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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 hear back from him, to hear just his retelling of everything that happened. But thanks for laying out all out. So, yeah, ultimately, he's the only one who's punished for anything that had happened that night. And at the end of the day, no justice was served for the three young men that were killed.

And, you know, here we are today. It's going on. What if we're 55, 56 years later? Like, how did we get here to where this major event that actually was so integral to the civil rights movement and so violence on top of it? How did we get to the point where this is just a blip on the radar in history, especially in terms with this?

Do you have any input on that? Well, the circumstances under which it happened in in 1968 was not well covered at that time. And 1968 was a very tumultuous year in American history. At the time of the year of the massacre in early February, the Tet Offensive was breaking out in Vietnam. The Vietnam War absorbed the attention of many, many Americans and the media shortly before that, and in January, an American naval vessel, the Pueblo, had been captured by North Korea and its crew taken hostage.

And then only weeks after the massacre, the sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, announced that he would not be running for reelection in 1968. And days after that, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was shot in Memphis, Tennessee. And then a couple of months after that, Robert Kennedy was shot after the Democratic primary in California, shot in Los Angeles, and he died a day or so later.

And the the the massacre got lost in this series of events. And to that, it happens in a small rural town in South Carolina. And then most importantly, there was a group of black students and it simply did not draw the attention or the coverage of most people, especially most white people. It did, as I mentioned, draw the coverage of the black press and black students at other HBCU, other historically black colleges, universities, North Carolina, and to Morehouse, Howard in Washington DC.

But it was largely overlooked and there was no story in Time magazine. There was a short story in Newsweek at the time, the media, in terms of television, I gave that very, very little attention. And what little attention it did give, it disappeared a very quickly. So most people never even heard of it. It didn't get into most of the history books.

And two years later, when the shootings occurred in at Kent State, it just exploded across the front pages of newspapers and on all of the major networks, CBS and NBC and ABC at that time. And so virtually everyone in the aftermath of Kent State knew about the shootings of the four students at Kent who were all white and hardly anyone had heard of the students who had been shot at South Carolina State who were black, which and thank you for bringing that up, because with your affiliation with the College, for my understanding, student organizations have done a pretty good job of remembering what had happened there.

I understand that there are their statues of the three young men on campus, or is that just sort now that's on campus. There's a memorial plaza there the year after the massacre in 1969, a small granite marker was placed there with the names of the three young men. And then 30 plus years after that, and there were bronze tablets established around that granite marker with the names of the 28 young men who were wounded there.

And then three years ago or so, a a brick monument was created, built there, and then two years ago, there were busts of the three young men placed within that brick and lighted monument, the bust and Smith and Delano Middleton and Samuel Hammond are there. So there is a monument on campus that has expanded over the years.

Okay. That's good to know. Thank you for clarifying all that. One of the last things here is, you know, we can't we can't change the past in how it was covered and portrayed and how no justice was done and all of that. But what would your, you know, the take away? You would hope for our listeners to get out of this or for people to learn from this?

Do you have anything that you'd like to kind of part with? Well, you would hope that people would learn that you don't have law enforcement shoot into a crowd of unarmed people. But the fact of the matter is they did it and do it again and then shot into a crowd of protesting, protesting students at Kent State in May of 1970.

And unfortunately, too often our law enforcement officers have taken it upon themselves to not only enforce the law, but apparently act as a jury and convict and punish those who they see protesting, demonstrating, are breaking the law in front of them. So that's one lesson that has regrettably not been learned very much, if at all, in the years and decades since then.

The other regret as far as I'm concerned, and many other people were involved with the massacre and those who survived it, I there was never any formal investigation of what happened and why it happened. There was a presidential commission formed after they can say, killings on campus violence. Richard Nixon appointed the former governor of Pennsylvania, William Scranton, and they did a thorough investigation of what happened at Kent State, what happened at Jackson State that pretty much ignored Orangeburg to try to get at the problems that led to the shootings at Jackson State and Kent State in May of 1970.

There's been other state investigations of of racially involved incidents everywhere from Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1923 to Rosewood, Florida, in 1922. More recent developments, but there was never a state or federal investigation of what happened in Orangeburg. And our effort to try to get into the underlying factors that contributed to this to try to bring some increased clarity. I don't know that would bring closure to this.

It might it might help it might assist in that. But it has never happened. And I in terms of the foreseeable future, it doesn't look like it's going to happen, but it does.

But in theory, it could still happen. That would be the. certainly. Okay. It's never too late. No, I mean, they investigated Tulsa almost 100 years after it happened. And Rosewood right, as well. Tulsa was 1921 and Rosewood was 1923. And state of Florida and state of Oklahoma did investigate those appointed people. They set aside relatively small amounts of money on this and then tried to undertake a thorough examination of the events that had occurred many decades before.

Now we're more than a half century since Orangeburg. There's still no investigation, and there seems to be little inclination on the part of the political leaders to undertake such an investigation, even though it would be of of modest cost. The attitude seems to be, well, we don't need to bring that up again. I don't don't let us put the scab on that wound again.

Let's just let it let it go. We can move on. And I will live in a better, happier future without digging into the past and stirring up the animosity and hard feelings once again. So we don't need no, we don't need an investigation like that and quit harping on it and quit suggesting that we do. And in fact, it's about time you stopped having those ceremonies in February 8th to commemorate this.

That only inflames people in the community and people get upset with this and would rather not. It happened, I should say that I helping with that has been the local newspaper, the The Times and Democrat. They have done a lot in recent years to try to bring about some some healing and some effort to recognize what happened in the community as a serious, serious tragedy and loss of life and the injuries that occurred.

And they've tried to bring people together in terms of healing with efforts to try to bring community leaders together, to agree, at least not to be so emotionally invested in this, that they that they have a hard time even speaking with each other. So The Times and Democratic Kathy Hughes and Lee Harder have have helped a lot there.

Is there anything that you would like to add before we parted ways? You know, I would I would repeat the what I've almost repeated over the years ad nauseum now about the need for an investigation. We're losing people. In the past year, two of the young men who were wounded in 1968 have have died since the fall of 1922.

And that's regrettable. But as the cliche goes, better late than never. So I would I repeat, a call for an investigation won't answer all the questions. It won't satisfy everyone. But I think it will help bring about an understanding of one of the most traumatic events that occurred in South Carolina in the 20th century. So on that note, I would would close and that's a great note to close on.

I really appreciate your time this was honestly a way more information than I actually expected. So huge. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much. And that's where we'll end the show for today. If you're interested in more details of how the victims of the massacre are being memorialized, please check out the articles linked in our show notes.

And don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what's coming next on Crime Chronicles. Thanks for listening.

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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)

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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 to go into the city. And Cloverleaf kind of was right on the edge.

People kind of associated Richmond with Cloverleaf on some level. So it was in decline. People began to view Cloverleaf as a dangerous place or potentially a dangerous place. And then when the double homicides took place in 96, that was kind of the end of it. But a lot of the tenants at the mall decided not to renew their leases.

The decline just accelerated and that was, I think, most people who are here in Richmond, you can recall this time period, would agree that that double homicide was kind of the nail in the coffin for Clover Moore, for lack of a better word.

Sure. They only. We need to take a quick break, so don't go too far. See you all soon during your you know, your coverage of that and the decline and talking in the nineties, Do you have any recollection of what else was going on there? I mean, goofy things happen when there's like vacant stores and that kind of thing.

I mean, there had but like, like what didn't what was going on inside a, I mean, murderous aside, like as far as trouble, whatever you want to label it as.

There have been some, you know, some reports of, you know, teenagers walking around the mall intimidating, you know, shoppers, that kind of thing. The mall had changed in terms of the retail mix. So as as it became less of a destination and other malls had kind of cornered the market in more populous areas, the demographics around Cloverleaf were lower income.

You know, there was a higher black population, higher Latino population, and you started to see a change in retail mix. So you didn't have some of the higher end retailers or the big chains had already kind of breaking. So the gaps, you know, the limited and those kinds of stores had kind of long had and left the place.

So you ended up with smaller stores that didn't quite fill the spaces that had been originally, you know, it was designed for a larger footprint and it created more vacancies. And it became a place where, you know, people kind of viewed all that's at the mall is the low income, you know, mall for for people who don't have as much money.

And the clientele kind of matched that. And that's the way a lot of people used. CLOVERLEAF But the vacancies were there. I mean, I don't know that it was anything I don't recall any any other major episodes. There had been, I think, another where every now and then there would be a report of someone who had been fired or a gun or a shooting or something like that.

But it wasn't.

But thanks for clarifying that. Yeah, I just didn't know if there was like other stuff going on there. It's more just like we don't go there because it's more.

That's what made this case so bizarre, is because it was a state. It was a you know, I think they were both staffed at least ten times, from what I recall. And, you know, they they couldn't quite figure out sort of, well, who was this someone who was just passing through? Because it was kind of an it was right off of Chippenham Parkway, was close to the interstate.

Could this been someone who was just passing through where they're looking around? Who knows? But the fact that they were stabbed multiple times kind of raised the question of it seemed personal. There was nothing I mean, not I mean, they scoured I mean, the police really did put everything into this, as far as I recall. And they just kept coming up empty.

They couldn't that they had every lead that they had. There was a U-Haul at one point in the parking lot that it had been left unlocked with the lights on. I think that turned out to not be connected. They just they just got run into dead ends. And yeah, it's just bizarre. I have no one really ever I don't think that.

I suspect today they are not any closer than they were.

We know whatever happened in 2004 as a possible break in the case or we did, you know, obviously fizzled out. And it's been there almost 20 years since. So, yeah, it's definitely really.

30 years here.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, from 24 for there to be like this possible break. But that was like the last that we've seen.

Right. That's the most completely They gone now. They tore down that wall.

Right. So, so 1990. So November 1996, these murders happened. I was your one style Weekly article that I first came across was, you know, eight years later in 2004. So when you were covering that, where where was the mall at at that time? Was it about like literally on its last legs or.

Yes, it was. It was literally on this last legs. I mean, in terms of the other day, gosh, I can't recall who was actually if one of the department stores was still there.

wow.

Sears might have still been there in 2004. Okay. But I believe they were the last anchor. But yeah, at that point in time, I mean, you know, a lot of it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. Chesterfield County had pegged it for redevelopment a few years earlier. And, you know, if you spend enough time talking about the mom and dad to your constituents and the news and with plans of what we're going to do to fix it, it kind of seals the enamel.

Yeah. And by 2004, it was done.

Okay.

It was just a matter of who was going to pay for the redevelopment. Sure.

And then on as an aside to that on the fringe, it really could never shake that. This is the place where two women were murdered and they still don't know what happened. True.

Yeah. No, absolutely true. There was a real estate agent. Real estate agent or a commercial real estate broker. We followed all of this with me, and the story that I wrote made the comment that, you know, that was got death written all over it. And that was really true. Like no one wanted to touch them all. You couldn't get content to resign.

It just had this perception of being in a bad area. There's some racial undertones to it, of course, but by that point it was so far gone that I don't think anyone reasonably thought it could be resurrected as a retail destination.

Sure. And then do you have any idea how long that all in $1 store where they were murdered out? Like how long did that survive?

Any clue after they were murdered? Yeah, I don't imagine a real oak. That's a really good question. I don't know the answer to every you know. Have you talked have you tried to talk to Jay Latham?

I know that the feelers have been out with that. I he he would probably have more insight on that. Right.

He's a great interview. Yeah. And he actually had he did two stints there. So he was I thought he was the original loan manager, but he came in I think 75 or six, 76 somewhere. There came a couple of years after they left and then came back and he was the manager at the mall where the homicides took place.

And it was like a really crazy time period, really. He just returned five weeks before or something.

He hadn't been there long, and they were in the process of trying to revive it. So he worked for a Think Simon Property group, which is either just purchased the mall or believe it and have to go back and check. But yeah he was with a group that had was they had taken it over and they were had hopes of sort of reviving and then that happened and yeah, changed his plans.

So. Right, so what, what's there now.

They had this sort of mixed use thing. It's, there's a big Kroger, one of the biggest doesn't have me, there's nothing exciting there. They basically replace it with a mix of retail and residential and Chester County had gotten involved in issuing health issue bonds to kind of pay for some of the infrastructure and got Kroger to build. I think at the time it might still be one of the biggest Kroger's in Virginia and it's just massive Kroger marketplace.

