Wyoming and New York: Children in the Dock, 1892
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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