Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast

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.
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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.

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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.

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The Bloody Benders killed travelers at their Kansas inn and vanished in 1873. In 1895 in Lunenburg County, Virginia, Mary Abernathy, Pokey Barnes and Mary Barnes were convicted of killing Lucy Pollard on testimony the witness later admitted was false. All three went free.
The Benders ran an inn on the Osage Trail in Labette County, Kansas, and for two years travelers went missing there. At least 11 victims were found buried in the orchard and the well, among them Dr. William York and an 18-month-old girl, Mary Ann Longcor. The family was gone before the bodies were found, and the 3,000 dollar reward was never claimed.
Lucy Pollard, 56, was killed in her farmyard in Fort Mitchell, Virginia, on June 14, 1895, as she walked out to collect eggs. Solomon Marable named three women and all three were convicted. Pokey Barnes cross-examined Marable herself and he admitted what he first said was false. With support from John Mitchell Jr. and the Richmond Planet, Pokey Barnes and Mary Abernathy won new trials and went free, and the governor pardoned Mary Barnes, who walked out on Christmas morning 1896.
Content note: the deaths of at least 11 people including a toddler, a plain description of a woman's injuries, an execution, and death sentences handed to Black defendants on testimony the witness later admitted was false.
Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 15.

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In 1876 an armed white mob killed six Black men in Hamburg, South Carolina, and not one of 94 men indicted was tried. That year Crawford Goldsby, later Cherokee Bill, was born; after Ike Rogers helped capture him, Goldsby was hanged for murder at Fort Smith in 1896.
On July 8, 1876, more than 100 armed white men attacked the Black militia of Hamburg, four days after a parade dispute over a road. They killed town marshal James Cook and Moses Parks, then shot four men they had captured, Allan Attaway, David Phillips, Hampton Stephens and Albert Myniart. A coroner's jury produced 94 indictments, including Benjamin Tillman, and no one was ever tried. Tillman became governor of South Carolina and a United States senator.
Crawford Goldsby was born at Fort Concho, Texas, that same year, the son of a Buffalo Soldier and a Cherokee freedwoman. As Cherokee Bill he rode with the Cook Gang. Judge Isaac Parker's federal court at Fort Smith, Arkansas, convicted him of murdering Ernest Melton, a painter who stepped to a window during a robbery at Lenapah, and jail guard Lawrence Keating, who left a wife and children. He was sentenced to death twice and hanged on March 17, 1896, at age 20. Rogers was shot dead by Goldsby's brother in 1897.
Content note: racial violence, a massacre, a state legislator shot while praying, the shooting of a bystander and a jail guard, and a public hanging.
Foul Play, Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states, fifty crimes. This is Episode 14.

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