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Speaker 2: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 2: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 2: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 2: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 2: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 2: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 6: Good evening. Nineteen twenty six was the year that Americans
Speaker 6: all over the country said screw it, and screw it
Speaker 6: they did. Mixing too much bootleg booze, marijuana, cocaine, and
Speaker 6: heroin with fast car sex and jazz music can only
Speaker 6: lead to trouble. The number of allegedly normal people senselessly
Speaker 6: committing ghastly murders in nineteen twenty six is astounding. Is
Speaker 6: like a switch got turned on and some people went mad,
Speaker 6: unlike any other time in American history. The book they
Speaker 6: were featuring this evening is nineteen twenty six Homicide in
Speaker 6: America with my special guest, journalist and author David Colchick.
Speaker 6: Welcome to the Welcome to the program, and thank you
Speaker 6: very much for agreeing to this interview. Again, David Colcheck, Hey, It's.
Speaker 1: Always great being on this show, and I'd like to
Speaker 1: thank you and your listeners for liking me.
Speaker 6: Thank you very much for joining us once again. For
Speaker 6: your latest book. Let me ask this. What was the
Speaker 6: impetus for this book, nineteen twenty six Homicide in America.
Speaker 1: Well, while I was writing my other five books about
Speaker 1: mostly about California crime, Maybay, they all were about California crime,
Speaker 1: I kept finding nineteen twenty things happening in nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: six that were just outrageous. A lot of them weren't
Speaker 1: happening in California, so I didn't put them in the book,
Speaker 1: although I have in my other books, like the terror
Speaker 1: Bandits of San Francisco happened in nineteen twenty six, Tan't
Speaker 1: Go and Hall happened in nineteen twenty six. There were
Speaker 1: two murderers that cop killers that escaped from San Quentin
Speaker 1: were on the run for a long time. It's pretty crazy.
Speaker 1: Happened all through the middle of California. So I'm finding
Speaker 1: all these odd things, and I started a file, and
Speaker 1: I started putting away, you know, the news clippings of
Speaker 1: what these crimes that happened, and came up to it,
Speaker 1: and I had decided I had enough that I could
Speaker 1: write a book about it. The weird thing about what
Speaker 1: happened there is that people they were fooled by World
Speaker 1: War One. You know, God in country. Everybody went out
Speaker 1: there and everybody, you know, so many people got killed,
Speaker 1: but so many people people were injured, severely injured. There
Speaker 1: were laws in some towns that if you were missing
Speaker 1: a leg or an arm, you had to you couldn't
Speaker 1: be out in certain like the business district during the daytime.
Speaker 1: And it just you know, people were just you know
Speaker 1: a lot of people had damage to their lungs. And
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of the soldiers during World War
Speaker 1: One it took them ten years to die. You know,
Speaker 1: same thing in World War Two. My father had a
Speaker 1: cousin who died in like nineteen fifty three from the
Speaker 1: effects of what happened to them in World War two.
Speaker 1: And so after a war like that, and then they
Speaker 1: had a Spanish flu pandemic, so everyone knew somebody who
Speaker 1: died the pandemic flu. The Spanish flu killed young people
Speaker 1: and healthy people, kind of left older and sick people alone.
Speaker 1: But you would get it and you'd be dead. You'd
Speaker 1: be dead. In forty eight hours, you'd just start coughing.
Speaker 1: Blood just splattered. So everyone knew my wife's my wife's grandmother,
Speaker 1: her her parents actually would be her great grandparents died
Speaker 1: in the epidemic, and her grandmother was an orphan. You know,
Speaker 1: it's like everyone knew somebod who died. People were just
Speaker 1: going like, you know, what's what's the point? You know,
Speaker 1: what's the point of everything? You know, when they saw death,
Speaker 1: you know what else could scare them? What else could
Speaker 1: bother them? And aroun At the same time, we had
Speaker 1: probation here in America where they outlawed alcohol, which brought
Speaker 1: everything underground and made it on to a big party.
Speaker 1: We had the rise of jazz music, which was something
Speaker 1: that you know, people never hurt anything like it. I've
Speaker 1: been reading some other stories about my friend Bill Berg
Speaker 1: here in Sacramento this story, and he's writing about a
Speaker 1: section of Sacramento that was torn down d' an urban
Speaker 1: renewal to put the throughway through. And you know, jazz
Speaker 1: music hit Sacramento like crazy at all happened in the
Speaker 1: early twenties and and people never heard things like that. So,
Speaker 1: you know, then we also had women had the right
Speaker 1: to develop and both my grandmothers were able to vote
Speaker 1: in the very first election because of that. But you know,
Speaker 1: women started saying, you know, hey, I don't need these
Speaker 1: Victorian rules, and you know, they got rid of the
Speaker 1: corsets and started relaxing a bit, showing some leg smoking cigarettes,
Speaker 1: going out unescorted, you know, moving out by themselves. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of things happened, caused a lot of friction
Speaker 1: among families and things, you know, And at the same
Speaker 1: time too, a lot of things are being modernized. For
Speaker 1: some people that had you know, guaranteed job like a
Speaker 1: blacksmith or something, or the quintisential buggy whip maker, completely
Speaker 1: lost their occupations. It just disappeared, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: like a kind of like a little type of writer
Speaker 1: or some and you know, so all these changes were happening,
Speaker 1: and at the same time, this is what I think
Speaker 1: caused the whole thing. It was the first modern epiphany
Speaker 1: is that in nineteen twenty six or NBC, the National
Speaker 1: Broadcasting Corporation, had simultaneously been able to broadcast coast to
Speaker 1: coast a show all at the same time, so everyone
Speaker 1: in the country was hearing the same thing. First time
Speaker 1: in history. Everyone was listening to the same thing, and
Speaker 1: it's kind of like, you know, the moonshot that just
Speaker 1: happened the fifty eight or anniversary, you know, and everyone
Speaker 1: was like, wow, you know, the look at that the
Speaker 1: same thing kind of happened, except they weren't is articulate
Speaker 1: about it. You know, there was still a lot of
Speaker 1: not much modern thinking. People were really second on out
Speaker 1: old world waste, so they didn't realize what was actually
Speaker 1: really happening. So all these things combined, you know, along
Speaker 1: with fast cars. You know, cars were all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: they were pretty affordable. The economy in the cities were booming.
Speaker 1: Almost every almost every city in the United States. Their
Speaker 1: original downtown was built during the nineteen twenties the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties. Almost all of San Francisco, of the downtown
Speaker 1: of the old buildings, was built during that time. So
Speaker 1: it was very prosperous. People had money. They had, you know,
Speaker 1: money to drink, they had money to buy cars, They
Speaker 1: had money to go out and have a long drinken
Speaker 1: drug filled weekends.
