The Accidents

Park Predators

audiochuck

True Crime

4.4 • 15.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

When a rancher and early settler of Minnesota’s Itasca State Park is shot and killed during a hunting trip, suspicion falls on his partner in the woods who claims a peculiar sequence of events resulted in his buddy’s death. An ominously named ridge in Great Smoky Mountains National Park has a backstory so unsettling, that it takes diving through a trove of historical documents to settle on what is truth and what is fiction.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Diambra. And today's episode is a unique one. I'm going to tell you
0:07.8	about two different cases, which are both more than 100 years old. But they share something crucial in
0:14.3	common, well, more like a crucial question in common. And that is, are they accidents or are they murders? The first case I'm going to
0:24.5	dive into is the death of a man named William McMullen, who met his demise in Minnesota's
0:29.9	Itasca State Park. It happened in the fall of 1898, so more than 125 years ago, But I became obsessed with his case after reading a book
0:40.6	by author John Dobie called The Itasca Story. For those of you who aren't as familiar with
0:46.2	this recreation space or may never read Dobie's book, Itasca State Park is Minnesota's oldest
0:52.2	state park. Located in the northwest part of the state,
0:56.3	its roughly 32,000 acres are home to more than 200 campsites, a historic lodge and other cabins,
1:02.6	as well as a wilderness sanctuary. It was officially established as a state park in 1891,
1:09.2	so seven years before William McMullen's death.
1:12.6	And let's just say back in the late 19th century, things looked a little differently than they do now.
1:18.9	The second case I'm going to dive into is the mysterious death of a man named Jasper Melinger,
1:25.0	who met his untimely end in the early 1900s in what is now known as the
1:29.7	Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. Great Smoky Mountains is a park that prides itself
1:36.1	on prioritizing the preservation of historic artifacts and stories. And Jasper Melinger's tale
1:42.1	is no exception. While researching this episode, I got in touch with a librarian and archivist for the National Park Service,
1:49.4	who provided me with a handful of historic documents and writings from the Park's Collections Preservation Center.
1:56.1	Reading these archives was like traveling back in time.
1:59.5	It was amazing.
2:03.2	And thanks to NPS's diligent record keeping, I'm able to provide you with so much more information on a case that might just be hiding a
2:08.9	devil in the details. This is Park Predators. years. ... I'm Oh Oh I'm
	...

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