Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast

Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes. Two fires burned in 1898
America. One in South Carolina, where a mob murdered a Black postmaster and his two-year-old daughter. One
in Indian Territory, where a mob burned two Seminole teenagers alive. Both cases reached federal court. Neither
delivered justice.
Frazier Baker held a federal appointment. Lincoln McGeisey and Palmer Sampson were teenagers with no
connection to the crime they died for. The federal government proved it could indict in both cases. What it could
not do -- or chose not to do -- was convict. This is the story of 1898, when America showed exactly what it was
willing to tolerate.
The Victims
Frazier Baker was born around 1857 in Effingham, Florence County, South Carolina. He became a schoolteacher,
then a postmaster. On July 30, 1897, the McKinley administration appointed him the first Black postmaster of
Lake City, Williamsburg County. He and his wife Lavinia had six children: Rosa, Cora, Lincoln, Sarah, Millie, and the
youngest, Julia, who was two years old in the winter of 1898. Baker refused to abandon his federal post despite
threats, a shooting, an arson, and a boycott. He stayed.
Lincoln McGeisey was fifteen or sixteen years old. His father, Thomas McGeisey, was the superintendent of the
Seminole Nation's public schools and was in Washington, D.C., negotiating on behalf of his people when the mob
took his son. Lincoln had four siblings -- Martha, Nora, William, and James -- and had never been in trouble. Palmer
Sampson was also a teenager, the son of Sukey Natuksie and Sampson Walker. Congress formally exonerated
both young men within six months of their deaths, declaring them innocent before a single defendant stood trial.
The Crimes
On February 22, 1898, at approximately 1:00 in the morning, a mob surrounded Frazier Baker's home in Lake City,
South Carolina -- which also served as the post office. They set fire to the building and fired approximately one
hundred bullets into the structure while the Baker family was inside. Frazier Baker was killed. Two-year-old Julia
Baker died from a bullet that passed through her mother Lavinia's forearm. Three more Baker children survived
with gunshot wounds.
On January 8, 1898, shortly after 2:00 in the morning, Lincoln McGeisey and Palmer Sampson were chained to
trees at the Maud tabernacle in Indian Territory. A minister named Andrew J. Mathis prayed over them, then set
fire to the dry brush heaped around them. A crowd numbering in the hundreds watched. Three white Protestant
ministers were documented as present. Neither teenager had been formally charged, brought before any legal
authority, or connected by evidence to the murder of Mary Leard, the crime the mob claimed to be avenging.
The Investigation
In March 1898, journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett organized a delegation to the White
House, meeting President McKinley. She was the sole woman in a group that included eight Illinois congressmen.
She demanded federal action and a federal anti-lynching law.
In the Baker case, thirteen men were indicted on twenty-four criminal counts in April 1899. Joseph P. Newham
testified under immunity, admitting in open court that he personally started the fire. An all-white jury in
Charleston, South Carolina, acquitted three defendants outright and deadlocked on the remaining eight. The
judge declared a mistrial. No one was ever convicted for the murder of Frazier Baker or Julia Baker.
In the Seminole burning case, more than fifty people were indicted. Fifty-four were tried. The prosecution
succeeded in convicting six individuals, including Nelson M. Jones, a former Deputy U.S. Marshal whose federal
status made the prosecution legally viable, and Andrew J. Mathis, the minister who set the fire. It was the first
successful prosecution of lynchers in the American Southwest. When convicted mob member Mont Ballard
returned to Maud after serving seven years, the town threw him a celebration.
Historical Context
1898 was a year of organized racial terror across America. The Wilmington Massacre rewrote the political map
of North Carolina. The Curtis Act dissolved Seminole tribal government. Federal prosecutors proved the system
could work -- and then the system refused to deliver results. The United States did not pass a federal anti-lynching
law until March 29, 2022, when the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into law -- one hundred and
twenty-four years after Frazier Baker and Julia Baker were killed. Ida B. Wells-Barnett demanded that law in 1898.
She died in 1931 without seeing it. Lavinia Baker moved her family to Boston, later returned to South Carolina,
and died in 1947. The Lake City post office was renamed in honor of Frazier B. Baker on February 22, 2019. There
is no major public memorial to Lincoln McGeisey or Palmer Sampson.

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Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes. This is Episode 13, covering
Rhode Island and North Dakota with two true crime cases from the 1880s and 1890s that circle the same
question: who do you believe when the dead cannot speak?
October 1885. A wealthy Black businessman in Newport, Rhode Island, is found dead at his kitchen table -- two
gunshot wounds, unchewed bread still in his mouth. The city calls it suicide before the day is over. Eight years
later, a hired hand in North Dakota murders six members of the family that trusted him, and a fifteen-year-old
girl walks barefoot to town to report it.