Speaker 6: But as you write, but as you write, this is
Speaker 6: a time that unlike any other time in American history.
Speaker 6: I mean, you talked about all the conditions that were
Speaker 6: ripe for this to happen. But despite that, this is
Speaker 6: an unusual time regardless this nineteen twenty six, Let's talk
Speaker 6: about one of the first stories that you that really,
Speaker 6: I guess jumps out of you at this book. This
Speaker 6: book the story they Urged for Overkill June twenty eighth,
Speaker 6: twenty eighth, nineteen twenty six, and it goes to May
Speaker 6: twenty sixth, nineteen twenty seven, a year and you talk
Speaker 6: about Eva Lina Roll and her friend. She's looking for
Speaker 6: her friends, so she goes to the house looking for
Speaker 6: her tell us about what happens at the Role house
Speaker 6: and this friend and what she finds along with her
Speaker 6: father that one day when they go to see her friend.
Speaker 1: Well, Rolled in a big house in the old part
Speaker 1: of Tampa. I guess it's called the Canal District. And
Speaker 1: Tampa at that time was a major port to Cuba
Speaker 1: in the Caribbean and stuff, very busy, prosperous place. There's
Speaker 1: about fifty thousand people there. So they had this big house,
Speaker 1: extended family, uncles, aunts, niece's, uh, the grandmother. She was
Speaker 1: anywhere between ninety six and one hundred and one years old.
Speaker 1: They all lived in this house, and in this big house,
Speaker 1: they had a lot of you know, social things happening,
Speaker 1: and they also rented out some rooms to border some stuff.
Speaker 1: So this girl, Eva or Ruby uh comes over to
Speaker 1: Eva Roland's house. They were going to go look for
Speaker 1: a job together, to have some interviews and Ruby's father
Speaker 1: was going to drive them around so that, you know,
Speaker 1: it could be a lot nicer. She goes to the
Speaker 1: door and there's no one there, and you know, this
Speaker 1: house is pretty much away twenty four seven, with you know,
Speaker 1: the range of ages of people in the house and stuff.
Speaker 1: She looked through the window and saw the bloody body
Speaker 1: laying there. So the police show up and not everybody
Speaker 1: that lives in the house is there. You know, some
Speaker 1: people had some jobs out of town, some people were
Speaker 1: just staying over somewhere else. They find four bodies there.
Speaker 1: Eva was still alive, but she died in the hospital
Speaker 1: a couple hours later without getting consciousness. Everybody's head was
Speaker 1: bashed in with a railroad spike, which is like a
Speaker 1: hammer with a spike on the end of it. Right,
Speaker 1: So her forty five year old uncle Bee which is
Speaker 1: that great name, Uncle b and her her grandmother Caroline
Speaker 1: and a border who was thirty six year old Charles Anderson,
Speaker 1: were all just all chopped up. So the cops, you know,
Speaker 1: they thought, oh, is this a crime thing, and they
Speaker 1: you know, arrested everybody that had visited him in the
Speaker 1: last day. And after a year it went cold. They
Speaker 1: could not figure out who killed this whole family. And
Speaker 1: so a year later, and this is weird, how I
Speaker 1: found this story is that originally I just found the
Speaker 1: murder story, and then later while I was really doing
Speaker 1: the research for this book, I was scouting through Tampa
Speaker 1: papers and I found the conclusion of this This is
Speaker 1: like one of the strangest, strangest murder cases I have
Speaker 1: ever come across. So a year later, on me twenty six,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty seven, there's like a three bedroom, three roomhouse
Speaker 1: and this little kid that lived their eight year old
Speaker 1: Hugh Merrill, who woke up on the floor of his bedroom.
Speaker 1: He'd fallen out of bed, and he went to his
Speaker 1: parents room and he found them dead. He ran to
Speaker 1: the house on the sixteen year old brother who was
Speaker 1: coming home from there. They killed a baby, the husband
Speaker 1: and wife, eleven year old, a five year old, and
Speaker 1: a three month old baby. They all had their heads
Speaker 1: crushed in and so the police are going like, what
Speaker 1: it's going on here, you know, and turns out that
Speaker 1: there's this guy who was is this so strange? He
Speaker 1: was a heroin at His name was Benjamin Franklin Levin's
Speaker 1: and he was hanging out with this other guy and
Speaker 1: they were drinking, you know, like raw alcohol and trying
Speaker 1: to score heroin and stuff, and they were just loud
Speaker 1: in bars, and they went to a fortune teller and
Speaker 1: asked if they were going to get caught, and a
Speaker 1: couple of people are probably called, you know, but.
Speaker 6: These guys.
Speaker 1: The cops ended up picking these guys up. And this
Speaker 1: eleventh guy was a fisherman and a dope beend for amusement,
Speaker 1: and he admitted right up that he killed that family.
Speaker 1: And it turned out that one of the Rolls, one
Speaker 1: of the royal family, lived at that house until recently
Speaker 1: and they had moved and a new family moved in.
Speaker 1: He broke into the house because he wanted to kill them,
Speaker 1: so hopefully he wouldn't get caught with his crime or something.
Speaker 1: Who knows what was going on in his brain, you know,
Speaker 1: this guy was very chemically dependent, so he broke in
Speaker 1: his buddy. He told the pointed it out to him
Speaker 1: and said, it's well, one of those guys lived that
Speaker 1: was in that murder, you know, and he broke into
Speaker 1: their house and killed them off five people. And the
Speaker 1: people in Tampa were various, you know, the Royal family
Speaker 1: were longtime residents there, and they wanted to lynch the guy,
Speaker 1: and they went to the jail started throwing bricks and things,
Speaker 1: but the police had already gotten him like three counties
Speaker 1: away into another jail, just because they knew this was
Speaker 1: going to happen. So that three thousand people, like for
Speaker 1: three nights in a row, kept on barricading the jail
Speaker 1: throwing bricks. A group of them actually had a big
Speaker 1: timber of bean and they bashed a hole in the
Speaker 1: side of the jail and they were met with shotgun
Speaker 1: pellets and all arrested. So the National guardgets called in
Speaker 1: and they set up and stuff with machine guns, and
Speaker 1: somebody in the crowd. No one knows, it's the way
Speaker 1: it always happens, you know, No one knows who shot
Speaker 1: first or what happened. But they ended up opening fire
Speaker 1: and they killed five more people that were just there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and one person was just like walking by had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with what was going on. This guy hit
Speaker 1: with some bullets, so they ended up getting you know,
Speaker 1: they they let the leaders go into the jail to
Speaker 1: see that the guy wasn't there, you know, just to
Speaker 1: cool everything off because it was going crazy. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they took him the trial and he was like, oh,
Speaker 1: they beat the confession out of me and stuff, and
Speaker 1: he was like found guilty, like right away, is just
Speaker 1: because of this one guy. It turns out that the
Speaker 1: reason why he killed in the house in nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: six is that he went to see the border the
Speaker 1: person who was just renting a room from them, Charles Anderson.