And that was the big anchor. Well, interestingly, there is one little remnant of the mall still left, which is a tire shop that was part of the mall and it still has the old sixties and early seventies sort of architecture that refused to sell. And it's still there. And it's right in the middle of this sort of new development because they put him on kind of sticking out like a sore thumb.

So you can appreciate.

The entire place. Yeah, and it's exciting, but they're in the process of redeveloping the whole area now. You know, there's some stuff going to put it in a couple of ice skating rinks across the street and there's a big sort of office park that have been there for years. They're trying to interconnect their office park with some shopping district slash entertainment complex right next to it that's close to the mall.

You know.

This is like any to pop that in any city kind of thing.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. What's different?

Right. Well, what's the what's the demographics in the area now?

It's still primarily it's not a high income. You know, the area of of just, you know, just was big is about 400 square miles. So it's a big, big footprint. The sort of the as the suburban development kind of shifted further out, you know, that there was sort of inner edge parts of both counties is just kind of, you know.

The one last thing that pops in my mind here is, I mean, I know you weren't a crime reporter and you are not one currently, but just for more context, because we're I'm not there and I know that Richmond was at one time, you know, the murder capital, like you say. Are there more cases like this? Like I just I guess it's interesting to me that there's so little coverage of an unsolved murder of two women at a mall, something so public.

And you know, seemingly random. And it's just like, is this? And I was just kind of one of those earmarked cases in the area that people like. Definitely. No, definitely remember like or other like tons of these. I just I just don't get it.

I think at the time I mean the be just what I remember of this time period, you know, Richmond was I think two years early. We had 160 murder incidents in a city of less than 200,000 people. It was a problem. We had a higher murder rate. So it wasn't it didn't happen often in Chesterfield, the jurisdictions around the city.

I mean, they always had it and we've always had issues, but not not 160 murders year. So when the Cleveland murders happened, I think it just kind of got lost a little bit. I was like, okay, it's there's a racial element to it. You know, if it were two white women, then there would be way more attention focused on it.

That's just tends to be the case. And because these were minority women who were found stabbed to death and all that, people had stopped caring about at least those with political power and stopped caring about allowing it to sort of just kind of drift. That's quite a bit of that here. No, it's almost.

Yeah. Is there anything else you just want to add about your realm of things in connection with cool relief?

Yeah, I'm so, I mean, you know, I hope it's I hope it's enough for you to sink your teeth into. And I guess I'm not having a lot of information about the actual case itself. I know Chesterfield was very close to the vest about what they were, what they would release the police department was. So I recall just kind of during when I was reporting on this, just kind of being in my head against the wall because they wanted this to be out there.

But they were very it was very difficult to get them to talk about some of the leads that they had and didn't have them. All that good stuff. You know, I think for me, just going back and looking at the the case itself, I was always fascinated with it. I mean, I'm I'm a local, you know, journalist, you know, So outside of Richmond, maybe you wouldn't care about such things.

But, you know, there are there are so many different layers to it from understanding like the connection between annexation and sort of the racial history. There was always like another layer to it that maybe I didn't think about or didn't realize until I went back and looked at everything again.

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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.

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 the the people, the language. My understanding is, is that the actors, the main actors all learned some Osage so they could deliver lines in Osage. So my understanding is, is that, you know, it's about betrayal. The movie the movie is about betrayal. And I think betrayal is asked is almost always support a crime.

You're betraying someone in some way. And and it's about how, you know, it focuses I think a lot on this one couple and and in in the birchard he's played by Leonardo DiCaprio his struggle with you know apparently he really did care for his wife but he was also he also was kind of under the influence of this uncle who only cared about money and had been taught, you know, to think only about money.

And also that, you know, Indian people were not really they didn't really count. Right. Right. And that and I think, you know, and that also often plays into crime. But I think there's a lot psychologically that people who are interested in crime would would find insightful.

I think it's a good way for us to start exploring the history that we aren't all taught. Sure, it might be Leo's face up there, but I know there are tons of times where I've gone to see movies that are based on true stories. And then I start Googling and I start reading. And, you know, you kind of fall down that rabbit hole.

Well, you hope so. And, you know, it's. I mean, history is almost always more complicated than you can sit. And this is is a very long movie. Apparently, it's I'm told it's three and a half hours long that.

Scorsese.

But even in with that, you know, yeah, there are things that are left out but but hope that hopefully it takes people's attention interest and as you mentioned there is just an awful lot of history that gets.

Swept under the rug neglected over. Yeah well, you know, I've told this a lot. I've said this a lot of times, but I think it's true is that you know, history, the teaching of history serves to almost oppositional purposes. One is one is to try and create this sort of legend about the place we live and who we are. And it's all, you know, we're all the good guys and they're all the bad guys.

And that sort of thing. And it's all positive. It's more about image and building community and and patriotism and all that stuff. And then there's sort of and then there's the grittier history that requires some critical thinking and and shows you that, you know, what the the rules tend to favor the people who make the rules.

And you mentioned that you had done a lot of writing about the Tulsa race massacre, which was, what, 1921, I believe?

Yep. Yep.

Was there overlap? I mean, obviously timing. Yes.

But I a little bit. And one of the stories that talks about that a little bit so and Brian was found about I think it was ten days before the Tulsa race massacre. so so, you know, so that was very close in time. And there are some people who show up in both stories. One of them is a guy named John Gustafson, who was the police chief of Tulsa and was removed from office.

He was basically impeached and removed from office after the massacre for dereliction of duty. Well, he was also a private detective. And so at the same time, he was the chief of police and being removed from office in Tulsa. He'd been hired by Inner Brown's family to find out who killed her. And so he spent a lot of time traipsing around Osage County and according to the FBI and that what they concluded was that he was trying to play both sides.

He'd come up with information and then he'd try and chop it and see who he could get the most money for. So from. And so there is that. And then there's another guy that is semi important, a a couple more. One is a guy named John Goldsberry who at the time of the race massacre was the assistant county attorney in Tulsa.

And he was the guy who was in who was part of the prosecution of John Gustafson and was also kind of involved in telling the people who I don't know how much of the Tulsa story, you know, but there was this group of people that were trying to take over the Greenwood area and they and they failed. And he was kind of in the group that was telling them, you can't do that.

That's a bad idea. So then eight years later, in 1929, he was the U.S. attorney in Tulsa and he was involved in the final prosecution. Bill Hale and in John Ramsey. And then finally, I'd mentioned, well, I guess there's a team or so also there is an attorney again named Prince Freeling. And Prince Freeling was the attorney general at the time of the Tulsa race massacre.

And he came in and blow in and go in and he ran the grand jury and all that stuff. By the time that the Ramsey and Hale were on trial, he was out of office and he was part of their defense team. And then and so then I know these guys are all lawyers. It's amazing how many lawyers there are involved in this.

But anyway, there's a lawyer named TJ Leahy who is from Pawhuska, and he was guest Gaston's attorney in the in his impeachment trial. But then he was hired by the Osage people to look out for their interests in these prosecutions. And he was involved in the prosecution of every one of these people who went to trial, whether it was in state trial or state court or federal court.

He was there as part of the prosecution and and was the guy that Burkhart went to during a state trial in Pawhuska and said, I'm tired of lying. I just want to tell the truth. And he turned on his turned on his uncle. So there are people that I've never seen like a direct, you know, like the people who burned down and were stealing money from people.

And I haven't seen that. But there are there are some familiar names. Gotcha. I would say there is this connection, which is that in both cases you see where the lives of, you know, minorities, of people of color and especially women just didn't matter very much. You know, in Tulsa when they decided they were going to do something different with, with the Greenwood area, They didn't ask the black people who lived there.

They just tried to do it. Yeah. All right. Well, if you owned the property.

By the way, for the most.

Part, so they formed this community. Well, so in, you know, in in the Osage, it was like, in fact, there's a quote in one of the FBI reports from there was a notorious outlaw, who was approached about killing a bill and ready to smear who's there, the folks who were blown up in the movie. And he said he wouldn't do it, that he had never he had never stoop so low that he would kill a woman even if she was an Indian.

That's something that, you know, that that says it right. These these folks, they just you know, it it wasn't so much in my observation, it wasn't so much that they hated them. It was that they just didn't care anyway.

Yeah.

They were. They weren't worth anything. Yeah, that's exactly right. And so that is the connection.

Very. I hate to say it's interesting because it's such a horrific things happened, but it's impossible to teach comprehensive history, you know, especially at junior high, high school, you know, elementary level. I just wish that it was a little more comprehensive, I guess I should say.

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the hard things about teaching school, whatever it is, is deciding what's important in what you know, what's what are the priorities as far as teach. Well, So you do have to learn the fundamentals of history. But somewhere in there, you know, I think there's also room to learn about, you know, not everything was done, you know, virtuously.

And it and you do have to question, motivations and things like why do people do the things they do? I think that's just a useful life. You know, I think one of the things that's really hard when you're writing about things like this, whether it's Tulsa or or we're talking about it or the Osage deal is how you talk about a singular event that's particularly horrific and then put it in a larger context without appearing to or actually diminishing that one event.

And so, you know, the only thing I'd say is that what happened in Osage County was a singular, ah, event and particularly distressing. But things like that happened all over the and Oklahoma had some of the during the during the oil booms of the early 20th century, some pretty, pretty bad places. And they say something about, you know, human greed and and just sort of the human condition that we should be aware of and like what we were talking about earlier, where we had a I hope we've passed it.

But, you know, I'm not always convinced we are that, you know, people who are different than us just don't matter. Are people who are in the in our way don't matter. You know, as a reporter, always trying to look at what is singular about this event, but also how does it fit into sort of the universe of things and how do you tell that story without how do you balance it, you know, and how do how do you not diminish, you know, this one group or one individual's story and yet presented in the full context.

And that's where we're wrapping things up with the reign of terror. For more details about the crimes life in the area in the 1920s, the film Killers of the Flower Moon and the Hostages, please visit the Tulsa World's website. There are links in the show notes to all of the content. The reporters and editors at the paper created.

Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what's coming up next. And you can go back in and check out any of our past episodes that you may have missed.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 were working with were just furious at what they considered to be dishonest and unethical behavior, behavior by his lawyers and some of these lawyers were pretty well known. One of them was a former attorney general in the state of Oklahoma, the the his defense lawyers.

So the answer to your question is not many and not only not many, you know, go to prison over this. They really didn't stay very long. They'll have all got out in 16 years. But Burkhart got out before that but then got in trouble again. He violated parole. And so they put him back in in prison. Kelsey Morrison got out in a few years and was killed in a shootout in Texas.

So, you know, most of these guys, they didn't serve very long in it. I remember, you know, I was reading some of this stuff and at the same time, we had the the Jones case going on here. And and, you know, whether you think he's guilty or whatever. But I just I couldn't help thinking about the difference in the way, you know, we think about that, at least in Oklahoma.

It's pretty routine for people to get life without parole, if not the death penalty. And these guys were out in 16 years. So, you know, I'm sure somebody who is a lot smarter than I am to try and figure out what all of the different racial biases and so forth were in the criminal justice system or in the criminal justice system.

I will say just in general, at that time, they didn't they tended not to keep people in prison any longer than they had to. They were you know, they were.

It wasn't for profit back then?

It wasn't. Well, no, it was it was a cost. And a lot of the states didn't have a lot of money to to they'd rather turn the guys loose and than keep housing and feeding them.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

How did the government kind of impact this? The FBI came in to investigate. Was the federal government making sure allocations and money were going to the right places and right people? Was it state or was it tribal responsibility?

So in theory and this is one of the things that we're still fighting about in Oklahoma, but in theory, the the Osage reservation was dissolved, that statehood. And that's pretty much held up even with some recent Supreme Court decisions that have decided that some of the other reservations weren't dissolved, that statehood. So it was dissolved, that statehood. However, you still had the Osage is owned a lot of the land there because it had been allotted to them.

So again, this gets a little complicated, but the state officials did not think they could get a conviction in this case, in state court and in Pawhuska. They wanted the federal government to come in. They wanted. And so the federal government has jurisdiction over Indian land. And and so and there was a lot of discussion at the time to our guys even have any kind of authority here.

