The

The Years ago, John Pallisard, a raw-boned Illinois country youth, fell deeply in love with Lucy Grunden, a red-cheeked little girl whose books he would carry to the old schoolhouse at

Crescent City.

When I've made an aim for myself, we'll get married, he would say, and the girl would answer

yes.

Pallisard went to college.

He studied law. He set up his shingle in Crescent City.

Clients came, slowly.

The girl grew impatient. The young lawyer worked the harder to force fortune.

John Saylor, a rich man, a banker appeared. The girl broke her promise to the briefless attorney

and married the man of wealth. Palisard made himself leader of the brilliant bar of the

Middle West. He became the state's attorney, the public prosecutor of the Illinois district.

Criminals grew to know him for the keenest, most dangerously brilliant adversary they could meet.

Then fate played a grim jest. The woman who had jilted Pallisard was put on trial as an accessory for the murder of her husband,

the rich banker, for whom the poor lawyer was thrown aside. And Pallisard, the old lover,

was the instrument of justice whose duty it was to send Mrs. Saylor to the

gallows if she was guilty. Here was a strange situation, perhaps the most dramatic that ever

cropped up in an American murder trial. It would make a powerful drama. True Crime Historian presents yesterday's news, tales of classic scandals, scoundrels, and scourges told from historic newspapers in the golden age of yellow journalism.

Today's episode is a rare love quadrangle that comes to light when a woman is charged with accessory to the murder of her banker husband,

committed by her physician lover, and the state's attorney turns out to be a former fiancee.

It's a tangled, tangled web, and you know it's not going to end well.

I'm true crime historian Richard O. Jones, and I give you Lucy's lethal love, the Crescent City Quadrangle Scandal.

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