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I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

And I'm Paul Holz, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them. Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens. Some are solved and some are cold.
Very cold. This is Buried Bones.

Hey, Paul. Hey, Kate.
How are you? I'm doing really well. I have an odd question for you.
Uh-oh. And I know I always,

do I start every episode like that? I have an odd question for you, Paul. I get so nervous about this.
It's like, what's going to happen? What am I going to be forced to have to reveal? No, no.

It's not that interesting. It is odd.
So, the case of what we're going to talk about today a really well-known case from 1830s New York, well-known to me and any history geek who likes true crime.

But the reason I'm bringing that up is because the subject of the case was featured in a really unusual museum in the 1800s that a lot of well-known authors like to visit. The Wax Museum.

Have you ever been to one of those wax museum anywhere? Like I went to one in London and I can't remember which one it was. Have you done that before?

Yeah, you know, when I was young, I remember going, is it Madame Toussau?

I don't remember how to pronounce it. Please don't kill us, listeners.
But yes, everybody knows what you're talking about. Yeah,

and if I remember right, that was out in Hollywood. What did you think?

Well, you know, it's interesting because, of course, now that you see these famous individuals, because typically you see them in magazines or on TV or something. And so to actually see them,

not quite real life, you know, it's sort of like at least you get a better sense on what they look like. But also, as good as these

wax replicas are, you can still see, well, it's not quite right. You know, there is some minor differences, you know, but it is, it's, it's interesting for sure.

Well, the funny story about this is, is that I have a book that's going to come out in January, January 7th, and it's called The Sinner's All Bow.

And we can talk about this, you know, at a later episode.

But the book features the story of a young woman who was a parishioner at a Methodist church, and she is found hanging from a haystack pole in New England in the 1830s.

So, a very famous author, years later, is at a wax museum in Boston. And it is a wax museum that is featuring several different true crime, contemporary for them, 1830s, 1840s, true crime stories.

One of them is the story we're going to talk about, Helen Jewett. The other is the story from The Sinner's All Bow, my book.

And I'll just tell you, it's Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter. And the woman at the center of my book is believed to be his inspiration for Hester Prynn.

the main character in The Scarlet Letter.

And his comments, Nathaniel Hawthorne's comments about the way that the supposed killer and the victim were standing near each other.

It's very clear that the way that whomever was in charge of the wax museum had him sort of hover over her in a very menacing way. So it wasn't just someone standing there in a pose.

They were kind of staging people in different action poses. And, you know, I'm not going to, the case is complicated.
I'm not going to give away what happens in the case.

But I think Nathaniel Hawthorne really looked at this and said, well, it's very clear that he's guilty. And it's the way that the Wax Museum owner staged it.
It was very influential.

And you're right, that 3D feeling makes people feel like they're right there. And it can really shift opinions about stories.
This was very popular. Well,

I find it fascinating that all the way back in the 1830s and 1840s is that the Wax Museum was paying attention to true crime. I know.
Oh, yeah.

Well, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were crazy about true crime stories. They both went to trials.
They both read all the newspaper accounts of all types of different stories.

And there are stories that we talk about in this show that inspire, you know, true crime stories.

Like we just talked about, remember the story of Mary Rogers, the woman who went missing from her boarding house, a cigar girl, a woman who worked at the cigar shop, and then later she was rumored to have died from a failed abortion.

And so, you know, these are, these are the kinds of stories that these authors really picked up on.

So it's interesting to, you know, you're at this sort of attraction and you're getting all of this information and it's really framing these stories in a certain way.

And the story that we're going to talk about was a huge story in Manhattan in the 1830s. And anybody who is a history true crime geek might know the story of Helen Jewett.

So get ready because talk about somebody who's been exposed to a lot of different types of people. We are really going to be right in the middle of Manhattan, which is now the area known as Tribeca,

but we're right in the middle of it. So let's go ahead and set the scene.

So, this is 1836, a very cold night in April. You know, this is kind of the end of a very cold winter in New York.

I had mentioned before that we are in an area on Thomas Street, which is now known as Tribeca,

and we are at a well-known brothel.

When I wrote my book about Edward Ruloff, which was set around this time period, there was a book that I quoted a little bit called The Gentleman's Guide to Manhattan.

And it was a, no joke, Paul, a rundown of 1860s, 1870s brothels. Almost like what you would get on Yelp, like the $2

signs, the $3 signs, the different people that were recommended who work there, what block to go on to, what not.

It was written in a very civilized way, kind of like shopping for someone.

And they would talk about, you know, brothels where the women would steal from you, brothels where they wouldn't, where you could feel safe, where, you know, I mean,

it was called The Gentleman's Guide to New York. And I thought, that's, I guess, good advice for people.
I don't know. That still goes on to this day.

You know, so like when I was investigating, you know, Unsolved series of sex workers, they were on the street, they're in stroll areas.

And so, of course, I'm looking to see what the Johns are saying about the locations, if there was anybody that would pop up as a suspect. And these Johns are doing the exact same thing.

They're saying, hey, look for so-and-so. She's usually dressed like this.
She'll do this, this, and this for this amount of money. She's, you know, and gives ratings on the women.

