No. 874
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
July 14, 2026
A Jilted Woman’s Revenge.
Isabella Mariano cuts out the tongues of her lover and his bride.
July 14, 2026
alias: WILLIAMS
HOTEL THIEF
Welcome to this week's Link Dump!And greetings from the Strange Company mail room!A teenager who died in the American Revolution has finally been identified.An ancient Roman fossil collector.The strange case of the "Leavenworth Look-Alikes."The legend of what may have been the first underwater tunnel.Casual snapshots of the Romanovs.The strange case of the Beale Ciphers.A diplomat's widow
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Strange Company - 7/17/2026
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge)
oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name.
At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
The first things I noticed about 2029 First Avenue were the decorative lintels above the second floor windows. Attractively styled for window lintels on upper First Avenue, I figured this stubby holdout wedged beside two brick buildings between East 104th and 105th Streets must have been a former stable. I imagined that those roll-down window […]
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Ephemeral New York - 7/13/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
(Philadelphia Inquirer, April 29, 1895.)Johanna Gahan married Jimmy Logue, a professional thief, in
1871, just as he was preparing to serve a seven-year prison sentence for
burglary. She waited for him, and after his release, Jimmy bought a house for
them in Philadelphia. Within a year, Jimmy was off on a “thieving expedition” to
Boston. When he returned, Johanna was gone.
Those who knew Jimmy
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Murder By Gaslight - 7/18/2026
Join us on our Facebook page as we begin counting down the days to August 4th and all of the events leading up to the day. https://www.facebook.com/lizziebordenwarpsandwefts
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 7/7/2026
[Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
Jose Pedro, a Mexican, was to have married Isabella Mariano in Los Ojos, N.M., but after ruining the girl, cast her aside and married Angelica Montzan. The other day, while the inhabitants of the Pedro hacienda were taking their afternoon siesta, Isabella entered without warning and, cutting out the tongues of both the sleeping victims, fled, only to be captured by the city marshal after a hard fight and a desperate struggle, in which the maddened woman inflicted cuts, one of them serious, on the arresting officer. Both Pedro and his wife are alive. Neither will be able to articulate another word.The Bloody Century 2
Takes the reader back to 19th-century America in all its gory glory.
