Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles

Lee Enterprises Podcasts

Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, a product of Lee Enterprises, is a collection of limited anthology style episodes exploring true stories as told by journalists from regional newspapers around America.

  1. 02/05/2024

    The Orangeburg Massacre: A peaceful protest met with violence, who was held responsible and how the victims are remembered

    In 1968, a peaceful civil rights protest turned deadly in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Known as the Orangeburg Massacre, it became known as one of the most violent events of the civil rights movement, but details aren't widely known. Host Nat Cardona is again joined by subject matter expert Dr. William Heine to discuss how peaceful protestors were met with violence, what happened to the victims, and who was- or wasn't- held responsible for the bloodshed. The two also discuss how the victims are remembered today. Listen to Episode 1 of the Orangeburg Massacre Read more here and here and here. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. I'm your host Nat Cardona. In the last episode, we discuss the climate leading into the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre in Orangeburg, South Carolina. If you haven't listened to that episode, please go back and listen. There's a link in the show notes to help make it easier for you to find. In this week's episode, I'm again joined by Dr. William Heine. He's a former history professor at South Carolina State University. We discuss in detail how the peaceful protest by students was met with violence from law enforcement. We also go into who was or wasn't held responsible for the deaths of three students and the wounding of more than 20 others. And with that, let's get to it. So you have this pressure cooker of tensions for the handful of years nights before the actual event happens. What's the tipping point? What's the the other shoe that drops to turn from. You know, a lot of tension to violence. What were the what was the thing that happened that night? That's that's that's it. There was nothing. I mean, they were they're they're fronted each other and went back and forth or time. As I mentioned, there was a bonfire that was was put out. People continued to throw things at one point and officer of the highway patrol, a man named Shelly, got it. Looked like he'd been shot almost literally between the eyes. He went down at least semi-conscious for a period of time, bleeding profusely, and it appeared as if he had been been shot from the direction of the students. As it turned out, he had not been shot. He'd been hit with a heavy piece of timber. It had opened a wound on his forehead. They took him off after the hospital and at least another 10 minutes or more elapsed after Shelly was hit with the with the timber. A lot of people were at the time and sense under the mistaken impression, well surely got hit and then the highway patrolman opened fire. It didn't happen. It did not happen that way. They opened fire with no announcement that they were going to fire. Nobody said lock and load or know you have one minute or and 80 seconds to retreat or we're going to open fire. It wasn't announced. They just simply started shooting. Not all the highway patrolman shot. There were 66 of them aligned along the embankment and kind of curled around at right angles toward an unoccupied house next next door to the campus there. Some opened fire, some did not. Most of the students were hit in the back as they turned to run from the shotgun blast and more than 30 were were hit and three were killed and at least 28 were injured, some superficially, some very seriously. Note that there was no ready, aim, fire. It was just a spontaneous opening of a fire. The later it was, it was determined that apparently one of the highway patrol officers had fired a warning shot into the air with his sidearm and others not realizing that opened fire. You're hearing a a weapon go off. That's been about the best determination of how the highway patrolman came to open fire that night, roughly 10:30, 10:45 on February eight. Okay. So you have a bunch of these young people wounded. Three young men ultimately are massacred or killed. Can you talk a little bit about those three young men, if you don't mind? Well, two of them were college students. One was a high school student and they were there as much out of curiosity as a determination that they're going to be involved in protests. Henry Smith was probably the most active of the students. He wanted to be there. He did consider himself an activist. He was upset with conditions in the community and on the campus. And there's no question of his involvement, his determination to be a part of this. And the other college student was a freshman football player named Samuel Hammond from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was there are of interest and curiosity. He was there with several other football players and athletes as well. He was shot and died shortly after that. Then there was Delano Middleton, who was the high school student. His mother worked on the campus and he kind of came up to see what was happening on the front of the campus. And he was ahead and fatally injured as well that night. He was he was local. He was from the Orangeburg area and Smith was from Marion, now probably 100 miles. He came from a poor family over there. And as I mentioned, Samuel Hammond was an athlete from Fort Lauderdale, although his parents, his father was from are down the road from Orangeburg and Bamberg, South Carolina. And so but they had connections and roots to the local area as well. Okay. Unfortunately, they're killed and other people are wounded. And then what? Like what is the what does that rest of the night like what happens pretty much immediately after? Well, it was chaos initially on the campus. I mean, there was fear, one, that this was just a prelude to an invasion by law enforcement that were going to head head on and through the campus and maybe continue shooting or occupy the campus. No one knew what was going on. There was a absence of communication of any time. They were taking wounded students out the back side of the campus and going to the to the hospital by a back route. The college infirmary was filled with bleeding students of was great fear, anger, trepidation about what? What, what, what's next. I hear and it took a number of hours for this to settle down in the meantime, that the accounts that were out through the media were, well, incomplete and false as it turned out as well. Associated Press tape sent out an account that there had been an exchange of gunfire on the campus with students shooting at highway patrolman and patrolman shooting back. And that was absolutely incorrect. And it was it was never a corrected by AP either. So the headlines, such as they were that appeared the next day, was that there had been an exchange of gunfire and the governor and the local authorities were pretty well convinced that they'd saved Orangeburg from some kind of massive black nationalist uprising. And as regrettable as it was that students got shot, that this was necessary to protect the community, protect the lives and property of people in Orangeburg. And the governor maintained that and continued to maintain that as the days and weeks and then months and even years went by. After that, he was convinced that he'd acted properly and that he had helped to preserve the security and preserve what threatened to become a much worse situation from exploding into that. And that is, to a large extent our the conventional story that was heard in the aftermath of the massacre, except for the black press that did cover the black newspapers at the time, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier and our Defender, Jet magazine. I mean, they covered it, But as far as most people in the black community were concerned, that was just cold blooded murder by armed highway patrolman, all white who shot into a crowd of black young men protesting on their own campus unarmed at the time. So there are two versions that prevailed for many days, weeks and months, even years to the present day about what actually happened that night in 1968. Sure. We needed to take a quick break, so don't go too far. Just so listeners understand, there were out of the 70 or so patrolmen, nine were charged with shooting at protesters, but ultimately none were convicted of anything, totally just wiped clean. No one held accountable for the murders or the shootings. Anything, correct? That is correct. The U.S. Department of Justice tried to indict the nine highway patrolman who did admit shooting into the crowd of students. A federal grand jury in Columbia in the fall of 1968 refused to indict them on felony charges and the Department of Justice and ended them on misdemeanor charges, criminal information. And they went on trial the following spring of 1969 in federal court in Florence, South Carolina. And a jury of ten white people and two black people found them not guilty and that they felt their lives were in danger and therefore they were justified in shooting into this crowd of students, even if the students weren't armed with weapons. And so the nine Howard patrolmen were indeed acquitted. And then a year after that, Cleveland Sellers was brought to the bar of justice in Orangeburg, and he was charged with an assortment of charges, including inciting a riot. There. As it turned out, most of the charges were abandoned and he was finally convicted, not for what happened on the night of February, but on the night of February six at the bowling alley of inciting the crowd down there. And he was sentenced to a year in state prison in the Bradford River Federal Byrd River State Correctional Institution. He served nine months. He was released early on our good behavior. So he's the only one who was penalized for the events surrounding the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968. And I should point out that he was one of the people shot and wounded that night as while he was hit in the upper arm by a shotgun pellets there. So he had to face the indignity of going to jail and being shot as well. I'm really, really hoping to still