Both killers were inside the circle. Both were trusted. Both destroyed the people who let them in. This episode
examines what trust costs in a country still deciding which lives deserve investigation and which can be dismissed
with a shrug from the mayor's office.
The Victims
Benjamin J. Burton was the wealthiest Black businessman in Rhode Island when he was killed in October 1885.
He had arrived in Newport around 1845 from Connecticut and spent four decades building a baggage transfer
empire -- the Original Express and the Bellevue Avenue Express Line -- moving trunks between the wharves
and the Gilded Age mansions. Burton was a civil rights organizer who helped desegregate Rhode Island's public
schools in 1866, working alongside Isaac Rice and George T. Downing. He was fifty-nine years old. He had been
eating breakfast when he was shot.
Daniel and Barbara Kreider were a Mennonite farming family who had relocated from Lancaster County, Penn-
sylvania, to a homestead southeast of Cando, North Dakota. Daniel was born in 1856; Barbara came from one
of Lancaster County's most established Mennonite families -- the Rissers, whose meeting house had been in
continuous operation since the 1700s. By summer 1893, they had eight children. Four of those children -- Bernice,
thirteen; Murbey, eleven; Mary, nine; and David, seven -- were killed alongside their parents on the morning of
July 7, 1893.
The Crimes
In Newport, Burton's son-in-law Allen Dorsey -- a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, one year from
finishing his degree -- shot Burton at 63 Levin Street on October 6, 1885. The wound sequence was medically
damning: a shot to the head first, a shot to the heart second. No powder burns. Unchewed bread in the victim's
mouth. The city ruled it suicide anyway. The coroner signed off. The mayor ridiculed the idea of murder.
In North Dakota, Albert Bomberger -- a twenty-two-year-old hired hand who had lived with the Kreider family for
five years -- killed six family members with a shotgun in thirty minutes after the eldest daughter, Annie, rejected
his advances and her father told him to leave. After the killings, Bomberger forced fifteen-year-old Annie to cook
his breakfast while the bodies lay in the rooms around her. He ate, ransacked the house, beat Annie with a rope,
and fled toward Canada on a stolen pony.
The Investigation
In the Burton case, Newport's official investigation went nowhere. The community Burton had spent forty years
building ran a parallel investigation through church and civic networks. Seven weeks later, Burton's younger
daughter Emmie came forward and named Allen Dorsey as the killer and Maria Dorsey as complicit. Her testimony
made prosecution possible. The trial began in late June 1886. Allen and Maria Dorsey were convicted and
sentenced to life. Emmie was also convicted -- she had served as lookout -- and died of consumption in the prison
infirmary within six months. In June 1887, the Burton case was presented to the American Medical Association
at their 38th Annual Meeting as an example of physical evidence clearly indicating murder that official authority
chose to read otherwise.
Annie Kreider walked to Cando barefoot. No shoes, no horse, no telephone. Her testimony was the entire
foundation of the prosecution. Bomberger was captured at Deloraine, Manitoba, three days later. The threat of
lynching was immediate -- the Grand Forks County sheriff moved Bomberger to a more secure jail. On November
21, 1893, Bomberger was arraigned. Two days later, he was sentenced to death. The entire court proceeding
lasted fifteen minutes. He was hanged on January 19, 1894 -- the first legal execution in North Dakota history.
Historical Context
These two historical murder cases sit at the edges of American justice in the Gilded Age. In Rhode Island, the
system initially failed a Black man whose physical evidence was dismissed by the same city he had served for
decades. In North Dakota, a state just four years old produced a fifteen-minute guilty plea and a death sentence
in two days -- justice delivered under the shadow of a lynch mob. Allen Dorsey was pardoned in 1912, moved to
New York City, worked as a waiter, and died in 1918. Annie Kreider lived until 1960, carrying that July morning for
sixty-seven years.

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This episode is part of Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary -- 50 states, 25 double-feature episodes
exploring the cases that shaped American history from every corner of the country.
Hawaii, 1889. A Japanese shopkeeper is lynched from a telephone pole on the main street of Honoka'a for
speaking English on behalf of plantation workers. Louisiana, 1887. Ten thousand sugar cane workers strike for cash
wages instead of scrip -- and armed paramilitaries sweep through residential streets at dawn, killing between 35
and 300 people. Two plantation economies. Two communities who challenged the system. The same answer.
