William J. Sharkey’s Not-so-great Escape

Stuff You Missed in History Class

iHeartPodcasts

History, Society & Culture

4.2 • 23.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

William J. Sharkey was a pickpocket, a con man, a politician, and a murderer, though whether or not that murder was an accident became the question at the center of a case that gripped New York for months. And then, he vanished. Sort of.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:04.5	Adventure should never come with a pause button.
0:07.1	Remember Movie Pass?
0:08.4	All the movies you wanted for just nine bucks?
0:11.1	I'm Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet.
0:13.9	And this season, I'm digging into the tech stories we weren't told.
0:17.4	Starting with Stacey Spikes, the black founder of movie pass who got pushed out of the company
0:21.6	he built.
0:22.8	Everybody's trying to knock you down and it's not going to work and no one's going to like it.
0:27.3	And then boom, it's everywhere.
0:29.3	And that was that moment.
0:30.7	Listen to there are no girls on the internet on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
0:36.0	Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.
0:46.6	Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.
0:49.3	And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
0:51.4	So, this was going to be an episode about several escaped criminals that have never been found.
0:57.7	You know, one of our little smorgasbordy popery episodes.
1:02.2	Yeah, we have a six impossibles on jail breaks from a few years ago.
1:06.5	Yeah, and this was kind of similar.
1:09.6	But then I got to reading about William J. Sharky's case, and then I was like, well, this is going to be a whole thing on its own.
1:16.1	Because it's got some fun drama.
1:19.3	Also, frankly, I'm in the middle of a lot of travel, and I wanted to do something that would be really fun and engaging that I didn't have to, like, learn telemetry
	...

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