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In 1980, Pennsylvania voters elected Budd Dwyer to the office of state treasurer. At the age of 40 with 16 years’ experience in the state legislature, Dwyer was a rising star in the state’s Republican ranks. As the first member of his party to be Pennsylvania’s treasurer in 20 years, Dwyer promised the state’s citizens that he would reform the office by modernizing its outdated operations. The previous occupants of the state treasurer’s office, Dwyer said, had created a “financial antique” th...
As we have seen, Robert E. Casey won election to the office of state treasurer of Pennsylvania in 1976. Almost everyone agrees that his rise in state politics was a fluke. Presumably, at least, many (and perhaps most) voters mistook Casey for state auditor (and future governor) Robert P. Casey. So, when it was time for Robert E. to run for a second term in 1980, Pennsylvania Republicans were ready. First, they chose a rising young star in the party to be their nominee. The GOP’s candidate was B...
Robert P. Casey Sr. capped off his political career by being elected governor of Pennsylvania in 1986. He was reelected in 1990 and served from early 1987 to 1995. Casey’s road to the statehouse, however, was a rocky one. He lost three elections for governor prior to his 1986 victory! In each of his unsuccessful campaigns – in 1966, 1970 and 1978 – he was defeated in the Democratic primary. But, as we noted last week, this story is about a political scandal that is not related to the story...
Few people would deny that politics is an important part of American culture. As contentious as political campaigns often get, it is a fact of life that politics is how we elect our leaders in the United States. Politics is messy sometimes and divisive sometimes, but necessary always – if we are to have governmental officials chosen by the people. Unfortunately, sometimes those who get elected to office abuse the positions of trust the voters have given them. We almost always have at least o...
The 1879 murder of a prostitute known as Mother Featherlegs shocked the people in the town of Lusk, Wyoming. Years later, they learned that the deceased woman’s real name was Charlotte Shepard. Shepard had moved to Wyoming from Louisiana along with her boyfriend, Richard Davis. The couple had fled their native state to avoid punishment for the numerous crimes they had committed there. The business that Shepard operated out of a cabin in a remote, sparsely populated area of Wyoming Territory was...
Folks in Lusk, Wyoming, were horrified in 1879 to learn that well-known local prostitute Mother Featherlegs had been murdered near her cabin a few miles outside of town. Local authorities soon learned that Mother Featherlegs’ boyfriend was missing, along with $1,500 in jewels. While locals liked Mother Featherlegs, they were not so fond of the man with whom she lived. His name was Richard Davis and he, too, had a colorful nickname: Dangerous Dick. Suspicion fell upon him because he was, like M...
Mother Featherlegs was a prostitute who moved to Wyoming in 1876 and set up shop a few miles south of the town of Lusk. Her cabin was conveniently located on a well-travelled trail, which provided her with customers. Rumors around town were that she was from Louisiana and had been part of an outlaw gang there. An additional rumor was that her cabin was the gathering place for a new bunch of outlaws. As we saw last week, Wyoming in the 1870s was home to several thousand more men than women, and...
Men greatly outnumbered women in the American West in the late 19th century. In some places, in fact, women were almost nonexistent. In farming regions, like the Great Plains, settlers were often married couples with children, so the number of males and females were close to being equal. But that was not the case in some other western areas. Mining camps, ranches and military forts, for example, had numerous male workers but very few females. The same was true in places where railroad, lumber...
When Juliet Hulme’s true identity became known in 1994, Juliet – going by the name of Anne Perry – was not happy that her cover had been blown. For the past 15 years she had been establishing a reputation as a prolific and successful author of crime novels. She feared that exposure of her teenaged criminal conduct would ruin her career. Through 1993, Perry had published 17 novels. Her first, in 1979, introduced readers to London policeman Thomas Pitt who was good at solving murders, usual...
When filmmakers Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson went looking for Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme in 1994, they were able to find both of them living in the United Kingdom. Pauline lived in an English village under the pseudonym of Hilary Nathan. Juliet was living in a fishing village in Scotland and going by the name of Anne Perry. Back when she lived in New Zealand and was friends with Pauline, Juliet was always the more outgoing of the two. She was also a much better student than Pauline. So,...
Teenaged murderers Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were imprisoned in New Zealand from 1954 until 1959 for killing Pauline’s mother, Honorah Parker. They were released when they became 21. They served their time in different prisons and, as far as anyone knows, never had contact with each other after being convicted in the summer of 1954. Juliet wrote Pauline a few letters while incarcerated but Pauline never answered. Apparently, spending several years imprisoned and apart was enough to end t...
Sixteen-year-old Pauline Parker and her 15-year-old friend, Juliet Hulme, carried out their plan to murder Pauline’s mother on June 22, 1954, in New Zealand. As the trio walked along a pathway in a park, Juliet – as previously agreed – surreptitiously dropped a decorated stone. Honorah Parker, Pauline’s mother, bent over to pick up the object, and Pauline struck Honorah in the head with a brick. The plan had worked – except for one thing. It never occurred to the amateur killers that Honorah w...
