Pirates On The Penguin

True Crime Historian

Richard O Jones

True Crime, Performing Arts, Documentary, Arts, Society & Culture

4.5 • 720 Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2025

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Astounding Disappearance Of Benjamin Collings On Long Island Sound

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Episode 396 relates the puzzling story of a family apparently attacked on their cabin cruiser on an inky summer night. The husband is missing and the wife and five-year-old daughter have an amazing tale to tell. But can her story hold water as well as the 26-foot cruiser?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Popular.com
0:03.5	September 11, 1931.
0:10.8	A wealthy yachtsman vanished in the waters of Long Island Sound yesterday.
0:19.5	His beautiful wife, hysterical and raving after a midnight murder and
0:24.5	attack, was found adrift in a small boat, and their five-year-old daughter was discovered alone
0:31.0	on their abandoned, blood-stained yacht. The astounding, fantastic situation was further involved when the woman, a stunning brunette,
0:41.3	declared that her husband, Benjamin P. Collings of Stamford, Connecticut,
0:46.3	had been thrown overboard in the dead of night by gunmen, pirates, one of whom criminally assaulted her.
0:56.0	Still more complicated did it become when it was found that the deserted child, Barbara Collings,
1:03.0	had her mother's two diamond rings wedged tightly into the toes of her tiny shoes.
1:10.0	First inkling of the staggering sea mystery
1:12.7	came to light with the gray dawn as the cruiser penguin,
1:17.1	a dim and ghostly shape,
1:19.6	idle along with the current off Lloyd's Point, Long Island.
1:24.5	The penguin, known to many yachtsmen along the sound as the property of Collings, sportsmen and Yale graduate, was hailed by a party of New Rochelle Boatman.
1:36.3	Yo-ho, captain, shouted N. L. Nottman, owner of a fishing boat. They smiled as a pretty blonde infant, poked her tousled head over the side,
1:47.7	and exclaimed, I'm not captain, I'm Barbara. Just then came weird cries and sounds from the water
1:56.2	on the other side of the penguin. Someone drowning, said Noteman.
2:02.7	The noise kept up until the boatman seemed to be within 50 feet of it.
2:07.2	Then it ceased as mysteriously as it began.
2:11.5	About half an hour later, off of Oyster Bay, Long Island,
2:15.2	a woman's piercing screams came across the water. Harold Howard of
	...

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