No. 150
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
May 21, 2013

xDropping Their Disguise.

May 21, 2013
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Tag: Deception

Thimble Rig A La Mode.

3/18/2014

Nature versus Art.

2/18/2014

It Was Another Kind of Cat.

2/21/2012

The Female Marine

12/27/2011
"Indian Citizen," November 12. 1914, via Newspapers.comA frightening and inexplicable tragedy hit the normally peaceful town of Durant, Oklahoma in 1914.  According to Jake and Celia Amsel, a well-to-do, respectable couple, at about one-thirty a.m. on the night of November 11, they were awakened by screams emanating from their home’s outdoor sleeping porch.  They were horrified to
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Strange Company - 6/8/2026
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
You can see it peeking out from the Harlem River Drive or through the chain-link fence of the Third Avenue Bridge: a five-story red brick building almost buried behind glass and steel apartment towers. The towers are newish luxury rental residences built on the Bronx side of the Harlem River. Shiny and modern, they bring […]
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Ephemeral New York - 6/8/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
In 1830, Joseph Knapp conspired with his brother, John Francis Knapp, to hire a local criminal, Richard Crowninshield, to murder their great uncle, Captain Joseph White, in Salem, Massachusetts. They believed that if the captain died without a will, they stood to inherit a sizable fortune.Read the full story here: "A Most Extraordinary Case"
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Murder By Gaslight - 6/6/2026
As Mr. Moody for the Prosecution dramatically expounds on hatchets and grisly details, and a glimpse of two skulls in a leather case, Lizzie slumps over in her chair. Was it the heat or the ghastly descriptions?
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 6/7/2026
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
| A Female Card Sharp.

xDropping Their Disguise.

Dropping Their Disguise How a loving bridal couple were suddenly transformed into a brace of absconding counterfeiters after crossing the border between the United States and Canada, on the A. & G. W. R. R. [more]

“We’re in Canada now, Mike; I’m going to take of these togs."

This was the remark made by an apparently youthful bride to her companion, a well dressed young bridegroom on his wedding tour.

They were seated in one of the parlor cars on the Atlantic and Great Western railroad, and the train had just passed the boundary line that separates the land where the stars and stripes float supreme an the territory where flaps the crimson ensign of England.

The pair had attracted much attention all the way from Lockport, being very loving and billing and cooing like turtle doves. The rather peculiar expression alluded to above attracted still more attention, and the passengers were somewhat surprised to see the blushing bride disrobe herself, take of a jaunty hat and blonde wig and disclose an underdress of male clothing. Her companion also divested himself of a mustache and a wig. The metamorphosis showed up the travelers in their true light. . They were two counterfeiters escaping from the land of the brave and the home of the free, where things had got too hot for them.


Reprinted from The National Police Gazette, November 19, 1883.