Or they will get online and say, hey, it looks like there's a Weisting going on. Avoid this area.
So

they swap information to help each other out. That doesn't have anything to do with our case, this gentleman's handbook.

I just remember thinking it was really interesting, you know, that you could get this thing for like five cents or something like that and have a pretty decent rundown of what was happening in New York.

This is a brothel, and it is run by a woman named Rosina Townsend. She's 39, she's a madam,

and she has a very, very tight security system. She knows how to run this place.
I'm sure she's encountered every kind of man, gentlemen, and not in this brothel over the years.

And she has several sex workers who work there, live there. And she has a lot of systems in place that I think are pretty interesting.

Incoming with the old gays. It's Jessie, Bill, Robert, and Mick with a special bonus episode of Silver Linings with the Old Gays.

No matter what time of year it is, we know it's important to uplift the spirit of pride, which is relatively easy when Palm Springs celebrates in November.

The first pride I went to, it made me feel like I was really part of something.

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Silver Linings with the Old Days is brought to you in partnership with iHeart's Ruby Studio and Viv Healthcare. Listen on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone. We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So this is what happens. Rosina is awoken on April 10th, 1836, this cold day.
She's awoken in the very early hours of the morning to a knock at her bedroom door.

She opens the door, and there's a man who says, We presume is a client, who says, I need to get out of the brothel.

So, what happened is she had a front door that was locked both from the inside and the outside. And after midnight, Rosina would lock both sides.

So if you wanted to get out as a client or as a sex worker, you would have to talk to her. She's the only one who had the key, and she would unlock it and let you out for security purposes.

She won't give him the key. She says, go get your woman to let you out.

So he says, okay, she shuts the door. But none of the sex workers come to her door to say, you know, where's the key? So she would loan the key out.

They would unlock the door for the client and then give the key back. No one comes to her door.
So she sort of just blew it off.

And maybe I assumed that thought that he went back to the woman he was with.

A few hours later, she's awoken by a much louder knocking at the front door, this time, not her bedroom door or any of the doors of the nine women who lived there.

At the front door, she's sleeping next to a man. He wakes up, and they both look at the clock on the mantle, and it's three o'clock in the morning.

This is a different client who has made a prearranged appointment at three in the morning with one of the women. So Rosina says, okay, and lets him in.

And when she does, she looks around and notices there's a gas lamp that's out of place. It's lit, it's sitting on the table on the first floor parlor.
It's not supposed to be there.

It's actually supposed to be upstairs on the second floor in one of the bedrooms. And she thinks this is odd.
I mean, this woman is on top of stuff. She understands how to run this place.

So she takes the lamp and she goes to the parlor and when she's kind of walking back there, she looks at the back of the building and she sees that the door to the backyard is unlocked.

So this is a door that has a latch. It doesn't have a key lock on it.
And anyone can get out from the inside anytime they want.

I don't think most of the client, the men, know about this, but if you know about this door, you can go down and unlatch the door and go out the back door, which is where the yard yard is, and then there's an outhouse.

So she thinks the sex worker who was with the first man who wanted out of the building, she thinks that the woman said to him, just go down the back way and unlatch it yourself.

And that's how he went out. So do you have anything you need to say?

I have another about half a page of information here. There's a lot of that.
I told you there's a lot going on. We don't even have a death yet.

No, right now it's just sort of what sounds like routine happenings every night, except you've got this light that has been noticed out of place.

So we'll see where you go from here. So she looks out into the backyard.
It's like I said, three in the morning. This is the way the backyard is set up.

It's completely fenced in, and the fence varies from like eight feet to 12 feet tall. And on one side, the neighbor's stable, horse stable, backs up to the fence.

And that part of the fence has pickets to prevent anyone from climbing onto it from the stable roof. And this is considered pretty tight security.

So they don't want men hopping in and hopping out of this yard. They want to know who's there the whole time.
It's very, very high fencing. There's an outhouse in the yard.
And so,

you know, Rosina is thinking, okay, well, maybe the guy went out to use it, or one of the women, maybe, and that's why the latch was off on this back door.

But she said, that doesn't make any sense because it's a really cold, nasty, drizzly night, and everybody has a chamber pot, gross, in their room.

So, you know, Rosina is really trying to figure out what exactly happened. She says that she calls out who's there in the backyard a few times.
Nobody answers.

She goes upstairs and she's trying to figure out which bedroom the lamp is missing from.

She goes to the first bedroom upstairs and the door is locked, which means there's a woman who wants privacy with a client.

She goes to the other bedroom, which belongs to the woman we're going to be talking about, Helen Jewett. The door swings open.
It's not locked. And we have, it sounds like a fire.

There are thick plumes of smoke coming out of the room. She yells fire and runs down to her bedroom, which faces the street on the first floor and yells fire out the window.
And there is a watchman.

There's no organized police in New York in the 1830s, just sort of like night watchman.

Watchman is posted nearby, hears her, and everybody has now woken up in the whole house because people are yelling fire.

