Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins sit down together for the first time in over a year for a wide-ranging conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik in Baltimore, Maryland. Known to millions through the Netflix documentary The Keepers, Gemma has spent more than a decade investigating what happened to Sister Cathy, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School. She was found dead two months after her disappearance. This episode is a Q&A, recorded live with questions submitted by listeners through the show's Facebook community.

The Investigation: Timeline Questions and New Doubts

Listeners asked about the timeline of the night Sister Cathy Cesnik disappeared on November 7, 1969. Father Gerard Koob, who was in a relationship with Sister Cathy, claims he called the police at 11:30 PM after arriving at her apartment. The police report says the call came at 1:30 AM, a two-hour gap that remains unexplained. Koob says he and Father Peter McKeon found Cathy's car around 3:30 AM during a walk, but the police report credits McKeon alone with the discovery.

Gemma corrects a long-standing detail from The Keepers: the car was not found directly across the street from Cathy's apartment at Carriage House. It was actually found one court up the street, on Carriage Court, around a curve and out of direct line of sight from Lantern Court. She also confirms that the image of Sister Cathy's car shown in The Keepers was digitally placed into the scene by producer Jessica Hargrave as a visual aid. The steering wheel appears on the wrong side because the original police impound photo was flipped to match the camera angle.

Shane and Gemma discuss the suspicious letter Father Koob claims Cathy wrote to him, a handwritten love letter dated 12:30 AM on the Monday before she disappeared. The letter was found in the morgue notes rather than the detective's case file. Shane points out this means it was likely turned over after Cathy's body was found in January 1970, not when she first went missing. A profiler formerly with Scotland Yard analyzed the letter's content and concluded it was not written by Sister Cathy. Koob did not pass his second polygraph examination.

They also examine a separate letter Cathy wrote to her sister Marilyn, postmarked after the disappearance, which was admitted into evidence with the Baltimore County Police but has since gone missing. Shane raises the question of whether Father Koob could have written the letter to Marilyn as well, noting the parallels to the other letter and the movie ticket alibi.

New Evidence: The Mary Statue at St. Clement's

Gemma shares a story that has not been widely reported. Approximately two years ago, Eva Nelson, a publicly identified survivor of Father Joseph Maskell's abuse, told investigators she remembered watching Maskell bury something in the backyard of the St. Clement's rectory in Lansdowne. Police obtained permission from the current property owner and brought in ground-penetrating sonar equipment. Detective Josh Battaglia, the current investigator on Sister Cathy Cesnik's case, was present at the dig.

After two visits and multiple excavations, they found a broken statue of the Virgin Mary buried beneath a large bush that had once been small when Eva was a child. Eva recognized the statue immediately. A nun at St. Clement's had given it to her for protection, telling her, "Mary will always protect you." Father Maskell found the statue, broke it in front of Eva, and forced her to watch him bury it. The discovery validates Eva's memory of events that took place decades ago.

Historical Context

Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik was a 26-year-old School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore. She disappeared on November 7, 1969 after leaving her apartment to run errands. Her body was found on January 3, 1970 in a wooded area in Lansdowne. Her murder has never been solved. Father Joseph Maskell, a Catholic priest and school counselor at Keough, was later accused of sexually abusing dozens of students throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Multiple survivors have said they believe Sister Cathy was killed because she was about to report the abuse. Maskell died in 2001 without facing criminal charges. The case was the subject of the 2017 Netflix documentary series The Keepers.

Content Warning

This episode discusses clergy abuse and violence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gemma Hoskins?

Gemma Hoskins is a retired Baltimore teacher and former student at Archbishop Keough High School. She has spent over a decade investigating the murder of her former teacher, Sister Cathy Cesnik. She was featured in the Netflix documentary The Keepers and authored a book about herself and the case. She was named Maryland Teacher of the Year in 1992.

What happened to Sister Cathy Cesnik?

Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik disappeared from her Baltimore apartment on November 7, 1969. She had gone out to run errands, including a stop at a local bakery. Her car was found near her apartment that night. Her body was found on January 3, 1970. Her murder remains unsolved.

What was found buried at St. Clement's?

Police used ground-penetrating sonar to search the backyard of a former rectory associated with Father Maskell in Lansdowne. They found a broken statue of the Virgin Mary that a survivor remembered Maskell burying in front of her decades earlier.

Who is investigating Sister Cathy's case today?

Detective Josh Battaglia of the Baltimore County Police Department currently handles the investigation into Sister Cathy Cesnik's murder. He took over from Corporal Robin Teal after her retirement.

Crisis Resources

If you or someone you know has been affected by abuse:

US: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673

US: Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-422-4453

UK: NSPCC Helpline, 0808 800 5000

UK: Rape Crisis England & Wales, 0808 500 2222

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Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins continue their first sit-down in over a year, working through the second half of the questions listeners submitted through the show's Facebook community. This is the follow-up to "The Mary Statue and Unanswered Questions, " a wide-ranging conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik in Baltimore, Maryland. Known to millions through the Netflix documentary The Keepers, Gemma has spent more than a decade investigating what happened to Sister Cathy, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School.

The Persons of Interest

Listeners asked about the figures who have circled this case for years. Gemma explains why "Brother Bob" has never been publicly identified, how the nickname came to stand for more than one man, and why she has stepped back from the theory she put forward in her own 2019 book. She and Shane talk through how a single murder sits at the center of a web of other abuse and other suspected crimes, and why that makes Sister Cathy's case so difficult to untangle.

New Questions Around Father Koob

Gemma describes the women who have come forward in recent years with accusations against Father Gerard Koob, and walks through why, in her understanding, charges have been so hard to bring, including questions of jurisdiction and corroboration, since only some of the accusers were abused in Maryland. She recounts asking Detective Josh Battaglia to put her questions to Koob directly. Koob, who was the subject of a 2023 Baltimore Banner investigation by reporter Justin Fenton, continues to deny wrongdoing and says listeners are thinking of a different man. He has not been charged.

Who Knew, and the Attorney General's Report

Shane and Gemma discuss how much the staff at Archbishop Keough may have known, and why so many people went quiet after Sister Cathy was killed. They place it in the context of the Maryland Attorney General's 2023 report on clergy abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, a 456-page document detailing the abuse of more than 600 children across decades and the conclusion that "no parish went untouched. " That history is part of what is driving the Archdiocese's current bankruptcy.

Joyce Malecki and the Sealed Files

The conversation turns to Joyce Malecki, the 20-year-old whose 1969 murder near Fort Meade has long been discussed alongside Sister Cathy's. Gemma updates listeners on the 2023 exhumation of Joyce's body, the family's still-unanswered request for thousands of pages of FBI files first sought in 2014, and the letter Senator Chris Van Hollen carried to the White House on their behalf. Shane makes the case for why physical evidence in an unsolved murder should never be destroyed.

Cathy's Family

Gemma reflects on why Sister Cathy's family chose to step out of the spotlight after The Keepers, the heartbreak of learning their loved one's death may not have been random, and the dignity of their decision to protect their own peace.

Content Warning

This episode discusses clergy abuse and violence.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gemma Hoskins?

Gemma Hoskins is a retired Baltimore teacher and former student at Archbishop Keough High School. She has spent more than a decade investigating the murder of her former teacher, Sister Cathy Cesnik, and was one of the central figures in the Netflix documentary The Keepers. She was named Maryland Teacher of the Year in 1992.

Has anyone been charged in Sister Cathy's murder?

No. The 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik remains unsolved, and no one has ever been charged.

What is the Maryland Attorney General's report?

Released in 2023, the report documented decades of child sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Baltimore, naming Father Joseph Maskell among its most prolific abusers and identifying more than 600 victims across the Archdiocese.

Who is investigating Sister Cathy's case today?

Detective Josh Battaglia of the Baltimore County Police Department currently handles the investigation. He took overfrom Corporal Robin Teal after her retirement.

Crisis Resources

If you or someone you know has been affected by abuse:

US: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673

US: Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-422-4453

UK: NSPCC Helpline, 0808 800 5000

UK: Rape Crisis England & Wales, 0808 500 2222

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Shane Waters and Gemma Hoskins close out their reunion by going down the list of the people who appeared in the Netflix documentary The Keepers, where they are today, who is still fighting, who has found peace, and who the world has lost. It is a warm, reflective conversation about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik, the young School Sister of Notre Dame who taught English and drama at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, and about the community of survivors, investigators, journalists, and filmmakers her case brought together.

The Investigators and Advocates

Gemma gives an honest update on her own life, recovering from a broken hip, stepping back from the day-to-day advocacy, and finding peace in a quiet home in the woods. She talks about her fellow amateur investigator Abbie Schaub, who remains active in the legislative fight and helps run the official Keepers community online.

