Murder

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.

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.

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