15 Minutes of Infamy

Lydia 'Lida' Beecher Fourteen miles north of Utica, New York, lies the sleepy village of Poland. On the Saturday morning of March 28, 1914, a farmer driving along the road leading out of this little Herkimer County village noticed something strange in the freshly fallen snow. It was blood, and an assortment of random objects haphazardly strewn about, as if scattered by a violent struggle. When the farmer realized that one of the objects was a woman's hair comb, he followed the tracks into the woods, past a barbed wire fence, where he found the mutilated body of a young woman. Lydia Beecher, known to friends and family simply as Lida, was the 21-year-old daughter of Reverend William A. Beecher, a Presbyterian minister from Cayuga County. Lida, who was a teacher at the one-room schoolhouse in the village of Poland, lived in a rented room in a boarding house not far from the spot where her body was discovered. According to her housemates, Lida had gone out to mail a letter on ...

This is the story of a story of a girl, who drowned in a river and shocked the whole world. And while she looked so sad in photographs, Poe absolutely loved her-- and so she became the inspiration behind one of his most famous stories.  In 1840, Mary Cecelia Rogers was a 21-year-old beauty who worked in the tobacco shop of John Anderson on a street in New York known as Broadway. Her home was a boarding house run by her widowed mother, just a short walk from her place of employment, and Anderson had hired Mary because he believed that the best way to pull in male customers from the street was to have a beautiful female face behind the counter. His philosophy worked. Business increased so much that the shop was continually filled with young men, most of whom were eager to introduce themselves to the young woman known simply as the Broadway Cigar Girl. However, Mary had two serious suitors with honorable intentions. This didn't dissuade the more persistent potential suitors, so, as a ...

  John Caldwell Colt Today we present one of the most discussed true crime cases of Old New York-- a case which famously spawned a conspiracy theory involving a faked death, a doppelganger corpse, and powerful family connections. Like most people who made it their career to teach penmanship, Asa Wheeler was the quiet, meticulous sort. During the mid-19th century Asa conducted daily classes in a building on Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan, instructing anyone who wanted to learn calligraphy or Spencerian script. Unfortunately for Mr. Wheeler, there just weren't enough students to fill a classroom, and so, to make ends meet, he sublet one of his rooms to another teacher named John Caldwell Colt. Colt was a fur trader turned gambler turned bookkeeper who had fallen on hard times, and he believed that he could turn his fortunes around by publishing a textbook on the subject. Asa Wheeler didn't share the struggling bookkeeper's optimism, however. But he decided to rent space o...

This week, we visit the Emmanuel Church in San Francisco-- a church with a very dark history. One of its former pastors had committed suicide in his study, another pastor had murdered a member of the congregation, and a third had carried on so many extramarital affairs that he had been forced to resign.  But, in 1895, when the body of a missing teenage housekeeper was discovered inside the church library with a dinner knife protruding from her chest and another young woman was found butchered in the belltower, it created a media sensation that helped launch one of the greatest careers in the history of journalism.   It was a slow news day and the San Francisco Examiner was looking for something fresh with a local angle. It was a classified ad in Examiner which caught the attention of one newspaper reporter. Nine little words, sandwiched between two names. It was an ad which hinted at the promise of an interesting story: Blanche: No matter what has happened, come home to me. M...

Dorothy Berrum During WW2, thousands of young women invaded the city of Washington. With all the able-bodied men fighting the war, many of these women took government jobs and were, for the first time in their lives, out on their own.  One such woman was 18-year-old Dorothy Berrum. In August of 1944, Dorothy, and two of her friends, left their hometown of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She went to work for the War Department. Her workplace was the Pentagon. Dorothy and her two friends had shared an apartment, briefly, before Dorothy decided to move into her own room at a government housing project for women called Arlington Farms. Dorothy, who found her old friends a bit too conservative and straight-laced, wanted her independence. While she devoted herself to her job during the day, her nights were filled with parties and dates with the young men whom the draft board had left behind. This concerned her friends, of course; just as the war had brought shortages of everything from silk a...

This week, we meet William Udderzook, a criminal mastermind who might've gotten away with the perfect murder... if only his victim hadn't practiced such fantastic oral hygiene. On the night of February 2, 1872, the cottage known by the name of Yorkhouse burned brightly and briskly, attracting the residents of the Baltimore neighborhood of Waverly. Among those who stood helplessly and watched the fire burn was Andrew J. Lowdes, the owner of Yorkhouse. The inferno had been raging nearly an hour when a man elbowed his way through the crowd. "I think my brother-in-law in inside that houseI" "What?" gasped Lowndes. "Who? Who's inside the house?" "Winnie Goss." "You say Winfield is inside the house?  Good God! If you thought Winnie was in there, why didn't you say something? We might have saved him!" "I wasn't certain, Mr. Lowndes. I couldn't let you endanger your life on a whim." "For heaven's sake,...

Frank Henwood Think carefully before you appeal your criminal conviction, because you just might end up with a harsher sentence than the one had already been given. The story of Frank Henwood illustrates why it's often better to quit while you're ahead. One of the most well-known murders in the history of Denver, Colorado, didn't involve a wily gold prospector, a Wild West bandit, or a rugged cattle rancher. It grew out of a good, old-fashioned love triangle. But this triangle didn't involve a wife, a husband, and another woman; it involved a wife and two men who were not her husband. The wife in question was Isabel Patterson Springer, the attractive and vivacious second bride of a wealthy banker and industrialist named John W. Springer. The men were Sylvester Louis Von Phul (known to his friends as Tony), and Harold Frank Henwood. Tony Von Phul was a 32-year-old wine merchant and hot air balloonist from St. Louis, while Frank Henwood was a 31-year-old promoter, with a...