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.

On a hundred-degree night in August of 1938, in Durant, Oklahoma, a fifty-year-old woman named Ethel Story burned to death in a storeroom behind her own house.

The building was eight feet by five. It had no windows. And the latch was on the outside.

Her fourteen-year-old son heard her screaming from forty feet away. He got that door open once — and watched it swing shut again.

The next afternoon a coroner's jury sat down in a funeral home and called it an accidental fire. Her funeral had already started across town. She was in the ground before the verdict was read.

And then, for three hundred and fifty-six days, nothing happened at all.

This is the story of a street that decided it knew exactly what it had seen — and then, almost a year later, changed its mind. It's the story of a traveling soap peddler that nobody in that town had ever really looked at.

The court that reviewed this case wrote that the evidence "tended to show a motive for the crime."

It never said what the motive was. Neither did the three courts that came after it.

The answer has been sitting on the front page of a 1939 newspaper — public, findable, in plain English — for eighty-seven years.

Nobody looked.

Content note: this episode describes a death by fire and the deaths of children. 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

La Crescenta, California — August 1935. A barber comes home after dark with two friends invited for a barbecue supper, and finds his wife face down in the backyard fish pond. There's a snakebite on her foot, a note pinned to the door that's been hanging there a day too long — and for a long time, longer than you'd believe, this wasn't a murder case at all.

From the newspapers, the court files, and the sworn record: the story of Mary Busch James of Burt, Iowa — and of the man the country came to call Rattlesnake James.

Every source for this episode — the front pages, the photographs, the census sheets, the court record — is at Section29.com

📖 Down in the Cellar — the case from Episode 2, now a full book. Kindle and paperback on Amazon: https://a.co/d/04uuN7Yl

Content note: this episode involves the murder of a pregnant woman and briefly references a sexual-abuse conviction. Details are kept to what the record requires.

Music by TrackTribe.

Forgotten True Crime is an independent podcast — one person doing the research, writing, recording, and editing. If the show was worth your time, share an episode or leave a review. It matters more than you know.