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and parts of China.

• Each dorsal spine works like a pressure activated syringe: the harder a victim steps, the deeper it goes and the more venom is forced into the wound.
• Beyond its spines, the stonefish carries lachrymal sabers, bony cheek blades it can flick outward to deter anything trying to swallow it head first.
• Deaths are rare but real, including one on Thursday Island, Australia, in 1915 and one in Okinawa, Japan, in 2010. Doctors dose the antivenom by counting puncture wounds.
• Soaking the limb in water at about 45 degrees Celsius denatures the toxin, much as heat sets an egg white, though severe stings still need medical care.
• Unlike pufferfish, stonefish flesh is not toxic, so chefs who cleanly remove the dorsal apparatus can serve it in ginger soup or even raw as sashimi.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Thomas Coleman Younger was born in 1844 in Jackson County, Missouri, the seventh of 14 children of a prosperous farmer. His father, Henry, supported the Union and was shot dead anyway by a Union soldier from Kansas. Grief turned Cole toward William Clarke Quantrill's pro-Confederate bushwhackers, and by August 1863 he was riding in the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where guerrillas burned the town and killed roughly 200 citizens. This episode follows how a border war with no rules shaped a particular kind of violent man.

Peace offered no way back. Missouri's new constitution barred former Confederate sympathizers from voting, serving on juries, or holding office, and a core of ex-guerrillas turned to robbing banks. By 1868 Cole was named in a robbery at Russellville, Kentucky, and the James-Younger gang took shape around him, his brothers Jim, John, and Bob, and Frank and Jesse James. The story runs through train wrecking, Pinkerton blood feuds, the ruinous Northfield raid of 1876, and long quiet years in Stillwater prison before a Wild West show and a public conversion.

• In 1873 the gang derailed a Rock Island Railroad locomotive at Adair, Iowa, to loot the express car, which brought the Pinkerton National Detective Agency after them.
• A March 1874 shootout on a Missouri road killed Pinkerton agent Louis Lull and Cole's brother John.
• At Northfield, Minnesota, in September 1876, townspeople grabbed rifles from hardware stores and shot the gang to pieces. Clell Miller and William Chadwell died in the street and the robbers left with nothing.
• Sentenced to life at Stillwater, Cole became the prison librarian and worked as a printer's devil on the Prison Mirror, a newspaper the Younger brothers helped fund.
• Paroled in July 1901, he toured with Frank James in a Wild West company in 1903, was baptized in Lee's Summit, and died there in March 1916 at age 72.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

About a mile off Marseille sits a three hectare limestone rock crowned by the Château d'If. King Francis I visited around 1516 and ordered a fortress to shield the port, and between 1524 and 1531 builders raised a square, three story stronghold with three cylindrical towers. It looked fearsome enough that Charles V dropped his plans to attack Marseille, yet it never saw battle. When the military engineer Vauban inspected it in 1701, he judged it very badly built, with mortar slapped over natural rock.

A useless fort on an isolated island found other work. Napoleon parked the embalmed body of General Jean-Baptiste Kléber there so no tomb could rally Republican opposition, and the state then turned the rock into a prison ringed by deadly currents. This episode traces that grim history, including more than 3,500 Huguenots held there, and shows how Alexandre Dumas buried it all in 1844 with The Count of Monte Cristo. Roughly 100,000 visitors a year now come to see the cell of Edmond Dantès, a man who never existed.

• Kléber was assassinated in Cairo in 1800, and his coffin sat on the island for 18 years because Napoleon feared a martyr's grave on the mainland.
• Wealthy inmates such as Mirabeau could rent upper cells called pistoles, with windows and fireplaces, while the poor were chained by the dozen in windowless dungeons cut into the rock.
• No real prisoner is known to have escaped the island and survived. After it opened to the public in 1890, operators hacked a hole between two cells and labeled it the cell of Dantès.
• Mark Twain toured the still working prison in July 1867 and was shown the supposed cell of the Man in the Iron Mask, who was never held there.
• Gaston Crémieux, a leader of the Paris Commune, was shot against the walls in 1871, and the 2002 film of the novel was shot in Malta instead of on the real island.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Roughly 50 miles east of Hanksville, in the rough country around the Dirty Devil River in southeastern Utah, a maze of slot canyons gave Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch a hideout that lawmen could not find. This episode treats Robbers Roost as its main character: a natural funnel of sandstone where a posse had to ride single file and one man with a Winchester on the high ground could hold off an army. Cassidy and his closest friend, Elzy Lay, forged the gang here and returned after major robberies to lie low for a month or longer.

