True Crime Historian presents Sunday Magazine, a trilogy of true crime adventures.

Back when newspapers were still a big deal, the Sunday newspaper was the biggest deal of all.

A good Metropolitan Sunday paper was huge, with plenty of special sections and thick with advertising.

One popular feature was the Sunday magazine, where readers would discover feature-length human

interest articles, and true crime was often a staple of those pages.

So today I'm giving you three stories. The first is about an opera singer whose genetic past gave her a strange predilection for torture.

Following that, you'll hear about a former circus performer who became a grifter when a near-fatal injury gave him the ability to fake a broken neck.

And finally, I'll bring you the tale of a whip-smart mongrel dog who helps solve a murder.

I'm true crime historian Richard O. Jones, and I give you, turned into a tigress by her Borgia blood.

Why alienists believe the beautiful Charlotte Raider is a throwback in heredity like her sister,

the countess who murdered her husband.

The famous opera singer, Charlotte Raider, accused of whipping and torturing young

girls, is linearly descended from the notorious Borgia family. This astonishing discovery is the

latest development in the extraordinary case which involves a dozen titled personages and which has stirred up a

tremendous sensation in all the capitals of Central Europe. It began when Fraulein Raider, rich,

brilliant, beautiful, as prominent in society as she is on the grand opera stage, was accused by a young milliner named

Matilda Messler, 18 years old and exceptionally pretty, of having imprisoned her in an apartment

in the fashionable Ritz Hotel at Budapest, where she was kept fettered in chains, mercilessly

whipped and tortured in other ways, simply for the prima donna's pleasure

and amusement, said the police.

One of the first things the police discovered was that the opera singer came of noble family,

that she was own sister to the famous red-haired Venetian countess Marie Tarnowska, whose tragic and fantastic career

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