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On the morning of December 10, 1945, a maid at the Pine Crest hotel on Chicago's North Side saw a door standing open and heard a radio playing. Inside, someone had written a message in lipstick on the wall, begging the police to catch him before he killed again. The woman in that apartment was Frances Brown, 33. She grew up in Richmond, Indiana, played the bass fiddle in her high school orchestra, served three years in the WAVES, and had been home from the war for less than three months. Her killer got a name from the newspapers almost overnight. The investigation got the same police captain who had worked the Josephine Ross case six months earlier, a crime lab, banner headlines and a long list of men questioned and let go. Then, week by week, her story moved further back in the paper. Built from the December 1945 newspaper record, this episode follows Frances Brown from Richmond to the Pine Crest, and the city's hunt for her killer from page one to page twelve. By January, she was a single paragraph in a small box on someone else's front page. Episode two of three. Content warning: this episode describes a violent murder.

Chicago, June 1945. A woman is murdered in her apartment on the North Side of the city — and when they find her, one of her hands is closed around several short black hairs. She fought him. Somebody taped the wounds on her throat closed afterwards and left the tape to dry, rinsed her clothes in the bathtub, and went out the back way, down the fire escape, between noon and one o'clock. Nothing was taken. Her name was Josephine Ross. She was forty-three years old. She had been married three times and divorced twice, and she had two daughters. The police worked her murder for eight days — one captain, one coroner, and not one other officer we can name. Then it went quiet. Six months later, when the next woman was killed, the city built a task force. It did not go back for Josephine Ross. This is episode one of three, and it is about the woman everybody forgot first. Everything here is built from the record — the death certificates, the census pages, the coroner's file, and the newspapers of 1945. Every source, photograph and document in the case file is at Section29.com. New to the show? Hit subscribe so the next two episodes find you. And if it was worth your time, a review helps more than you know — Forgotten True Crime is one person doing the research, the writing, the recording and the editing. AI is only used to enhance audio quality of what is recorded.

Updated October 1st 2026. On Wednesday morning, about an hour before the State of Tennessee was set to execute Christa Pike, a federal appeals court stopped it. This is the story of how she got there, and of the nineteen-year-old girl thirty years of headlines mostly forgot. It's a Thursday night in January of 1995, and May Martinez's phone is ringing in Orange Park, Florida. It's her daughter, Colleen, calling from Knoxville, Tennessee, five hundred miles up the interstate, where she's living at a Job Corps center in an old Holiday Inn on Dale Avenue. The call keeps breaking up. So May hangs up and calls her back. Colleen's gone out. At about eight o'clock that night, four students signed out at the front desk of that building and walked off toward the University of Tennessee. A couple of hours later, three of those names came back in. This is Colleen's story, told from where her mother stood: a bad phone connection, a sign-out book, a trial, a deal the jury never heard about, three kids from one building sent to three very different places, and thirty years of waiting for the rest of that phone call. Recorded on September 30, 2026, the day of the stay. Things may have moved since. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Content note: this episode describes the killing of a nineteen-year-old woman, quotes a jailhouse letter in crude language, and refers to claims of childhood sexual abuse made in court filings. I don't dwell on any of it, but some details are hard to hear. If that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one. ON THE BLOG — Everything I found for this episode is posted at Section29.com: the court opinions, a map of the walk from Dale Avenue to the university, and a timeline of the whole case, from that phone call to this week. There's a good deal there I didn't have room for. IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING — If you knew Colleen, or you were at the Knoxville Job Corps center on Dale Avenue in 1994 or 1995, or you know what happened to that front-desk sign-out book or the Knoxville police file, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at Section29.com. And if you have a forgotten case you'd like me to dig into, send it along. I'm always looking for the next one. A NOTE ON THE AUDIO — I narrate every episode of this show myself. I use AI tools in the edit to clean that narration up: levels, noise, the rough edges you get recording in a room that isn't a studio. The voice is mine and the read is mine. The software just makes it easier to listen to. MUSIC — Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com FIND THE SHOW — Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Section29 · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops. And if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

