True Crime Historian

The Crocodile Tears of Calvin Dellinger

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Episode 99 begins early one brisk fall morning in 1888, when a group of railroad men spy the drowned body of Mary Catherine Dellinger on the bank of Conestoga Creek in rural Pennsylvania. The evidence is thin and circumstantial, but it all points to her husband, Calvin, who expertly plays the part of the grieving husband, but his history of cruelty to women leads to a different conclusion. There’s a coda to the murder story that takes place thirty years later, when Calvin Dellinger again gets into trouble for playing with dynamite. Literally.

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Los Angeles, California
February 26, 1931

The Great Depression had America on its knees, and men in power needed someone to blame. On a sunny Thursday afternoon, federal immigration agents and local police sealed off La Placita park in the heart of Mexican Los Angeles, trapping nearly four hundred men, women, and children. They demanded papers. They beat those who tried to run. They arrested a man whose documents proved he'd lived legally in the country for eight years — and stuffed them back in his pocket. The raid was the opening salvo in what became the Mexican Repatriation, a decade-long campaign that drove an estimated one to two million people of Mexican descent out of the United States. Sixty percent were American citizens. It took California seventy-four years to apologize. This is the story of the afternoon it 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 Crescent City Quadrangle Scandal

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Episode 98 involves a rare love quadrangle that comes to light when a woman is charged with accessory to the murder of her banker husband, committed by her physician lover and the state’s attorney turns out to be her former fiance. It’s a tangled, tangled web, and you know it’s not going to end well. 

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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.

Munich, Germany
February 24, 1920

A failed painter and Army intelligence operative named Adolf Hitler stood before a packed house at Munich's Hofbräuhaus to announce a new political program. The event, which nearly erupted in a riot, marked the public christening of what would soon be called the Nazi Party.
The episode reports from the oldest and most famous beer hall in the city on the chaotic night Hitler read the twenty-five points of the party’s platform—a volatile blend of nationalist fury, populist promises, and racial hatred. The program was born from the wreckage of the German Empire, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, and the "stab-in-the-back" legend that blamed socialists and Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I. The twenty-five points, though later abandoned in practice, were declared "permanent and unalterable," forming the original foundation for the darkest chapter in human history.

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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.

The Redpath Mansion Myster

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Episode 465, a classic locked-room mystery, takes place in the summer of 1901, when two bodies are discovered inside a mansion in Montreal’s exclusive Golden Square Mile. Ada Maria Mills Redpath and her son, Clifford, are dead. Authorities quickly ruled it a tragic murder-suicide, blaming a seizure. But the evidence was immediately buried—literally—as the family arranged a funeral within 48 hours. 

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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.

What Happened In The Guttenberg Woods 

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Episode 97 is another story of a honeymoon trip gone awry, but it was a marriage likely doomed from the start. For one thing, Mina Muller and Martin Kettler -- if that’s his real name -- were both already married. With children. But they still visit the minister and, well, you know it’s not gonna end well.

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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.

Rouen, France
February 21, 1431
At eight o'clock on a frozen Wednesday morning, a nineteen-year-old peasant girl in leg irons shuffled into the Chapel Royal of Rouen Castle to face forty-two robed clerics who had already decided her fate. Two years earlier, Joan of Arc had heard the voice of the Archangel Michael in her father's garden. She went on to break the siege of Orléans, rout the English across the Loire Valley, and crown a king at Reims. Now she was chained to a wooden block in an English military prison, guarded day and night by soldiers, and charged with heresy, witchcraft, and the unforgivable crime of being a teenage girl who had changed the course of a war. The king she crowned never lifted a finger to save her. This is the story of the most infamous trial in medieval history.

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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.

There were ghosts at the San Quentin gallows. That's what the hangman saw. San Quentin

Executioner Amos Lunt 

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Episode 95 explores a different point of view of capital punishment, a behind the scenes look at the gallows of San Quentin Prison from the hangman’s point of view. One of the minor characters in Episode 84 “The Belle in the Belfry” was the hangman, Amos Lunt, who seemed quite shaken by the event and was reported as “seeing spooks”. That was enough to get me to look a little deeper into Amos Lunt and his descent into madness. 

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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.

True Tales From The Old West

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Episode 63 tells the story of the scoundrel Charley Bowles who took the moniker Black Bart from a villain in a dime novel, but I think he used it ironically because it didn’t really fit his gentlemanly style. He only robbed coaches carrying treasure belonging to the Wells Fargo Company, apparently in revenge for a mining dispute in Nevada. When he left his doggerel poetry at the scene of the crime, he would sign it “Black Bart PO8” spelling poet with a numeral, text-message style long before the internet, way ahead of his time.

Culled from the historic pages of the Washington Evening Star, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other newspapers of the era.

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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.

Sing Sing Prison
February 18, 1916
On September 5th, 1913, two boys fishing off a dock in Weehawken, New Jersey, hauled up a bundle wrapped in oilcloth and weighted with stone. Inside was the upper torso of a young woman. No head. No identification. What followed was one of the most sensational murder investigations in New York City history — a trail of pillowcase tags, bloodstained walls, and forged documents that led detectives from a bare apartment on Bradhurst Avenue to the rectory door of a Catholic church in Harlem. The man they arrested at half past eleven that night was Father Hans Schmidt, a German-born priest with a secret wife, a counterfeiting operation, and a past that stretched across two continents and an unknown number of graves. On February 18th, 1916, Schmidt was electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison. He remains the only Catholic priest ever executed in the United States. This is his story.

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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.