Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking, they change laws, change society, or even

earn the label Crime of the Century. But the stories that made headlines and decades past

aren't necessarily remembered today.

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

I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.

This is Crimes of the Centuries.

Thank you. This is Crimes of the Centuries. All Alice Stahl wanted was a day of rest. She had an awful cold and a 103-degree fever. Her husband, Barry, had left her in the

morning in the home they shared in Louisville, Kentucky. The home had a name, which I share as

evidence that the stalls were from a wealthy family. The house was called the cottage,

capital T, capital C. It sat just off Lime Kiln Lane on a 16-acre estate

in an isolated, hilly, wooded parcel in the Herod's Creek area. Now, when I think of a cottage,

lower-casey, I usually picture something modest. The cottage was, by my standards anyway, a straight-up house.

It was 1,900 square feet with two bedrooms on the second floor and a spare room on

the first floor that the family could use as an office or a third bedroom.

It was awfully nice by normal income standards, but it was also the most modest of several properties

owned by the stall family. See, Barry Stahl was an executive at the Stahl Oil Refining

Company. There's two stalls in that sentence because the company's founder, Charles Christian

Stahl, better known as C.C. stall, was Barry's father. C.C. launched the company in

1911. Back then, it was just the stall oil co. No refining in the title. And it sold almost a hundred

petroleum products, things like transmission oil, gear lubricant, that kind of sexy stuff. The refining

was added to the name in 1918.

Speaking of names, just quickly I'll mention that the surname here is spelled S-T-O-L-L, which

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