Crime Classics — 1953
26 episodes broadcast in 1953.
June 15, 1953
The Crime of Bathsheba Spooner, the First Woman to Be Tried for Murder in the U.s
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The premiere: Bathsheba Spooner conspires to kill her husband and, in 1778, becomes the first woman tried and executed in the United States.
England, New Year's Eve 1885 -- the oddly serene death of grocer Thomas Edwin Bartlett, and the poisoning riddle it left behind.
New York, 1872: two rich rivals and the widow they both loved end in a Grand Central Hotel stairway, where flamboyant Colonel Jim Fisk is shot by his former friend Edward Stokes.
London, 1739 -- to inherit before the will can change, young Charles Drew arranges an alibi with a hook-handed smuggler and shoots his own father dead.
July 13, 1953
The Terrible Deed of John White Webster, and His Crime That Shocked the Nation.
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Harvard, 1849: Professor John White Webster murders his creditor Dr. George Parkman in his laboratory, only for a suspicious janitor to start asking questions.
St. Joseph, Missouri, 1882 -- outlaw Jesse James hangs a picture on his parlor wall while the hired Ford brothers prepare to collect the price on his head.
The sudden, baffling deathbed collapse of Major General William Scott Ketchum -- a demise nobody, including his doctors, can quite explain.
Suffolk, England, 1804: village blacksmith Edmund Thrower bludgeons a father and daughter, and eleven years later a nagging doubt reopens the case.
Pennsylvania, 1795 -- Peter Droot writes his will, unwittingly sealing the fate of two of his sons as the family axe finds the shortest road to an inheritance.
San Francisco Bay, the 1870s: the much-married Laura D. Fair boards a ferry and shoots her lover Mr. Crittenden through the heart in front of his family.
17th-century England -- a family of highwaymen led by grave-digging patriarch James Alsop takes murderous exception to a new daughter-in-law.
Rome, 62 AD: after a scuttled boat fails to drown his mother Agrippina, the Emperor Nero resolves to finish the job -- with a rare turn of William Conrad singing.
Troy, New York, 1855 -- grief-maddened Henrietta Robinson, clutching her doll Cecily, turns from drowning the toy to poisoning her neighbors.
Fall River, 1892: an axe finds Mr. and Mrs. Borden on a hot summer morning, and since Lizzie was acquitted the question lingers -- then who?
Rugeley, England: genial Dr. William Palmer loves the racetrack and poison in equal measure, carrying candy for his sweetheart and something deadlier for her husband.
France, 1839 -- in a quiet country summer, Madame Marie Lafarge is accused of feeding her husband an arsenic-laced cake, half loving wife, half scheming murderess.
New Mexico, from 1871 -- the short, violent life of young William Bonney, who defends his mother's honor with a knife and becomes Billy the Kid.
Warwickshire, England, 1785: Catherine Hayes, ambitious to be a widow, has her husband John killed -- and his severed head turns up beside the Thames, then in a jar.
Host Thomas Hyland opens the file on Raschi, whose grim prank among the crocodiles becomes another of his true tales of crime.
The Caribbean, 1714 -- pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, trims his blood-washed beard while his fourteenth wife proves to be no good for him at all.
6th-century Britain: in Camelot, King Arthur marches four thousand men to their deaths over a woman, and calls it chivalry.
England, 1827 -- knife-sharpener William Corder courts Maria Marten in London while, back home, she lies murdered in the Red Barn.
Edinburgh, 1826: with cadavers scarce for the medical schools, Burke and Hare hit on a grislier shortcut than grave-robbing to supply bodies on demand.
April 1865 -- a president's prophetic dream and how it came to pass, as Thomas Hyland reports on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
England, 1684: John and Judith murder for gain, then spend their remaining days hating each other and wishing they had never done it.
A hulking Scot and his small partner, Coyle and Richardson, take up a seagoing life of crime that ends with the pair swinging in the breeze.
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