UNSOLVED!Exploring one of history's most baffling murder mysteries.

The Awful Death of Miss Elsie Sigel

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In this episode, we’ll take a look at the newspaper accounts in the case of Elsie Sigel, a pretty young girl from a prominent New York family who went to work as a missionary in Manhattan’s Chinatown. In the summer of 1909, police found Elsie’s body packed in a trunk in an apartment above a chop suey joint.

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Music by Chuck Wiggins

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www.truecrimehistorian.com

EYE FOR AN EYE

Exploring America's criminal justice system at its most extreme: Inflicting the Death Penalty

The True Crime of Irene Schroeder

During the early days of the Great Depression, one patrolman is killed and another seriously wounded while trying to prevent a trio of bandits who had robbed a department store in Western Pennsylvania from making a getaway. The surviving officer said it was not one of the two men who killed his partner, but the woman of the group, a young blonde, who was using her four-year-old son as a shield in the getaway. The child, recovered a few days later at his grandfather’s house, confirmed the story, and a nationwide manhunt ends in the desert mountains near Phoenix, Arizona, where the blond and her companions shoot it out with police for six hours, until they run out of ammunition.

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Visit www.truecrimehistorian.com for clippings and sources.

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Music by Chuck Wiggins

TRUE CRIME STORY TIMEThe Sad Tale of Anna May Gamble Knapp
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Around the jails and the Indiana and Ohio neighborhoods where he lived, Alfred Knapp carried the nickname “Looney” Knapp for his bizarre, often childish behavior. He spent half of his adult life in prison for petty larcenies and attacks upon young women. When he was released from the Michigan City Penitentiary in the summer of 1902, he joined his third wife, Hannah, in her hometown of Hamilton, Ohio. Three days before Christmas that year, Knapp strangled his wife in the early morning hours and put her body in a box and put the box in the Great Miami River, then told everyone that Hannah had left him. Some in his family became suspicious, and when he remarried two months later, they had him arrested for bigamy. Alfred Knapp then not only confessed to killing his wife, but four other women in Cincinnati and Indianapolis, including his second wife. Consequently, “The Strangler Knapp” became a Midwest sensation and dozens of newspapers sent reporters to cover the case.
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One of the many things that makes the Knapp case a remarkable story worth telling is the intense family and courtroom drama that was chronicled in the extensive press coverage. One of the most colorful real-life characters in this tale is the young, simple-minded fourth wife, from whose bed he was arrested for bigamy at four in the morning. So I want to tell you her story in a series of excerpts from my latest book, The First Celebrity Serial Killer: Confessions of the Strangler Alfred Knapp.
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I invite you to visit my website, www.truecrimehistorian.com, for source information and instructions on how you can buy an inscribed edition of “The First Celebrity Serial Killer.”

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.

YESTERDAY'S NEWSEye for an Eye Edition

The Botched Execution of George H. Painter

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Exploring America's Criminal Justice at Its Most Extreme: Inflicting the Death Penalty

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Shortly after midnight, the night of May 17, 1891, George H. Painter awoke the people living in his Chicago house shortly after midnight, shouting that his common law wife Alice Martin had been murdered. Painter himself went to fetch the police, who promptly arrested him for the brutal crime. The trial made it a cut and dry case, and Painter was sentenced to hang, although he insisted his innocence up to the very end. His lawyers continued to investigate while Painter sat on death row, presenting affidavit after affidavit to shadow the case with doubt, but not enough to convince a resolute governor.

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For a complete list of sources for this podcast, please visit www.truecrimehistorian.com, where you can also find newspaper clippings and drawings from this case, and a summary of George H. Painter’s final written statement, as well as more stories about the scandals, scoundrels and scourges of America’s past, along with information about my true crime books and my Two-Dollar Terror series of historical crime novellas.

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Music by Chuck Wiggins

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Produced by Richard O Jones

THE GANGSTER CHRONICLES 1.4-
The Gangster Chronicles is a special edition of Yesterday's News focusing on the notorious scoundrels of the Prohibition and Depression eras.
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We're beginning this series with newspaper accounts of the trail of terror blazed by one of America's most famous, dare I say most beloved, gangsters, John Dillinger.
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From the time he was paroled from the Michigan City prison in May, 1933, to the time he was gunned down by police on a Chicago sidewalk 14 months later, John Herbert Dillinger was one of America's most notorious scoundrels.
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In chapter one, we looked at the escape of ten convicts from the Indiana penitentiary at Michigan City and the bloody delivery of Dillinger from the Lima, Ohio. In Chapter Two, Dillinger and his new gang blazed a trail of terror across the Midwest. In chapter three, Dillinger gets quietly captured in Tuscon, but makes another daring escape, this time, using a gun he made from broomstick.
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With Dillinger again in the wind, state and now federal police launch a desperate manhunt while the gangster continues his trail of terror.
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For source information and clips related to this installment of the Gangster Chronicles, visit www.truecrimehistorian.com, where you can also find additional stories about the scandals, scoundrels and scourges of America's past, as well as information about my books and my TwoDollar Terror series of true crime novellas.
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And come back here next month for Chapter 5 in the Dillinger saga when the notorious scoundrel once more narrowly escape arrest in a deadly police raid at Little Bohemia.Lodge in Wisconsin.
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Musical direction by Chuck Wiggins.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.

PULP NONFICTIONA reading from True Crime Edmund Pearson

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True crime history is not just about reviving the stories of America's scandals, scoundrels and scourges, but also about exploring the history of true crime as a genre.