The Victims
Katsu Goto was twenty-seven years old when he was killed on October 29, 1889. Born in Japan in 1862, he
changed his family name from Kobayakawa to Goto to qualify for the Hawaii immigration program. He arrived in
Honolulu Harbor on February 8, 1885, aboard the SS City of Tokio -- one of 944 immigrants in the first wave of
government-contract Japanese workers under the kanyaku imin program. After three years cutting cane at nine
dollars a month on the Hamakua Coast, Goto opened a general store in Honoka'a, the second-largest town on
the Big Island. He spoke English. He used that skill to help Japanese workers file complaints against plantation
abuses. That made him a target.
In Thibodaux, Louisiana, the victims of the November 23, 1887 massacre were overwhelmingly Black -- formerly
enslaved people and their children who had struck for fair wages during the sugar harvest. Eight names survived
the historical record: Willis Wilson, Felix Pierre, Archy Jones, Frank Patterson, Grant Conrad, Marcellin Weldon,
Riley Anderson, and Mahala Washington. They represent a fraction of those killed. The full death toll has never
been established.
The Crimes
On the night of October 28, 1889, Katsu Goto rode on horseback to Robert Overend's plantation to meet with
Japanese workers who had been fined for a cane field fire they may not have set. He left the meeting around ten
o'clock. Six men were waiting on the road: Joseph R. Mills, Thomas Steele, William C. Blabon, William D. Watson,
John Richmond, and a man identified only as Lala. Goto was found the next morning hanging from a telephone
pole on Honoka'a's main street. The coroner determined he died of asphyxiation -- he was alive when the rope
went around his neck.
In Louisiana, the 1887 sugar strike began on October 29 when approximately 10,000 workers laid down their cane
knives at the start of harvest season. The Knights of Labor had demanded $1.25 per day in cash wages, elimination
of the scrip system, and biweekly payment. Governor Samuel Douglas McEnery -- himself a planter -- deployed
eleven companies of state militia to evict striking families from plantation housing. Parish District Judge Taylor
Beattie, a former Confederate and sugar planter, declared martial law over the Black population of Thibodaux,
assembled a committee of three hundred armed white men, and required Black residents to carry passes. On
the morning of November 23, 1887, armed paramilitaries moved through Black neighborhoods for more than two
hours, killing men, women, and children in their homes, yards, and streets.
The Investigation
In Hawaii, all six perpetrators in the Katsu Goto lynching were identified within weeks. Lala and Richmond
cooperated with authorities in exchange for dropped charges. The 1890 trial convicted four men of manslaughter
-- not murder. Mills and Steele received nine years; Blabon and Watson received four years each. But justice
eroded: Steele escaped to Australia, Blabon escaped to California, and Mills was pardoned in 1894 by the same
planter-aligned provisional government that had overthrown Queen Lili'uokalani the year before. Only Watson,
who played the smallest role, served his full sentence.
In Thibodaux, no one was arrested for the killings. No one was tried. No one was convicted. The bodies were
collected and dumped in unmarked graves at a site that later became the city dump. Andrew Price, a sugar planter
who participated in the attacks, was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1889 -- two years
after the massacre.
Historical Context
Both cases occurred within plantation economies that ran on the same equation: keep labor costs low, keep
workers dependent, and make it dangerous to organize. In Hawaii, the Bayonet Constitution of 1887 had already
stripped voting rights from Asian residents. In Louisiana, the scrip system effectively trapped formerly enslaved
workers on the same land they had worked before emancipation. Black farm labor organizing in the American
South did not resume in earnest until the 1930s -- more than forty years after the Thibodaux massacre.
Today, a memorial to Katsu Goto stands near the Honoka'a Library on Mamane Street, erected in 1994 -- 105 years
after his death. A documentary, Honoka'a Hero: The Story of Katsu Goto, remains in production. In Thibodaux,
the City Council officially condemned the violence in 2017, and a state historical marker was approved for 1123
Bourbon Street. Ground-penetrating radar surveys of the former dump site have found anomalies consistent
with burials. As of 2025, excavation and formal identification have not been completed. The bodies are still in the
ground.

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Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary — fifty true crime stories from fifty states. Wyoming, 1892. A fiftee-
n-year-old orphan train rider murders two young men in a boxcar and becomes the first person executed by
the state. New York, 1906. A seventeen-year-old immigrant kills the uncle who abused her and walks free from
a packed Manhattan courtroom. Two teenagers. Two states. Two verdicts that split the question of whether a
child's history belongs to them or to the law.
In this historical true crime double feature, Foul Play examines the execution of Charles "Kansas Charley" Miller
and the acquittal of Josephine Terranova — two cases that reveal how gender, geography, and political timing
determined which children America chose to protect and which it chose to destroy.