We can pause here because I will tell you as a spoiler alert, Helen will be found dead inside this room. And we have a similar story that we've talked about, a similar type of setup.

You know, someone is murdered and someone is using fire to try to cover it up.

Yeah, you know, and this is, of course, I've had cases with burning bodies or crime scenes that have been burned, you know, and it is, it's a tough, tough type of case to work because fire can be so destructive.

Incoming with the old gays. It's Jessé, Bill, Robert, and Mick with a special bonus episode of Silver Linings with the Old Gays.

No matter what time of year it is, we know it's important to uplift the spirit of Pride, which is relatively easy when Palm Springs celebrates in November.

The first Pride I went to, it made me feel like I was really part of something.

People being so joyous in the streets and being themselves.

We've really come a long way, and I realize I am standing on the shoulders. of so many millions of queer people who sacrificed their lives for what we have today.

Silver Linings with the Old Days is brought to you in partnership with iHeart's Ruby Studio and Viv Healthcare. Listen on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.
One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

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So why not you? Try Odoo for free at Odu.com. That's Odo.com.

Hi, I'm Martine Hackett, host of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a production from Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenix.

This season, we're sharing powerful stories of resilience from people living with MG and CIDP.

Our hope is to inspire, educate, and remind each other that even in the toughest moments, we're not alone. We'll hear from people like Corbin Whittington.

After being diagnosed with both CIDP and dilated cardiomyopathy, he found incredible strength through community.

So when we talk community, we're talking about an entire ecosystem surrounding this condition, including, of course, the patients at the center, that are all trying to live life in the moment, live life for the future, but then also create a new future.

Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The case that you and I talked about before, I think you remember Albert Terrell, the man who was in a relationship with a woman named Mary Ann Bickford, who was kind of an on-again, off-again sex worker.

He kills her and then tries to set the whole area on fire and then claims he was sleepwalking.

There is some speculation that this is where Albert Terrell got the idea from, was this story to be able to kind of commit his crime, to murder this woman and then set the place on fire.

That seems a little far-fetched. I don't think it's a genius.
It takes a genius to think if you're going to kill someone, maybe a fire would be helpful.

We've talked talked about this before, I think, right? Do you really believe that killers are inspired by other killers? Pick up tips from other killers? Oh, absolutely. I've seen it firsthand.

I've got

Phil Hughes following the Hillside Stranglers, and Hughes himself was a strangler. Trevor Burrus: Like, picking up tips, or what happens? Do you think they're just inspired? Well, it's both.

You know, they're, of course, paying attention to how other killers are getting away with the crimes, you know, how details about the crimes are being reported in the press, how law enforcement is, you know, trying to, you know, work to solve the case.

But then they also get

inspired to try the various different things that these other killers are doing just to see if they like it.

So

it's a different psychology. Well, let's get back to the case.

So the night watchmen sound the alarm on the fire, and I don't think it's enough of a fire to cause major damage because they are able to go back up into the room because Rosina is very concerned about Helen Jewett.

So she is afraid that Helen and her companion are going to die of smoke inhalation. So they go up to try to rescue her.
It's Rosina and a woman named Maria Stevens.

And they go up and they find Helen with no male client with her.

So when the night watchmen get to the house and they find out that Helen has been killed, they try to, you know, get together their resources and get some more officers.

They also call the coroner, and a coroner brings two doctors to the house, and they start to examine her body. So the fire's out.
It doesn't look like it really did any damage.

It did not do what I'm assuming the killer thought it was going to do. And I told you, I talked to a forensic chemist who said, it often does not do what a killer hopes it will do.

You know, it's hard to predict whether or not it's going to work or not.

And it's a risky, I would not have thought fire would be risky, but she said it just doesn't behave the way you want it to behave a lot of times. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: it goes where it wants to go.

You know, and there's so many different factors within any environment, you know, where the fuel source is, you know, where the oxygen supply is, unless you have literally a body doused with gasoline and lit directly on fire.

If you're just trying to set a fire inside a room,

it's not necessarily going to consume everything in that room right off the bat, or if at all.

You know, it's, it really takes a level of expertise to to kind of understand how to set a fire in order to completely obliterate a room accounting for all the various different types of variables that are within that particular scene and it attracts people maybe sooner than the killer would have wanted certainly sooner than if he had covered it up i mean this is probably several hours at the very most i would assume because you know there's a fire sure you know and sometimes a fire will just smolder you know and now you have a fair amount of heat and smoke present within the room.

And you can get these flashover points where the heat gets, it gets hot enough inside the room where the other flammables inside the room just instantaneously will light.

And now they've accomplished what they wanted to do. But it can smolder for hours.

This fire does no good. to the killer, it sounds like, because they are able to obviously identify her.
They're able to look at her body and determine how she died and get some pretty good details.

So, as I said, the coroner brings two doctors to the house, they examine Helen's body. She is 24 years old, and I'll tell you a little bit about her in a second.

But I know, I now know the most important thing for you, you have a big smile on your face.

The most important thing to you is to talk about the injuries and the autopsy and the examination first, and then we can get to all the victimology stuff, right? Yes. There you go.
See, I know you.

It only took about a what, a year and a half, maybe two years.

