Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast

Season 40: America's 250th -- fifty true crime stories from fifty states. Delaware, 1891. A headless body in a
commercial canal, the head never recovered. Montana Territory, 1889. A drifter murders five settlers on the open
prairie, dumps them in a river, and dies before trial. His coffin, when checked, was empty.
Two waterways. Two states. Two historical murders where the water held the dead and refused to give them
back.
The Victims
**Noah Benson** was pulled from the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in 1891 -- a headless body floating
in one of America's busiest commercial waterways. In an era before fingerprints, dental records, or circulated
photographs, the human face was the only reliable means of identification. Benson's had been taken from him.
That investigators identified him at all, through physical markings or recognition by people who knew him, speaks
to the determination of a county with no state police force and no forensic capability beyond what constables
could see with their own eyes.
**Edward and Lucina Crowell Biggs**, **Joseph and Sarah Ellen Jolliff Kurtz**, and six-year-old **Ida Schauss**
were settlers heading northeast from Helena toward the gold-mining town of Maiden in the Judith Mountains.
Ida had been formally adopted by the Kurtzes in January 1889, just months before the journey. Her biological
father, Julius Schaus of Helena, recently widowed, had placed her in the couple's care through a formal adoption
granted by Judge Howey. Sarah Kurtz, a farmer's wife of fifteen years from Iowa, knew what it took to start over.
She did not know that the man offering to guide them through the Judith Basin was planning to kill them all.
The Crimes
In Delaware, the canal that ran fourteen miles through the flatlands of northern Delaware -- connecting the
Delaware River to the Chesapeake Bay since 1829 -- gave up Benson's body but kept the one piece that mattered
most. His head was never found. A murder trial followed, drawing weeks of coverage from the *Every Evening*,
the *Morning News*, and the *Evening Journal* out of Wilmington. The prosecution had to prove who Benson
was, prove he had been murdered, and prove who did it, all without the single piece of evidence that could have
simplified everything.
In Montana Territory, **James Wilber** -- also known as Jack Gilding -- met the five settlers in Helena and offered
to guide them to Maiden. The last person outside the party to see them alive was John Beck at Castle Butte
on June 7, 1889. That evening or night, Wilber shot all five with a Winchester rifle. He loaded the bodies into
the wagon, drove through open country in daylight, and dumped them in the Judith River at Samples Crossing,
roughly twenty miles south of Lewistown.
The Investigations
Delaware's law enforcement in 1891 relied on county constables and local sheriffs. There was no state police force
(Delaware State Police would not be founded until 1923). Investigators worked without fingerprinting technology,
forensic pathology, or the victim's head. The trial reportedly concluded with a verdict, but the details remain
buried in the Delaware state archives and on microfilm at the Wilmington Public Library -- waiting for whoever
goes looking.
In Montana, a cowboy from the Moccasin roundup found a woman's body in the Judith River on June 15. Within
days, all five bodies had surfaced. The *Fergus County Argus* declared on June 20 that never in the history of
Montana had such a crime been committed. Sheriff Clary traced Wilber through a horse trade at James Wood's
ranch near Stanford. Deputy Jo. Hamilton and Sheriff Downing of Cascade County tracked him to Great Falls
and arrested him. On the night of Friday, June 21, 1889, Wilber hanged himself in his cell with his own belt. There
was no trial.
Historical Context
Delaware in 1891 maintained one of the harshest criminal justice systems in the nation. The whipping post,
known locally as "Red Hannah," was still in active use -- disproportionately against Black defendants -- and would
remain so until 1972. The canal corridor was a place between identities: Major Philip Reybold and his five sons
had once planted over 117,000 peach trees across two states, but peach yellows disease was killing the groves.
The canal itself would later be purchased by the federal government, widened, deepened, and converted from a
lock-controlled passage to a sea-level waterway. Even the crime scene was consumed.
Montana was admitted as the 41st state on November 8, 1889 -- five months after the murders. The Wilber case
was the last great crime of the territorial era. And one final mystery remained: when someone later checked
Wilber's grave at Highland Cemetery in Great Falls, the coffin was empty. The body was never found. A man who
tried to make five people disappear into a river himself disappeared from his own grave.