    27 min
  2. How The Monkees ended up with an FBI file

    01/08/2024

    How The Monkees ended up with an FBI file

    Marvin Gaye. Jimi Hendrix. The Beatles. John Denver. The Monkees. All successful musical acts… with FBI files. In this week’s episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, the Tulsa World’s Randy Krehbil joins show producer/editor Ambre Moton to take a look at how the city of Tulsa was central to The Monkees hitting the FBI’s radar as persons of interest. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Boy bands are pretty popular nowadays, and most people probably credit the Beatles for the creation of the phenomenon. But some people remember the Monkees, a group often referred to as the Pre-Fab Four, a U.S. pop band that was created in 1968 for a television show of the same name that originally aired for two seasons and then went on to become a legitimate pop band in its own right. Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises Podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the show's producer and editor. Back with another story that you may not think of as a traditional true crime case. Okay. The band, it consisted of Micky Dolanz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The show played well to both fans and critics and performed well in its original run and through syndication and Saturday morning repeats. The show is a scripted comedy, all about the four bandmates struggling to make it in the music business. And of course, the hijinks that ensued while a manufactured band. The music really did catch on, and they eventually toured to sold out crowds on a cool OC. But how did the creators of Daydream Believer and I'm a Believer, a song brought back into the lexicon by the band Smash Mouth for the Shrek soundtrack, Lend themselves the subject of a true crime podcast? Well, would you be surprised to learn that the Monkees were the subject of an FBI investigation? The group's final surviving member, Micky Dolenz, sued the FBI in 2022 to obtain any files on him. The band and his bandmates, after submitting a Freedom of Information Act request in June of that year and failing to receive anything more than an automated response within the 20 days that federal agencies are obligated to respond. Randy Krehbiel, you may remember from the series of episodes we did with the Tulsa World about the Osages during the Reign of Terror, joins me in this episode to explain how the pop band came to the attention of the FBI. And of course, the tie to Tulsa. Randy, it is great to have you back on the podcast, so thank you so much for doing this. It's with you! You wrote an article about The Monkees, the band, and a tie to the FBI. But let's kind of start a little bit with who the Monkees were. I remember them... when I was little, I think around when I was four, MTV was airing reruns of their TV show, which was a sitcom, if I remember correctly, and I absolutely adored it. Can you just kind of talk about the history of The Monkees? Sure. So I was kind of the Monkees target audience when they came out. But in the 1960s, when they you know, we had the British invasion then and sort of pop music and rock music was really exploding onto the scene. Some TV producers got the idea of creating a band and making a television series about the band. And initially the band was not going to be performing their own music. I think the idea was they actually would do the singing but not play the instruments. And the show turned out to be like a lot of music in that era that the band became rapidly popular and almost as rapidly faded from the scene. But at any rate, they they became proficient enough, I guess you would say. Basically, they just insisted that they were going to be the band, that they didn't need all these other people. So they went out on tour. They had at least a couple of them and well, actually they had more than that, I think. But they went out on tour and they were quite successful. Like I found that they they sold something like 75 million records in about a two or three year span. So like they were pretty much a big deal. They because it was put together by these TV producers, they hired some some of the big, big name songwriters in the Brill Building in New York, which was, you know, the place where a lot of the fifties and sixties and on into the seventies. Big hits were written in the Brill Building in New York. And so so they had and they had some very big hits. And so they and they and then you mentioned MTV. They had kind of a second life when MTV came out because they started playing those shows in reruns and they became popular again. And at least some of them started touring again. And then I guess it was in the eighties and even there's one of them still alive, Micky Dolenz And he still does some shows at 78. Where didn't the show actually win an Emmy, I think. Yeah, I think one year the show won an Emmy for best comedy series. It beat out like Andy Griffith and some shows like that. So, I mean, it was legitimately entertaining, it sounds like, and critically acclaimed. So it was different because they as I recall, they they would come out and there were sort of plots, but it was almost kind of an absurdist comedy in that they were kind of goofy and they were just a lot of little series of scenes. And some people have drawn a line from that show to music videos in the you know, in the MTV area, because the you know, it was set up to kind of sell this and sell the music. And and it all revolved around the music. I mean, the the plot such as they were were pretty simple and silly and really silly, I should say. Right, Right. Okay. So let's set up the crime in air quotes here. So the Monkees were in Tulsa. You said they were touring. They were in Tulsa in 1967 to play a concert. Can you kind of set the scene with that? Yeah, they came. It was actually on January the second, 1967. They played at what was then called the Convention Center Arena. It was a downtown venue that had not been open very long at that time. It would hold about 8500 people for a concert like this, and they sold out. It was mainly like young teens. I think you know, probably 11 or 12 to 16, 17, something like that. And their parents said mom would get roped into, bring in, you know, five or six kids from the neighborhood or whatever. And, you know, we know there was no big controversy, I don't think, at the time, except this entertainment writer editor from the Tulsa Tribune, which was an afternoon paper here at the time. And he just he didn't like it. And and one of the criticisms in general of the Monkees was that it was a it was a back then. Some people call them the pre-fab four because they they you know, they were created specifically for television. It wasn't a group of guys who just kind of came together and started making music together. They were they were created and some people didn't like that. And and and their music was not intended to be, for the most part, real, you know, deep and social meaning or anything like that. And so anyway, he didn't like it. He and he wrote a letter to the FBI. Well, it's not clear to me in the in the report is not clear whether he wrote directly to the FBI. You know, apparently he maybe sent this to the television production or the television studio complaining that they were projecting subliminal messages onto a screen behind them during one of the songs, which is one of the things if you weren't around in the sixties, there was all kinds of stuff like that in the sixties and early seventies. You know, if you play Beatles records backwards, they had some kind of acid or, you know, there was that big set, a lot of a lot of radio stations and so forth would be played. Louie, Louie by the Kingsmen, because no one could understand the lyrics, but they were pretty sure they were bad, so they didn't understand. It was just a very poor recording. But so he anyway, he complained to the FBI. I don't know that the FBI really took it that seriously because as I wrote in the story, they had the guy, the guy who complained his name was Bill Donaldson. So they had his name wrong in their report. They had his newspaper wrong and their report and they had the date of the concert wrong and their report. But what happened was they said someone. A few months later, I compiled all of that into a bigger report is like 80 pages long on the influence of communism and subversive groups on Hollywood. And so that that was included in there. And, you know, I don't think anything came out of it. But if I could, I mean, I this is all kind of fun. But on the other hand, it does make people kind of stop and think it should make people kind of stop and think about, well, what does it take to get, you know, to have an FBI file? Apparently not very much writing. What was the political climate like back then? Yeah, it was it was very it was very is a lot of turmoil. And so what? And in this particular case, what they had done, they had a song that did try and it was called I Want to Be Free. We did try and have a little bit of a social message and they were showing that there is nothing subliminal about this. They were showing images of riots and the war in Vietnam and peace marches. And I think they had something on the maybe Well, I think there were scenes from the Selma, Alabama, march which would have actually taken place, you know, several years earlier. But at any rate, was still very much in the news. And so so it was it really subliminal? It was stuff they'd see on on the news every day. But but the bigger picture was that, yes, there was a lot of turmoil. There's a lot of opposition to the war in Vietnam. There was you know, it was the sixties. It was approaching a protest era. There were quite a few violent demonstrations and there was a lot of concern about the communists taking over. So a lot of a lot of this file was there was a radio station in Los Angeles th

