True Crime Historian

Washington, District of ColumbiaMarch 7, 1850Daniel 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.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/tr

Bloody Murder Among the PewsJump to the AD-FREE Safe House EditionEpisode 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. Listen to more stories about FALLS FROM GRACEBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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

Boca del Infierno, Puerto RicoMarch 5, 1825Three 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.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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 4

The Lindbergh TragedyJump to the Ad-Free Safe House EditionEpisode 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. Listen to more stories about KIDNAPPINGSBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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 CATAS

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

Emmett TillJump to Ad-Free Safe House EditionEpisode 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.Hear More Stories About MOB JUSTICEBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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

Wellington, WashingtonMarch 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.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe H

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

The Crocodile Tears of Calvin DellingerAd-Free Safe House EditionEpisode 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.Hear More Stories Featuring BIG BOOMS!Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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

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.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.You can pay more if you want to, but rent at the Safe House is still just a bu

The Crescent City Quadrangle ScandalJump to the AD-FREE Safe House EditionEpisode 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. Read more stories about LOVE TRIANGLES GONE AWRYBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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

Munich, GermanyFebruary 24, 1920A 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.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/supp

The Redpath Mansion MysterJump to the Ad-Free Safe House EditionEpisode 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. Hear more stories about Unsolved MysteriesBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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 forg

What Happened In The Guttenberg Woods Jump to the AD-FREE Safe House EditionEpisode 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.Hear More Episodes About LOVE TRIANGLES GONE AWRYBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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? Everyt

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

There were ghosts at the San Quentin gallows. That's what the hangman saw. San QuentinExecutioner Amos Lunt Jump to Ad-Free Safe House EditionEpisode 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. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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 ou

True Tales From The Old WestJump to the AD-FREE Safe House EditionEpisode 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.Hear More True Crime Stories From THE WILD WESTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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 t

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

Rome, ItalyFebruary 17, 1600Rome, the day after Ash Wednesday. A naked man rides a mule through the streets toward the Campo de' Fiori, a leather bridle strapped across his mouth to keep him from shouting heresies to the crowd. Giordano Bruno — philosopher, former Dominican friar, and the man who told the Roman Inquisition that the universe was infinite — is about to be burned alive at the stake for refusing to take it back.Bruno spent sixteen years as a wandering scholar across Europe, dined with kings, debated at Oxford, and proposed ideas about distant suns and alien worlds that wouldn't be proven for four centuries. He also spent seven years in a Roman prison cell, where the Church begged him to recant. He wouldn't.This is the story of the man who chose the fire over the silence.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-historian--2909311/support.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

Nazis Invade AmericaEpisode 464Jump to Ad-Free Safe House EditionIn the summer of 1942, the war was supposed to be a distant conflict. But that illusion shattered when German U-boats, the predators of Operation Drumbeat, brought the fight to the American home front, sinking ships within sight of Long Island. This episode dives into the extraordinary story of Operation Pastorius, Hitler’s audacious plan to cripple the “Arsenal of Democracy.”Eight German agents—all fluent in English and trained in sabotage—landed on American beaches carrying a staggering $175,000 in cash and their most terrifying weapon: the disguised coal torpedo. Their mission: to blow up aluminum plants, railways, and bridges, and sow terror across the nation.The entire operation, however, pivoted on a foggy beach encounter with an unarmed 21-year-old Coast Guardsman, John Cullen, and the stunning betrayal of the mission's leader, George John Dasch. His self-surrender to the FBI exposed the entire plot, leading to a frantic manhunt and the c