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

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

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

Season 40: America's 250th — 50 states, 50 forgotten crimes. Two communities. Two murders decades apart.
In the Arkansas Ozarks, a town rushed to convict a man on circumstantial evidence and may have hanged the
wrong person. In northern Michigan, an entire town conspired to kill its tyrannical founder — then said nothing
for sixteen years.
In 1912, eighteen-year-old Ella Barham walked to a post office in the Arkansas hills to buy cloth for a hat. She
never came home. Her dismembered remains were found scattered across a hillside that night. The community
blamed a neighbor named Odus Davidson. He was hanged within nine months. His gravestone still declares he
was innocent.
The Victims
Ella Lillian Ethel Barham was born February 16, 1894, in the Pleasant Ridge community of Boone County, Arkansas
— a scattering of homesteads along Crooked Creek in the Ozark hills. Her father, George Solomon Barham, was
one of the largest landowners in the county. Ella was eighteen, described by neighbors as popular and well-liked.
On the morning of November 21, 1912, her world measured in creek crossings and ridge trails. Her biggest concern
was a hat.
In Michigan, the victim was Albert Molitor — born 1842 in Ludwigsburg, Germany, founder of Rogers City and
the political architect of Presque Isle County. He built the sawmill, the store, the boarding house, the post office.
He paid workers in scrip redeemable only at his store. He declared himself "the King of Presque Isle County." He
was thirty-three when fifteen men decided he had to die. But the shooting that killed Molitor on August 23, 1875,
also killed Edward Sullivan — a clerk working late, a bystander, a man whose death nobody conspired to avenge.
The Crimes
In Arkansas, Ella Barham's remains were found around 9:00 p.m. by two boys and a hunter on a hillside south of
Crooked Creek. She had been decapitated, severed at the torso, both legs removed, and nearly every bone in her
skull crushed. Doctors Taylor and Lair determined she had been sexually assaulted, possibly by more than one
person. Neighbor Odus Davidson — twenty-nine, known to have expressed romantic interest Ella rejected —
was arrested within days. His seventeen-year-old brother Lair was taken in as an accomplice.
In Michigan, buckshot from at least two guns tore through the mill office where Albert Molitor and clerk Edward
Sullivan worked. Fifteen to twenty pieces of shot struck Molitor in the back and side. Sullivan took a blast through
the jaw that severed his tongue. Sullivan died the next day on a boat to Alpena. Molitor lingered approximately
three weeks before dying in Detroit.
The Investigations
The Davidson case was built entirely on circumstantial evidence: threatening statements Odus made after Ella's
rejection, red pepper-filled socks dropped from a Davidson window to confuse bloodhounds, a bloody axe at the
family woodpile, and Davidson's reluctance to join the search party. No confession. No eyewitness. No forensic
evidence that would meet modern standards. The trial before Judge George Reed lasted five days. Davidson was
not present when the jury returned its verdict of murder in the first degree after four hours of deliberation. He
was sentenced to hang.
Attorney E.G. Mitchell — a former circuit court judge — fought the conviction through the Arkansas Supreme
Court and lobbied the governor for clemency. Every effort failed. On August 11, 1913, Odus Davidson was hanged
in Harrison before a crowd numbering in the thousands. His final words were a declaration of innocence. The
rope was cut into pieces and thrown to the crowd as souvenirs.
In Rogers City, there was no investigation — not a real one. Nobody particularly wanted to find the killers. For
sixteen years the community kept its silence. In 1891, farmer William Repke turned himself in and named fourteen
other conspirators. He identified Hermann Hoeft, a rival store owner, as the mastermind and Andrew Banks as
the orchestrator. When authorities tried to seat a jury in Presque Isle County, they summoned, examined, and
dismissed 252 prospective jurors. The entire eligible pool. The trial moved to Alpena County. Five men were
convicted and sentenced to life with hard labor at Jackson State Prison. Approximately five years later, the
governor pardoned four; the fifth was pardoned roughly two and a half years after that.
Historical Context
Both cases reveal how justice operated in isolated American communities before professional law enforcement
and modern forensics. In Boone County, Arkansas, grief and certainty replaced due process. In Presque Isle
County, Michigan, a community decided collectively that a killing was deserved — and the state eventually
agreed by pardoning the convicted men. Davidson's appeal has been cited as legal precedent in numerous cases,
including the 1915 Leo Frank appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