    23 min
  3. Update on the Susan Negersmith case

    12/19/2023

    Update on the Susan Negersmith case

    Welcome back to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises podcast with host Nat Cardona. On this podcast, you’ll hear true crime stories as told by journalists from regional newspapers across the country. This week's episode is an update on a cold case that was featured in May, the murder of Susan Negersmith in Wildwood, New Jersey Memorial Day weekend in 1990. Get caught up on those episodes here: Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 Read more about the case Cape May County judge dismisses charges against man accused in Negersmith cold case (April 20, 2023) Man charged in Wildwood cold case released following case dismissal (March 30, 2023) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    3 min
  4. The impact of the double murders on Richmond and Cloverleaf Mall

    12/12/2023

    The impact of the double murders on Richmond and Cloverleaf Mall

    In November of 1996, Cloverleaf Mall in Richmond, Virginia was the site of the still-unsolved double murder of Cheryl Edwards and Charlita Singleton, two mall employees found stabbed to death in the back office of the dollar store where they worked. In 2004, investigators briefly thought they'd uncovered new leads... that don't appear to have resulted in progress on the case. In the latest episode of Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, host Nat Cardona speaks with Scott Bass of the Richmond Times-Dispatch who extensively covered the mall's fallout from the double homicide and the impact it had on the surrounding community. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Hello and welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. I'm your host, Nat Cardona, and I'm happy to be back after a little bit of a hiatus. The last time you listened, I introduced you to the unsolved case of the Cloverleaf Mall stabbings in Richmond, Virginia. This week, I'm talking with Richmond Times Dispatch opinion editor Scott Bass, who extensively covered the mall's fallout from the double homicide and the impact it had on the surrounding community. Tell me a little bit about yourself, your career now and when you first laid your hands on this topic and coverage and what you were doing then, because I know it's like 15 plus years ago, right? As far as what you were. It was a long time. Right. I'm the Opinion Page editor at the Times Dispatch in Richmond. I've only been here for about a year. In essence, I've been a journalist in the Richmond area for almost 30 years now. Almost 30 years. So I've just kind of jumped around from place to place. I worked in magazine journalism for probably the bulk of my career. Richmond Magazine There was a publication here as an alternative weekly called Style Weekly, where I worked for about ten years. Prior to that, I worked at the Small Daily out in Petersburg, Virginia, the Progress-Index, for about two years. And then, oddly enough, I started my career as a business reporter for a monthly that a weekly business journal called Inside Business. And when the homicides took place in 96, I was I had just kind of started my career as a business journalist. Wasn't very good. Still learning. So most of my focus was kind of on the development side of things. In this particular mall was Richmond's first. The Richmond area's first sort of regional shopping destination was a reasonable shot. We didn't have anything like it, and it kind of replaced in the Richmond area, you know, in most a lot of cities where, you know, the main shopping district was downtown in Richmond, it was Broad Street. And Broad Street had the military roads. It had a big, tall Hammer's big, beautiful department stores. It's where everyone kind of collected during the holidays. It was the primary sort of retail shopping district. And then somewhere around, starting in the mid fifties, early sixties, shopping malls started to replace downtown retail districts as whites that not white flight, but as sort of the great suburban explosion took place after World War Two. Everyone moved out of urban areas into suburban the suburbs, and the retail sort of followed back. And this was Cloverleaf Mall was our first sort of big regional shopping destination that was outside of East Broad Street, downtown. And sort of a big deal. Yeah, we were a little late. Like Richmond was always kind of wait things. So, you know, this opened and the first mall Cloverleaf opened in 1972. But right about this time, within three or four years, several malls had been kind of built, were built right after Regency or excuse me, right after Cloverleaf Mall was built in 72, the Regency Mall, which was a bigger, much nicer facility. It was two stories that was built in 74 five. And then, oddly enough, Cloverleaf, which is located south of Richmond and Chesterfield County, which is sort of the biggest jurisdiction in our metro region, opened a second mall much further down the road, about three miles down the road from Cloverleaf, where there was nothing. It was a real tiny shopping strip with one anchor, and it did no business for several years. They used to call it the Chesterfield morgue. But it's interesting because just as an aside, you mall development really took off in the fifties after Congress kind of passed this as a law, basically making it, allowing developers to