I'm getting there. Okay.
The doctors say they found a large, deep gash on the right side of her head above the temple that was likely made by a hatchet.

So it doesn't sound like they found the murder weapon. The gash goes through the skull into the brain.

And they perform an autopsy and find that she was, they say, mostly healthy, though they find evidence. Now, I don't know what this means, Paul.

They find evidence that her uterus had been, quote, quote, laboring under an old disease. Does that sound like maybe a venereal disease or something, a venereal infection? I'm not entirely sure.

Or endometriosis, you know, something like that. Yeah, I don't know.
But she's not pregnant, and they're not seeing anything else. And obviously, they know the cause of death.

She's been hit in the head by what they think is a hatchet. And the gash goes through her skull into her brain.

And I know that you'll say that it doesn't take very much to do that, right with a hatchet, I'm assuming. Like this could be a woman.
This could be anybody. Oh, sure.

It doesn't provide enough information to indicate, you know, how strong or robust the offender is. It's just, you know, a hatchet is a very effective weapon, you know, and,

you know, I've seen cases with hatcheting deaths, and you see where the sharp edge of the hatchet will go through the skull,

just like what we're seeing here in Helen's case. Well, let me tell you more about Helen, a little victimology stuff here.

So she was 24 years old, as I said, when she died. She came from Hallowell, Maine, and her birth name was Dorcas Duncan.
I love Dorcas.

That is like a totally old-fashioned, to me, 1800s name that I've read quite a bit. She was known as a local beauty.
Of course, we hear that all the time.

Her parents died when she was young, and she was adopted by a local judge.

But when she was 17, she had what the newspapers would later describe as a quote-unquote affair with with a local prominent banker, which at 17, I'm not sure we could define that as an affair at all because this is a grown man.

This caused a huge uproar in her community, and I'm sure that people blamed her to a certain extent because that's what they would have done in the 1800s.

She changed her name from Dorcas Duncan to Helen Jewett, and she moved to New York, and she had no other resources, so she became a sex worker.

Okay, and now she's in the brothel, and she's dead with a hatchet wound, and the offender has tried to set the room on fire.

Now, do you know

would Helen have kept any amount of the proceeds from the clients within the room? Like, could there be a financial motive to this crime?

It didn't sound like it was like a theft thing because I think Rosina would have known that. Yes.

One thing they don't talk about also is whether or not this hatchet was brought to the scene or if it was something that the killer had found at the house.

So, I don't think that robbery is the motive, is the very long answer to that. Okay.
Let me tell you about what they know about that day. So, the night before her body was discovered was a Friday.

And on most Fridays, Helen had a regular client. His, I mean, these are some fake names.
His name was Bill Easy.

Fake name.

However, on this day, she asked Rosina to not let Bill into the brothel and to reschedule him because she said she had another date, another person coming.

So, Rosina lets in a man later that night wearing a long black cloak. And his name, also a fake name, was Frank Rivers.
You would think people could be more creative, but

I guess they need to be able to remember it, right, if it's their fake name. That's right.
He had been covering his face with his cloak so nobody could see what he looked like.

But, you know, Rosina, who is just as sharp as attack, made sure that she at least could look at his height, listen to his voice, pick out details. And she said that was not Bill Easy.

This was a different guy. This was not her normal guy based on everything that she remembers.
So this guy comes, Frank Rivers, comes between 9 o'clock and 10 o'clock.

Then about 11 o'clock, Helen called down for a bottle of champagne, which apparently Rosina had on hand.

She brought up the bottle and two glasses and she saw the guy, the mystery guy, but only the back of his head because he was laying on her bed reading a book. Now we are caught up.

We have no suspect except a guy who provided a fake name. The only person, the only person

who saw him was the madam, Rosina, which I know you can imagine is at some point going to cause a problem. This is the only witness in what she does for a living.
So what's your impression so far?

So Rosina is saying when she looks into the room in Helen's room, she sees this Frank Rivers laying on Helen's bed reading a book. He must be on his side because she can only see the back of his head.

Okay. This seems like an unusual thing to be doing when you've gone to a brothel to hire a sex worker, but

maybe that's what he was doing. Fundamentally, none of the other women in the brothel

see Frank Rivers. It's just Rosina and Helen, and Helen is dead.
Yep, you got it. Of course, I can see where this possibly is going to go is, did Rosina have any issues with Helen?

Not that we know of. No.
She seemed like a wonderful person to work for, it sounds like, and that's what the other women said.

Well organized, good security, all of that. We don't know.
We don't know of any problems between them. And she was very upset about, obviously, what happened with Helen.
Okay. Yeah.

Obviously, it'd be nice to have other people corroborate Rosina's story of Frank Rivers being present within Helen's room.

And Rosina's the one that's reporting this lamp that's moved out of place, as well as the back door being unlatched. So she's kind of controlling all the information flow in this investigation.

So the night watchmen, remember, who are not trained police necessarily, the night watchmen spread out and they start trying to figure out who murdered this woman, this young sex worker.

To their credit, I would say that this was not a time when police would have necessarily been enthusiastic about doing this, but they did.