The Survivors

Shane and Gemma share where the survivors are now. Jean Hargadon Wehner, known as "Jane Doe" in the case, is doing meaningful work and published her memoir, Walking with Aletheia. Teresa Lancaster, "Jane Roe, " became an attorney and a leading public voice for survivors, helped pass Maryland's 2023 Child Victims Act, and wrote her memoir, Safe in Socks. Donna testified in Annapolis for the Child Victims Act and helped get Father Neil Magnus added to a public list of credibly accused clergy. They also remember Charles Franz and several of Sister Cathy's former students, including Kathy Hoback, the student Sister Cathy once shielded from Father Maskell, who passed away thispast year.

The Journalists and Experts

They remember journalist Bob Erlandson of the Baltimore Sun, who covered the case as it happened and died this past year at 94, and renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Werner Spitz, who died in 2024 at 97. Shane and Gemma also revisit Delegate C.T. Wilson, the abuse survivor who championed the Child Victims Act, and journalist Tom Nugent, whose reporting first brought the case back into the light.

The Filmmakers

Gemma catches listeners up on the team behind The Keepers, director Ryan White, producer Jessica Hargrave, and cinematographer John Benham, whose work since the series includes the Oscar-nominated, Peabody-winning documentary Come See Me in the Good Light. And, of course, they give a nod to Kim, who edits this very podcast.

What Comes Next

Shane and Gemma agree to keep going as the story unfolds, and invite listeners to suggest the people they would still like to hear from.

Content Warning

This episode discusses clergy abuse and violence.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Keepers about?

The Keepers is a 2017 Netflix documentary series about the unsolved 1969 murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a Baltimore nun and teacher, and the allegations of abuse at Archbishop Keough High School that may be connected to her death.

Who were Jane Doe and Jane Roe?

Jean Hargadon Wehner was known as "Jane Doe" and Teresa Lancaster as "Jane Roe, " two survivors whose accounts were central to The Keepers. Both have since written memoirs and become advocates for other survivors.

What is the Maryland Child Victims Act?

Passed in 2023, the Maryland Child Victims Act removed the time limits on lawsuits for survivors of child sexual abuse. Survivors featured in The Keepers, along with Delegate C.T. Wilson, were instrumental in its passage.

Is Sister Cathy's murder solved?

No. The murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik remains unsolved more than fifty years later. Crisis Resources

If you or someone you know has been affected by abuse:

US: RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 1-800-656-4673

US: Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, 1-800-422-4453

UK: NSPCC Helpline, 0808 800 5000

UK: Rape Crisis England & Wales, 0808 500 2222

Our Sponsors:
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Content Warning

This episode contains discussions of domestic abuse, poisoning, and death. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

This Episode

Season 39: The Balham Mystery. April 1876, a successful barrister collapses in his bedroom after drinking from a bedside water jug. For three agonizing days, doctors begged him to name his poisoner. He never would. This is the story of Charles Bravo, and the Victorian murder that has never been solved.

Behind the elegant facade of The Priory, a villa in Balham, South London, lay a tangle of secrets: a wealthy widow's scandalous past, a controlling husband who knew everything, and a companion with everything to lose.

The Victim

Charles Delauney Turner Bravo was thirty years old when he died. A barrister called to the bar, Charles came from a prosperous family of Portuguese Jewish ancestry. He was ambitious, charming, and by all accounts, determined to control every aspect of his household, including his wife's considerable fortune. Charles married Florence Campbell Ricardo in December 1875, knowing full well about her four-year affair with the famous hydropathy physician Dr. James Gully. What should have been a fresh start for Florence became something else entirely: a marriage built on use and suspicion.

The Crime

On the evening of April 18, 1876, Charles Bravo dined at The Priory with his wife Florence and her companion, Jane Cannon Cox. He retired to his bedroom around 8:30pm. Shortly after, servants heard a bedroom door crash open. Charles staggered into the hallway, his face contorted in agony, crying out for hot water. Jane Cox reached him first, a detail that would later prove important.

Charles had been poisoned with antimony, likely administered in his bedside water jug. The dose was massive: 20-40 grains of tartar emetic, ten times the lethal amount. For three days, as doctors fought to save him, Charles was asked repeatedly who had poisoned him. His only answer: "I have told you all I know."

The Investigation

Charles Bravo died at 5:20am on April 21, 1876. The first inquest returned an open verdict, insufficient evidence to determine what had happened. But public outrage demanded answers. A second inquest, lasting 23 days and calling over 40 witnesses, became a Victorian sensation.

Florence Bravo took the stand and admitted everything: the affair with Gully, a pregnancy, a possible miscarriage. Dr. James Gully, 66 years old and once one of England's most respected physicians, saw his reputation destroyed. Jane Cox, whose position in the household was under threat from Charles's cost-cutting, gave contradictory testimony that convinced no one.

The verdict: "Wilful murder by person or persons unknown." Three suspects. No conviction. No justice.

Historical Context

The Bravo case emerged during a period when Victorian marriage laws trapped women in impossible situations. Florence had inherited £40,000 (approximately £5 million today) from her first husband, an alcoholic who died at 27. Yet as a married woman, she had limited control over her own life. Divorce required proving both adultery and cruelty, nearly impossible for women of her class.

The case also highlighted Victorian England's reputation as a "poisoner's paradise." Antimony was readily available in most households, used to treat horses in stables. The science of toxicology was still developing, and many poisonings went undetected or unprosecuted.

Sources (Chicago Notes-Bibliography format):

Primary:

The National Archives, Coroner's Inquest Records, Bravo Case (1876)

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Content Warning

This episode contains discussions of poisoning and death. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

This Episode

Season 39: The Balham Mystery. April 1876—a young barrister collapses in agony minutes after retiring to bed. For three days, Charles Bravo suffers while doctors, family, and suspects gather. He names no one. The poison is antimony—enough to kill ten men.

Behind the gaslit elegance of The Priory, a household harbors dangerous secrets. A wife with a scandalous past. A companion facing dismissal. A former lover humiliated by her marriage. And a husband who knew everything—and paid the ultimate price.

The Victim

Charles Delauney Bravo was thirty years old when he died on 21 April 1876. A barrister called to the bar only recently, he had married Florence Campbell just four months earlier, on 7 December 1875. The marriage brought him access to Florence's considerable fortune—approximately £40,000, inherited from her first husband Alexander Ricardo.

Charles was ambitious. His chambers at Essex Court in the Temple represented the foundation of a legal career he hoped would match his new social position. But colleagues described a man preoccupied with money—Florence's money—and control over the household he had married into.

On that final Tuesday, Charles argued with Florence in their carriage, his horse bolted during an afternoon ride, and by nightfall he had consumed enough antimony to "kill a horse," according to the doctors who watched him die.

The Crime

The evening of 18 April 1876 began unremarkably. Charles, Florence, and her companion Jane Cox dined together at The Priory on Bedford Hill. Charles ate well—whiting, lamb, eggs on toast—and drank several glasses of burgundy. Neither woman touched the wine.

After dinner, they retired to the morning room. Around nine o'clock, Charles suggested Florence retire to bed. She had been unwell. Jane accompanied her upstairs.

Charles remained alone.

Approximately fifteen minutes later, he climbed the stairs to his bedroom. The housemaid Mary Ann Keeber passed him on the staircase. She would later tell police that he looked at her strangely—pale, silent, studying her face.

In his room, Charles undressed and reached for the water jug that servants prepared fresh each evening. He drank. Within minutes, his bedroom door flew open and he staggered onto the landing, screaming for Florence, for hot water, vomiting violently.

The post-mortem revealed thirty to forty grains of tartar emetic—a derivative of antimony—ten times the lethal dose. The poison had been in the water.

The Investigation

The first inquest convened on 25 and 28 April 1876. Coroner William Carter sought to spare the family's feelings, keeping the inquiry private. The jury returned an open verdict.

But Charles's stepfather, Joseph Bravo, was not satisfied. He demanded a second investigation.

The second inquest ran for an unprecedented twenty-three days, from 11 July through 11 August 1876, at the Bedford Hotel in Balham. It became a Victorian sensation. Crowds gathered in the streets. Newspapers printed every salacious detail—Florence's affair with Dr James Manby Gully, the abortion in Bavaria, the household tensions, Charles's jealousy.

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Content Warning

This episode contains detailed descriptions of poisoning and prolonged death. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

This Episode

Season 39: The Balham Mystery. For seventy-two hours, Charles Bravo lay dying at The Priory while doctors—including Queen Victoria's own physician—watched helplessly. He suffered. He convulsed. He said almost nothing about who poisoned him.