depreciate real estate development really, really quickly. And that was in 54. And that just jumpstarted mall development. And all of a sudden there was an explosion. Malls were built literally all over the country because it was very easy for developers to build a mall and get their money back paid off within a few years independent of how the mall actually was doing. From a retail perspective. So it just led to a proliferation of malls. And that's kind of what happened at Cloverleaf Club, which was the first. But there were several others that had built up not far away. And slowly but surely it was eagerness. It started E Cloverleaf to launch. This cloverleaf was sort of on the edge of Richmond or just across the border, and that's in Chesterfield from Richmond. And there's an interesting racial history, too, obviously, in Virginia we have independent cities, which means that our cities are actually they have separate governments from the counties next to them. Whereas if you go and everywhere else in the country, cities are tended to be centers of commerce that are part of another jurisdiction. In Virginia, we have independent cities, which means they have no connection whatsoever to the municipalities around them, which meant that in order for the city to grow, it had to annex the surrounding jurisdictions and its property residents. And this had been going on in Virginia. And, you know, the first part of the 20th century, the last one of the last big annexations and I think it might have been the last one was the city of Richmond, annexing about 23 square miles of Chesterfield County in 1970. Chesterfield County is just south of the city, sort of south and east. And they basically absorbed 23 square miles in about 40,000, 47,000 or so residents understanding that there was a racial backdrop here because this came a few years after desegregation and Richmond was sort of ground zero in massive resistance to segregation of integration in schools. And once that happened in the sixties, there was a white flight, a lot of white flight out of Richmond. People just white folks just left and they moved into Chesterfield and Henrico and some of the surrounding jurisdictions. The sort of last gasp for Richmond to sort of maintain some of its tax base occur in 1970 with the annexation. But it was also an attempt to sort of bolster the white political structure because most of the residents that they absorb were white. They were beginning to lose their political power. And that was a primary motivator for the annexation. The mall was built by Chesterfield Camp in Chesterfield County is kind of a big F-you to the city of Richmond. Like, okay, you can you took our land, you took our residents and we're going to build this big fancy mall and we're going to suck all the retail dollars out of the city into Chesterfield County. That's the way a lot of people read that. So it's just she has an interesting history there. The location was just across the city border, the border with Richmond and Chesterfield. They wouldn't even allow busses to venture into Chesterfield County because the idea was to allow busses to come into the county. We're going to be allowing black folks to come here and no one wanted that because there was a lot of there was this perception that once black residents moved in to Chesterfield County, then, you know, everything was lost. This was a difficult time for the Richmond region from a racial perspective, was not a healthy, healthy time or a place. So the mall had always had sort of this slight stigma attached to it in that regard. But in the very beginning, Cloverleaf Mall was really the center of fashion for a couple of years in Richmond. Everyone coalesced there. You know, the local department stores, which had they had stores all up and down the East Coast, Tom Heimer and Miller Roads that were founded here for hire was there. Railroads came a little bit later and Richmond really was for a period of time, kind of a center of retail innovation. This was in the seventies, sixties and seventies. A lot of the big, big format, big box stores kind of came out of Richmond and Circuit City best products. Back in those days. They were the kind of first to actually do big, big box retail. So it was an interesting time and an interesting place for Richmond because we had this history of sort of retail innovation in New York on the East Coast and in the south. And the mall came along. It was a brand new concept and everyone's letter to the mall that lasted for a few years until the other malls started showing up and duplicating those efforts. And it just kind of splintered the market. The homicides came, I guess it was 96. So several years later, the mall was in decline, had been for several years as a sort of suburban development, really took off in Chesterfield further out where around that other mall that built in that direction. So the mall completely mall was in decline, had been struggling. They had struggled to keep their department stores. They would leave, they would have new ones come in. It was difficult, but during the early nineties, things really started to take a turn. Richmond at that time was becoming known as one of the murder capitals of the U.S. during the crack cocaine epidemic, and a lot of people in the surrounding jurisdictions kind of looked at Richmond as this dangerous place to be and it was drug infested. You didn't want t

