Ohio & Washington: Justice Buried for a Century
Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast
Shane L. Waters, Wendy Cee, Gemma Hoskins
4.5 • 992 Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions of gun violence, intimate partner violence, poisoning, and discussions of coercive control in same-sex and heterosexual relationships. Crisis resources are listed at the end of these notes.
of Foul Play, Shane and Wendy examine two cases from the American Gilded Age connected by the same institutional failure: not a lack of evidence, but a refusal to act on it. The Ashtabula bridge disaster killed 92 people and led to the silencing of the one man who told the truth. The Hells Canyon massacre left as many as 34 Chinese miners dead, and an all-white jury acquitted the confessed killers.
Season 40: Twin Portraits, two states, two stories. Ohio, 1877. Washington and Oregon, 1887. A murdered railroad engineer whose autopsy was hidden for 123 years, and Chinese gold miners massacred in the deepest gorge in North America while federal law declared them less than citizens. Two historical murder cases where the evidence existed and the institutions responsible chose silence.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A woman adjusts her child's blanket. |
| 0:06.0 | The car is warm. |
| 0:09.0 | The coal stove at the far end is throwing heat, |
| 0:12.0 | and the kerosene lamp overhead rocks with the motion of the train. |
| 0:17.0 | Outside the window, nothing. Snow driving sideways through the dark, 20 inches on the ground and still falling. |
| 0:28.6 | Northern Ohio, the night of December 29, 1876. |
| 0:35.6 | The Pacific Express has been slow through the blizzard, |
| 0:40.3 | 159 passengers and crew, |
| 0:43.3 | most of them coming back from Christmas, |
| 0:45.3 | pressed into the wooden coaches behind two steam locomotives, |
| 0:50.3 | the heating stoves, |
| 0:52.3 | kerosene, the rocking lamps. |
| 0:55.0 | Everything that makes the car feel safe is about to become the thing that kills them. |
| 1:02.0 | The train reaches the Astrobula River Bridge, |
| 1:06.0 | 154 feet of iron, spanning a gorge 76 feet deep. |
| 1:12.6 | The second locomotive crosses the far stone abutment, and the floor drops. |
| 1:21.6 | 11 cars fall onto the frozen riverbed. |
| 1:25.6 | The stoves burst through the walls. |
| 1:28.9 | The kerosene ignites, and the passengers who survived the fall began to burn. |
| 1:36.3 | Ninety-two people died that night. |
| 1:39.4 | It was the worst railroad disaster of the 19th century. |
| 1:44.1 | The engineer who had warned anyone who would listen |
... |
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