Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast

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.

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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.

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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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