    27 min
  5. Cloverleaf Mall murders remain unsolved nearly 30 years later

    11/28/2023

    Cloverleaf Mall murders remain unsolved nearly 30 years later

    The latest episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles is centered on the unsolved 1996 stabbing murders of Cheryl Edwards and Charlita Singleton at the Cloverleaf Mall in Richmond, Virginia. In this episode, host Nat Cardona gives an overview of the crimes and the location where they took place. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: If a case isn't solved within the first 72 hours, the chances of solving that crime becomes exponentially lower. The case we're going to start on today is a cold case that's remained unsolved for 27 years. I'm Nat Cardona and welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. In this episode, we take a look at the Cloverleaf Mall murders from November of 1996. And November 7th, 1996, 25 year old Cheryl Edwards and 36 year old Charlita Singleton were working at the all for one store at Cloverleaf Mark's out of Richmond, Virginia. Early the next day, Charlita's family called the police to report her missing after she failed to return home from work. The two women were found stabbed to death, their bodies discovered in the office at the rear of the store. Now some background on the mall. Cloverleaf was like so many other malls in that golden age of malls in America. It opened in August of 1972 and was the largest in Richmond, Virginia. 42 stores in over 750,000 square feet of retail space. And again, like so many other malls, and it was anchored by retailers like JCPenney and Sears. The mall was designed by local architects and featured a center court with a 20 foot pool, crystal trees and falling water. It was named Cloverleaf because of its proximity to the Cloverleaf intersection at Chippenham Parkway and Midlothian Turnpike. Cloverleaf Mall was the place to be. Teens hanging out in common areas on weekends. Movie fans taking in a show at the Multiplex theater and families having lunch. Any good suburbanites version of downtown.  Back to November of 1996. By the time the two women were working at the mall, many of Cloverleaf Best customers women with disposable income to spend at the malls. More than 20 women's clothing stores were choosing other malls for their shopping. The then mall manager, Jay LaFleur, said at the time that people were starting to see kids with huge baggy pants and jeans hanging off their belts and people were intimidated. Details about the double murder are scarce, not surprising for a decades old unsolved murder case. What we do know is that the Singleton family called the police early on November 8th to report that Charlita was missing, and both families met the first patrol officer in the mall parking lot around 5:15 a.m.. Lieutenant Robert Skowron of the Chesterfield County Police, used a key from story management to enter the back door of the All for $1 store. That door opened from the parking lot into the store's office. When reflecting about the incident, the lieutenant said he felt uneasy as he approached that locked door scar and recalled with both of their vehicles out front. He strongly suspected that foul play was involved. He opened the door and he found Cheryl Edwards and Charlita Singleton's body stabbed multiple times in the safe open, presumably with money missing. The lieutenant returned to the parking lot to tell the families in the mall was closed for the day so that law enforcement could scour the crime scene in the surrounding areas for evidence. Family members of both women were quickly cleared of suspicion. They only. We need to take a quick break, so don't go too far with you on on. Investigators believe that the killer or killers seemingly entered through the back door of the store's mall was closing or already close at the time that they approximate the murder to have happened. However, the police were never able to determine a motive. So typical victimology work the understanding that victims tend to know their murderers resulted in zero leads. Investigators dug into both women's backgrounds and weren't able to find any enemies or persons who would want to harm them- no angry spouses or partners, jealous girlfriend or any type of the usual suspects.  Now back to that empty safe was the motive robbery? If so, why viciously stabbed Singleton and Edwards to death? Could it have been a mall worker or someone who knew their schedules around $20,000 in reward money failed to yield any productive leads, although there were some promising clues at one point in time, a stolen U-Haul from Chattanooga, Tennessee, causing people to hypothesize that maybe it was an out of town robbery, though unlikely for a dollar store type of robbery. There was that in a man seen running outside of the mall around the presumed time of the murders. Police believe it was soon after the store closed around 9 p.m., but that turned out to be a dead end. So in 1997, a year after the murders, police said that they had no leads. At the time, Singleton and Edwards were killed. They left behind small kids who were forced to grow up without their mothers. Eight years after the murders and 24 lieutenants score and said the case was getting a fresh look but shared few details. The fallout from the murders is believed to have hastened the closing of the Cloverleaf Mall. Jay LaFleur said at the time that after the tragedy, the national tenants just couldn't get help. Parents wouldn't want their kids to work there. It was catastrophic. Cloverleaf Mall became the murder mall. And that's where I leave you today. Make sure you hit the subscribe and so you don't miss my interview with Scott Bass of the Times Dispatch. And don't forget to listen to our past episodes of Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises podcast. See you later.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    7 min
  6. A deeper look at the crimes committed against the Osage during the Reign of Terror | Bonus episode

    11/14/2023 ·  Bonus

    A deeper look at the crimes committed against the Osage during the Reign of Terror | Bonus episode

