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.

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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