Half past two on a Monday afternoon, the third of March, 1952, in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Augustus Shoals comes home and finds his wife sitting on the side of the bed with her head down. She tells him what his cousin did that morning — and the cousin, on the other side of the wall, hears every word of it, and calls through the boards: "If you fool with me, I will take my old scatter gun and shoot you through the wall." Shoals answers him: "No, don't do that, Pannell. Meet me out doors." The house is three rooms in a line, split down the middle by one-by-twelve boards and paper, with two doors that open onto the same yard. Pannell is sixty and over six feet tall. Shoals is fifty-nine that day, arthritic since 1947, and out of work. The two men are cousins, and they have known each other all their lives. This is the story of a killing the record has argued about ever since — the gun, the hour, the bullet, and the spelling of the dead man's name — of the wife who was in that house from ten in the morning until the officers came for her, and of where it ended sixteen years later, somewhere nobody in that courtroom would ever have guessed. Content note: this episode carries a killing, a courtroom and a prison. It also quotes 1952 newspapers in the language they were printed in — including the word they used for these men in every headline. When you hear that word, that is 1952 talking, not me. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one. The case file — the front pages, the court opinion, the documents — is at Section29.com. Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops — and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

On a Monday evening in November 1936, a young woman carried a basket of clean laundry up the steps of a little clapboard house on South Waco Avenue in Wichita, Kansas, and knocked on her grandfather's door. Nobody answered. She knocked again on Tuesday, and again on Wednesday, and by then she had decided the old man was behind his curtains, laughing at her. On Thursday her father snapped the latch. George Washington Wiant was on the floor of the next room, fully clothed, on his left side near the wall, and the newspapers had been piling up on the porch for three days. Seventeen years later, a New York tabloid retold the case under a headline that did all the work for the reader: Perfect Candidate for Murder. An old man, alone, bad-tempered, separated from his wife, eight housekeepers hired and none of them stayed, a flock of relatives waiting to inherit, and money — everybody in the neighborhood knew — hidden somewhere in that house. A police chief with three conclusions and a bloody footprint on the linoleum. A lie detector. A woman with a briefcase and a fur coat. And a hired hand from a farm south of town who went in front of a Wichita jury twice, once with the State asking for his life. But the coroner said something about the night George Wiant died that changes what that knock on Monday evening meant. The county clerk said something about the estate that takes the paper's motive apart in a single line. And a jury that had put a boot on a footprint and voted ten to two to acquit talked itself back into a deadlock on three words that became the title of this episode. Then we went and found him ourselves: three censuses, a farm in Sumner County, a house he owned outright, a wife the paper never names, and a life that starts with a fatherless one-year-old in Ohio and runs longer than the newspaper ever knew. A beating death, a description of a body, and a district court trial. Listener discretion advised.

On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, two men walked a shoe company's payroll down a street in South Braintree, Massachusetts, the way they had done it a hundred paydays before. They never reached the other end of the street. Thirty-three years later, a New York newspaper gave that afternoon a full page, a photograph, and a map. It gave one of the murdered men a single sentence. It gave the other one four words: He was hit running. The case that grew out of that street is one of the most famous in American history, and almost nobody remembers the men who died on it. Everybody knows the two names that came later: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the shoeworker and the fish peddler pulled off a trolley car three weeks after the shooting, tried before a judge whose opinion a future Supreme Court justice called a farrago, and executed in the first minutes of an August night in 1927. This episode starts somewhere else, with Frederick Parmenter, a paymaster with a wife and two children, and Alessandro Berardelli, an Italian immigrant who became a Braintree police officer and carried a cigar case with his American name on it. Because there is a file. Twenty-one pages of it, written the day after the shooting by the doctors who examined both bodies, and it says things the newspaper never could: what the bullets did, where they went in, how long each man took to die, and what happened to the evidence that came out of them. It also contains a page that is almost blank, and the four lines on it are the chain of custody for the most argued-over bullets in American legal history. A payroll robbery, two dead men, a trial that changed the law of Massachusetts, and a question that has gone a hundred years without an answer. Listener discretion advised.