One woman claims she heard a confession. No one else heard a word. Was it truth, or a convenient lie to make murder look like suicide?

The Victim

Charles Bravo had three days to name his killer—and chose silence.

From April 18th to April 21st, 1876, the thirty-year-old barrister endured unimaginable suffering at The Priory in Balham. The antimony that had entered his system through his bedside water destroyed him methodically—causing relentless vomiting, organ failure, and slow collapse.

Throughout his ordeal, Charles remained lucid for extended periods. He could speak. He could understand questions. Yet when doctors pressed him about what he had taken, he mentioned only rubbing laudanum on his gums for a toothache. When they begged him to name anyone who might have harmed him, he said nothing useful.

The Crime

The parade of physicians began within hours of Charles's collapse. Dr. Joseph Moore arrived first, administering mustard water to induce vomiting—standard treatment for suspected poisoning. By morning, Charles's condition had deteriorated so drastically that Florence summoned reinforcements.

Dr. George Harrison came from London. Dr. Royes Bell, a specialist in internal medicine, examined the patient. None could identify the poison or stop its progress. Charles vomited until nothing remained. His body rejected water, medicine, even champagne.

On April 20th, Sir William Gull arrived—the physician to Queen Victoria herself. His verdict was grim: Charles was beyond saving. Whatever poison he had ingested, the damage was irreversible.

The Investigation

The alleged confession came from Jane Cannon Cox, Florence's companion. According to Mrs. Cox, Charles turned to her in the sickroom and whispered: "I took poison. Don't tell Florence."

Five words that could explain everything—or nothing at all.

But the housemaid Mary Ann Keeber was present in that room for much of the ordeal. She heard no such statement. The doctors who questioned Charles directly received no confession. Only Mrs. Cox, alone and uncorroborated, claimed to hear Charles take responsibility for his own death.

Sir William Gull made his own attempt. "Did you take anything to cause this illness?" he asked. Charles reportedly answered: "I took nothing intentionally."

Nothing intentionally. The words of a man who did not know how poison entered his body? Or a man protecting someone else?

Historical Context

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Content Warning

This episode contains discussions of adultery, abortion, and Victorian scandal. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

This Episode

Season 39: The Balham Mystery. For twenty-three days, the secrets of The Priory were stripped bare in the longest inquest in English legal history. Forty witnesses. Thousands of pages of testimony. Florence Bravo finally forced to admit her affair. Dr. Gully humiliated on the stand.

Every scandal exposed. And still no murderer named.

The Victim

Charles Bravo's death demanded answers. The open verdict of the first inquest—held in private, concluded in three days—satisfied no one. His family demanded justice. The newspapers demanded scandal. On May 15th, 1876, the Attorney General ordered an unprecedented second inquest.

What followed was theatre as much as justice. The Bedford Hotel in Balham was transformed into a makeshift courtroom. Crowds queued for hours to witness proceedings. The Attorney General himself, Sir John Holker, took personal charge—an extraordinary intervention for a coroner's inquest.

The Crime

Florence Bravo had avoided testifying at the first inquest. Her doctor declared her too ill to appear. This time, there would be no escape.

On July 13th, 1876, Florence walked to the witness stand in mourning clothes—black from head to toe. Sir John Holker's questions began gently, then turned to the matter everyone had come to hear.

"Mrs. Bravo, were you acquainted with Dr. James Manby Gully?"

"I was."

"And what was the nature of that acquaintance?"

The room held its breath. Then Florence spoke the words that would define her forever.

"Dr. Gully and I were... intimately connected. For approximately two years."

The crowd erupted. Florence Bravo's reputation died in that moment. But she held firm: she had not killed her husband. She did not know who had.

The Investigation

Jane Cannon Cox faced far more hostile questioning. Her alleged confession—"I took poison. Don't tell Florence"—was the foundation of the suicide theory. Now it crumbled under scrutiny.

Sir John Holker walked her through April 18th minute by minute. The housemaid Mary Ann Keeber heard no confession. The doctors received none. Only Mrs. Cox, alone and uncorroborated, claimed Charles had taken responsibility for his own death.

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Content Warning

This episode contains discussions of murder, suicide, and Victorian scandal. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

This Episode

Season 39 Finale: The Balham Mystery. The jury deliberated for three hours. Their verdict would haunt this case for one hundred and fifty years: "Willful murder by person or persons unknown." Murder--but no murderer. Four suspects. Four possible killers. And no way to know which one poisoned Charles Bravo.

The Victim

Charles Bravo died on April 21st, 1876. On August 12th, after twenty-three days of testimony, the jury confirmed what his family had always believed: he was murdered. But they could not--or would not--name the killer. This was not acquittal. Florence Bravo, Jane Cannon Cox, and Dr. James Manby Gully walked free not because they were innocent, but because the evidence against each was insufficient for prosecution. The cloud of suspicion would follow all three for the rest of their lives.

The Crime

Four suspects. Four possible murderers. Florence Bravo had motive: freedom from an unhappy marriage and control of her fortune. She had opportunity: she was present at The Priory that evening. But she was not alone with Charles, and her psychological profile--a woman who had fought for independence her entire life--suggested she might simply have waited for divorce.

Jane Cannon Cox had motive: Charles wanted her dismissed, threatening her livelihood. She had opportunity: she was the last person to interact with Charles before his collapse. She had means: the coachman testified she had asked about the antimony in the stables. But her alleged confession story, if fabricated, created enormous risk--the very outcome she feared would result from investigation.

Dr. James Manby Gully had motive: jealousy, revenge against the man who had taken his lover. He had knowledge: as a physician, he knew exactly how much antimony would kill. But he was not at The Priory that night. If he killed Charles, he did so through an intermediary--most likely Mrs. Cox.

Charles Bravo himself might have committed suicide, as Mrs. Cox claimed. But he left no note, settled no affairs, and had taken out life insurance that would be void if he killed himself--leaving his devoted family with nothing.

The Investigation

The evidence pointed everywhere and nowhere.

The antimony was definitively identified--enough tartar emetic to kill three men. It was kept in the stables at The Priory, accessible to anyone in the household. The poison most likely entered Charles's system through his bedside water jug.

The servants testified about a household filled with tension. Charles and Florence argued constantly. Mrs. Cox's position was precarious. The shadow of Dr. Gully hung over everything.

The jury faced an impossible task: convict without proof, or release without justice.

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Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions of gun violence, intimate partner violence, poisoning, and discussions of coercive control in same-sex and heterosexual relationships. Crisis resources are listed at the end of these notes.

Historical Context

In Indiana, public pressure forced an exhumation four months after Hattie's death. Organs shipped to Chicago forchemical analysis revealed large quantities of strychnine. Pettit was arrested and charged with murder. The trial in Crawfordsville drew journalists from across the Midwest. Lew Wallace — the author of *Ben-Hur*, a former Union general, and a member of the military commission that tried the Lincoln assassination conspirators — attendedregularly from the gallery. The jury convicted Pettit and sentenced him to life in prison at hard labor. He died oftuberculosis in 1893, the same day the Indiana Supreme Court granted him a retrial. Elma Whitehead, who funded his defense and fled the state to avoid subpoenas, was never tried.

Lilly Duer was captured in Baltimore and tried at the Worcester County courthouse in Snow Hill, Maryland, in May 1879. She was housed not in jail but at the National Hotel across the street — jail being unsuitable for a woman of her standing. The jury convicted her of manslaughter. The sentence: a five-hundred-dollar fine and no prison time. For shooting a woman in the face.

The Investigations

Indiana, 1889: While Hattie Pettit visited a friend in South Bend, her husband moved into the home of Elma Whitehead — the wealthiest woman in the county, daughter of church patron David Meharry. Pettit proposed to Elma, and she accepted. When Hattie returned on July 12, she was poisoned with strychnine on at least three separate occasions over five days. The poison produced violent convulsions — the body arching, the muscles seizing, the face drawn into what the Victorians called the risus sardonicus. Hattie told her doctor she believed she had been poisoned. He did nothing. She died July 17, 1889. The official cause: malaria.

Maryland, 1878:On November 5, Lilly Duer walked into the Hearn family home in Pocomoke City with a revolverconcealed in a specially sewn pocket of her dress. She shot Ella Hearn in the face. The bullet passed through Ella's lip, shattered a tooth, and lodged in her skull. Through the blood, Ella spoke: "Don't, Lilly, please don't. I'll marry you." Lilly fled to Baltimore disguised in her brother's suit with her already-short hair cropped shorter.

The Crimes

Hattie Sperry Pettit: was a schoolteacher who married the Reverend William Pettit through church connections inNew York. In 1889 Indiana, teaching was one of the very few professional callings available to educated women, andHattie was practical, self-sufficient, and disciplined. She did not know that the man at the head of her table had oncebeen jailed for theft, had lied his way into the Masonic Brotherhood, and had used those connections to secure his ordination. The minister she married was a fabrication.

