Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with IHeartRadio.

Before we begin, this is a story of two very violent men, which is sometimes the nature of historical true crime.

Important to this episode, though, we want you to be aware that this story begins with graphic

conversation about child abuse as we introduce Samuel Green.

On their best days, Samuel Green and William Ash were burglars, highway robbers, and counterfeiters.

On their worst, murderers. Samuel was known in general to be a much more violent person than his

partner in crime. William was hardly innocent, though, and he was always on hand to break Samuel out

of prison, and did so on

more than one occasion. Though we have partners in crime in this story, Samuel does seem to be the

standout violent criminal of the two because there's just more in the historical record about him.

Let's meet these men who terrorized New England in the late 1700s. Welcome to

Criminalia. I'm Maria Tremarki. And I'm Holly Fry. First, we want to address this nickname that people

seem to want to give to Samuel. He has been called America's first public enemy number one. Now, if you've been

with us for previous episodes this season, that might sound a little confusing because several

people have tried to claim that spot. Of course, there can be only one, and that was not Samuel

Green or William Ash, who we're talking about today.

The public enemy number one epithet was one that Jay Edgar Hoover liked to assign to dangerous

criminals at large, and that was in the 1920s and 30s when the Federal Bureau of Investigation

as an organization was just forming. And Samuel lived and died

more than a hundred years before Hoover came on the scene. So we're taking that nickname that's

given in hindsight with just a grain of salt. Samuel Green was born in Meredith, New Hampshire,

in 1796, a town on the shores of Lake Winipasaki.

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