Speaker 1: They went to discuss with him about some female jail
Speaker 1: problem and he ended up smashing him in the hat
Speaker 1: and he realized that he would be caught, so he
Speaker 1: just kept quiet until everybody went to bed in the
Speaker 1: house and there were actually like visitors visiting the teenagers
Speaker 1: and then there was like a card party happening in
Speaker 1: the kitchen with Uncle B and he killed them.
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Speaker 1: For my reason. Then he killed the other people because
Speaker 1: he thought that was a relative of them. So because
Speaker 1: of this one guy, fourteen people died. You write about protesters.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you talk about the interesting trial of his cohort Thompson.
Speaker 6: Would you write that when they drank this ethanol, it
Speaker 6: looked like this Thompson passed out and he did. He
Speaker 6: did the carnage himself. Richard did the carnage himself. Now,
Speaker 6: he was supposed to testify because he admitted to killing
Speaker 6: in Orlando Benjamin Franklin Levin's admitted to it. What does
Speaker 6: he do at the trial of Leonard Thompson's when Thompson
Speaker 6: is facing what the death penalty? Tell us what happens?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they brought in Levin and he told the court
Speaker 1: that he had committed the murders alone, and Thompson had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the crimes, and they had no
Speaker 1: alternative but to release him. They discharged the guy and
Speaker 1: he went on with his wife. He's probably pretty lucky guy.
Speaker 1: You know, he didn't commit the crimes, so I could see.
Speaker 1: But it's actually almost commendable for person like Levin's to
Speaker 1: actually save one person's life.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but it's something automoly.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh, after the murder. I didn't even include this.
Speaker 1: This is like really important. After the murder, the first murders,
Speaker 1: Levins went and signed up on a fishing boat and
Speaker 1: was like in the golf of Mexico for a whole year.
Speaker 1: That's why he was gone. He just signed up right
Speaker 1: away and you know, left town, and you know when
Speaker 1: you went to look for him, I mean, he finally
Speaker 1: came back and he opened his mouth. That's one of
Speaker 1: the craziest I can't really think of anything as crazy
Speaker 1: as that crime.
Speaker 6: I've got some more in the book here. Let's talk
Speaker 6: about let's talk about panic in Cicero, Cicero, Illinois and
Speaker 6: July eleventh, nineteen twenty six, and maybe can help me
Speaker 6: out with the pronunciation James Christius, and yeah, he was
Speaker 6: angry and wanted revenge. Tell us about James Christius. Why
Speaker 6: he was angry and wanted revenge?
Speaker 1: Well, James Christmas was this guy who was working in
Speaker 1: a manufacturing plant in Chicago, and the owner's son told
Speaker 1: him to use this one late that everyone knew was unsafe,
Speaker 1: and so he pertest that he did it anyways, and
Speaker 1: he lost his finger. It's like I'm training, I have
Speaker 1: everything marked in my bood.
Speaker 6: But of course that well, I could tell you he
Speaker 6: lost his left thumb in the industrial accident at work.
Speaker 1: And then the.
Speaker 6: Owner's son, Saul Schwartz, had, like you say, he had
Speaker 6: insisted did he operate this late? And then after that,
Speaker 6: you say, he wasn't compensated for his injury whatsoever? And
Speaker 6: then with his lump thumb missing and his hand bandaged,
Speaker 6: what was his fate in terms of trying to find
Speaker 6: work and what was his uh inevitable fate as a result.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he he wasn't even compensated. He was fired for
Speaker 1: losing his thumb, and uh so he uh just ended
Speaker 1: up becoming homeless, sleeping in parks and freebag motels. And
Speaker 1: he met this guy named Thomas mcwing. Now he said
Speaker 1: later in his trial that he wanted to rob to
Speaker 1: get money to get a good attorney so he could
Speaker 1: see his former boss. But you know, these these guys
Speaker 1: were both drug addicts too. You know, a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't think about it, but you know, there was
Speaker 1: a lot of people were doing heroin and speed and
Speaker 1: cocaine and crazy stuff like that, and so these guys
Speaker 1: that's kind of all they did. They he sent away,
Speaker 1: so he met this Thomas mcwing guy, who was not
Speaker 1: much better than crisis. They ordered a mail ordered gun.
Speaker 1: They got it like in a week, and they went
Speaker 1: out and robbed some people, like I'm almost right away.
Speaker 1: They got ruby wing and twenty eight bucks, which wasn't
Speaker 1: that bad of a score. The next day, just before midnight,
Speaker 1: the flag down a cab and this guy named Legwig
Speaker 1: Rose was the driver, and they wouldn't really give him
Speaker 1: an address to go to. When he finally said, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, I got to know where I'm going, poked
Speaker 1: a gun in the back of his head and then stopped.
Speaker 1: They took his uniform, tied him up with snow tire
Speaker 1: chains and stuff, and took his cash box and the
Speaker 1: weird thing is like the Terror band it's in San
Speaker 1: Francisco did the same thing where they got a cab
Speaker 1: driver and they got us clothes and stuff and then
Speaker 1: they shot and killed him. So I guess it's always
Speaker 1: been bad, hard time to be a cab driver. So
Speaker 1: these guys started driving around looking for somebody to wrap.
Speaker 1: Just after midnight, they saw nineteen year old Mary Blaine
Speaker 1: who worked in the offices of Cracker Jacks, and she
Speaker 1: was with her her kind of suitor, Frederick Hyne, who
Speaker 1: was like the church seeing church, Sunday school and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. And they belonged the Saint Church in Cicero,
Speaker 1: Cicero right cro that's where El Capone had his headquarters too.
