True Crime Historian

Dolly Oesterreich’s Hidden Lover

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Episode 468 is what Agatha Christie would call a "locked room" murder. In 1922 Los Angeles, Fred Oesterreich seems to have been murdered by a ransacking intruder. The problem: The house was locked up tight when the police arrived with the dead man on the floor and his wife locked in a closet. No signs of forced entry. Eight years would pass before the world learns the truth of Dolly Osterreich's kept man. Not a euphemism. She literally kept a man in her attic.

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This episode includes AI-generated content.

Gnadenhutten, Ohio Country
March 8, 1782

The name meant "Huts of Grace." It was a Moravian missionary village where Lenape and Mohican converts had embraced Christianity, European dress, and pacifism. They refused to take sides in the American Revolution. Both sides hated them for it. When 160 Pennsylvania militiamen rode into the Tuscarawas Valley that March, they found unarmed families harvesting corn. The militia smiled, shook hands, and promised safe passage to Fort Pitt. Then they bound their hosts, separated men from women and children, and held a vote. The result was ninety-six dead — bludgeoned with a cooper's mallet, scalped, and burned with their village. Two boys survived. Congress opened an investigation, then quietly killed it. Tecumseh remembered. The Lenape remembered. The mound where the dead are buried is still maintained. The descendants still come every March. Today on Dark History Today: the Gnadenhutten Massacre.



























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This episode includes AI-generated content.

Washington, District of Columbia
March 7, 1850

Daniel Webster — the most celebrated orator in American history — rose in a packed Senate chamber to deliver the speech that would save the Union and destroy his reputation. With the nation tearing itself apart over slavery, and a dying John C. Calhoun having just issued an ultimatum for Southern secession three days earlier, Webster endorsed Henry Clay's Compromise of 1850 in its entirety, including the despised Fugitive Slave Law. The speech bought the country a decade of peace. It also turned Webster from "Godlike Daniel" into a pariah overnight. Emerson compared him to a courtesan. Whittier wrote his poetic obituary while he was still breathing. Not a single New England colleague would publicly support him. Was it the greatest act of political courage in Senate history, or the most consequential moral surrender? The answer depends on which side of the Fugitive Slave Law you were standing on.

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You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is still just a buck a week, and you can get access to over 400 ad-free episodes from the dusty vault, Safe House Exclusives, direct access to the Boss, and whatever personal services you require.

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This episode includes AI-generated content.

Bloody Murder Among the Pews

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Episode 112 begins inside the Rattle Run Michigan Methodist Church, smeared with blood as if it had been the scene of a battle to the death. Charred bones discovered in the stove were presumed to belong to the missing pastor, Rev. John H. Carmichael. But then, the town roustabout also turned up missing, and the game is on to figure out who killed who. This gruesome story plays out in less than a week, and ends with a chilling confession. Gave me the willies reading it. Hope you get ‘em, too. 

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Boca del Infierno, Puerto Rico
March 5, 1825

Three nations set a trap at the Mouth of Hell, and the Caribbean's most wanted pirate sailed right into it. Roberto Cofresí was the son of an Austrian nobleman who'd fled a murder charge and a Puerto Rican mother from one of the island's founding families. Noble blood, empty pockets. When colonial Puerto Rico collapsed around him, Cofresí took to the sea with a fast sloop and a crew of men who had nothing left to lose. He robbed merchant vessels from six nations, attacked a U.S. Navy warship, and became a folk hero to the poor criollos of the coast. It took an alliance of Spain, the United States, and Denmark to bring him down. Twenty-four days after his capture, a firing squad at El Morro ended the pirate. The legend was just getting started.

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You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is still just a buck a week, and you can get access to over 400 ad-free episodes from the dusty vault, Safe House Exclusives, direct access to the Boss, and whatever personal services you require.

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If disaster is more your jam, check out CATASTROPHIC CALAMITIES, telling the stories of famous and forgotten tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries. What could go wrong? Everything!

For brand-new tales in the old clothes from the golden era of popular literature, give your ears a treat with PULP MAGAZINES with two new stories every week.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

The Lindbergh Tragedy

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Episode 113 came about because of a listener request. Indeed, several people have asked for this, one of the rare cases that really earned the title “Crime of the Century.” The baby Lindbergh, son of an American aviation hero, “the little eaglet,” was one of America’s most-loved babies of his day, and that helped make his short life one of legend. So the newspapers went over every little detail of the case and assigned their ace reporters to cover every aspect. 