    The latest episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles is in partnership with the Tulsa World to introduce the story of the Osage Reign of Terror and the feature film Killers of the Flower Moon. In this bonus episode, show producer Ambre Moton is joined by two writers from the Tulsa World, Randy Krehbiel and Tim Stanley to dig a little deeper into some of the crimes committed during the Reign of Terror. More coverage Read all of the coverage of the film Killers of the Flower Moon and related stories here. All episodes from this series can be found here. Also, for more on the movie, listen to the latest episode of Streamed & Screened: Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' might be the best film you see this year. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the producer and editor of the show, filling in for Nat Cardona who is taking some well-deserved time off with the help of the reporters from the Tulsa World Crime Beat Chronicles spent the month of October telling the story of the Osage's and the reign of terror in the 1920s. Here's a bonus episode with the paper's Tim Stanley and Randy Krehbiel going into a little more detail about some of the crimes that took place. You know, one particular case that it's not mentioned in our story, but that I'm aware of and it was certainly mentioned in David Grann's book, was the the Case of William Stepson, a tribal member who died under mysterious circumstances and whose who's grandson is still alive in Osage County is a former Osage tribal court chief justice named Marvin Steps and William steps in. Apparently from from what we know. I mean, he'd gone out with some friends, came in later that night and laid down in his bed and and died. And he'd been out. I think he'd probably been drinking. This is you know, this is another way that, you know, this could have happened is, again, considering the historical context and the era of prohibition. Unregulated alcohol, bootleg whiskey, moonshine. I mean, everybody consumed this stuff. It was unregulated. Was not uncommon for someone to get, you know, a bad batch of alcohol, of moonshine and die from it. This was another way that you could potentially kill someone if you wanted to is just spike their whiskey. That may be what happened to William stepson is that he he got some bad whiskey. And, you know, his his grandson, Marvin, who who believes based on what he knows, he believes that it was strychnine, which was a poison that was very common and easy to come by and very, very effective. But it just it made no sense. Still makes no sense to Marvin that, you know, this perfectly otherwise healthy young man. His you know, his grandfather, William, just went out for a night. Everything was fine, comes home and does in bed in his sleep. Yeah. In a lot of the lists that you see, of the 24 victims, you will see William Stepson's name. I think it's been pretty commonly accepted among the people who've looked into this that we know enough in the case of William Steps and to to to declare him a victim, although again, like in other similar deaths, his was never investigated as a homicide that you know, that's you know, there's just so many so many opportunities to kill someone discretely. I don't know if it's the right word, but you don't have to shoot somebody. Fact, if you're going to shoot him, maybe, you know, it's hard to say why. You know, Henry Roane and some of the others were were killed as violently as they were, which would draw attention. You know, the fact is something was amiss that the killer was afoot unless it was to inspire terror. But so many of these other ones that were not are not necessarily connected to the two William Hale and his conspirators, maybe a marvin stepson, you know, or others. It's just hard to say. It could have been could always, always be a family member. And that's that's just one of the sad facts of this story, is is how quickly or how greed could could lead someone to kill a loved one, you know, to to get access to their to their wealth. I mean, that could be what we're talking about here with stepson and any number of others who died under suspicious circumstances like that. David Grann's book and the movie, they they each pull out the figure or the character of Mollie Burkhart and make her kind of the central figure in the story, you know. But Molly ultimately survives an attempt on her life. But that but her family was hit as hard as any. As far as we know. You know, in this in this story, she lost her wife. I'm sorry. Molly lost her a sister, potentially two sisters, and then her mother as well. And then and then did survive an attempt on her life. But one of her sisters, Anna Brown, is also sort of pivotal in the story because she is considered really to be the first victim. Now, again, it depends on where you start counting. Anna Brown was a she was clearly a homicide. Again, like Henry Rollins, she was shot in the head and found in the countryside outside of town. But she yes, she she's generally recognized as the first victim of what you know, what would become known as the reign of terror. And she was a sister to Mollie Burkhart. And they also had a sister named Rita Smith. Rita would also be killed. She was killed later, that one family. I mean, so many of the graves in in the tribal cemetery there in Gray Horse, which is where it's located in in Osage County. So many of the graves there are of family members of Molly's. And Molly's is there, too. She would die years later, not of suspicious circumstances, although undoubtedly the stress from this ordeal and she was already in poor health. Undoubtedly. I mean, you know, she it affected her and she she didn't live too much longer, too many more years after this. But, yeah, Molly's family, just a traditional Osage family. Her mother, you know, still believed very much in the old ways. Molly and her sisters were more, I guess, assimilated, so to speak. You know, they they had taken up and I. Anna Brown. Yes. She was found fatally shot May 1921. She disappeared days earlier. So she's considered really the first, although, you know, again, we could go back and probably find some suspicious deaths. With the Osage as they all when they started, they all had equal share. So any Osage was worth, you know, some some sort of money from their head. Right. Whereas with the Muskogee and the Cherokees, their mineral rights were tied to their individual allotment. So if you were if you were a member of one of those tribes that had a particularly valuable allotment, you could be targeted. And and so in some cases, you know, 19 six, 19, 1908, there were people who were disappearing. Some of them turned up alive somewhere else. Some of them were never found. There's a story about a creek boy, for instance, who went missing and they all thought he had been killed. Well, it turned out when one of his some businessmen had sent him to England to get him out of the way, they got him to sign, signed a lease on his allotment, and they sent him to England to get him out of the way. But he was still. Anyway, as far as the Osage, it really began to intensify. It seems like, you know, 19, probably around 1920. And that coincides with when the the the the height of the ban. Now, your article mentions an Osage, a young woman being kidnaped, I believe. Is that the woman you were referencing when you were talking about how she held what, eight had rights or something? Yeah, that's who I was thinking of. Yeah, this was and this was I think it was in the late twenties, but people would find a way to in this, especially white people would find a way to get power over, you know, get control of somebody. A lot had rights. In her case, there was some kind of a marriage or something set up with a with the local guy who apparently was just a front for some bigger group. And he took her off to Colorado Springs and and kept her there. And in this case, you know, lots of times the Guardians are are portrayed in an unfavorable eye. But in this case, he may have had self-interest. I don't know. But in this case, The Guardian went and found her and and got her back. Got her back to Oklahoma. And in the end, the ring was broken up. I think there were probably a lot of, you know, white people to who were not comfortable and in some cases were absolutely opposed to what was going on. But I didn't want to I don't want to make it sound like it's an equal thing. But the white people sometimes were affected by the reign of terror, too, because there were a couple of white guys tried to stand up for the hostages and they were murdered. And so it was it really was a reign of terror. It was pretty much on everybody who lived there in one way or another. And again, I want to stress, I'm not equating everybody the same, but it trickled down to a lot of different people. And as always, thanks for listening to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what's ahead.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    12 min
  7. 'Killers of the Flower Moon' and the Reign of Terror's place in pop culture