Speaker 1: It was completely bought by the mobsters and things. So
Speaker 1: they're sitting in front of her house. They just got
Speaker 1: back from like a church service or something. They were
Speaker 1: doing something at their church and mcwayne and Christmas pulls
Speaker 1: up and they jump out wanted money and they hin
Speaker 1: had the collection money from their evening meeting, and they
Speaker 1: shot him in the had this boom and then they
Speaker 1: shot Marie, which was like dead right in the head,
Speaker 1: both of them, just headshots. They took the money jump
Speaker 1: out in the cab and rode off, and Rose was
Speaker 1: still tied up. The candy was still in the back
Speaker 1: seat and he heard all this. They started driving fast,
Speaker 1: and he kicked the door open somehow and managed to
Speaker 1: fall out of the cab. So the bandits stopped and
Speaker 1: they just got out and shot him dead right there,
Speaker 1: so that there was three people dead in this little
Speaker 1: little problems. They ended up wrecking their car and uh
Speaker 1: and uh mcween got caught in his pin and the
Speaker 1: cops took him to the jail, to Cook County Jail,
Speaker 1: and on the way they stopped at the Morgue where
Speaker 1: where Marie was just dropped off on this lab you know,
Speaker 1: in a big hole in her forehead, and the guy
Speaker 1: totally just cracked, just cracked and said everything he knew
Speaker 1: and but you know, he only knew crisis as Eddie
Speaker 1: and uh, you know he didn't know he went us
Speaker 1: for another name too. Uh. So everyone's looking for the craze,
Speaker 1: this guy, and it turns out he was hiding on
Speaker 1: a roof of this apartment building. It's still there too.
Speaker 1: The whole neighborhood is really attacked. It's it's actually quite fascinating,
Speaker 1: and he hung out out of the roof next to
Speaker 1: like the you know, gable thing or something, and he
Speaker 1: kind of bothered some of the tenants asking for food
Speaker 1: and stuff. They're kind of wondering, in what the what's
Speaker 1: this guy coming around the apartments for. So later in
Speaker 1: the day, the two people that lived in the building,
Speaker 1: they noticed the trap door of the roof was open
Speaker 1: and they went up there and it was, uh, it's
Speaker 1: where he was hiding out. They found the roses chauffeur
Speaker 1: cap and coat watch, the ruby ring from the earlier robbery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they found the glove with the left fund was
Speaker 1: stuck with paper because you know, this guy didn't have
Speaker 1: as they had a bunch of scribble and stuff. They
Speaker 1: ended up getting them, getting them down from there. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it was you know, kind of really frightening by the
Speaker 1: people that lived there that they realized that there's this
Speaker 1: multi killer that was just like on the roof, you know,
Speaker 1: a real urban, real urban area, you know, it was
Speaker 1: like real apartments, just you know, wall a wall up
Speaker 1: and down the street. So yeah, both of those guys
Speaker 1: got the death sentence, and uh, we're hung at the
Speaker 1: scaffolds of Pilcock counting jail. And the weird thing about it,
Speaker 1: it was kind of funny thing about it is that
Speaker 1: you know they had in the papers they had about
Speaker 1: the execution, they had a sidebar about the executioner because
Speaker 1: it was his last execution. He was the jails plumber.
Speaker 1: And he said, I'm sixty years old. I've had enough
Speaker 1: of this job. I'm going out to California to take
Speaker 1: a rest. That was a sixty his sixty fifth execution.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you talk about too, and continue with that story
Speaker 6: and that he had he say, a semi literate a
Speaker 6: notebook where he left I guess a suicide note. But
Speaker 6: it was very interesting, sort of said goodbye everyone. Everybody,
Speaker 6: not all my fault, it was their own faults. I
Speaker 6: wish I'd died myself instead. He said, never be peace
Speaker 6: on earth. Too many hogs. Goodbye old Earth. So yeah,
Speaker 6: he had left something behind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know this is a strange thing also about
Speaker 1: what in nineteen twenty six is that all these people
Speaker 1: left their big letters behind and you know, big notes.
Speaker 1: There's like just a minister in Montana who was basically
Speaker 1: he had his life ruined by area politicians, so he
Speaker 1: shot the rest of his family and he wrote like
Speaker 1: these five hundred word letters, you know, to make concerns
Speaker 1: and things, and another ones did too, one of if
Speaker 1: they were less more literate back then, like to kill.
Speaker 6: Her obviously, as we'll see, Yeah, that'll be the next up,
Speaker 6: for sure, we'll discuss.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you talk about that? Go ahead, sorry, go ahead, No,
Speaker 1: we were just saying the same thing about being more
Speaker 1: literate bigs then or go ahead. I'm sorry.
Speaker 6: I just I just want to mention they that they
Speaker 6: both received a death sentence and they were scheduled to
Speaker 6: be hanged on New Year's Eve nineteen twenty six, and
Speaker 6: they were hung that day. As you're right, oh, oh.
Speaker 1: Thanks man, Yeah, they were in New Year's Eve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tell you I think you know, you think back then
Speaker 1: in people have movies to watch, you know, you had
Speaker 1: to leave your house to go see it.
Speaker 6: Though.
Speaker 1: Anything you had was like the radio that you could play,
Speaker 1: or a player piano or something like that. A lot
Speaker 1: of people knew how to play piano, and they would
Speaker 1: buy sheet music, just like people would buy records or
Speaker 1: do downloads now. You know, they went to hear in
Speaker 1: the latest song, they'd go buy it and then they'd
Speaker 1: play it. There's always people could cite read and they
Speaker 1: wrote very flowery letters about things.
Speaker 6: M Well, there's a limited form of communication, and so obviously,
Speaker 6: just like today, maybe we're using short forms and emojis
Speaker 6: and things to express, but we're still communicating in the
Speaker 6: popular mode of the time. And so if we're going
Speaker 6: to try to impress somebody with a profile on a
Speaker 6: dating site or a profile on Facebook, we would put
Speaker 6: our best photo forward, and we put our our best
Speaker 6: thoughts forward. Are our best description of ourselves. So again
Speaker 6: again probably flowery description of ourselves and our potential love
Speaker 6: for somebody else. And just like as we see in
Speaker 6: the nineteen twenty six that despite the flowery wording that
Speaker 6: there was a very murderous time as well, we're going
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Speaker 6: That's Native, now, David, we were last talking about and
Speaker 6: you just alluded to one of the most fascinating stories
Speaker 6: in this collection of fascinating stories, and that is the
Speaker 6: Phantom Killer. Willard Carson born in nine eighteen oh two,
Speaker 6: and this takes place and he was born in Liberty,
Speaker 6: Indiana on a farm, and his parents, Clinton and Minnie Carson,
Speaker 6: which are very important to this story and tell us
Speaker 6: a little bit about Willard Carson and his life and
Speaker 6: what happens.
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Speaker 1: Willard Carson was you almost have to say it was
Speaker 1: like a proto beatnik born, like said in nineteen oh two.
Speaker 1: And Liberty, Indiana is pretty close to the Ohio border.
Speaker 1: This whole chapter takes place between that small area, probably
Speaker 1: only fifty miles square between the two states. So Willard
Speaker 1: his parents were successful farmers. His father actually sold out
Speaker 1: in his early fifties and moved to a big house
Speaker 1: in town. But Willard he was he liked gloss interest
Speaker 1: in school, dropped out in eash grade, and he left
Speaker 1: home and he lived out in the woods around this
Speaker 1: area and a small town. There's only a thousand people there.
