No. 778
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
November 04, 2024
A New Child Abandonment Trick.
How a soman slipped out and left a kid on a photographer's hands.
November 4, 2024
alias: ADAMS, DAVIS, KID AFFLECK
THIEF, CONFIDENCE MAN
In 1956, author Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975) described the eerie phenomena she and her husband experienced after they moved into a seemingly innocuous little home, only to realize they were really renting a hefty dose of The Weird:When the owner showed me the little cottage on a hill in Mill Valley, California, nearly forty years ago, she made a strange remark. We were on the sun porch,
More...
Strange Company - 3/23/2026
"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
More...
Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
Stores come and go; office buildings gain and lose tenants. But the grief really hits when a shuttered movie theater remains empty, stripped of posters, concession signs, even the theater’s name. This is what remains of the Beekman Theater at 1271 Second Avenue, between 65th and 66th Streets. It showed its last film before abruptly […]
More...
Ephemeral New York - 3/23/2026
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
More...
Executed Today - 11/13/2020
Maggie Crowley(New York American, March 16, 1898)Robert Hoey, coming home from work in the early hours of
March 15, 1898, literally tripped over the body of a dead woman in the
courtyard of his New York City tenement. The woman had been strangled to death
and dragged to the courtyard known in the neighborhood as “Hogan’s Alley.” Four
days later, she was identified as Maggie Crowley, a young woman
More...
Murder By Gaslight - 3/21/2026
The good-looking thirty-seven year old gentleman handling the reins behind the glossy matched pair pulling the spanking-new carriage drew the attention of more than one feminine eye. Pacing down French St. at a sharp clip, the lady next to him, dressed neatly in a tailor-made suit with the latest in millinery fashion, smiled up at her coachman. Behind the lace curtains on the Hill section of Fall River, tongues were wagging about the unseemly pair. Lizzie Borden, acquitted of double homici
More...
Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 10/16/2025
[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 […]
More...
Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
A lady called at a photograph gallery in Columbus, 0., the other day, with a baby whose photograph she desired taken. The necessary arrangements were made, the little cherub was propped up in a chair in the best possible position, and the artist was proceeding to adjust his camera, when the mother excused herself for a moment. The moment grew to minutes, and the minutes to hours. In short, the mother did not come back, and the artist finds himself with a ready-made baby on his hands, whose name and origin are unknown to him.The Bloody Century 2
Takes the reader back to 19th-century America in all its gory glory.