The Victims
Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh** were eighteen and twenty years old, from St. Joseph, Missouri. They
were not vagrants. They had outfitted themselves for a tramping adventure on the Union Pacific line with new
clothes, spending money, and arms. On the night of September 27, 1890, they were shot in the head while they
slept in a boxcar somewhere between Pine Bluff and Hillsdale, Wyoming, by a fifteen-year-old boy they had been
traveling with. Fishbaugh was found alive but died without recovering.
**Gaetano and Concetta Riggio** were killed in their home at 110 East 220th Street in the Bronx by their niece
and goddaughter, Josephine Terranova, in 1906. Gaetano had been Josephine's legal guardian and godfather
since her arrival from Sicily. Trial testimony established that he had subjected her to years of forced labor and
sustained sexual abuse behind closed doors.
The Crimes
Charles Miller — known as Kansas Charley — was born in a Manhattan tenement in 1874. Orphaned by age six, he
was placed into the Children's Aid Society orphan train system founded by Charles Loring Brace in 1853. Roughly
two hundred thousand children rode those trains between 1854 and 1929. Charley was beaten by his foster family
for bedwetting and abandoned at a train depot at thirteen. He was gang-raped in a boxcar in Omaha. He bought
a pistol. On September 27, 1890, he killed Emerson and Fishbaugh in their sleep and took their belongings.
Josephine Pullare arrived at Ellis Island from San Stefano, Sicily, around 1903. Within a year, her aunt and uncle
had turned her into a domestic servant working from four in the morning until midday, seven days a week.
The sexual abuse began sometime after. Following her husband's departure, Josephine experienced a ten-day
psychological collapse involving auditory hallucinations she believed were the voice of God commanding her to
kill her uncle. She traveled to Park Row in lower Manhattan, purchased a revolver and a long potato knife, and
returned to the Bronx to kill both Gaetano and Concetta Riggio.
The Investigation and Trials
Miller turned himself in through his brother Fred's foster family in Manhattan, Kansas. His court-appointed
defender, Frank Taggart, had never handled a capital case and was not yet admitted to the Wyoming bar.
Taggart's defense included the humiliating strategy of having Charley testify to chronic masturbation — a
nineteenth-century theory linking the practice to moral derangement. The jury convicted. First-degree murder.
Death by hanging. An eighteen-month petition campaign involving senators, congressmen, and the son of Esther
Hobart Morris — the first woman to hold judicial office in the United States — failed to persuade Acting Governor
Amos Barber to commute the sentence. On April 22, 1892, Charles Miller became the first person executed by
the state of Wyoming, killed by a hydraulic gallows mechanism designed by James Julien that had never been
used on a person before.
Josephine Terranova's trial opened May 14, 1906, in Justice Francis M. Scott's courtroom on Franklin Street in
Manhattan. Several hundred people packed inside, including more than forty women from the Italian-American
community. Defense attorney ex-Judge Palmieri argued temporary madness. Prosecutor James R. Ely argued
deliberate calculation. Competing alienists — the 1906 term for forensic psychiatrists — reached irreconcilable
conclusions. The jury delivered a swift verdict: not guilty. Scholars have called it jury nullification. Josephine was
seventeen years old.
Historical Context
These two cases, separated by fourteen years, mark a fault line in American juvenile justice during the historical
true crime era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wyoming in 1892 was less than three months
past statehood, assembling its legal institutions while the Johnson County War between cattle barons and
homesteaders demanded hard enforcement. New York in 1906 had a legal tradition that sometimes extended
a margin of leniency to female defendants — the so-called "unwritten law" — though it was not applied equally
across race, class, or ethnicity.
Cornell historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg brought Charley's story back to public attention in a 2003 book,
discovered while researching juvenile male violence after the 1998 Jonesboro school shooting. In 2005, the
Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that executing people for crimes committed before age eighteen was
unconstitutional. Josephine relocated to California — reportedly with financial assistance from William Randolph
Hearst — and settled in Marin County. She died on July 16, 1981, at ninety-two years old, outliving her uncle by
seventy-five years.

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Season 40: America's 250th Anniversary. Fifty states. Fifty crimes. Two hundred and fifty years of American
history, told through the true crime cases that other shows leave behind.
New Mexico, 1892. A former sheriff walks into the dark with a man he trusts and never comes home. Illinois, 1871.
A former Secretary of State steps off his porch for a midnight train and is shot dead in the street. Both men
served their communities. Both were killed for it. Both were largely forgotten — until now. This is historical true
crime, and tonight both cases are about what happens when political power turns lethal.