Speaker 1: It's all just you know, cornfields and the great Midwest.
Speaker 1: You know. He met his own camp and went to
Speaker 1: the library and checked out books of you know, existential
Speaker 1: literature and dime novels. He just read all the time.
Speaker 1: So he in trouble every now and then, and his
Speaker 1: parents would bail him out. You know, he was kind
Speaker 1: of a you know, they gave him money all the time,
Speaker 1: and he was kind of a spoiled kid. He only
Speaker 1: had an older sister, so he living out rough in
Speaker 1: a forest camp and he'd drink and read books and
Speaker 1: hang out in the pool hall. And you know, of course,
Speaker 1: in a small town like that, they actually had a
Speaker 1: police force, which is kind of hard to believe a
Speaker 1: town a thousand people. This officer started giving him some
Speaker 1: grief in the pool hall for being public intoxicated, and
Speaker 1: Willard pulled out a gun and fired at a deputy.
Speaker 1: Didn't hit him or anything, but he just took off
Speaker 1: and he just disappeared. And that's a trait that will
Speaker 1: follow him throughout his life. This guy would just vanish.
Speaker 1: He was like a phantom. And he must have been
Speaker 1: a really likable guy because he had a lot of
Speaker 1: friends who helped him throughout this long, weird career, and
Speaker 1: he had a thing for the late he's too, evidently,
Speaker 1: because he had a girlfriend who was a nineteen year
Speaker 1: old married mother too, and he was glad as quick,
Speaker 1: and she had gotten him out of town, took him
Speaker 1: to like another town's got him out of train and
Speaker 1: got him out of there, and he was just hanging
Speaker 1: out until he came down, and he was hoping his
Speaker 1: father was gonna get a good layer and they would
Speaker 1: just kind of give him a fine or something. So
Speaker 1: he's living like twenty feet he had like a treehouse
Speaker 1: twenty feet up in the air in this tree and
Speaker 1: had all kinds of all kinds of you know, comforts there.
Speaker 1: He was really mad that is well, he needed money.
Speaker 1: He came to his brother in law's place on his
Speaker 1: farm and asked for money. And he's like having money
Speaker 1: to after after the harvest. You know, this is in July.
Speaker 1: So he was he was furious that his parents didn't
Speaker 1: help him out. So on the night of August third,
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty six, and August third is my wife's birthday.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of murders happened on that day
Speaker 1: for some reason. And I always see that it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's my wife's birthday, and it's like but a lot
Speaker 1: of them make sure. In this book, I think there's
Speaker 1: like three that happened on that day. So about four
Speaker 1: in the morning, he used the ladder, climbed up stairs
Speaker 1: on the roof, got into his parents' bedroom, and as
Speaker 1: he's climbing in through the window, he tripped over a
Speaker 1: sewing machine and woke up his parents. And his father,
Speaker 1: Clinton sat up in bed, and Willard shot him four
Speaker 1: times with a thirty eight caliber revolver. One of them
Speaker 1: hit him in the face, one of his hands in
Speaker 1: the third in the chest, and then he put the
Speaker 1: barrow up to his father's forehead and fired one more time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so his mother, well this has happened, and she
Speaker 1: jumped out the window and broke her back and stuff
Speaker 1: that she got out of there. He stole his father's car.
Speaker 1: And after this man he never stops. And you know,
Speaker 1: the cops always thought that, you know, they were always
Speaker 1: watching to see if he was going to come back
Speaker 1: into town and stuff. But you know, he had a
Speaker 1: lot of friends that helped him out. The cops kicked
Speaker 1: down the doors of all his friends.
Speaker 5: And things and couldn't find out anything to happen. So, uh,
Speaker 5: in November, Yeah, in November, he went to his brother's.
Speaker 1: House again, tried to get money and he called the
Speaker 1: cops and they sent up airplanes and they couldn't find them.
Speaker 1: So a year later, he's in Kocomo, Indiana, and he's
Speaker 1: written a room from this fifty year old guy named
Speaker 1: Alonzo Whalen and he was using the name Edgar Dixon.
Speaker 1: And he was there with his wife and his kid.
Speaker 1: He got to move fast. Yeah, so this guy is
Speaker 1: landlord can get suspicious of him because you know, he's like,
Speaker 1: this guy just reads books and stuff. And I guess
Speaker 1: that was weird net or something. But he went and
Speaker 1: told the police, and so the police came out over
Speaker 1: there with soldiers from the Indian International Guard and he
Speaker 1: was gone. And they found his wife, Irene, this kid,
Speaker 1: and she didn't know. She met him in November nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty six in Indianapolis and got married to him. She
Speaker 1: always knew him, this Edgard Dixon. She had no idea
Speaker 1: that he was this wanted murderer Willard Carson. So about
Speaker 1: a year later, May third, nineteen twenty nine, Alonzo, his
Speaker 1: old landlord that squealed on him, was sitting in his
Speaker 1: chair by his window after dinner, chatting with his wife,
Speaker 1: and Carson had a double barrel shotgun and blew his
Speaker 1: hat off through the window disappeared, So he's got this
Speaker 1: vengeance thing going. So they were like, what what the hell,
Speaker 1: you know. So, like another year in nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: this town called College Corner, which is on the border
Speaker 1: of Indiana and Ohio. It's a little town. It's like
Speaker 1: five hundred people, and they had their own police officer.
Speaker 1: He was just a merchant cop who'd walk around at
Speaker 1: night make sure the doors were locked and no one
Speaker 1: was stealing from anything like that. And he was found
Speaker 1: dead in the morning and laying in the alley and
Speaker 1: he had come across Willard somehow, and Willard shot him.
Speaker 1: And it was kind of weird, is because it happened
Speaker 1: right where the border is, and it was like his
Speaker 1: gun was like in Ohio and his body was in Indiana.
Speaker 1: And there was all kinds of arguments about that went
Speaker 1: out and out of the paper and stuff. But you know,
Speaker 1: this is like a small town. It was only eight
Speaker 1: miles from Liberty too. So this Carson guy, he turns
Speaker 1: into like the Bogeyman in the Midwest. You know, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: he's going to get you. So then okay, So years
Speaker 1: go by. It's in nineteen thirty five and Anderson, Indiana
Speaker 1: officer Frank Letty, he gets called that there's a suspicious
Speaker 1: vehicle idling with its lights on in this quiet neighborhood.
