Retro Crime Story Time

In September of 1959, Kitty Harrig killed her husband and his mistress in their apartment in the Catskills. The town was shocked because Howard had been philandering for years, and Kitty had always handled it well. What made such a lovely person snap?

In 1957, Lena Trappin was the oldest woman in Pennsylvania to be tried for murder. The 75 year old was charged with strangling her neighbor with a belt and dragged him downstairs into his yard in the middle of the night. What motive could she have had?

In East Liverpool, Ohio in 1948, Goldie Adams is found shot dead on Christmas morning by her common-law husband, John Adams. They lived in a shack at the dump. Her ex-husband Ross Adams was sleeping on their couch. All of them had been drunk and no one remembers what happened. Who did it?

I discovered the British expression "I'm all right, Jack". It's used to describe another person who is selfish, smug, and doesn't care about anyone but themselves. This episode is about a murder in December of 1916. Jack Nolte shot his young lover Lee Ritz in Wheeling, West Virginia. Lee was a local celebrity for his talent on the football field. He had recently accepted a scholarship to Cornell, and Jack refused to be separated.

Thanksgiving of 1935 was peak drama at Chessie Tomlin's home. There was booze, adultery, and murder- all before the meal was ready! In my attempt to find a wild Thanksgiving story outside of my city, Pittsburgh once again proved to have the craziest crime.

For our Halloween episode, we went to the historic Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York to find a ghost. Despite the prison being secretive about the supernatural, we were able to find one. William Caesar killed his common-law wife Mary Martin in 1894, and his blundering of the cover-up lead the police to him.

My six year old Zach and four year old Kate join me on this episode about kids who committed crimes in our neck of the woods. We also have a story about ten year old boy who protected his brother from a kidnapper in Washington County, Pennsylvania.

In Ambridge, Pennsylvania in 1949, 15 year old Margaret Bankowski was found murdered on a slag pile off a lovers' lane near the Ohio River. The case went cold until Catherine Smutko was arrested for murder. She allegedly wanted Margaret’s dad Ziegfeld all to herself and mistook his daughter for his wife.

In the summer of 1939, the bodies of Eddie Dombrowski and his uncle Ignatz were found outside of Eddie's car on a lone country road in New Castle, Pennsylvania. The crime left the family and community confused. Some things are too tragic to wrap our minds around.