And as the story goes along, you see, of course, an interesting divide between people who were supportive of the sex workers and this was a tragedy, and the people who thought, well, you know, they're putting themselves in this position.

And of course, we see that today with the media. So the night watchmen are going out and they look in the neighborhood and they find out that there is a guy named Richard Robinson.

Richard Robinson lives in a boarding house nearby. And when I say boarding house, I know it sounds like a flop house.
They're not. Sometimes they're very nice.

I mean, you can have a nice boarding house. It doesn't have to be some rancid place.
And he is living nearby. At some point, Rosina sees him and says, this is the guy.

This is Frank Rivers, Richard Robinson. He's 19 years old.
And of course, he says, you're nuts. I had nothing to do with this.
So this is haphazard, I would say, at best.

They kind of run into this guy. He's known to have a long black jacket, coat.
Rosina then sees him and says, yep, that's him, never having actually seen this guy's face before.

Yeah, and that was what I was going to point out. He comes in with this cloak wrapped around his face.
She only sees the back of his head when he's laying on Helen's bed.

You know, so that ID is really weak.

This case, I'm telling you, you know, the struggle is real for investigators in the 1900s.

I will read these stories sometimes and I'll just think, gosh, to be a detective in the 18, you know, in the 1890s, even when there were detectives, it just sounds awful.

I don't know, unless you just run across a murder as it's happening, I don't know how they were able to really solve these. I do know the third degree, degree, you know, they would harass people.

They would have informants who probably were not very accurate, certainly witnesses that were not accurate.

But this sounds like a nightmare of a case in a big city with a lot of pressure on people to solve it. Aaron Powell, Jr.: Oh, sure.

You know, and this is where, I mean, there are investigators that are so good at reading people and doing interviews and stitching together circumstantial cases.

But even the best investigators could potentially, just relying on circumstantial evidence, be wrong.

Our limitations as humans is, you know, we kind of add things together and think, oh, this must be it. And

in my experience, I've done that myself and then had physical evidence go, nope, you're wrong. Yeah.
And I like hearing you say that. And I will say, Paul, you know, I've said this before.

One of your superpowers, again, is you're, I think, humble and you're aware of your limitations and you know when to call people, and you certainly on our show know when to say, This is not my jam.

I don't know anything about botanical toxicology or whatever it is.

I have told people in interviews before that with American Sherlock, I read two to three thousand of Oscar Heinrich's letters, and not once did he say, Maybe I was wrong.

You know, when they were released, and he had had them essentially convicted. I mean, he never doubted himself.
And I just think that's such a problem, a big problem.

I think you have to think about when new information comes out, man, I might have screwed this up.

And there's so much responsibility on somebody like you, especially you're doing these active cases now. You know, there's a lot of responsibility on your shoulders with these cases.
Yeah.

And, you know, cases, they're the ultimate

challenge. They're very humbling.
I often would go into a case with an ego thinking, I can solve this. And then as time goes on, recognizing, oh, you know, it's just, you have to stay humble.

You constantly have to assess the information and hope that, you know, your efforts ultimately pay off with a solid case in one way or the other.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Well, the people investigating this case have a lot to deal with because when the media gets involved, like I said, it's pretty polarizing.

So who they're targeting, Richard Robinson, who is this 19-year-old.

He is a clerk for a prominent cloth merchant, and he's the son of a relatively wealthy landowner and a politician from outside New Haven, Connecticut. So lots of money.

Remember, I said boarding houses. I know it sounds like they're not the greatest place, but it's a flat with a bunch of other people, and they can be nice and expensive.

So Richard is from a good family. He's from that neighborhood.
And I'm already sensing a pretty bad dynamic here that we've also heard about in the past.

A client with a wealthy family or a potential offender from a wealthy family and a sex worker who will be easily dismissed as a victim, most likely based on her profession.

And then, of course, our main witness, who is a madam. So this is a familiar story over and over again.
You know, who gets justice in this country? Aaron Ross Bowie.

Yeah, I can see where this is going to be heading now. A lot of this is going to end up being dependent upon

the prosecutor. And

what kind of political influence does the Robinson family have on the prosecutor? Or is the prosecutor independent?

It's It's a tough dynamic when you have this disparity, if you will, on the defendant versus the victims and the social status or the perceived social status that they have.

Aaron Powell, well, let me give you some information that will shine a light on

1800s and before Manhattan. So, number one, the police say, okay, this sounds like Rosina, the madam, says that Richard is the guy.
Let's go pick him up.

So, they go to his boarding house to see what's going on with him, to interview him, you know, just to get more information. I'm sure they don't want to rely specifically on Rosina.

And they get there and he is asleep. His roommate answers the door.
He wakes up Richard and Richard pulls on a pair of pants that have a stain that looks like white paint or whitewash on his pants.

And detectives make a mental note of that.

So this is the quirky part of policing in the 1800s. Instead of taking him down to the police station, they decide to do a little bit of a gotcha thing with Richard.
They take him to the brothel.

So, the custom of the time, in the 1600s, a couple hundred years earlier, was that it was a superstition: if you bring a murderer to the scene of the crime and you make him touch the victim, the victim will bleed fresh blood, and that is damning.