The the FBI was not even the FBI at that time. It was just the Bureau of Investigation in the Department of Justice. And it had very, very limited authority. And so the key sort of the key thing in bringing this case down, or one of the key things was that one of the men who who was killed, Henry Roan, was killed on an allotment that was still owned by the original L.A. The federal judge in Oklahoma originally ruled that the federal government didn't have authority over that allotment, and it went up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The US Supreme Court said no and allotment is Indian land. And that means the federal the federal government has the authority to to to do this. And so almost all of the real police work, if you will, on this was done by the by the Bureau of Investigation. And they were helped by somewhat by state and local officials.

But in their letters, they talk about they just didn't feel like there were many of those people they could trust because of their interest in, first of all, what was going on in Osage County. But then more broadly, you know, they did not want anybody looking too closely into the what was going on with these Indian allotments and in the mineral rights.

So. So the involvement of the federal government was key. It's really unlikely that that anything could have been done in the Osage Nation, had actually gone to Congress and asked them to intervene. The Osage is pay a big part and maybe all of the federal government's expenses in prosecuting this case. They paid the federal government to investigate these, or at least they paid the expenses of the federal government to do that.

I think another important person in this does not get a lot of attention was Charles Curtis. Charles Curtis was a U.S. senator from Kansas, his whose mother was a college Indian, who was born in in that in what is now Oklahoma. And he was later the vice president of the United States. And he got involved in it and and pushed the Department of Justice to do something.

And that, folks, is where we're leaving it for this episode. Thanks for listening to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. Don't forget to hit that. Subscribe button so you don't miss what's coming up next. A look at where the head write stand currently with the Osages and how the Reign of Terror has its own place in pop culture.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 upcoming 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 Tim Stanley, to discuss the motives for the murders and detail some of the crimes and the environment of fear that the Reign of Terror caused in the Osage community.

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 last episode introducing our latest topic, The Osage Reign of Terror. Go check it out before listening to this one. 

Today, we're continuing our look at the series of suspicious deaths in the 1920s of members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the early 1900s.

Oil was found on the land that the Osage is had purchased, but the Tulsa World's Randy Krehbiel explains more.

The story is that for a long, long time, Indians had known that there were these oil seeps. You know, we're seeing oil would seep out of the ground and it'd be in springs and things like that. But through most of the 1800s, there wasn't really a lot of use for that. Well, they they actually they would use it for like rim remedies and things like that.

It was considered medicinal. And so, of course, it wasn't until the invention of things like kerosene lamps and the internal combustion engine that that oil became more valuable. And so the first the first commercial oil well in Oklahoma or what became Oklahoma, this was completed in 1897, just outside the Osage Reservation, just on the eastern edge of it.

And a couple of years later, the first well then was drilled in Oklahoma and about that time. And so this was around, you know, around 1900. And that was about the time we were starting to see motor vehicles and and again, kerosene was already pretty popular. People tend to forget that the first use of oil as as we think of it today, was actually kerosene and to use in lamps and things like that.

So anyway, that was in the early 1900s, around 1900. And by O 1905 or 1906, they knew they had, you know, quite a bit right around the time of World War One is when it really picked up from like about, you know, about the mid 19 teens through around 1929 was kind of the height of the oil boom.

And the Osage nation, the Osage is actually had relative little control over their own affairs. Almost all of that was handled by what now is the Bureau of Indian Affairs or or by the guardians that were appointed. You know, a lot of a lot of them had somebody who was appointed to handle their business affairs because they were not thought to be competent to handle their business affairs.

So a lot of that was out of their hands. And also, I think a lot of them, especially the older ones, probably didn't even really completely understand what was going on. But when they first moved there, they probably mainly wanted to just be left alone and and it pretty became pretty soon became apparent that they were not going to be able to do that.

When did the Osage reign of terror really begin?

There's not really a definite date. So the killers of the Flower Moon, basically the book follow the is a period from about 1921 to about 1929. But there were probably people dying as early as 1912, 1910 or something like that. And interestingly enough, I mean, similar type things were going on in the adjoining Muskogee Creek Nation. The Cherokees had some of that going on.

It was a different situation because 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, one of those tribes that had a particularly valuable allotment, you could be targeted.

And and so in some cases, you know, 19 six, 1907, 1908, there were people who were disappearing. Some of them turned up alive somewhere else. Some of them were never found. 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 the height of the boom.

So, you know, the boom was really taking off in the late teens, early twenties. By the late twenties, I'm sorry, the late teens, early twenties, it was pretty well subsiding by the late twenties.

A very quick reminder about the Osage as mineral rights, the original allotments of the mineral rights were divided into over 2200 shares, which were called head rates as people died, had babies, got married, etc. those rights began moving around and you had some people with multiple rights and some with fractional rights. Making things even more complicated was the ability to pass had rights to non-tribal areas.

I spoke with Randi's colleague, Tim Stanley about the series of crimes that earned the name the Osage reign of terror.

I am Tim Stanley, reporter here for the Tulsa World have been with the world for a little over 20 years, the reign of terror. I think that was a term that was probably coined maybe by a journalist. I'm not real sure of the origins of it, but I know it did appear in some of the newspapers of the time, but it was a reference to a series of murders that took place among Osage Nation tribal members in the early 1900s.

Specifically, I think they date them or officially to like 1921 to 26, that a five year span. Of course, as we as David Grant in his book has pointed out, and as we also did in our series, the the exact years that this took place and the true number of victims probably were probably talking about a much larger span than just that five years.

But the murders were, you know, committed by I mean, there was a conspiracy involved. But at the same time, there were a lot of people just individually taking the opportunity they saw to to cheat and exploit and white people taking the opportunity to cheat and exploit their Osage neighbors there in Osage County. But yeah, I just I mean, I think specifically the reign of terror and the word terror there refers to, you know, just how this atmosphere of dread and terror that that really materialized in Osage County.

Among the tribal citizens. Thereafter, I think the first three or four killings, I mean, when it kind of became obvious that that these were connected and that potentially anyone who was a member of the tribe could be next. So, yeah, it was I mean, as reported in the newspapers at the time and as David Grann and others have chronicled, it was a time of heightened fear.

You had many this was I mean, the electric light bulb in that at that time was still a relatively new innovation. But for a lot of the people, Osage tribal members living outside of the town of Pawhuska or some of the other towns, they lived in the countryside. And Grant describes this in his book that they began to put up electric lights on their properties at night in such a way that they just really are shown for miles around.

And they were doing that really out of fear, out of what might be out there in the darkness. Of course, as as we would come to find out, it was less the danger that was out there in the darkness. For many of these folks. It was less what was out there as opposed to what was was inside and close to them.

Many of the murders, as it turns out, were committed very sadly by people They trusted, people they knew, family members, close family members, spouses, people who who would then have access to their oil wealth, which was really the motive behind it all.

How many victims were there officially?

Officially, this is this is where it's interesting, the number that has been tossed around, you know, for years, even before the grand book was was 24. And where that.

Which is a lot in a nutshell.

That's definitely I mean, it should be eye opening, just as it is today. People know where that comes from. It's interesting, You know, the federal investigators at the time who investigated this case and ultimately, you know, brought charges that that number was one that they put out there. And I think their exact words were they believed that there were at least 24 victims.

So they were even, you know, in their language, I think, leaving it open for more. But the 24, you know, that's that's the number that has sort of been, you know, considered official. But, you know, the problem with it, as you know, as we as would as we found out and in our own reporting and as has been reported, you know, my grand you know, the T4, you know, is probably well shy, well short of what the true number was.

You know, the problem with the 24 is that and and it's given rise to so much speculation is in saying that there were at least 24 you know, federal investigators didn't give you give or provide a list of those 24. So all we've been able to do, you know, in retrospect, and that includes, you know, the tribal members who've looked into this, is sort of speculate at the top for themselves.

Now, some of them are obvious. Three homicides that ended up, you know, charges being brought in that were investigated as homicides. But then you had many others that were just the circumstances were probably suspicious, but they were never investigated as homicides. It's just it's really in other words, it's really hard to come up with a definitive list of the 24 that, you know, federal investigators, you know, thought were were victims here.

You know, you'll find lists out there where people speculate on who they might have been. And between those lists, some names or certainly they have in common. But yeah, they didn't they didn't do us any favors when they put that number out there all those years ago and then didn't bother to elaborate on on who that might be.

All of them outside of the ones in their specific cases. I think the best thing you can say about it is it's more of a starting point. I mean, it's it's a number that was put out there by the people who investigated it. So it's worth considering. But the problem is we don't even know who the 424 were.

And and we now have reason to believe that there were many more in addition to that, that was never made the list. So. So that's that's where the number comes from. And just a little background on it.

I guess, unofficially, members of the Osage tribe, do they have another estimate for victims?

And when we had a chance to sit down with some of the tribal officials and we talked to the chief Standing bear. Chief for Standing Bear, the principal chief. He said, you know, once there was a time many, many years ago, several decades, when when they were sort of informally talking about this just amongst themselves. And again, very informal, he said.

But the number they came up with was I would have put it at well over a hundred killed for their oil wealth during that time span and that it would have been roughly 5% of the tribe's then population, which is pretty eye opening. And he said, you know, even then there were other some of the older members of the tribe who maybe had, you know, who were around even back at the time, who thought that estimate was too low.

So, you know, so the tribe unofficially, based on that very informal internal investigation, you know, suggested or proposed well over 100, I mean, 100 compared to 24. So we're talking a death toll, you know, really far exceeding that original estimate. But as you know, Chief Standing Bear pointed out to us, there's just nothing there's no way to do anything with that.

There's no way to to, you know, make it any more official than just that. It's pure speculation because that's all you can do, really. A hundred years removed from the events when the when the when the deaths were not necessarily investigated as homicides and when when all you've got or family stories or family suspicions. I mean, that's all you can do is speculate.

I mean, it's nothing wrong with that. Speculation can be a good thing. And in this case, I think it is a good thing. But as he would say and remember, it is speculation. It's just it's something we can never know, unfortunately.

The way people were killed, it wasn't the same. It wasn't everyone was shot or whatever.

No, that would have that sure to have made it a lot easier. Right. From a from an investigative standpoint. But no, you could probably put them into categories. And that's, you know, the ones that were obviously violent and there were many shootings. There was a you know, as it's going to be vividly, I think, portrayed in the movie, there was a house that was dynamited and blown up.

Three people killed in it. So those I mean, obviously, you know, those didn't take Sherlock Holmes to to know that you were dealing with homicides. But there were a lot of others, you know, that were just very quiet and just where the, you know, the homicide, if, in fact, that's what it was, just just wasn't obvious and would have taken some serious investigation and in most cases was not done.

And in the article that you wrote about how the total number of victims, you know, we may or we will never know the total number of victims compared to what's officially on record. You talked about a few specific or wrote about a few specific stories. Is there anything about those that you'd want to share on the podcast?

You know, it's difficult, you know, a hundred years removed to find people who can talk about it or family members that still remember. I you know, we I guess, you know, centrally or especially important to our story was, you know, an interview we did with former Osage principal chief Jim Gray, who is the great grandson of one of the one of the pivotal, pivotal figures, you know, in the whole story.

And that was Henry Roan, who was one of the victims and who was a victim who ultimately it was his his slaying that that Hale and the others held accountable were charged for Henry, you know, ended up being a pivotal figure in the story. He was he was murdered, found, you know, shot in the head. He was one of the early murders.

He was a he wasn't the first, but it was his that I think, as we mentioned, really, really sort of triggered the terror as we called it at that point, that people could really connect the dots and see that that somebody was out to get these tribal members. But yeah, I think the interview with with former Chief Gray about his his great grandfather was was critical to our story because, number one, I mean, Henry is is so important to the overall story but also just the insights that that Jim Gray could give a contextual understanding of the other forces at work in Henry's life and in helping or making him who he was at that point in his life. But yeah, I mean, he never you know, Jim Gray never had a chance to know his great grandfather. He just knew him through things that his mother would tell him about Henry, who was her grandfather. You know, we went to one of the interviews we did was with the former executive director of the Osage History Museum in Pawhuska, which is a sort of a repository there of a lot of tribal history and artifacts.