Santa Cruz, California. The ninth of September, 1933 — Admission Day, the state's own holiday — and up on Beach Hill, above the bay, the afternoon is coming down soft and warm. In the garden of a big house called "The Cabins," Francis J. M. Grace sits in his chair: fifty-nine years old, a millionaire, a retired shipping man of the Grace family, and a semi-invalid whose heart will not let him do much of anything anymore. His wife has driven downtown to shop, and the house is nearly empty but for a young nurse sitting with him. Then a woman comes up the path and stops at the edge of the lawn, and the nurse knows her: she used to work in this house, until she was let go. Grace gets up and crosses the lawn, and the two of them talk for two or three minutes — in full view, out of earshot. He comes back disturbed. The nurse asks the woman to leave, and is refused. And as the old man and the nurse start for the house, there is a shot. Grace lurches through the screen door and goes down in the hallway, his head in a pool of blood. The woman is standing a few feet away with the pistol in her hand. She does not run, and she does not deny it. She is asked why she has done this dreadful thing, and she says: "I had a reason." She says it again to the butler, who takes the gun out of her hands while she begs him for it back, saying she wants to kill herself; she says it to Mrs. Grace, coming up the drive; and she says it in the county jail that night: "I had a good reason for shooting Mr. Grace." Asked to explain, she says only: "You wouldn't understand it if I told you." Within minutes of the shot she had swallowed the sedative she carried in her purse, at the garden tap, and by nightfall she was unconscious. By then Santa Cruz had everything but the one thing it wanted: a discharged army nurse, a woman whose registry called her reputation "most excellent" — and, the prosecution would say, a woman who had taken rooms across the street from his garden seven separate times in fifteen months, under a false name, always the room that looked out on the lawn. Her name was Frieda Weltz, and by November she was on trial for first-degree murder in Santa Cruz — a charge that carried the death penalty — with the whole case come down to a trigger. The prosecutor told the jury that whatever had passed between this woman and this man "does not constitute a defense in this case," and that the court would instruct them to disregard it. So ten days of evidence went to the only question the law would let twelve people answer: whether the gun went off by itself, in a garden, in front of a witness. Eleven men and one woman sat in that box and heard a woman who had said, four times, that she had a reason — and for ten weeks nobody in Santa Cruz could get her to say the rest of it. What that reason was, and what a courtroom in 1933 was willing to do with it, is this story. The case file — every paper, every page, every source we could pin to the ground — is at ⁠Section29.com⁠. Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops — and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Music by TrackTribe

At about seven o'clock on a Sunday morning in November of 1921, two men walked out of a farmhouse on Hickory Creek, south of the little town of Woodford, Oklahoma, to gather pecans. One of them was about sixty years old. The whole county called him Uncle Bill. The other had been living in his house for a week or so — eating at his table, picking pecans alongside him to sell in Ardmore. Three days before, they had sold a haul in town and split the money. Half an hour later, five shots were fired down by the creek. They were heard by people at a house close by. In a country where a gun could mean anything, somebody listened a moment — and went back to their Sunday. Nobody went to look. Content note: this episode describes two deaths by gunfire, and it ends in a courtroom. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one. The case file — every paper, every page, every source we could pin to the ground — is at Section29.com. Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops — and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Music by TrackTribe

Omaha, Nebraska, the winter of 1926. On a Sunday night in February, a dairyman named W. L. McDevitt steps out of his house — "We're waiting supper for him now" — and is shot dead on the sidewalk in front of the First Methodist church. Four days later, a wealthy physician named Dr. Austin Searles is found shot behind the ear in his own locked office, an empty shell on the floor and his watch and keys gone. The police had a word for it: maniac. One man. One gun. No motive. And nobody had ever seen him. For a week, he owned Omaha. Windows were blacked out, theaters went dark, streets emptied, and police were ordered to shoot on sight. A railroad detective in Council Bluffs took seven bullets in the dark and lived — and he was the first man who had ever gotten a good look at the killer: heavy-set, leather vest, a quiet little pistol that made no sound. A week into the panic, a copycat sniper started shooting from the rooftops of New York City, emulating "the western man." Two people died: W. L. McDevitt, the dairyman, and Dr. Austin D. Searles, the physician. Whoever did it left the same empty shells at both scenes — but the police couldn't find a motive, and the city couldn't find a face. Nine days after the first shot, the case broke in a way nobody expected. What the papers called a maniac might have been something else entirely — and that's the part we're not going to spoil here. The case file, the newspapers, and a full list of every place the sources contradict each other — and on this case they do it constantly — are at Section29.com. Music by TrackTribe. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Listener discretion advised. This episode describes murder and gun violence.