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Edmund Pearson was a librarian by trade, but also one of the early writers of true crime, who first came to prominence in his articles about the Lizzie Borden trials in the 1890s. In 1928, he wrote a series of eight true crime articles for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about some of America's Classic murders.

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This one takes place in 1849, a week before Thanksgiving, in a laboratory at the Harvard Medical College while the famed physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes was lecturing in the room directly above. The victim was one of Boston's wealthy elite on a mission to collect a debt from a geology professor.

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The Parkman-Webster murder case, as it came to be known, was notable because it was one of the first murder cases where circumstantial forensic evidence was used in a trial.

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Please visit www.truecrimehistorian.com/1849webster for more information on this story, including a clipping describing John White Webster's execution and a link to the complete trial transcript. On the website, you can also find additional stories about America's famous and forgotten scandals, scoundrels and scourges as well as information about how to purchase my true crime books and Two-Dollar Terror novellas.

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Musical direction and theme music by Chuck Wiggins.

SOLEMNLY SWORNTestimony from History’s Sensational Trials

Rhode Island v. The Rev. Eprhaim Kingsbury Avery

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Some sixty years before the trial of Lizzie Borden put the town of Fall River Massachusetts in the public eye, the body of Sarah Maria Cornell, a 30 year old millworker from that town was found hanging from a haystack pole in the nearby town of Tiverton, just across the Rhode Island border.

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The first coroner’s jury ruled the death a suicide, but a note later found in the woman’s boarding house led to the first of two exhumations of the body and the arrest of the Rev. Ephraim Kingsbury Avery for her murder.

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It is believed to be one of the first trials of a minister for murder in America, and it was a scandalous one. Newspapers across the country published transcripts on a daily basis, and when it was all over, many booklets—including one by the defendant himself—were published with the complete testimony and arguments of the 27 day trial.

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I invite you to my website, www.truecrimehistorian.com, where you can find complete source information and links to copies of two of the booklets containing complete transcripts of Avery’s trial. I have also posted photos of a surtout, a type of overcoat, and a calash, a retractable bonnet that not only provides protection from the elements, but also hides the face of the wearer.

On the website, you will also find information about my true crime books and my TWO-DOLLAR TERROR series of true crime novellas.

Music by Chuck Wiggins.

PULP NONFICTIONA reading from the pioneers of True Crime

The Murder of Edith May Thompson Woodill

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True crime history is not just about reviving the stories of America's scandals, scoundrels and scourges, but also about exploring the history of true crime as a genre.

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Apart from the lurid newspaper accounts of crimes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some of the earliest writers of true crime grew out of the pulp magazine tradition.

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This story revolves around the friendship between a pretty socialite and an erudite, seemingly scholarly man who came to live in her hometown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The residents of Talbot County were shocked beyond belief when a pair of crab trappers pulled the body the newly-married young woman from the Chesapeake Bay and the newcomer disappeared.

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The following story is adapted from the April, 1930 edition of True Detective Mysteries Magazine, a first-person account from the Sheriff on the case, told twenty years after the fact.

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This episode runs a little longer than usual, but I promise you it is worth the time to follow the winding trail of deceit and the exciting manhunt in the shallow Maryland waters.

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Please visit www.truecrimehistorian.com for source information on this story, and a few clippings from the original reporting, including the map that the Sheriff referred to. On the website, you can also find additional stories about America's famous and forgotten scandals, scoundrels and scourges as well as information about how to purchase my true crime books and Two-Dollar Terror novellas.

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Musical direction and theme music by Chuck Wiggins

TRUE CRIME STORY TIMEA true short story by Richard O Jones

The Mysterious Death of Louise Monteabaro

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Police Chief Henry Blake’s story was consistent throughout, from the time he reported the incident to the judge/acting coroner to the time that the dead girl’s aunt stabbed him in the neck: Miss Louise Monteabaro used her own gun to commit suicide in the passenger seat of her car. But according to those who new the young sewing machine saleswoman, that seemed unlikely.

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Visit www.truecrimehistorian.com/monteabaro for sources and clippings, along with more stories about the famous and forgotten scandals, scoundrels and scourges of America's past.

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Musical direction by Chuck Wiggins

YESTERDAY'S NEWSEye for an Eye Edition

The First Electric Execution

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Following the brutal murder of his common law wife Tillie Ziegler in Buffalo, New York, March, 1889, the rough character William Kemmler said he was glad he did it and was happy to hang for the crime. He did not quite get his wish, as a newly passed law in the state of New York allowed Kemmler to become the first man to die in the electric chair. His executioners knew that the execution would be an experiment of sorts, and it was not exactly the rousing success they had hoped for, but it did usher in a new era in America's criminal justice system.

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In this adaptation of coverage from the New York World, we learn about the gruesome crime and the agonizing price William Kemmler paid for it.

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Many people predicted that after Kemmler's execution that the electric chair would soon fall out of disfavor. It has, but it took over 100 years and more than 4,400 electrocutions at the hand of the state to begin turning the tide. Although lethal injection is now the preferred method of execution in most states, some still offer electrocution as an option, and men have died in the electric chair as recently as 2013.

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For a complete list of sources for this podcast, please visit www.truecrimehistorian.com, where you can also find newspaper clippings and photos from this case, and more stories about the scandals, scoundrels and scourges of America’s past.

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Theme song by Chuck Wiggins.

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Produced by Richard O Jones