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

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

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary — fifty states, fifty crimes, two hundred and fifty years. This double--
feature episode covers Kansas and Virginia.
A city marshal with a gold-engraved Winchester and a secret past as a wanted killer. A mountain doctor who
preached Sunday sermons and planned a massacre on a mountain road. Two men who wore badges. Two
communities that trusted them. Two moments when the authority collapsed and the man underneath it was
exposed. This is the story of Henry Newton Brown and Marshall Benton "Doc" Taylor — and the people they
killed.
The Victims
**E.W. Wylie Payne** was the president of the Medicine Valley Bank in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. He was a
Missouri-born businessman, married to Susan, and the father of nine children. He was shot during a robbery on
April 30, 1884, and died the following day — May 1, 1884. **George Geppert**, the bank's chief cashier, was
shot twice during the same robbery. Dying, he sealed the bank vault with his own hands. The robbers escaped
with nothing because of what Geppert did in his final moments.
**Louranza Mullins** was thirty-five years old on May 14, 1892, traveling through Pound Gap on the Virginia-Ken-
tucky border with her husband **Ira Mullins**, **Wilson Mullins**, **John Chappel**, and **Greenberry Harris**.
All five were killed in a planned ambush at a place now called Killing Rock. Two survived: fourteen-year-old **John
Harrison Mullins**, whose left arm was shattered, and **Amoda Jane Mullins**, Ira's sister, who was carrying an
infant and identified the killers by their voices.
The Crimes
**Case A — The Medicine Lodge Bank Robbery (Kansas, 1884):** Henry Newton Brown was city marshal of
Caldwell, Kansas — a man so trusted that citizens presented him a gold-engraved Winchester rifle in January
1883. What no one in Caldwell knew was that Brown was wanted for murder in New Mexico Territory. He had
ridden with Billy the Kid's Regulators and participated in the ambush that killed Lincoln County Sheriff William
Brady in April 1878. On April 30, 1884, five weeks after marrying Alice Maude Levagood, Brown led his deputy Ben
Wheeler (real name: William Sherod Robinson, also a fugitive) and two accomplices to rob the Medicine Valley
Bank. The robbery failed. Cowboys sheltering from a thunderstorm in a nearby livery stable gave chase. The gang
was trapped in a flooded box canyon within three miles. Brown was shot and killed by a mob that night. Wheeler,
Smith, and Wesley were hanged from an elm tree.
**Case B — The Killing Rock Massacre at Pound Gap (Virginia, 1892):** Marshall Benton "Doc" Taylor was a
physician, Baptist preacher, and former federal revenue officer in the Appalachian coalfields of Wise County,
Virginia. In 1889, Taylor led a posse that intercepted a Mullins whiskey wagon on the main street of Wise
Courthouse — approximately 250 shots were exchanged. The wagon driver was killed, Ira Mullins was shot
through both hips and crippled for life, and several others were wounded. Taylor lost his federal appointment.
Three years later, on May 14, 1892, Taylor and brothers Henan and Calvin Fleming ambushed the Mullins party at
Pound Gap, killing five people from behind a breastwork of sandstone and rhododendron.
The Investigation
Taylor fled and was dubbed the Red Fox of the Mountains by the press. Railroad detectives captured him on
August 18, 1892, in an empty freight car at Bluefield, West Virginia. His trial was moved 275 miles to Lynchburg for
security. A ballistics question emerged — rim-fire shells at the scene did not match Taylor's modified center-fire
Winchester — but the jury deliberated two hours and convicted him on five counts of first-degree murder, largely
on the eyewitness identification of Jane Mullins.
Brown's case never reached trial. The mob killed him and his accomplices the night of the failed robbery, after
bank president Wylie Payne died of his wounds. A coroner's jury reported the deaths were at the hands of "a
mob, composed of persons unknown."
Historical Context
Both cases reveal the thin line between law and lawlessness on the American frontier. Brown carried active murder
warrants while serving as one of the most effective marshals in Kansas. Taylor combined medicine, ministry,
and federal authority in a single person — and used all three to position himself for premeditated murder. The
gold-engraved Winchester that Caldwell gave to Brown now sits in the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka
(collection item 209981). The Red Fox Trail runs 1.5 miles through the George Washington and Jefferson National
Forests past the sandstone outcropping called Killing Rock. Every May, descendants of both the Taylor and
Mullins families return there together.

