Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast

Season 40: America's 250th — fifty states, fifty crimes, two hundred and fifty years. Tonight is a double feature:
Nebraska and Oregon. Two frontier murder convictions. Two men the justice system got wrong.
May 1876. A horse breeder is found killed with an axe in a barn loft in Seward, Nebraska. His brother Warren
Clough stands over the body — the first murder victim in Seward County history. Within weeks, the community
convicts Warren on nothing but circumstance. He is sentenced to hang. Fifteen years later, the prosecutor, the
judge, and the jurors who condemned him all petition for his release, admitting they punished the wrong man.
Then, in Portland, Oregon, 1894: a waterfront murder pins on "Bunko" Kelly, the city's most notorious shanghaier
— convicted not on evidence, but on a bow tie found near the body and a reputation too convenient to ignore.
The Victims
**Nathan Clough** was a horse breeder from Postville, Allamakee County, Iowa. He had followed homestead
land westward after the Civil War, building a trade that gave him standing among farmers and ranchers across
the Nebraska plains. Nathan arrived at the Blue Valley House hotel in Seward carrying a large sum from horse
sales. He slept near his animals in the barn, as he always did. That routine cost him his life. Nathan was killed with
an axe in the barn loft. His money was gone. He was the first murder victim in Seward County history.
**George W. Sayres** was an opium smuggler working Portland's waterfront. His background, origins, family, and
age at death are undocumented. He exists in the historical record only as a victim and a criminal. In 1894, Sayres
was hacked to death and his body thrown into the Willamette River. Whatever his crimes, he was murdered —
and if historians are right that the man convicted of killing him was framed, then Sayres's actual killer was never
identified.
The Crime
In Nebraska, suspicion fell on Warren Clough immediately. He discovered Nathan's body. He knew about the
money. There was an acknowledged tension between the brothers. No physical evidence connected Warren
to the killing. None. Warren employed at least two hired men — Jacob Trent and Charles Wilcox — who had
equal access to the barn and potential knowledge of Nathan's money. The investigation never examined either
of them.
In Oregon, the prosecution argued Kelly lured Sayres from his home with a scheme to sell fake opium to members
of Portland's Chinese community. The take would have been around two hundred dollars. Instead, Sayres was
killed. The key physical evidence linking Kelly to the murder: a bow tie found at or near the scene that resembled
a style Kelly was known to wear. Beyond the bow tie, the case was circumstantial — built on Kelly's reputation
as a shanghaier, not proof of this specific crime.
The Investigation
Warren Clough was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death by hanging at a trial moved thirty
miles west to York, Nebraska, because prejudice in Seward was too deep. The night before execution, Governor
Silas Garber commuted the sentence to life. Warren entered the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln and spent
nearly fifteen years inside its limestone walls. During that time, Jacob Trent told Warren's former defense attorney
that Warren was innocent — then died of heart disease in the penitentiary before he could formally confess. The
original prosecutor, the sentencing judge, and surviving jurors all petitioned Governor John M. Thayer for Warren's
release. The Omaha Daily Bee reported it plainly: the evidence was circumstantial only, but somebody had to be
punished for the crime, and on the brother of the murdered man the blame was laid. Warren was pardoned on
January 1, 1891. He was never exonerated.
Kelly was convicted of second-degree murder in March 1895 after twelve hours of deliberation and sentenced
to life at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. He served thirteen years. Historian Barney Blalock, whose
2014 study The Oregon Shanghaiers was the first rigorously sourced account of Portland's crimping trade,
assessed the case as politically motivated — likely engineered to remove Kelly after he broke from Larry Sullivan's
shanghaiing syndicate. Kelly was released in 1908, wrote a memoir nobody bought, conducted a book tour in
Seattle in 1909, and disappeared from the historical record entirely.
Historical Context
These cases span America's frontier and Gilded Age justice systems. In 1876 Nebraska, there was no forensic
science, no fingerprinting, no detective force. A coroner's jury of local men served as both investigators and grand
jury. In 1890s Portland, Andrew Furuseth — president of the International Seamen's Union — testified before
Congress that the city was the greatest crimping den in America, where boarding house keepers kidnapped men
off the streets and sold them to ships for thirty to one hundred dollars per head. Both convictions were built on
community suspicion, political convenience, and the demand for punishment — not proof.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

October 1900, Paterson, New Jersey. A seventeen-year-old silk mill worker named Jennie Bosschieter walks to
a drugstore on a Thursday evening. She never comes home. Four men from the city's wealthiest families drug
her with chloral hydrate, assault her, and leave her body by the Wagaraw Bridge. The murder trial exposes a city
where the families that owned the mills believed they owned the law, too.