Speaker 1: It's just just a little town, you know, and there's
Speaker 1: an island there. For a couple of hours. Of course,
Speaker 1: he was with a woman. So so the cop goes
Speaker 1: up and Willard jumps out and shoots him four times
Speaker 1: in the chest, just kills him right there. And you know,
Speaker 1: this is a small town. The cop gets killed, it's
Speaker 1: like a big deal. So, you know, they tried to
Speaker 1: shake everybody down this woman that was suspected of being
Speaker 1: in the vehicle Wooden talk, and you know, they never
Speaker 1: got it. In the meantime, you know, his mother died
Speaker 1: and stuff, and he's supposed to get you know, inherit
Speaker 1: a bunch of money, so the cops were He would
Speaker 1: also send postcards to different police departments taunting them that
Speaker 1: you know that they'll never get of and things like that,
Speaker 1: which is like really something. So by nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 1: is sister and the police over there in Liberty were
Speaker 1: wondering they haven't heard from mint awhile, so they made
Speaker 1: up a new reward and they sent out, you know,
Speaker 1: wanted posters to all different police departments all over the place.
Speaker 1: So nineteen forty one in July, Iawak County share Frank
Speaker 1: van Etta and this is a Michigan the west coast
Speaker 1: of Michigan on Lake Here on a very beautiful area
Speaker 1: of beautiful beaches, and you know it's kind of a
Speaker 1: vacation area for people from Chicago. These stamp ships that
Speaker 1: would go from Milwaukee and Chicago over to Grand Haven
Speaker 1: in that area. You know, it was that popular. So
Speaker 1: the chiefs looking through and he sees the picture and
Speaker 1: he goes, hey, that looks like this vagrant guy that
Speaker 1: we found washed up on the beach in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: They knew him as Lloyd Keene, and they found them
Speaker 1: on the beach in August. It was August. I heard
Speaker 1: about things, so I'll get third again. He was in
Speaker 1: the swimming trunks and he you know, the Lake Michigan
Speaker 1: undertoes are notorious. They'll just take out and just drown
Speaker 1: you and then dump you on the shore. A couple
Speaker 1: of days later, so they found him and they just thought, well,
Speaker 1: you know, bury him in a pauper's grave. And he
Speaker 1: realized that that was that guy. So he contacted the
Speaker 1: police back in Indiana and his sister and he exhumed
Speaker 1: his body and they identified him from a chip tooth
Speaker 1: and a bullet scar and he had a missing rate
Speaker 1: pinky finger and that's another thing, missing digits and it's
Speaker 1: mainteen twenty six feet. So yeah, it turned out that
Speaker 1: that was him, and he had died of drowning sixteen
Speaker 1: years after he had murdered his father. Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: had killed two police officers and you know, that terrifying
Speaker 1: people for years, and Lake Michigan got him and he
Speaker 1: kept doing it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like you say, it wasn't like it wasn't for
Speaker 6: Lake Michigan's undertow that prevented him from more killing. Absolutely absolutely.
Speaker 1: And I had another story too about this guy in
Speaker 1: him in Indiana, which was the area where my mother
Speaker 1: is from a lot of my family and uh he uh,
Speaker 1: a social worker came because this guy just pretty much
Speaker 1: just quit working and he had nine kids and and
Speaker 1: uh no furniture and stuff. Social workers stopped by. He
Speaker 1: ended up shooting her in the head and he ran
Speaker 1: off and they never found them. The uh the son
Speaker 1: said they about years later, he heard that he was
Speaker 1: living in a farm in Michigan. He went up and
Speaker 1: saw and a couple of years later he went back
Speaker 1: and the farm and burnt down. And the neighbors said, yeah,
Speaker 1: he just moved away after that happened. That's another guy
Speaker 1: that just got away with it.
Speaker 6: M interesting. We're going to talk about one more story here,
Speaker 6: and this is again a very bizarre one, but much
Speaker 6: different than the other stories. And it's titled Like a
Speaker 6: Girl who Married Dear old Dad. This is in Springfield, Massachusetts,
Speaker 6: and a person named Richard Burse and you always said
Speaker 6: he was an oddball. He's twenty six years old, living
Speaker 6: with his divorced mother Eda and his father Fred Verse.
Speaker 6: They had had a amicable divorce and he's a county
Speaker 6: treasurer for Hampton County. Tell us about life with Richard
Speaker 6: Burse and what happens.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was another only child. He was, you know, spoiled,
Speaker 1: rout and about things. He had a degree in the
Speaker 1: mechanical engineering Northwestern University in nineteen twenty four. He's a
Speaker 1: pretty young guy and he was a nice guy, but
Speaker 1: he had an explosive temper. So he had added the
Speaker 1: Springfield gas Light Company and he quit it because he
Speaker 1: thought he could make more money with his electrical engineering
Speaker 1: degree or mechanical engineering degree someplace else. Instead of looking
Speaker 1: for a job first, he just quit it. I guess
Speaker 1: that's how good the economy was that, you know, it
Speaker 1: was like you could just quit your job and go
Speaker 1: get another one. But he was he was kind of
Speaker 1: pummed about what he did, and his parents sent him
Speaker 1: out of vacation. Like I said, he was pretty spoiled.
Speaker 1: The homes where he lived are all still there too.
Speaker 1: So he went to the beach out in Saybrook, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: and for a two week vacation. He met this woman,
Speaker 1: Marie Wilson. She was from Springfield, Tissues twenty one, and
Speaker 1: they fell madly in love and they wanted to get married,
Speaker 1: like right away in things. So they're back in Springfield,
Speaker 1: and you know, they went a date and stuff, and
Speaker 1: she told him when he was dropping her off that
Speaker 1: she had a boyfriend when she met him, but she
Speaker 1: wrote him a Dear Johnt letter and broke up with
Speaker 1: him because she wanted to be with d And Richard
Speaker 1: just freaked out, just just totally lost it, you know, unreasonably,
Speaker 1: you know, And he took Marie home and went back
Speaker 1: home to his home he lived with his mother, which
Speaker 1: that home is for sale. When I was ready to
Speaker 1: this book.
Speaker 6: Just kind of still there.
Speaker 1: So about six point thirty in the morning the next day,
Speaker 1: neighbors hearted big commotion in the house and they actually
Speaker 1: called the police. Cops came, didn't see anything until they left,
Speaker 1: and they got called again saying there was more sounds.
Speaker 1: So the cops came and kicked down the house and
Speaker 1: what they found was Richard burse covered in his mother's blood,
Speaker 1: cradling her naked body on the int intestine laden gold
Speaker 1: covered kitchen floor. He had suffocated her, revived her, and
Speaker 1: had suffocated her again until she died, and then using
Speaker 1: his bare hands, he pulled out her eye balls and
Speaker 1: her internal organs, completing her heart. He did not use
Speaker 1: a knife, he used his bare hands.