Ella Hearn was nineteen years old in the autumn of 1878, the daughter of an established merchant family in Pocomoke City, Maryland. Quiet, gentle, trusting — she had graduated from a boarding academy where she shared a room with the woman who would shoot her. She observed what the newspapers called a delicate, unassuming grace. That grace made her extraordinarily vulnerable.

The Victims

Both cases are about desire that could not be spoken aloud and justice systems that decided the people who caused harm deserved more mercy than the people who were harmed.In a river town on Maryland's Eastern Shore, a nineteen-year-old woman is shot in the face by her closest companion— and through the blood and agony speaks five words that have echoed for nearly a century and a half. In the farming country of western Indiana, a minister poisons his wife with strychnine so he can marry the richest woman in the county — and the dying woman figures out exactly what is happening to her. No one lifts a finger.

Season 40 of Foul Play begins a year-long journey across all fifty states, pairing two historical crimes per episode —connected by a single thread. Tonight: Maryland, 1878, and Indiana, 1889. Two women trusted the people closest to them. Both paid for that trust with their bodies.

Crisis Support Resources

If you or someone you know is experiencing intimate partner violence:-

US: National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233-

US: Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741-

UK: National Domestic Abuse Helpline: 0808 2000 247-

UK: Victim Support: 0808 1689 111

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Billy Wimbish - was born around 1859. A Black man who made his life in the Alaska Interior, Wimbish earned respect among the miners of the Fairbanks district. In 1906, he served as lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against mine owner D.H. Cascaden on Cleary Creek. Judge James Wickersham ruled in the miners' favor, finding Cascaden liable for all wages owed. That legal victory, won in Alaska Territory as a Black man against a white mine owner, defined the kind of man Wimbish was.

Lloyd Magruder - was born in 1825 in Maryland, descended from a Scottish ancestor who arrived as a prisoner of war in 1653. He served in the Mexican War, rising from private to second lieutenant. After a stint in California politics representing Sacramento in the State Assembly, Magruder moved to Lewiston, Idaho Territory, in July 1862. He built a mercantile store and a pack train operation in a frontier capital still called "Ragtown" for its canvastents. He had a wife named Caroline and three children.

Idaho and Alaska. 1863 and 1910. Two murders separated by forty-seven years and two thousand miles, connected by gold and the calculation that it was worth more than a man. In Idaho, a merchant named Lloyd Magruder loaded a fortune onto pack mules and trusted the wrong men. In Alaska, a miner named Billy Wimbish disappeared from his claim, and the system did not look for him. Both cases were solved not by authorities but by friends who refused to stop searching. This is the story of gold fever and what it cost.

Season 40: Two hundred and fifty years of American history. Fifty states. Fifty crimes. Two per episode, paired by what connects them.

This episode contains discussions of murder, violence, and the destruction of human remains. Crisis resources are listed at the end of these notes.

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Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions of gun violence, intimate partner violence, poisoning, and discussions of coercive control in same-sex and heterosexual relationships. Crisis resources are listed at the end of these notes.

of Foul Play, Shane and Wendy examine two cases from the American Gilded Age connected by the same institutional failure: not a lack of evidence, but a refusal to act on it. The Ashtabula bridge disaster killed 92 people and led to the silencing of the one man who told the truth. The Hells Canyon massacre left as many as 34 Chinese miners dead, and an all-white jury acquitted the confessed killers.

Season 40: Twin Portraits, two states, two stories. Ohio, 1877. Washington and Oregon, 1887. A murdered railroad engineer whose autopsy was hidden for 123 years, and Chinese gold miners massacred in the deepest gorge in North America while federal law declared them less than citizens. Two historical murder cases where the evidence existed and the institutions responsible chose silence.

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July 1877. A dirt road in rural Missouri. A fifty-eight-year-old woman named Martha Parrish is shot dead by her own son-in-law while trying to rescue her daughter from an abusive marriage. Fifteen years later and five hundred miles east, an eighteen-year-old maid named Ellen Smith is shot behind a luxury hotel in Winston, North Carolina — and someone writes a song about it. Two historical murders. Two women killed by men who claimed to love someone close to them. One ended in a double coffin. The other became a folk song you may have heard without knowing it was real.

Season 40: Twin Portraits — double-feature true crime episodes exploring two historical murders from different American states, connected by a single theme. In Episode 3, the theme is love that kills — and the songs that outlive the dead.

This episode contains discussions of domestic violence, murder, suicide, and public execution. If you need to skip this content, support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

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Historical Significance

In Georgia, a Webster County posse pursued Susan and Enoch one hundred twenty-five miles to Coffee County, Alabama. The grand jury indicted both on May 27, 1872, twenty-three days after the murder. Enoch's trial lasted a single day; the jury deliberated for three minutes. Both were sentenced to death on May 30. Twenty-six days from murder to death sentence. The Georgia Supreme Court denied Susan's appeal in *Eberhart v. State* 47 Ga. 598 (1873), with Justice H.K. McCay dismissing calls for mercy. Governor James M. Smith refused clemency four days before Susan was to die.

Sheriff L.R. Barnard traced the Potts family over five hundred miles to Rock Springs, Wyoming, arresting the couple on February 16, 1889. Josiah Potts claimed Fawcett had killed himself after sexually abusing their daughter Edith, then approximately five years old. The abuse allegation was never investigated. The jury deliberated four hours, unanimous guilty verdict. Two hundred sixty-seven residents of Carlin petitioned the state board of pardons to commute both sentences to life imprisonment. The board refused. Sheriff Barnard himself opposed the execution.

The Investigations and Trials

Case B, Georgia (1872): On May 4, 1872, after ten o'clock at night, Enoch Spann strangled his wife Sarah with a plow line, breaking her neck. According to his confession, Susan Eberhart held a handkerchief over Sarah's mouth at his command. Susan maintained she had been asleep and was compelled to participate under direct threat from a man who had already attempted murder twice, including a staged buggy accident where Susan had pulled Sarah from a swollen creek to save her life.

Case A, Nevada (1888): Miles Fawcett entered the Potts household on New Year's Day to collect a debt and use knowledge of Elizabeth's bigamous marriage in Fresno, California. He was never seen alive again. His remains, charred, dismembered, buried in pieces throughout the cellar floor, were discovered on January 16, 1889, by the new tenant George Brewer. The only identifying object: a fragment of burned trouser pocket containing Fawcett's pocketknife.

The Crimes

Sarah Spann was approximately fifty years old. She had lost a leg and lived as an invalid in a one-room log cabin inWebster County, Georgia, dependent on her husband Enoch for everything. A Confederate veteran whose own fellow soldiers had described him as "very ignorant and very imbecile, Enoch Spann was the man she was married to and the man who killed her.

Miles Fawcett was born around 1830 near Manchester, England. He came west following the railroad, settling in Carlin, a Central Pacific division point established in 1868 with a population of roughly eight hundred. Fawcett worked a small ranch outside town. He kept to himself, known well enough that his pocketknife was recognized on sight but private enough that neighbors called him "Old Man Fawcett" and left it at that. He was fifty-seven when he disappeared.

The Victims

New Year's Day, 1888. A fifty-seven-year-old English carpenter named Miles Fawcett walks into a house on Silver Street in Carlin, Nevada, to collect a debt. He never comes back out. For a full year, the town absorbs his absence. When a new tenant probes the cellar floor and pulls up what he takes for a rotten turnip, it turns out to be a charred, decapitated human head. The woman who lived above that cellar, Elizabeth Potts, would become the only female ever legally executed in the state of Nevada. Meanwhile, in post-Civil War Georgia, an eighteen-year-old named Susan Eberhart is sent to cook and wash for a one-legged woman in a one-room cabin. Within days of her arrival, the man of the house begins telling her how he intends to kill his wife. Susan once waded into a swollen creek to save that woman's life. She would be convicted of helping to end it.

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes, two hundred and fifty years of history. This double-feature covers Nevada and Georgia, two women sentenced to hang, separated by seventeen years and two thousand miles, connected by a question neither court could answer.

This Episode

This episode contains discussions of murder, execution by hanging, domestic violence, sexual coercion, and dismemberment.

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This episode contains discussions of murder, arsenic poisoning, the deaths of children, and historical criminal trials. Ifyou need to skip any portion, advance past that segment using your chapter markers.

This Episode

Season 40 of Foul Play marks America's 250th anniversary by examining two cases that expose how the justice system treated killers differently based on wealth, gender, and class. This week: a double feature — one case from Texas, one from Pennsylvania, eleven years apart, and both asking the same question. Was justice served?

