On January 31, 2002, Robert Roberson carried his two-year-old daughter, Nikki Curtis, into the emergency room in Palestine, Texas. She was limp and blue, and she had been sick all week. He said she had fallen out of bed in the night. The nurses thought he seemed too calm, and the detective said his story didn’t match the evidence. Nikki died the next day.

Doctors called it shaken baby syndrome. Within a year a jury had convicted Roberson of capital murder, and he was sentenced to death.

Twenty years later the case looks different. New experts point to pneumonia, the medicine she was given, and a fall. The State’s experts still stand by abuse. Roberson was later diagnosed with autism, and the detective who arrested him now says he didn’t see Robert for who he was. In October 2024, days before his execution date, a Texas House committee stepped in. A year later the state’s highest criminal court stopped the execution and sent the case back to East Texas.

This episode walks through what the jury heard, what has changed since, and why some of the people who were most sure in 2002 aren’t anymore. As of October 2026, Robert Roberson is still waiting.

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Monday night, the fourth of June, 1945. Park Avenue at Forty-Seventh Street, the Hotel Marguery, where the people who live there don't visit; they live there, in suites, with maids. Two men in soft dark hats step into an elevator, and one of them says one word: "Seven."

Up on the seventh floor, in apartment 705, a red-haired heiress is lying in bed. Her husband, Albert Langford, sixty-three, a textile man, is sitting at the foot of it, reading the paper. Then their little black Pekingese starts to growl at a door they never use. Two strangers are out there, and they want to see her about Raphael Diaz, a Metropolitan Opera tenor who has been dead for a year and a half. She tells Albert to send them away. He goes back out to the foyer, and she hears a thud, and a groan.

Within days, New York had everything it wanted except an answer: a widow who said one age and was another, a silent film star, the most famous face of 1906, a singer under a borrowed name, a self-styled chief and a self-styled baroness, and a little gift book with more than two hundred names in it and a sum of money beside every one. The papers chased all of it, and somewhere along the way they lost sight of the man on the foyer floor. This is his story, built from the newspapers of the time and the records that survive, and it's about what a city looked at instead of him, and the name a district attorney finally said out loud, five years later.

Content note: this episode describes a shooting and a death, and the investigation that followed. Nothing in it is graphic, but 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 at Section29.com: the newspaper pages from 1945 to 1950, the photographs, and a floor plan of the apartment that a newspaper artist drew in 1950.

Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

MUSIC: Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com

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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.

Two women and a girl, killed in one Chicago neighborhood in the space of seven months.

On June 5, 1945, Josephine Ross was murdered in her flat at 4108 North Kenmore Avenue. Within a week, everyone held for questioning had been let go. Six months later, on December 10, Frances Brown, a former WAVE just home from the Navy, was killed at the Pine Crest hotel on Pine Grove Avenue. On her bedroom wall, someone had written thirteen words in her own lipstick, begging to be caught. By morning, the papers had a name for a man nobody had seen: the Lipstick Killer.

By the first week of January, no one had been charged with either murder. Then, in the small hours of Monday, January 7, 1946, two miles up the same street, a six-year-old girl was taken from her bed.

This is Suzanne Degnan.

Photographs, front pages and the full source list for all three episodes are at Section29.com.

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