On June 22, 1954, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme murdered Pauline’s mother, Honorah Parker. The crime took place in a park in New Zealand. At that time, Pauline was 16 years-old and Juliet was 15. They had decided that killing Honorah would make it possible for the two of them to save their friendship. Juliet’s parents’ marriage was in trouble because Hilda Hulme had been having an affair. Moreover, her husband, Henry, had lost his job at a New Zealand university, so they planned to move back...
As we saw last week, the Hulme family from London, England, beginning in 1948 lived in New Zealand, where Henry Hulme worked as a university administrator. The Hulme daughter, Juliet, who suffered from tuberculosis, lived with them there, even though she had earlier resided with relatives in the Caribbean and South Africa. In early 1954, Henry Hulme lost his job. Moreover, the Hulme marriage was in trouble due, in part, to the fact that Hilda, Henry’s wife, was having an affair with a local man....
Juliet Hulme was born in 1938 in London, England. Her parents were upper-middle class. Her father, Henry, was a prominent scientist who eventually held several important governmental positions in the British defense program during World War II. Juliet contracted tuberculosis as a child, and her parents decided to send her to live with relatives in the Caribbean and South Africa – believing that escaping England’s cold weather for warmer climes would help their daughter’s health. In 1948 Henry...
As we have seen, Alice Roth was struck by two foul balls hit by Richie Ashburn of the Philadelphia Phillies on Aug. 17, 1957, during a baseball game between the Phillies and the New York Giants. A company that specializes in statistics once estimated that the odds of a spectator at a baseball game getting hit by ONE foul ball was 1 in 300,000. That is obviously only an estimate. Such a computation would have to take into effect the size of the crowd, the number of seats in foul territory, and...
On Aug. 17, 1957, the Philadelphia Phillies hosted the New York Giants in an afternoon baseball game at Connie Mack Stadium. The crowd that day was small – 7,929 fans in a facility that could accommodate 23,000 spectators. Approximately two-thirds of the seats were empty. Among those in the park that afternoon was Earl Roth, sports editor of Philadelphia’s largest newspaper, the Bulletin. His work required his attendance, although he would likely have been present anyway. Sitting with Roth in...
One thing that I doubt we will ever run out of in this country is amazing sports stories. Baseball – which at one time was the most popular American sport – used to be known as the “national pastime”. As such, that particular sport is the source of a seemingly endless supply of colorful and interesting tales. That’s because lots of colorful and interesting people have played it. One extremely odd event that occurred in a game once upon a time involved an outfielder for the Philadelphia Phillies...
As we have seen, Martin Van Buren Bates (at 7-foot-9) was reputedly the tallest person to fight in the Civil War. But another soldier, Henry Clay Thruston, also laid claim to that distinction. Bates and Thruston had several things in common besides being named for famous nineteenth-century politicians. For one, both fought for the South. Thruston (who was likely born in 1830) was from Missouri, a state that – like Bates’s home state of Kentucky – did not secede from the Union. But both Kentu...
Martin Van Buren Bates and Anna Swan Bates lived comfortably in Seville, Ohio, in the 1870s and 1880s. They earned good incomes working as circus attractions, and they owned a productive farm with a comfortable home. Martin and Anna were also active members of the local community, including regularly attending a Baptist church. But all was not perfect. Their desire to add children to their family was unsuccessful; a daughter was stillborn and a son lived less than a day. Then, in 1888, Anna...
When the Civil War ended, Confederate army veteran Martin Van Buren Bates moved from his native Kentucky across the Ohio River into the southern part of the state that shares a name with that waterway. Bates settled near Cincinnati where he lived when not touring with a local circus. Soon, however, he moved over 200 miles northeast and bought a 130-acre farm near the village of Seville, Ohio. Eventually, the circus took Bates to Halifax, Nova Scotia. One of the locals who came to see the so-call...
When the Civil War ended, Martin Van Buren Bates returned home to the farm on which he had been raised in eastern Kentucky. But some of his neighbors were not happy with Bates and his family. The number of slaveowners in the mountain counties of the states where slavery existed was relatively small. Consequently, the number of residents who had supported the Confederacy was minimal. That is why, for example, Virginia split in two with several of its mountain counties breaking away and entering...
As we saw last week, Martin Van Buren Bates was an imposing figure, standing 7 feet, 9 inches tall and weighing 475 pounds. Some sources, however, say that he was even larger in both height and weight than those statistics indicate. He grew so fast that measurements recorded in one instance might be outdated a few months or years later. Regardless of exactly how tall he was and how much he weighed, all sources agree that he was huge. When the Civil War began in April 1861, Bates was 23 years...
When the Civil War began in April 1861, many men – especially those who lived in states where slavery was legal – had a tough choice to make. The issue, of course, was which side they would support. As we have seen, many soldiers in the states that seceded from the Union fought for the North although the majority joined the southern army. In slave states that did not secede – Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Delaware – the majority of soldiers fought for the Union. Robert E. Lee, the general...
As we saw previously, one of the big advantages the North had during the Civil War was that it had many more people available for military service than did the South. Ultimately, this disparity in population was a key factor in the North winning. Historians often describe the conflict as a war of attrition. Basically, they believe that the outcome of the war was determined by the fact that the South ran out of soldiers. The Confederacy being able to stave off defeat from northern attacks helped...