So a wonderful place if you ever get a chance to go. But the former executive director of that is the lady still lives in that era area named Katherine Red Corn. She talked to us. She she was interviewed by David Grann for his book Killers of the Flower Moon and in it as as in our interview, you know, she talks about an exhibit that they did and there that really sort of, I think from David Grann's own recollections, really sort of launched him on this mission to write this book.

And that was an exhibit of of photos from tribal members from the early 1900s, many of whom would have been caught up in this in the reign of terror when they first put this exhibit together. I think Grann came in later and he saw it and was moved by it. But the reason I mean, we want to talk to Katherine about that, because that was pivotal.

But she has a family story that I think illustrates what a what a lot of a large number of families have been left to live with as far as questions about a relative's demise and not being able to know for sure whether it was connected. She she told us about, you know, her grandfather, a man named Raymond Red Corn, who died.

And this is important. He died in 1931 of suspicious circumstances. And the reason that's important is that if he died in 1931 and his his death is connected to the reign of terror, well, that's you know, the official span was 1921 to 1926 that these killings took place. So if if his death was connected, it shows that they spanned not only farther than that, but end of the next decade.

And, you know, we want to be careful with this because, as she said, you know, we really don't know anything for sure. But there there there's always been suspicions surrounding her grandfather's death and that he apparently, based on what things that he said at the time that were that have been passed on, he believed that his his wife at the time, in 1931, I believe, would have been his second wife was actually poisoning him.

And he from what Catherine and others told us, you know, if you went over to his house during that time period, he would advise you, don't eat anything while you're here. Don't drink anything. You know, he clearly believes something was going on. And then and then what do you know? One day he dies and now he had had a protracted illness.

He had been growing weaker. Well, the only thing we can say, you know, and it really is circumstantial, you know, case. But, you know, the the evidence does seem to fit the patterns of of other what we might call other poisonings. And one thing that makes this so difficult is, is some of these killings were were it was very obvious that they were homicides that you because they were violent.

I mean, like with Henry who was shot in the head, I mean, there was no denying it. But with many, many others that that people in retrospect now, we believe, were suspicious. I mean, the cause was just not so obvious. And this was an era when when poisonings were very common, a lot of murders by poison. And depending on, you know, what the substance was and how it was administered, it could be very hard to detect.

Now, they could, you know, if they did an autopsy and they did a what we now call a toxic toxicological do talks on it, they could determine that poison was present. They did have that. They did have that capacity. Then, however, you know, if if there was no obvious reason to do it and and you also were dealing with potentially corrupt authorities who were not inclined to look too closely, a lot of these a lot of these deaths were never investigated.

We have to take a quick break. So don't go too far.

The reign of terror did just that, created an atmosphere of fear in the Osage community. Fear of violence and fear that authorities weren't going to help, even if someone were to speak up. Randy explained how this fear impacted the investigations.

The earliest? 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, is as is 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. And 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 other people in And, you know, I think Molly 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. And, you know, so again, you'd have people just go missing their bodies, you know, that that would turn out you know, they'd find them out in the in the oil field or or in a ravine or or you'd have one thing that happened a lot was was unexplained deaths.

People would, you know, quote, get sick and die. And that happened with Molly Burkhart mother. And and at least and in one of her, at least one of her sisters, where they, uh, they called it like mysterious wasting disease and things like they didn't really have a name for it. And the FBI suspected the local doctor was in on it, that he that he knew what was going on.

And he was, you know, making it worse or at least reporting it.

Maybe taking kickbacks from the perpetrators.

Well, yes, exactly.

Some people some of these folks suffered from diabetes and they weren't being. Now, treating diabetes, I think in those days was probably a lot more difficult anyway. But they were not like, we're not helping it anyway. Mm hmm. And it you know, it was just.

It... Was it was a time when you just had to, you know, be careful about every little thing you did and said.

And this is where we wrap things up today. Thanks for listening to Late Edition, Crime Beat Chronicles. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss. Our next episode will pick up with the investigation and who was held responsible- or not- for the murders during the Osage reign of terror.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 upcoming 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 explore the history of the Osages and what led to the crimes committed against them.

Read all of the coverage of the film Killers of the Flower Moon and related stories here.

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. 

Our next few episodes are going to take us back to the late 1800s through the 1920s to Osage County in Oklahoma. With the help of and in partnership with reporters from the Tulsa World, the daily newspaper for the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and primary paper for the northeastern and eastern parts of the state.

Before we dive into those conversations, a tiny bit of background over the next set of episodes we're going to cover the Osage reign of terror, a series of murders of members of the Osage tribe and those who supported them that took place in the 1920s. By all accounts, these crimes are committed by people attempting to gain control of the Osage as oil rights and the profits from it.

We'll cover some of the history of the tribe, the crimes themselves, the investigation by the be a lie, which later became the FBI, and later a look at the crimes place and pop culture captured in books, newspapers and the soon to be released Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon, which was filmed in the same area that the events took place.

But back to the beginning, I spoke with Randy Krehbiel of the Tulsa World, someone we'll hear from several times as we tell this story about how the Osage tribe ended up in what is now Oklahoma.

My name is Randy Krehbiel. I've been at the Tulsa World since 1979. I came here as a sportswriter, did that for about 13 years, switched over to news. And over the years, I've written a lot of things. I've written about a lot of different subjects, but I've written a lot about history and the history of this area era.

I actually published the book several years ago on the 1921 race massacre, and I've written a book on the history of the Tulsa World and the city of Tulsa. And so all of these things are really interesting to me. And and some things, you know, you kind of know about for a while and some things you don't. My main job actually is covering state and federal government.

What kind of led you to writing about the Osage tribe, the the reign of terror and everything that goes into the story of killing of the flower moon?

You know, I had actually written a little bit about it probably 15 years ago or something like that. And there's nothing in-depth like, you know, the book or the David Green book or some of the other books that have been written about it. And I got into it and, it's just like a lot of other things. It's, you know, part of our our story.

It's part of how we we got here and, you know, I think I was probably somewhat fascinated, if that's the right word, by just just how terrible some of these people were. And also, you know, the people who were victimized by them, too, you know. So it's you know, it's part of who we are. And not only, you know, in Oklahoma, but really across the country.

And it's it's part of it's part of the history that, you know, we probably don't like to think about as much It does it doesn't make us feel as good as 4th of July.

Kind of, I guess, on that topic. I think people obviously in Oklahoma, but people of a certain age, I guess I should say, because I'm not sure that it's necessarily being taught as widely as it used to be, are aware of, you know, like the Trail of Tears and the establishment of, you know, Indian territory. But like people may not be familiar with the existence of the Osage people and everything they went through.

So can you just kind of talk a little bit about how they ended up in what is now Tulsa and kind of what what went into that?

Yes, ages originally were a very large tribe and they they're they're sort of their home grounds, at least at the time of, you know, European encounter was most of the state of Missouri and and some of Arkansas and then out onto the plains in Kansas and Oklahoma and then in the 1800s and they were kind of pushed by treaty into an area in Missouri and then that and then into Kansas and in 1872, they sold their reservation in Kansas and bought 1.7 million acres from the Cherokee Nation.

And for their what became their final reservation. And because they bought their reservation, they they owned it. They they had a title to it. It gave them a little different status going forward and and it allowed them to get some concessions. Then when the state of Oklahoma was created really in 1960 to accommodate and become a state until 1907, but by that time, they had been reduced to, you know, just a few thousand people.

They all all of that moving around and man squished together. And they'd undergone a lot of illness and so forth. So they they were down by statehood. They were down to fewer than 2500 people living on the reservation.

It's my understanding that the Osage land that they had, it wasn't, I guess, the most hospitable, especially when it comes to like agriculture. So how did they initially I'm assuming they didn't buy it and then strike oil immediately?

No, actually, yeah. So the story is, is that they actually chose that land because they thought it was the least attractive to white people and they would be left alone. And the story the chief Standing bear tells and there's a tell the story, too, is that they sent out these scouting parties and they told them to throw their spear into the ground.

And if the spear stuck, they were supposed to move on because it meant the soil was too thick and too rich and there'd be white people coming for it. But if they threw their spear into the ground and it fell over because it had hit rock, that's where they wanted wanted to be. And so the story is, again, that they actually chose pretty poor agricultural land.

Now, it almost immediately didn't work out that way because it wasn't very good for farming, but it was very good for for grazing. And they had, you know, the cattlemen from Texas driving cattle up into Kansas. So they wound up, you know, making a fairly good living off leasing their their land to the cattlemen for grazing.

That's a great visual, though. The story that you said that it was cheap standing there. Right, that he said that the steers. That's a great visual. We have to take a quick break, so don't go too far. An important thing to note is that in 1887, the Dawes Act divided up communally owned reservations into privately owned allotments as a way to force Native Americans to assimilate, to make each member of the tribe an owner of 160 acres and selling the quote unquote, surplus land to non-natives.

This made tribal members, private property owners and effectively ended their communal way of living since the Osage bought their land outright. They were exempt from the allotments under the Dawes Act. Instead, Chief James Big Heart insisted on what is known as the Osage Allotment Act in 1906, where the Osage allotted all of their land to their people, giving 657 acres each to the over 2200 registered Osage.

I also spoke with Jimmie Tramel, pop culture writer at the Tulsa World.

Hey, I'm Jimmie Tramel. I'm a pop culture writer at the Tulsa World, a newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and TulsaWorld.Com. I was a sportswriter for 25 years, but for the last ten years, I've been our pop culture person.

You know, I think everybody or most people of a certain age anyway, should be familiar with the Trail of Tears, everything with how Oklahoma was formed. But they may not have, you know, all of the insight into what happened with the Osage people.

What you just said is fascinating and said you should know. I think maybe the words you use, we should have known about this. But like the Tulsa race massacre of the 1920s, the Osage reign of terror occurred in the same era. And until recently, I think many people not I mean, Oklahomans and around the world, we're not familiar with these things.

Sometimes it takes pop culture to bring awareness to these things that the history books haven't told us. Like the movie HBO's Watchmen brought the Tulsa Race massacre into the consciousness. And I think this movie, Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, is Bring is doing the same thing to bring the awareness to the Osage reign of terror.

Yes. And thank you for mentioning the film is called Killers of the Flower Moon.

Yes. Filmed in Oklahoma, we're on the same turf where the actual Osage reign of terror happened. At one point in history, the the Osage nation of It's a Tribe, one of many tribes in Oklahoma was prior to statehood. Oklahoma was known as Indian Territory because all the tribes had land here that were there. People could live, and maybe this would never be a state, but actually it became a state in 1907.

But the Osage land, I think a lot of people would say was not the best land in Oklahoma. But guess what? Oil was found under that land and the Osage people became like the wealthiest people on Earth overnight almost. And then what happens when moneys are involved is greed, betrayal, and in this case, even murder, where there were several murders of the Osage, because people wanted their oil money.

It's funny how money can motivate people to do such heinous things, right?

Yeah. I mean, brings out the worst in people and in many occasions. And and eventually you hope someone will step up and do right. But if you when you read the book Killers of the Flower Moon, you'll see that many people who should have known better were conspirators in this.

What kind of wealth? Do you know how that translates into terms to current day?

Well, this kind of wealth, when they would run out of gas in an automobile they had purchased rather than just fill up with a new tank of gas. They would be so like, here's a new car. So that kind of money.

That does incite less scrupulous people to do bad things, definitely.

And that's where we're going to leave the story for today. Thanks for listening to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss our next episode where we discuss the crimes that became known as the Osage Reign of Terror.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode continues the conversation with Dianne Berg, author of What's behind our enduring fascination with wives and mothers who kill. In this episode, Nat Cardona and Diane talk about what causes wives and mothers to commit murder and how the public, judicial system and medical fields contribute and/or react to these criminal events.

To listen to the first half of the interview with Dianne, click here. 

To learn more about Dianne Berg, click here. 

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Welcome to Lee Enterprise's Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. I'm your host Nat Cardona. In this episode, we're continuing the exploration of a niche area of true crime stories, the obsession that fans seem to have with killer wives and mothers. We're back with Diane Berg, a professor at Clark University and author of the article What's behind our enduring fascination with wives and mothers who kill? She is very much an expert on this complex topic. If you haven't listened to the first episode, go back and listen to the first half of my interview, please. Otherwise, we pick up the conversation back up by discussing some causes of what makes mothers and wives kill.