In January 1877, a woman known as Diamond Bessie crossed a footbridge over Big Cypress Bayou in Jefferson, Texas. She never came back. Her companion — the wealthy son of a Cincinnati jeweler — walked away with her rings on his fingers and her luggage on his arm. What followed was one of the most contested murder trials in Texas history, in a town that was already losing everything. This is true crime at its most infuriating: a woman's life weighed against a powerful family's money.

Then we cross to Philadelphia, 1888. Sarah Jane Whiteling, a forty-year-old factory worker's wife in a rear apartment on Cadwallader Street, lost her husband, her daughter, and her son inside sixty-seven days. The insurance companies paid out $399 total — $47 for her two-year-old boy. Arsenic trioxide was in every body. The prosecution called it wholesale murder. The defense called it insanity. The jury took two hours. This is historical true crime that doesn't let you look away.

The Victims

Diamond Bessie — real name believed to be Annie Stone, born around 1854 in upstate New York — had built a life on her own terms in an era that gave women almost none. She worked in upscale establishments in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Hot Springs, accepting fine jewelry as payment, which earned her the name everyone knew her by. Dark- haired, pale-skinned, with grey or steel-blue eyes that period newspapers described as striking, she was intelligent and charming by every account. She married Abraham Rothschild in Danville, Illinois on January 11, 1877. Ten days later, a Black woman named Sarah King found her body propped against a twisted oak in the bayou woods — fully clothed, stripped of every piece of jewelry, a single gunshot wound to her temple.

The Whiteling victims were a family. John Whiteling, thirty-eight, worked as a streetcar conductor and factory worker. Bertha was nine years old. Willie was two. John died on or around March 20, 1888. Bertha died April 25. Willie died May 26. Sixty-seven days, start to finish. Each death had a doctor's signature and a natural cause on the certificate. None of those causes were arsenic. The bodies at Mechanics' Cemetery held the truth that the living room had hidden.

The Crimes

Abraham Rothschild — son of Meyer Rothschild, a prosperous Cincinnati jeweler — had been traveling with Bessie since meeting her in Hot Springs around 1875. On January 21, 1877, he bought two picnic lunches from Henrique's Restaurant in Jefferson, crossed the footbridge over Big Cypress Bayou with Bessie, and came back alone. He told the hotel staff she was visiting friends. The next morning he wore two of her large diamond rings to breakfast. Two days later he boarded the eastbound train with both sets of luggage. He was traced to the Capitol Hotel in Marshall, then arrested after shooting himself outside a saloon — blinded in his right eye — in Cincinnati. His family spent what contemporary sources called "no fewer than ten high-priced attorneys" on his defense, led by U.S. Congressman David B. Culberson. The first trial ended in a conviction and a death sentence. The Texas Court of Appeals threw it out on a procedural technicality. The second trial ended in an acquittal. The jury deliberated four hours.

Sarah Jane Whiteling purchased Rough on Rats — an arsenic trioxide compound manufactured by Ephraim S. Wells of New Jersey — and administered it to three members of her household between March and May of 1888. Coroner Samuel H. Ashbridge ordered the bodies exhumed. Professor Henry Leffmann, a chemist, and Dr. Henry F. Formad, a pathologist, found arsenic in every body. A drugstore clerk confirmed the purchase. Sarah confessed. Her defense centered on Dr. Alice Bennett — the first female physician to lead a department at an American asylum, Norristown State Hospital — who testified that Whiteling suffered from "physiological insanity" linked to reproductive dysfunction. The prosecution answered with their own experts: Drs. Charles Mills and John Chapin, who acknowledged she was of weak mind but said she was not legally insane. The jury deliberated approximately two hours. Guilty. First-degree murder. Death.

On June 25, 1889, at 10:07 in the morning, Sarah Jane Whiteling was executed at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia. She was the first woman executed in Philadelphia since colonial times. She reportedly appeared calm and believed she would be reunited with her children in heaven.

Historical Context

Both cases unfold during America's Gilded Age — that era of violent contradiction between spectacular wealth and grinding poverty. Jefferson, Texas had been the biggest riverport in the state until the Army Corps of Engineers removed the natural logjam on the Red River in 1873, and the railroad bypassed the city for Marshall. What had once shipped more than 75,000 bales of cotton annually was already hollowing out when Bessie's body was found. Reconstruction was collapsing across the South. Democrats had retaken the Texas state government three years earlier. In this context, the Rothschild family's ability to hire an army of lawyers — including a sitting U.S. Congressman — and purchase an acquittal reads as something beyond a legal outcome. It reads as a statement about whose life counted.

In Philadelphia, 1888, a factory worker's full-year wages ran between $300 and $500. Sarah Whiteling collected $399 from three life insurance policies — nearly a year's salary — for the deaths of her husband and two children. The arithmetic is not subtle. Dr. Alice Bennett's insanity defense was, by the standards of 1888 forensic psychiatry, genuinely innovative — her theory of "physiological insanity" in women with reproductive dysfunction would later be examined in the *Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law* (Vol. 48, No. 3, 2020). But the jury didn't buy it, and Sarah Whiteling hanged.

Together these cases are a portrait of American justice in 1877 and 1888: brilliant, broken, and priced according to what you could afford.

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This episode contains detailed descriptions of violent death, including axe murders and decapitation. If you need to skip this content, advance to the chapter markers below. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

This Episode

Season 40 of Foul Play marks America's 250th anniversary with a series of Twin Portraits, two true crimes from two different states, set in the same decade, examined side by side. This week: two axe murders from the 1890s, one in Massachusetts, one in Tennessee, both forgotten by history.

On May 30, 1893, twenty-two-year-old Bertha Manchester was killed in her father's farmhouse outside Fall River, Massachusetts, six days before the Lizzie Borden trial opened fifteen miles away in New Bedford. In March 1897, five members of a German immigrant family were slaughtered on a Tennessee ridge, their house burned to the ground, their case never solved. Two women named lived into their nineties and never saw justice. Shane and Wendy tell both stories.

The Victims (Case A, Massachusetts )

Bertha Mabel Manchester was born May 7, 1871, in Fall River, Massachusetts. She was twenty-two years old. Her mother had died when she was young, and she helped run the family dairy farm on New Boston Road, the quiet, rural edge of a city better known for cotton mills and crowded streets. She was home alone on the morning of May 30, 1893, when her father Stephen and her twelve-year-old brother Freddie left with the milk wagon.

She fought back. The medical examiner found twenty-three wounds to the back of her skull, defensive cuts on her hands and arms, and clothing torn in the struggle. Five teeth had been knocked out. The same doctor who performed those wounds had examined two other bodies less than a year before, Andrew and Abby Borden, murdered with a hatchet eight miles away the previous August. Dr. William A. Dolan was the medical examiner for Bristol County. He had seen this kind of violence before.

The Victims (Case B, Tennessee)

Jacob Ade was a German immigrant who had farmed 410 acres on Paradise Ridge, in the northwestern corner of Davidson County, Tennessee, for twenty years. His wife Pauline was fifty. Their daughter Lizzie was eighteen. Their son Henry was thirteen. On the night of March 23, 1897, a ten-year-old neighbor named Rosa Moirer was sleeping over at the Ade farm.

By 9:30 that night, a neighbor named Squire Simpson saw a glow on the horizon. He went to investigate with a potato fork lashed to a long pole, probing through the burning debris. He pulled four bodies from the sitting room. All four Ade family members had been decapitated. Rosa Moirer, the neighbor's daughter, was found outside. She had not been decapitated. Her head was still intact. Five people were dead.

The Crimes and Investigations

In Fall River, a nineteen-year-old Azorean immigrant named José Correia de Mello, who had arrived in America barely one month earlier, spoke no English, and had worked a day or two on the Manchester farm before disappearing, came back to the property on May 30 looking for money he believed Stephen Manchester owed him. When his uncle was told police needed him as a witness to a horse theft, de Mello went to the station without any idea he was a suspect. A shoe store owner testified that de Mello had tried to pay for new shoes using a trade dollar and a plugged half-dollar, the distinctive coins known to have been in Bertha's stolen purse. On September 18, 1893, de Mello changed his plea to guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. He walked out on January 31, 1914, twenty-one years later, and was deported to the Azores. No record of him survives after that.

In Tennessee, the case produced theories but no convictions. Jacob Ade had withdrawn approximately $200 from a Nashville bank the day he died, intended as a loan for a neighbor. The money was never found. Investigators considered the neighbor Henry Moirer, whose daughter Rosa was among the dead; a man named Ed Anderson with whom Jacob had quarreled over hogs; and a group of men from Ashland City whose confessions didn't match the physical evidence and who were eventually released. Every trial ended in acquittal. The Paradise Ridge axe murders have never been solved.