I know you're smiling, and that is very damning. And I told you that

in my Tenfold More Wicked, they believed that somebody who bled after they died or had any sort of bodily fluid come out, that it was a sign that they were possessed by the devil.

So I'm getting mixed messages here, but essentially, the body of a victim could really tell you a lot. They could, in this case, point to the identity of the murderer.
Are you going to debunk this?

I'm assuming you will. Do I even have to debunk it? No.

Definitely not the possessed by the devil part. I think we're okay with that.
They know how many bodies I've touched and they bled after I

bled.

You move a body and then you start getting, you know, bleeding out of bullet injuries or knife stab wounds. You know, it's just nah,

this is silly. Well, I will say in the 1800s, they don't believe that anymore.
Thank goodness we've progressed from the 1600s to the 1800s.

They do use it as a little bit of a, like, I like to think of it as a lie detector. They did this with Edward Ruloff, too.
So they bring Richard down and they

show him Helen's body and they're looking for a reaction. That's all they want to know.

And they feel like they can really read whether he is guilty or innocent based on his reaction to seeing her body. So Richard sees their going to the brothel and they said that his face goes pale.

But when he sees her body, nothing. No reaction whatsoever.
Just sort of like nothing's there. And that was it.

I assuming you're going to say that you cannot obviously predict based on someone's reaction, I see this on the movies all the time where they'll show the potential offender, the suspect, photos of the body to see what the reaction is.

Is that a common, is that a real tool that police officers use?

Well, they shouldn't because, you know, if you're displaying aspects of the crime scene to your suspect, How do you know when the suspect starts providing certain details that they acquire those details based on what they've seen.

Like they're now, let's say you have somebody who's falsely confessing. Or are they purposely altering their statements because now they know what they're perceiving happened at the crime scene?

You know, you really don't want to have that type of contamination. You know, so with Richard Robinson, I put no weight on his reactions.

You know, he's, he's recognizing when he's being brought to the brothel, uh-oh, I'm under suspicion here, right? You know, and that could be part of the reason for his

not appearing to be in good shape in route. And then you never know how somebody's going to react when they're taking a look at a dead body.

So it just underscores that these investigators really don't know what they're doing.

And one of the issues is that Richard doesn't deny that he's been at the brothel. In fact, he and his roommate had been at the brothel.
So, you know, he says, yes, I was there.

And let me tell you what he says. So Richard says he was home just after 11 o'clock that night.
And, you know, another brothel owner comes over and says, Richard, how could you kill this poor woman?

And he says, I didn't do anything. And then he says, maybe the madam did it, just like what you said.
Maybe the madam did it. But he denies doing anything.

And he says, in fact, Helen has a handkerchief with another guy's name under her pillow, which she did. So, you know, he's placing himself there.

He's saying I was there, but he's not admitting, obviously, to killing her. There's a coroner's inquest.
The jury is made up from people.

This is funny. The jury is made up of people from the crowd.
Whoever shows up first, it gets to be in the coroner's jury, it sounds like. I mean, that's what they did in the 1800s.

They were just pulling people off the street. Anybody, anybody.

I mean, in the case of my book, And The Center's All Bout, the coroner's inquest, the only restriction or the only guide was they had to be a landowner.

That was it. Okay.
To be on the coroner's jury, you just had to be a landowner, and that was it. They considered that meant you were a gentleman or you were an upstanding citizen.

And that's all that was required of it. And that's it.
So the jury sits, the coroner starts bringing information to the jury.

Richard's roommate goes to the jury and says, Yeah, we had been at the brothel the night before. He thinks that Richard came home around 10 o'clock.
He said, But I'm not 100% sure.

And then when he thinks about it, he says, well, maybe it was more like 1 a.m.

Even though Richard says it was 11 p.m. So it sounds like the roommate comes home first

and then Richard comes home later, but because the roommate was asleep, he couldn't really quite figure out how late it was. And of course, you know, there's no cell phones or watches.

Well, there's watches, but nobody's wearing a watch at night. So you have to kind of squint and look at the clock probably on the mantle.

I think you have to be pretty motivated to see what the time is. And I'm not sure that the roommate was that motivated.
He just heard Richard come in late.

So I don't know about this alibi, and he puts himself there. So what do you think about that? I mean, you still have to prove that he was the one holding the hatchet.
Yes.

So does he put himself with Helen that night before she's killed? I'm kind of confused on that. He does.
So he says, yes, I was there, but I left. And she was alive.
And the madam probably did it.

Or the man whose name is etched on a handkerchief under her pillow. Rosina picked Richard out, Richard Robinson out as being Frank Rivers, right? Mm-hmm.
Yep.

Robinson is placing him there with Helen that night.

You know, it's just one little detail where it makes you just kind of stop and go, okay, Richard Robinson potentially had an opportunity.

to have been involved with Helen's homicide. There seems to be some looseness with the timeframe that the roommate is saying that Robinson came home.