I'm a mother myself and I'm, I'm actually pregnant.

So I'm gonna have a baby in four weeks.

I'm actually pregnant, but I'm having a baby in four weeks. Thank you. So I'm kind of like, you know, going through all these things and, you know, very much in the, you know, what makes me different from these other women who have done this historically or in more recent history.

But the thing that comes to mind is there is just something so grabbing about when women do this, because you carry the child for so long and you birth the child and it's so much more intimate than the father who's removed and can kind of clean his hands in the sense of when there is a murder, you can go.

You know, and that's because he's not involved. So in the natural process of pregnancy and birth. So, yeah, when there are these women historically or modern day that do this, it's like, well, you know, you just sit there and go, how how could this happen? How could this happen? And you do. The next point I want to get at is the openness nowadays that we have about talking about postpartum depression, because there seems to be a link with that postpartum psychosis.

And you mentioned it's Lynsey Clancy who's kind of the most recent with that. So in your research and I is something you mentioned, I just want to clarify. Have you you've seen a difference between, let's say, 20, 30 years ago media coverage and nowadays media coverage of like like just jump into that.

Okay. I mean, I kind of want to take those in order, if I may. So, yeah. First, going back to what you were talking about, how okay, when a man does it. Yes, that's terrible and bad and they're they're bad people. But when a woman does it, when a mother does it, especially, there's all this kind of language of the unnatural and the monstrous.

And again, going back to, you know, right now, I've been rereading Euripides Medea all week to get ready for this class, because Medea is like the her murderous mother. Right. And a lot of times these these early modern mothers who kill their children, who, as you point out statistically are fewer than men who kill their children. It is then is now like men commit way more domestic violence than women do.

But women do it. It gets more attention. And it's because of this unnatural list. Right? Women mothers are supposed to be, as you say, it's the natural process whereby we actually think we incubate the child. And there's a lot of that kind of language of like, how could she like a bloody like a bloody tiger? A tiger wouldn't do a thing like this.

A snake wouldn't do a thing like this. The child that she nursed in her body for 40 weeks and fed with her breasts, and there's all this kind of language of like how unnatural this is that you would destroy your own creation in this way. And I think that's really deep. Obviously, that plays it. I think at a really macro level, it plays into fears about like God destroying the earth.

But I think on the more kind of social and cultural level, it just flies in the face of everything that women are supposed to be. We're supposed to be kind and gentle and nurturing and giving and selfless, and all of these things are intimately tied up with our concept of the mother, right? The mother just gives and gives and gives.

The mother is is a a you know, a vessel that never runs dry. Right. That's what it's supposed to be. And so if a mother not only fails to deliver on all those counts, but actually turns on her children and even destroys them, this like, taps into, I think, some really elemental fears. And I think that's why we're so interested in it.

And I think that's why we stay interested in it. And as a mother, I'm a mother as well. I think it's it strikes a particular chord because it's that on the one hand, yes, there's that schadenfreude or. Right, There's that. Well, I didn't do that. You didn't do that? Yeah. My, my, my kid cried all day, too, but I didn't, you know, throw him out a window.

There's that. But there's also the more interesting thing is that on some level, I think anyone who has ever had to care for a small child, an infant, especially if you have recently given birth and your own body and your own mind are still you know, you're not yourself yet. I think anyone who's been in that position has been that exhausted, that frustrated, felt that inadequate, felt how hard it is to live up to all those things.

I just enumerated that mothers are supposed to be can understand how it happens. And that's terrifying that there but for the grace of God go. I write that if I hadn't had my support network, if I hadn't had my level of education, if I hadn't known how to find help. Right. That the I might have done a thing like that.

And I think that's why we can't look away. I think that's a big part of it.

Yeah, that is actually one of the notes that I was just rereading here is that it's hard to make peace with that because, you know, whether it be it's like take guys who who commit murder, there's often the you find out that they had childhood trauma they were abused but then there's plenty of people say, well, so was I.

But I didn't it you know kill five people. It's kind of the same thing here. It's there's there's so many women who deal with postpartum depression and then it's very easy to say, well, I didn't do that and I would never think of doing that. But it's exactly what you say. It's when you stare in the face, it's like, well, it's a really thin line of what, you know, the possibility of it.

It's just it's a weird thing to kind of I just grapple with an iron out. Yeah.

And if there's actually, you know, things out of whack that would respond to medication, this isn't just even a this goes beyond just being exhaustion of being overwhelmed, feeling inadequate, all of which are incredibly legitimate things that, you know, I certainly experienced as a mother of three children. But then you actually add in some sort of, you know, chemical balance or mental illness or, you know, various factors.

Women have no resources. They have no help, they have no money, no one cares about them. We have a government that cares very much about fetuses or at least claims to care very much about fetuses. It doesn't care so much about babies or their mothers. You know, if they wind up needing extra help. So in answer to your question about the sort of coverage of these things, I do think and I hope I'm not being optimistic, I do think that I'm seeing a shift in the coverage.

It's not that there wasn't any mention when the when the Yates murders happened in 2001 or maybe it was. Yes, it was one. There was talk of the fact that this woman hadn't for one reason or another, she didn't get the care that she needed. And there were a lot of factors at play there. She and her husband were evangelical Christians.

They were part of this quiver full movement, which basically they want you to have as many children for Jesus as possible. It's God's will. You just keep having children as long as God sends them to you. She was homeschooling them all she had already had. I can't remember now if it was after her second or third child. She'd had a pretty serious case of postpartum depression to the point where her her gynecologist said she shouldn't have any more children.

This is going to happen again. It's going to get worse. But they had, I think, two more children after that. Anyway. She was being insufficiently monitored. I mean, there was a lot of talk about the fact that this woman was, in her own way, a victim. And there was a lot of finger pointing at the husband. His name was Rusty.

Rusty Yates for continuing to, you know, have children with her and allowing her to homeschool the children. She had five children under the age of seven and, you know, wasn't taking her medication. And there was a lot going on there. So it wasn't that the coverage of her was completely unsympathetic, but there was an awful lot of she's a monster.

She she couldn't have done it if she because the insanity defense, they're doing same thing with Lindsey Clancy. The prosecution is saying, well, no, no, she can't have been insane because she knew what she was doing. She was able to make a plan and carried out both Lindsey Clancy, Andrea Yates and Margaret Robinson, for that matter, wait until their husbands were away and they knew they had a window in order to commit the crimes.

And the prosecution in Clancy's case and in this case have argued that that's impossible, because if she was insane, she couldn't have made a plan, she couldn't have carried it out, etc., etc.. Of course, we know that's not true. People, people suffering from psychosis can commit, make plans and carry them out all time. And it was initially charged with first degree murder and found guilty.

And the jury didn't. They could have given her the death penalty. They they didn't, but they sent a sort of life in prison initially. And then they appealed several years later using an insanity defense, which which succeeded I don't actually think I don't have a crystal ball, but I think that the passage of 22 years is going to have made a difference in the Lindsey Clancy case.

She is, you know, remains in a psychiatric facility. I, I think that there would be a great outcry if she actually were brought to trial for murder charges. And I think that there's been so much more in the press about postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis in the wake of Lindsey Clancy's. I mean, it's a crime. I but I hesitate to use that word.

But in the wake of this very tragic incident, there's been so much more coverage of that and a lot more people coming forward, a lot of kind of op ed pieces, people saying, I have postpartum depression. This is what it's like. I you know, again, that could have been me. So I feel like there's a broader discussion about it.

And you know, it was just I think two weeks ago that the government approved this medication for women with postpartum depression to be more widely distributed, which I feel is like a huge step forward. And, you know, I mean, I can talk obviously, I can talk about this all day. At the root of this, the fact that it's 2023 and we're only now it seems like having a really serious conversation about this just speaks to the degree to which women's issues are always pushed down the list.

Right. Women's health, women's wellbeing, women's mental health. It's always bumped down the list. And of course, again, we're going back to mothers, right? Mothers aren't supposed to need anything. We're supposed to take care of everyone all the time and no one takes care of us. So I feel like, yes, progress. But wow, it's, you know, the 21st century.

I know. We need to take a quick break, so don't go too far. It's fascinating to me. And I wonder if it's repeatedly fascinating to you just if this small increment of time is where we're starting to see that little switch turn to, you know, more in favor of the other possibilities that could be at play here. But 2023 compared to, you know, 16, 16, we're not you know, how how in the media things are typecasting with these types of crimes.

Is it for it to be so not that much different? Is, oh, you know, how many how many things can you count, How many topics can you say are like that?

Yeah, I mean, that's a great money generator. So I mean, I mean. Margaret Vincent, you know, I mean, she said ultimately that she had been, you know, she had fallen under evil influences and basically the devil made her do it. And you know, there's this great woodcut on the cover of the pamphlet about her, which is called The Pity Lost Mother Goes on, but we'll just call it a pity loss.

Mother, for the sake of brevity that shows her with her children and she's strangling them and the devil is standing behind her. And he's got horns and claws and and he's he's basically making her do it. And after she had been in prison when she was apprehended, she said that she had been, you know, laboring under this terrible delusion.

And there had been, like Roman Catholic neighbors who were trying to persuade her to become a Catholic. And that's like a bad influence at this time. And once she had been spoken to at length by a proper, you know, Protestant minister, she repented and recanted. And obviously she had to be hanged for it, but she at least was able to repent and make her peace.

And so, like the the the end game of the pamphlet is that since she was truly repentant, you know, maybe she can be saved, right? Like, her body has to die, but maybe her soul can still be saved. But the important part is the repentance, right? Kind of say, yes, I did that. Yes, it was wrong in those days, you know, like, you know, I like to say yesterday's demonic possession might be today's postpartum psychosis or the other way around.

Right. That, you know, these behaviors, there's got to be some kind of a just be an explanation as to be a reason. So, you know, if it's that, you know, I have a chemical imbalance and I need to, you know, take medication and be treated for it or like, oh, like I was actually possessed by it by a demon when this happened.

There has to be some kind of resolution and you have to be sorry.

Do you know off the top of your head with Lindsay Clancy if she said anything like in.

Yeah, she said at her arraignment or I guess her she didn't speak at her arraignment, but her her counsel said that she said that she heard a voice in her head when her husband was gone. She sent her husband out on an errand. He was working from home because she was that she was sick. He had been working from home and she was doing well, apparently seemed to be doing well and hadn't had a good day with the children playing outside in the snow.

And he was working from his home office and she texted him, recalled him and said, let's get takeout. And he said, Yeah. And so he sent him to a place that was about a half hour's drive away. And she said she heard a voice in her head telling her that she had to do it now, because if she didn't do it now, she wouldn't have another chance.

That sounds pretty psychotic to me right? Andrea Yates said something pretty similar that, you know, she she knew that she would have to do it. Now. This was the chance and she had to take it. And something would have prevented them from doing these things. If, you know, if they hadn't taken these these opportunities, created, you know, these opportunities and and taken them.

That's all we've really heard from her thus far. But apparently, she you know, she told her husband that you've done it. The husband has argued very movingly. I think that she deserves compassion and not condemnation, and that if he can forgive her, then, you know, then the people, the people on Facebook comment threads should probably, you know, dig deep and either find compassion or find the ability to get off that Facebook comment thread.

Right.

Oh, my gosh. Amen to that. I mean, and that that kind of brings me to my my parting thoughts here was how you ended your piece was there. It seems to be that there's two lanes of thought here when someone's digesting all of the true crime that they can, especially when it comes to wives of mothers. It seems it's the what did you call it, the shattered fruit.

I can't.

It just means that kind of it's a nasty word and there isn't a word in English that means this. Exactly. It basically means that the sort of pleasure, often a kind of guilty pleasure. We take in the misfortunes of others.

But yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, when when the Lindsay Clancey situation occurred, I know my immediate thought was like, oh my goodness, like, you know, social media, like, that's going to be an absolute pit of despair. You know, if you do the things that people the people's hot takes. Right. But but I feel like that visceral reaction that people have where they feel like they have to get in there and say, look, she's a monster and she should go to hell.