The surprise is how domestic the place was. The outlaws built cabins to survive Utah winters, kept horses, cattle, and flocks of chickens, and played poker with $20 gold pieces while the Pinkertons searched in vain. Their lifeline was a supply chain run with the help of sympathetic ranchers Ann and Josie Bassett, who moved beef and horses over bare slickrock and up shallow riverbeds so that no tracks survived. The story then turns to the raid that finally breached the canyon and to the hikers and canyoneers who now seek out the same terrain for sport.

• A slot canyon can be hundreds of feet deep yet only a few feet wide at the bottom, which made numbers meaningless for any posse that tried to enter.
• Livestock was driven across solid sandstone and through the Dirty Devil's shallows, where hooves left no mark and running water erased the rest.
• Only five women are known to have been allowed inside: Ann and Josie Bassett, Etta Place, Elzy Lay's girlfriend, and Laura Bullion, a gang member in her own right.
• According to cowboy detective Charlie Siringo, a posse of Salt Lake City officers led by Joe Bush used informants and a narrow pathway to raid the Roost, killing several gang members.
• The hideout lives on in Robert Redford's book The Outlaw Trail, a Zane Grey novel named for it, and canyon shootouts in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Bill Tilghman was born in Iowa in 1854 and raised in Kansas territory, where at 17 he took a contract to hunt buffalo for railroad labor camps and claimed more than 3,000 in a single year. That hard schooling carried him to Dodge City, where he opened a saloon called the Crystal Palace and pinned on a deputy badge under Bat Masterson. The line between lawman and outlaw was thin: Masterson himself arrested Tilghman for horse theft. The charges were dropped, and by 1884 Tilghman was Dodge City marshal, honored by citizens with a solid gold badge.

The blizzard of 1886 wiped out his ranching investments and pushed him into the 1889 Oklahoma land rush, where he staked a commercial lot in Guthrie. By 1892 he was a deputy U.S. marshal, riding with Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas as the Three Guardsmen of Oklahoma. This episode follows him from the pursuit of Bill Doolin and the Wild Bunch to politics, a meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, and the Eagle Film Company, where in 1915 he starred as himself in The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws. It ends in the oil town of Cromwell in 1924, where a 70-year-old Tilghman met a kind of corruption his old code could not handle.

• While serving as a Dodge City deputy, Tilghman was charged as an accessory to an attempted train robbery and, barely two months later, with horse theft. Both cases collapsed for lack of evidence.
• In January 1896 he tracked Bill Doolin to a bathhouse in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and tackled him in the lobby without firing a shot. A crowd of 2,000 met their train in Guthrie.
• Doolin broke out of jail less than six months later, and Oklahoma used the escape as a technicality to refuse Tilghman his reward money.
• To sell the film, Tilghman toured with the reels and lectured live on stage. Its promotion invented the tale that Doolin once ordered his men not to shoot Tilghman in the back out of respect.
• On Halloween night Tilghman disarmed a drunken Prohibition agent, Wiley Lynn, with his bare hands, only to be shot with a concealed second pistol. Lynn was acquitted, and Tilghman's body lay in state in the capitol rotunda.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

You can use long passwords, multi-factor authentication, and prompt updates and still be exposed to a zero-day: a flaw the software vendor has known about for exactly zero days. This episode separates terms that are often blurred. A vulnerability is the opening, like a bank vault air vent built an inch too wide. An exploit is the specialized tool built to get through it. A 2017 RAND Corporation data set found exploits took an average of 22 days to develop and stayed usable for 6.9 years.

Around these flaws sits a three-part economy. On the white market, researchers report bugs for bounties. On the black market, criminal groups buy working exploits. The largest buyers are in the gray market: governments and intelligence agencies, where a single zero-click exploit can fetch millions. That feeds the debate over disclosure versus stockpiling, which stopped being theoretical with Stuxnet in 2010 and the Shadow Brokers leak in 2016. The episode closes with defense in depth, the practice of making a breach too slow, costly, and noisy to pay off.

• Releasing a patch can raise risk for a time, since attackers compare old and new code to locate the flaw before users install the fix.
• Stuxnet used four zero-days at once, spread by USB drives into the air-gapped Natanz facility, and fed operators fake readings while centrifuges tore themselves apart.
• EternalBlue, an exploit stolen from the NSA, powered the 2017 WannaCry and NotPetya attacks, with damage estimated at $10 billion.
• Pegasus spyware from the NSO Group uses zero-click exploits against apps such as iMessage and WhatsApp, requiring no action from the target.
• A 2022 study of an exploit broker found a 44 percent annualized inflation rate in exploit prices.