    10/31/2023

    'Killers of the Flower Moon' and the Reign of Terror's place in pop culture

    The latest episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles is in partnership with the Tulsa World to introduce the story of the Osage Reign of Terror and the feature film Killers of the Flower Moon. In this episode, show producer Ambre Moton is joined by two writers from the Tulsa World, Randy Krehbiel and Jimmie Tramel to discuss the film Killers of the Flower Moon as well as the film and the Reign of Terror's places in pop culture. More coverage Read all of the coverage of the film Killers of the Flower Moon and related stories here. All episodes from this series can be found here. Also, for more on the movie, listen to the latest episode of Streamed & Screened: Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' might be the best film you see this year. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises Podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the producer and editor of the show, filling in for Nat Cardona who's taking some well-deserved time off.  If you haven't listened to the first three episodes and our latest series about the Osage reign of terror, please go back and listen to those before starting this one. So far, we've talked about the history of the Osage tribe and how they ended up in what became the state of Oklahoma, their oil rich land, and how those rights to that land led to the horrible series of suspicious deaths. Kidnapings and the general environment of fear that made up the reign of terror. We've talked about the blue eyes, investigation and eventual conviction of those who are found guilty of the crimes. In this episode, we talk about the place in history and in pop culture that the reign of terror holds. This episode was recorded prior to the release of the film The Killers of the Flower Moon. Those age reign of terror may not have a prominent spot in the United States history curriculum, but it has established its place in popular culture with multiple books, plays, radio shows, films and more created about the events that went on during the 1920s. Most recently, the film Killers of the Flower Moon, based on a book by David Grann, was released on October 20th, 2023. Martin Scorsese directed and Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone star in the film. The Tulsa World's pop culture reporter Jimmy Trammell and I talked about the place the reign of terror holds in pop culture, and a little more about the film. Why should people go see the movie, especially our true crime fans? I can't think of a reason that they should not go to see the movie. It's one of the. From a true crime standpoint, it's one of the biggest crimes in our nation's history that really has not been expounded on. It's crazy. This happened 100 years ago. And as far as us knowing about it, as far as the story being fleshed out, that it never really came to light nationally at all until David Grann's fantastic book became a bestseller. And then and then Scorsese's movie is going to take it to the next level. And I should tell you that initially the movie was going to be, here comes the FBI to solve these murders. And then Scorsese. DiCaprio I think that huddled and decided to pivot. And now this movie is not going to be strictly about FBI coming in. It's going to be. It's going to be wrapped around the marriage of DiCaprio's character and Lily Gladstone's character. It's going to focus on this very personal story. And by the way, we're going to wrap it in to the Osage reign of terror, which I think is a fantastic way of going about it in a personal story is always going to resonate more than a story of another kind. Completely agree that everyone is giving Martin Scorsese, the director, props 100% because he didn't just come in and say, I have adopted this book. We're going to make a movie at every step along the way. He has incorporated and involved and consulted the Osage people were I mean, it's their story. They were impacted. They should have a say in this. And so their language, their costumes, everything about their way of life is portrayed authentically in this film. It's not an outsider coming in and saying, to heck with that. We'll do it my way. You're going to see it portrayed legitimately. You did profile Julie O'Keefe, who was a wardrobe consultant on the film. Can you tell us a little bit about her, her background and why she was important to the portrayal of the Osage as in the movie? Julie O'Keefe, who has had some costume shops, but her resumé is far more extensive than having a costume shop. She was enlisted to be a costume designer, an Osage costume consultant on the film. And so they used pictures from back in the day. Other reference to really make sure the people you see in the film dressed in the way they were, you know, in the 1920s, 100 years ago. And that's another example of Martin Scorsese and his team just taking every measure possible to make sure the Osage, what you see on the screen, is authentic. I mean, he Martin Scorsese, he even said, well, I'm sorry. I was standing there with the Osage who said at the premiere in France that some of the actors on the screen are speaking Osage as well as some of the Osage Nation members. I love that we've come so far from having Italian actors playing natives to respecting the history, the people and the living history that's going on. And yeah, Chief Strongbow, the Native American wrestler, was an Italian word. So what you're talking about. Exactly. I mean, I can turn on any Western on TV in the next room and see Mr. Spock playing a Native American. I love Leonard Nimoy, but he's not a Native American. So we we love. Yes. That people of a certain ethnicity are playing those people in pop culture. No better example of this than Reservation Dogs, the television series that wrapped up a three year run and was shot in Oklahoma as well. I grew up in small town Oklahoma and primarily a Cherokee community, and the people I see, the people I saw in reservation dogs. I look at them and think, I grew up exactly with these people. Especially with everything else going on in the world. It's just great to see the respect to culture being given. Well, typically, how the Native Americans have been portrayed and in movie and TV is John Wayne is shooting at them and that's it. I mean, I I've had I have many native friends, but I had one native friend tell me like, hey, when I was young, I would watch Cowboy and Indian movies and root for the Cowboys. How crazy is that? And he's native because, you know, that's the story being told and and you buy in. But I mean, it's so important now that we can see the Native American not as a stereotype, but just as as a human being, as someone who you don't have to tell a native story per se. You can tell a human being story. And by the way, they happen to be native. I know you talked about it a little bit, but what kind of reactions have you heard or seen from Julie and the other Osages. They had an Osage Nation premiere in Tulsa for only the Osage and people who took part in the film And kind of a takeaway was very powerful, very emotional. Glad to see this story being brought to light. But also it's a lot to wrap your head around because if you were in the movie and that premiere in Tulsa, you're probably sitting with people whose grandmother grandfather died as a result of these murders. So it's a lot to process, a lot to wrap your head around. Did anybody express any discomfort about participating in the movie? I mean, you mentioned that some of the people who were there, they might have had grandparents who were, you know, their lives were taken because of all of this. Were there people who might have been reticent at first to participate? Well, because of history, you couldn't blame anyone for being a little tread cautiously. But I think Martin Scorsese, he got rid of all that wariness early on because he met with the Osage. Is right away before they started filming and made it clear that the Osage people would be treated respectfully. I think this movie is going to create a lot of opportunity for the Osage, and as other films go out forward, we've seen, you know, Native Representation and the Great Prey Predator movie last year. Many of the people who were extras or worked on Killers of the Flower Moon now have an opportunity to go on and work on some other things. Oklahoma has a pretty rich film history, you know, you wouldn't think. But they do. Like The Outsiders was filmed here in 82 that launched the careers of Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe. Tom Cruise, he told me, Tell Ralph, Marty, Mojo, all those guys. And in fact, the exact county where killers of the Flower Moon was filmed was where August Osage County was filmed ten years ago. But by far, this figures to be the biggest blockbuster film ever shot on Oklahoma soil. And I think everyone is just happy that instead of going to California and on some down soundstage, Martin Scorsese brought those actors to where everything occurred. So it could be as true to life as possible. We have to take a quick break, so don't go too far. And of course, I caught up with Randy Krehbiel about the film, why people should see it, and how the reign of terror had something in common with another major criminal event that took place in the same area and at the same time period, as I understand it, Martin Scorsese, he shot the film in Osage County. I think the majority of it was shot there. A little bit of it was shot here in Tulsa. In fact, catty corner from our office at the federal courthouse. And I think they shot some in Guthrie, which is a town over north of Oklahoma City and maybe a few other places. But most of it was shot there. And from everything we've heard from the Osage, is he really made an effort? Leonardo DiCaprio made an effort to be very authentic with it in terms of th

