Welcome to the Season Finale of Criminalia: PARTNERS IN CRIME

Welcome to the final episode of our season about partners in crime -- some of whom were criminal duos, some of whom worked in gangs, but, unlike what we've found in some of our previous seasons, most of these people were absolutely guilty as charged. This season had quite a variety of crimes and cr…

The 'Last of America's Classic Train Robbers' Weren't Train Robbers at All

“Two gaudily-dressed 'Brooklyn cowboys' attempted a desert train robbery”, reported the Associated Press on November 25, 1937. Henry Loftus and Harry Donaldson have been referred to as, "the last of America's classic train robbers," but the pair weren't professional criminals. This is the story of …

Prohibition Outlaws: The Rise and Fall of the Kimes-Terrill Gang

Led by Matthew Kimes and Ray Terrill, the Kimes–Terrill Gang were known for successfully pulling off some very high-profile bank robberies -- but they may have been better known for their daring prison escapes. In the lore of their gang it's said that each member swore a blood oath promising to fre…

Serial Killers on the American Frontier: "Big" and "Little" Harpe

Herman Webster Mudgett of New Hampshire, better known by the alias H.H. Holmes, was responsible for anywhere from 20 to 200 killings before he was apprehended in 1894, and is known as one of America’s first serial killers. But ... not THE first. That title -– at least on record -- belongs to the Ha…

Samuel Green and William Ash, the 'Terrors of New England'

When the priest asked, "Are you penitent, my son?", Samuel Green, with the rope around his neck and standing at the gallows, said with a smirk, "If you wish it." On their best days, Samuel Green and William Ash were burglars, highway robbers, and counterfeiters. On their worst; violent murderers. T…

The Reluctant Blanche Barrow: Bonnie Wasn't the Only Dame in Clyde Barrow's Gang

In the Ambush Museum in Gibson, Louisiana, hangs a copy of a poem written by a woman named Blanche Barrow, and it reads: "Across the fields of yesterday / She sometimes calls to me / A little girl just back from play / the girl I used to be / And yet she smiles so wistfully / once she has crept wit…

Where Prohibition-era Gangsters Went to Hide: The Farmer's Farm

'Pretty Boy' Flloyd. John Dillinger. The Barkers. A lot of well-known gangsters emerged in the 1920s and 1930s; all of them criminals known as 'public enemies' to the government, and highly sought after by authorities, as you can imagine. But lesser known are the hideouts these criminals used -- an…

The Black Widows of Liverpool: Sisters Catherine Flannagan and Margaret Higgins

When Catherine Flannagan and her younger sister Margaret moved to Liverpool from Ireland in the late 1800s, they were among the tens of thousands of poverty-stricken Irish laborers and their families who left Ireland during the potato famine to find work in Britain during the Industrial Revolution.…

The Trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants who were – controversially – convicted of murdering Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter, a security guard and a payroll clerk, during an armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Massachusetts. About a century has …

Did Mary Blandy Know the 'Love Powder' She Gave Her Father Was Arsenic?

Mary Blandy was desperate to marry, but none of her suitors met the stringent standards set by her father -- until she met William Cranstoun, son of a Scottish peer. But her engagement to him turned out to be her downfall; William was already married. When it was divulged, her father did not approv…