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...
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...
On Sunday, April 5, HBO premiered a new documentary series on the Atlanta Child Murders: a terrifying period between 1979 and 1981 when at least 30 African-American children and young men disappeared without a trace or were...
It was almost the perfect crime. Stabbed forty-four times, sixteen-year-old Tina Faelz had been murdered in a tucked-away blind spot of Pleasanton, California, her body found in a drainage ditch just a stone’s throw away from her home. No witnesses to...
In 1969, the body of a young woman was discovered in the woods of Renton, Washington rocking the communities along Puget Sound. Three more brutal murders followed, drawing the attention of multiple police agencies as...
We here at CrimeCapsule.com love a good urban legend, especially when it’s tied to something nice and nefarious. Time and distance have a way of twisting and distorting facts that to our minds is just irresistible: both...