    24 min
  8. Investigating the perpetrators of the Reign of Terror

    10/24/2023

    Investigating the perpetrators of the Reign of Terror

    The latest episode of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles is in partnership with the Tulsa World to introduce the story of the Osage Reign of Terror and the feature film Killers of the Flower Moon. In this episode, show producer Ambre Moton is joined by three writers from the Tulsa World, Randy Krehbiel, Jimmie Tramel and Tim Stanley, to discuss how the Bureau of Investigation came to investigate the killings, the handling of the case, the people held responsible for the killings and why the federal government had jurisdiction.  More coverage Read all of the coverage of the film Killers of the Flower Moon and related stories here. All episodes from this series can be found here. Also, for more on the movie, listen to the latest episode of Streamed & Screened: Martin Scorsese's 'Killers of the Flower Moon' might be the best film you see this year. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Welcome to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, a Lee Enterprises Podcast. I'm Ambre Moton, the producer and editor of the show, filling in for Nat Cardona who's taking some well-deserved time off.  If you haven't listened to the first two episodes of our series about the Osage reign of terror, please go back and listen to those before starting this one. So far, we've talked about the history of the Osage tribe and how they ended up in what became the state of Oklahoma. Their oil rich land. And how those rights were divided. And the horrible series of murders or suspicious deaths. Kidnappings and the environment of fear that made up what historians and journalists call the reign of terror. This week we're talking about the investigations into the crimes, what they found and more. Randy Krehbiel of The Tulsa World reminds us about how difficult it was to get proper investigations into the deaths of the Osage community. Who hired a private detectives to find the cause for the suspicious deaths? The Osage Tribal Council finally petitioned the federal government to send investigators, and in April of 1923, the Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the FBI, assigned agents to the case. Here's what Randy had to say about the investigation. Well, it was called the reign of terror, because people just lived in terror. They were afraid to to talk. And when the FBI came in there in 1923 to try and sort things out in their in their letters and reports and so forth from that time, you know, they talk about how people are just terrified to talk and and they would not talk to outsiders at all. And, in fact, this is just been talked about a lot with with this book and movie. They wound up putting some some men undercover to try and insinuate themselves into the community so they could get information because people were afraid if they if they told what they knew or what they thought and they were honest about it, they they'd be killed. And and this and this was true of a lot of a lot of people. And, you know, I think Mollie Burkhart, at one time, she told her priest that she was afraid. People just, you know, people people who were not part of the and even some of them who were part of the these these organizations that were that were doing these things were afraid to talk about it. And sometimes they were afraid to talk about it because they were involved, too. You know, but but they often they were afraid to talk about it because of repercussions against themselves. Tulsa World's Jimmy Trammel commented about the investigation's primary target. Who were the the FBI, you know, kind of focusing on or suspecting of all these crimes? Well, Jesse Plemons plays the FBI character, I think, in the in the film. And as far as the actual suspects, you had some other people had kind of amateurish early tried to be the detective or figured this out or, you know, paid to find things out. What ended up happening was the gentleman who was ultimately the suspect and the primary culprit and was put on trial, many people was like, oh, my, he couldn't it couldn't be that guy. He couldn't do it because he's friendly. He was probably the most soldiers. But I mean, you just never know. I mean, it was some kind of wolf in sheep's clothing kind of deal. I asked Tulsa World's Tim Stanley about how well the boy investigated and who they held responsible for the 24 murders that they determined were on an official record. Federal investigators did a good job in so far as it went. I mean, they did they did investigate it. They did bring charges. And they did get convictions. I think the problem is, is that they were more or less content to kind of tie a bow on the whole thing at that point and then move on, which I mean, that's we see that even today in cases of mass killings or where you have serial killers or who are suspected of being connected to any number of deaths, once they get the conviction on on one or two deaths and they get that person off the street, often that's the end of it. You know, for them that, you know, the value in the case to them has, you know, they've they've achieved. But that's yeah. I mean, I think that's kind of what you had here is it was investigated and the federal agency which you know, as we may have discussed previously, the one that it would become the FBI, they did they did a solid job and bringing at least some justice in this case. But they were they didn't really want to dig any further than than just the initial investigation. I mean, J. Edgar Hoover, you know, who was the boss at the time? You know, he got he was well-known for enjoying publicity. And he saw that as valuable to the agency. And he's right. I mean, public relations matter. So, you know, coming in and getting this getting some convictions here, getting a lot of good press out of it, I think satisfied him. And he had no reason to to investigate it or direct that it be investigated further. So, yeah, unfortunate. But you know what that leads us here. You know, 100 years later and tribal members over the decades leaves us all asking a lot of questions that unfortunately can never be answered. How many people were eventually held responsible or convicted, at least of some of these crimes? There were three principal convictions. And the one that's, you know, most significant is the trial and conviction of William Hale and two of the others who were convicted along with him were associates of his. He he has always been considered the mastermind behind many in the slayings, although, again, I think, as we just discussed, the investigators were pretty happy to hang the whole thing on him that made it, you know, a cleaner case and then they could move on in all likelihood. You know, there were many other perpetrators acting independently of Mr. Hale, just opportunists, again, close family members who saw an opportunity to inherit. He was the primary conviction. He was. And he was important, very significant. Even if even if the feds didn't, you know, go any further than this. I mean, it's just, you know, without a doubt, he was behind several of them. And, you know, he ended up I think everyone, the three Hale and his associates were given life sentences, but they were all eventually paroled after just a handful of years, which, you know, is kind of a sad, you know, footnote to this is that while they did face justice, well, they were convicted. You know, they they did end up not serving all of that long. And so while the people obviously it's often this way with justice, but obviously the people that they killed, you know, that that was it for them that these guys did eventually get to get out. But yeah, so three primary, there may have been some others and some tangentially related cases, but three primary convictions. And with William Hale being the chief one. We have to take a quick break. So don't go too far. And Randy added more details about those held responsible and a little about those who weren't. How many people were held responsible for the reign of terror? Almost no one. Almost no one. So in the case of the murders that are highlighted in killers of the flower moon, the two main defendants, as it turned out, were Bill Hale, who was accused of being that kind of the mastermind, and a guy named John Ramsey, who was kind of a ne'er do well cowboy, who basically just, you know, did whatever Hale told him to do. And so each of them was tried three times in federal court for the same murder. And and they were of the first time was a hung jury. They were convicted. This is they were convicted in the next two. And and after the first conviction, there was an appeal. And so they had to be tried again. So those two guys went to prison. Molly Burkhart has been also went to prison. A guy named Kelsey Mawson who killed Anna Brown, who was who was Molly Burkhart sister, he went to prison. Byron Burkhart, who was a Molly Burkhart brother in law, even though he had confessed to killing Hannah Brown, never went to prison. He he testified against Kelsey Morse and in his trial ended in a hung jury. He was never retried. And I'm getting a little bit off your your question here, but I think you'll find this interesting. In the sixties, there was an Osage woman die and she left behind a letter that said, if something happens to me, look at Byron. Well, she was living with Byron Burkhart, who had been involved in these things 40 years before and in and again, he nothing ever happened to him. So I think there were some others that were prosecuted, but but they were very few. And one of the things you realize, especially in going through these FBI papers and reading the trial stories, is how hard it was to get convictions in these things. And and emails case. He had a lot of money and he just pretty blatantly went out and bought tried to buy alibis. I mean the the federal officials and some of the state officials that they

    19 min
See All (69)

Trailers

4.6
out of 5
48 Ratings

About

Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, a product of Lee Enterprises, is a collection of limited anthology style episodes exploring true stories as told by journalists from regional newspapers around America.

Information

More From Lee Enterprises Podcasts