The Times ran letters framing Ireland's biggest politician for murder. One misspelled word on the witness stand collapsed the whole thing inside a week.

In 1887 a broke Dublin hack named Richard Pigott sold The Times a bundle of letters that supposedly caught Charles Stewart Parnell blessing political assassination, and the paper printed them like gospel. Two years later barrister Charles Russell asked him to write out a single word — 'hesitancy' — and Pigott spelled it 'hesitency,' exactly the way the forger had. He fled to a Madrid hotel and put a bullet in his head before the week was out. Drawn from the Special Commission transcripts and the London and Dublin papers that followed him to the Hotel Embajadores.

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The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

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