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

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

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

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes. Two fires burned in 1898
America. One in South Carolina, where a mob murdered a Black postmaster and his two-year-old daughter. One
in Indian Territory, where a mob burned two Seminole teenagers alive. Both cases reached federal court. Neither
delivered justice.
Frazier Baker held a federal appointment. Lincoln McGeisey and Palmer Sampson were teenagers with no
connection to the crime they died for. The federal government proved it could indict in both cases. What it could
not do -- or chose not to do -- was convict. This is the story of 1898, when America showed exactly what it was
willing to tolerate.
The Victims
Frazier Baker was born around 1857 in Effingham, Florence County, South Carolina. He became a schoolteacher,
then a postmaster. On July 30, 1897, the McKinley administration appointed him the first Black postmaster of
Lake City, Williamsburg County. He and his wife Lavinia had six children: Rosa, Cora, Lincoln, Sarah, Millie, and the
youngest, Julia, who was two years old in the winter of 1898. Baker refused to abandon his federal post despite
threats, a shooting, an arson, and a boycott. He stayed.
Lincoln McGeisey was fifteen or sixteen years old. His father, Thomas McGeisey, was the superintendent of the
Seminole Nation's public schools and was in Washington, D.C., negotiating on behalf of his people when the mob
took his son. Lincoln had four siblings -- Martha, Nora, William, and James -- and had never been in trouble. Palmer
Sampson was also a teenager, the son of Sukey Natuksie and Sampson Walker. Congress formally exonerated
both young men within six months of their deaths, declaring them innocent before a single defendant stood trial.
The Crimes
On February 22, 1898, at approximately 1:00 in the morning, a mob surrounded Frazier Baker's home in Lake City,
South Carolina -- which also served as the post office. They set fire to the building and fired approximately one
hundred bullets into the structure while the Baker family was inside. Frazier Baker was killed. Two-year-old Julia
Baker died from a bullet that passed through her mother Lavinia's forearm. Three more Baker children survived
with gunshot wounds.
On January 8, 1898, shortly after 2:00 in the morning, Lincoln McGeisey and Palmer Sampson were chained to
trees at the Maud tabernacle in Indian Territory. A minister named Andrew J. Mathis prayed over them, then set
fire to the dry brush heaped around them. A crowd numbering in the hundreds watched. Three white Protestant
ministers were documented as present. Neither teenager had been formally charged, brought before any legal
authority, or connected by evidence to the murder of Mary Leard, the crime the mob claimed to be avenging.
The Investigation
In March 1898, journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett organized a delegation to the White
House, meeting President McKinley. She was the sole woman in a group that included eight Illinois congressmen.
She demanded federal action and a federal anti-lynching law.
In the Baker case, thirteen men were indicted on twenty-four criminal counts in April 1899. Joseph P. Newham
testified under immunity, admitting in open court that he personally started the fire. An all-white jury in
Charleston, South Carolina, acquitted three defendants outright and deadlocked on the remaining eight. The
judge declared a mistrial. No one was ever convicted for the murder of Frazier Baker or Julia Baker.
In the Seminole burning case, more than fifty people were indicted. Fifty-four were tried. The prosecution
succeeded in convicting six individuals, including Nelson M. Jones, a former Deputy U.S. Marshal whose federal
status made the prosecution legally viable, and Andrew J. Mathis, the minister who set the fire. It was the first
successful prosecution of lynchers in the American Southwest. When convicted mob member Mont Ballard
returned to Maud after serving seven years, the town threw him a celebration.
Historical Context
1898 was a year of organized racial terror across America. The Wilmington Massacre rewrote the political map
of North Carolina. The Curtis Act dissolved Seminole tribal government. Federal prosecutors proved the system
could work -- and then the system refused to deliver results. The United States did not pass a federal anti-lynching
law until March 29, 2022, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into law -- one hundred and
twenty-four years after Frazier Baker and Julia Baker were killed. Ida B. Wells-Barnett demanded that law in 1898.
She died in 1931 without seeing it. Lavinia Baker moved her family to Boston, later returned to South Carolina,
and died in 1947. The Lake City post office was renamed in honor of Frazier B. Baker on February 22, 2019. There
is no major public memorial to Lincoln McGeisey or Palmer Sampson.