Historical Context

Both cases belong to the same decade, the 1890s, when the United States was processing waves of immigration, rapid industrialization, and deep regional tensions a generation after the Civil War. In Fall River, José de Mello arrived in a city with one of the largest Portuguese-American populations in New England. The community that helped deliver him to police later spent years petitioning for his release. In Tennessee, the racial climate meant that multiple Black men from Ashland City were arrested, subjected to interrogation, and coerced into confessions that investigators ultimately couldn't use. Both cases carry the shadow of a justice system that worked very differently depending on who stood before it.

Rosa Ade married Lawrence James Hehir in Nashville on January 20, 1897, just two months before her family was killed. She lived until May 17, 1962. She was ninety years old. The Tennessee Centennial Exposition opened in Nashville five weeks after her family was buried on the Ade property in March 1897. The state was celebrating. A family had been erased.

In 2023, a hundred and thirty years after Bertha Manchester's death, William D. Spencer published *The Other Fall River Tragedy* through the Fall River Historical Society. It was the first full-length account of her case. A historical marker for the Ade family was erected in 2018 at 3000 Morgan Road in Joelton by the Historical Commission of Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County. A small road called Jacobs Valley runs through what was once the Ade homestead, named in honor of Jacob Ade.

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This episode contains discussions of murder, execution, racial violence, and a botched public hanging. If you need to skip any section, the chapter markers below will help you find your way around. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

This Episode

Season 40 of Foul Play covers America's forgotten crimes — fifty states, 250 years, and the stories that slipped out of the history books. Episode 8 closes out the season with a double portrait. One case from New Hampshire. One from Colorado. Eleven years apart. Two thousand miles between them. The same question at the center of both: when the law finally catches up with a killer, does it actually deliver justice?

This is historical true crime at its most uncomfortable.

Case A: The Great Falls National Bank Murder — New Hampshire , 1897

Joseph A. Stickney was sixty-eight years old when a man walked into his bank on Good Friday morning, April 16, 1897, and cut his throat.

Stickney was the cashier of the Great Falls National Bank in Somersworth, New Hampshire — a mill city of seven thousand people where the Salmon Falls River dropped one hundred feet over a mile and powered seven textile mills. The bank had operated since 1865. On a holiday morning, with the mills closed and families walking to Mass, Stickney was alone at his desk with $150,000 in money and securities behind him.

The man who killed him was Joseph E. Kelley, twenty-four years old, born in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Kelley had been convicted in Somersworth five years earlier for breaking and entering. He had studied the bank's routine. He walked in with a blackjack, knocked Stickney to the floor, cut his throat, and left with approximately $6,000 in cash — leaving $144,000 behind.

The historical murder investigation moved fast. Kelley hired a horse team from Whitten's Stable. The team was found the next day at Phoenix Stables. On April 29, investigators searched a boarding house in Berwick, Maine, where they found a box containing a false mustache and goatee. Kelley had already crossed into Quebec on a Boston & Maine train. He was caught in a Montreal brothel, seated between two prostitutes, still wearing a woman's dress he had purchased for $10 in gold from a hotelkeeper in Quebec.

At trial in Dover, New Hampshire, in November 1897, Kelley changed his plea to guilty — but only if the hanging could be scheduled for January 16, 1898. He had a contract with the Devil, he explained, that expired January 15.

Dr. Charles Bancroft of the New Hampshire State Asylum for the Insane examined Kelley multiple times and concluded he had the instincts of a man but the judgment and capacity of a child of nine. Expert after expert called him a "high-grade imbecile. " Chief Justice Alonzo P. Carpenter, who had served as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court since 1896, presided over a bench that ultimately found Kelley guilty of second-degree murder — thirty years in state prison. Kelley was reportedly disappointed. He had wanted to hang.

Case B: The Trolley Murder of Joseph C. Whitnah — Colorado , 1886

On the night of May 19, 1886, Joseph C. Whitnah was driving a horse-drawn streetcar along the Broadway line of the Denver City Railway when two men approached his car at the southern terminus at Broadway and Alameda.

Whitnah was a streetcar operator in a city mid-boom. Denver's population tripled between 1880 and 1890, from roughly 35,000 to more than 106,000. The Denver City Railway operated forty-five coaches across sixteen miles of track.

Andrew Green, twenty-five years old, and his associate John "Kansas" Withers had been waiting for Whitnah's car. Green fired two shots from a .38 caliber revolver. The first shot was accidental — triggered when Whitnah screamed. The second was deliberate, close-range, through the heart. Whitnah died on the spot. The $14 in fares in his cashbox went untouched.

The true crime investigation broke in six days. On May 21, a private detective received a tip at the G.A.R. Saloon on Larimer Street — the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization for Union veterans. Withers confessed almost immediately and identified Green as the shooter. Green was arrested and confessed on May 25. He told investigators he had been promised the death penalty would be taken off the table if he cooperated.

That promise was never confirmed or denied.

Green stood trial before an all-white jury. This was Denver six years after a mob of 3,000 attacked the city's Chinese quarter and lynched a man named Look Young. Defense attorney Edgar Caypless worked pro bono. He argued that no robbery had actually been completed, that Green's confession was coerced by a false promise, and that the first shot was accidental. The jury deliberated a little over an hour — was polled four times, one juror holding out for second- degree — and returned a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. Death.

On July 27, 1886, Sheriff Frederick Cramer of Arapahoe County cut the main rope at 2:24 PM before fifteen to twenty thousand spectators gathered between the Broadway and Colfax bridges. Vendors sold lemonade. Families had brought picnic lunches. Children were in the crowd.

Green's neck did not snap. Twelve minutes after the jerk-up, doctors could still feel a pulse at his wrist. At 3:45 PM — eighty-one minutes after Cramer cut the rope — undertakers removed Andrew Green from the gallows and placed him in a casket bound for the "colored" section of Riverside Cemetery.

The execution was condemned by nearly every Denver newspaper. In 1889, Colorado moved all executions to the state prison in Canon City, limited witnesses, and commissioned a new gallows design. In 1897 — the same year Joseph Stickney was murdered in New Hampshire — Colorado abolished the death penalty. It was reinstated in 1901.

Historical Context

Both cases arrived during the same decade, when American law was negotiating what justice was supposed to look like. In New Hampshire, a court grappled with whether a man who could plan a murder could simultaneously lack the mental capacity to stand fully accountable for it. In Colorado, a court asked whether a Black man could get a fair trial six years after his city had watched a lynch mob go unpunished.

Neither question has a clean answer. Both still echo.

This is Season 40 of Foul Play: America's 250th Anniversary — the crimes that didn't make the monuments.

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This episode contains descriptions of murder, mob violence, historical racial violence, and the execution of a convicted killer. If you need to skip this content, advance past the 18:00 mark. Support resources are listed at the end of these notes.

This Episode

Season 40: Fifty states, fifty forgotten crimes, America's 250th year. Episode 9 covers California and Alabama — two cases, two communities that looked at the legal system and reached for something uglier. October 10, 1890. A woman named Helen Riche is playing cards in her tavern near a California quicksilver mine when ten men in flour-sack hoods crash through the door. She does not run. She reaches up and rips the mask off the nearest man's face, and in that single act she solves the crime that is about to kill her. This is true crime history from the American frontier, and the legal system that followed would leave you cold.

December 1888, Birmingham, Alabama. A railroad engineer named Richard Hawes boards a streetcar with his eight- year-old daughter May. He gets off with her at East Lake. He gets back on alone. The body of a young girl is found floating in the lake the next morning. On the same day, Hawes is across the state line getting married. When Birmingham finds out, two thousand people march on the jail.

The Victims

Helen Matilda Riche ran the Campers' Retreat tavern on sixty-two acres near the Bradford quicksilver mine, three miles south of Middletown, California. We do not know where she was born or how she came to run a mining-camp saloon in hard hill country — the historical record is thin on her life before October 10, 1890. What it preserves is a woman who managed a clientele of mercury miners in one of the most physically dangerous industries of the era. She was shot five times during the raid. She fought back, reaching for her husband's .44 Winchester with five bullets already in her body. She died four days later. Her husband J.W. Riche died less than three months after her, his own bullet wound never having healed.

May Hawes was eight years old when her father took her on a one-way train ride to East Lake on the evening of December 3, 1888. She had been doing the work of a parent since she could walk, looking after younger siblings in a household already coming apart. She was laid out for public identification at Lockwood & Miller's Funeral Parlor in Birmingham, unidentified for a full day. A local butcher recognized her. May, her mother Emma, and her six-year-old sister Irene — all three murdered by Richard Hawes — lay in an unmarked grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in Birmingham for more than 135 years. In April 2024, they finally received a headstone.