Speaker 6: Incredible.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, that's just amazingly horrible. And uh, he was
Speaker 1: all historical and said to the cops, I did it
Speaker 1: because I love her her. My love was intense, and
Speaker 1: that's why he mutilated her to clean her soul from sin. So,
Speaker 1: you know, it was just horrible. And his girlfriend Marie
Speaker 1: was just in shock. She said that he told her
Speaker 1: that when they get married, he wanted to live with
Speaker 1: his mother, and she like laughed it off because she said,
Speaker 1: you know, the house gun gave her creeps and stuff,
Speaker 1: and she didn't want to live with her mother in law.
Speaker 1: You know, the young kids, they're in the early chores,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 1: He's murthered to the murder, and uh you know. Of
Speaker 1: course his father, you know, helped him with his uh
Speaker 1: well with his legal seas and stuff, and he ended
Speaker 1: up getting put in Bridgewater State Hospital, which I guess
Speaker 1: is putting notorious at the time. He was there for
Speaker 1: twenty two years and he was in isolation the entire time.
Speaker 1: So his father pulled as much strings as he could
Speaker 1: got him into a nicer hospital, and then eventually got
Speaker 1: him pardoned from the governor and he brought him home,
Speaker 1: but he died just a few weeks later. His father
Speaker 1: died just after he brought his son back home from
Speaker 1: the insane ASAUBM And so for six months he stayed
Speaker 1: at the house at ten seventy five Boston Road for
Speaker 1: about six months, and then he checked himself back out.
Speaker 1: When he was in the nicer mental hospital, they would
Speaker 1: let him out he could walk around in town and
Speaker 1: things like that, but he ended up living at age
Speaker 1: fifty nine, died of a heart attack on my birthday.
Speaker 1: I was a year old on April twenty eight, thineteen
Speaker 1: two night he was still a voluntary patient there. But well,
Speaker 1: what would make this guy, I know, what would make
Speaker 1: this guy? What could be so bad? And how badly
Speaker 1: did he have to really click to do that? You know,
Speaker 1: with the world as his oyster at.
Speaker 6: That point too, Well, obviously he was insane. All his
Speaker 6: actions after that date obviously a simple I mean, obviously
Speaker 6: he was jealous, and a lot of people have experienced
Speaker 6: those feelings. But he went home and did some bizarre right,
Speaker 6: Like I say, I mean, I've heard of people taking
Speaker 6: out organs out of a body, but they used a knife.
Speaker 6: I mean they weren't surgeons, and not shocking enough, but
Speaker 6: to somebody to rip organs out of a body with
Speaker 6: their bare hands, again, it's it does point to obvious insanity.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, certainly I'd never heard of that.
Speaker 6: No, No, that's that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, even in you know Aborigine stories, you know Captain
Speaker 1: Cook and all those things, or American Indians and all that,
Speaker 1: I never heard of anything like that.
Speaker 6: Well, what I find is what I found is doing
Speaker 6: this for so many years and reading is that the
Speaker 6: psychopathic killer or the insane killer both seem to have
Speaker 6: this extraordinary almost superhuman strength and endurance and stamina to
Speaker 6: do what they're doing, to be able to do what
Speaker 6: they're doing, incredible amount of effort and strength. This story
Speaker 6: demonstrates even more, you know, strength to be able to
Speaker 6: do something like and anger and yeah, so it's it
Speaker 6: is a horrifying story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it doesn't get any stranger than that, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, at the same time in nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 1: there was not only was there a lot of like
Speaker 1: the gangster wars happening, you know, that was all over
Speaker 1: the place. I mean, this book could have been the
Speaker 1: size of a you know, nineteen eighty LA phone book
Speaker 1: if I would have really gone through, I just picked
Speaker 1: out the ones that weren't like mob related or you know,
Speaker 1: just like the average person that did something like that,
Speaker 1: because you know, at the same time that ape guy
Speaker 1: was running around Canada in America killing middle aged landladies.
Speaker 1: You'd go in and see about renting a room, and
Speaker 1: he'd kill these landladies and rape them after death and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. And at the same time that was
Speaker 1: happening nineteen twenty six was just crazy. The first day
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty six at the Rose Bull Parade, the
Speaker 1: bleachers fell and injured like one hundred people and killed
Speaker 1: one person. You know, it was just like in August,
Speaker 1: three hundred people died of alcohol poisoning in New York City.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine if that happened now? I mean, that's like,
Speaker 1: you know, drinking tainted booze end up on Lake Ontario
Speaker 1: in outside of Buffalo, Like fifteen people got pulled out
Speaker 1: by an undertow and drowned. And a bunch of them
Speaker 1: were like a bunch of high school kids that were
Speaker 1: all there together, and others were just people just having
Speaker 1: a good time. But this weird undertow happened and pulled
Speaker 1: everybody out, drowned all these people. Yeah, it was just
Speaker 1: a very odd year.
Speaker 6: Could you tell us a little bit about a few
Speaker 6: of the other just a basic outline of a couple
Speaker 6: of the other stories in your book, like Just a
Speaker 6: Good Old Boy, which is another fascinating story. Tell us
Speaker 6: about this one a little bit on the outline of it,
Speaker 6: and a couple of the other ones that you include
Speaker 6: in this book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, George Jefferson Hassel was like the psychopathic guy,
Speaker 1: just you know, one of those guys that kind of
Speaker 1: he has a good old boy and got along with
Speaker 1: everybody and was always just like a manual labor. He
Speaker 1: found out his brother died got kicked by mule, so
Speaker 1: he went to his farm and ended up marrying his wife,
Speaker 1: and he inherited like six kids. And the same time,
Speaker 1: there's just all these weird things that happened. Like his
Speaker 1: brother's oldest daughter. He met her in California once, ended
Speaker 1: up having an ascious affair with her and had a
Speaker 1: kid with her, and she showed up at the ranch
Speaker 1: and things kind of came to a head, and his
Speaker 1: wife found out he was really angry. He was drinking
Speaker 1: one night and she got mad about that, and he
Speaker 1: killed everybody's family and took a couple of days to
Speaker 1: do it. As people came into the house, he told
Speaker 1: told everybody that they were moving, like they already moved
Speaker 1: to Oklahoma, and he was selling their stuff while he's
Speaker 1: having his auction wagon went over We're he buried them
Speaker 1: and sunk into it and they found all the bodies
Speaker 1: right there. So the sheriff just happened to be there
Speaker 1: when it happened. So after the arrest of this guy,
Speaker 1: they started finding out all these people that he had
Speaker 1: married and things like that, and it turned out that
Speaker 1: he had had a family in nineteen eighteen in Whittier, California,
Speaker 1: and we adopted children. And his wife he said he
Speaker 1: was going to join the army. She said, you're crazy,
Speaker 1: you're like forty years old. And he killed them and
Speaker 1: buried them on their floor too. So you get this
Speaker 1: like sheriff from Texas called in La sheriffs saying, you know, hey,
Speaker 1: there's this house. You know they had like five bodies
Speaker 1: and they were like, yeah, right, And they went and
Speaker 1: investigated and there were like five bodies down there too.