Oh, those poor little angels, etc., etc.. That's very much part and parcel of that. Pushing it away. That can't be me. I'm not like that where you know, I'm not like that. I'm not a person who with my children, I'm not a person who would kill my husband. I'm not a person who, you know, would do X, Y, Z, terrible thing.

And so I have to jump in here and do this very kind of like performative public condemnation of this thing to kind of distance myself from it, but also kind of reassure myself that, you know, that's not me, I'm different than that. I'm better than that.

Right? That's actually the flip side of things. The other lane is what you had mentioned is that the appeal might lie in the fact that, oh, that light bulb thing, we might be capable of these things. It's kind of funny. And the thought that immediately came to me and this is always how I've felt about true crime, and especially on this topic, is like it's better to what is it the devil you know versus the devil you don't know, right?

Yeah, that's just right.

Well, I've been, you know, again, I've sort of been down this kind of classical tragedy rabbit hole this week. You know, I come back to what do we get out of this kind of stuff, Like, you know, here you are. You confess to being like you're constantly devouring this material, right? I do it. Lots of people I know do it.

True crime, you know, has been so massive in recent years. Right. People just devour this stuff. I mean, it's always been very popular. It does seem like it's really kind of having a moment culturally. There's what we get from this stuff is is catharsis, Right? I mean, it's the same thing as as classical tragedy, right? We we watched the terrible thing happen, but the terrible thing hasn't happened to us.

Now, if we're talking about a drama, if we're talking about Medea or Oedipus Rex or even Hamlet, yet the body, you know, the bodies are littering the stage and all these terrible things have happened. We have the the purging of pity and terror that comes. But no one has actually died. Nothing terrible has actually happened. We leave the theater feeling kind of scoured out and then we go and we we get a coffee and we chat about it.

Right. But with the true crime stuff, someone has died. Something a real tragedy has occurred. And yet I still feel like it's that catharsis that you know, we see it, we watch it. You know, people watch to watch these trials when they can. Right? They need to see how it ends. And then they can walk away from it and it hasn't happened to us.

Mhm. Right. We sort of had the, the, the purging of pity and terror but something terrible really has happened and still it's not like when a play is over and now the play is over. As you say, these stories happen over and over again.

It's so, so accessible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I mean yeah that, yeah, yeah. And then there's that other thing. Go ahead, Go ahead.

No, no, it's just kind of. I just feel like this. This appeal is kind of timeless, and it speaks to something in in like, the human condition. And I'm not sure it's a very nice thing in the human condition, but it certainly is. There.

That's my thinking. Exactly. Yeah. It really it all ties in together. It's just. Yeah, definitely something to chew on, to use. I mean, what's next for you in this grand scheme of things. And I think going forward, I mean that's kind of a really open ended question.

I, I mean, I'm excited for this, this course. I'm going to start teaching on Monday, which is again, we're going to start with with Medea and we're moving on to so then we're moving on to some everything inside of mothers and we're going to move on to some some women who kill, too. I don't know. We're moving on to petty tyrants after that.

So we'll have some texts about fathers who abuse their authority by killing their wives and or children. And we're going to end up with wives who who kill their their husbands sort of petty traitors. And I will be putting kind of early modern texts in conversation with more modern cases throughout the semester. So I think it's going to be really fun and interesting.

And I'm hoping my my I have I have every intention of writing a book, which is I have a title. It's going to be the same title as my seminar are actually Pulp Pulp nonfiction, Oh, True Crime and Fake News and Early Modern England. So that's that's my next big project. I'm currently working on a of what I think is going to be more public facing piece which is kind of different but kind of not.

It's actually about Barbie and Paradise Lost. Milton's Paradise Lost, which I think is kind of interesting, is sort of Barbie Land as a kind of Eden and Ken as a kind of Adam figure. But that's that's what I'm kind of working on right now on the side. We'll see what happens with that. But yeah, I think going forward, you know, it's going to kind of be more murder and mayhem for me.

I really safe to say that's the life, right.

I hasten to add, I'm actually a very nice person. And it's funny that I know. I mean, I have three children of my own. And I think they they think it's they're a little bemused that this is kind of like my my reputation. I was once at a conference and I was introduced to someone and he said, Oh, you're the infanticide woman.

And I was like, Please don't call me that. But, you know, yeah, I have children, I have children, I have dogs and cats. I, you know, I, I'm, I'm a nice person. I swear to God, you know, I'm vegan. I've been begging for for a very long time. So, yeah, this is all purely intellectual, I assure you.

Yeah. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, Well, these are wrenching, all of that. And is there any way, if a listener is interested in following you and is not obviously at one of your classes at university, one of your son winners at university, is there a way that people can follow what you're doing or publishing.

A I'm not really very I I'm not on Twitter or whatever it's called this week, so I have to go. Yeah, right. Perhaps going forward at this at this point, mainly, you know, just through, through what I publish. Yeah. And up to Clark University. I, I teach English at Clark University in Massachusetts.

Okay. Okay. So Google search, people.

And that is that, my friends, special thanks to Diane Berg for joining the show and then giving us a look at what's mesmerized true crime fans for centuries. Thanks for listening to Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss what's coming next. See you later on.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Pew Research Center found in 2022 that nearly 25% of top-ranked podcasts were true crime-related. In the next set of episodes, host Nat Cardona speaks with Dianne Berg, college professor and author of What's behind our enduring fascination with wives and mothers who kill, to explore why this niche of true crime fascinates so many. 

In this first episode, we discuss the history of the public's nearly-fanatical interest in mothers and wives who commit murder and why societies are particularly fascinated by these stories. 

To learn more about Dianne Berg, click here. 

Episode transcript

Note: The following transcript was created by Slack and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:

Hey there, as a listener of this podcast, you must be at least somewhat into the whole true crime genre.

But did you know that True Crime is the most common topic among top ranked podcasts?

To be specific?

The Pew Research Center reports that in 2022 almost a quarter of top podcasts are primarily about true crime.

Welcome to Lee Enterprise's Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles.

I'm your host Nat Cardona.

In the next two episodes, we're going to explore a very niche area of true crime stories.

The obsession that fans seem to have with killer wives and mothers.

But how does one even begin to tackle such a complex topic?

Enter Dianne Berg.

She's a professor at Clark University and the author of the article, what's behind our enduring fascination with wives and mothers who kill her?

Research traces this phenomenon back to literature from the 15 hundreds and 16 hundreds with clearly printed details of the early fascination that people had with murderesses.

And here's my interview with Dianne just to kick things off.

Why don't you just tell me a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do?

Nowadays.

Ok.

I, that's kind of hard to answer.

I mean, where he, ok.

Well, once upon a time before I decided to become an academic, I, was, the education program manager at a Museum of Medieval and Renaissance Arms and Armor, in Worcester, Massachusetts, called the Higgins Armory Museum, which is now sadly defunct.

I left years before, it, it went out, sort of went out of business. But while I was there, I learned a great deal about, armor and, and weapons and warfare and medieval politics and things.

I was always very interested in medieval renaissance, history and literature. But not so much that side of it. But it kind of opened up, a different window in, into these things for me doing that work.

And when I left there, I realized that what I had enjoyed most about that job was researching and developing education programs.

So, essentially, you know, going down research rabbit holes and writing things up.

So I went and I got a master's degree and I did the master's degree basically to see if I wanted to get a phd.

And after I had finished that, then I decided that I did indeed want to get a phd.

So, my dissertation, my doctoral dissertation focused on kind of, literary representations of true crime between about 1550, 1650.

And it was very interesting because the thing that jumped out at me when the project first started, the sort of germ of the project came about by accident when I was researching something completely different.

And I came across this pamphlet about a woman named Margaret Vincent.

And in 1616, she strangled two of her Children.

She had 31 was away at the wet nurse and so was spared and she did so because she believed that she was saving them, she was saving them.

She was taking them out of a sinful world.

And her reason for this was that she wanted to convert to Roman Catholicism.

And she thought if they didn't do that, then they were going to be damned.

And her husband was not on board with that because basically being a Catholic was illegal was essentially illegal in early 17th century England.

So she did this bad thing for what she believed were good reasons and this just rang a bell in my head because back in 2001, this woman named Andrea Yates in Texas who was an evangelical Christian.

She strangled all five, she strangled and drowned all five of her Children.

And like Margaret Vincent laid them out neatly on a bed and said afterwards that she had done so in order to save them.

And so the, you know, this really kind of struck me and I wondered how many other cases where they're out there like this because we always hear about mothers who kill their Children as being, you know, evil monsters or, they want to get rid of the kids because they want to start a new relationship or, there's all these kinds of lurid stories that have been in the news just in the past 30 years or so.

I think someone like Casey, Anthony.

Right.

But what about good mothers?

Right.

What about good mothers who do this terrible thing for what they believe at the time are good reasons.

And then of course, we've just had this Lindsay Lacy case here in Massachusetts, which is unbelievably tragic and it is kind of still evolving in, in Andrea Yates case.

Postpartum psychosis was at play in Lindsay Clancy's case.

It certainly sounds as if postpartum psychosis was at play.

We can't know what was going on with Margaret Vincent in 16 16, but she did have a new baby at the time.

So, you know, I can't prove it.

But I have, but I have my theories.

So anyway, that particular story, stumbling upon that particular story was the kind of impetus for my doctoral work.

And for most of the things that I've published since, and I'm actually about to teach a class focused on these, these kinds of stories and that leads us here today, which is why I'm talking with you.

We had found that piece, the what's behind our enduring fascination with wives and mothers who kill because of all the things you said.

It's just the, the women as the monsters and it's such a, there's so few and far between that.

Yeah, it, people latch on to it and are fascinated by it.

So we'll just kind of jump into, the piece that you've written today.

Thank you for that all that back story leading us up to Margaret Vinson, Andrea Yates.

And we'll get more into the modern day examples and parallels that you drew even with that Utah mother, which is how you started your article.

But I kind of just want to jump into and maybe this is just me fan girling.

But the the tolstoy quote that you popped in there, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way was a really good way to kick off.

Why this could be a source of interest for a lot of people looking at, you know, other people and being like, oh, that's another family's problem and that, that can't happen here and we'll get into all of that.

The first thing I wanna jump into is you mentioned how true crime is.

Nothing new.

It's always been a tale as old as time that people are fascinated with it and devour it in different ways.

Nowadays, we've got the podcasts and the documentaries and novels and this and that.

But from your background and the you know, 15, 50 16 50 that, that time range, it was not, obviously those things you mentioned, ballads, domestic tragedies and these penny pamphlets.

Can you, like, explain what those are like?

Like, what the hell are those?

Yeah, it's really interesting.

So, you know, there's no, news reporting in this period, right?

Like what we would think of as, you know, news reporting. But news does get disseminated obviously.

So, you know, if there's a big scandal, there is going to be ways for people to find out about it.

So we're, it's very interesting because we're also kind of in the early days of print, right?

The printing press arise in England in 14 75 William Caxton is the first guy to use the printing press in London in 14 75.

And he starts printing, aside from obviously religious things, you know, we're gonna are gonna get kind of priority.

He printed the Canterbury Tales and he, he printed Thomas Mallory's more Arthur.

It sort of like gives us some sense of what people were interested in reading, right?

So think about like, what were the first websites, right?

Because you can really make the printing press analogous to the internet.

Like, so what were the first things that started appearing on the internet?

It tells us something about what people were interested back in those like embryonic.

It, you know, information superhighway days.

So by the middle of the 15 hundreds.

You're getting more kind of political tracks being printed And starting to see chronicles.

So basically, these are what pass for.

They're not really news, they're kind of somewhere between like the encyclopedia Bria or something.

There's several chronicles that are very famous and their names aren't, aren't really important for our conversation.

But Rafael Hole and, and John Stow several others and they print these sort of big chronicles that are gonna give you the history of England, everything important that ever happened.

And, and mostly they just talk about kings and queens and battles and the usual things you would expect.

But this murder that happened in 15 51 which I write about in the article Thomas Arden, he was murdered on Valentine's Day 15 51 by his wife Alice and she conspired with her lover, a guy named Mosby, and some of some of their servants and a couple of hired killers.

The whole thing is actually kind of slapstick when I teach this.

When I teach the, the text that's based on the play Arden and my students are always like, I've had these murders compared to the wet Bandits in home alone, they're kind of incompetent.

That was good.