Six-thirty on a Friday morning, February 19, 1926, in Troy, Ohio. Jacob Nesbitt gets up, fixes the furnace, sweeps the snow off the front walk, and drives to Dayton to sell kitchen machines at a food show — the machines at which his own wife had just been handed the better territory. His wife is in the bathtub. She has been there since 6:30. Frances Drake Nesbitt was twenty-six — three-time tennis champion at Ohio State, the best saleswoman in the district, and the reason her husband had just been handed Springfield and Xenia while she kept Dayton. In a town that had not seen a murder in twenty-two years. This is the story of a murder the town solved and refused to say out loud — of the overnight trip with a detective who never shut up, the friend in that house whose words opened the confession, and the guest who remembered the pajamas. Content note: this episode describes a murder and its aftermath, and it quotes 1926 newspapers in the language they were printed in. Nothing in it is gratuitous, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one. Blog: ⁠Section29.com⁠ Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops — and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

Five past eight on a Saturday morning, the eighteenth of March, 1944, in Weleetka, Oklahoma. The man delivering the milk sets his bottles down inside a corner grocery and looks over at the chair by the front door — the chair where the owner sits every morning of his life, with the radio going. The chair is empty. Arley Keck was sixty years old, though his own town would have told you sixty-five. He'd run that store for ten years and slept in the back of it, so the filling station out front could stay open all night for the truckers. He had a wife, nine children, and two boys in the war — one of them in a Japanese prison camp since the very beginning of it. By that afternoon there were bloodhounds in the street, brought up from the state penitentiary at McAlester. Red pepper had been thrown over everything the killer had touched — which is an old idea, and not a stupid one. Red pepper is supposed to ruin a dog. It was two years before anybody was arrested. This is the story of what a small Oklahoma county did with those two years — three suspects, fingerprint men brought in from the city, a reward nobody ever collected — and of what it finally took to close the case: a room in Tulsa, five hours, and a photograph that officers made on purpose to fool a man. And it's the story of the one detail I can't put down. When they finally took a man for this, they had already had him. In a cell. Two years earlier. They let him go.

This August I asked the Beverly Hills Police Department for the file on crime case number 46176. It is a homicide from 1947. They wrote back twenty-four days later. The records exist. They are in the department's possession. And they are exempt from disclosure, and will not be released. Then they told me the rest of it. The case is presently assigned to the Crimes Against Persons unit of the Detective Bureau. The file is on permanent retention — kept indefinitely, not subject to any planned destruction. And the department's summary of the incident, written out for me this year, is one sentence long: "Unknown assailant shot into window of residence fatally wounding victim." Seventy-nine years. Still assigned. Still unknown. On the night of Friday, the twentieth of June, 1947, a man sat down on a chintz sofa in a rented house on North Linden Drive and opened a newspaper. A few minutes before eleven, somebody standing in the driveway next door rested a thirty-caliber carbine on a rose trellis, fourteen feet from the window, and emptied the magazine into the room. There were nine shell casings in that driveway the next morning. There were four people awake upstairs, and a man sitting on the same sofa. Nobody saw anybody. This show is called Forgotten True Crime, and Benjamin Siegel is not forgotten. The murder is. Everybody knows the man on the sofa. Almost nobody knows what was actually done about it, or who stopped it being done, or that six people came to the funeral and it lasted four minutes. If you have a copy of Fortnight magazine for the fourteenth of July, 1947 — a Los Angeles news weekly, Siegel on the cover — I would like to hear from you. I know it exists because the publisher mailed one to the FBI. I have never been able to find one. I'd also like the Herald-Express or the Beverly Hills Citizen for the twenty-first of June, 1947. Content note: this episode describes a shooting and its results, and it quotes 1947 newspapers in the language they were printed in. Nothing in it is gratuitous, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one. Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops — and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

On the night of Friday, the seventh of April, 1944, a posse of farmers and twenty-five sailors from the naval firing station at Shawnee, Oklahoma, put about a hundred and fifty shots into a patch of brush. Twelve days after they pulled a man out of it, he had pleaded guilty to three murders and been sentenced to die. Twelve days. From three bodies to a death sentence. There was no trial. The defense called no witnesses. It called nobody at all. Four days before the shooting in the brush, a forty-seven-year-old farmer named Roy Schat drove into Oklahoma City to sell hogs and buy feed, and did not come home. That same afternoon, forty miles east, a woman named Victoria Gorski and her three-year-old daughter Martha were killed in the hallway of their own barn. One of the older girls found them when she came home to gather the eggs. Depending on which newspaper you read that week, that farm was in one of four different counties. This is the story of twelve days in the spring of 1944. It's also the story of two Oklahoma City detectives named Ernest Jones and Nathaniel "Bo" Baker, who broke this case in a rented room on North Missouri Street, and who survive in the official record as "E. E. Jones and Nathan Baker, two negro policemen." One newspaper in that city printed their names. It printed their photographs. It ran an editorial about what it meant. It was not one of the white papers. I tell this one as Andrew Orr, the sheriff of Lincoln County — what he couldn't find out, you don't find out either. And on the afternoon he was sentenced to death, Amon Johnson got into a car with Sheriff Orr and told him why he had done it. It is not what he told the court. Nobody in that courtroom ever heard it. The State of Oklahoma put him to death eleven months later. It never did establish how old he was. If you know anything about a young woman named Elouise Chandler — nineteen years old in 1944, living in Oklahoma City — I would like to hear from you. She is the reason this case was solved, and after that she goes out of the record completely. I'd also like to hear from anyone descended from the Schat or the Gorski families. Content note: this episode describes three murders, one of them a three-year-old child, and it ends with an execution. It also quotes 1944 newspapers in the language they were printed in, which I'm not going to clean up for them. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one. Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops — and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

