190: Tag Team: The Philadelphia Poison Ring

Corpus Delicti

CDM Productions

True Crime

4.5 • 608 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Apparently desperate times call for desperate measures, and the Great Depression brought that out in a lot of people, including two cousins who came up with the perfect insurance scam. They'd sell insurance to women who were mad at their husbands, name themselves as beneficiaries, convince the women to kill their husbands, and split the profits.

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Music by:

Kai Engel

"Daemones"

Blooper music by:

Art of Escapism

"Coal Miners"

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Sources:

Philadelphia Poison Ring - Absolute Crime

Philadelphia Poison Ring (en-academic.com)

Morris Bolber - Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone is Jen and this is Lindsay.
0:26.4	And welcome back to Corpus Delecti, the podcast.
0:29.8	We are officially up and rolling and we're hopefully not missing a week this time.
0:34.7	Yes, and tonight we're bringing you a new series, and we're going to call
0:38.6	this one tag team. So this is our series on team killers, duos, trios, gangs, you name it.
0:47.6	May or may not be a few couples in there, but we have already done couples who kill before,
0:51.9	so that will not be the main focus. But that's what
0:54.5	we're going to go ahead and kick off tonight. So this week's episode takes us back to the U.S. in the
1:00.5	1930s. Now, the Great Depression brought speak easies and the general feeling of misery is pretty
1:07.1	much throughout the U.S. population. Unemployment is at an all-time high,
1:12.3	leaving people with a feeling of doing what they have to do to survive.
1:16.6	So this is the time where we have mobsters, bootleggers, and high crime rates.
1:21.5	And that's becoming normalized in every major city.
1:26.6	And so this week, we're going to the city of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia.
1:31.7	And this is where two cousins were involved with insurance scams, counterfeiting,
1:36.5	and of course the reason we're here, murder.
1:39.3	The total body count is disputed from anywhere between 30 to 50 people. Now one source got a little too
1:47.7	crazy and said it was a thousand, but that really seems unlikely. So this is Herman and Paul Petrillo,
1:56.8	and they were Italian immigrants who came to the U.S. sometime around World War I.
2:02.5	And during this time, the Italian immigration grew from about 76,000 in 1910 to over 155,000 by the 1930s.
2:14.6	Now, this is a very tight-knit community.
2:16.7	They share culture, language, food,
	...

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