278: The Murder of Journalist Don Mellett w/ Thomas Crowl - A True Crime History Podcast

Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

Erik Rivenes

True Crime, History, Education

4.7 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2023

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The July 1926 murder of the editor of the Canton, Ohio, Daily News, Don R. Mellett, was one of the most publicized crimes in the 1920s. For less than a year, Mellett was the editor of the Daily News, owned by former Ohio governor and Democrat presidential candidate James Cox. Having promised Cox he would turn the unprofitable News into a success, Mellett combined personal conviction with marketing savvy and in 1925 embarked on an antivice, anticorruption editorial campaign. The following year, the Daily News and Mellett, posthumously, received the Pulitzer Prize for his columns.

His editorials were often aimed at the Canton police chief, S. A. Lengel, making the News law and order crusade personal. An unholy alliance of bootleggers and corrupt police, angered at Mellett’s interference with business as usual, hired an ex-con from Pennsylvania, Patrick McDermott, to attack and scare the editor. When the intended assault spiraled out of control and Mellett was murdered, the national press became outraged and saw this situation as an attack on the First Amendment, demanding justice in editorials appearing on the front pages of newspapers throughout the country.

My guest is Thomas Crowl, author of "Murder of a Journalist: The True Story of the Death of Donald Ring Mellett. He shares this largely forgotten but very important case with us on this latest episode of
Most Notorious.

More about the author and his work can be found here: https://www.kentstateuniversitypress.com/author/crowlt/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to another episode of the most notorious podcast
0:29.8	I'm Eric Rivenes. Thank you so much for staying subscribed and being a listener. I
0:36.9	appreciate it so much. I am very happy to have Thomas Crowell back on my show. I
0:44.4	interviewed him a year or so ago about Cassie Chadwick, the subject of his
0:49.8	marvelous book called Queen of the Con from a spiritualist to the Carnegie
0:55.9	Imposter. The book he is here to talk about today is the one he talked about
1:01.2	briefly at the end of our first interview. It is called Murder of a Journalist,
1:06.9	the true story of the death of Donald Ring Millett. Thank you so much for
1:13.0	coming back on. My pleasure to be here. So when did you first become aware of this
1:19.4	notorious Canton Ohio murder? Well, Murder of a Journalist was actually the first
1:26.4	book I wrote and it's been out there now something like 12 years and I was at
1:35.1	the time looking for a book to write. I lived in Northeastern Ohio and I was
1:41.8	looking for something that I could do that wasn't going to take me too far from
1:46.3	home or cost me too much money to research it. So I stumbled on this story
1:53.4	actually while doing research and on Cassie Chadwick. So I did some looking
2:02.7	into it and no one had done a story. No one had done a book on Millett and
2:09.4	frankly it's a very interesting story. I have to admit I've written three books
2:14.6	now and Don Millett is still my favorite. He's the kind of character that you can
2:21.0	really get behind because he was a good guy doing a good thing. And so that's how
2:28.8	I found the book and I went with it from there. I had a few lucky breaks. There's
2:34.0	no doubt along the way. Eventually the book after it was published was chosen as a
2:40.6	one book selection for the Stark County which is Canton, Ohio Library System.
	...

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