The Crimes

The Lake County White Cap raid followed personal grudges that had been tightening for months. Blackburn, a mine foreman, had been thrown out of the Campers' Retreat after a brawl with the bartender Fred Bennett. Others in the group had boundary disputes, cattle quarrels, neighborhood debts to settle. They put flour sacks over their heads and called it a community morality action — the Whitecapping movement had spread from Indiana through the Southern states and into California by 1890. The plan was to flog Bennett and run him to the county line. Helen Riche unmasked Henry Arkarro the moment the men crashed through the door, and the plan collapsed into gunfire.

Richard Hawes murdered three members of his own family to clear the way for a new marriage. Emma and Irene Hawes were found bound with curtain cord and weighted with railroad iron curve-braces in a Birmingham lake on December 8, 1888 — the same day a mob of approximately 2,000 people converged on the Jefferson County Jail demanding to hang him on the spot. Sheriff Joseph S. Smith fired into the crowd. Ten men were killed. Approximately thirty were wounded. The historical murder case that followed Hawes would take fourteen more months and a formal trial to reach the same conclusion the mob wanted.

The Investigations and Legal Outcomes

In California, ten men were arrested within days. The mining community was small; Helen Riche had identified one attacker herself. The trial opened February 6, 1891, in Lakeport — *People of the State of California v. B.F. Staley et al.* Four men were convicted of second-degree murder: Blackburn sentenced to twenty-five years, Staley and Cradwick to twenty years each, Osgood to twelve years. All four were released from San Quentin within approximately three years. The Governor had commuted Blackburn's sentence to ten years following an extensive lobbying campaign. Three years, for a home invasion that killed two people.

In Alabama, Richard Hawes was tried beginning April 22, 1889, before Judge Samuel Greene. The prosecution built the case around May's murder — the strongest evidence available, though entirely circumstantial: eyewitness testimony placing father and daughter on the streetcar together, and only the father returning. The jury deliberated fifty-five minutes. Death. After multiple appeals to the Alabama Supreme Court, all denied, Richard Hawes was hanged by Sheriff Smith on February 28, 1890 — the same man who had fired into a crowd to keep him alive for this moment. Hawes wore a geranium in his lapel. The gallows were built by a man who had served on his jury.

Historical Context

Both cases sit at a specific American intersection: communities losing faith in institutional justice and reaching for extralegal violence, with consequences that fell hardest on people who had nothing to do with the original grievance. The Whitecapping movement was already documented across Indiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi before it reached California. In Alabama, the Birmingham riot of 1888 killed ten bystanders, including Maurice Throckmorton, thirty-three, the city's postmaster, who was reportedly trying to calm the crowd when he was shot. The legal system delivered the outcome the mob demanded — it just took fourteen months and cost ten additional lives to get there.

California's legislature responded to the broader wave of hooded vigilantism during this period with enhanced anti- vigilante and anti-mask statutes. For the Hawes case, Fannie Bryant — the family's cook and a key witness for the prosecution — was herself sentenced to death for allegedly aiding Hawes. She died in a prison riot before the sentence could be carried out. Her actual level of involvement remains contested. She was a Black woman in 1880s Alabama, easily targeted by a system that offered her no protection.

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Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states. Fifty crimes. Two hundred and fifty years of American

history, told through the true crime cases that other shows leave behind.

New Mexico, 1892. A former sheriff walks into the dark with a man he trusts and never comes home. Illinois, 1871.

A former Secretary of State steps off his porch for a midnight train and is shot dead in the street. Both men

served their communities. Both were killed for it. Both were largely forgotten — until now. This is historical true

crime, and tonight both cases are about what happens when political power turns lethal.

Case A: Francisco Chavez and the Santa Fe Ring

Francisco Chavez was born around 1851 in New Mexico Territory, the son of a family that had shaped this region

for generations before the American flag flew over Santa Fe's plaza. He was Hispanic, a nuevomexicano, and he

became sheriff of Santa Fe County at a time when the territory's government had been captured by the Santa Fe

Ring — an informal network of Anglo-American lawyers, politicians, and land speculators who exploited Spanish

and Mexican land grants to strip Hispanic families of land they had occupied for generations.

At the center of the Ring stood Thomas Catron, a Confederate veteran and Missouri lawyer who arrived in New

Mexico in 1866. By the 1890s, Catron had acquired interests in thirty-four land grants totaling approximately

three million acres — making him, by most accounts, the largest private landowner in the United States. He had

served as district attorney, territorial attorney general, and U.S. attorney. He owned the territory as surely as

anyone could.

Chavez stood against him. Historian Tobias Duran, writing in the New Mexico Historical Review, called Chavez a

formidable foe of the Santa Fe Ring. He was the rare Hispanic Democrat using the blunt authority of the sheriff's

office to push back against the most powerful men in the territory.

On the night of May 29, 1892, Chavez was lured from a Santa Fe bar by a man named Atilano Gold — someone

he trusted. Gold walked him toward the Guadalupe bridge, near the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe,

the oldest shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the United States. Armed men waited behind a telegraph pole.

Chavez was shot multiple times. His last words, spoken in Spanish, were that brutes had assassinated him.

Four men were indicted: Francisco Gonzales y Borrego, his brother Antonio, Laureano Alarid, and Patricio

Valencia. Their defense attorney was Thomas Catron — the man widely suspected of ordering the murder,

now defending the accused killers. The prosecution's key witness, Juan Gallegos, testified that a $700 payment

had been offered through intermediaries for Chavez's death. Judge Seeds ruled that he did not believe Catron

personally made the offer, but accepted the conspiracy existed. That distinction shielded Catron from criminal

liability.

All four defendants were convicted and sentenced to death. Appeals dragged on for nearly five years. On April

2, 1897, they were hanged simultaneously at the Santa Fe jail grounds. Forty-five National Guard soldiers were

present. At 9:09 AM, the trap bolt was drawn. Three necks broke on impact. Patricio Valencia strangled for three

to four minutes before he died.

Thomas Catron was never charged. When New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912, the territory he had helped

plunder elected him as one of its first two United States Senators. He died in 1921. A former senator. Never

charged. Never tried.

Case B: Sharon Tyndale and the Seal That Outlasted Him

Sharon Tyndale was born in Philadelphia on January 19, 1816. He arrived in Belleville, Illinois in 1833 — the same

year Chicago was incorporated as a town — and spent the next three decades building railroads and building a

career. Abraham Lincoln personally appointed him Postmaster of Belleville in 1861. When Lincoln was assassinated

in 1865, Tyndale was among the committee members who received the president's coffin in Springfield. He was

one of the original fifteen members of the National Lincoln Monument Association, the group that built Lincoln's

tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery.

In 1865, Tyndale was elected Illinois Secretary of State. His younger brother Hector had bled for the Union at

Antietam, was promoted to brigadier general, and was later breveted major general for gallantry. The family's

loyalty to the Union was bone-deep.

In 1867, the Illinois legislature authorized a new state seal. Tyndale proposed reversing the state motto from "State

Sovereignty, National Union" to "National Union, State Sovereignty." The Civil War had settled that question with

blood. The Senate rejected his proposal. So the legislature gave him the wording and handed him the design.

Tyndale kept the words in their mandated order. But he designed the banner in the eagle's beak to twist, placing

the word "Sovereignty" upside down. The seal entered use in 1868. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the

word "Sovereignty" still hangs inverted on the Great Seal of the State of Illinois.

On April 29, 1871, two years after leaving office, Tyndale walked out of his home on Adams Street in Springfield

just after one in the morning, heading to the Chicago & Alton railroad station for a 1:50 AM train. On the dark

street, steps from his own front door, someone clubbed him to the ground and shot him behind the right ear with

a single-shot Derringer — the same type of weapon used to kill Abraham Lincoln six years earlier. His $50 wallet

was taken. His gold watch was not. His killer was never identified.

A five-thousand-dollar reward went unclaimed. Four theories competed — robbery, romantic entanglement,

political enemies, railroad business dispute — and the competition destroyed the investigation. The 1929 Illinois

State Journal concluded the welter of possible motives had hindered the case. No arrest was ever made.

The seal lives on. Every official document issued by the State of Illinois, every state flag that flies over Springfield,

still carries the handiwork of a man who was murdered two years after completing it.

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Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary — fifty true crime stories from fifty states. Wyoming, 1892. A fiftee-

n-year-old orphan train rider murders two young men in a boxcar and becomes the first person executed by

the state. New York, 1906. A seventeen-year-old immigrant kills the uncle who abused her and walks free from

a packed Manhattan courtroom. Two teenagers. Two states. Two verdicts that split the question of whether a

child's history belongs to them or to the law.

