Mrs. Ann E. Freese ran a brothel in a section of Rutland, Vermont, known as the “Swamp.” On June 9, 1874, the house burned to the ground. Amid the rubble was the body of Mrs. Freese, badly burned but recognizable. She had been stabbed several times in the throat before the fire started. The investigation proved daunting with so many anonymous men coming and going from the house, but one man stood out. John Phair, a known associate of Freese, left town around the time of the fire. When he was identified as the man who pawned her jewelry in several Boston pawnshops, Phair was arrested. He was ..read more

Dr. Henry Clark of Boston was summoned to 11 Hamilton Place at around 7:00 the morning of December 30, 1879. A woman had been shot and needed urgent care. When he got there, she was nearly gone, and there was nothing he could do.  A policeman and a medical examiner arrived soon after and determined that the woman, Mrs. Helen J. Ward, had been shot twice in the head. One shot entered her temple and went through her head, the other fractured her skull without entering.  Her 18-year-old daughter, also named Helen, did her best to explain what happened. Mother and daughter shared a bed ..read more

In 1872, George Wheeler married May Tilson in Boston. He soon fell in love with May’s younger sister, Delia, and they began an intimate relationship. In 1880 George and Delia were living together in San Francisco. There, Delia began a relationship with another man, and Wheeler declared he would rather see her dead than with another lover. According to Wheeler, Delia felt so conflicted and disgraced that she agreed with him and begged him to cut her throat. Instead, he strangled Delia and hid her body in a trunk. Read the full story here: "Thus She Passed Away." Image from "Horrible Beyond P ..read more

From the confession of Mary Brown to the murder of her husband, John Brown, by her paramour, Joseph Wade: When I first went to the gate Mr. Brown was lying with his feet about the middle of the gate and his head towards the buggy, close to the hind wheel. The buggy robe was under him and the blanket over him, so that I could not see his head. After I took the child in and returned Brown was still groaning, as he was when I first come to the gate. I said: "My God, Joe, what have you done?" He said: "Darling, this is what love will do," and threw his arms around my shoulders. He said: "I love ..read more

Maggie Thompson, a pretty eight-year-old girl living on Merchant Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, mysteriously disappeared on May 9, 1889. She was coming from school, just two blocks away, but she never reached her home. Detectives, police constables, and private citizens searched the neighborhood to no avail. They found no trace of Maggie. In early June, Joseph Shovell, who lived seven doors away from the Thompsons on Merchant Avenue, noticed a foul smell coming from somewhere in the house. The building housed two families: the Shovells in one half and the Leuths, a family of German immigrants, in ..read more

  W. S. Forest, of counsel for the defense, cross-examining the expert microscopist Tollman. Defendants (far left) 1. Beggs, 2. Coughlin, 3. O'Sullivan, 4. Burke, 5. Kunze. Dr. Patrick Henry Cronin was a prominent Chicago physician, and a member of Clan-na-Gael an American political organization formed to promote Irish independence from British rule. After Dr. Cronin uncovered corruption among the leaders, his naked body was found stuffed in a sewer with icepick wounds to his head. In the 1889 murder trial of five members of Clan-na-Gael, the defense tried to paint Dr. Cronin as, a ..read more

George Wilbur and Michael Kildorf, both 17 years old, were good friends in North Plains, Michigan. On January 28, 1879, they went together into the woods to hunt rabbits. At some point during the hunt, a dispute arose between them. The cause of the disagreement was not disclosed, but it continued to escalate. Kildorf was resting on the root of a tree when Wilbur came up behind him and shot him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Wilbur took Kildorf’s revolver and went back home. Later that day, Kildorf’s body was discovered, and the authorities tracked Wilbur to his father’s ..read more

  When William W. Place’s first wife died, he married his housekeeper, Martha Scovoll. It was a whirlwind courtship and William did not listen to his relatives who thought Martha would bring trouble. Sure enough, before long, Martha’s true nature came out. She had a quick temper and was irrationally jealous of William’s relationship with his young daughter Ida. Martha had violent fits of temper and threatened to kill both William and Ida. On February 8, 1868, she made good on her threats, strangling Ida to death and attacking William with an axe. She was convicted of first-degree murder ..read more

  In the wee hours of February 8, 1888, burglars broke into the mansion of Amos J. Snell, one of the wealthiest men in Chicago. They went straight to Snell’s office and opened his safe and a strong box but did not find the fortune they expected. The thieves went upstairs and began gathering silver items. The noise awaked Snell who came down in his nightshirt, armed with an old muzzle-loading pistol. Hearing the thieves in the parlor, he shouted, “Get out! Get out of here!”  and fired his pistol through the closed parlor door. The thieves responded by firing back through the door. Sn ..read more

  On April 14, 1885, the manager of the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, responded to complaints of a foul odor emanating from room 144.  Inside a trunk in that room, the manager found the murdered body of Charles Arthur Preller, one of two Englishmen who had checked in two weeks earlier. The killer left a note implying that the death had been a political assassination, but it was, in fact, the tragic ending of a “peculiar relationship.” The hunt for the killer, Hugh Mottram Brooks, would end 8,000 miles away in New Zealand. Read the full story here:  The St. Louis Trunk ..read more