Case A: Francisco Chavez and the Santa Fe Ring
Francisco Chavez was born around 1851 in New Mexico Territory, the son of a family that had shaped this region
for generations before the American flag flew over Santa Fe's plaza. He was Hispanic, a nuevomexicano, and he
became sheriff of Santa Fe County at a time when the territory's government had been captured by the Santa Fe
Ring — an informal network of Anglo-American lawyers, politicians, and land speculators who exploited Spanish
and Mexican land grants to strip Hispanic families of land they had occupied for generations.
At the center of the Ring stood Thomas Catron, a Confederate veteran and Missouri lawyer who arrived in New
Mexico in 1866. By the 1890s, Catron had acquired interests in thirty-four land grants totaling approximately
three million acres — making him, by most accounts, the largest private landowner in the United States. He had
served as district attorney, territorial attorney general, and U.S. attorney. He owned the territory as surely as
anyone could.
Chavez stood against him. Historian Tobias Duran, writing in the New Mexico Historical Review, called Chavez a
formidable foe of the Santa Fe Ring. He was the rare Hispanic Democrat using the blunt authority of the sheriff's
office to push back against the most powerful men in the territory.
On the night of May 29, 1892, Chavez was lured from a Santa Fe bar by a man named Atilano Gold — someone
he trusted. Gold walked him toward the Guadalupe bridge, near the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe,
the oldest shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the United States. Armed men waited behind a telegraph pole.
Chavez was shot multiple times. His last words, spoken in Spanish, were that brutes had assassinated him.
Four men were indicted: Francisco Gonzales y Borrego, his brother Antonio, Laureano Alarid, and Patricio
Valencia. Their defense attorney was Thomas Catron — the man widely suspected of ordering the murder,
now defending the accused killers. The prosecution's key witness, Juan Gallegos, testified that a $700 payment
had been offered through intermediaries for Chavez's death. Judge Seeds ruled that he did not believe Catron
personally made the offer, but accepted the conspiracy existed. That distinction shielded Catron from criminal
liability.
All four defendants were convicted and sentenced to death. Appeals dragged on for nearly five years. On April
2, 1897, they were hanged simultaneously at the Santa Fe jail grounds. Forty-five National Guard soldiers were
present. At 9:09 AM, the trap bolt was drawn. Three necks broke on impact. Patricio Valencia strangled for three
to four minutes before he died.
Thomas Catron was never charged. When New Mexico achieved statehood in 1912, the territory he had helped
plunder elected him as one of its first two United States Senators. He died in 1921. A former senator. Never
charged. Never tried.
Case B: Sharon Tyndale and the Seal That Outlasted Him
Sharon Tyndale was born in Philadelphia on January 19, 1816. He arrived in Belleville, Illinois in 1833 — the same
year Chicago was incorporated as a town — and spent the next three decades building railroads and building a
career. Abraham Lincoln personally appointed him Postmaster of Belleville in 1861. When Lincoln was assassinated
in 1865, Tyndale was among the committee members who received the president's coffin in Springfield. He was
one of the original fifteen members of the National Lincoln Monument Association, the group that built Lincoln's
tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery.
In 1865, Tyndale was elected Illinois Secretary of State. His younger brother Hector had bled for the Union at
Antietam, was promoted to brigadier general, and was later breveted major general for gallantry. The family's
loyalty to the Union was bone-deep.
In 1867, the Illinois legislature authorized a new state seal. Tyndale proposed reversing the state motto from "State
Sovereignty, National Union" to "National Union, State Sovereignty." The Civil War had settled that question with
blood. The Senate rejected his proposal. So the legislature gave him the wording and handed him the design.
Tyndale kept the words in their mandated order. But he designed the banner in the eagle's beak to twist, placing
the word "Sovereignty" upside down. The seal entered use in 1868. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the
word "Sovereignty" still hangs inverted on the Great Seal of the State of Illinois.
On April 29, 1871, two years after leaving office, Tyndale walked out of his home on Adams Street in Springfield
just after one in the morning, heading to the Chicago & Alton railroad station for a 1:50 AM train. On the dark
street, steps from his own front door, someone clubbed him to the ground and shot him behind the right ear with
a single-shot Derringer — the same type of weapon used to kill Abraham Lincoln six years earlier. His $50 wallet
was taken. His gold watch was not. His killer was never identified.
A five-thousand-dollar reward went unclaimed. Four theories competed — robbery, romantic entanglement,
political enemies, railroad business dispute — and the competition destroyed the investigation. The 1929 Illinois
State Journal concluded the welter of possible motives had hindered the case. No arrest was ever made.
The seal lives on. Every official document issued by the State of Illinois, every state flag that flies over Springfield,
still carries the handiwork of a man who was murdered two years after completing it.

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