In this historical true crime double feature, Foul Play examines the execution of Charles "Kansas Charley" Miller

and the acquittal of Josephine Terranova — two cases that reveal how gender, geography, and political timing

determined which children America chose to protect and which it chose to destroy.

The Victims

Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh** were eighteen and twenty years old, from St. Joseph, Missouri. They

were not vagrants. They had outfitted themselves for a tramping adventure on the Union Pacific line with new

clothes, spending money, and arms. On the night of September 27, 1890, they were shot in the head while they

slept in a boxcar somewhere between Pine Bluff and Hillsdale, Wyoming, by a fifteen-year-old boy they had been

traveling with. Fishbaugh was found alive but died without recovering.

**Gaetano and Concetta Riggio** were killed in their home at 110 East 220th Street in the Bronx by their niece

and goddaughter, Josephine Terranova, in 1906. Gaetano had been Josephine's legal guardian and godfather

since her arrival from Sicily. Trial testimony established that he had subjected her to years of forced labor and

sustained sexual abuse behind closed doors.

The Crimes

Charles Miller — known as Kansas Charley — was born in a Manhattan tenement in 1874. Orphaned by age six, he

was placed into the Children's Aid Society orphan train system founded by Charles Loring Brace in 1853. Roughly

two hundred thousand children rode those trains between 1854 and 1929. Charley was beaten by his foster family

for bedwetting and abandoned at a train depot at thirteen. He was gang-raped in a boxcar in Omaha. He bought

a pistol. On September 27, 1890, he killed Emerson and Fishbaugh in their sleep and took their belongings.

Josephine Pullare arrived at Ellis Island from San Stefano, Sicily, around 1903. Within a year, her aunt and uncle

had turned her into a domestic servant working from four in the morning until midday, seven days a week.

The sexual abuse began sometime after. Following her husband's departure, Josephine experienced a ten-day

psychological collapse involving auditory hallucinations she believed were the voice of God commanding her to

kill her uncle. She traveled to Park Row in lower Manhattan, purchased a revolver and a long potato knife, and

returned to the Bronx to kill both Gaetano and Concetta Riggio.

The Investigation and Trials

Miller turned himself in through his brother Fred's foster family in Manhattan, Kansas. His court-appointed

defender, Frank Taggart, had never handled a capital case and was not yet admitted to the Wyoming bar.

Taggart's defense included the humiliating strategy of having Charley testify to chronic masturbation — a

nineteenth-century theory linking the practice to moral derangement. The jury convicted. First-degree murder.

Death by hanging. An eighteen-month petition campaign involving senators, congressmen, and the son of Esther

Hobart Morris — the first woman to hold judicial office in the United States — failed to persuade Acting Governor

Amos Barber to commute the sentence. On April 22, 1892, Charles Miller became the first person executed by

the state of Wyoming, killed by a hydraulic gallows mechanism designed by James Julien that had never been

used on a person before.

Josephine Terranova's trial opened May 14, 1906, in Justice Francis M. Scott's courtroom on Franklin Street in

Manhattan. Several hundred people packed inside, including more than forty women from the Italian-American

community. Defense attorney ex-Judge Palmieri argued temporary madness. Prosecutor James R. Ely argued

deliberate calculation. Competing alienists — the 1906 term for forensic psychiatrists — reached irreconcilable

conclusions. The jury delivered a swift verdict: not guilty. Scholars have called it jury nullification. Josephine was

seventeen years old.

Historical Context

These two cases, separated by fourteen years, mark a fault line in American juvenile justice during the historical

true crime era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wyoming in 1892 was less than three months

past statehood, assembling its legal institutions while the Johnson County War between cattle barons and

homesteaders demanded hard enforcement. New York in 1906 had a legal tradition that sometimes extended

a margin of leniency to female defendants — the so-called "unwritten law" — though it was not applied equally

across race, class, or ethnicity.

Cornell historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg brought Charley's story back to public attention in a 2003 book,

discovered while researching juvenile male violence after the 1998 Jonesboro school shooting. In 2005, the

Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that executing people for crimes committed before age eighteen was

unconstitutional. Josephine relocated to California — reportedly with financial assistance from William Randolph

Hearst — and settled in Marin County. She died on July 16, 1981, at ninety-two years old, outliving her uncle by

seventy-five years.

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This episode is part of Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes

exploring the cases that shaped American history from every corner of the country.

Hawaii, 1889. A Japanese shopkeeper is lynched from a telephone pole on the main street of Honoka'a for

speaking English on behalf of plantation workers. Louisiana, 1887. Ten thousand sugar cane workers strike for cash

wages instead of scrip -- and armed paramilitaries sweep through residential streets at dawn, killing between 35

and 300 people. Two plantation economies. Two communities who challenged the system. The same answer.

The Victims

Katsu Goto was twenty-seven years old when he was killed on October 29, 1889. Born in Japan in 1862, he

changed his family name from Kobayakawa to Goto to qualify for the Hawaii immigration program. He arrived in

Honolulu Harbor on February 8, 1885, aboard the SS City of Tokio -- one of 944 immigrants in the first wave of

government-contract Japanese workers under the kanyaku imin program. After three years cutting cane at nine

dollars a month on the Hamakua Coast, Goto opened a general store in Honoka'a, the second-largest town on

the Big Island. He spoke English. He used that skill to help Japanese workers file complaints against plantation

abuses. That made him a target.

In Thibodaux, Louisiana, the victims of the November 23, 1887 massacre were overwhelmingly Black -- formerly

enslaved people and their children who had struck for fair wages during the sugar harvest. Eight names survived

the historical record: Willis Wilson, Felix Pierre, Archy Jones, Frank Patterson, Grant Conrad, Marcellin Weldon,

Riley Anderson, and Mahala Washington. They represent a fraction of those killed. The full death toll has never

been established.

The Crimes

On the night of October 28, 1889, Katsu Goto rode on horseback to Robert Overend's plantation to meet with

Japanese workers who had been fined for a cane field fire they may not have set. He left the meeting around ten

o'clock. Six men were waiting on the road: Joseph R. Mills, Thomas Steele, William C. Blabon, William D. Watson,

John Richmond, and a man identified only as Lala. Goto was found the next morning hanging from a telephone

pole on Honoka'a's main street. The coroner determined he died of asphyxiation -- he was alive when the rope

went around his neck.

In Louisiana, the 1887 sugar strike began on October 29 when approximately 10,000 workers laid down their cane

knives at the start of harvest season. The Knights of Labor had demanded $1.25 per day in cash wages, elimination

of the scrip system, and biweekly payment. Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery -- himself a planter -- deployed

eleven companies of state militia to evict striking families from plantation housing. Parish District Judge Taylor

Beattie, a former Confederate and sugar planter, declared martial law over the Black population of Thibodaux,

assembled a committee of three hundred armed white men, and required Black residents to carry passes. On

the morning of November 23, 1887, armed paramilitaries moved through Black neighborhoods for more than two

hours, killing men, women, and children in their homes, yards, and streets.

The Investigation

In Hawaii, all six perpetrators in the Katsu Goto lynching were identified within weeks. Lala and Richmond

cooperated with authorities in exchange for dropped charges. The 1890 trial convicted four men of manslaughter

-- not murder. Mills and Steele received nine years; Blabon and Watson received four years each. But justice

eroded: Steele escaped to Australia, Blabon escaped to California, and Mills was pardoned in 1894 by the same

planter-aligned provisional government that had overthrown Queen Lili'uokalani the year before. Only Watson,

who played the smallest role, served his full sentence.

In Thibodaux, no one was arrested for the killings. No one was tried. No one was convicted. The bodies were

collected and dumped in unmarked graves at a site that later became the city dump. Andrew Price, a sugar planter

who participated in the attacks, was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1889 -- two years

after the massacre.

Historical Context

Both cases occurred within plantation economies that ran on the same equation: keep labor costs low, keep

workers dependent, and make it dangerous to organize. In Hawaii, the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 had already

stripped voting rights from Asian residents. In Louisiana, the scrip system effectively trapped formerly enslaved

workers on the same land they had worked before emancipation. Black farm labor organizing in the American

South did not resume in earnest until the 1930s -- more than forty years after the Thibodaux massacre.

Today, a memorial to Katsu Goto stands near the Honoka'a Library on Mamane Street, erected in 1994 -- 105 years

after his death. A documentary, Honoka'a Hero: The Story of Katsu Goto, remains in production. In Thibodaux,

the City Council officially condemned the violence in 2017, and a state historical marker was approved for 1123

Bourbon Street. Ground-penetrating radar surveys of the former dump site have found anomalies consistent

with burials. As of 2025, excavation and formal identification have not been completed. The bodies are still in the

ground.

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