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