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If disaster is more your jam, check out CATASTROPHIC CALAMITIES, telling the stories of famous and forgotten tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries. What could go wrong? Everything!

For brand-new tales in the old clothes from the golden era of popular literature, give your ears a treat with PULP MAGAZINES with two new stories every week.

Washington, D.C.
March 3, 1913. 

The day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer named Inez Milholland climbed onto a white horse and led more than five thousand women down Pennsylvania Avenue in the largest suffrage demonstration the nation had ever seen. They never made it four blocks before a mob of a quarter million men surged into the street. Women were grabbed, shoved, spat upon, and pelted with bottles while D.C. police laughed along with the crowd. Over a hundred marchers were hospitalized. Helen Keller was so shaken she couldn't speak. The cavalry had to be called from Fort Myer to restore order. Meanwhile, Ida B. Wells-Barnett defied orders to march in the back of the parade and took her rightful place with the Illinois delegation. The resulting scandal cost the police superintendent his career — and gave the suffrage movement the momentum that would carry it to the Nineteenth Amendment.

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You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is still just a buck a week, and you can get access to over 400 ad-free episodes from the dusty vault, Safe House Exclusives, direct access to the Boss, and whatever personal services you require.

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If disaster is more your jam, check out CATASTROPHIC CALAMITIES, telling the stories of famous and forgotten tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries. What could go wrong? Everything!

For brand-new tales in the old clothes from the golden era of popular literature, give your ears a treat with PULP MAGAZINES with two new stories every week.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

Emmett Till

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Episode 467 takes us back to the Mississippi Delta in August 1955, where a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy named Emmett Till whistled at a white woman in a country store. What followed—the abduction, the murder, the sham trial, and one mother's radical decision to open the casket—changed America forever.

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If disaster is more your jam, check out CATASTROPHIC CALAMITIES, telling the stories of famous and forgotten tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries. What could go wrong? Everything!

For brand-new tales in the old clothes from the golden era of popular literature, give your ears a treat with PULP MAGAZINES with two new stories every week.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

Wellington, Washington
March 1, 1910

Two Great Northern Railway trains sit snowbound at a tiny depot in the Cascade Mountains, trapped by a nine-day blizzard that has buried the tracks under seventeen feet of snow. The rotary plows are broken. The shovelers have walked off the job. The telegraph lines are down. Some passengers escape on foot down a near-vertical slope. The rest stay, because the railroad tells them it's safer to wait. On the last day of February, the snow turns to rain, and then comes the thunder. Just after one in the morning, a slab of snow half a mile wide breaks loose from Windy Mountain and sweeps both trains — locomotives, passenger cars, mail cars, and all — 150 feet down into the Tye River valley. Ninety-six people die in the deadliest avalanche in American history. The town is so haunted by the disaster, they change its name.

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You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is still just a buck a week, and you can get access to over 400 ad-free episodes from the dusty vault, Safe House Exclusives, direct access to the Boss, and whatever personal services you require.

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If disaster is more your jam, check out CATASTROPHIC CALAMITIES, telling the stories of famous and forgotten tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries. What could go wrong? Everything!

For brand-new tales in the old clothes from the golden era of popular literature, give your ears a treat with PULP MAGAZINES with two new stories every week.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

Alexandria, Virginia
February 28, 1844 

A pleasure cruise on the Potomac River turned into the deadliest single-day loss of senior government officials in American history when the world's largest naval cannon exploded on the deck of the USS Princeton. Secretary of State Abel Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, and four others were killed instantly in front of four hundred horrified guests. President John Tyler survived only because someone handed him a glass of champagne at the foot of the ladder. Among the dead was David Gardiner, whose twenty-three-year-old daughter Julia fainted at the news and was carried off the ship in the President's arms. Four months later, she married him. The blast derailed the annexation of Texas, reshaped Tyler's cabinet, and launched a romance born from carnage aboard the Navy's most celebrated warship. The gun was called the Peacemaker. Nobody renamed it.

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You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is still just a buck a week, and you can get access to over 400 ad-free episodes from the dusty vault, Safe House Exclusives, direct access to the Boss, and whatever personal services you require.

We invite you to our other PULPULAR MEDIA podcasts:

If disaster is more your jam, check out CATASTROPHIC CALAMITIES, telling the stories of famous and forgotten tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries. What could go wrong? Everything!

For brand-new tales in the old clothes from the golden era of popular literature, give your ears a treat with PULP MAGAZINES with two new stories every week.

This episode includes AI-generated content.