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

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

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

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes. This is Episode 13, covering
Rhode Island and North Dakota with two true crime cases from the 1880s and 1890s that circle the same
question: who do you believe when the dead cannot speak?
October 1885. A wealthy Black businessman in Newport, Rhode Island, is found dead at his kitchen table -- two
gunshot wounds, unchewed bread still in his mouth. The city calls it suicide before the day is over. Eight years
later, a hired hand in North Dakota murders six members of the family that trusted him, and a fifteen-year-old
girl walks barefoot to town to report it.
Both killers were inside the circle. Both were trusted. Both destroyed the people who let them in. This episode
examines what trust costs in a country still deciding which lives deserve investigation and which can be dismissed
with a shrug from the mayor's office.
The Victims
Benjamin J. Burton was the wealthiest Black businessman in Rhode Island when he was killed in October 1885.
He had arrived in Newport around 1845 from Connecticut and spent four decades building a baggage transfer
empire -- the Original Express and the Bellevue Avenue Express Line -- moving trunks between the wharves
and the Gilded Age mansions. Burton was a civil rights organizer who helped desegregate Rhode Island's public
schools in 1866, working alongside Isaac Rice and George T. Downing. He was fifty-nine years old. He had been
eating breakfast when he was shot.
Daniel and Barbara Kreider were a Mennonite farming family who had relocated from Lancaster County, Penn-
sylvania, to a homestead southeast of Cando, North Dakota. Daniel was born in 1856; Barbara came from one
of Lancaster County's most established Mennonite families -- the Rissers, whose meeting house had been in
continuous operation since the 1700s. By summer 1893, they had eight children. Four of those children -- Bernice,
thirteen; Murbey, eleven; Mary, nine; and David, seven -- were killed alongside their parents on the morning of
July 7, 1893.
The Crimes
In Newport, Burton's son-in-law Allen Dorsey -- a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, one year from
finishing his degree -- shot Burton at 63 Levin Street on October 6, 1885. The wound sequence was medically
damning: a shot to the head first, a shot to the heart second. No powder burns. Unchewed bread in the victim's
mouth. The city ruled it suicide anyway. The coroner signed off. The mayor ridiculed the idea of murder.
In North Dakota, Albert Bomberger -- a twenty-two-year-old hired hand who had lived with the Kreider family for
five years -- killed six family members with a shotgun in thirty minutes after the eldest daughter, Annie, rejected
his advances and her father told him to leave. After the killings, Bomberger forced fifteen-year-old Annie to cook
his breakfast while the bodies lay in the rooms around her. He ate, ransacked the house, beat Annie with a rope,
and fled toward Canada on a stolen pony.
The Investigation
In the Burton case, Newport's official investigation went nowhere. The community Burton had spent forty years
building ran a parallel investigation through church and civic networks. Seven weeks later, Burton's younger
daughter Emmie came forward and named Allen Dorsey as the killer and Maria Dorsey as complicit. Her testimony
made prosecution possible. The trial began in late June 1886. Allen and Maria Dorsey were convicted and
sentenced to life. Emmie was also convicted -- she had served as lookout -- and died of consumption in the prison
infirmary within six months. In June 1887, the Burton case was presented to the American Medical Association
at their 38th Annual Meeting as an example of physical evidence clearly indicating murder that official authority
chose to read otherwise.
Annie Kreider walked to Cando barefoot. No shoes, no horse, no telephone. Her testimony was the entire
foundation of the prosecution. Bomberger was captured at Deloraine, Manitoba, three days later. The threat of
lynching was immediate -- the Grand Forks County sheriff moved Bomberger to a more secure jail. On November
21, 1893, Bomberger was arraigned. Two days later, he was sentenced to death. The entire court proceeding
lasted fifteen minutes. He was hanged on January 19, 1894 -- the first legal execution in North Dakota history.
Historical Context
These two historical murder cases sit at the edges of American justice in the Gilded Age. In Rhode Island, the
system initially failed a Black man whose physical evidence was dismissed by the same city he had served for
decades. In North Dakota, a state just four years old produced a fifteen-minute guilty plea and a death sentence
in two days -- justice delivered under the shadow of a lynch mob. Allen Dorsey was pardoned in 1912, moved to
New York City, worked as a waiter, and died in 1918. Annie Kreider lived until 1960, carrying that July morning for
sixty-seven years.

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

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

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