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: DOCTOR ST CLAIR, DR EDW'D S WEST
HOTEL, BOARDING-HOUSE THIEF
Welcome to this week's Link Dump!The Strange Company HQ staffers wish you pleasant reading!A handy reminder that bees are weird.A look at medieval executioners.The world's oldest dated printed book.A stupid theory about the Salem Witch Trials that refuses to die.The 11th century abbot and the recycled sarcophagus.The duel between W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley.The man who made a living
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Strange Company - 10/23/2026
[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
"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
This week, we feature a guest post by Don Everett Smith Jr., author of The Goffle Road Murders of Passaic County (History Press, 2011). In a previous post on Murder by Gaslight, “Revisiting the Goffle Road Murders,” Don presented an excerpt from his book. This week’s post, “The Three Hangings, Lycoming County,” examines the 1880 murder of Andrew Miller in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania
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Murder By Gaslight - 10/24/2026
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
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.