Eight hundred miles south, Perry County, Kentucky, 1887. Two merchants in a town called Hazard turn a dispute
over coal mineral rights into a seven-year shooting war. The French-Eversole Feud kills more than twenty
men, burns down the county courthouse, and brings the state militia into Appalachian Kentucky. The outside
companies that started the conflict get exactly what they wanted.
The Victims
Jennie Bosschieter was seventeen years old, Dutch-American, the middle child of an immigrant family living at
155 East Fifth Street in Paterson's Riverside section. She had been working at the Paterson Ribbon Company on
Vreeland Avenue since she was thirteen — twelve-hour shifts on a doubling machine, barely a dollar a day. She
was walking to Kent's Drugstore on Main Street to buy baby powder for her infant niece when she encountered
the men who would kill her.
Joseph Eversole was a merchant, lawyer, and father of seven in Hazard, Kentucky. He traveled Perry County's
hollows warning subsistence farmers that outside agents were buying their coal mineral rights for fifty cents an
acre — a fraction of their value. Nick Combs, Eversole's brother-in-law, was twenty years old when he was killed
alongside Eversole in an ambush on a mountain road in April 1888. Judge Josiah Combs, sixty-two, grandson of
Hazard's founder, was shot at his own doorstep six years later.
The Crimes
**Case A — Paterson, New Jersey (1900):** Walter C. McAlister, Andrew J. Campbell, William A. Death, and
George J. Kerr lured Jennie Bosschieter to Saal's Saloon at River and Bridge Streets. McAlister placed chloral
hydrate in her drinks — two doses, the second lethal. The four men took her in a hired carriage toward the Bergen
side of Paterson. Jennie was sexually assaulted and died from the chloral hydrate overdose. Her body was found
near the Wagaraw Bridge at 5:30 the next morning by Marinus Gary, walking to work at Alyea Brothers feed mill.
The cause of death: chloral hydrate poisoning. A visible skull fracture was determined to be postmortem, from
being dropped.
**Case B — Perry County, Kentucky (1887-1894):** The French-Eversole Feud began as a commercial rivalry
between Joseph Eversole and Fulton French over coal mineral rights and control of the county courthouse. The
first killing came September 15, 1887, when Eversole shot French supporter Bill Gambriel in the street. On April
15, 1888, hired assassins ambushed and killed both Eversole and Nick Combs on the road to Hyden. The violence
escalated through the Battle of Hazard in November 1889 — a two-day gun battle through the town streets, with
the Eversole faction barricaded in the courthouse and the French faction occupying the jail fifteen feet away.
As many as twenty of the town's roughly 135 residents died. The courthouse was burned on July 4, 1890. Judge
Josiah Combs was assassinated at his doorstep on September 23, 1894.
The Aftermath
McAlister, Campbell, and Death were convicted of second-degree murder. McAlister and Campbell each received
thirty years. George Kerr, tried separately for rape, received fifteen years. Judge Dixon stated openly he wished
the death penalty had been available. Kerr served eleven years before release. A New York labor newspaper, The
Call, ran the headline: "Wealthy Murderer Released." Campbell served fifteen of his thirty years. Author Kimberly
Tilley recovered Jennie's story in her 2019 book *The Poisoned Glass: A Famous, Forgotten Murder*, restoring
a case that had been forgotten for over a century. The Bosschieter murder is recognized as one of the earliest
documented uses of chloral hydrate as a date rape drug.
In Kentucky, "Bad Tom" Smith confessed from the gallows on June 28, 1895, to seven murders — naming Fulton
French as the man who ordered the assassinations. French was indicted but acquitted. In 1913, Harry Clay Eversole
— Joe's one-armed son, not yet three years old when his father was killed — shot French in the spleen on a
Hazard street. Harry was fined seventy-five dollars for disturbing the peace. His mother paid the fine. French
died from complications of the wound in 1915. The railroad reached Hazard in 1912, and commercial coal mining
began in 1916. The outside companies that men like French had represented got exactly what they wanted.
Frequently Asked Questions
**Who was Jennie Bosschieter?** Jennie Bosschieter was a seventeen-year-old Dutch-American silk mill worker
in Paterson, New Jersey, murdered in October 1900 by four men from prominent local families who drugged her
with chloral hydrate and assaulted her.
