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:
* Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com


Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

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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.

Support Foul Play: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/foulplaypodcast Website: https://www.mythsandmalice.com/show/foul-play/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/foul-play-crime-series/id1525832703 Follow us: Instagram: @foulplaycrimeseries Twitter: @foulplaypod

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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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Paula Angel was hanged twice from a cottonwood tree in New Mexico in 1861. Five years earlier in Charleston, Illinois, a mob hanged Adolphus Monroe after the governor reprieved him for shooting his father-in-law, Nathan Ellington.

Paula Angel was about 19 when she killed Juan Miguel Martin, a father of five, in March 1861. Judge Kirby Benedict told the jury it could consider only first-degree murder, and she was hanged on April 26, 1861, with her appeal still pending. She is the only woman ever legally executed in New Mexico.

In Charleston, Illinois, Adolphus Monroe shot Nathan Ellington, the county's first clerk, in October 1855 and said it was self-defense. A jury convicted him of murder in January 1856 and sentenced him to hang. Governor Joel Matteson granted a reprieve, the sheriff handed out copies of it, and a mob broke into the jail and hanged Monroe on February 15, 1856.

Content note: a hanging that failed and was carried out a second time, a lynching, and a body paraded through a town square.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 10.

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William Freeman, a deaf Black man broken by Auburn State Prison, killed four people near Owasco Lake in 1846, and Seward defended him. In 1889 in Wyoming, six men lynched Ella Watson, and newspapers smeared her as Cattle Kate.

Freeman was born free in Auburn, New York, and was sent to Auburn State Prison before he turned 16, on one man's word in a horse theft case. A keeper's blow with a board left him deaf. Released in 1845 with nothing, he killed John Van Nest, a farmer and justice of the peace; his pregnant wife, Sarah; their son George, not yet two; and Sarah's mother, Phebe Wyckoff, in March 1846. Seward argued insanity, the conviction was reversed in 1847, and Freeman died in his cell that August before a new trial.

Ella Watson was 28, with a legal homestead claim in Carbon County, Wyoming Territory, when six men took her and Jim Averell on July 20, 1889, and hanged them from a pine above the Sweetwater River. A coroner's jury named the six, a grand jury indicted no one, and the name Cattle Kate was never one she was known by in life.

Content note: racism, the beating of a Black prisoner, the killing of a pregnant woman and a child, and a lynching.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 11.

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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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In 1888 in Wahpeton, Dakota Territory, 19-year-old Mollie Korbel was shot in a kitchen after refusing a deputy, and a mob hanged him. In Rhode Island, John Gordon was hanged in 1845 for the murder of mill owner Amasa Sprague; the state pardoned him in 2011.

Mollie Korbel, from an immigrant family, worked as a hired girl in the Richland County sheriff's house. Deputy Lee Elmer shot her on July 25, 1888, after she refused his proposal, and masked men took him from the jail past a crowd of about 1,000 and hanged him from a railroad bridge. No one in the mob was charged.

Amasa Sprague, a Rhode Island mill owner, was killed on a footbridge in Cranston on New Year's Eve 1843. John Gordon was tried before Chief Justice Job Durfee, who told the jury to weigh Yankee testimony above Irish testimony, and was hanged on February 14, 1845, the last execution in Rhode Island. Durfee's own notes surfaced in 2008 and the state pardoned Gordon in 2011.

Content note: a lynching, a young woman shot for saying no, a man beaten to death on a footbridge, and an execution.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 13.

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In 1876 an armed white mob killed six Black men in Hamburg, South Carolina, and not one of 94 men indicted was tried. That year Crawford Goldsby, later Cherokee Bill, was born; after Ike Rogers helped capture him, Goldsby was hanged for murder at Fort Smith in 1896.

On July 8, 1876, more than 100 armed white men attacked the Black militia of Hamburg, four days after a parade dispute over a road. They killed town marshal James Cook and Moses Parks, then shot four men they had captured, Allan Attaway, David Phillips, Hampton Stephens and Albert Myniart. A coroner's jury produced 94 indictments, including Benjamin Tillman, and no one was ever tried. Tillman became governor of South Carolina and a United States senator.

Crawford Goldsby was born at Fort Concho, Texas, that same year, the son of a Buffalo Soldier and a Cherokee freedwoman. As Cherokee Bill he rode with the Cook Gang. Judge Isaac Parker's federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, convicted him of murdering Ernest Melton, a painter who stepped to a window during a robbery at Lenapah, and jail guard Lawrence Keating, who left a wife and children. He was sentenced to death twice and hanged on March 17, 1896, at age 20. Rogers was shot dead by Goldsby's brother in 1897.

Content note: racial violence, a massacre, a state legislator shot while praying, the shooting of a bystander and a jail guard, and a public hanging.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 14.

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The Bloody Benders killed travelers at their Kansas inn and vanished in 1873. In 1895 in Lunenburg County, Virginia, Mary Abernathy, Pokey Barnes and Mary Barnes were convicted of killing Lucy Pollard on testimony the witness later admitted was false. All three went free.

The Benders ran an inn on the Osage Trail in Labette County, Kansas, and for two years travelers went missing there. At least 11 victims were found buried in the orchard and the well, among them Dr. William York and an 18-month-old girl, Mary Ann Longcor. The family was gone before the bodies were found, and the 3,000 dollar reward was never claimed.

Lucy Pollard, 56, was killed in her farmyard in Fort Mitchell, Virginia, on June 14, 1895, as she walked out to collect eggs. Solomon Marable named three women and all three were convicted. Pokey Barnes cross-examined Marable herself and he admitted what he first said was false. With support from John Mitchell Jr. and the Richmond Planet, Pokey Barnes and Mary Abernathy won new trials and went free, and the governor pardoned Mary Barnes, who walked out on Christmas morning 1896.

Content note: the deaths of at least 11 people including a toddler, a plain description of a woman's injuries, an execution, and death sentences handed to Black defendants on testimony the witness later admitted was false.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 15.

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In 1912 in the Arkansas Ozarks, 18-year-old Ella Barham was murdered, and Boone County hanged her neighbor Odus Davidson on circumstantial evidence. In 1875 in Rogers City, Michigan, fifteen men plotted to kill the town's founder, Albert Molitor. The shooting killed him and his clerk, Edward Sullivan, and the town kept the secret for sixteen years.

Ella Barham's errand on a November morning in 1912 was a hat for her sister, and she never came home. Her remains were found that night on a hillside south of Crooked Creek. Odus Davidson was convicted of first-degree murder in January 1913 after his own lawyers had him moved to Berryville while the jury was out, so he never heard the verdict. He was hanged in Harrison on August 11, 1913, still saying he was innocent, and his appeal was studied by the lawyers for Leo Frank in 1915.

Albert Molitor helped found Rogers City in 1868, paid his workers in scrip good only at his own store, and called himself the King of Presque Isle County. On August 23, 1875, buckshot tore through his mill office. His clerk, Edward Sullivan, who was not a target, died on the boat to Alpena, and Molitor, taken to Detroit, died on September 18. In 1891 a farmer named William Repke confessed and named fourteen others. Presque Isle County dismissed 252 prospective jurors, the trial moved to Alpena, five men were sentenced to life at hard labor, and all five were later pardoned. Hermann Hoeft and Andrew Banks, named as the recruiters, were never charged.

Content note: sexual violence, a dismemberment, a hanging, a shooting, a family driven from its home by armed riders, and the mob expulsions of a county's Black residents.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 16.

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In 1891 Noah Benson, a Black farmhand and a father, was murdered, and his body was pulled from the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. His head was never found. In 1889 in Montana Territory, five settlers were murdered and left in the Judith River, and James Wilber, the guide the record names as their killer, died in jail before any trial.

Noah Benson worked the land around Delaware City. He had a son named William, and an employer called him an exemplary man. He was last seen alive on Thanksgiving night, November 26, 1891, and a lock tender towed his body ashore in December. He was identified by an old bullet the doctor found lodged in his left hand, between the third and little fingers. Doctor William Jacobs told the coroner's jury there was no water in the lungs: Benson was dead before he went into the canal. In June 1892 a jury convicted three men of second-degree murder and acquitted a fourth defendant.

Joseph and Sarah Kurtz, farmers from Iowa, their friends Edward and Lucina Biggs, and Ida Schaus, the six-year-old the Kurtzes had adopted that January, left Helena for the gold town of Maiden with Wilber as their guide. They were killed at their camp near Lewistown on the night of June 7, 1889, and their bodies were dumped at Samples Crossing. A cowboy from the Moccasin roundup reported the first body on June 15. Sheriff Clary traced the traded horses to a ranch near Stanford, followed the trail to Great Falls and, with a Cascade County deputy, took Wilber into custody. Wilber died by suicide in jail on June 21. Within three weeks of his burial at Highland Cemetery in Great Falls, the grave was found disturbed and the coffin empty. Montana became a state that November.

Content note: the murder of a six-year-old girl, a death by suicide in a jail cell, and a body that came out of the water without its head.

Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 17.

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Foul Play is historical true crime, built from the records that survive. Every week Shane Waters goes back to a real crime that history tried to bury and tells it plainly, with respect for the people in it, the victims most of all.

In this trailer: the Bender orchard in Kansas, 1873. Katsu Goto's last ride home in Hawaii, 1889. Mollie Korbel's kitchen in Dakota Territory, 1888. And Hamburg, South Carolina, on the nation's hundredth birthday in 1876.

There are more than 300 episodes waiting. Start anywhere, and follow Foul Play so the next story finds you.

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October 1900, Paterson, New Jersey. A seventeen-year-old silk mill worker named Jennie Bosschieter walks to

a drugstore on a Thursday evening. She never comes home. Four men from the city's wealthiest families drug

her with chloral hydrate, assault her, and leave her body by the Wagaraw Bridge. The murder trial exposes a city

where the families that owned the mills believed they owned the law, too.

Eight hundred miles south, Perry County, Kentucky, 1887. Two merchants in a town called Hazard turn a dispute

over coal mineral rights into a seven-year shooting war. The French-Eversole Feud kills more than twenty

men, burns down the county courthouse, and brings the state militia into Appalachian Kentucky. The outside

companies that started the conflict get exactly what they wanted.

The Victims

Jennie Bosschieter was seventeen years old, Dutch-American, the middle child of an immigrant family living at

155 East Fifth Street in Paterson's Riverside section. She had been working at the Paterson Ribbon Company on

Vreeland Avenue since she was thirteen — twelve-hour shifts on a doubling machine, barely a dollar a day. She

was walking to Kent's Drugstore on Main Street to buy baby powder for her infant niece when she encountered

the men who would kill her.

Joseph Eversole was a merchant, lawyer, and father of seven in Hazard, Kentucky. He traveled Perry County's

hollows warning subsistence farmers that outside agents were buying their coal mineral rights for fifty cents an

acre — a fraction of their value. Nick Combs, Eversole's brother-in-law, was twenty years old when he was killed

alongside Eversole in an ambush on a mountain road in April 1888. Judge Josiah Combs, sixty-two, grandson of

Hazard's founder, was shot at his own doorstep six years later.

The Crimes

**Case A — Paterson, New Jersey (1900):** Walter C. McAlister, Andrew J. Campbell, William A. Death, and

George J. Kerr lured Jennie Bosschieter to Saal's Saloon at River and Bridge Streets. McAlister placed chloral

hydrate in her drinks — two doses, the second lethal. The four men took her in a hired carriage toward the Bergen

side of Paterson. Jennie was sexually assaulted and died from the chloral hydrate overdose. Her body was found

near the Wagaraw Bridge at 5:30 the next morning by Marinus Gary, walking to work at Alyea Brothers feed mill.

The cause of death: chloral hydrate poisoning. A visible skull fracture was determined to be postmortem, from

being dropped.

**Case B — Perry County, Kentucky (1887-1894):** The French-Eversole Feud began as a commercial rivalry

between Joseph Eversole and Fulton French over coal mineral rights and control of the county courthouse. The

first killing came September 15, 1887, when Eversole shot French supporter Bill Gambriel in the street. On April

15, 1888, hired assassins ambushed and killed both Eversole and Nick Combs on the road to Hyden. The violence

escalated through the Battle of Hazard in November 1889 — a two-day gun battle through the town streets, with

the Eversole faction barricaded in the courthouse and the French faction occupying the jail fifteen feet away.

As many as twenty of the town's roughly 135 residents died. The courthouse was burned on July 4, 1890. Judge

Josiah Combs was assassinated at his doorstep on September 23, 1894.

The Aftermath

McAlister, Campbell, and Death were convicted of second-degree murder. McAlister and Campbell each received

thirty years. George Kerr, tried separately for rape, received fifteen years. Judge Dixon stated openly he wished

the death penalty had been available. Kerr served eleven years before release. A New York labor newspaper, The

Call, ran the headline: "Wealthy Murderer Released." Campbell served fifteen of his thirty years. Author Kimberly

Tilley recovered Jennie's story in her 2019 book *The Poisoned Glass: A Famous, Forgotten Murder*, restoring

a case that had been forgotten for over a century. The Bosschieter murder is recognized as one of the earliest

documented uses of chloral hydrate as a date rape drug.

In Kentucky, "Bad Tom" Smith confessed from the gallows on June 28, 1895, to seven murders — naming Fulton

French as the man who ordered the assassinations. French was indicted but acquitted. In 1913, Harry Clay Eversole

— Joe's one-armed son, not yet three years old when his father was killed — shot French in the spleen on a

Hazard street. Harry was fined seventy-five dollars for disturbing the peace. His mother paid the fine. French

died from complications of the wound in 1915. The railroad reached Hazard in 1912, and commercial coal mining

began in 1916. The outside companies that men like French had represented got exactly what they wanted.

Frequently Asked Questions

**Who was Jennie Bosschieter?** Jennie Bosschieter was a seventeen-year-old Dutch-American silk mill worker

in Paterson, New Jersey, murdered in October 1900 by four men from prominent local families who drugged her

with chloral hydrate and assaulted her.

**What was the French-Eversole Feud?** The French-Eversole Feud was a seven-year conflict (1887-1894) in

Perry County, Kentucky, between rival merchants Joseph Eversole and Fulton French. What began as a dispute

over coal mineral rights became an armed conflict that killed more than twenty people and devastated the town

of Hazard.

**Was Fulton French ever convicted?** French was indicted for ordering the murder of Judge Josiah Combs but

was acquitted by a jury. He was never convicted for any feud-related killing. He was shot by Harry Clay Eversole

in 1913 and died from complications of the wound in 1915.

**Why was Jennie Bosschieter's case forgotten?** Despite being national news in 1900, the case vanished from

public memory by the mid-twentieth century. Author Kimberly Tilley spent years in archives recovering the story,

publishing *The Poisoned Glass* in 2019 — 119 years after Jennie's death.

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