You know, but all it does is it's just from just an assessment of Robinson, it's like, well, he's in play,

but it definitely does not prove that he's responsible for Helen's homicide. Nowhere near that at this point in time.

So they turn to the cloak, the prosecutors, that Rosina said Frank Rivers was wearing, and they find this cloak kind of in a neighbor's yard.

And he denies, this is my cloak, but with some prodding, the roommate says, yes, Richard had worn that cloak. Then they turn to the pants that the detective saw him wearing.

The coroner's inquest finds that one of the fences that Richard would have had to climb to get out of the yard if he were the killer was whitewashed, which is where those stains on his pants came from.

And this seems to be enough, Paul, for the coroner's jury to charge Richard with her murder. That's not a lot.

No, it's not a lot. You know, part of it, this cloak being found, you know, this is where now that kind of diminishes my initial thought of Rosina.

You know, unless she planted this cloak, maybe she is telling the truth about Frank Rivers showing up with the cloak. You know,

I guess it's, you know, how common is this type of cloak during this era? You know, that's what I would want to know.

Is this just going to be, I mean, we see like hoodies all over the place on the ground, you know,

but doesn't mean that that hoodie was used by the offender in any particular case today. It's just, it's a common item out there.
But I don't know.

You know, I think there isn't a case against Robinson at this point. You know, the whitewash thing, no.

The cloak, they can't even really prove that it's his. You know, it's just, you've got the roommate saying, yeah, it looks like a cloak that he had, but let's see what else they develop.

Well, and, you know, you're talking talking about nine women in this house plus Rosina the madam, and they have men coming in and out. She has regulars.

I mean, there's just a lot of things happening here.

So, even if it is Frank Rivers, whether it's Robinson or not, if there is this Frank Rivers and he's wearing this cloak and he jumps over a fence and it's whitewashed and all of this stuff comes together, it still doesn't put the hatchet in his hand.

No. You know, it just proves that he had sex with her, or maybe they didn't even have sex.
Maybe they were just, you know, drinking champagne and reading. We don't know.

And that's one of the issues with this case. So it becomes what many people have called, I've heard this a million times, but

the first public sex scandal. I'm pretty sure there were big sex scandals in the 1700s too, but this is a tabloid sex scandal in New York.
It's a huge amount of interest, as I told you.

You know, Nathaniel Hawthorne also wrote about that case of Helen Jewett in what he saw depicted in the Wax Museum. The newspapers go crazy over this case because she's attractive.

There are all sorts of trial pamphlets printed, and he is arrested for her murder. The coroner's inquest found that he was likely responsible, so they arrest him.

This is a very polarizing case because

there are, you know, people who are obviously defending him. He's from a really well-known good family, and then attacking attacking her because she's a sex worker.

And then there are, of course, the opposite, which is that he is this rogue who frequents sex workers' brothels. And, you know, he's a disgusting person, and she didn't deserve to be killed.

Now we have some more information. And this is where I think the case takes a little bit of a turn.
And you could tell me if this is enough.

So, you know, what we know so far is that he said he was there. He said he was a client.
He said he left. She was alive.
He has nothing to do with it.

They do some digging, and the prosecutor comes up with letters that Helen and Richard have written each other because it turns out that they had known each other for almost a year and that he had either been a regular client of hers or a relationship for her.

But it was very tumultuous. There were instances in the letters that prosecutors picked up on where he admits that he physically hurt her.

And then the flip side of that is they also exchanged portrait miniatures, which is a huge deal, those little miniatures, you know, that depict different scenes. They're incredibly expensive.

And when Richard writes kind of this final letter that says, I'm breaking up with you, you're nuts. I want my miniature back.
You know, this becomes this big media frenzy.

And they were reproducing the pictures of the miniatures because they were collector's items at this point. So that's kind of how big this case was.

But the big highlight here that I'm asking you about is the letters and

how much we have an established relationship between them. It sounds like he was breaking up with her.
He had admitted to being violent with her. Does the case get more solid with these letters?

Well, he gets more interesting as a suspect because now it appears that there may even be a motive that's identified. You know, he's upset with her.
He wants his miniature back.

Part of the question that I had is if he was a routine customer of Helen's over the past year, how many times in the past had he used the pseudonym of Frank Rivers? And why does he do it that night?

Well, maybe he does it that night because he's trying to pose as somebody else,

knowing that he's probably going to minimally rob Helen of this miniature. And then if he's bringing a hatchet to the scene, he may have had bad intent from the very beginning.
But I don't know.

You know,

I think he's more interesting because of the prior relationship and the history of some level of physical violence against Helen.

Still, you have to prove the case of homicide. And just this prior relationship doesn't do that.
It's just investigators need to pay attention to him a little bit more.

But as of now, I still don't think that they've got a case against Richard.

No, and it's interesting when you talk about the relationship, whatever that was, if this was a regular boyfriend of hers, not a client, but a regular boyfriend, you would think that if Rosina knew him for a year, that she would be able to recognize him, even like with his head.

I would recognize you with your head, you know, turned away from me, probably. I don't know, maybe not.

But, but I would think this might have been a relationship that she kept very quiet, and maybe this is, you know, one of the first times that he's visited the brothel before. I don't know.

