• Osage Reign of Terror

    The early 1920’s looked like a good time for the Osage tribe.  They were in the midst of an oil boom as large deposits of oil were found on tribal land in north central Oklahoma.  Many members of the Osage tribe were becoming wealthy.  Unlike other Native Americans, the Osage had deeds to their land, unlike other tribes forced onto a reservation.  Under the 1906 Osage Allotment Act all subsurface minerals were tribally owned and held in trust by the United States government.  Revenues from the mineral leases paid the tribe over 30 million dollars.  Each member of the tribe received one share, called a headright, which could be passed…

  • The Crippen Murder

    Hawley Harvey Crippen was a meek little man with a big problem.  His wife was a cheating, gold digging narcissist.  To complicate matters, he was in love with another woman.  How did he get into this predicament? Crippen was born to a prosperous family in Coldwater, Michigan in 1862.  Despite the fact the family was comfortable, they instilled in young Hawley a strict work ethic.  Crippen completed a degree an M.D. from Cleveland Homeopathic Hospital after graduating from the University of Michigan.  He set up practice in Brooklyn, NY and married a nurse named Charlotte Bell and the two had a son.  Bell died suddenly, and Crippen sent their son…

  • Sophia Dorothea of Celle- The Lady in the Tower

    Born the only child of the Duke George William of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1666, Sophia Dorothea was illegitimate.  Her mother was the Duke’s long standing mistress, Éléonore Marie d’Esmier d’Olbreuse, an exiled French Protestant aristocrat.  They weren’t even supposed to be together, and Sophia Dorothea was not supposed to exist. George William was supposed to marry Princess Sophia, daughter of the Palatine King of Bohemia (For more on her, please see this post:  http://www.historynaked.com/sophia-of-hanover/)  George William was so repulsed by the “mannish” Sophia, he traded his claim to the duchy of Hanover to his brother, Ernst Augustus, so he’d take her off his hands.  Item:  If you look at her picture,…

  • Who was Kaspar Hauser?

    On May 26, 1828, the streets of Nuremberg, Germany were fairly deserted.  One person seemed to be wandering them aimlessly- a teenage boy dressed in coarse peasant clothes.  He was about four feet nine inches tall with curly brown hair.  He was stocky with broad shoulders and the pale skin of an invalid.  Around five in the afternoon, Georg Weickmann, a shoemaker, stopped the boy, who was staggering around as if he was drunk.  All he could get out of him was “I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was.” in the Old Bavarian dialect.  He gave the shoemaker a sealed letter he was carrying addressed “To the…

  • The Kitty Genovese Syndrome

    Catherine Susan Genovese was an average American girl growing up in Queens, New York in the 1940s.  Kitty, as she was called by friends and family, was the eldest of five children.  Her parents moved to Connecticut when she was a young woman, but Kitty stayed in the city with her grandparents.  After a failed marriage and a succession of uninteresting clerical jobs, Kitty got a job as a bartender at Ev’s Eleventh Hour Bar.  She worked the night shift, returning home to the apartment she shared with her girlfriend at Kew Gardens around 3am each night. Winston Moseley seemed to be living an average American life as well.  He…