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Crimes of the Centuries

S1 Ep7: The Mysterious Beheading of Pearl Bryan

Crimes of the Centuries

Amber Hunt and Audioboom

History, Documentary, Society & Culture, True Crime

4.74K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2020

⏱️ 42 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When a headless woman's remains were discovered near Cincinnati in 1896, police had a problem. Long before DNA and fingerprinting, the lack of a head made it tough to identify the victim. Thanks to a sharp-eyed shoemaker, a new kind of detective work was born: The woman was ID'd thanks to a pair of distinctive shoes on the corpse's feet. Pearl Bryan was a 22-year-old Indiana woman who'd recently learned she was pregnant. Her lover, a Cincinnati man named Scott Jackson, suggested she come to town so they could figure out their next steps. After police discovered the "who," they then had to piece together the "how."

"Crimes of the Centuries" is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter: @centuriespod

Transcript

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0:00.0

Quiz question for you. Of the 20-hour to London boroughs, how many do you think meet

0:05.6

the World Health Organization's safe limit for toxic air pollution? How many do you think?

0:11.8

Go on, say a number out loud. None of them. That's why the U-Lets is expanding across

0:19.2

all London boroughs. Search U-Lets 2023 to see if you're affected and if you are eligible

0:25.4

for funding to help replace your vehicle. Let's clear the air.

0:36.6

Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they earn the label crime of the century,

0:43.6

but the stories that made headlines and decades passed aren't necessarily remembered today.

0:52.6

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author. And in each episode of this show, I'll examine

0:58.8

a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened. This is crimes

1:07.0

of the centuries.

1:37.0

At first, the details might sound familiar. One morning, an unwitting passerby spotted something

1:48.2

odd and went to investigate. What he discovered was a grisly sight, a pregnant woman's

1:54.7

decapitated body. But this isn't the Lacey Peterson case, you know, the 2002 case with

2:01.3

a husband and the missing wife. This one happened in 1896, back when Grover Cleveland was

2:08.2

president and Utah was being admitted as the 45th US state. Just 10 years earlier was the

2:15.7

birth of the modern day car, horses and buggies were the main mode of transportation.

2:21.8

The passerby was a 17 year old named Johnny Hewley who worked as a farmhand on a hunk

2:27.2

of land in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. That's in Campbell County, which is across the river

2:32.3

from Cincinnati. If we're being precise, the farmhand Hewley wasn't exactly passing.

2:39.0

He was pruning. He had climbed up an apple tree to snip off dead branches. When, from his

2:44.6

high perch, he spotted a strange bundle on the ground and went to investigate. Hewley

2:51.1

worked for a farmer named James Locke. The Locke farm was in an odd triangular shape that

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