**What was the French-Eversole Feud?** The French-Eversole Feud was a seven-year conflict (1887-1894) in
Perry County, Kentucky, between rival merchants Joseph Eversole and Fulton French. What began as a dispute
over coal mineral rights became an armed conflict that killed more than twenty people and devastated the town
of Hazard.
**Was Fulton French ever convicted?** French was indicted for ordering the murder of Judge Josiah Combs but
was acquitted by a jury. He was never convicted for any feud-related killing. He was shot by Harry Clay Eversole
in 1913 and died from complications of the wound in 1915.
**Why was Jennie Bosschieter's case forgotten?** Despite being national news in 1900, the case vanished from
public memory by the mid-twentieth century. Author Kimberly Tilley spent years in archives recovering the story,
publishing *The Poisoned Glass* in 2019 — 119 years after Jennie's death.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Foul Play is historical true crime, built from the records that survive. Every week Shane Waters goes back to a real crime that history tried to bury and tells it plainly, with respect for the people in it, the victims most of all.
In this trailer: the Bender orchard in Kansas, 1873. Katsu Goto's last ride home in Hawaii, 1889. Mollie Korbel's kitchen in Dakota Territory, 1888. And Hamburg, South Carolina, on the nation's hundredth birthday in 1876.
There are more than 300 episodes waiting. Start anywhere, and follow Foul Play so the next story finds you.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In 1891 Noah Benson, a Black farmhand and a father, was murdered, and his body was pulled from the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. His head was never found. In 1889 in Montana Territory, five settlers were murdered and left in the Judith River, and James Wilber, the guide the record names as their killer, died in jail before any trial.
Noah Benson worked the land around Delaware City. He had a son named William, and an employer called him an exemplary man. He was last seen alive on Thanksgiving night, November 26, 1891, and a lock tender towed his body ashore in December. He was identified by an old bullet the doctor found lodged in his left hand, between the third and little fingers. Doctor William Jacobs told the coroner's jury there was no water in the lungs: Benson was dead before he went into the canal. In June 1892 a jury convicted three men of second-degree murder and acquitted a fourth defendant.
Joseph and Sarah Kurtz, farmers from Iowa, their friends Edward and Lucina Biggs, and Ida Schaus, the six-year-old the Kurtzes had adopted that January, left Helena for the gold town of Maiden with Wilber as their guide. They were killed at their camp near Lewistown on the night of June 7, 1889, and their bodies were dumped at Samples Crossing. A cowboy from the Moccasin roundup reported the first body on June 15. Sheriff Clary traced the traded horses to a ranch near Stanford, followed the trail to Great Falls and, with a Cascade County deputy, took Wilber into custody. Wilber died by suicide in jail on June 21. Within three weeks of his burial at Highland Cemetery in Great Falls, the grave was found disturbed and the coffin empty. Montana became a state that November.
Content note: the murder of a six-year-old girl, a death by suicide in a jail cell, and a body that came out of the water without its head.
Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 17.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In 1912 in the Arkansas Ozarks, 18-year-old Ella Barham was murdered, and Boone County hanged her neighbor Odus Davidson on circumstantial evidence. In 1875 in Rogers City, Michigan, fifteen men plotted to kill the town's founder, Albert Molitor. The shooting killed him and his clerk, Edward Sullivan, and the town kept the secret for sixteen years.
Ella Barham's errand on a November morning in 1912 was a hat for her sister, and she never came home. Her remains were found that night on a hillside south of Crooked Creek. Odus Davidson was convicted of first-degree murder in January 1913 after his own lawyers had him moved to Berryville while the jury was out, so he never heard the verdict. He was hanged in Harrison on August 11, 1913, still saying he was innocent, and his appeal was studied by the lawyers for Leo Frank in 1915.
Albert Molitor helped found Rogers City in 1868, paid his workers in scrip good only at his own store, and called himself the King of Presque Isle County. On August 23, 1875, buckshot tore through his mill office. His clerk, Edward Sullivan, who was not a target, died on the boat to Alpena, and Molitor, taken to Detroit, died on September 18. In 1891 a farmer named William Repke confessed and named fourteen others. Presque Isle County dismissed 252 prospective jurors, the trial moved to Alpena, five men were sentenced to life at hard labor, and all five were later pardoned. Hermann Hoeft and Andrew Banks, named as the recruiters, were never charged.
Content note: sexual violence, a dismemberment, a hanging, a shooting, a family driven from its home by armed riders, and the mob expulsions of a county's Black residents.
Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 16.

Our Sponsors:
* Check out Kensington Publishing: https://www.kensingtonbooks.com

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy