Murder

The 1974 murder of Anita Fagiani Andrews shook Napa. After thirty-seven years DNA evidence brought her killer, Roy Melanson to justice. Most crime junkies know the Texas Defense, made famous by country singer...

We’ve been here before. In a previous look at the dangerous, often violent early years of American metal industries, Crime Capsule explored the turbulent development of the steel industry in western Pennsylvania. Today, we’re moving just across the state line, to the famous Mahoning Valley of Ohio, where many of the mines that produced raw material for those steel mills were housed.

U.S. Capitol building under construction. National Archives. This past election season, one of the major issues up for debate was the filibuster. Were one party able to gain a super-majority in the Senate,...

An ad for Luetgert Sausage, Chicago’s finest. Unfortunately, the news spoiled people’s appetites. Bizzarepedia. You had to, didn’t you. Against every piece of advice, you had to ask. Well, there’s no easy way...

Is there any act more macabre than dismemberment? To take the knife or axe to the body you’ve just slain; to hold the limbs, still warm to the touch, in your bloodied hands; to raise your arm before lowering it and then—

No, we’re pretty sure there’s nothing worse. Seriously. We checked.

As we’ve seen, criminals will do just about anything to hide evidence of their crimes, including burying the corpse of their lover in their own backyard. But when criminals take things to the next level, desperate times calling for desperate measures and all—if you remember the unfortunate case of Sam McMillan of Sanford, Florida, then you’ll remember the rather grisly discovery that investigators searching for his remains found in October 1882.

Too bad John C. Best of Breakheart Hill Farm, Massachussetts, wasn’t a Crime Capsule reader, because he might have disposed of his own victim’s body more successfully.

We’ll spare you the backstory, riveting though it is—a dark and murky stew of violence, whiskey, licentiousness, adultery, whiskey, repression, abuse, enforced flights by horse-and-carriage, unruly mobs, and oh, did we mention the whiskey? The pages of Douglas L. Heath and Alison C. Simcox’s Murder at Breakheart Hill Farm: The Shocking 1900 Case that Gripped Boston’s North Shore are positively soaked with the stuff. Between that and the homemade apple cider they all drank instead of water, it’s a wonder these late Victorian farmers didn’t die of cirrhosis first before murdering each other.

It’s said that of all the methods of execution, the gallows is one of the more humane ways to die. Similar in some ways to the guillotine, if the procedure is properly performed (and we know that...

Cat and mouse. Hunter and hunted. Chess and—checkers? Long Island, 1937. For months, the wealthy heiress Alice Parsons has been missing from her rural estate of Long Meadow Farm ever since she got into...

The last time we visited Chicago on a cold winter’s night, a gangster lay bleeding out in a doorway—a man who had stood up to none other than Al Capone. That visit was in 1959—on this visit,...

Friends, we’ve seen some twists in our day. The broken-down car in the getaway plot, or the Mafioso who ended up kidnapping himself. But this one—we admit, we never saw this one coming. At...

After following historian Kelly Hartman down the deadly Yellowstone Trail, this week we’re privileged to have Susan Guy join us on Crime Capsule. Guy is not only a historian but a longtime police officer in Ohio, bringing...