Speaker 1: And he loved to talk to the press. He was
Speaker 1: just like a horrible, horrible person. One of the weirdest
Speaker 1: things I thought was in Nebraska, not too far out
Speaker 1: from Omaha, there were abandoned Gypsies that were horse traders,
Speaker 1: and weird, weird thing happened is this woman, uh the
Speaker 1: gypsy father his wife died and his son married this woman,
Speaker 1: but she he married her, but it was really his father,
Speaker 1: Frank Mason's girlfriend, and so they were you know, he
Speaker 1: was married to his son. But they were like running
Speaker 1: out together hotel rooms and omaha. And she was buying
Speaker 1: the latest fashions and bobbing her hair and stuff. And
Speaker 1: while she was getting her hair bobbed in a in
Speaker 1: a barber shop. And this is in this little town
Speaker 1: called Leah, Nebraska. It's still only like five hundred people,
Speaker 1: another one of his sons walked in and shot her
Speaker 1: in the hat and said that, you know, he got
Speaker 1: rid of her silely and stuff. And this is just
Speaker 1: really strange because his son that Mary had married her.
Speaker 1: Her name was Spaine Schaeffer. He quit the gypsy family
Speaker 1: and you know, none of them had education. They could
Speaker 1: they were all literate and stuff. And he was only
Speaker 1: like eighteen years old. He completely left his family and
Speaker 1: became a farmer and got an education and stuff. But
Speaker 1: you know, you don't think of flappers or gypsies in
Speaker 1: Rule Nebraska. And that's a lot of the thing you
Speaker 1: know that you know, people say, like, you know, they
Speaker 1: think they'd like to think that when women's got the
Speaker 1: rights to marry and think or to vote and stuff,
Speaker 1: that all kind of happened slowly, but it didn't like
Speaker 1: women just kicked off their you know their courses and says,
Speaker 1: screw that man, I'm having fun. You know, there's another
Speaker 1: guy in Michigan who this white supremist. He was like
Speaker 1: the leader of the ku klutz Klan in Miskegan County
Speaker 1: in Michigan. Didn't like this guy who who had just
Speaker 1: one like road commissioner something like that. And uh so
Speaker 1: this guy, the road commissioner guy had like a bar
Speaker 1: restaurant type place, no resort thing on the lake, real nice.
Speaker 1: His daughter was getting married and they were getting all
Speaker 1: these packages and letters from everywhere, and he was he
Speaker 1: gave him that package to open. He said, oh, it's
Speaker 1: got to be for you, you know, it's just you know, package,
Speaker 1: and it blew up. It turned out that that that
Speaker 1: pansman guy had made a bomb and meant for the
Speaker 1: road commissioner guy to explode. Instead he killed his daughter
Speaker 1: and her husband they were getting married like the next day,
Speaker 1: and killed and killed the road commissioner. And he got
Speaker 1: caught right away because they he had used the postage
Speaker 1: that was like metered, and the male guy remembers it
Speaker 1: and he hit Part of one of his jobs was
Speaker 1: to blow up stumps, and Michigan was full of stumps
Speaker 1: because it was they cut down trees and by then
Speaker 1: they went to clear the land and so he knew
Speaker 1: about explosives. But they found the triggering device from the
Speaker 1: old rifle. That was that the part fit perfectly that
Speaker 1: was in the bomb. I think that part had like
Speaker 1: went into the man was they found it inside of
Speaker 1: this part of the stratone or something. But it was
Speaker 1: part of the triggering device. But you know, you got
Speaker 1: this little rural town in Michigan and you know, bomb
Speaker 1: blows up, basically blows up the whole place, you know,
Speaker 1: just strange. Another one was this this reacher out in Montana,
Speaker 1: like outside of Yellowstone and he killed his like eighteen
Speaker 1: year old girlfriend and tried to make it seem that
Speaker 1: she was trained to kill him and stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: this guy was like forty five and she was just
Speaker 1: like eighteen and just this crazy, you know thing of lies.
Speaker 1: And you know, funny thing is that he was convicted
Speaker 1: immediately because the jury of his peers were like ranchers, farmers, miners, cowboys.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, they didn't take any kind of
Speaker 1: malonely about.
Speaker 6: It, you know, right, you have. Sorry, I just wanted
Speaker 6: to mention before we have no more time to to
Speaker 6: see all of the chapters in the book. The story
Speaker 6: is the farmer in the Dell, I love a man
Speaker 6: in uniform, a moron with a gun, pocket full of
Speaker 6: bullets like a hole in the head, the end of
Speaker 6: the Frontier, the guy who Never got a break, Dumkoff
Speaker 6: a Michigan mail bomb. So Mike Toddler is an axe murderer,
Speaker 6: incest in Seattle, urged for overkill, three bullets for her husband,
Speaker 6: panic and cicero spotty excuse, Oh my Papa, the phantom killer.
Speaker 6: He auto stayed home like a girl that married. Dear
Speaker 6: old Dad, really bad Dad, Darnold Sock's Jitney's, Bill's Cafe,
Speaker 6: and the Cozy Cafe. Oh, we got a bunch. More So,
Speaker 6: there's numerous stories in here, all of them in the
Speaker 6: same ilk as this incredible sensational stories of nineteen twenty
Speaker 6: six and the year that Americans went berserk, even more
Speaker 6: so than any other time in history. I want to
Speaker 6: thank you very much for coming on and talking about
Speaker 6: nineteen twenty six homicide in America. For those that might
Speaker 6: want to check out other work of yours, and how
Speaker 6: can they get a copy of Homicide in America.
Speaker 1: Where do they go through Amazon? I put it out
Speaker 1: through Amazon, so it's on my author page David Colchik's
Speaker 1: author page on Amazon. I had my five other books
Speaker 1: on there, and that's where you can get it right now.
Speaker 6: Well, that's great. I want to thank you very much
Speaker 6: for coming on and talking about nineteen twenty six Homicide
Speaker 6: in America. A fascinating, fascinating collection, David. Thank you very much,
Speaker 6: David Kolchik for this interview. You have a great evening.
Speaker 1: Us out