But but I can't get it out of my head.

But anyway, so this is, these are just middle class bourgeois people living in a London suburb.

And there's nothing important or famous or particularly interesting about them except the woman conspires to murder her husband.

And this winds up in one of these chronicles, it winds up in Holland.

It's chronicle amidst like, you know, Julius Caesar invading Britain and things like that.

And the reason he included this seemingly ordinary and unimportant episode he says is because of the horribleness thereof because the idea of a wife killing her husband is so horrible, right?

It goes against nature.

It goes against the sort of political theology of the time it threatens order in the household.

And in this period, there's this kind of analog framing of the household as like a miniature state, a little commonwealth.

There's a long tract about it by Robert John Dodd and Robert Clever that comes out in the 15 hundreds.

And essentially, it's kind of just saying that the household is just like a miniature kingdom and of course, who's at the top of the kingdom, right?

The husband and the father, right?

Everybody is subordinate just like the king is the head of the nation and God is the head of the universe.

And this is the analogy.

So if a wife kills her husband, it's it's a political crime, it's treason, it's like killing the king, right?

So, whereas if a husband kills his wife, he's guilty of murder.

And depending on his social class, he'll, he'll be hanged or maybe beheaded.

If a wife kills her husband, she's gonna be burned because that's the penalty for treason.

So this case gets way more attention than you would think it should merit and winds up in this chronicle and inspires a play called Arden of Fabric, which comes circa 15 90.

We don't know the writer is unknown.

And it also inspired at least one battle ballad that we know of that came out way later like 16 30 or something.

Which Ventri likewise is Alan Alice Arden, just before she dies before she gets burned at the stake.

And basically, she goes on for, I think 90 19 verses about how terrible she is and how sorry she is and how, what she did was really, really wrong and you should never tell.

So there's all this kind of like rhetorical work that these kinds of cases serve beyond just saying, OK, this is a crime, this is what happened.

These are the details.

It's like, so what right.

Going back to what you were saying about Tolstoy, right?

It's like, how can this be used weaponized to kind of reinforce the status quo?

And what's the word I want?

Sissuade discourage people, other people from doing this kind of thing, right?

Show them what the consequences are.

Mhm Yeah.

It's the, the true life scary story to keep people in line.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes, for sure.

Ca a cautionary tale the cautionary tale.

Yes.

Yeah, we need to take a quick break. So don't go too far.

Ok.

So we're gonna toggle a little bit between current day and going back and it's going off of the things that you just mentioned.

So this is probably pretty straightforward and most people especially like true crime junkies should know this.

But statistically crimes committed, you know, whether it be a murder, a rape, a burglary kidnapping.

it's typically by somebody, you know, and it's typically a man who does it and I mean, I devour these True Crime podcasts and you always hear whatever the case, it's like the husband always does it or the boyfriend and, and it's true and, and, and that's sad.

But then it's like, ok, move on because it's time a dozen.

So when you've done your right, it's just a Tuesday.

Right.

You know?

Right.

Right.

Right.

It's a 20, that's sad.

And then it's like, so like when you've done your research in, in, on all your historical, you know, literature and all, whatever have you, my guess would be that you haven't seen men as portrayed in these cautionary tales as much as, you know, Margaret Vincent or Alice Arden that you mentioned.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think, and it, I didn't really answer your question about the pamphlets and this ties into that.

So, these pamphlets are basically cheap.

I make them kind of analogous to, tabloid newspapers, you know, the things that you see at the supermarket checkout or, or online now, you know, with the kind of like the, the, the red thing in the UK, they call them red tops because they always have like a red headline.

And, you know, it's like, oh, you know, demon mother murders, helpless angel Children, you know, that, that kind of stuff.

And they, they're grabby and they're cheap and they're really disposable, right?

You read that and then you line the cat box with it or something.

And that's, these pamphlets were cheap like that.

They were mass produced.

you could buy it.

They lured, they always featured these, like, really kind of, lurid woodcuts, showing, you know, somebody hacking someone's head off or strangling a baby or whatever.

And the funny thing is that they're really kind of like early modern clip art.

They reuse the images over and over again and just changed the headline, which I think is really funny.

They're sort of like memes.

Yeah.

I'm no kidding.

Yeah, they are.

They're like memes.

So anybody would look at this image even though it's been used like six different times for 66 different context.

It's like, oh, well, that's like, oh, that's like, you know, somebody strangling their wife or something, you know, and it's just like, you know what this is gonna be about.

So, yeah, I think, I wrote a lot about this.

The way men, male perpetrators and female perpetrators are portrayed in these kinds of texts.

So, yeah, the pamphlets for sure, because they've got this kind of, again, the rhetoric is so similar to what you see in these tabloids that it's funny, it's really kind of like overwrought really over the top, kind of hysterical.

Do you remember Nancy Grace?

She used to be on TV.

She used to always follow, she'd be like, if somebody murders their kid, she's the one on TV.

Like that kind of tone that like screaming outraged, but kind of like titillated.

It's like, yeah.

Oh, I'm, I'm like pointing the finger.

These people are monsters, but I love it, you know, the tone is very, very, very similar.

So when a man does this kind of stuff, he's definitely what he's done is wrong.

So a man like kills his family or something, the portrayal of him is definitely, you know, the disapproving.

But what he has done the, the sort of social crime he has committed is, is called petty tyranny because a man is supposed to be in charge, right?

He's supposed to have all the power.

But if he, it's, and it's ok for him to chastise his subordinates, right?

Like it's his job to chastise his subordinates, you know, he should beat his Children.

If they misbehave, he should chastise his wife if she's, if she's insubordinate, right?

But he shouldn't kill them, right.

He shouldn't beat them to the point of, you know, maiming them or seriously harming them and he certainly shouldn't kill them.

So, when a man does these kinds of things, he has abused his power and that is very much disapproved of.

But there's also kind of a whiff of, there's often kind of a whiff of, well, what made him do it, what drove him to it?

Right.

Does this sound at all familiar?

You know, and I, I, ok, so it's, it's just funny that you brought this up because one of my notes that I I had mentioned is like going beyond like a guy who kills his wife.

You know, Scott Peterson comes to mind with Lacey Peterson and then Chris Watts, the family annihilator, right?

With his pregnant wife, right?

And you see every time these, these stories hit the news, like, you know, I often, I often just sort of have news on when I'm cooking in my kitchen and these things come on and I'm just like, I've got like a wooden spoon in my hand and I'm like, he did it like I know he did it like, you know, he totally, he definitely did it.

And I'm always right.

Yeah.

And it's just, it is.

So, so those two names and everything that you just had mentioned, I had this inner dialogue yesterday when I was thinking about it because it goes back to the top, like, why are, why are you and I talking today the why do we care so much when it's a wife and, or mother as opposed to the, you know, we can be like, oh, you know, Chris Watson Scott Peterson, like those guys are terrible, nail rotten hell.

But again, it goes back to when it's a woman, it's that monster.

It's a evil.

And then I kind of had this own thought dialogue.

I'm a mother myself and I'm, I'm actually pregnant.

So I'm gonna have a baby in four weeks.

Thank you.

So I'm kind of like, you know, going through all of these things and, you know, very much in the, you know, what makes me different from these other women who have done this historically or in more recent history.

But the thing that comes to mind is there is just something so grabbing about when women do this because you carry the child for so long and you birth the child and it's so much more intimate than the father who's removed and can kind of clean his hands in the sense of when there is a murder, you can go, you know, and that's because he's not involved.

So in the, in the natural process of pregnancy and birth.

So, yeah, when there are these women historically or modern day that do this, it's like how, you know, you just sit there and go, how you know, how could this happen?

And that's where we'll wrap up this week.

Come back next week where Dianne and I discuss how society has evolved or remain the same as far as discussing women's wellness, postpartum ghost and how all of that contributes to violence committed by women.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, we introduce you to the Lincoln Journal Stars’ published Presumed Guilty series, an award-winning examination of the case from 2009. Later in 2019, the project was adapted for a podcast, Revisiting the Case hosted by Elizabeth Rembert. This is part two of an abridged rerelease of the Presumed Guilty podcast.

We pick up with six people behind bars for the 1985 murder and rape of Helen Wilson. Six innocent people set to serve a combined 70 years. In this episode, find out how things played out in the courtroom, with defendants turning on each other with their testimonies in 1989.

Thanks to DNA evidence, the six convicted of the crime in 1989 were exonerated in 2008, and in March of 2023, Gage County completed its payoff to the Beatrice Six (or their estates)-- a total payoff of around $30 million once attorneys' fees were added. 

Read more on the case here. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, we introduce you to the Lincoln Journal Stars’ published Presumed Guilty series, an award-winning examination of the case from 2009. Later in 2019, the project was adapted for a podcast, Revisiting the Case hosted by Elizabeth Rembert. This is part one of an abridged rerelease of the Presumed Guilty podcast.

Read more on the case here. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Up next, Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles revisits the case. Read more here. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You’ll be hearing from Arizona Daily Star reporter Caitlin Schmidt.

In this episode, host Natalie Cardona and Caitlin Schmidt examine the trials of the man accused of the killings for both girls.

Past episodes from this season:

Episode One

Episode Two

More on the case

Isabel was last seen by her parents at 11 p.m. on April 21 when she was put to bed. Her father discovered she was missing the next morning, police said. Police completed a search of the Celis home in the 5600 block of East 12th Street, near East Broadway and South Craycroft Road, at about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday but would not comment on what was found.

Thousands of fliers were passed out. Landfills were searched as well as lakes and basins. Isabel’s parents Sergio and Becky Celis had come under some criticism for not speaking to the media or the public in the effort to find their daughter. More money poured into the search effort, but no more leads for years.

Then on June 3, 2014 — two years after Isabel Celis first went missing — another young girl, Maribel Gonzalez, 13, told her mother she was going to a friend’s house. Three days later her body was found near West Avra Valley Road by a Pima County sheriff’s deputy responding to a call about suspicious activity. A few days after her body was discovered, a Pima County medical examiner ruled the death a homicide by unspecified means.

In March 2017, Isabel’s body was in a rural area of Pima County nearly five years after she disappeared. Police Chief Chris Magnus said it wasn’t happenstance. An autopsy later that year confirmed it was a homicide. The bones that were recovered were redacted from the report, but an included chart of a human skeleton show part of a pelvis and several skull bones that are a darker color than the rest of the body.

Christopher Clements was charged with both crimes and in September of 2022 the first of his two trials began on the charges of kidnapping and murdering Maribel Gonzalez. 

Then, in February of 2023, Clements' trial for Isabel Celis began.

If you like what we do here at Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, please be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You’ll be hearing from Arizona Daily Star reporter Caitlin Schmidt. But first, we travel back to April 25, 2012, shortly after Isabel first went missing.

In this episode, host Schmidt discusses how police made the connection between the two cases.

Past episodes from this season:

Episode One

More on the case

Isabel was last seen by her parents at 11 p.m. on April 21 when she was put to bed. Her father discovered she was missing the next morning, police said. Police completed a search of the Celis home in the 5600 block of East 12th Street, near East Broadway and South Craycroft Road, at about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday but would not comment on what was found.

Thousands of fliers were passed out. Landfills were searched as well as lakes and basins. Isabel’s parents Sergio and Becky Celis had come under some criticism for not speaking to the media or the public in the effort to find their daughter. More money poured into the search effort, but no more leads for years.

Then on June 3, 2014 — two years after Isabel Celis first went missing — another young girl, Maribel Gonzalez, 13, told her mother she was going to a friend’s house. Three days later her body was found near West Avra Valley Road by a Pima County sheriff’s deputy responding to a call about suspicious activity. A few days after her body was discovered, a Pima County medical examiner ruled the death a homicide by unspecified means.

In March 2017, Isabel’s body was in a rural area of Pima County nearly five years after she disappeared. Police Chief Chris Magnus said it wasn’t happenstance. An autopsy later that year confirmed it was a homicide. The bones that were recovered were redacted from the report, but an included chart of a human skeleton show part of a pelvis and several skull bones that are a darker color than the rest of the body.

Next time on Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, we go deeper into the connection between these two young girls’ cases and the man on trial for their murders. If you like what we do here at Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, please be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You’ll be hearing from Arizona Daily Star reporter Caitlin Schmidt. But first, we travel back to April 25, 2012, shortly after Isabel first went missing.