We don't have that much context. But the violent part of it I thought was interesting, too.
Yeah. You know, but again, it doesn't prove the homicide.
Oh, don't be picky, Paul.

Two weeks after the murder, Richard is sitting in jail, and there's a grocer who comes over to see him and says, Listen, I saw a picture of you in the paper, and I think you were in my store buying cigars that night.

Richard agrees, and eventually the grocer will testify, giving him kind of a partial alibi, but certainly not for the whole night.

So the majority of Richard's defense is: are you really going to believe a madam over Richard Robinson? And are you really going to make this big of a fuss over a sex worker?

That was pretty much the defense.

And, you know, I mean, this is no surprise as somebody who works in the 1800s all the time, but it's still disgusting every time this comes up, the misogyny of it and just in general, you know, the kind of the dismissiveness in the media, but also the polarization of it.

You know, I mean, these are two people who turned into avatars for specific parts of society.

It's hard to know if Helen Jewett at this point is going to get any kind of justice or if Richard Robinson is responsible for anything.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: I think there's a lot of flames that are fanned by the media frenzy around this, you know, and I can see what you're saying about the polarization.

But on both sides, you've got a woman who's lost her life,

and now you've got this 19-year-old Richard Robinson who sounds like he's being drugged through the ringer. And if he's responsible, so be it.
But as of right now, I'm questioning that.

You know, so it's sort of like, okay, where is this going to go? I'm kind of curious. Well, we don't have very much longer.
You know, the trial goes on.

He has great defense attorneys who, as I said, attack Helen's character, attack Rosina, the Madam's character. The grocer is helpful with providing a partial alibi.

And really, you've got sex workers who talk about Helen's relationship with Richard and saying that they knew him and they had a tumultuous relationship.

But as soon as they are called, they're completely diminished, of course, because of their bad character. But you're right, there's not very much evidence here.

I mean, certainly Richard from the letters sounds like he's a jerk, probably violent. Doesn't mean he killed her.
So, you know, this is a fast trial.

The jury goes and deliberates, and they are gone for between 8 and 15 minutes. Oh, geez.
Okay. Yeah, and they say not guilty.

And that is that.

Very weak circumstantial case, even for the 1800s. Usually we get more than that, you know.

And this was a very, very well-known case because it was considered such a tragedy where, you know, you just didn't, we didn't have enough information.

But, you know, on the other hand, it's almost like they felt like they couldn't get a foothold because of the status of the people involved in the case, both the high and the lower status. Right.

You know, and that's my concern. I think the not guilty verdict with the information that was being used, I can't argue against that at all.
You know, but

for them to only deliberate for 8 to 15 minutes, that suggests to me that probably the Robinson family influence was huge, you know, and you'd like to see the jurors at least, you know, really think about the case a little bit harder versus just dismissing Helen.

You know, that's in essence what they did. Definitely.
Richard moves to Texas. He opens a saloon and eventually becomes a deputy clerk of the court.

And Helen Jewett goes down in history as a sex worker who was murdered and kind of thrown away in the eyes of the media oftentimes, but then immortalized in a wax museum in Boston and seen by several different well-known authors.

And probably they were inspired by her story. So I often think about that sort of scenario, like Sarah Maria Cornell in my case, you know, a case that a lot of people had never heard of before.

And then I think about it, I pick up her story, and I think this is why the story is important. And I think a lot of people have done that.

In Helen Jewett's case, in Mary Rogers' case, you know, these women in history who I had heard of.

And you've got these authors who want to write books, and you know, they credit the tragic story, but oftentimes the bravery of these women, their circumstances limiting them, their time periods limiting them, and them doing the best they can.

And then they end up much more famous when they're dead than when they were alive. No, for sure.
Fascinating to hear how this case ended up in the Wax Museum and how it inspired

those authors. I'd never heard of it, you know, but here we go.
You know, there's been books written because of this case.

And I think when I write my books and do the podcasts, when I think about the victims who are most of the time women, you know, people know who've read my books, most of the time they're women.

I think that there is some element of bravery from the women in every book that I've done. Something has happened in their lives that they've overcome.

And I think it's important to shine a light on those kinds of stories, even when they end tragically. I think they're inspiring.

And, you know, with Helen Jewett, she sounds like she was run out of town when she was young.

And yes, 17-year-old, seduced, it sounds like, or manipulated, or assaulted by a grown man and drummed out of town and taken on sex work and was just trying to do the best she could, and then did not receive justice.

But she has been immortalized in so many trial transcripts, and just it's pretty incredible. So I'm happy to have told her story.

I hadn't told her story yet, and I'm glad that you were available and interested in listening, Paul. No, I appreciate you taking the time.
Thank you, Kate. All right.

Well, I will see you next week with another story. Awesome.
See ya.

This has been an Exactly Right Production. For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/slash buried bones sources.
Our senior producer is Alexis Alexis Emorosi.

Research by Marin McClashin, Allie Elkin, and Kate Winkler-Dawson. Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.
Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel. Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer. You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.

Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked: A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Deco the Criminal Mind, is available now.

And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.

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