On this episode of the Most Notorious Podcast, a gruesome murder in a Florida orange grove in 1882.

Several men in a boat find a bloated corpse floating in the lake or an adjoining lake.

You're a very small island in the middle of this lake. The body had floated to the surface and they row over to it and turn it over.

And it has no head missing part of an arm missing an entire leg and a whole bunch of other of what look like stab wounds and cuts to the body.

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Most Notorious Podcast. I'm Eric Rivenes. Great to have you here.

Again, I wanted to remind everyone that we have a Most Notorious community over at patreon.com slash Most Notorious.

Patreon is spelled P-A-T-R-E-O-N. If you've ever thought at any point, well, listening to the show that you would like to help in some way, well, good news you can do it.

You can support the show by going to patreon.com slash Most Notorious. And as a reminder, every week, I do offer a brand new Agast at the past episode on Mondays.

It is a this day in true crime history episode and I've gotten great feedback about it. If nothing else, you can come on over and not only support the show, but you can get these Patreon exclusive episodes of Agast at the past.

Okay, on to this week's interview. I am so pleased to have as my guest today Andrew Fink. He is an attorney executive counsel to a Fortune 100 company by day and a writer and historian by night.

He's here to talk about his book with one of the best titles I've ever had the pleasure to announce on this show. Murder on the Florida Frontier. The true story behind Sanford's headless miser legend. That's awesome. Thank you for joining me.

You're welcome and thanks so much for having me.

Yeah. So let me start by asking you, where did you first hear about this story?

Yeah, I first heard about this through some of the work I had done at the Sanford Historical Society and Sanford is a small town in central Florida. And I had joined the Historical Society there and actually at my very first meeting with the organization.

I volunteered to be the vice president. They had an opening and not really sure what compel me to raise my hand in volunteer. But I became involved with the Sanford Historical Society.

And through some of the work I did at the Sanford Museum, which is affiliated with the society, did a lot of helping organize and going through materials and things of that nature.

I came across this story of the tragic murder of a man named Samuel McMillan and the probably equally tragic story of the person accused of killing him named Archie Newton.

And the story of these two men was sitting on the shelf at the Sanford Museum in a form of a really small binder. And the curator there, Alicia Clark, one day I was mentioning that I had been doing some research on some other projects and other history things that I was looking at.

She pulled that small binder down off the shelf and said, here's a story that I think you'd be interested in. And I think it's a story that A is worth telling and B was just waiting for someone to discover and to be able to have these two men kind of brought to light again.

And I opened the binder and it just had a few newspaper articles and part of a Florida Supreme Court case in this binder. And you know, being a lawyer, that certainly appealed to me and I kind of read through that.

And as I read kind of just that brief material that they had there, it was a fascinating story with colorful characters that if you put them in a fiction novel, people would think that you completely made it up and it wasn't real.

So that's kind of how I found that story. And you know, from there, just took all the other projects I was doing set those aside and focused on this story.

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