Mystery At The Laconey Mill
True Crime Historian
Richard O Jones
4.4 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2023
⏱️ 120 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Episode 428 describes two violent murders in the rural areas around Merchantville, New Jersey, in the 1890s. A rough farm-hand is the first suspect in the first case, but suspicion suddenly turns to the victim’s uncle/husband and attention to a trial full of courtroom theatrics. Then a nearly identical murder a year later adds a new wrinkle to the case. But that’s still not all.
Culled from the historic pages of the New York Daily World, the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers of the era.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Popular.com |
| 0:03.3 | Merchantville, New Jersey, September 9, 1889. |
| 0:14.5 | A suspicious quietness hovers about Likoni's farmhouse on Church Road, a lonely lane two miles from Merchantsville, New Jersey. |
| 0:24.6 | The menfolk are in the south field a mile away, gathering produce for the market. |
| 0:31.2 | There should be a healthy, handsome young woman, Annie Lee Lacone, the 28-year-old niece of Chalkley-Laconey, in the house attending to her |
| 0:41.1 | daily duties. Lizzie O'Donnell, the buxom daughter of a neighboring farmer, thinks so as she |
| 0:49.5 | walks quickly along the old cowpath to borrow a pail of chicken feed. |
| 0:55.0 | Familiar with the premises, she steps into Farmer Likoni's granary, |
| 1:00.0 | fills her pail, and then thinks, |
| 1:02.0 | I will run in and have a chat with friend Annie before I return home. |
| 1:08.0 | She walks to the kitchen door, opens it, glances in, and then the pail of feed drops from her |
| 1:16.2 | nerveless fingers. She feels her face turned white, clasping her hands to her eyes to shut out the |
| 1:24.3 | horrible sight she sees. She turns and running home, bursts into the kitchen |
| 1:29.9 | of her parents' home, moaning, Annie Laconee is dead, murdered, I think. She's full of blood and |
| 1:36.8 | she fainted. William LaBerry, a farmhand, was in the kitchen and and hurried at once over to the Likoni farmstead. |
| 1:48.0 | He knew where the farmer was at work, and without waiting to verify the girl's story, |
| 1:53.0 | he went out into the field and alarmed him and his hired man, Garrett Murray, who was working with him. |
| 2:00.0 | The three men then started on a run for Likoni's house. |
| 2:04.6 | They found that Lizzie O'Donnell's story was only too true. |
| 2:13.6 | True Crime Historian presents yesterday's news. |
| 2:20.0 | Tales of the classic scandals, scoundals, and scourges of the past, |
| 2:24.3 | told through vintage newspaper accounts from the golden age of yellow journals. |
... |
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