Isabel was last seen by her parents at 11 p.m. on April 21 when she was put to bed. Her father discovered she was missing the next morning, police said. Police completed a search of the Celis home in the 5600 block of East 12th Street, near East Broadway and South Craycroft Road, at about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday but would not comment on what was found.

Thousands of fliers were passed out. Landfills were searched as well as lakes and basins. Isabel’s parents Sergio and Becky Celis had come under some criticism for not speaking to the media or the public in the effort to find their daughter. More money poured into the search effort, but no more leads for years.

Then on June 3, 2014 — two years after Isabel Celis first went missing — another young girl, Maribel Gonzalez, 13, told her mother she was going to a friend’s house. Three days later her body was found near West Avra Valley Road by a Pima County sheriff’s deputy responding to a call about suspicious activity. A few days after her body was discovered, a Pima County medical examiner ruled the death a homicide by unspecified means.

In March 2017, Isabel’s body was in a rural area of Pima County nearly five years after she disappeared. Police Chief Chris Magnus said it wasn’t happenstance. An autopsy later that year confirmed it was a homicide. The bones that were recovered were redacted from the report, but an included chart of a human skeleton show part of a pelvis and several skull bones that are a darker color than the rest of the body.

Next time on Late Edition Crime Beat Chronicles, we go deeper into the connection between these two young girls’ cases and the man on trial for their murders. If you like what we do here at Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles, please be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

For the next series of episodes, we will be diving into the 1990 cold case murder of Susan Negersmith in Wildwood, New Jersey. You’ll hear from reporters, past and present, who covered the case as it has unfolded throughout the years and the many twists and turns along the way.

Susan Negersmith was a 20 year-old woman from Carmel, New York. She was visiting Wildwood, New Jersey, on Memorial Day Weekend with friends in 1990.  She said goodbye to her friends in the evening of Saturday, May 26, and by the early hours of Sunday morning, Susan’s partially clothed body was found behind a dumpster near a Wildwood restaurant. Her death was originally ruled accidental, although there were signs of a struggle.

An important thing to note about Susan Negersmith’s weekend trip with friends to Wildwood: this area is a destination for a debaucherously good time. Tourists flock there in the warm weather months to party hard. There’s a boardwalk packed with restaurants and bars packed with people from all over. Drinking heavily is a main activity. The reputation of the area for all of these things quickly comes into play in the early days of the investigation ... at the expense of solving Susan’s case in a timely fashion.

For this final episode of the series, we speak with Eric Conklin, a breaking news reporter for the Press of Atlantic City, who has written about some of the recent developments in the case tied charges involving Jerry Rosado, a Millville, New Jersey, man accused of sexually assaulting Negersmith.

A motion for dismissal was made on Rosado’s behalf on the grounds that his sexual assault charge exceeded the statute of limitations governing crimes in 1990, when Negersmith’s body was found.

Rosado was released from the Cape May County jail March 30, a day after the appellate panel published their opinion siding with the defense. We'll have more details on that in the fourth episode.

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)
• DNA used to break a 30-year stalemate in Wildwood cold case (April 18, 2022)
• After 32 years, Millville man accused of attacking Susan Negersmith (April 8, 2022)
• Negersmith family finds new champion in pursuit of justice (May 31, 2015)
• Family still holds out hope on 25 anniversary of death (May 29, 2015)
• From the archives: Complete coverage from 1990-2023

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

We're currently producing the final episode of the current season that is looking into the 1990 cold case murder of Susan Negersmith in Wildwood, New Jersey.

Past episodes from this season

• Chapter 1: Susan Negersmith case went from accidental death to suspected homicide 
• Chapter 2: Juggling facts and hearsay in the Susan Negersmith homicide investigation
• Chapter 3: Arrest made in Susan Negersmith homicide case, but there's a twist

More on the case

Susan Negersmith was a 20 year-old woman from Carmel, New York. She was visiting Wildwood, New Jersey, on Memorial Day Weekend with friends in 1990.  She said goodbye to her friends in the evening of Saturday, May 26, and by the early hours of Sunday morning, Susan’s partially clothed body was found behind a dumpster near a Wildwood restaurant. Her death was originally ruled accidental, although there were signs of a struggle.

An important thing to note about Susan Negersmith’s weekend trip with friends to Wildwood: this area is a destination for a debaucherously good time. Tourists flock there in the warm weather months to party hard. There’s a boardwalk packed with restaurants and bars packed with people from all over. Drinking heavily is a main activity. The reputation of the area for all of these things quickly comes into play in the early days of the investigation ... at the expense of solving Susan’s case in a timely fashion.

Our guests this season are Yvette Craig, who initially covered the story for the Press of Atlantic City, and Bill Barrow, a reporter who has largely taken on following the case in recent years following Craig's departure from the paper.

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)
• DNA used to break a 30-year stalemate in Wildwood cold case (April 18, 2022)
• After 32 years, Millville man accused of attacking Susan Negersmith (April 8, 2022)
• Negersmith family finds new champion in pursuit of justice (May 31, 2015)
• Family still holds out hope on 25 anniversary of death (May 29, 2015)
• From the archives: Complete coverage from 1990-2023

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

For the next series of episodes, we will be diving into the 1990 cold case murder of Susan Negersmith in Wildwood, New Jersey. You’ll hear from reporters, past and present, who covered the case as it has unfolded throughout the years and the many twists and turns along the way.

Susan Negersmith was a 20 year-old woman from Carmel, New York. She was visiting Wildwood, New Jersey, on Memorial Day Weekend with friends in 1990.  She said goodbye to her friends in the evening of Saturday, May 26, and by the early hours of Sunday morning, Susan’s partially clothed body was found behind a dumpster near a Wildwood restaurant. Her death was originally ruled accidental, although there were signs of a struggle.

An important thing to note about Susan Negersmith’s weekend trip with friends to Wildwood: this area is a destination for a debaucherously good time. Tourists flock there in the warm weather months to party hard. There’s a boardwalk packed with restaurants and bars packed with people from all over. Drinking heavily is a main activity. The reputation of the area for all of these things quickly comes into play in the early days of the investigation ... at the expense of solving Susan’s case in a timely fashion.

And for more on that, we are joined by Bill Barrow, a reporter at the Press of Atlantic City who has largely taken on following the case in recent years following Yvette Craig. Bill talks about how the case evolved in recent years and where the case stands now following the arrest of Jerry Rosado, a Millville, New Jersey, man accused of sexually assaulting Negersmith.

However, a motion for dismissal was made on Rosado’s behalf on the grounds that his sexual assault charge exceeded the statute of limitations governing crimes in 1990, when Negersmith’s body was found.

Rosado was released from the Cape May County jail March 30, a day after the appellate panel published their opinion siding with the defense. We'll have more details on that in the fourth episode.

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)
• DNA used to break a 30-year stalemate in Wildwood cold case (April 18, 2022)
• After 32 years, Millville man accused of attacking Susan Negersmith (April 8, 2022)
• Negersmith family finds new champion in pursuit of justice (May 31, 2015)
• Family still holds out hope on 25 anniversary of death (May 29, 2015)
• From the archives: Complete coverage from 1990-2023

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

For the next series of episodes, we will be diving into the 1990 cold case murder of Susan Negersmith in Wildwood, New Jersey. You’ll hear from reporters, past and present, who covered the case as it has unfolded throughout the years and the many twists and turns along the way.

Before we hear from one of the original reporters on the Negersmith case, we need to head down to the Jersey Shore more than 30 years ago.

Susan Negersmith was a 20 year-old woman from Carmel, New York. She was visiting Wildwood, New Jersey, on Memorial Day Weekend with friends in 1990.  She said goodbye to her friends in the evening of Saturday, May 26, and by the early hours of Sunday morning, Susan’s partially clothed body was found behind a dumpster near a Wildwood restaurant. Her death was originally ruled accidental, although there were signs of a struggle.

An important thing to note about Susan Negersmith’s weekend trip with friends to Wildwood: this area is a destination for a debaucherously good time. Tourists flock there in the warm weather months to party hard. There’s a boardwalk packed with restaurants and bars packed with people from all over. Drinking heavily is a main activity. The reputation of the area for all of these things quickly comes into play in the early days of the investigation ... at the expense of solving Susan’s case in a timely fashion.

And for more on that, we are joined once again by Yvette Craig. She was a reporter at the Press of Atlantic City in the early 90s and closely covered Susan Negersmith’s case from day one.

Read more about the case

• Man charged in Wildwood cold case released following case dismissal (March 30, 2023)
• DNA used to break a 30-year stalemate in Wildwood cold case (April 18, 2022)
• After 32 years, Millville man accused of attacking Susan Negersmith (April 8, 2022)
• Negersmith family finds new champion in pursuit of justice (May 31, 2015)
• Family still holds out hope on 25 anniversary of death (May 29, 2015)
• From the archives: Complete coverage from 1990-2023

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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.

For the next series of episodes, we will be diving into the 1990 cold case murder of Susan Negersmith in Wildwood, New Jersey. You’ll hear from reporters, past and present, who covered the case as it has unfolded throughout the years and the many twists and turns along the way.

Before we hear from one of the original reporters on the Negersmith case, we need to head down to the Jersey Shore more than 30 years ago.

Susan Negersmith was a 20 year-old woman from Carmel, New York. She was visiting Wildwood, New Jersey, on Memorial Day Weekend with friends in 1990.  She said goodbye to her friends in the evening of Saturday, May 26, and by the early hours of Sunday morning, Susan’s partially clothed body was found behind a dumpster near a Wildwood restaurant. Her death was originally ruled accidental, although there were signs of a struggle.

An important thing to note about Susan Negersmith’s weekend trip with friends to Wildwood: this area is a destination for a debaucherously good time. Tourists flock there in the warm weather months to party hard. There’s a boardwalk packed with restaurants and bars packed with people from all over. Drinking heavily is a main activity. The reputation of the area for all of these things quickly comes into play in the early days of the investigation ... at the expense of solving Susan’s case in a timely fashion.

And for more on that, we are joined by Yvette Craig. She was a reporter at the Press of Atlantic City in the early 90s and closely covered Susan Negersmith’s case from day one.

Read more about the case

• Man charged in Wildwood cold case released following case dismissal (March 30, 2023)
• DNA used to break a 30-year stalemate in Wildwood cold case (April 18, 2022)
• After 32 years, Millville man accused of attacking Susan Negersmith (April 8, 2022)
• Negersmith family finds new champion in pursuit of justice (May 31, 2015)
• Family still holds out hope on 25 anniversary of death (May 29, 2015)
• From the archives: Complete coverage from 1990-2023

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lee Enterprises produces other podcasts such as The Ethical Life, a program that focuses on the intersection of ethics and modern life. The show is hosted by Scott Rada, Lee Enterprises social media manager, and Richard Kyte, director of the Ethics Institute at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

A recent episode of The Ethical Life is of particular interest to listeners of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles as it looks at the appeal of true-crime programs.

True crime is one Hollywood’s most successful genres. Recently, Netflix aired a 10-part series about Jeffery Dahmer, the Milwaukee serial killer, and it was a huge hit. But the sister of one of Dahmer’s victim’s said it’s sad that the producers are making money off of the tragic events that happened more than three decades ago.

Richard Kyte and Scott Rada discuss why true crime is so popular and why such disturbing stories have a strong appeal.

A link to the episode “What is so appealing about true-crime shows?” is available here.

Listen now and subscribe to The Ethical Life: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSS Feed | Omny Studio

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lee Enterprises produces other podcasts, including Across the Sky, a program dedicated to all things weather and climate. A recent episode is of particular interest to listeners of Late Edition: Crime Beat Chronicles as it takes you behind the scenes into forensic meteorology. 

We have broken out a segment of that episode that focuses on the research conducted that can be used as evidence in depositions and even inside the courtroom.

Forensic meteorologist Sherilyn Patrick, Director of Forensic Services for WeatherWorks in Hackettstown, New Jersey, provides insight. For the full episode search for “Need weather information for a lawsuit? Call a forensic meteorologist” under the Across the Sky podcast on all major podcasting hosts. 

Listen now and subscribe to Across the Sky: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | Omny Studio

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.