Bishop John Fisher was one of the most respected minds of Tudor England. He was also one of the very few men who dared to say “no” to King Henry VIII. Rising quickly through a series of early successes, Fisher became Bishop of Rochester, where he openly opposed the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, which named the king as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. His defiance led to imprisonment in the Tower of London and beheading in 1535. Fisher’s story is one of moral courage and the high personal cost of standing firm in one’s beliefs.

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Mary Hamilton was a young woman of Scottish descent who rose to prominence in the Russian court of Peter the Great. Serving as a lady-in-waiting to Empress Catherine I, Mary appeared to have a life worth envying. But behind the elegance of court life, she harbored dark and dangerous secrets.

Set in early 18th-century Russia, this episode examines how power, gender, and fear shaped justice under Peter the Great. While Mary Hamilton’s choices carried deadly consequences, her public execution became one of the most shocking and haunting scandals of the Romanov era.

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In this episode, we travel to the dusty streets of Bisbee, Arizona in 1883, where a robbery quickly spiraled into deadly violence. What was intended to be a targeted crime resulted in the deaths of innocent people and left the town shaken with shock and anger. At the center of it all was John Heath, the man who orchestrated the robbery while keeping his own hands free of blood.

In the aftermath of what became known as the Bisbee Massacre, five men were put on trial for first degree murder. John Heath faced a separate trial for his role in planning the crime, and while he may have believed he escaped the worst punishment, his sentence set the stage for one of the most infamous acts of vigilante justice in the American West.

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