I have been traveling throughout the Mid-Atlantic researching the dark underside of history, shocking murders from long ago that once stunned communities and filled newspapers with sensational headlines. From the mountains of Western Pennsylvania and Maryland to the Atlantic Coast, these terrible crimes, many lingering as unsolved cold cases, provide a stark look at the slowly evolving criminal justice system of the 19th and the early 20th century and the nature of crime in the past.
As one generation gave way to another, memory faded and communities eventually forgot the dreadful events, except in dusty old pages of newspapers or an occasional diary. But if one deeply searches archives, libraries, courthouses, and historical societies, long unexamined coroner’s inquests, court proceedings – death warrants, pleas, motions, and trial transcripts – and police blotters fill in the details, allowing for some reasonable reconstruction of the circumstances.
I use these tragic cases to examine the early workings of the criminal justice system and consider what law enforcement did or could have done to solve them and bring about justice. The period of consideration spans the centuries, from when forensic science was unheard of and witnesses and “smoking guns” were about all the police had to rely on to bring killers to justice until scientific breakthroughs in the first half of the 20th century brought investigations into the modern age, allowing the police to crack once unsolvable crime cases.
This fieldwork is for a series of lectures this autumn in libraries across the state for the One Maryland One Book 2018 theme, justice. The Maryland Humanities sponsors this annual reading program, and many county library systems are offering this lecture to support this year’s book, “Bloodsworth: The True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA Evidence.
Here’s a link to the program at the Frederick County Library on Sep. 28, 2018
For additional photos related to this fieldwork click this link