A Two-Dollar Terror Series

Before the dust settled on the 1917 case, there would be accusations of murder, an exhumation of the body, three trials, one hung jury, a prison break and a scandal that rocked Southwestern Ohio.

Before he could bleed out, his family discovered the bloody, bloody scene, and rescued the beleaguered coal man. He said his only regret is that he didn't kill his meddling mother-in-law, too. This "novelette" length true crime story details the family quarrel that led to the gruesome crime and the delivery of turn-of-the-century justice.

He was working at a small shop in Northern Ohio shaving an undertaker when the sheriff arrived to arrest him. The barber said he was not Charlie King the fugitive but J.W. Thomas. He couldn't remember where he'd been the last year. This novella length true crime history shows how a wily police chief wrangled the truth from him and sent the barber on the way to his date with Old Sparky, the electric chair at the Ohio Penitentiary.

George said that he was taking his mother to a train in the fall of 1883 when they were overcome by two robbers at the end of the lane at the edge of his farm. In the course of the robbery, he claimed, the robbers killed his mother, and buried her in a ravine on George's property. He fetched a shovel for them. George said they threatened his family, so he kept quiet about it for five long weeks. This novelette-length story details the unraveling of George's story and the terrible price he paid for his rage.

When the married veterinarian Dr. David Roberts, a renowned expert on exotic cattle and distributor of a line of patent medicines for pets and farm animals, approached the spinster schoolteacher Grace Lusk about helping him edit a textbook on cattle, he sparked a three-year illicit relationship that ended in the killing of the doctor's wife. The veterinarian and the school teacher would travel separately to hotels in Chicago and Milwaukee while working on the cow book and would take long rides in the country in the wealthy veterinarian's touring car. On June 21, 1917, Dr. Roberts received a phone call summoning him to the boarding house where Grace Lusk lived, only to find his wife Mary bleeding on the parlor floor, a gunshot wound to her heart and Grace Lusk bleeding from a self-inflicted wound. For nearly an hour Miss Lusk held three grown men--including the chief of police--at bay from the top of the staircase, and even had a doctor take dictation for a farewell note to her father. Her plea would be insanity, and the trial filled with shocking revelations and torrid love letters. Read how the affair and all of its intrigues led to "The Blood-Soaked Woman at the Top of the Stairs," A Two-Dollar Terror No. 5.

The Rev. S. Althea Berrie of Muskogee, Oklahoma, was no stranger to controversy. In 1932, the handsome hymn writer found himself facing charges of heresy after preaching that Santa Claus was an affront to the Child in the manger. Much deeper trouble was in store when his wife wife, Fannie, died after a long illness and a 30-hour streak of convulsions. Two months later, the Rev. Berrie married his pretty young secretary, Ida Bess Bright, which not only set tongues wagging but placed suspicion on the composer of "In Beulah Land" and other popular Presbyterian hymns. After his late wife's siblings paid to have an autopsy done on her exhumed body and the discovery of a stack of love poems written to Ida Bess before his wife's death, the hymnist faced a charge more serious than heresy: Murder. Did he really put strychnine in her aspirin? Did Fannie Berrie die of her own hand? Or was it just the side effects of the herbal remedies prescribed by her doctor? Explore all the intricacies of this love triangle gone awry in A Two-Dollar Terror #6, "Hymns of a Raving Heart."

On November 14, 1912, house detectives at the Saratoga Hotel in Chicago discovered the body of a woman in room 409 on a blood-soaked mattress. The labels in her clothing led police to Cincinnati, where friends and relatives identified the belongings of Mrs. Emma Kraft, a highly-respected widow who had recently taken up with a much younger man of dubious reputation, one John B. Koetters, known about town as "Handsome Jack." A nationwide manhunt was on, but it took several months for the fugitive to turn up in San Francisco under the name Nieman, where he was involved with the widowed owner of a residential hotel. In "Woman Slugged; Left for Dead," True Crime Historian Richard O Jones spins the tale of a fallen woman, a man on the run and a frustrated captain of detectives who pulled out no stops to find Handsome Jack.

Here's a true crime story that is too bizarre to be believed. In 1921, the Roseburg, Oregon, dentist Dr. Richard M Brumfield tried to fake his own death by putting the dead body of the local hermit, Dennis Russell, in the flaming wreckage of Doc's roadster--after he removed the man's teeth and set off a stick of dynamite in his mouth. It was a thin ruse, and when the dentist was nowhere to be seen, a thorough manhunt of the Oregon Mountains and the Pacific Coast ensued. After a month of mistaken identities and false leads, the trail suddenly turned north to Canada, where it only took the Royal Northwest Mounted Police a few days to get their man. Or did they? Incredibly, the fugitive claimed to be the victim Dennis Russell. Then he claimed to not know who he was. Then he admitted he was Doc Brumfield, but could not remember anything that happened for more than a month. Was the dentist really mad? Or was he the criminal mastermind that the prosecutor made him out to be?

Although it wasn't yet summer, the temperature climbed into triple digits on June 3, 1925, and Lloyd Russell could not sleep that night. He lived with his mother and his brother's family in a modest three room bungalow on Progress Avenue in a neighborhood call Prospect Hill. Despite the bountiful implications of the place names, Lloyd worried about a mortgage coming due. Despite two jobs, he couldn't keep up, and he couldn't get that off his mind. Before daylight, the temperature still in the 80s, he got up from his sweat-soaked bed, loaded two pistols and shot and killed his mother, his brother, his sister-in-law and five of his brother's six children. Only 10-year-old Dorothy escaped, and if the shots didn't wake the neighborhood, her screaming in the terrible hot night did. One of those neighbors was local war hero and deputy sheriff Wesley Wulzen, who kept the man calm while more help arrived.

The tongues of Ina, Illinois, were already wagging about the friendship between the Reverend Lawrence Hight, the local circuit-riding Methodist preacher, and the pretty young housewife Elsie Sweetin when their spouses turned up dead from similar sudden illnesses just a couple of months apart in the summer and fall of 1924. Was it food poisoning as the doctors first said? Or something more sinister? True Crime Historian Richard O Jones recounts the gossip, the confessions and the trials of the couple that came to be known as "The Poison Pair of Little Egypt."