Murder on Ossipee Lake: The Case of Florence Small

Dark Downeast

audiochuck

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.8 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2022

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

The fire horn rang out in Ossipee, New Hampshire around 10 p.m. on September 28, 1916. The blaze at Frederick and Florence Small's cottage on the lake burned fast, even, and hot. The fire department could do nothing to save the structure or anyone who might remain inside. Frederick was out of town, seen leaving on a train towards Boston that afternoon, but Florence was unaccounted for.

It was a suspicious fire that left a homicide case in its smoldering rubble. Frederick Small was arrested and charged with his wife's murder, but how could he pull off the crime from an entirely different state?

Janice Petrie, author of Perfection To A Fault: A Small Murder in Ossipee, New Hampshire, 1916 joins me to explore the case of Florence Aileen Curry Small.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It started with a piece of family folklore.
0:07.3	Janice Petrie was just a baby when her parents brought her and her brother to stay at their
0:12.3	grandparents cottage on Ossipy Lake for a week-long family vacation.
0:17.9	But the first night would be their only night.
0:21.6	Was the cottage haunted?
0:24.6	The energy was unsettling, dark, cold.
0:30.9	My parents are absolutely not involved or interested in the supernatural at all.
0:38.0	Which that's what made this so weird that they felt that way and yet they were not never
0:43.2	even considered ghosts or anything like that.
0:45.8	That was not their thing.
0:47.6	Neither parent could sleep a wink that night.
0:50.4	They waited for sunrise to signal their chance to get out.
0:54.6	At four o'clock in the morning, as soon as they could see the boat and the trailer to put
0:59.6	the boat on the trailer and get out of town, that's exactly what they did.
1:03.2	They left the cottage and they had to tell my grandparents something so they said,
1:07.3	well, you know, it was really hard not having a washer and dryer and having, you know,
1:12.2	diapers from, you know, a toddler and a baby because
1:15.2	campers didn't exist back then.
1:17.4	And so they said they really decided that it wasn't going to be vacation at all, you know,
1:21.3	doing it that way and they'd rather take day trips.
1:23.5	And my grandparents bought that, you know.
1:25.6	So nobody had to say anything about how they felt about the cottage.
	...

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