Murder - General Archives - The Library of Podcasts

The Wicked Boy: An Infamous Murder in Victorian London

In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London — for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home alone while their mother visited family in Liverpool, but their aunt was suspicious. When she eventually forced the brothers to open the house to her, she found the badly decomposed body of their mother in a bedroom upstairs. Robert and Nattie were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. […Learn More]

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

The New York Times bestselling account of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land. […Learn More]

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

A journalist’s twenty-year fascination with the Manson murders leads to shocking new revelations about the FBI’s involvement in this riveting reassessment of an infamous case in American history.
Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. […Learn More]

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the “worst of the worst,” among other bravura works of literary journalism. […Learn More]

These Are Not Gentle People

Fast-paced South African true crime – the case that has defined a nation – by BBC Africa Correspondent

Since early 2016 South Africans have become gripped by a trial that has been taking place in the small town of Parys, south of Johannesburg, where are group of white farmers are accused of murdering two black farmhands. The white farmers say it was a question of self-defence: the two black labourers were threatening them and their families. […Learn More]

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America

Shortly after a dismembered torso was discovered by a pond outside Philadelphia in 1887, investigators homed in on two suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs, a married, working-class, black woman, and George Wilson, a former neighbor whom Tabbs implicated after her arrest.

As details surrounding the shocking case emerged, both the crime and ensuing trial–which spanned several months–were featured in the national press. The trial brought otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the black community to public attention. […Learn More]

Terror to the Wicked: America’s First Trial by Jury That Ended a War and Helped to Form a Nation

A little-known moment in colonial history that changed the course of America’s future. A riveting account of a brutal killing, an all-out manhunt, and the first murder trial in America, set against the backdrop of the Pequot War (between the Pequot tribe and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay) that ended this two-year war and brought about a peace that allowed the colonies to become a nation. […Learn More]

Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America

An immersive tale of the killing of a Native American man and its far-reaching implications for the definition of justice from early America to today.

On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two white fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. Though virtually forgotten today, this act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America. […Learn More]

Book Cover of Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country by Sierra Crane Murdoch

Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and A Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country

The gripping true story of a murder on an Indian reservation, and the unforgettable Arikara woman who becomes obsessed with solving it—an urgent work of literary journalism.
When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. […Learn More]

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. […Learn More]