On June 23, 2021, a 24-year-old field geologist named Daniel Robinson drove away from a water well site outside Buckeye, Arizona, in the rain. Twenty-six days later a rancher found his Jeep in a ravine three and a half miles out — rolled, every airbag fired, still in drive, his phone and keys and wallet inside it.His clothes were scattered up the hillside above it. Jeans inside out. Socks inside out.Daniel has not been seen since. He turned 29 this January.IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING: 844-602-0660. Call or text. You do not have to give your name.I wrote about this case on my blog three and a half years ago, and then I watched the country stop typing his name. This is why I came back to it.It is also not the episode I set out to make. I read the 128-page Buckeye Police Department file, and it changed what I had to say. His family has pointed at four things for five years. One of them comes apart — in their own investigator's words, not the department's. One has never been tested by anybody. And two of them are still standing, including one I had backwards until I read the officer's own report.Nobody has explained the clothes on that hillside. Not the department, not their crash expert, not the family's investigator, not me.This is also the story of David Robinson II — a retired Army combat engineer who left the desert of Afghanistan and ended up searching the desert of Arizona for his son. Fifty organized searches and counting. DANIEL CORNELIUS ROBINSONMissing since June 23, 2021 — Buckeye, Arizona.5'8", 165 lbs, black hair, brown eyes. Born without his lower right arm.Last seen driving a 2017 blue-grey Jeep Renegade.NamUs #MP82064 · Buckeye PD case #210623079HOW TO HELPFamily tip line: 844-602-0660 (call or text, anonymous accepted)Buckeye Police Department: 623-349-6400 · buckeyeaz.gov/crimetippleasehelpfinddaniel.comdanielrobinsonfoundation.orgSOURCESEvery quote in this episode is numbered to a page at Section29.com — the speaker, the date, the outlet it was said to, and a link, so you can read anything I quoted in full and decide for yourself whether I used it fairly. The 128-page police report is there too.A NOTEThis episode discusses a young man in apparent distress in the days before he disappeared. If you are struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available in the US, by call or text.CREDITSWritten, researched, recorded and edited by Trevor Shelby.Music by TrackTribe.Forgotten True Crime is an independent show. No network, no studio, no staff. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Sharing this one is the point. If it meant something to you, send it to one person — that is the actual thing the family needs.Section29.com

Oklahoma, the summer of 1978. A family pulls over on Interstate 35 to help a woman with a broken-down car. Twenty-four days later, six people are shot to death in a walk-in freezer at a steakhouse in south Oklahoma City. For eight months, nobody knew the two crimes were connected — until a ten-year-old boy came around the side of his house holding a paper sack. Nine people died: Melvin, Linda and Richard Lorenz on the highway near Purcell, and Isaac Freeman, Louis Zacarias, David Lindsey, David Salsman, Anthony Tew and Terri Horst inside the Sirloin Stockade on SW 74th. Roger Dale Stafford was executed in 1995. His brother Harold died six days after the massacre and never answered a single question about it. And Verna Stafford is 73 years old, still in an Oklahoma prison, and standing in front of the Pardon and Parole Board this week. She is the only person still alive who was in that building. She is also the only reason the case was ever solved. Court records, the appellate opinions, the parole docket, and a full list of every place the sources contradict each other — and on this case they do it constantly — are at ⁠Section29.com.⁠ Music by TrackTribe. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. Listener discretion advised. This episode describes the murders of children.